Passages: on the Rue des Thermopyles

“It was a beautiful street. The street of homeless cats, she often thought. She never came into it without seeing several of them, prowling, thin vagabonds, furtive, aloof, but strangely proud. Sympathetic creatures, after all.” – Jean Rhys, Quartet

By Anna Evans:

In the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, starting from Metro Denfert-Rochereau. On the trail of passages and impasses, courtyards and gardens. With a scattering of notes and addresses to guide us through our route. Wide streets branch off in different directions from the centre, where the great lion looks out. We walk along the Avenue d’Orléans, renamed Avenue General Leclerc after the liberation of Paris. The old street name has been retained only crossed out. Strikethrough: a line drawn through, as though to keep the name still present. 

Along Rue Daguerre, past the pink house that was Agnes Varda’s, there are patterns of white cloud where the sun is starting to break through, to dazzle. The elegant white facades of the buildings appear lighter, so that the street seems to open to us, as we absorb the decorated iron balconies, shutters and flowers in window boxes, pavement cafés, and glimpses in shop windows. We like to spot the launderettes and tabacs, the neighbourhood shops and bakeries.

In Place Jacques Demy, in a square shaded by trees, we sit and drink coffee. In the park there are basketball courts and ping pong tables. An old merry go round and tables with chess squares painted over them, a few old books left there for the taking. The sun makes patterns through the trees.

In photographs taken along the way are glimpses in passing of buildings and streets. Compositions of a moment in time. Walking along the Rue des Plantes in search of an impasse. Impasses, the streets that come to a dead end, a cul-de-sac, that most evocative of Parisian place names: a passage with no way through. 

The Impasse du Moulin Vert. An enclosed passage, a cobbled street with the feel of a village. There are houses and buildings of different styles, statues and carvings, hidden entrances. Gates conceal gardens and terraces, trees growing tantalizingly across the walls. At the end of the passage, a courtyard with old style lamps and green shutters on the windows. There are pots of flowering plants, pink roses, geraniums, and begonias. An elegant pink and white building with iron balconies and ivy growing up its side. Shadows of trees make patterns on the walls.

The streets of this area, Pernety, have the feel of another time. Narrow streets and smaller houses, shutters and chimneys mingle with Haussmann-style facades. Enclosed gardens tucked away behind trees and railings, with enticing corners to sit and read among grass and sunlight, green and shaded. The village meets the city as people gather with friends or pause to eat their lunch, making use of the space, scattered sounds of music.

A mural with flowers and bold lettering along the wall, the words of Louise Michel, a revolutionary of the Paris Commune: La révolution sera la floraison de l’humanité comme l’amour est la floraison du coeur[1]. 

Turning the corner to find a passage, the Rue des Thermopyles, a narrow street paved with cobblestones that feels quiet and secluded. There are low-rise houses linked by leafy arches, blue shutters, and red flowering roses. Some of the buildings seem like artists’ studios, the sense of Montparnasse in another time. Climbing vines and wisteria grow across the passage and trail between the houses and branches cover windows. Window boxes and planters, pots of different shapes and sizes, imperfect, unexpected, like a story opening outwards.

On the corner is a yellow house with a black painted door, creepers grow across the building and pots of plants and flowers. We hear music, the sound of a piano through the open window and a voice singing, soaring like a moment in a film. Each day, a reel of moments. 

Looking back along the cobbled lane there is a sense of green everywhere, hushed voices from the shared garden. The shade of trees and dappled sunlight, rooftops, and blue sky. Each glimpse is like framing a different fall of shadow and sunlight and sometimes the street seems to lengthen depending on the angle I look, as figures emerge and fade into the space of the passage and around corners. I want to notice every detail, to know the story behind every door.

Cats emerge from behind windows, unobtrusively free, and stroll along the cobbled alleyway looking for a patch of sunlight to sprawl under. I think of the city as viewed by its cats, who prowl its spaces, its hidden courtyards, and enclosed places. For the cats there are escape routes in every dead end, and no forbidden entrances. 

We take our time, absorbing every angle, torn between the wish to linger here, and the draw of the blue sky ahead and what comes next; of what other hidden places we might find. The city becomes an endless series of movements, experienced in passing. A passage is made to be followed.

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Notes: [1] The revolution will be the flowering of humanity as love is the flowering of the heart.

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Crookes

By Sarah Alwin:

A gentle tug of nostalgia helps me up the hill to Crookes, a place I have not been for about fifteen years despite still only living less than two miles away. I stride up purposefully, eyes stinging from the robust breeze and high pollen count, camera at the ready to contain those recalcitrant memories. Sheffield is a city of seven hills, like Rome, as everyone says gleefully, citing strong calf muscles as a prerequisite or maybe even benefit of settling here.

