Towards a catalogue of London’s inter-dimensional gateways
Brockwell Lido on the first warm Saturday of spring. That’s the bittersweet image preoccupying Yua Fremantle in these strange, shut-down days. She wrote about it last year on her blog of Herne Hill life, The Woman in the Lido Cafe:
“Light. Tumbling in from the open sky to splash across pool water, sunglasses, dripping dry bodies and smiles. Light shining into noise – noise reflected as light.… Read more
Browse the Rotherhithe Archive here
Portals of London has accumulated a library of material (pages from old books, deleted social media, other odds and ends) which speaks to London’s fractured temporal boundaries. Some are referenced in our blog posts, but there is another, shadow collection of items that don’t have an obvious home, but resonate all the same.
When I mentioned this small but growing haul to scholars and other amateur portologists, I was advised to do two things:
First, share all findings with Maeve Atkins of the Redriff Society.… Read more
Rotherhithe Archive #C762
PoL notes:
Taken from a page of the famous online forum. This one is a mystery. It contains uncanny resonances for those in our field.
Rotherhithe Archive #P4862
PoL notes:
Lovers of old books, turn away now. At some point in the 20th century, a Westminster Abbey gardener took scissors to a rare copy of The Herball, or the Generall Historie of Plantes by John Gerard (published 1597), and stuck the soil-marked cuttings into their dog-eared gardening journal.… Read more
Rotherhithe Archive #C657
PoL notes:
Peregrine keeps a close eye on this Wikipedia entry, and tells us it is taken down – or edited beyond recognition – as soon as it is put up. He claims ignorance of its provenance, but we can’t help detecting Peregrine’s writing style (and barely concealed editorialising).… Read more
Madeline Lee’s older brother Max disappeared from their teenage home 22 year’s ago, an unsolved family tragedy. Until now Madeline has kept secret the strange notebook Max kept in the days leading up to that night. We alternate extracts from the notebook with Madeline’s own recollections:
Madeline: I’d been happy, having Max back from uni for a bit. He was five years older and our lives were quite separate, but the house seemed empty without him.… Read more
The following story was posted on a Lewisham borough forum, under a discussion about Sydenham Hill in the 1980s and ’90s:
Yes, I remember stories about secret tunnels in the hill. Me and a friend found one once. But it was nothing like they said. This was thirty years back and you may not believe me, but hey.
They closed the branch line to Crystal Palace in the 1950s.… Read more
268-270 High Holborn is an unassuming building, ignored by countless Londoners since it was built almost a century ago. Few, hurrying past in the 1920s and ’30s, would have guessed it housed central London’s foremost telecommunications hub.
But to those who chart the wayward history of London’s anchoring in space and time, 268-270 High Holborn is as famous as they come.… Read more
Ash Malik shouldn’t be talking to me. ‘Stuff like this makes investors nervous. Which is kind of the opposite of my job’. He is a planning officer for the council, and the stalled building site we’re on – in the eastern reaches of London’s Docklands – is testament to the challenges of the role.
There’s no shortage of new developments on the archipelago-like patches of land between Bow Creek, the Royal Docks and the Thames.… Read more
If you were a school kid in Putney in the 1980s you will have heard of the Putney Bee Man. Playgrounds sang with tales of the local beekeeper who spoke only to bees, ate only honey, and was eventually stung to death in his hive-like home.
But there was more to the life of Joseph Henshall. And, though his story is fragmented – pieced together from TV and newspaper interviews with his former neighbours – it speaks to London as a place where seemingly immutable boundaries exist to be breached.… Read more
