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We're coming to the end of a tumultuous year (both politically and, for many of us, personally) and although, worryingly, that situation both seems completely normal now and for, at least, the next five years there is, as ever, solace, to be had in walking, friendship, food, and drink. As, once again, yesterday's final walk in 2019's London by Foot season was to prove.
Excessive Joy Weeps:A Journey Into the Heart of William Blake was the sixth of these walks I'd curated this calendar year and if the turnout didn't match my trilogy of graveyard walks or my walks along the river Lea and 'river' New in quantity then it did, at least, in quality. In fact it could easily be said that the walkers in attendance were the very hardcore of our little walking club. It was me, Shep, and Pam. As it so often is.
After a pleasant, but low key, festive period, I'd risen early and took the train from Honor Oak Park to Clapham Junction where Shep was waiting in Caffe Nero. I had a chai latte and then, with the assumption it was just the two of us out for the day, we headed off towards the river.
I was just about to get a snap of a brutalist monster when I noticed I'd had a WhatsApp message from Pam so we headed back to meet her and then turned round and retraced our footsteps once more. On a day in which I'd eventually notch up over 35,000 steps what's another few hundred?
We reached the banks of the Thames just short of Battersea Bridge and after pausing to take in the glorious, and often huge, Dutch barges rested up on the silted foreshore we headed downstream until we reached St Mary's. This was to be our first stop for spiel and I'd already been careful to warn my friends that I'd prepared SEVEN sheets of A4.
I'd done A LOT OF RESEARCH for this walk yet it didn't bother me that only two of my closest friends turned up. I can run the walk again and, for me, the most important thing, always, is getting out into the fresh air, seeing new things, blowing off a few cobwebs, and spending quality time with people.
I, as so often, digress! St Mary's (by Joseph Dixon) is a handsome specimen. It was completed in 1777 with four simple Tuscan columns holding the entablature aloft to create a modest, yet proud, portico. JMW Turner used to set easel up in the vestry so he could paint riverine scenes and the American military officer Benedict Arnold (who swapped sides during the American Revolutionary War) is buried in the crypt.
For Blakean purposes though, our interest came in the fact that it was in this church that he had wed. On 17th August 1782, a 24 year old Blake married 20 year old Catherine Boucher. They had known each other one year after meeting when Blake was visiting the area recovering from an earlier romantic failure. She sympathised with his predicament and he, apparently, replied with "do you pity me? Then I love you".
Which is hardly the most silver tongued of lines but it seems to have worked. Catherine was illiterate and signed her marital contract with an X. Blake later taught her to read, write, and to use a printing press. The marriage produced no children yet it is said that Blake, consistent with the Swedenborgianism that so influenced his world view, wished to bring a concubine into the marriage as a surrogate mother. The evidence for this, however, comes from Algernon Charles Swinburne who was born both a decade after Blake's death and was notorious for his writings on then transgressive subjects like cannibalism, lesbianism, anti-theism, and sado-masochism so may, possibly, have been an unreliable narrator.
He was, it seems, smitten from first meeting until departure of this mortal coil. Blake himself had been born 28th November 1757 in Soho as the third of seven children (Blake's 7?). His father, James, was a hosier and his mother, too, was named Catherine. Blake left school aged ten and even though his family were English Dissenters he was baptised and the Bible influenced both his life and work constantly and immeasurably.
His artistic career began with engravings of copies of Greek antiquities and, through this, become exposed to the work of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Durer. After being taken out of school at that early age he was enrolled in drawing classes at Pars' on The Strand and soon began to take an interest in the poetry of Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser.
On 4th August 1772, aged fourteen, Blake was apprenticed by engraver James Basire on Great Queen Street in Covent Garden. He stayed with Basire for seven years and at twenty-one became a professional engraver himself. While on Great Queen Street, Blake would be sent to Westminster Abbey and other Gothic churches in London to work. He came to see Gothic as "the living form" and claimed to have experienced visions in the Abbey of Christ, his apostles, and monks and priests chanting in a "great procession".
While at the Abbey, he was also responsible for causing a young boy from Westminster School, who had been teasing Blake at the time, to fall from a scaffold to the ground "with terrific violence". In 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy (then in the old Somerset House). There he rebelled against fashionable painters of the time like Rubens and he came to detest the attitude of the RA's first president Joshua Reynolds and his pursuit of "general truth" and "general beauty. Blake wrote "To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit".