Today, artisan coffee shops like Whaletown Coffee Co. that would sit quite comfortably in Notting Hill instead jostle by the Londis convenience and Barnardo’s charity shop. I had forgotten how much my weeks had been punctuated by the pub and I had really forgotten quite how many of them there actually were in the short walk from Broomhill to Crookes. All the pubs now serve food. This would have been inconceivable, sacrilegious even, when I lived here in 1998. They all retain their original names: The Grindstone, The Ball, The Punchbowl, and The Noah’s Ark; but have a quietly different aesthetic. Outside The Ball, hungover hipsters tuck into avocado and poached egg crumpets. I remember taking over pitchers of lager from The Ball to the unlicensed Indian Chef across the road on a Friday night, careful not to slosh any over the zebra crossing.

It is when I turn onto Loxley View Road that I remember moving in at number 9 in July 1998, having just graduated and about to embark on a PGCE. I was earnest and a deep believer in my own edginess, and together with my housemate (also confusingly named Sarah – at one time it was a fashionable one) constructed a self-consciously adult domestic formula at Loxley View. In reality we were simply play acting.

Over the summer I turned 21 and four awkward boys moved into number 7. Sarah announced with disgust one afternoon that one of them had moved in early and wanted to get to know us. She said this as if he’d been a fungal infection. I was of course smitten with them. I had a battered Citroen AX and gave them lifts to work and to town in between my school placements, and the six of us eventually fell into comfortable, genial companionship, revolving around the pub in the main. The boys used to distinguish between me and the other Sarah by calling me Chicken. Ironically this was because they were too chicken to give her the nickname, probably sensing that underneath it all she thought they were fungal. One of the lads was a little feral, that much was true. But whenever his dad came to visit he would put on a shirt and tie, which we all found miserable.

Over the road from us, on the other corner of Loxley View, was an Indian and Bangladeshi restaurant called Jaflong. The lads next door were frequent visitors, as were our two cats. Today Jaflong is in bigger premises further down Crookes, and its original site looks worse for wear. 

I take this photograph to corroborate my presence there today. I kind of like the washing machine in there next to the rubble and my almost ghostly reflected squint into the murk.

In reality, my time at Loxley View Road was sometimes extremely painful. That winter I embarked on a difficult relationship with a much older, already attached man. It was part of that carefully constructed growing up that I had prepared for myself: ostensibly marginal in a nonchalant way but in reality quite difficult to navigate and more of a cliché than I could admit to myself.

Some afternoons I would walk to the end of Loxley View and look out over the view it was named for. 

Some nights I would go there if I couldn’t sleep, staring into the twinkle of lives across the valley. The view there today is as stunning and the stiff breeze throws up this crow who seems to fit in well with my walk. I am still moved by this beauty. It is so simple and so true.

I still know one of the boys next door though he doesn’t call me Chicken any more. We don’t see each other too often but he is steadfast and good, and I am glad that he got to know us. It was camaraderie and curry that got me through that time, that chastened me out of wanting to grow up sophisticated so fast. It was this vista too that stilled me and took me back to myself. 

***
Sarah Alwin is a special needs teacher and PhD researcher working on domestic space in South East Asian literature. She is half Dutch and half Singaporean and has lived in Sheffield for 27 years. She co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, on a community radio station, Sheffield Live 93.2FM.

Walking cities with my mother

By Anandi Mishra:

Earlier this year during the covid-19 lockdowns in Delhi, I realised how much I had always loved walking not knowing why so. Flipping through old photo albums, I found photographs of myself walking in various cities. A friend or a boyfriend, always someone clicking me from the back, as the city spread itself out before me. Consuming walking nostalgia from the pre-covid era, reading different kinds of writing about walking, listening to podcasts about it, eventually I started dreaming about it. In one of those dreams, an ancient, grainy visual played. A memory from my childhood returned. My mother walking five or six steps ahead of me, as we both made our way to the nearby market in my hometown in north India, Kanpur. Watching her walk, always trying to keep pace with her, I had memorised the vision – always her walking, walking ahead, walking to or from, and me trying to follow, match her stride. That’s when I remembered how she was the one who had taught me mapping places on foot, implicitly, all throughout my childhood. 

As a working woman in the 80s and 90s of north India, my mother defied several social odds. She was married, had two kids, an extended set of in-laws to take care of and an entire household to run, yet she chose to work. In addition to that, bereft of any personal vehicles, and due to the general plight of public transport in Kanpur, she walked to most places. So much so that walking became an extension of her personality. As I started going to school, she took me along, to accompany her on most such walks.

