Magic walk in the cold
My tire is flat, it's cold, we say let's walk.
So we head to the Northern Line destination Angel with the view to take a look at three warehouses we have checked online, one in Islington overlooking Regent's Canal, the other in the beginning of Kingsland road and the third just off Dalston Junction. When we reach Old street you give me the look of an alternative plan and we swiftly get off the train. We take subway 1 exit Hoxton and Shorditch and head towards Kingsland road. It's a crisp, sharply defined mid-morning day with a blue sky and a biting sun.
Kingsland road. You feel straight away at home. You like grunge, reminds you of New York cool, the Bronx or is it Harlem or neither? Can't remember what you say. We look up and there it is. White, unimpressive, The Union Central Building. Not exactly a warehouse. No, I don't want to live on Kingsland road. Not in a block of ex-offices, I want factory loft. You agree. You look back at the City of London half covered in fog and take a picture. Did I say blue sky? We turn around the corner and right again. You want to check the building from behind not that we can or perhaps we do but in any event isn't obvious. The Kingsland Slums. The number, state and misalignment of the air-conditioning units send me back to March 2019 and the back streets of Hong Kong: filthy, cheap, packed, neglected.
We postpone Regent's canal and walk up Kingsland to better understand the grid and how neighbourhoods connect. You're surprised to find out later at home that Stoke Newington is a little further up from Dalston Junction. I knew that. Oh, yes. You hate me saying that. As you point up at various warehouses around Hoxton you get exasperated by my ''I know that''. I know you know but have you paid attention to every detail I point out? I guess not:) I love the cute graffiti figures on the big wall - so Hoxton 1996. Suddenly the memory of licking envelopes comes sharp into focus, I'm twenty six volunteering for Proboscis Publishing on Curtain Road. It whooshes past the minute you point at the same graffiti figures as we're walking passed Hoxton Square, this time they're in 3D, larger than life, made out of steel. November 1999 punches me in the stomach. I'm temporarily re-subjected to the most excruciating point when the two male interviewers realise that I'm not who they think I am. They savage my work which ironically a few months later will be awarded a 'BIMA'. Their office is overlooking Hoxton square.
Kingsland. I have diverted. A dump but you like it and I struggle to see why. You point at The Grocery, a food store I have been talking about for the last ten minutes but you haven't realised it is this shop I'm referring to or you have forgotten or you don't listen - the increasing short memory loss of the 50-something is a terrifying thought when you remember! So yes, I used to shop here, decent health food shop not like those pretend-whole food shops selling mostly shit. We come up to the bridge - ah, that's where that bridge is. This is precisely why it's good to walk: you understand where things are. This time we take the steps down to Regent's canal direction Islington. Loads of people. Joggers profusely breathing their could-be-corona-virus breaths right in my face as they brush through me; I hate the fuckers, the only ones without a mask of course. I walk behind you to avoid clashing with dogs, prams, bikes, black, white, fat, slim, Asian, European, African, American. Gosh, I sound so racist but I'm truly not - I'm just Greek and get irritated by all sorts of people very often:) The diesel-fuelled wood burners from the house boats moored along the stretch of the canal fill the joyful air with homey winter hygge even though we are certain that there's nothing hygge about living inside them: narrow with sharp edges, hard to keep clean. Nightmare, no, thanks! The nine months living on Fiat the Belgian barge at Ransom's Dock flash back leaving behind the same stench of metal and diesel; cool as fuck industrial living but hard.
We think we spotted the 2nd warehouse - I stop briefly to check the listing resisting Google Maps and setting my privacy 'on'. You get impatient and don't like the idea of stopping so continue to walk. Is it the crowds, the cold, both? I give up but know for a fact that it's not the warehouse we're looking for. The warehouse opposite it's supposed to look at from the lounge is not 'it'. So we leave the canal to go back on the road to avoid people - is it really a lockdown? - further down the canal is closed and we will soon run out of bridges so we have to cross over to the left, now. A stylish jogger - Dane perhaps? - senses our confusion and asks if we're lost. We're not but we engage with him anyway. We're looking for the Royle building, I say; he recognises it straight away, just on the other side of the park not far from where we're standing. The back streets just before Wenlock road remind us once again of New York. Genuine warehouses, creative, a serene rough that feels familiar, cosy, inspiring and certainly inviting. The windows are big and generous letting light in. The proportions significant. Ahhh, you rightly fall in love with some of these flats and imagine owning one and wonder while lost in reverie how these artists manage to afford them. I say to you that they're not artists but fashion designers or working for Google, as if I have a clue. You don't look convinced. They don't have to own them, you can rent them out as live/work units. How can they afford the rent? They can split it, they can fuck off if they can't and move somewhere cheaper. Yeah, they can fuck off. Fuck off. Yeah.
