Whitechapel

It was one of those Sunday mornings when you wake up possibly still a little drunk from the night before. There’s no hang-over, which with the memories of the night before feels woefully wrong. In fact everything feels weirdly good, aside from a slight sludgyness, as though your body is sinking in syrup. Anyway, it was one of those types of mornings and we sat in the shade because it was too hot to concentrate on much else, our bare feet jutting out into the sunshine. Me and the two guys I’d only met the day before sat and talked about nothing much.

‘What’s that place in Liverpool, the one that’s always used as example of Britain screwing itself up?’ asked the one from West London. ‘You know, the one where the kids have guns and everyone wears a shell suit?’

‘Croxteth?’ the one from up north hesitantly replied.

‘Yeah. Croxteth. It’s a no-go area, right? Unless you’re born there. See, the thing with London is we don’t have areas like that. There’s nowhere you can’t go into. The city’s too mixed up.’

‘I guess,’ I pondered slightly sceptically yet adding my probably unwanted opinion, ‘places get stereotyped. Like Whitechapel. Someone from out of London probably has all these negative images of it, but it’s all right. It’s just context. Wherever you’re comfortable with.’

‘God,’ he looked shocked ‘I didn’t mean somewhere like that. Why the hell would you want to go to Whitechapel?’

If this was a movie we’d now cut to a long sweeping shot. One that starts high overhead and then arches across me as I stand on the bottom corner of Brick Lane and Whitechapel Road. All around, London life bumbles along in all its glory of bright coloured saris and wrap around shades and folks on their way home overlapping with those heading out and then the people only just keeping gtheir nose out the sewer of everyday life and then the camera zooms in for my close up. If I were so inclined I might light a cigarette or raise an eyebrow or curl the corner of my mouth.

‘Bloody Whitechapel,’ I might say.

But this isn’t a film. It’s just me putting words on a page and then you reading them off a screen. But just so you know: That sort of self-indulgent dramatisation is how my head works sometimes.

It’s a strange area, Whitechapel. It’s the name that springs into most people’s heads when they refer to the East End. It’s the East End of fifties gangsters and allegedly unlocked doors and blitz spirit and pearly queens and cultural integration, but it feels more transient than that. On the monopoly board it’s partnered with Old Kent Road as the toilet brown bargain basement set to collect, and like the Old Kent Road it’s more of a thoroughfare than a place in its own right. It’s surrounded by plenty of character, Aldgate to the west, Shoreditch to the north, Wapping to the south and Stepney to the east as though it’s squeezed into a few small blocks of buildings by the financial city, the Thames and places people really live. And yet somehow, it also encompasses all these other places, cradles them within its lovingly notorious arms until they shrug free with an identity all of their own.

A couple of years I ago I was stuck in traffic around the Aldgate one-way loop. I glanced at the dashboard and noticed the temperature gauge creeping up. It hadn’t simply shifted a little bit, in a way where I might have been mistaken, I could see the needle sweeping towards the red block of danger. I switched the engine off, thwacked the hazard lights on and jumped out into the monsoon.

The rain pounded down. Fat dollops of water broke over my head. It instantly soaked into my clothes, into my skin. I felt underwater. I popped the bonnet, not because I thought I’d be able to fix the damn thing, but as an international sign of “no, I really have broken down” to the twat angrily honking his horn. I peered into the piping hot steamy and dark recesses where the rain water evaporated as it landed and ignored the shout of ‘wanker’ as the honker passed.

I couldn’t stay where I was and block the whole system. I had to move the car somehow. I glanced around and saw, about thirty metres behind me, an access road to one of the office monstrosities that form the middle of Aldgate roundabout. At the time, the area was being resulted, the lines of access remodelled in a way that still doesn’t make sense, but it did mean the gates to this private road had been left open for goods vehicles to get through. It would do. It would get me out of the way. The problem was, how to get there. I didn’t want to turn the engine back on in case I damaged it, or the needle piped into the red and the whole thing disappeared in flames.

