The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Journeys on the Caledonian Road
knowledge it. It’s as much part of being in a city as anything else, but I would
be an odd person if I constantly went out and beat the bounds of the prison.
This view of the Cally causes even me to check; it’s topographically
correct, as it were, but then you think, “Hey, this guy’s going to die”; it’s from
a very high viewpoint. I was inspired by a fantastic radio broadcast by Kees
Notteboum from the top of a London bus. I’ve used the top of the bus much
more since I heard that program; he reminded me that it’s a very specific
kind of place.
The Caledonian Road used to be much more “butcher, baker, candlestick
maker”; there was a wet fish shop here, a decent baker, Woolworth’s,
Boots, Tesco’s, and they’ve all gone as they have in the whole country. But
what is delightful here is that it’s completely without any of the new orthodoxies
of consumption—it’s lost the old ones, but there’s no Body Shop,
no Sock Shop, no Pret à Manger, nobody wants to come here. The retail
chains have somehow described an exclusion zone. The Cally hovers in the
vacuum.
Surveying this, you have to ask who owns what and why. For people
who think that there isn’t a narrative, or that you shouldn’t speak narratively,
it is necessary to examine this landscape. You have here a circa 1972 conspiracy
by the new middle-class occupiers of these residential streets to put
barriers in the roads to make this side belong to us, and that side belong to
them—just what Victorian London was like, I understand. Then you’ve got
23.3 | The view you can’t have.