It can see you. Wherever you turn, you know it’s watching. Think you’re safe hidden within four walls? Think again. Those three evil eyes at the top can see through bricks and mortar with x-ray vision.
What am I talking about? The eye of Mordor Elephant & Castle aka Strata SE1 aka ‘Razor’, one of the more evil looking buildings in London, with its wind turbine apertures that look like eyes. I remember leaving for work in the mornings when I lived in Brixton and casually, even nonchalantly, glancing backwards as I crossed the Brixton Road and BAM. There it was. Staring right back. Ugh. Creepy.
Thankfully, where there is darkness, there may be light. The fell presence of this all-seeing towereye is combatted by a mast to the south of the city. Hardly exciting sounding I know, a mast. Great. But just as some buildings can produce an irrational disquiet, so can others come to mean much more than what they seem.
Rewind to eleven years ago. Edinburgh Fringe. The comedian Daniel Kitson is performing. His show C90 is making me laugh. But while critics like it, they say it’s not his best work. So it’s consigned to the dustbin of ‘nearlys’. What I heard, though, wasn’t a three star show. I heard his character, Henry, describe a life that sounded like something out of Fever Pitch, something more than a postcode or an area: a beery, footbally, humming Shandri-La.
He was talking, believe it or not, about Crystal Palace. The show had a dreamlike quality to it. Henry worked in an archive, surrounded by old casette tapes, and told the audience the story of his life. This was composed of and interrupted by long, glassy-eyed digressions on Crystal Palace. He conjured the special from the mundane: big trains, small cafes, sprawling cosy pubs, early starts in autumn mists, winter nights whiled away over beer, trooping through the streets with crowds towards the football ground on top of the hill, a crow’s nest with all of London spread out away to the north. Sounds a bit like bullshit, maybe, but it felt real enough at the time. Crystal Palace had an authenticity, like a dream-village hiding in London.
I never forgot the show. From where I lived in north London, from the top of Hampstead Heath, I could see, far off, a lonely radio mast. A distant tiny, finger pointing skywards on a southern ridge. And it meant Crystal Palace.
Fast forward to last November and it was closer than ever. I’d moved to South East London, Loughborough Junction. I could see it from my train station. Sometimes it can look like the Eiffel Tower. Sometimes it can look furtive. Or even alluring.
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| As seen, under the watchful gaze of three cameras, from Loughborough Junction |
On second thoughts, maybe a radio transmission tower can’t be alluring. But I wanted to go all the same. And so, one sunny morning in the last days of summer, I got on my bike and, finally, set out for Crystal Palace.
From my house I ducked under a railway bridge and shot up through Ruskin Park, where brown leaves scattered the pathways. After cresting Denmark Hill and careering along that arrow straight, dipped path alongside East Dulwich I took a fork past a large church in green fields. The road was practically empty. Slowly the gradient began to increase. I waved hello to Nigel Farage’s old alma mater (how Dulwich College must regret ever having admitted him) as well as the toll guard, discovered, quite unexpectedly, in a little white hut on the lane just up from the school. Dulwich is a strange place. The last section felt vertical and had me on the smallest, elliptical chain ring of my bike (which is built for long distances with heavy loads – in the 80s ellipses were considered more efficient), puffing past early conkers strewing the cycle path.
At the top I got my reward. That she blew.
It was a moment of release. I’d made it. Finally. After so many years of wondering and day dreaming, I was beneath the radio mast. I got back on my bike to cycle into what I imagined was the centre of Crystal Palace, to see if I could sniff out some of the magic Kitson had described. The light was red and the road was wide so I stole another glance up at the tower as I waited. Suddenly I felt sick. The top loomed above me and then swayed forward. The whole structure was toppling forward, ready to come crashing down onto the road. Fuck! I pedalled like my life depended on it, panting hard.
Then it was behind me. And all was fine. The mast wasn’t falling. Just an optical illusion. Or the slight swaying of the tower in the wind. Was it? Was I sure? One thing is certain. I didn’t stop pedalling. Because ahead of me was what had been floating through my head for eleven years: Crystal Palace.
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