portalsoflondon

Dark parliaments: The House of Uncommons and The Other Other Place

The recent silencing, for maintenance reasons, of the bell known as Big Ben met a suitably muted response from the nation. A half-hearted effort by a handful of MPs to lend the moment significance faded on the wind. But, on the day the last chimes rang across Westminster – and the small group held their vigil outside the Big Ben tower – it seems that inside the Houses of Parliament, a disruption may indeed have been felt.… Read more

Beneath the overground: The Shepherd’s Bush to Willesden Junction Spectre

Recently a post did the rounds on social media. Its author declined to discuss it, but gave permission for us to reproduce it here. We do so unedited:

So a fucking weird and scary thing just happened on the overground. I’m home now, I’m fine, shaking as I type this but housemate’s making me a cup of tea so don’t panic I’m fine but just listen to this.… Read more

London’s invisible lines: The Boundary Marker File

In the course of our attempts to catalogue London’s inter-dimensional gateways, PoL has learned to keep an open mind. The unpredictable happens when a Londoner treads too close to the city’s precarious dimensional bounds. We are accustomed to the scattershot nature of the resulting stories.

But it seems we may not be the first to try to impose a sense of order on this chaotic history.… Read more

Starry mills of Satan: The Waterloo Arches Rift

“The starry mills of Satan are built beneath the earth and waters of the mundane shell”.

Matthew Lindon eyes me over his omelette and chips.

“That was another one of Stewart’s things, the poetry. He’d launch into it on tea breaks. All sorts, but William Blake, mainly. Dark Satanic Mills and all that. He was proud of Blake’s connection to Lambeth”

Matthew speaks often of Stewart, chief mechanic – and, the way Matthew tells it, guardian spirit – at the small metal-pressing workshop under the arches of Waterloo station, where Matthew worked as a young man.… Read more

Cursed gifts and untold visions: The Headless Statues of Crystal Palace Park

There is much to be written about the drifts of psychic memory that swirl through Crystal Palace Park. The famous dinosaurs are a petrified glimpse into the knowledge and preoccupations of Victorian science. A deserted and beautiful subway lies hidden under an A road, a reminder of the long-demolished railway station it once served. And root-mangled stairways lead to shabby remnants of 20th Century concrete utopianism.… Read more

Forgotten Futures: Blakeley’s Highwalk

Any visitor to the Barbican will know its highwalks. The criss-cross of raised footpaths provide a confusing but just-about functional means of traversing the much loved residential and cultural centre. But follow them to the estate’s edges, attempt to use them to exit to the City at large, and whatever strange logic they possess starts to break down.

A bridge you half-remember led to the tube station you want ends abruptly in mid-air, its access point fenced off.… Read more

Night static: The Nine Elms Entity Recordings

These are transcripts of three recordings made within the last month. They were leaked to us by someone working for a company that logs radio traffic within the security industry. The fate of the subjects (whose names have been changed) is unknown. PoL’s attempts to follow it up with the relevant bodies and corporations have met with resistance.

The events within, to our mind, constitute convincing evidence for some manner of cross-dimensional breach.… Read more

Hidden worlds: The Stoke Newington Nursery Vanishing

Halfway along Stoke Newington Church Street is a rift. A lost world of leaf, iron and stone; a crouching, brooding interruption in the row of high-end bakeries, fashionable cafes and designer home-ware shops:

Abney Park Cemetery.

One of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ garden cemeteries built when Victorian London was too full of the dead, Abney Park’s garden element has, over the years, assumed feral dominion over the dwindling numbers of burials.… Read more

Intersecting parallels: The Greenwich Meridian Glitch

Each night, a bright green beam cuts through the sky above Greenwich: a laser, marking the path of the Prime Meridian (the imaginary line – from the north pole to the south pole – from which all other lines of longitude are measured).

It is emitted from the Royal Observatory, high on the hill at Greenwich Park. Another (carved and gilded) representation of the line crosses the building’s forecourt.… Read more

Thames Mud, Long Memory: The Bellarmine Jug

The original mudlarks were children who scoured the Thames slime for coal, copper or other items that had fallen from commercial ships: a symbol of inequality in 19^th Century London. Poverty remains in the capital, of course – often in sight of the luxury developments that now line the river – but the working docks and their ecosystem are gone.… Read more