Skip to content

Chalfont and Latimer

Chalfont and Latimer.

Picture by markhillary: Chalfont and Latimer

“Is it winter yet?” the children of Little Chalfont ask when the leaves turn brown.

“Not yet,” their parents say, and the children go back to playing in the street. Their favourite game is Elephant and Clown, though it takes them five minutes of dibbing every time to choose the elephant.

“Is it winter now?” the children ask again, when the leaves begin to collect in gutters. They wrap themselves in too many coats, as if they can call down the new season by pretending that it’s already arrived.

“Not yet,” their parents say, “and take that coat off.”

“Is it winter yet?” they ask once more as the leaves pile knee-deep, coats off this time despite the late autumn wind: if they’re shivering, surely it must be time?

“Nearly,” their parents say. “And put a coat on.”

The Betram Mills Circus arrives at night, cars and caravans rolling through the village. Six-year-olds wake abruptly and run, blanket-tangled, to the window; their older brothers and sisters sneak out to get a closer look. The animals arrive the next day, by train, and the railroad tracks are lined with spectators.

It’s been eight months since they left, the magicians and acrobats, the dogs that play football and dance, the jugglers, the strongmen, the clowns that play football and fall over, the tigers that play football and growl. For them, it’s the off-season now, a chance for a break; but the village has been waiting.

The youngest children climb trees to peer over the walls of the old Mills house, desperate for a glance of the elephants (which also play football). For the older children, it’s more serious. Violet and Sebastian turn cartwheels on the village green whenever Frederico, the Man with the Iron Jaw! walks past to the tobacconist. John pulls Ruffles onto his hind legs to dance while Kelly the American Clown! and Karniga the Fakir! walk back from the bakery. Susannah sneaks her mother’s wedding dress from the closet one night, and stands outside the front gate of the Mills house, pale in the dark and the wind, an upside-down salad bowl standing in for a crystal ball.

Adele can’t turn cartwheels, she isn’t allowed to have a dog, and her hair and her nose are all wrong for fortune-telling. Instead she reads Enid Blyton really, really hard, and choreographs trapeze routines in her head. When that doesn’t work, she builds a giant automaton and drives it to the gates of Mills House.

“I don’t know,” Bertram Mills says. “We’re not really an automaton kind of circus. What happened to the young lady with the salad bowl?”

“She died of pneumonia,” Adele lies.

Mills frowns and scratches his nose, then steps backward to look the automaton up and down. “Can it tell the future?”

“No,” Adele says, and pulls a lever; the automaton rocks from side to side and lifts one clunketing leg. “But it can play football.” Susannah, crouched inside the automaton suit and trying to breathe quietly, probably doesn’t know the rules; but Adele is pretty sure that the elephants don’t either.

Posted in Metropolitan Line. Tagged with , , , , , .

By Holly
May 2, 2009

322 comments

Canons Park

Canons Park.

Picture by Matt from London: St Lawrence Canons Park

Rotterdam! Home over its many centuries to writer Hendrik van Loon, artist Pieter de Hooch, footballer Bram Appel, and - most pertinently to our story - seventeenth-century wood-carver Grinling Gibbons.

Grinling spends his unteased childhood playing in the street, swimming in the Nieuwe Maas, frolicking in knickerbockers, and learning to carve wood very well indeed. His summer days are long and warm; in winter he skates. “Grinling!” his friends call to him across the lake, beckoning him into their games, or passing over a particularly appealing piece of wood for him to transform.

It is not until Grinling Gibbons moves to England that he discovers his name is funny.

“Grinling?” asks Christopher Wren. “Gibbons?” asks John Evelyn. They smile at him widely.

“That’s right,” Grinling says, and looks up placidly for a moment from the wooden pea-pod that’s coming into focus beneath his chisel.

John Evelyn bends closer. “That’s actually pretty good,” he says.

“Thanks,” Grinling says.

“But… Grinling?”

“That’s me.” He swaps his chisel out for a bent gouge.

He adapts to the widespread amusement by failing, as far as is possible, to notice its existence. All he wants is to keep carving, and his name is, if anything, an aid in this endeavour; it makes him easier to remember, and that brings the commissions in. He carves altars and cherubs; leaves, curlicues, vines that nobody can walk past without leaning in to pluck a grape. He carves a flower so lifelike, it’s said, that the dew itself is deceived, and gathers on its petals each morning. And every time he meets someone new, there’s a moment of awkwardness where they laugh, just a little, at his name; and he watches, unperturbed, and the amusement fades away.