But cars are fucking heavy, you know?

I leant my shoulder under the driver’s doorframe, one hand holding the steering wheel, the other against the back window, slick with rain as it continued to gush down. My teeth were barred as I strained and the car rolled slowly. I became aware of a presence to my left. A man holding an umbrella, his head cocked curiously, watched.

‘Have you broken down?’ he asked in an accent vaguely eastern European.

‘No, I find pushing my car backwards the most efficient way of moving around the city,’ I snarkily replied.

Without another word he folded his umbrella away and leant into the bonnet. The added momentum quickly took us around the corner, although not swiftly enough for the bus driver who flicked us the finger anyway.

Out of everyone’s way, I reopened the bonnet and took another look. The dirty plastic water bulb was empty. I poured my drinking water into it, only for it flush straight out the bottom of the radiator in a splatter that was drowned out by the falling rains.

‘There is problem,’ my new friend pointed out.

‘You think?’

Despite my hostility he hung around whilst I waited for the RAC man to fight his way through the traffic. We sat on the closed bonnet of my inert car letting the rain near-drown us, turn our skin baby wrinkled, talking about nothing much.

Bloody Whitechapel.

I came to Whitechapel on one of my first visits to the city. We went to the Whitechapel Gallery. To see what, I can’t remember, but I do distinctly remember sitting in a greasy café drinking tea out of a cup with a saucer and being a little bit oddly mesmerised by the concrete blandness of the metropolitan university building on the other side of the road. Why this memory lingers so vividly I cannot say. I don’t remember what we talked about, but it feels like it should have been significant, as though we’d been telling each other secret histories. It probably wasn’t. It was probably just endless silliness yet for some reason the image of my then girlfriend drinking tea from a dainty cup trying to symbolise something that had already departed with this anonymous building in the background has stuck around the back of my head.

The café, however, is now probably a Subway.

Some time after we split I found myself in the Whitechapel Gallery once again. I’d gone to see the Sophie Calle exhibition, the one where she took a letter from the lover ditching her and got different women from different walks of life to interpret it in different ways. A clown, a singer, a dancer, a linguist, all pulling it apart and giving the words an emotional context through the mirror of their own experiences. It was rewritten as an email, a formal letter, a scrawled note, the words changed not just by their delivery but by the surface they were etched upon. Take Care of Yourself, both a distraught final gasp of love and also a pithy phrase, used just to couch the dismissal in something approaching affection. It’s a beautiful piece of work and, probably because we’d first seen it together at the Venetian biennale, it made me think about her.

Another ghost, but then the city haunts in many people in many different ways. Somewhere just behind the main road is the grave of a church, the public garden that still holds the skeletal shape of St Mary St Mary Matfelon. The church was the original parish church and is sometimes whimsically referred to the invisible church or the disappearing church. It seems to have spent as much time being absent as it has being there. It was destroyed in the great storms of 1362, the raging fire of 1880, and then again the fire from bombs in 1942 and finally to the overarching pressure of ruin in 1952. All that remains are the shadows of failure.

Further up the road, outside the tube station – the first of the old East London line stations – people were selling Jack the Ripper tours. These are both genuine and a con; Jack and murder wrapped up in another conspiracy to take unsuspecting tourists deep into the side streets and then deprive them of their belongings. They’re not all like that, but you can’t help but suspect that for some the risk of getting a wrong ‘un, much like the risk the girls took with punters when Jack was abroad, adds something to the experience. A misunderstood false layer of empathy.

People seem to occasionally quote this blog back at me. People whom I’m not aware of reading it will sometimes come out with statements that seem weighted, as though it’s some kind of test to see whether it’s really me or not. For example, I have mainly been coatless in the heat of the summer, but the other evening it threatened rain and so I wore my leather jacket.

‘I like your jacket,’ she said with a smile, ‘it suits you.’

‘It’s very old,’ I replied apologetically.

