The London Nobody Knows

We’re losing our cultural backwaters: those undefinable nooks, crannies and dead ends, the quirks of our national existence that only ever gained our attention as a source of low-level irritation until we began to notice them by their absence. The deadbeat, knackered parts of town to whose alien strangeness we had become contemptuously familiarised. The empty, crap Sundays that spread before us, as bland and dissatisfying as a potted meat sandwich (white sliced bread obligatory). Thin, yeasty beer sold in plastic bottles and metallic cans. Television test cards. Co-op stamps.
Slowly but surely these eccentricities became homogenised, commercialised, gentrified, monetised – all in the name of progress. Now every day is the same, every hour is the same, every town is the same. This relentless surge forward frequently feels like the adrenaline-crazed, sugar-fuelled rush of a sub-adolescent society uneasy in its own skin; scared to be without anything to do, driven mad by the sound of silence, taunted by the subliminal, corrosive crackling of time moving ceaselessly onwards to the ticking accompaniment of the death watch beetle’s mating call.
Back in a distant era of three TV channels and four national radio stations, the quantity – if not quality – of original broadcast material was much lower than today. Endless classic film repeats jostled in the off-peak TV schedules with quirkier fare like the slapstick of Sykes’ The Plank and the whimsy of Betjeman’s Metro-land. I fancy that I also once saw the infinitely stranger spectacle of an intriguing, almost hallucinatory late 1960s documentary about aspects of post-war London that were even then disappearing. This might be a false memory*, but even so it’s a fitting one.
Fronted somewhat incongruously by James Mason, The London Nobody Knows has finally received its debut release on DVD. Unavailable commercially for many years, the film developed a cult following. You could only see it by booking a private showing at the BFI, or cadging a video copy from one of its many aficionados. Until recently, it too seemed to be destined for the very same fate as many of the obscurities whose disappearances it had described so vividly: a slow decline in the collective memory and a final passing into folklore upon its dissolution and disintegration.
Beginning with the striking image of a pickaxe head sinking into the ground, the documentary slips behind the Swinging London of thronging shopping streets (which look predictably quaint to modern eyes) and sleek new tower blocks, to portray an older, more arcane city whose sprawling, depressive anarchy is as pervasive as the murky, black Thames at its heart. Surveying a cast of comedy buskers, mournful lamplighters, budget Houdinis, pie & mash eaters and eel skinners, this London seems populated entirely by grotesques. Even its children have a baleful, demonic presence.
The film depicts much for urban historians to savour. The Roundhouse in Camden was at this point purely a piece of decaying railway architecture – derelict and empty since before the Second World War – and had yet to stage its legendary concerts by Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin or The Doors. Reference is made to the demolition of the old Euston station a few years previously, but the new station is still unopened. Broad Street is mentioned in passing as just another London rail terminus, although by this time it was already in decline and would close for good within twenty years.
Footage taken by the Thames shows a working river of docks and wharves. A visit to an East End funeral parlour looks more like a scene out of a Dickens period drama than a functioning business of the late 1960s. Pubs serve draught pints of Watney’s Red Barrel. Head-scarved women and flat-capped men eat plates of indefinable greyish-brown sludge in backstreet cafes. At Islington’s Chapel Market, the crowd members’ nervous glances at the camera betray an unease light-years away from today’s ethos of constant surveillance and incessant YouTube self-promotion.
Invoking the spirits of Marie Lloyd and Walter Sickert, Mason stands in the decaying ruins of the Bedford Theatre in Camden, his habitual clipped tones observing that the building’s tragedy was not that it had fallen into disuse, but that it had remained standing, unloved and decrepit, for so long. This attitude – possibly characteristic of the generally modernist spirit of the film’s times – sets up a paradox that the documentary never quite resolves. Is this a loving homage to the remnants of a dying era, or merely a gleeful dance on its rotting cadaver before the bulldozers move in?
Mason clearly approves of “seedy terraces [that] are coming up in the world, after years of neglect”, though only minutes later he warns against falling for the curious appeal of these “crumbling images of the past… we’d be foolish to mourn them too readily”. Yet the film is continually haunted by the spirit of the music hall, which recurs in its choices of the music, architecture and performers that it depicts. The narrative tone is similarly ambiguous; is it jokey and familiar, or elegaic and nostalgia-tinged? Its occasional flashes of exasperated impatience never make this entirely clear.
A visit to a Salvation Army hostel appears more socially concerned. Accompanied by beautiful and melancholic photography of its occupants, Mason seems genuinely to share in the frustration of men unable to gain employment simply because of their address. However, when the camera moves on to cover those less fortunate – a reminder that you rarely see tramps drinking bottles of purple meths these days – the scenes of confused, piss-soaked and clearly mentally ill homeless Londoners seem altogether more exploitative; an apparently spontaneous fight scene looks suspiciously staged.
Towards the end of the film, as he visits Spitalfields, the biggest difference between late 1960s and mid 2000s attitudes to the urban environment becomes apparent. In Fournier Street, older neighbours of the woman whose house he enters – in all its shocking, black, bleak squalor – can still remember the later Jack the Ripper murders. He describes these terraced streets as “out of date, inefficient, taking up too much space” and contrasts them with the concrete tower blocks that provide outdoor, green space for a notably multi-racial gaggle of young children to play in.
In mock-lamenting the decline of the older streets, he makes what is probably the most telling observation of the film:

“… there’s no need to be too sad about it because, after all, most of Victorian London was fairly hideous. And we can also console ourselves with the knowledge that the same fate attends our least favourite modern monstrosities.”

And there you have it. This blunt attitude is anathema to the modern way of thinking, in which the reverential and occasionally fetishistic preservation of “period features” is generally the over-riding consideration where Victoriana is concerned. These days Fournier Street is lovingly restored and priced out of the reach of mere mortals, whereas the tower blocks that Mason admired are now reviled, their once shiny futures tarnished by the realities of gritty economic conundrums never factored into the lofty ambitions and idealistic dreams of their original planners.
If this film has any underlying philosophy, it seems to be sic transit gloria mundi: thus fades the glory of the world. How very appropriate. Fashions ebb and flow like the tides on the banks of the Thames and the only constant is change. The tranquil obscurity of the backwaters has had its day and now the spirit of the age is for commonality and motion, for stirring things up, for getting them out into the open, for speed and display. I might mourn what we’ve lost with a little more sentimentality than Mason, but at the same time I can’t deny the thrills that this age of constant stimulation provides.
For every music hall that falls to rubble and dust, a mythology of ghosts arises. For every filled hour in the TV schedules, a new strand of tradition is woven. What now seems commonplace – mundane and ugly, even – will one day be strange and fantastic; in a hundred years’ time, my spiritual successors will no doubt lament the destruction of the superb 1960s architecture of the second Euston station. I hope that they too will have access to the fascinating historical jetsam of The London Nobody Knows, which provides an enduring reminder of the ephemerality of much that surrounds us.
* possibly as a result of reading this four and a half years ago