Eventually, he gets married.

Elizabeth is younger than he is, and easier to tease. One cold afternoon, a month into their marriage, she comes into his workshop.

“What’re you doing?” she says.

“It’s an organ case,” he says. “For St Lawrence’s, in Canons Park.”

“I like it there,” she says. “I like the trees,” and then suddenly she’s crying.

Grinling doesn’t know what to do, what to say. He hesitates for a moment, then keeps working on his pea pod. “They’re good trees,” he says.

“They just keep on!” she says.

“The trees?”

“The people! My sisters. My friends. Whenever I talk about you, they start laughing. And they keep on and on and on, as soon as they can see it upsets me.”

“If you didn’t pay them any attention,” he says, “they’d stop laughing so much.”

“But I can’t ignore them,” she says. “I’ve tried, and I can’t, and I just want to be proud of you, and your grapes and your cherubs and, and,” and there’s a thumping sound. When he turns around, she’s sitting on the ground with her green skirts puffed out around her.

“I can’t do anything about my name,” he says, and she shakes her head, agreement or acknowledgement or despair. “It’s just a name,” he adds.

“I want to tell people about you and be happy,” she says. “And I can’t.” And she sits there, silent, while he thinks for a while and looks at her and picks up his tools again, and starts to carve.

Evening comes. Grinling lights candles, and keeps working. Elizabeth watches; eventually, she falls asleep.

In the morning, Grinling brings here a present. “Here,” he says.

It’s dim and murky still. For a moment she thinks he’s brought her a mirror, and then she realises: it’s a mask. It’s warm under her fingertips, and carved from wood so thin that it could be paper. It’s the face she would have if only she were calmer and graver and braver. The eyebrows arch with just a little more symmetry than her own. The nose is a touch straighter. The lids of the hollow eyes are just right.

“If they don’t see that you’re upset,” Grinling says, “they’ll stop laughing,” and she leans away as he lifts the mask towards her face.

Posted in Jubilee Line. Tagged with , , .

By Holly
April 29, 2009

2 comments

Cannon Street

Cannon Street.

Picture by 5imon: London Stone plus bikes

Randolph draws the curtain, then turns the projector on. “Here,” he says, showing them a picture, “we have Cannon Street.” He gives them a moment to absorb this. “And here,” he adds, “we have the London Stone.” He clicks to the next image, and the angle on the street has shifted; there’s cars and bicycles, but on the far side, just visible between vehicles, there’s also a small, glowing cage.

Naomi leans forward. “What is it?”

“Nobody’s quite sure.” He clicks his mouse, and the camera moves closer again. The cage is clear now, bright under a row of footwear advertisements. There’s glass or plastic behind the metal bars; and behind even that, a smooth grey rock. It’s hard to make out the scale.

Trevor pushes up from his half-asleep sprawl on the sofa. “Why should I be interested in this stone if nobody knows what it is?”

Randolph frowns, then clicks again, refusing to be rushed: another image, closer still. “The Romans,” he says, “saw the Stone as the centre of the city. They measured local distances from where it stood. For thousands of years it’s been at London’s heart. Some people say it is London’s heart, the thing that keeps everything else going strong. Rebels flocked to it as a symbol of sovereignty; bombs fell and it survived.”

He clicks his mouse again, and the picture is even closer this time, almost abstract in its reduction to shapes and shades: a black bar on either side of the frame, and grey in the middle.

“It’s been said,” Randolph says, turning to face them, “that as long as the stone stands, London will flourish.”

“And?” Naomi’s still waiting to see where this goes.

“And it’s being moved. Tomorrow. Its current home is due to be demolished. At three o’clock in the afternoon, that’s just over twenty-four hours from now, it will be collected from Cannon Street. From there it will be taken directly to the Museum of London. Once it’s in the museum, it will be placed in a laser-protected room whose backup security system includes both pressure pads and CCTV. It will be entirely inaccessible. But while it’s in transit…”, and he flicks through to another picture, even closer, nothing but grey and tiny pockmarks, “that’s our chance.”

He lets go of the mouse and turns to face the gang. Naomi frowns. “How much is it worth?”

“In a traditional sense? Hardly anything.”

“Then… ransom?”

Randolph tilts his head to one side. “Could do,” he says. “I was thinking of something a little more… ambitious.”

“I’m not,” Trevor says, “helping you bring about the fall of London.”

“Of course not. That’s not what I want. The fall of London would be bad for business; in times of social disorder, most burglaries are carried out by unskilled looters, and the work of the superthief heist gang is undervalued.”

