Love Lockdown.

"I'm not loving you the way I wanted to. See, I had to go, I had to move. No more wasting time, you can't wait for life, we're just wasting time, where's the finish line?" - Love Lockdown, Kanye West.

There's more lockdown love than love lockdowns these days but ain't love a funny thing? Isn't the act of telling somebody you love them a scary and exciting thing. Two people can tell each other that they love each other and both completely mean it - but they can both mean quite different things by it. Even when they mean the same thing by it, even when they tell each other that they will love each other forever, they can mean different things by that - and that meaning can change over the years too.

 

So, over time, customs and rituals have developed that have helped people make firmer commitments to those they profess to love the most. Engagements, marriages, marriage vows ("for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health"), interdependency, tattoos, and, most importantly of all, the shared bond of rearing the children that the physical expression of love between two lovers has brought into the world.

A more modern cultural phenomenon has come into being in which two lovers express their hopefully undying, and eternal, romantic connection by writing their names, or initials, on a padlock, attaching it to a bridge (often in a large city, over a major waterway), locking it, and tossing the key into the river below.  An act that somehow manages to combine reckless abandon and firm commitment at the same time.

I was online, of course, with the London Fortean Society (with thanks to Conway Hall for enabling the event) for Love-Locks - The History and Heritage of a Contemporary Custom. Author, lecturer, and archaeologist Dr Ceri Houlbrook was on hand, on Zoom, to lead us through how this ritual, or fad if you prefer, had come into being and what it says about us, people with all of modernity's power at our fingertips but still haunted to the depths of our soul by the fear that someone we love to the bottom of our heart and beyond may not love us back.

Or not in the way we would like them too. It was my first LFS talk, first talk actually, of 2021 and it was brilliant and fascinating. Like love itself, it was even better than I thought it might be. Via Zoom, Dr Houlbrook began by acknowledging that, on the surface, padlocks appear to be very very boring items. Before, immediately, contradicting herself and saying that the history of padlocks, the technology behind them, and their ritual use has, actually, rendered them quite fascinating.

Which she went on to prove. The custom of these love-locks has grown to be a global phenomenon, you can find examples in all continents except Antarctica - and Dr Houlbrook seems to still hold out some hope one will show up at a research station there eventually - but it is in Europe where they've really taken off.

But where did the practice start? Dr Houlbrook ran through various theories regarding the proposed origin of the love-lock. Some argue that it is an ancient Chinese custom that dates from a time when a young couple who were forbidden to marry threw themselves to their deaths from the Yellow Mountain in Anhui Province. Others argue that that story is simply an embellishment to aid a commercial project in the region aimed at making money from gullible, or lovestruck, tourists.

There's a Serbian claim too. A soldier from Vrnjacka Banja left his hometown, and his school teacher girlfriend, to go and fight in the first World War. There he fell in love with a Greek lady and back in his home town his now ex went on to die of a broken heart. As a memorial to this tragic tale padlocks were attached to fences. In Pecs, Hungary the love-lock fence only goes back as far as the early 1980s and stems from the Hungarian punk rock scene. Sid Vicious was often photographed with a padlock round his neck.

It's an example of padlocks being used as symbols of resistance rather than romance. In Merano, Italy soldiers celebrated the end of active service by attaching their padlocks to a particular fence and it was in Italy, in 2006, where the craze was first turbocharged in the public imagination.

The author Federico Moccia, that year, wrote a book called Ho voglia di te (I Want You in English translation) in which one of the characters expresses his true and unwavering love to his partner by attaching a padlock to the Ponte Milvio in Rome and tossing the key into the Tiber to be lost forever.

Pop culture pilgrimages to sights featured in The Hobbit, His Dark Materials, Twilight, and Pride and Prejudice have become a recent phenomenon, you only need go to Kings Cross station to see people lining up in their Harry Potter garb to have their photo taken, and, in Rome, Moccia's book, and a later film version of it, made sure the Ponte Milvio became part of that list,

Popular culture became popular custom and soon the craze reached Paris. From the city of love and romance, the craze spread further and soon padlocks appeared as far apart as London, Sydney, Venice. They sprung up from New York to Newport and from Beijing to Blackpool.