In those times (as now) to most people, walking was the very antithesis of existing in a city as a woman. It meant a certain slowing down, attentive step by step discursive engagement with the immediate surroundings that we were meant to avoid altogether in the first place. While on such walks, several times, men shouted at us telling us to hop on their cars or bikes, or to talk to them – but my mother carried on unperturbed, too consumed in the pleasures of her walk to respond to anything.

My predominant memory of walking with my mum when I was little is how fast she walked. Walking with her, I too quickly learned to look both ways and to run across the street, pace myself out of a thick crowd and never get lost.

This was in the decades before we knew of the concept of the flaneur or flaneuse. Now as I try to recall those formative experiences of walking, Walter Benjamin’s writing comes to mind. “The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls…. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.” If not in the same length, breadth or depth, but my experience of consuming the city was somewhat the same. 

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As we entered the twenty first century, the danger of getting lost and disconnected in technology loomed large. People fretted on the urban dweller’s dependence upon it and that it would mean an erosion or indefinite derailment of contact with others and nature. We were afraid that humans would be another notch removed from consciousness as the individual will no longer touch or be touched by what once was most natural. These fears eluded me, as I continued walking even into my late twenties. 

I experienced a strange joy in being alone on the streets of various cities, at odd hours, walking with my phone in hand. I used the phone to record what I saw around. I wrote, took photographs and videos. It was not as though I was lost, but as if I was losing myself to the city.

Benjamin writes about this: “Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling. Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest…”

This was similar to the meandering walks my mother took in her days. She would walk from

her office to the bookstore, to the temple and nearby sweet shop in the vicinity. Ambling, she would take in the surroundings, nod and wave and say hello to her friends and acquaintances who ran several of the businesses, who she had made friends with over the years. While accompanying her I had learnt these primal pleasures of walking, measuring a city up and down by putting one foot in front of the other.

To be able to call a place my own she taught me, required that we first stray into unfamiliar streets, at strange hours. The shock of the new, she said, will be disruptive at first, but it will also break the insulating, silken lining of culture and grooming, allowing me to sink my teeth into a new way of exploring a place. 

In walking thus so, we were able to transcend the immediate relationship of mother and daughter, and model a companionship as co-walkers. In pacing the city of my birth up and down, one foot before the other, my mother set an example for me before any of the modern day flâneuses, implicitly giving me permission to navigate my (or any) city on my own terms and make a place my own. Her constant insistence on walking, became a part of my body, culture and daily routine the way, as Garnette Cadogan writes in his seminal essay “Walking While Black”, “home became home”.

When I learned of the word “flânerie” it gave meaning and shape to my ways of reading the city by walking on foot. The Berlin flaneur Franz Hessel while writing about flânerie and flaneurs had said that they perceive passersby, streets, and fleeting impressions as the transitory signs of modernity. The more I read the more I unearthed the connections between flânerie and being a woman, and how female flânerie is a means of asserting female subjectivity in the public realm. 

In her book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London Lauren Elkin elaborates on that: “Why do I walk? I walk because I like it. I like the rhythm of it, my shadow always a little ahead of me on the pavement. I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note in my journal, or read an email, or send a text message, and for the world to stop while I do it. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness. Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighbourhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote.” 

That my hometown barely had any “walking infrastructure” did not deter my mother. In the remove of her strolls, she found solace. In sauntering, strolling, wandering, promenading, she created her own time. And I imbibed these learnings from here. To not rush through a walk as a commuter, or as a morning passenger running behind their bus.

In that way, all cities were immensely walkable. I loved pacing up and down the various soulless parts of towns, observing what was happening. Dull sidewalks were akin to the stage of a theatre. I saw people going about their odd jobs, sketchy businesses, small works, toiling away idiosyncratically. Watching people navigate through traffic, and other humans became my way of spending idle time. I invested hours in walking the sidewalks in big cities to get a broader view of how people live on the roadside, how the city is stitched together, the history and the present colliding at all times. On a drab day, walking through the melee of people that were always thronging the streets became my way of knowing my place in the world. And in the lockdown it felt poetically justified to remember that I had learnt it all from my mother.

***

Anandi Mishra is a Delhi-based writer and research communicator who has worked as a reporter for The Times of India and The Hindu. Her writing has been published by or is forthcoming in the Harvard Review, The Atlantic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Popula, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. She tweets at @anandi010.

