Human Flower Project

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Greenwich Park, Beyond Indications

A band of photographers descends on Greenwich Park south of London. Wild boars could do wonders for the place! (Thanks, John.)

Visitors’ souvenir in Greenwich Park
Photo: John Levett

By John Levett

The roots of my family were in Suffolk on the edge of East Anglia. They lived in the village of Tunstall and were farriers. They moved to London, to Greenwich on the south bank of the Thames, in the late nineteenth century. I have no idea what caused the move. Agriculture was depressed and remained so but horses stayed to be shod. Perhaps the 1890s brought too many motor vehicles passing through towards Lowestoft to the north or Ipswich to the south. Maybe Grandfather Levett saw the time of change and hoofed it to the city. I have no idea either what happened to him or what business he took up. Grandmother Levett lived until the early 1960s but she never spoke of life as a young Victorian. You may guess that communication wasn’t a skill much practiced in the family.

My mother and I traipsed from one lodging to another, one family member to another, after the war, until arriving back in the south London borough of Bromley in 1954. Grandmother Levett traipsed with us (being that time of the century, the remaining unmarried daughter got to look after the remaining mother). Gran was a bit of a trial after a while. She was suffering from what would nowadays no doubt be recognized as Alzheimer’s. She’d dress up in what was left of her finery and wander off into town with mum in chase having shut up the corner grocer store she ran. Some Wednesday afternoons (there was a tradition of half-day closing for shop workers in those days) we’d all go to the cinema together. Often, through the main feature, Gran would shout out: “I’m going up to bed now, Mabel. I’ll have a cup of Ovaltine.” Mum blushed; I sank lower in the seat.

With an eye out for the long grass—a rarity in Greenwich Park
Photo: John Levett

Some Sundays, family members would come and take Gran out so Mum could have a break. The best break was Greenwich Park. We’d bus down to Lewisham and climb up the hill to Blackheath. At Easter & early summer Bank Holidays there were fairs on the heath, other times kite festivals. But best was the Park & best of all was standing on the hill in front of General Wolfe’s statue and running full pelt downwards towards Wren’s naval college until velocity wouldn’t keep you anchored any more, you could keep upright no longer and tumbled headfirst to a stop. Then did it again. And again. And again.

Fade to black.

A few years back Cambridge had a public access Darkroom Gallery, curiously so-called because it was both a film processing darkroom and a photographic gallery. For various admin reasons it had to close down at the end of the ‘90s. It was just at the cusp of digital taking off on its inevitable trajectory so for many the loss of the darkroom was no loss at all. For me, I missed the ‘alchemy’ of the developing print—‘instant’ has never had the same magic. But what I lost also was the camp meetings & the fireside chats—looking over at someone else’s stuff, sharing failures, getting feedback, quick fixes. So …

Just over a year ago I got wind of a group of independent photographers in London, cunningly known as London Independent Photographers. I joined up. One of its finest features is its satellite groups—locations & members at various points around London who meet regularly to share work in progress, get feedback, seek a critique, reflect on practice, get an insight how a photographer got from ‘there’ to ‘here.’ The group down in Greenwich needed a coordinator so I volunteered; we marked our first birthday last month. The group has grown into a fine collection of photographers at all stages of development (professionals, designers, starters, portraitists, street photographers, landscapers, urbanists, documentarists); those who live in London, those studying, those passing through; those who pop in occasionally, those who never miss a meetup. Living groups need that sort of flux. An essential feature of the satellites is that they each have a different character, different pace, different makeup—need a different audience for your work, another perspective? Pop over to another group one evening.

‘Resurrection, performance, and poesy’ —Greenwich Park
Photo: John Levett

A week ago we arranged our first group shoot. Ten o’clock Sunday morning at the bottom of Greenwich Park. Two hours in the Park and its boundary roads and try interpreting this text …

Ballard parted the slats of the blind and looked across the park: a necropolis of empire; relics of science, plunder and fantasy; the presence of the dead; forgotten histories soaked in walls.
Blake broke his silence, “Resurrection, performance and poesy. And across the water the Throne of Mammon grey.”

I’d tried to find a poem or piece of prose that might give suitable inspiration for a morning’s shoot but out of the whole oeuvre of Wordsworth, Blake, the rest of the Romantics, Ian Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and the collective sons and daughters of Albion I could find nothing that fitted. So I cobbled that together and waited for jaws to drop and a quick scramble for the exit. No need. We had a fine morning. Rain had threatened but never arrived. We met up two hours later and amazed ourselves at our inventiveness & (de)construction; our hermeneutical facility; our snappiness. We enjoyed ourselves and being with, fortunately, unlike-minded photographers.