Blake also disliked Reynold's humility which he held to be hypocrisy and preferred to look back to the era, and works, of Michelangelo and Raphael for his inspiration. As we looked across to Lots Road Power Station and the towering new developments it seemed, for me, an apt time for the first poem of the day. The poem London was published in 1794 and comes from the collection Songs of Experience.
"I wander thro' each charter'd street
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe
In every cry of Every man
In every infant's cry of fear
In every voice, in every ban
The mind forg'd manacles I hear
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blast the newborn infant's tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse"
We continued along the bank of the river, past Foster and Partners high tech and high end modernist residential development Albion Riverside, and, after taking in the splendour of Albert Bridge (it looks great lit up at night and Shep treated us to a blast of The Pogues Misty Morning, Albert Bridge) and its wonderful sign (in a booth that looks like the place you'd buy tokens for fairground rides) we dropped down into Battersea Park and followed the riverside Terrace Walk.
Battersea Park was opened in 1858 and, before that, it was Battersea Fields - a popular spot for duelling. In 1829, two years after Blake's death, the Duke of Wellington and the Earl of Winchelsea met here to settle a matter of honour. The Duke aimed wide and the Earl fired into the air and both lives were spared in what I guess you'd call a scoreless draw.
We continued on to the peace pagoda, erected in those halcyon GLC days of 1985 and attended, each day, by a Buddhist monk. One man was paying religious observance but more of us were taking photographs and, quite simply, taking in the scene. It's a beautiful monument in a beautiful location taking in views of a beautiful river and even a grey, if pleasantly mild, December day could not detract from that fact.
As we reached Chelsea Bridge, and the end of Battersea Park, we were to spot herons, cormorants, Egyptian geese, ducks, and an inordinate number of crows (no doubt emboldened by their recent starring role in Mackenzie Crook's Worzel Gummidge remake) before we entered into the brave new world of the Battersea Power Station redevelopment project.
It's a project that millennials (or those who seek to sound like them) may describe as giving them "all the feels" (I cringe just to type it) but, overall, it seems to be a good thing. At least for now. My main fear is how inclusive it will be. Is it just, as so many of these redevelopments tend to be, a rich man's plaything where long time residents will feel excluded or marginalised? Will the no doubt phenomenally expensive apartments be used merely as placeholders and money makers by rich Russian oligarchs and Saudi oil men? Will there even be affordable accommodation for key workers and those potentially displaced by the endless redrawing of the London skyline?
On the plus side, for now, there's a little ice rink for the kids and you can have a free game of curling! There's a visitor centre where you can read about the history of the power station, there's a neat little store (not shop, it seems) where Shep purchased a samosa and Pam a melted cheese panini (I settled for a small tube of Pringles, salt'n'vinegar) and bars and restaurants are springing up among the undulating and curvaceous building sites. One which boasts of an opportunity to live in a Frank Gehry designed home. Something I am unlikely to be ever even close to being able to afford.
It's a fascinating, and vast, building site and it'll be interesting to revisit in months or years and see how it develops. Let's just hope it doesn't become a gated community. There's something really really depressing about a gated community. When you leave the development you have a real sense of returning to the real world with its Sunday markets and car boot sales but that's still mixed with an unbelievable number of new developments that are changing the face of London as we know it.
For the better or for the worse is for you to decide and for time to tell. The new US Embassy is a smart building but it could hardly be more different to the Chariots spas, bus station, and Portuguese eateries of Vauxhall Cross. Terry Farrell's MI6 (or SIS) Building and the towering blocks of St George's Wharf are already starting to look dated next to their new neighbours.
We'd lost track of Blake completely here. I wondered what he'd think about these skyscrapers, these ostentatious displays of wealth, and I could only come to the decision he'd be as disheartened as he'd be confused by them. I take a more positive view of them but I still reserve judgement.
We passed the Tamesis Dock (where Pam and I once saw, about a decade back, Euros Childs play a superb gig) and, just before Lambeth Palace and the Garden Museum (still on my 'to-do' list) we swung right, away from the river, and away from Joseph Bazalgette's Albert Embankment (1866-1869). A short way along Lambeth Road we crossed under a railway bridge and took a left into Hercules Road.
