Walking the Circle Line: Embankment to St James’s Park
My humble little project is to walk the above-ground circuit of the Circle Line, taking photographs with a primitive, cumbersome, and unreliable pinhole Camera. My previous installments have taken me from Barbican to Moorgate, Moorgate to Tower Hill, Tower Hill to Blackfriars, Blackfriars to Temple, and Temple to Embankment. This sixth installment takes me to St James’s Park past the political and civic headquarters of the nation.
Eleven days ago, London Underground was attacked by several suicide bombers. Like seven million other Londoners, I’m safe and sound. Thanks to all those who asked. I was on the Circle Line passing through Embankment at the time.
The last installment left me at Cleopatra’s Needle outside Embankment. One of the most interesting books on London is Chiang Yee’s 1938 ‘The Silent Traveller in London’. He says that the Sphinxes and Needle “have pride and dignified tranquility. [The monument’s] greatness will never be spoilt or harmed even if it has to pass through sufferings or painful times. In front of this monument while I am passing, I feel myself very small - only a tiny dust particle of which it must have seen countless millions during the ages. And I also feel that it will just laugh at the struggle of human life and the present conflicts between nations. How many more it must have seen before European nations had names!”. The Sphinxes are now scaffolded behind plastic in the name of periodic conservation, their eyes shrouded from the current troubles.
Above, a makeshift memorial to the victims across the road from the monument in Victoria Garden. From amongst the flowers, photographs of the dead stare up at the camera. I move on a few hundred metres to the safety of the London Eye.
I’ve photographed this many times, but never tire of taking the same shot. A Circle Line itself, but with 32 pods rather than 27 stations.
To Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, which sit only metres above the Circle Line. When George Bush visited London for three days in 2003 he tried to have the Tube closed down for the period. Apparently it might have been a terrorist target. The mere thought that the tube runs under the Houses of Parliament and the Queens Palace seemed to startle his entourage. Thirty seconds after I stop and raise my strange camera toward Big Ben, police appear. A jovial bobby tells me that the “little eyes” of CCTV have seen me and “they’ll be watching you now” but there is nothing is nothing illegal about taking the photograph.
On the eve of George Bush’s visit in 2003 the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said that Bush was the “greatest threat to life on this planet that we’ve most probably ever seen”, “a stooge of the oil industry”, “corrupt”, and “illegitimate”. Last week a circumspect Livingstone received global accolades for his public show of London spirit. The short-term memory of CNN and co. did not see the double edged sword of his rage at the terrorists for targeting “ordinary Londoners”, not “Presidents or Prime Ministers”.
This tension between the politics of the City and the Nation is in evidence directly opposite the Houses of Parliament. There sits Brian Haw, as he has done every day and night since June 2001, protesting the UK’s foreign policy. The government has tried to have his “shanty town of placards” removed many times, and in two weeks time they will have have prevailed. For the first time in several hundred years, it will not be legal to protest outside parliament. At least not without six days written notice and permission.
I cross Brian’s Parliament Square past the statues of Churchill (World War II), Lincoln (American Civil War), Peel (instituted the Police force), Palmerston (Secretary at War), Smuts (Boer War), and Cromwell (English Civil War) and take a photograph of Westminster Abbey. The site has had a religious presence for 1400 years. Buried in the Abbey are Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, David Livingstone, Ben Jonson, Charles Dickins, Tennyson, Olivier, Chaucer, Samuel Johnson, Rutherford, Maxwell, JJ Thompson, Purcell, and Hardy, to name a few. No wonder the tourists flock here.
London Underground, known as Transport for London, has its headquarters above St James’s Park station. An ominous building built in the late 1920s, it has a colourful history. Here you see part of the ‘Day and Night’ sculpture which enraged 1920s London, due to the public show of sculptural nudity. Engulfed in scandal, the manager director of the Underground offered his resignation over this sculpture. How strange, we say 80 years later.
I continue my walk toward Victoria Station but don’t get far. A middle aged man of ‘middle-eastern appearance’ runs around the corner of Victoria Street and drops a paperback book as he is wrestled to the ground by two burly young men. They lock his arms behind his back and push his nose hard into the pavement each time he screams for relief. His crime appears to be shoplifting a £5 book. It is more than ten minutes before the wail of police sirens are heard. One of the apprehenders fumbles in the pockets of the man that he is holding down with his knee. I tell one of the eight policeman that the citizen’s arrest was rather violent. The policeman tells me to “keep your opinion to yourself” and to “move along”, apparently the man had “drugs in his pockets”. The man is cuffed and screaming that he is only being arrested as he looks Muslim, that they put things in his pockets, that he will be deported. The crowd moves on. I catch the tube home for the first time in eleven days.
