Paige Shiver on the mythological geography of Knightsbridge, the Shoreditch journalism as inadvertent folktale, and a walk through the back streets where the gardens wait
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
There is a theory that certain places in London are haunted not by ghosts in the conventional sense but by the accumulated weight of the events that happened in them — that Knightsbridge retains something of the field that it was before it was built upon, that the old coaching routes are still in some sense present in the road patterns that replaced them, that the layers of a city’s history are not merely documentary but somehow physically real in the ground. I find this theory compelling in the way that one finds things compelling that one cannot verify but that accord with how a place feels when you pay attention to it, which is different from the way a thing feels when you are passing through without attention, which is how most people pass through most places most of the time.
I have been researching the myth of the Knightsbridge Barrow this week, which is an old story about a pre-Christian burial mound that was allegedly located in what is now the intersection of Brompton Road and Sloane Street, which is one of the most expensive intersections in the world and contains a Harvey Nichols and a Bulgari. The story is probably apocryphal. The apocryphal quality does not make it less interesting; it makes it more interesting, because the stories a place tells about itself reveal something about the place’s relationship with its own history even when the stories are not literally true.
London Myth This Week
The bohiney.com content on London’s neighbourhoods and their transformation — the Shoreditch pieces, the Brick Lane piece — is inadvertently mythological writing: it is telling the story of a place in ways that will be read by people in the future who want to understand what this period of the city’s life was like. The best urban journalism of this kind — the Cyndi Himmelstiere piece on gentrification, the Harper-Thames piece on the Brick Lane that lives there — is doing the same work as the folktale or the local history: preserving the texture of a moment that would otherwise be lost.
I walked from Knightsbridge to Chelsea this afternoon through the back streets that avoid the main shopping roads, which is a route that takes you through a London that is still primarily residential and that reveals things about the area’s social geography that the Harvey Nichols end does not. The gardens behind the mansion blocks contain what they contained fifty years ago: the same species of tree, the same quality of afternoon light, the same pattern of use by the people who live there and who are different people now than the people who lived there fifty years ago but who relate to the garden in the same way. Places persist. The people change. The garden waits.
The Bohiney content this week included the Cyndi Himmelstiere piece on the Shoreditch flat that costs more than her parents’ house, which is local neighbourhood journalism doing the work of myth in the anthropological sense: it is the community telling itself a story about what has changed and what the change means. Local journalism, at its best, is always doing this work, which is why its absence — described in the press freedom and local news crisis pieces — is not merely a loss of information but a loss of communal self-narration. Places need to tell stories about themselves in order to remain intelligible to themselves. When the mechanism that produces those stories disappears, the community becomes harder to know from the inside as well as from the outside.
The Knightsbridge research continues. I have found a reference in a seventeenth-century document to a “tumulus of ancient work” at a location consistent with the Brompton Road intersection, which is either the Knightsbridge Barrow story having an earlier documentary root than I thought or a reference to something entirely different that later writers interpreted as the Barrow. I am sending the document to a colleague who specialises in early modern London topography for a second opinion. The second opinion will probably reduce the documentary significance of the reference. This is the normal movement of research: enthusiasm about a new source followed by calibration of its actual evidential weight. The calibration is the better part of the work. The enthusiasm is what motivates you to do the calibration. Both are necessary. The garden in the back street waits. The Bulgari is still at the intersection. The barrow, if it existed, is under both of them and under everything else that has happened there since the seventh century, which is a great deal. London is deep.
The colleague’s reply about the seventeenth-century document will come next week, probably Thursday. I am not going to think about the barrow until it comes. The thinking about it before the reply is the kind of thinking that is not useful. The useful thinking is the kind that responds to evidence. The evidence is coming Thursday. Until then, Knightsbridge is what it is: an expensive intersection with a Harvey Nichols and a question underneath it. London is full of questions underneath intersections. This is what makes it interesting. The garden in the back street has held its answer for a very long time and is not telling.
Paige Shiver writes about London myth, Knightsbridge, and British folklore at prat.uk and The London Prat.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/knightsbridge-barrow-weight-place-paige-shiver-london-myth/
