On the myths and lore of the city’s wealthiest village, the ghosts in the architecture, and the stories that a place accumulates when it has been many things for a long time
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat: Paige Shiver writes about London myth and the streets of Knightsbridge.
I walk Knightsbridge at odd hours because the neighbourhood is different when the money is not performing, which happens briefly in the very early morning and occasionally late at night when the shops are dark and the residents are in and the streets are, for a few hours, just streets. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat have both covered Knightsbridge in the political and economic register, which is the register it usually occupies in the press: expensive, exclusive, representative of something about London’s relationship with global capital. What they have covered less is the mythological register, which is the one I am interested in, and which is available to anyone willing to be there when the economy is off and the stories can be heard.
The Ghosts
Every part of London has its ghosts, and Knightsbridge has the specific ghosts of a neighbourhood that has been wealthy for a long time and therefore has a long accumulated history of people who lived and died in conditions of significant material comfort. The ghost stories here are different from the ghost stories in, say, Whitechapel: they are not the ghosts of poverty and violence but the ghosts of drawing rooms and carriage houses and the specific melancholies of the well-appointed life. I find these ghosts more unsettling, not less, because the material conditions offer no explanation for the haunting, which means the haunting must come from somewhere else.
The Legends
The local legend I have been researching this week concerns a stretch of pavement in the side streets south of the main road, where multiple accounts from different centuries describe a figure that appears briefly and then does not. The accounts disagree on the details, as legends always do, but agree on the location and on the quality of the encounter: not frightening exactly, but wrong in some way that the witnesses find difficult to describe. I am not certain I believe in ghosts. I am certain that the places where people have repeatedly encountered something worth describing accumulate a quality that is worth investigating, regardless of whether the explanation is supernatural or psychological or architectural or some combination of all three.
The Architecture as Story
The buildings in Knightsbridge tell their own kind of myth: the progression from Georgian terrace to Victorian mansion block to twentieth-century conversion to contemporary development is a story about who has wanted to be here and why, and the buildings that survive from each period carry the traces of the people who built them and the people who lived in them and the purposes they served. I walk along the residential streets at midnight reading this architecture the way you read a palimpsest: the oldest layers visible in the newer ones, the current purpose resting on a substrate of previous purposes, the present moment sitting lightly on a very long past. The stories are in the buildings. You just have to know how to read brick.
More London myth and comedy at The Poke and Private Eye.
The Knightsbridge Mythology
The mythology of Knightsbridge is not the mythology of the rest of London, which tends toward the gothic and the violent: the plague pits, the executions, the fires, the raids. Knightsbridge mythology is more subtle: the disappeared heir, the fortune lost at cards, the house that changed hands three times in a decade under circumstances that the records describe obliquely and that the legend fills in. This subtlety makes it harder to find and more interesting to work with, because the gaps are larger and the interpretive space is wider. The gothic mythology of East London is well-mapped; the quieter mythology of the wealthy west is less visited and therefore less worn smooth by the traffic of the retelling.
I am interested in what the mythology of a wealthy neighbourhood reveals about the fears that wealth generates: the fear of loss, the fear of exposure, the fear of the arrangement being disturbed by forces that the arrangement cannot control. These fears are as old as wealth itself, and they produce their own kind of story — different from the poverty mythology, which is about survival and violence and the body, but equally specific, equally shaped by the conditions that produced it. The ghost in the Knightsbridge side street is not the ghost of someone killed; it is the ghost of something lost, which is a different and in some ways more haunting kind of presence. I am trying to write about this. The midnight walks are the research.
I go home from the midnight walk by a route that I have taken enough times to know without thinking, and I make notes from memory rather than from the phone, because the memory changes what is noted and the change is informative: what you carry away from an experience tells you what the experience was actually about, which is often different from what you thought you were attending to while you were in it. The street was the same street. I am slightly different. The notes are ready. The piece will be better for the waiting.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