“Then what?”

Randolph turns off the projector, and walks over to the window. “It seems to me,” he says, “that Cannon Street and the City have been at London’s centre for a very long time. They get the lucrative developments, the high-paid jobs, an underground station around every corner, tailored suits for all. Isn’t it time,” and he pulls the curtains open, “that Stoke Newington took its turn?” And he gestures out at the street he loves so much, the stores selling phonecards and brightly-coloured plastic buckets, the cafes, the pound shops, the narrow buildings, the beautiful crooked chimney pots. What might it become with the help of the London Stone?

26 hours notice; it’s touch and go whether they can get ready in time. None of them like driving in central London traffic, so they can’t just steal the whole truck; they have to do it the old-fashioned way. Social engineering, ropes, distractions, sirens, accomplices around the corner dressed as police officers. Trevor works through the night to make Cannon Street ghillie suits: grey stone textures, chewing gum pressed into place at random intervals to break up the silhouette.

His hands are shaking in the morning, and Naomi tells him to get some rest, but he pours himself another cup of coffee instead. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “It’ll be fine.”

As always, it’s not clear whether he means it; but he’s right. It is fine. Not just any old fine, but astoundingly, triumphantly fine, smoother than anything they’ve pulled in months; everything fitting exactly into place. It feels like it’s meant to be. They pant and laugh and gasp for breath as they run full-pelt round the final corner, pushing the shopping trolley before them with the tarp-covered stone strapped safely in place…

…and then they swerve, too late, to avoid sudden traffic cones. The trolley wheels out of Randolph’s grasp and spins across the footpath.

“Oh dear, that was clumsy,” says a voice from behind.

Randolph turns quickly. “Fletcher,” he says.

“That the stone you’ve got there?” Fletcher’s leaning against a wall, eyebrows raised.

“Why don’t you run back to South London, Fletcher? Can’t find a cab to take you?” Randolph says, but when he turns around again Flavia’s there too, hand out to catch the trolley as it rolls to a stop.

“That was a very elegant operation, Randolph,” Flavia says. “We couldn’t have done it half so well ourselves. But the Heart of London was never meant to reside in Stoke Newington.”

Randolph, steps forward; Naomi and Trevor fall in behind him. “I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that,” he says.

Flavia’s smile grows wider. “We thought you might say that,” she says, “so we prepared.” There’s a click, and a whirr, from above. Randolph looks up; and the steering committee of the Battersea Society rappels down from the rooftops.

Posted in Circle Line, District Line. Tagged with , , .

By Holly
April 27, 2009

3 comments

Canning Town

Canning Town.

Picture by elbisreverri: Canning Town

In Canning Town, people say, you can buy anything, as long as you want it canned: canned artichokes, canned peas, canned bluebells and daffodils, canned paintings and rainstorms, summer, hot baths, hope, vocabulary, youth, despair.

What “people say” is not, of course, reliable in this instance. Canning Town is barbed wire and clanking industry, warning signs, high fences. The doors are the sort you can roll down and padlock. In the shops (and there aren’t many of them) you can buy cigarettes, biscuits and Coca Cola; hand-adjusted signs read Buy Any Two for 1.60. Inside the factories, it’s warm, and it’s very noisy.

The journalist pushes back her hair; the photographer squats down, focusing on the paddle packer.

“If you want a tin of peaches in Canning Town,” Dorothy says over the machinery, “the minimum order is a truckfull.”

The journalist says something inaudible.

“What?” Dorothy yells, leaning towards her.

“I said, could we maybe go somewhere a bit quieter?”

Dorothy sighs, and calls Mark over to take care of the photographer. “Up here,” she says to the journalist, and points to the meeting rooms.

There’s something about the name Pertwinkle & Lyme that appeals to journalists; plus their website has a functioning “contact” form, which puts them two steps ahead of most of the other factories in the area. What this means in practice is that P&L takes the fall whenever someone turns up to write an article on the canning industry, which happens on an approximately monthly basis. Dorothy is getting a little sick of it. “But will we ever,” they ask her every time, “find out how to preserve love?”

And every time, she says that they already know how, that it’s easy. That there’s a cupboard full of love in the storage room if they want a sample. Emotions preserve extremely well; much better than asparagus or weather, which always go wilty. “The trouble is,” Dorothy says, “that emotions are very… personalised.”

“How do you mean?” the journalist asks.

