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    Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London
    Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London
    Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London
    Ebook165 pages2 hours

    Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London

    By J. M. Tyree

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    About this ebook

    Vanishing Streets reveals an American writer's twenty-year love affair with London. Beguiling and idiosyncratic, obsessive and wry, it offers an illustrated travelogue of the peripheries, retracing some of London's most curious locations. As J. M. Tyree wanders deliriously in "the world's most visited city," he rediscovers and reinvents places that have changed drastically since he was a student at Cambridge in the 1990s. Tyree stumbles into the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock, Graham Greene, and the pioneers of the British Free Cinema Movement. He offers a new way of seeing familiar landmarks through the lens of film history, and reveals strange nooks and tiny oddities in out-of-the-way places, from a lost film by John Ford supposedly shot in Wapping to the beehives hidden in Tower Hamlets Cemetery, an area haunted by a translation error in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz.

    This book blends deeply personal writing with a foreigner's observations on a world capital experiencing an unsettling moment of transition. Vanishing Streets builds into an astonishing and innovative multi-layered project combining autobiography, movie madness, and postcard-like annotations on the magical properties of a great city. Tyree argues passionately for London as a cinematic dream city of perpetual fascinations and eccentricities, bridging the past and the present as well as the real and the imaginary.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRedwood Press
    Release dateOct 5, 2016
    ISBN9781503600942
    Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London

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      Book preview

      Vanishing Streets - J. M. Tyree

      ADVANCE PRAISE FOR VANISHING STREETS

      "Vanishing Streets is a vivid, sensual, and multi-directional take from a masterful writer who knows his craft, knows himself, and knows London. London is my favorite city on earth, and this book is a treasure house for all who adore this capital city."

      —Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal

      J. M. Tyree writes gorgeously, hauntingly of London. He enchants with ghostly byways, mythical wellsprings of memory, and astonishing secret civic trapdoors that lead to taproots of personal and cinematic identity. This is a dreamy subterranean work where one can equally find echoes of other cities—yours and mine—buried alive, subconsciously in sync with the great vanishing streets of a great city.

      —Guy Maddin, director of My Winnipeg

      "Vanishing Streets encompasses so many different forms: it’s a travelogue through an endlessly fascinating city, a deeply affecting memoir, and an elegy for London. J. M. Tyree’s voice is myriad as well: wise and ironic and funny and frank and searing and honest. Readers will want to remain in Tyree’s London long after they finish this book, drunk with wandering and wondering."

      —Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage the Bones and Men We Reaped

      "Vanishing Streets re-maps London. As both intimate guide and wide-eyed outsider, J. M. Tyree dwells in the places and histories lesser writers would ignore. Through his wry photos, searching intelligence, and witty, incisive prose, he imbues every street and every sentence with wonder and mystery. London is the most-visited city in the world. Open this book and see it anew."

      —Will Boast, author of Epilogue: A Memoir

      "J. M. Tyree’s Vanishing Streets is a journey through the streets of London—and also through loss and failure, and, most of all, through the writer’s 20-year love affair with his wife. In turns delightful and heartbreaking, Tyree’s is the best kind of travel writing; it is an exploration of how one place can vividly reveal us to ourselves."

      —Miranda Kennedy, author of Sideways on a Scooter: Life and Love in India

      "Vanishing Streets is difficult to classify—parts travelogue, guidebook, and criticism, maybe even a bit of memoir—but this strange and wonderful book is easy to like. J. M. Tyree writes with wit and insight about everything from Free Cinema to his marriage to gentrification. These idiosyncratic tours of London create a mosaic portrait of his city that feels like a gift to its reader."

      —Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun

      VANISHING STREETS

      JOURNEYS IN LONDON

      J. M. TYREE

      REDWOOD PRESS    STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

      Stanford University Press

      Stanford, California

      © 2016 by J. M. Tyree. All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Tyree, J. M. (Joshua M.), author.

      Title: Vanishing streets : journeys in London / J. M. Tyree.

      Description: Stanford, California : Redwood Press, 2016.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2016019731| ISBN 9781503600034 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503600942 (electronic)

      Subjects: LCSH: Tyree, J. M. (Joshua M.)—Travel—England—London. | London

      (England)—Description and travel. | London (England)—In motion pictures.

      Classification: LCC DA684.25 .T97 2016 | DDC 942.1—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019731

      Designed by Rob Ehle

      Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10.75/16 ADScala

      CONTENTS

      LONDON IS MY MISTRESS

      UNREAL CITY

      VISIBLE ARTIFACTS

      FREE CINEMA

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      LONDON IS MY MISTRESS

      FREEDOM OF THE CITY

      NOBODY UNDERSTOOD why I wanted to spend a month in North London during the winter. My wife had landed a precious academic sabbatical. Emily had zero interest in walking freezing rainy February streets haunted by her childhood memories of Islington in the age of Margaret Thatcher. We had argued—nothing serious, I hoped—about what to do with this lucky chance of time off. She was ready to start a family, but I hadn’t had a salary in three years. I was forty-one and prone to depression in the years after the Crash. Pushing a stroller as my primary occupation wouldn’t help—or maybe it was just what I needed. We agreed to go our separate ways for some thinking time and meet up in a month to talk things over.