It was nearly time for a pub stop but first some history of this area. Hercules Road is named after Hercules Hall (the former owner of which was the inventor, and father of the modern circus, Philip Astley). Astley invented the circus ring and was one of the principal reasons that Lambeth became a popular entertainment resort. Hercules Road was used in 1949's Passport to Pimlico and William Blake once lived on a house, no longer standing, on the road too. We were to find a plaque denoting the site of his former abode but, better still, we were to find (on Carlisle Lane, Virgil Street, and Centaur Street - near Archbishop's Park and a very busy Deliveroo depot) a series of Blake mosaics that have been described, by website The Londonist, as the largest gallery of Blake's art in the world.
There's a list of contributing artists as you depart the arches (and there's one or two people hanging about somewhat suspiciously too, maybe not a place for a night visit) but we were content to just take in the impressive collection. Even if we did marvel at the bed. Some kind of installation? Blake related? Or is it, and this is entirely possible in this day and age, actually somebody's bed? One they actually sleep in?
We couldn't possibly begin to know. The art had been great, the area a little, sketchy but the pub, The Pineapple, was to prove something of a disappointment even if my pint of Atlantic was eminently potable. On entering there were two solitary men in there. One, propping up the bar, remarked to the barmaid that a 'coach party' had arrived.
Yes, the arrival of three people apparently was of such import that this joke was deemed worth making. Oh dear. It's quite remarkable to think that, ten years back, the pub (or at least its toilet) was infamous for hosting a drunken orgy involving several police from the nearby station.
It wasn't the place for a two pint mistake on Saturday, let alone a drunken orgy, more's the pity as I'm sure Blake would have approved. Whilst resident of Hercules Road, Blake wrote Songs of Experience and painted the watercolours Newton and Nebuchadnezzar. His house was demolished in 1918 and the area is, surely, quite different to how it was when he arrived and it was described as both pleasant and rural. As legislation drove industry south of the river the area soon became a disease infested slum and that's what it was like when he left it. It's improved since then at least.
Refreshed, we had another fairly long walk ahead of us. We headed down Baylis Road and The Cut, turned left onto Blackfriars Road and crossed Blackfriars Bridge where, on the SE side, once stood John Rennie's Albion Mill. London's first great factory which burnt down in 1791. Blake would have passed it regularly on his perambulations around the capital. It is believed to have inspired his term "dark Satanic mills" which both Shep and myself had previously assumed had come from Lowryesque visions of Manchester and Salford.
Seemingly not so. Avoiding my proposed optional pub stop in The Blackfriar pub we passed through some back streets and near St Paul's and right in front of The Old Bailey before coming out at West Smithfield and cutting along Cloth Fair down to Barbican tube and passing under the Barbican on Beech Street, turning into Whitecross Street, then down Dufferin Street to Bunhill Fields.
Bunhill Fields was used as a burial ground between 1665 and 1854 and was favoured by non-comformists. As well as both William and Catherine Blake's grave it contains those of John Bunyan (author of The Pilgrim's Progress, died 1688), the mother of Methodism Susanna Wesley (d.1742), the father of English hymnody Isaac Watts (d.1748) and, right next to the Blake marker, that of Daniel Defoe. The Robinson Crusoe author passed away in 1731.
Blake died in August 1827 (aged sixty-nine, in Charing Cross) to no great fanfare. Partly because of that the marker of his burial place is not exact. That location was established in 2006/7 by The Friends of William Blake and in 2018, the President of that group, Philip Pullman unveiled a bronze plaque at the site. We were unable to spot it so we retired, as dark began to descend, to The Artillery Arms where I relaxed by a roaring fire with a pint of Seafarer's Ale.
On the day of Blake's death he had worked tirelessly on his Dante series before drawing his 'angel' Kate and then singing hymns and verses. He passed away at 6pm and an early biographer of Blake, Alexander Gilchrist, reported that a female lodger in Blake's house who was present at the expiration had remarked "I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel".
Forty-four years ealier, in 1783, Blake had published his first collection of poems and prose - Poetical Sketches. It was never published for the public but given as gifts to friends and other interested parties. There were only forty copies and its first poem, To Spring and I, I reproduce here as some kind of tribute:-
"O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down
Through the clear windows of the morning, turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle
Which in full choir hails they approach, O Spring!
