From quinn@interfuture.org Sun Dec 20 08:54:12 1998
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 06:16:36 -0800 (PST)
From: Quinn Norton
To: Dave
Subject: report from the smoke
another lost american's guide to getting around london
i will warn you straight up; when it comes to navigating london the only
thing more useless than a map is a londoner. natives are completely a
loss- they rarely seem to know what street they are standing on, much less
where other streets might be. they can point you to a car park, the
nearest tube station, say things to you like "head right and the bookstore
is on your left, can't miss it." but oh, yes you can. they don't use
landmarks, they don't pay attention to street names, they have no sense of
direction beyond right and left and they are always in a terrible hurry
headed towards their destination with unfathomable confidence. they appear
to arrive at their destinations by homing instinct, which they seem no
more inclined or able to explain than a salmon stopping for a chat on it's
way upstream. talking to a londoner about where things are adds to the
sense of a fairy tale city, because no where in lonndon seems to have a
geographic relationship to anywhere else in london. london is a collection
of impressions thrust together and connected haphazardly with a street
system that can be generously described as arbitrary. This city is
singularly unfazed by the concept of the shortest distance between two
points. it's been around longer than the modern concepts of space and
spatial relations and seems confident that it can outlive the fad.
london loves its maps. above all maps, it loves its map of the
underground. and true, in many ways both the underground and its map are
amazing- incredible full of a distinctive personality and acting effectively like the arteries of the city. a
londoner will proudly explain to you that the underground map makes no use
of scale, and that it was based on the look of a circuit board. the map is
simple, blitheringly easy to use and gives a false sense of the shape and
size of london. i blame this in part for the fact that no one seems to
have a concrete concept of london space. everything is presented in
relationship to your destination and not as foolish cartographers of other
places have attempted, where anything is. this has its drawback, but it
does make for a truly aesthetic figure complex enough to be useful and
simple enough to be branded all over london and for that matter the world.
both the map and the logo of the underground are carved forever in my
consciousness. a red circle crossed by a blue bar will forever indicate to
me that a tube station is nearby. the underground is a wonderfully
effective form of transport. it suspends not only space but time as well.
it's almost as if time spent tubing doesn't count and feels like you're
never on it for long... you can always get safely and quickly to the
general area of your destination, which doesn't make london feel small but
does make it feel close. the lifts and stairs of the underground then
birth you and untold numbers out onto the streets to fend for yourself in
the often cold, wet and always weirdly twisted city blocks of the surface. from there, you're on your own.
i am looking now at london's definitive self reference, the a-zed. (a-z,
of course. i may use zee for the rest of my life but this map book, it is
simply the a-zed. the alphabet doesn't even appear to have anything to do
with it. i refer to it as it cataloged in my mind.) the a-zed unfortunately
makes little more use of scale than the underground map and accomplishes a
great deal less. additionally the authors appear to believe that most
british are semi-blind cryptographers- they write the names to everything
very large and in ever conceivable direction, including over other names.
if you're coming to london get the a-zed. i am rushing out right after
this is written to procure my very own a-zed because i believe it is
incredibly worth owning, though nearly useless as a navigation tool. i
view the a-zed as a lens into the mind of the london gestalt and an
invaluable bit of british anthropology. if the a-zed is to be believed the
streets of london are incredibly wide and often simply overlap. they are
so important that it appears that there is no room for buildings, which
uncharitably encroach on the glorious roadspace here and there. streets
fade into one another at intersections with an artistic subtlety, so that
transitions on the map are never difficult. transitions on the surface of
london are abrupt and usually involve a motorcycle courier trying to run you down
after jumping the yellow but none of this is reflected in the sweet
artistic serenity of the a-zed. this thing should be enshrined in the
british museum as a native artistic interpretation of london, but i doubt
that's it's easy for the
british to see it that way. the british seem to have a capacity for
holding in their heads paradoxes of space that would boggle the average
american. they have, for instance, no problem thinking comfortably of a
multi-level flat. london is the platonic ideal of the british space
paradox, and the a-zed serves acts as its tangible portrait.
yoz is still milking me to admit that london is big. i haven't done so
because i claim that it's impossible to gauge the size of london as an
individual inside of it. i am lost inside a house of mirror that distort
and reflect everything but the viewer. for me london has a vibration
coursing through it like a song that plays just below the surface of
hearing. it has a beat slightly off my own but entirely self-consistent.
%%% "What garlic is to vampires, Marmite [Vegimite] is to Americans." %%%
%%% "I've found it very useful that way." --Yoz %%%
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