‘Leather jackets should be old,’ she said as her fingers brushed the lapels. ‘It gives it character.’

Okay, so I’m probably reading too much into that, but the other week the girl with the short dark hair and the southern French accent and I walked through Bloomsbury discussing our inclination towards intoxication when she said: ‘It’s like I don’t have a stop switch; as though I never reach that point other people have when I’ve had enough.’

It was an oddly specific turn of phrase and it made we wonder how much I should be sharing and whether the lines between what’s real and what’s in my head are too blurred. She said it and I felt another chink of the facade tumble away, as though in words the truth could be found.

The last time I inched my way along the Whitechapel Road, I drove one-handed and took photographs out of the window. I was looking for backdrops to a podcast; images of grime and urban murk to flash onto a green screen and prevent the people speaking from having to actually go down there for themselves. I parked up to wander around and left my car at the end of Mount Terrace, supposedly the former site of the Whitechapel mound. The enormous earth pile apparently stood forty feet high and would now rival the hospital for dominance of the road. Iain Sinclair wondered, and I agree, what happened to all the earth?

The Royal London squats moodily in hub of frantic activity. People are flushed in and out, often looking equally distressed in both directions. Sirens whirl and the noise of life and then what comes later is everywhere. The helicopter snarls across the rooftops and lowers itself almost lovingly down onto the pad at the peak of the Western wing. A giant, roaring red harbinger of aid. I’m sure there was a more logical reason for locating London’s sole airborne response unit in Whitechapel than the dreadful traffic clogging up the ambulance trails, but as the carbon monoxide flooded the hot summer air I couldn’t think of one.

Above the main entrance hangs a cracked and rusted bell. It used to be rung to summon orderlies to hold down the patients during surgery. Thick, possibly nervous hands pinned bodies to a wooden table with the etchings and the dried crimson from previous occasions still visible. The blade would bite into skin and all the patient could was bite down themselves on a block of wood between their teeth. That and the knowledge that every flinch risked greater injury were the only acknowledgements to anaesthetics. The lucky ones blacked out.

But then Whitechapel likes bells. Big Ben was cast in the Whitechapel foundry before being liberated away to the west.

John Merrick, the Elephant Man, lived in the Royal London for four years before his death. He stayed in a little room overlooking a square that now no longer exists whilst the country poked and prodded and pondered what exactly he was. Merrick lived there and only hundreds of metres away Jack was razoring his way through the women of the night. One of the more absurd Jack theories is that he and Merrick are one and the same, as though the Elephant Man couldn’t contain his urges and was embarrassed at being so easily identified by the girls that he silenced them. But that’s just London, isn’t it? The mishmash of hope and fear is so tightly overlain with each other as to become one.

Shortly after I arrived in London on a permanent basis I went to a wedding party just up the road in the upstairs rooms of the Blind Beggar. That place is also submerged in its own contradictions. Ronnie Cray blew away George Cornell in 1966 and William Booth in 1860 delivered a sermon that led to the foundation of the Salvation Army atop the same bar; echoes of good and evil whilst you get a pint in. Still, in 2001 I was there because someone from work was marrying her Columbian boyfriend in order to keep him in the country. We went along for the piss up.

It was a crazy fucked up affair comprising of her distinctly annoyed Oirish relations who supped Guinness in heavy draughts and a gaggle of stereotypically middle class South Americans over on student visas, all a mix of greasy hair and half-grown beards and shirts open down to just above the navel. I had a couple and then left them to seemingly try to beat the others traditional dance routines into submission.

Whitechapel. Sheesh, it’s just such a bloody cliché of itself at times there’s no helping it.

I’d just about had enough of its noisy smelly self-mythologising self as I stepped over the pearly king only just wearing a shattered suit of buttons and bottle tops and with the can of Strongbow black broken in his hand. I glanced down at him and wanted to tell him it’d be all right, but I couldn’t. I might be lying. He’d just have to find out for himself because I was heading down a quieter mess of narrowed terraced cottages on my way to Shadwell.