The hills tell one another, and the listening
Valleys hear, all our longing eyes are turn'd
Up to they bright pavilions, i see forth
And let thy holy feet visit thy clime
Come o'er the eastern hills, and let our winds
Kiss thy perfumed garments; let us taste
Thy morn and evening breath; scatter they pearls
Upon our lovesick land that mourns for thee
O deck her forth with thy fair fingers, pour
Thy soft kisses on her bosom; and put
Thy golden crown upon her languish'd head
Whose modest tresses are bound of for thee's"
In 1784, Blake and a former fellow apprentice opened a print shop and began working with the radical publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson's house was a meeting point for the era's intellectual dissenters including the artist Henry Fuseli, the feminist Mary Wollstonecroft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women), the poet William Wordsworth (that fella who used to wander lonely as a cloud) and Thomas Paine, the Thetford born activist whose pamphlets inspired the American Revolution.
Blake, initially, was a great supporter of the French and American revolutions and even took to wearing a Phyrgian cap in solidarity. But he later came to despair of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror which resulted in more than 16,000 deaths. He came to despair of many things, truth be told, and in fact had for a long time. Also in 1784 he composed an unfinished manuscript, An Island in the Moon, which acted as a satire on the "contrived and empty productions of the contemporary culture".
It showed Blake beginning his move away from convention towards a more prophetic mode of expression and inspired WB Yeats (who refused to believe Blake was not of Irish stock) who called it Blake's first true symbolic book. One copy survives today, in Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum, and the overriding theory throughout the book was that of Blake rejecting the bluestocking society of poetical evenings and his dissatisfaction within the social circles he was finding himself operating in.
The work parodied friends and acquaintances and gave them names like Sipsop the Pythagorean, Inflammable Gass, Obtuse Angle, Etruscan Column, Mrs Gimblet, Jack Tearguts, and Mrs Nannicantipot. Blake himself was called, in this book, Quid the Cynic. The final chapter contains hints of poems that would appear in 1785's Songs of Innocence. Poems like The Little Boy Lost:-
"Father! Father! Where are you going?
O do not walk so fast
Speak, father, speak to your little boy
Or else I shall be lost
The night was dark, no father was there;
The child was wet with dew
The mire was deep & the child did weep
And away the vapour flew"
Away, too, flew (or walked), Pam, Shep, and I. We left The Artillery Arms and headed down the roads of Clerkenwell and Theobalds. Then right into Southampton Row and Kingsway (where I picked up a regulation Greggs vegan sausage roll) and, eventually, left into Great Queen Street where at number thirty-one once stood the now demolished workshop where Blake plied his trade for James Basire. The brick houses nearby give an idea of how it would have looked.
The Freemason's Hall across the road looked far more imposing. It was soon time for yet more Blakean history. Songs of Innocence (1785) and Songs of Experience (1794) were released together and were definitions of consciousness that reimagined Milton's 'paradise' and 'fall'. Innocence looked at the unfallen world and Experience the fallen one. Blake viewed the innocence of childhood in a very romantic way and saw those dark Satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution (happening at that time) considerably less favourably. His 1804 poem 'And did those feet in ancient time', later (in 1916) put to the music by Hubert Parry as Jerusalem, is possibly Blake's most well known work:-
"And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountain green
And was the holy Lamb of God
on England's pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem buried here
Among those dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my Spear; O clouds unfold
Bring me my Chariot of fire
I will not cease from Mental Fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green & pleasant land"
In 1800, Blake moved to Felpham in Sussex (the only time he ever lived outside of London) where he took a job illustrating the works of William Hayley, a minor poet. While in Felpham he began to resent his patron, believing Hayley to be uninterested in art and preoccupied with "the mere drudgery of business" (Blake was not good with and rarely cared about money) and in August 1803 Blake was involved in a physical altercation with the soldier John Schofield. Schofield claimed Blake had said "damn the king" (George III) and that "the soldiers are all slaves". Blake was cleared in the Chichester Assizes but it was a grave crisis at the time.
In 1804, Blake returned to London where, for the next sixteen years, he worked on Jerusalem. He'd arrived at the idea of using characters from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and set up an exhibition in Soho at his brother's haberdashery shop. Aged sixty-five, Blake began illustrations for the Book of Job which Ruskin compared favourably with Rembrandt and, much later in 1931, Vaughan Williams based his ballet, Job:A Masque for Dancing, on these illustrations. His illustrations, however, do not eclipse the power of the 1794 poem The Tyger from Songs of Experience:-
"Tyger, Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame they fearful symmetry
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings does he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder & what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand & what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly venoms clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?"