There's the Royle Building. You like it more than I do. Darn. We can't go to the canal from here to have a proper look from the front. Wait a minute, it's not facing the canal. It's Wenlock Basin and is locked, we can't go passed the gate. So we look at it from behind. The council building opposite a sure anticlimax as always council buildings are but you're not fazed by it since the space we would be living in is facing Wenlock Basin and not the back. Fair enough but still, I don't love the building enough.
We walk back to the bridge to catch bus 76 to Dalston but decide we can't be bothered to wait in the cold so we carry on. We are reaching freezing point. My legs are wooden, both knee cups are locked but I can miraculously still walk. The tips of my fingers are killing me despite my cashmere gloves. You say it's 1 degree. Penetrating damp but the sky is a consistent blue and the sun is shining but I don't feel any warmth. You love this bit on the canal with the Rosemary Works on one corner, the Briccs warehouse on the other and the old pub across the road. We have a quick peak through the window at the expensive vintage furniture shop you like, shut of course. What road is this? Southgate.
There's the bus. We could have been on it had we been a little more patient.
You spot a coffee shop on Downham road. OMG. This is just wonderful. A GEM pronounced with a heavy Greek accent: tzem! We're starving and we're frozen after almost three hours walking looking at warehouses. There is even a white bench outside. This is a proper treat - what we have come to appreciate during lockdown: a naked wooden bench outside to sit on and have coffee and cake with trembling hands and teeth. I eat the entire salt caramel brownie in less than five minutes and you have a good looking fluffy fruity flapjack. You are telling me you don't do higgelty piggelty, referring to the age and style of the coffee shop. You prefer clean lines, no arches or funny little spaces that are hard to clean. Funny how you think of having to clean a coffee shop! You say it's dirty I say is charming although I know you're charmed by it too and both plain grateful that we can sip a pretty descent oat flat white despite the lack of the thick creamy layer when the oat milk combines with the coffee to create the sweet velvet blanket your lips rest on as you bring them towards the inviting hot liquid. But who cares, is coffee.
It pays off not to be patient.
De Beauvoir. Oh la la la. Très jolie. Proper comfort blanket. Beautiful houses. Is nice to feel safe admittedly not edgy enough but you can still have an edgy life just have somewhere lovely and safe to come back to. You nod half-convinced.
What is thaaaaat? From an angle, as we are approaching Mortimer road, it looks like a Rachel Whiteread house and as I get closer I realise it's a completed house that is meant to look this way: concrete, aged, uninviting but striking, cracked with steel bay windows and mirrored glass, a high fence standing on a triangular plot. After further investigation at home the following morning I find out it's Mole Man's House! William Lyttle, the Mole Man, appears to have obsessively dug under his house for years and finally got evicted in 2006 after the pavements began to cave in and bus 76 had to divert its route.
“I thought I’d try for a bit of a wine cellar, and found a taste for the thing,” William Lyttle, reportedly said. It was a blithe justification for the network of tunnels – stretching 66ft in every direction and as far down as the water table – that he burrowed deep beneath his home in De Beauvoir Town, east London, over a period of 40 years", Ellie Pithers writes on the 16 November 2019 for Vogue.
It now belongs to artist Sue Webster who bought it at auction in 2012 for 1.2 million pounds. Adjaye Associates, the architectural studio she appointed to take on the renovation, discovered tunnels that were eight metres deep and twenty metres long, radiating in all directions. A reported thirty three tonnes of gravel, earth, and junk including cars and a boat had to be removed by the council. The house was completed in 2018; presumably she still lives there although it does look very locked-down. A proper quarantine house.