Padlocks are designed specifically to enable two things to be joined together, to hold secure, and to resist destruction. Bridges also link two things together, admittedly usually two sides of a river, and they often feature in the denouement of romantic comedies. Being an old romantic at heart myself, I have often imagined walking on to a rainy Waterloo Bridge at midnight and embracing my true love at midnight.

Then we cut to the credits and everyone's at the wedding reception dancing to Love Train by The O'Jays! But I digress. Back to padlocks. Some places, Gretna Green for example, have turned a tidy profit. In the small Scottish town famous for people running away to get married there, they will charge you the best part of £20 for your own personalised padlock.

 

Lovelock in Nevada wasn't going to miss an opportunity. Not with a name like that. A syrupy advert shows citizens of the town proudly boasting that in the desert where once only sagebrush grew, love is now in full bloom. Love is all around in Lovelock.

But though love, as Cher, Chrissie Hynde, and Neneh Cherry sang at us back in 1995, can build a bridge, it seems that love, or at least the physical manifestations of it, can destroy a bridge too. In 2014, Paris removed its love-locks after a section of one bridge collapsed under their weight. Melbourne, Newcastle, and Leeds all followed suit.

Love can sometimes get too heavy for some people but it seems it can also get too heavy for some structures as well. Dr Houlbrook has, over the years, taken a particular interest in the love-locks that decorate, or make unseemly - depending on your point of view, the Oxford Road bridge over the Rochdale Canal in Manchester. 

Spending, occasionally, hours inspecting each and every love-lock and documenting them too. She's found examples of spontaneous love-locks, pre-planned love-locks made by companies like Forever Love Locks and Locked In Love, and she's noticed the four most common words that are featured on these locks are forever, always, heart, and, of course, love itself.

Some mark golden weddings and other anniversaries and some mark the act of proposal (presumably they played a part in that act of proposal) but there are also locks that mark out less romantic but still important moments. Birthdays, a trip to see Billy Elliott at the theatre, and one that features the names of Man Utd players Jesse Lingard, Marcus Rashford, David De Gea, and Anthony Martial.

Dr Houlbrook is a Man City fan so it choked her to have to include that one. Anybody would be choked up if they saw the locks that commemorate the twenty-two lives, many of them very young, that were lost with the terrorist bombing of the Manchester Arena following a concert by Ariane Grande in 2017.

Smaller tragedies have been played out on some of the love-locks when people have returned to them and, broken hearted perhaps, crudely daubed them with legends like "BROKE UP - SORRY" and, less pleasantly - and less well spelt, "FUCK BICHES". Some have been amended several times so that the love-lock acts as a public history of the ups and downs of their owners' romantic lives.

In some cases the love-locks have been 'hijacked' and those who presumably aren't prepared to cough up to buy their own simply write their names on existing locks. Dr Houlbrook spoke about the objectification of personhood these love-locks represent, she spoke about the magnetic effect of ritual assemblage, and she spoke of patterns of deposition and the rhythms of everyday practice.

Though this was learned, scholarly stuff, it was never dull. It never felt like a lecture as much as it felt like listening to a person enthusiastically sharing anecdotes about their passion. There were some romantic anecdotes that Dr Houlbrook had gathered from couples she'd found attaching love-locks to the bridge in Manchester and there was even a lovely coda to the story of the removed love-locks.

Some ended up in an exhibition about magic, ritual, and witchcraft in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, in Paris some were auctioned as art pieces to raise money for charities that worked with migrants and refugees, and in Melbourne they were incorporated into bells that people could buy. So that love, or the memory of love, can echo through space and time.

The London Fortean Society had yet again provided a wonderful evening's entertainment. At a time when much that is happening in the world makes no sense they at least help us understand some of the weirdness of the modern world and they make it fun too. With Valentine's Day coming up on Sunday, it seemed a very opportune time to have a talk on this topic.

Just like last year and the one before it, I won't be sending any Valentine cards and I won't be, any time soon, writing my initials on a padlock, attaching it to a bridge, and throwing the keys away but I hope I am still capable of love and I have written this as my gift of love to all of you who need, or want, some love at this difficult time. Because, despite everything, I still believe that love is the greatest power that humanity possesses and that love will be the thing we will need to help us through these dark days. Be it publicly displayed on a padlock or locked deep in our hearts.