SPITALFIELDS Church is a creepy spot at the best of times and is even more eery in the present ghost town of the East End. If Jack the Ripper was a chuchgoer, this would have been his local.
Christ Church is one of seven designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor under a Tory parliamentary act of 1711 to celebrate the fall of the rival Whigs.
It is a bit like Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson, currently self-confining at Downing Street, presiding over a spend-spend-spend budget to celebrate the recent victory over anti-austerity Labour.
In the early-18th century, law and order in London’s impoverished inner suburbs were thought to be under threat from the lack of churches. These days, it’s a lack of toilet paper.
In his 1985 novel Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd uses the London churches as the setting for his tale of a modern-day Hawksmoor, a police detective who investigates a series of mysterious murders in or around them and reveals a hidden Satanic network.
Anything by Ackroyd, the best modern chronicler of London and its darker side, is worth getting hold of if you’re running out of books in the current lockdown.
Christ Church has put up a sign at the gate saying the churchyard will stay open for the duration so that locals can enjoy some fresh air. Today, I was the only one there and, given the psychogeography of the place, I wasn’t tempted to linger.
Nearby Petticoat Lane market was deserted and shuttered. So you’ll have to be patient if you need to restock on cheap Asian fabrics, knock-off perfumes or other assorted toot.
The streets leading there have been a bit hipsterised in recent years as a new set has moved in to succeed centuries of incomers – Huguenots, Jews, Bangladeshis.
I see the trendy vegan cheese shop has had to shut down. Every cloud has a silver lining.
Back at Downing Street, Johnson is sweating and coughing from a mild dose of coronavirus and facing the flak over having failed to take his own advice on avoiding infection.
Tom Peck at The Independent was among those who castigated Johnson for having carried on as usual, “swanking about Westminster because, you know, as long as the little people stop spreading the virus”.
“Woah woah woah woah, you might say – you’re not actually laughing at getting the coronavirus, are you? Yes, I’m afraid to report, we are,” he chortled on Friday.
Never fear. Johnson says that “thanks to the wizardry of modern technology,” he will still be able to spearhead the current counter-attack. By wizardry, he presumably means the phone, that cutting edge late-19th century technology he used to ring the Queen this week.
In the coming days – weeks! – I’ll be bringing you more dispatches from this part of London’s East End. It’s comfortable walking distance, so I’m not breaking any no-public transport rule.
It’s an opportunity to indulge in a bit more psychogeography. That’s a concept of urban rambling that “has links to the Letterist and Situationist Internationals, revolutionary groups influenced by Marxist and anarchist theory, as well as by the attitudes and methods of Dadaists and Surrealists,” according to Wikipedia.
But don’t be alarmed. I plan to focus on the sites and avoid the mumbo jumbo.
Idle Thoughts on London Walks 