The sky is strange today. The wind and humidity suggest standing in the middle of a rain storm, but it refuses to fall; instead the skies have a winter twilight look to them from lunchtime until sunset. There is a constant spatter of drops like water being blown off leaves but the rain falling slower than usual, like little slugs sliding down a wall. Everything feels greasy, warm and cold at the same time, and everything feels filthy.
Many of the front walls have moss between the bricks, a nod to the area's recent history as a marshy swamp. If it wasn't for the decrepit nature of most of the house fronts, and the habit many residents of treating the entire pavement as a communal rubbish dump, and perhaps if there wasn't one of the busiest motorways around London a minute's walk away, it would be a pleasant part of town. Everyone here is just passing through. Perhaps what it needs is a Welcome Break.
This part of town is rough. It always has been. By the sliproad crowds of Somali men stand outside two cramped cafes and a line of shops that seem stacked to the ceiling with Arabic cans of coke and other essentials; they don't stand aside as you walk along the pavement, and judicious use of the shoulders and elbows is generally necessary. Along Silver Street Turkish shop after Turkish shop sells the same Eastern European brands of food and household products; the two members clubs have blinds always drawn across their windows, and although their doors are ajar they are not welcoming. I saw a man attacked there by a gang wielding long knives; the driver of the bus I was on jumped out and ran into one of the clubs, returning with a crowd. It turned out the man who had been attacked was the driver's son; he gave him a lift to the hospital on the 144 he was driving.
This is one of the flattest parts of London I've seen; standing by the North Circular and Fore Street junction, you can look towards the Edmonton Green shopping centre and the tarmac seems to spread out like water from a marshy river. When the sun strikes the reflective windows up the central stairwells in the tower blocks at sunset, it makes them look like the hulls of capsized ships floating in black oil. Around the corner is the building where Keats worked as a surgeon's apprentice. Keats' dreamscape poetry was probably inspired in part by his desire to be anywhere but Edmonton; more recently this theme has been covered by his contemporaries, who are probably less likely to have been heard of in two hundred years.
There is not much here; it hits the news in the negative only. There is little to do but watch the vastness of the sky or close your eyes and imagine you are somewhere else. Perhaps one day some group will settle here, but for now it lacks even the raw urban culture of places like Hackney or Haringay as a reason to enjoy life here. All it has going for it is a inescapable sense of scale: the oversized clouds; the roads that snake off into all directions; the flatness of the ground; the temporary nature of the people who live here, from all over the world. Like the lady who ran screaming for help up to the front door as I was leaving a few weeks back, Edmonton waits in the corridor for something better.
2 comments:
Perhaps naively I've never felt in danger there, even at walking around at stupid hours of the morning that would otherwise have "MUG ME" written across their heads. It feels like it's waiting for something, but everything happens further down the road. Like IKEA and Tesco.
Would I be being naive if I were to suggest that '300' is in someways a fairy tale... not in the strictest sense, but you know what I mean. ALSO, I'm at work, and there's nowt left to do for some reason, webmail is illegal, this is my only connection to the outside world. lets see me get sacked for it.
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