“Moving now, we are affected by the presence of individual buildings as by the trees of the forest. Each fossilised trunk its own history, each trunk part of a more complex organism: the city. Our traces are felt in the communication between buildings as they register our passage. The system is in precarious balance. Our moods adjust to reflections and shadows and the crowds that surge and flower, parading their neuroses. When my wife, recuperating, no longer accompanied me on a morning walk through a certain quiet street near Victoria Park, total strangers emerged from behind their windows and drawn curtains to ask what had happened. Was she well? Sleeping houses feed on the sugars of passerines, unconscious messengers.
“In smeared twilight, a dip of the shoulder south of Euston Road, clamping my lips to avoid the sour drench of stalled, snarling, emphysemic vehicles and the eternity of improvements bringing restless London to a shuddering halt in the underpass with its slow roll of overhead ad-porn, before the reef of hotels and terminal stations — and remembering John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, his 1661 denunciation of noxious stinks trapped in the funnel of the Thames Valley — I rediscovered the magic of movement.
“Above resistant pavements, I floated. That miraculously accessed network of walkable streets, close passages, curves, crescents, and permitted alleyways that are still there, outside time, offering, for whoever wants to experience it, narratives of a submerged and continuing city.”
(Sinclair, Living With Buildings: And Walking With Ghosts, “Ex-Voto Detour”)
