31/7/07

The arched brick arcades along King's Cross station have a likeable austerity: they remind you of how many of your childhood memories must be of these bare, brick, utilitarian walls (usually part of some railway engineering works), for their presence has lodged itself somewhere deep in your subconscious. The back wall of your parent's garden is surely one source of this, as is Auden Place which adjoins it. Interesting that the courtyard full of ruins cars that you remember playing in should have become a doubtful memory, and deeply confused with dream. Other high, brick walls include the cutting below the bridge at Chalk Farm, and the Roundhouse – both creations of the railway. They are always sinister and deeply familiar, and they always signify entrapment. The fondness you have for them must by nature be ambiguous. You shall never escape because you shall always return. Ironic that presently haute-bourgeois Primrose Hill should remain at bottom an industrial landscape. Or rather, industrialisation itself becomes a layer or sediment of the past (laid down, among other places, in your own mind). Other brick walls: along Chalk Farm Road, around Primrose Hill School (the school itself brick, tall and forbidding), along the canal: the vaults of the bridges over the canal particularly. You remember now that your childhood was haunted precisely by the ghosts of industrialisation, by its vanishing folk-memories, which adults, who themselves had hardly any direct memory of them, would parade in front of you as a means of inspiring fear, awe, and obedience.