We walked down Long Acre, Bow Street, and Wellington Street and turned into The Strand. There I had a "comfort break" (rather than the proposed pint) in The Coal Hole and told of how, between 1821 and 1827 when he died, William Blake had lived behind where the pub now stands in two rooms of 3 Fountain Court.
It's no longer there but Blake had written of how the Thames looked like "a bar of gold" from there. Even if the dwelling was a hole (not a coal hole). Blake had come to terms with poverty and believed God had a beautiful mansion waiting for him elsewhere.
By this time, we were running out of energy and time, so a quick decision was made to cut the walk short. I'd intended to pass by Westminster Abbey (where there is a monument to Blake in Poet's Corner, added in 1957), Christopher Wren's St James's Church on Piccadilly (where Blake was christened on 11th December 1757), 17 South Moulton Street (where Blake lived when he moved back from Felpham and near where hangings could be observed at Tyburn), before eventually cutting into Broadwick Street for one last lecture!
Instead we cut through the horrendous crowds of Leicester Square and Wardour Street (where, unplanned, we passed St Anne's where Blake should have been christened) and eventually turned into Broadwick (formerly Broad) Street where Blake had been born.
I knew it was near Masala Zone and Patisserie Valerie but, at first, I could find no number or plaque. Defeated we headed off to Carnaby Street and, there, in front of a tower block called, you guessed it, William Blake House stood a memento to the man. Covered in graffiti and rendered in a retro font but there it was for sure.
"Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean
The children walking two and two, in red and blue and green
Grey headed beadles walk'd before, with wands as white as snow
Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames' water flow
Oh what a multitude they seemed, those flowers of London town!
Seated in companies, they sit with radiance all their own
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of Heaven among
Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor
Then cherish pity, lest you desire an angel from your door"
We passed by the jellyfish Xmas decorations of Carnaby Street and over to the quieter northern side of Oxford Street (a blessed relief) and, as our legs and feet and stomachs were all telling us a change of tack was required, we stopped briefly for refreshment in the Northumberland Arms on Tottenham Court Road before heading on to Ravi Shankar's on Drummond Street.
I had intended a brief visit to the British Library where, in the courtyard, stands Eduardo Paolozzi's statue based on Blake's 1795 illustration of Newton from his 1795 series Nebuchadnezzar. Blake couldn't stand Newton, "May God us keep. From Single vision and Newton's sleep" and opposed the Enlightenment as well as writing "Art is the Tree of Life and Science is the Tree of Death".
I decided against a visit and after one more poem, 1789's Spring (below) we headed straight into Ravi Shankar's and Pam and I had a couple of Kingfishers, Shep a brace of cobras, and I thoroughly enjoyed my chili paneer and paratha and was glad I hadn't attempted Shep's spinach and paneer dosa as it looked absolutely huge. If very tasty.
"Sound the flute!
Now it's mute
Birds delight
Day and night;
Nightingale
In the dale,
Lark in sky,
Merrily,
Merrily, merrily, to welcome in the year
Little boy,
Full of joy;
Little girl,
Sweet and small;
Cock does crow,
So do you;
Merry voice,
Infant noise,
Merrily, merrily, to welcome in the year
Little lamb,
Here I am;
Come and lick
My white neck;
Let me pull
Your soft wool;
Let me kiss
Your soft face;
Merrily, merrily, we welcome in the year"
It seemed a suitable way to end the walk as well as the season of walking and it had been great to end it with a delicious curry with two of my very best friends and two of the best friends anyone could wish for. We eschewed another drink and headed to Warren Street tube. Shep took the Northern line to Waterloo and Pam and I the Victoria line. She hopped off at Victoria and I went all the way to Brixton where I jumped on the P4 bus and went home straight to bed where I slept like one of Blake's angels.
Thanks to Pam and Shep for joining me and for the photos (some of which have been incorporated into this write up, as ever) and thanks to them as well as Carl, Michelle, Marianne, Sue, Stuart, Tina, Neil W, Kathy, Colin, Emma, Neil B, Belinda, Eamon, Patricia, and Dena for their attendance on one, or several, of the London by Foot walks of 2019. In 2020 we go again on Saturday March 21st for A Rite of Spring:Roving Royal Parks (Fulwell to Hammersmith) and I hope to see as many of you as possible. In the meantime, happy new year and peace and love to each and every one of you.
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