St. Mary’s Church, on the Western side of Greenwich Park
Photo: John Levett

That morning I’d travelled down on the first train out of Cambridge, took a bus through south London and found Lewisham Hill. Sometimes there is an inevitably about routes I take. I hadn’t walked up the hill for something like twenty-five years and noticed nothing of note; a little deterioration on a few walls but nothing a corporate total erasure and rebuild wouldn’t put right. It was only on emerging onto the heath that I caught some remembrance—the houses around the edge I once thought I’d live in (fat chance), the spire of Blackheath church around which I nervily waited for an early date sometime around 1963 and thought this might be the place where we’d be married (it wasn’t, I wasn’t, she was).

Blackheath was the place where Richard II met the leaders & masses of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, promised the world then massacred a few. Which thought is a decent prelude to entering Greenwich Park. The park is a royal park which means it’s stolen property. The curious relationship which this country has with monarchy means the people won’t be stealing it back any moment soon. Even when Queenie snuffs it it’s unlikely those waiting in the wings will stir any lingering republicanism; more chance of a welcome to the X-Factor. Anyway …

The first thing to notice about the park is its blandness. Too kept-up, too organized, too signposted (isn’t everything?), too much like you’re being shunted into ‘useful’ directions (go here first, then there, now right). If you followed that you’d miss the margins. Get off the paths and look for the long grass (lovers have for centuries). You’ll find stuff there (buildings long since abandoned, tunnel entrances, views over gardens, carved embraces, found ways of looking). People who know the park find their way there—for reading, slouching, dreaming, avoiding, eating. Seeing London from a different view.

View of London, w/ generating station at right, from Greenwich Park
Photo: John Levett

I looked across the river and tried to work out what was left that I might have seen some time in the mid-1950s. Not much. There was the pre-Great War electricity generating station with its brick chimneys. And that was it. I could never recall any high-rises where the towers of Canary Wharf are now, in fact nothing on the Isle of Dogs and Millwall docks that rose higher than a crane. I also wondered if I’d have been interested in what was there anyway when I was a kid; I doubt it.

The Royal Observatory
Greenwich Park
Photo: John Levett

The observatory, of course, is still there, tarted-up as a ‘visitor attraction’ but worth the trip if this is your one-and-only-lifetime-visit-to-London. Standing on the meridian line (I had to), it caught my mind that we often go to public parks to avoid the public; carve a sitting space, hope for avoidance, pray for quiet. It’s what royal parks are good for because that’s why they were built. Keep in animals to hunt, keep out riff-raff (unless the animals don’t comply). Think of Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, Richmond Park; you can lose an army in any of them. They weren’t built like the great public parks of other great cities, out of some tinge of democratic responsibility or aristocratic beneficence, but out of separation, division and contempt. I still get a feeling of being there on sufferance (you’ll be OK with your Canon Ixus but try taking out a large-format and tripod).

Or maybe my lack of current enthusiasm comes down to something like commodification. Everything indicated (‘You are here’), bins for dog poo, multiple toilets for the adult, royal ice cream kiosks, royal restaurants, royal snack bar, royal benches, security suits … and so it goes. I suppose I compare it to the heath. Not much variety on that but at least you can make it what you want: party on, fly a kite, build a bonfire, start a gig, create an insurrection.

Park improvement project
Photo: John Levett

It happens on the commons of Cambridge. The first Saturday in June is Strawberry Fair on Midsummer Common. I’ve no idea how the thing started but it’s a magnet for the disenchanted of the East of England or Europe generally. Tents are pitched; music is blared; tie-die shirts are still sold (still); potions brewed; all manner of substances are ingested, digested and puked up. Then they go home and leave the clear-up to someone else. Just like hippies always did!

I’d close the royal parks for decades; let the grass grow, buildings collapse, restock with wild boar, spikes on the walls (makes scaling them more transgressive), no fly zones; await the tribes, a new folklore (‘Chaucerian English spoke here’), delving and spinning in Morrisonian (William) mediaeval worktents, brewing and digesting, leaving unwashed plates in the sink.

And then go home for a nice cup of tea at the end of the day.