“Look at sadness,” Dorothy says. “If you got a phonecall now saying that your best friend’s just died, you’d be sad. It would be trivial for our canners to skim off some of that sadness and preserve it. But let’s say a customer has a sister who’s ill, and he thinks he ought to feel bad, but he doesn’t. He could take your can of sadness, and open it — but it would be your sadness, about things that happened to you. It wouldn’t be applicable to his situation.”

The journalist nods.

“The reason you can’t buy a can of love at your local Asda,” Dorothy says, “isn’t that it’s too, oh, too magic and ephemeral and full of rainbow mystery sparkle glitter. It’s because love is very, very specific; it’s focused on an individual person. It’s not,” and she pauses for a moment, “like sex.” This is, she knows from experience, the only way to get a journalist off the How Do We Can Love obsession: dangle genitals in front of them enticingly.

It works, this time as always. “So you’re saying sex isn’t personal?”

“Not in the same way, no, of course it’s not. Lust, certainly. Sex, no.”

The journalist looks doubtful; again, they always do.

“There are,” Dorothy says, “two things that are easy to can well. First: food that’s supposed to be tender and juicy and soft. Tomatoes. Peaches. And second: simple fleeting sensations. Sunlight on your skin, waves in the sea that push you upward from behind.”

“And sex?”

“And sex.” She tilts her head towards a chart on the wall. “Thirty percent our sales come from baked beans and orgasms alone, so we pay quite a lot of attention to sex.”

“And what sort of people,” the journalist asks, ignoring the baked beans, “tend to buy your canned orgasms?”

Dorothy raises her eyebrows. “The ones who have a penis or a clitoris, mostly,” she says. “Plus a few who don’t. We’re the market leader, you know. People are quite willing to pay thirty pence extra for a Pertwinkle & Lyme orgasm over something artificial from ValuCan.”

“No, I mean— wait, artificial?”

How is it possible, Dorothy thinks, that people have so little understanding of the provenance of their consumer pleasures? “Our orgasms,” she says, “are genuine, rather than robot simulations. This explains their superior quality.”

The journalist frowns. “You mean, you get… people are…”

Dorothy has a can of patience, but she left it in her desk. “No, of course not,” she says. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

The journalist looks relieved.

“Usually,” Dorothy says, “we use pigs.”

Posted in Docklands Light Railway, Jubilee Line. Tagged with , , , .

By Holly
April 22, 2009

2 comments

Canary Wharf

Canary Wharf fountains.

Picture by Andwar: Fountain & The Towers

The fountain at Canary Wharf contains two kilometres of piping, 117 nozzles in the central feature alone, and a pump at each corner rated for 792 m/hour. The filtration system has automatic backwashing and chemical control. The headers are stainless steel, and match cut-outs in the wide marble base.

The buildings at Canary Wharf funnel wind right through the plaza, but that’s okay: the fountain has an anemometer and central computer to monitor wind speed, and the height of the water jets is automatically adjusted so that passers-by stay dry.

Matthew isn’t great with anemometers, but he’s pretty good with computers, and better still at pettily vindictive resentment that never goes away. Once he’s gained override control of the water jets, he works on access to the extensive CCTV network, but facial recognition software is still too hit-and-miss: even after a month of incremental improvements, he douses a thousand innocents for each time he catches Lloyd. There’s the RFID chip he implanted in Lloyd’s left thigh, that one drunken Thursday, but there’s no way of reading it from a distance. And GPS is no good: even if he could track Lloyd’s phone without getting caught, the tall buildings mess up the precision of the signal.

In the end he takes the easy way out and uses the Oyster system. When Lloyd scans out at Canary Wharf station, Matthew’s phone beeps at him and connects automatically to the CCTV; he can watch Lloyd’s progress himself and twist up the power on the jets at just the right moment. Low-tech, but it works.

At least, it works for a while. Three months in, his control of some of the jets becomes unreliable. The problem is surely mechanical, but he sends out a robot with a webcam and can’t find anything wrong; he’s going to have to check it out himself. Seven in the morning, he thinks, with a hard hat and a brightly-coloured safety vest and council-branded waders. He watches the area for twelve hours in advance, through a high window, just to be on the safe side: unexplained mechanical faults are always suspicious. He sees nothing.

That’s because Lloyd, it turns out, has been hiding in the fountain all night, dressed in a wetsuit, breathing through a pipe. “Not the old-fashioned sort,” he clarifies. “Ran some tubing through the fountain. Turns out all that ‘making stuff’ shit we used to do can come in handy sometimes.” Then he pushes Matthew’s head back under water.