I love the stories behind buildings you pass by accident. Time and time again I'm reminded of how absolutely necessary it is not to always repeat what you already know. Why not left here, or right there just to check this building out. It is one such moment when on the canal by Haggerston walking towards Islington you open a gate to our right and invite me in. I'm a little apprehensive to begin with because it looks as if we're entering private land but there is a path along the water basin, I can spot a coffeeshop in the distance and a staggering amount of residential flats on both sides in modern and traditional vertical structures. My eyes are transfixed on a brown dog acutely observing from outside his boat owner who's pottering inside. You are a little further down admiring the wild life, the place is like a bird sanctuary, the heron so still almost 2-dimensional like a watercolour. My eyes glide over the water and then up when my jaw suddenly drops. I must look like a man struck by lightening when a breathtakingly good-looking woman unexpectedly walks down the street and for a moment looses all sensory faculties except for his eyesight. Quebec Wharf, an imposing Grade II listed Victorian former Granary with attached boiler and engine house, office and dwelling house, later Spice Warehouse. From the sofa later at home you continue to read out to me that "it was built in 1878 for the North Metropolitan Tramways Company as a forage warehouse for its horses. That it is the best remaining example in South east England of a canal-side granary, probably the most distinctive relic of the C19 horse tramway system of London and one of the few remaining buildings associated with canal wharfage in London".
The coots in front are enjoying a swim and the occasional dive while my eyes examine the unusual wooden central structure with floor to ceiling windows. A man is vacuuming the space inside and I try and imagine what it must be like to be him looking out the window down. I can't quite believe my luck when I later find myself doing just that: a 2-bedroom flat is for sale for £1,000,000. I immediately write to Chestertons and get a reply within minutes even though it's Saturday just after 5:30pm. The agent informs me that a £950,000 offer has been rejected and another party is interested, if serious would advise to view on Monday.
Imagine. Just imagine.
If I end up buying this warehouse I blow out all dreams of a summer retreat.
The feeling of waking up in the morning walking barefoot on polish concrete - or other suitable surface - sitting out feeling the soft morning breeze eating watermelon or other fresh fruit - I know you're not keen on watermelon - tanned, happy wearing very little feeling just great.
Oh…. Do I really see life in the next few years in a cool London warehouse by the canal? If it's London for a few years more, doesn't London Bridge and the split level flat overlooking the Shard feel more homey even though James wants another 800,000 squid I haven't got? I'll know when I see it. At least I hope I will. You love it and can imagine life there. Location is perfect, a slice of history. Thank you for opening that door and inviting me in.
So. Where were we? I got distracted again. We leave the brutal, unsmiling beauty that is Mole's House in the enchanting leafy De Beauvoir Town with the perfectly shaped white, wholesome houses and arrive in gritty Dalston Junction. Just before the station we take a left turn on Bentley road - feels more like an alley than a road - and there it is, the third warehouse on today's list: Colour House. The MOT mechanics on one end not a good look but we like the building how it's off the main drag and its back on Ball Pond Road with its many coffee shops leading to Essex road and Islington. The 1-bedroom flat available for £565,000 is on the 2nd floor at the MOT end of the building and the 3-bedroom flat for £720,000 is on the 1st floor on the Dalston high street end. You're not impressed by the mural inside the entrance. Has the feel of a Student Hall of Residence. Despite its genuine warehouse good looks I'm pissed off with London developers making poky little flats out of magnificent warehouses. The lounge in Quebec Wharf is an uninterrupted space of 38.6 by 25 feet with an open plan kitchen, the way a warehouse should be converted. By this time we absolutely had it and jump on the 76 bus to St. Paul's. You're annoyed by the driver's frequent pauses to regulate the service but I'm just content sitting at the top front seat on an empty bus feeling warm. When we reach the Millennium Bridge we both surrender in the hot blanket that is the London Southbank we intimately know and love. If we live in Pontifex Wharf in London Bridge this bridge will be a mere 10-minute walk.
Dilemmas…
We stop at M&S by Tate Modern to get some food supplies and walk back home via Great Guildford street and then on to Southwark Bridge Road and Elephant home.
This walk and the emotions it evokes - the sense of exploration and discovery - is truly thrilling. It's what makes my blood flow exuberantly, what makes my mind dream in vivid colours and rejoice with what my heart strongly desires. To be with you, for ever and ever be it a historic warehouse, a shack by the sea or a magnificent detached home somewhere hot or cold. Who cares. All feels profoundly good.