      Emily’s Facebook feed started bursting with colorfully filtered snapshots of orange trees in Seville, carnival singers marching through sun-splashed Cádiz. I looked outside and saw a spider’s web of electrical wires looming in the cold mist above the gray brick rows of terraced houses near Finsbury Park, N4. Late afternoon gloom gathered in the secluded nooks of the park and the abandoned rail stations whose vanished tracks now formed a footpath to Highgate. I envisioned the diesel fumes of stalled-out rush-hour journeys choking the intersection between the Underground station and the Finsbury Park Mosque. The sodden gutters near Seven Sisters Road and Blackstock Road linked betting shops and Ethiopian restaurants, SIM-card kiosk guys and South Asian clothing merchants, the fragrant bagel bakery and the old pub signage for Courage beers and Meux’s Original London Stout. Here was the housing estate off Fonthill Road that replaced a demolished warren where a century ago the local gangs were said to speak their own coded language. In the plaza in front of the station loomed the bowling alley that used to be the Rink cinema. In its heyday the Rink had a seating capacity of over a thousand and plenty of room for prostitutes to operate in the warm darkness during the Great War.

      I would have liked to take Emily to visit the animal charity bookshops that faced one another on Blackstock Road—the cat people with their orderly sections and tidy themed displays, and the dog people with their wonderful cramped jumble (or was it the other way around?). These little rooms opened into alternate universes. Behind every shop front in this postcode lay a portal filled with stars. Or so it seemed when the snow drifted like sparks or fireflies in the street-lamps, reflected in dark windows after hours. A bus would gladly take us to Alexandra Palace, where the hill overlooked the entire city from the Olympic Site to Canary Wharf, the City, and the BT Tower. That was my idea of a nice day out, but I would have to go alone.

      Emily had already left for Spain, and in February I couldn’t convince anyone else to join me. My wife’s sister, Joanna, lived in Wandsworth, newly married and planning to relocate to Los Angeles. My best friend in Britain, Ben, lived near Waterloo Station. It was possible to entice South Londoners to cross the river but in the winter there had to be some compelling special event, like a holiday dessert you could soak in alcohol and light on fire. Wiser not to move more than a few paces away from the kettle, December to March.

      It had been nearly twenty years since I had experienced winter in England. I grew up in snowy Wisconsin, the land of the ice fishermen, and the London winter was much more miserable. Nothing ever really dried out. You could ward off the chill temporarily with things that warmed from within—tea, booze, smokes—but the damp got in your bones. I read about the homeless who drank wood alcohol concocted in illegal stills around the beds in sheds in the vast outskirts. Cheap heroin had been flooding back into London for years. Soup, hot beans, the wrapped bundle of grease and boiled fish from the chippie. Drinking chocolate, Golden Syrup, Nescafé, Horlicks, Bovril, or in a pinch just a cube of vegetable stock dissolved in boiling water. (I’d seen my wife do this from time to time over the years—Emily emigrated to America at age thirteen, but this act proved she was still British.) The crazy national logic of cellar-cool beer in winter. Pint after pint, measure for measure. Enough drink to make any social outing seem like a conclave of gutter drunks.

      After many jetlagged sleepless mornings and a long ride on a night bus with a broken heater, I got the flu and my brain started cooking itself. Semidelirious, it suddenly occurred to me that I had been having an affair with London, right under my wife’s nose, in her parents’ flat, for almost twenty years. During the time I had been visiting London—since 1996 when I was a student on scholarship at Cambridge—I had become addicted to wandering around the vaguely spleen-shaped area between the A1, the North Circular Road, and the A10. Or maybe I was more like a fake spy, an American tourist working for a fictional international intelligence organization. Collecting useless files and furtive accidental snapshots, street by street. My assignations with invisible lovers or nonexistent espionage contacts took place near statues of cats in Archway, along the canals of the New River, around the Nazi bomb sites of Stoke Newington.

      What is it with you and London? Emily wanted to know. On Skype she was relaxing outside on a sunny patio in Seville, talking about an endless succession of warm days and the grammatical complexities of the subjunctive. About palaces filled with fruit trees, tiles, flowers, fountains, and peacocks. Her skin had browned beautifully in the sun, and her green eyes looked greener in the sharp southern light.

      London was played out, Emily had been arguing for years. The city had transformed itself into a distasteful pseudo–New York, a playground for the world’s wealthy with their resplendent investment properties and river views. Global real estate developers raised Mordor-Lite towers along the riverside beyond Greenwich, while Australian chain malls dominated Stratford and White City. Rents doubled to clear out the poor. Teachers, artists, and writers fled the city in droves.

      What is left? Emily often asked me. Americans

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