Lloyd’ll be counting to ten, Matthew thinks, but it reaches twenty and he gets tired of waiting; fortunately his phone is waterproof, so he opens the fountain control app and directs the reliable nozzles full-speed towards them, twisting free while Lloyd sputters.

“I can’t believe you shaved off your beard,” he says as he regains his feet.

Lloyd sighs. “You need to get over this,” he says. “I didn’t burn your house down. I didn’t kidnap your only daughter. I just left a job.”

“I gave you everything!” Matthew says. “Business cards. We had those white Ikea bookshelves where all the shelves are squares, Lloyd, I bought those for you. A coffee table that lit up when you put stuff on it. You could use the Wii controllers to turn the lights on and off!”

“You never actually paid me, though,” Lloyd says.

“It was a start-up!”

A flurry of very neat people in suits goes by. “Hey Lloyd,” one of them says.

“Hi Kim,” Lloyd says. “I might be five minutes late to the seven-thirty, hope that’s not a problem?”

“Nah, no worries. See you there.”

Matthew looks at him in disgust. “And after all that, this is what you’ve come to,” he says. “Seven-thirty meetings with Australians in suits?”

Lloyd steps up onto the bench that surrounds the fountain and reaches back to unzip his wetsuit. “Yeah,” he says, as a grey jacket comes into view. “And you know what? It pays really well.”

“It pays well! And that’s enough, is it? That’s enough to keep you happy? No fulfillment, no creativity, it just pays well?”

Lloyd jumps down onto the plaza, and shrugs. “Mostly,” he says. “Plus they have actual chairs. I was getting sick of bean-bags.”

Posted in Docklands Light Railway, Jubilee Line. Tagged with , , , , .

By Holly
April 20, 2009

4 comments

Canada Water

Canada Water.

Picture by Kake Pugh: Canada Water Station

Sure, build your station in the shape of a a giant drum. Even call it a drum when you write about it in the architecture magazines, if you like: go on! Tempt that fate! But don’t pretend you have anyone to blame but yourself when a titan takes you at your word.

Kreios is thousands of years old, many metres tall, and half-blind, but the sound of construction on the new Canada Water library draws him to the area, and the giant drum keeps him there. He plays in time to the jackhammers. It’s pretty loud.

It gets louder over the course of the morning: the beeping of trucks and the burr of poured rubble only encourages Kreios to play faster. The neighbours complain, of course, but Kreios is (a) immortal, and (b) really really big, so the police just call to him through a megaphone for a fruitless thirty minutes and then tape the area off. Surely he’ll get bored and go away in an hour or two.

“WOOO!” Kreios yells, after a particularly triumphant drum roll, then settles back down into a steady beat. He has the air of someone who can keep this up all day, which is indeed what he does; he’s still going when the station fills with workers on their way home.

Nothing’s changed when they come back in the morning.

“He’s definitely louder when the builders are at it,” says the deputy station manager, which is technically true, but nobody can hear her say it.

“We’ve got to do something,” says the station manager, equally inaudible.

After a week, someone takes action: the TFL website is updated to warn of severe titans at Canada Water, and all staff are issued with earplugs. The deputy manager frowns, and pulls a notepad from her pocket. “Doesn’t he ever sleep?” she writes, and passes it to the station manager.

“Apparently not,” he writes in reply.

Still, they’re an adaptable lot, and after a few weeks they get used to it; in fact station efficiency improves slightly, in the absence of any opportunity for gossip or a quiet mug of coffee. Meanwhile the builders carry on working over the weekends and into the evenings, trying to finish off the library as soon as possible, hoping that without their accompaniment Kreios will grow bored.

Finally, on a warm summer evening, the last touches are put in place, the last crane rolled away. Kreios drums solemnly through the night, and the staff gather to watch him as dawn breaks. Through the day they listen. He’s still drumming, but slower and slower, by noon: without the sound of the construction work, there’s nothing to keep him going. By the middle of the afternoon, it’s the quietest he’s been since he arrived.

The sun is setting when Kreios finally trails off and turns his head, squints his pale eyes at the space where his accompaniment used to come from. A four-storey flat-roofed library sits, unmoving, silent.

He turns back to the station, then back to the library. He stands up, lumbering, and tilts his head to one side; then squats down.

Sarah holds her breath.

“BONGOS!” Kreios yells, and his smile is the happiest smile that anyone has ever seen.

Posted in Jubilee Line. Tagged with , , .

By Holly
April 17, 2009

No comments