Walking the Circle Line: Paddington to Baker Street
With a basic 4x5 pinhole camera on one shoulder and a cheap tripod on the other I am walking directly above London Underground’s Circle Line. Now about three-quarters of the way along my 14-mile journey, this installment takes me the two stops from Paddington to Baker Street. I began at my home in the Barbican and previous episodes have led me to Paddington (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th,
and 8th)
Departing Paddington via Praed St I walk adjacent to St Mary’s Hospital, past the spot where penicillin was discovered sixty years ago by Fleming (’on the second floor above this spot,’ reads the blue plaque). Across the road, a Bangladeshi restaurateur is beckoning passers-by into the rather unhygienic sounding ‘The Ganges (since 1965)’. I round the corner to Paddington Canal which lies hidden only metres away from Paddington station.
This spur of Regent’s Canal has escaped gentrification for almost 200 years. No longer. Paddington Basin is busy trying to sell apartments, the logo for the Basin inscribes a square around ‘Pad’, pad being the English vernacular for apartment. I compose a shot split perfectly 50/50 above their slogan ‘walk home from the world’. A strange slogan I think, so I google it later and the only hits relate to people walking home from the world trade centre on 9/11. Not the best advertisement.
It is a nice enough place. People pay £25 (about $45) a night to moor their narrow boats and then get around London for a day on their bicycles. Soon it will be surrounded by pre-sold apartment blocks and corporate headquarters and from the 12th floor the canal will lose any grandeur it might still hold. Below, nautically styled ventilations shafts from one of the office blocks.
A hundred yards further and the canal rounds a bend. The collision between new and old becomes clearer. Men fish from the walkway here, their catch destined perhaps for the stomachs of travellers outside Paddington station. The Ganges starts to sound appetising in comparison. A security guard barks into his walkie-talkie while walking toward me. I’m not in the mood to explain my contraption, so I set off.
The Marylebone/Edgware flyover is generally despised by Londoners but I find it fascinating. As if the Harrow/Marylebone Road daren’t touch the Roman-era Edgware Road, it puts down a single giant concrete stiletto heel on either side. I’ve travelled under it on 16/32/98 buses a hundred times, past Paddington Green police station which you can glimpse in the background of my photo. This is where international terrorists are held and questioned and who knows what else goes on while helicopters buzz above. Twenty yards away is Edgware Station, and ten yards under my feet five people died on July 7th. It is a predominantly Muslim area, you can see old Arab men smoking hookah pipes here by day and young Arab men trying to impress girls with their cars by night. Half a mile away is the house that Tony Blair bought less than a year ago in preparation for his post-politic life. He still has the house, but for security reasons has abandoned any idea of ever living in it.
A pinhole camera takes its own slow time, and in the eleven minutes I wait for the exposure hundreds of people scurry past looking only at their feet. A drug deal is done outside the Hilton. A woman honks her horn at me and asks directions to nearby Little Venice.
On the other side of Edgware Road lies one of those billboards with slats that alternates between three advertisments timed to 5 seconds each, equivalent to the time a passing motorist has available to pay attention. In a triple exposure (which doesn’t reproduce well at web resolution), Palmolive announce a way to achieve ‘Firmer Skin’, a broadband supplier offers ‘unlimited photo storage’ and a casino company promises that ‘there’s a place for fun and games’. While the photo exposes I notice how the slats are the same size and shape as the fence below.
Along Marylebone Road I walk toward Baker Street. Alternate one-way streets warn drivers of the £8 ($14) a day congestion charge that motorists must pay to enter central London. Cycling is big news lately and the number of marked routes grows by the day. My usual commute takes 25 minutes by train, 20 by taxi, 40 by foot, but just 12 minutes bicycling. While I’m taking this photo a young guy on a red moped pulls up next to my tripod and recognises the camera as being a pinhole. ‘How long is the exposure?’ he asks. ‘3 minutes’. For some reason he finds this ‘cool’, but splutters off at the green light before I can ask why it is any cooler than 1/30th of a second.
Regent’s Park is the most beautiful of London’s many green parks, and I’ve spent many an hour rowing on the lake at this very spot. A young couple rows with their screaming child, a man shows his 10 year old son how it is done, a man rows while his women passenger lays with feet dangled over the edge. It is only a three minute exposure in the photograph, but the half dozen rowboats on the placid lake disappear in this time. Confronted with scenes like this it is often difficult to remember that you are only a hundred yards from office blocks and several hundred from the rumbling Circle Line trains. That is the whole point, I suppose.
Finally, just outside Baker street is the recently demolished Abbey building. Only a facade is left. General Demolition Ltd tells me that this will be a “mixed use, office, retail, and residential development”. The facade remains but the character disappears.
So my journey today ends. For those not familiar with a pinhole camera, there is very little to it. It is a wooden box about 10″x10″x1″ with a tiny hole for light to enter on one side. There is no lens or timer or electronics, no LCD or viewfinder, it doesn’t know what a megapixel is. I place it on a tripod for stability, aim it generally, and wait anywhere from 15 seconds to 15 minutes for the image to etch itself on Polaroid 55 film. There are light leaks, mistakes, happy accidents, and the occassional memorable image. Polaroid 55 film is expensive stock, so I end up posting 9 out of every 10 shots I take on this blog. Stay tuned for the final installments of my walk around the Circle Line …
