Street Post 3: White Chapel. Tower Hill. White Chapel…again. Tower Hill…again? White Chapel? What the hell?
Last week’s Virginia Woolf walk through Westminster featured an interesting mix of purpose and pleasure. While the primary goal (of Clarissa’s walk) was to reach the place at 46 Bond Street where Clarissa would have purchased her flowers so many decades ago, the journey allowed us to take advantage of the winding, often topsy-turvy streets of London; not a simple task for a tourist whose only hope is that the city is set up on some sort of grid system. Today’s brief London encounter allowed me to face the (sometimes) harsh realities of London’s other street: the underground. Approximately seven minutes, three pounds, and four (ish) failed turnstile attempts after leaving the Brick Lane area, I found myself immersed in a dank, chaotic street system that offered little, if any, of the secluded refuge inherent to some of London’s above-ground neighborhoods. Even the energy packed hustle and bustle of Bond Street easily seeps into the quiet of St. James Park, just as one can find solace in Dean’s Yard from the frantic rigidity of most of Westminster.
I found no similar haven in this underground labyrinth. Cigarette-butt and chewing-gum laden steps led to a world where boisterous noise was the given, not just a possibility, and where focus might be defined as the happenstancial solitary moment of concentration which occurs at the very moment of the next train’s arrival--at which point I must decide if the Bakerloo line or the upcoming (and equally ridiculous sounding) Picadilly Circus line is the appropriate choice to escort me to my final destination.
To my right sits a newspaper vendor, half slumped over in a well-worn director’s chair; to my right performs a street musician, who, as it sounds, may or may not be covering the best of Journey, on his instrument of choice: the recorder. Other citizens of this public (yet somehow secret and hidden) underground street appear in each and every direction around me: food vendors, families, tourists, and, my particular favorite, a young mother earnestly screaming ‘I said MIND THE GAP SHELLY. MIND THE GAP! It is still London down here—perhaps a different, scaled-down, peripheral London, but London nonetheless. Not that I think anyone would want to live beneath the city by choice, but it seems one could. Food, entertainment, transportation, and many other spoils and troubles of the world above can be found below London’s surface. Even expensive advertising campaigns have found their way to London’s underground, with most ads featuring either West End musicals, or, ironically, I felt, car insurance.
All of these observations occurred before I was even able to step into an actual train car, as Lauren and I made our first attempt to get from White Chapel to Victoria, only to think we were going the wrong direction and change trains several times before realizing (thirty some minutes later) that our original train had been headed in the correct direction. Some might attribute our repeated failures to a tourist daze-- and this might be true to a certain extent. But our inability to function as subway regulars can’t be so easily reduced. Escalators (who knew escalator etiquette existed?) replace crosswalks; groups of small children forming human chains replace out-of-control cyclists; neatly presented posters dubbing the latest Footloose revival as THE must-see musical of the decade stand in for versions of those same posters, masking taped to any surface to which it might possibly stick. In our many mini trips between White Chapel and Tower Hill (and yes, eventually Victoria Station), we had to learn to navigate the new codes of the London underground.
*This my real street post 3, my post from last week should ahve been entitled as 'Street Post 2'
posted by PatrickMcKelvey @ 3:08 PM
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