Where the sun sinks and is caught

By Kenn Taylor:

The city has its grids
This is one where the sun is absorbed

The disc itself fades
far off in the distance
behind towers
behind seas
Here though,
bookended by two busy roads
of bars, restaurants, entertainment halls
Are running
as warps to their weft
smaller streets 
Taking you up and down
one of the city's few hills

A rare space of peace in the city
Quiet streets
some still Georgian
cobbled, mewsed
Punctuated by pubs nestling in corners
Pubs which give it lifeblood
Boxes of energy
in otherwise
often silent
throughfares 

This is one of those places in the city
though,
where the energy lies buried
waiting to be dug up

All the faded red brick
Cracked paving stones
Black painted iron
Even occasional marble
and contemporary pre-fab
capture the sun as it retreats 

As the gold and red bounces off surfaces
Reflects in dark glass
and double yellow lines
Brings brief heat to alley beer gardens and
casts shadows
long and lean 

Sweat pricks brows nearing the top
High enough to watch the disc
slide away from view
Leaving only the vast
blood and honey glow

As you look back down the
long straight vista
and up beyond it
to the distance
the buildings step down beneath 

That energy though
flowing through the streets
warp and weft
The ghosts of dwellers and idlers,
prophets and priests,
of the past 
Remains even after dark 

***

Kenn Taylor is a writer and creative producer with a particular interest in culture, community, class and place. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and City Monitor to Caught by the River, Entropy and Liverpool University Press.
www.kenn-taylor.com

This City Street

By Hannah-Louise Dunne:

For Conn.

There is a place in the middle of the city, where seagulls greet the morning light with throaty squaks. Here, the burgeoning bright of the day will blink your eyes open, unwilling, though they might be. Below the seagulls, the city is a zigzag of bricks. A red hue where the wide Georgian streets lie. Or the cold grey of the fresh rain-washed roads and car parks that guide commuters around the corporate zones. In other places, glass flashes up and into the morning light. A brash presence, wrapping the ever-rising office blocks in bold illumination.

This is where we live, baby, before you arrive. Where we first imagined you into existence in the curved oblong surrounds of our small city-centre flat. Home now to our whole world, where each day we marvel at how much you’ve grown. 

At one time, the city centre all around us was home to lots of people. Teeming groups of humanity, packed into the small square footage of the heart of the city. There were families of ten or more packed with no consideration for their health or safety into small one-roomed tenements down near the Four Courts. While up around the city’s grand squares, the newly wealthy and established aristocracy vied for prominence in the surrounds of the beautiful red brick of their tall proud townhouses.

Nowadays, the city streets are quieter. There are more offices and hotels here than people. More space for cars, conferences, tourists. Money, and more money, as the city reopens after the strange events of the last year and a half, and the streets slowly fill up with lines of traffic again and car horns beep into the midday stretch.

But if you look beyond the main streets, you can still catch glimpses of ordinary life. Of generations of families living together in the dark red brick of the flats close to Holles Street. Or families still dotted in the surrounds of the grand old houses of the city all along the tree-lined roads to Donnybrook. There are students and workers too, carefully sequestered from view in the shelter of mews houses, in unexpected apartments and studios situated above office buildings, down side-streets, and in the back of office buildings where you’ll find our small city-centre home.

It’s a funny looking place. I think most people who pass by are surprised to see a house there in the midst of the zig zag of car parks and cranes. But don’t let that shock you. There are many surprises to be found around here. Just down the road lies one of Dublin’s private parks. A sanctuary for the fortunate then and now, which we eyed with envy during the lengthy lockdown, where the lucky few could unlock the gate and luxuriate in all of that green space, as they snapped open cans of designer craft beer.  

Around that square, there are tall houses that once served as homes to some of our greatest artists. We have a print of one on the wall of our sitting room. He was the younger brother of W.B. Yeats. But truthfully, I like his work best of all the Yeats family. The bold colours of his paintings sing to me as I walk past their vast canvases on the calming walls of the nearby National Gallery. Just down the road from Jack B. Yeats along the side of Fitzwilliam Square, Mainie Jellett lived. She was one of Ireland’s first abstract painters. She saw the world and made sense of it in shapes of peculiar beauty. 

It’s not all grand houses here though. Outside our building, a charming man comes to sit each day to collect spare change from passing drivers. He mans the parking meter come rain, hail or sunshine and knows everything there is to know about what goes on around here from his perch at the bottom of the steps. When we go for our daily walks around Merrion Square, to admire the louche grandeur of Oscar Wilde’s statue once more, he regales us with tales of the street and keeps a close eye on your growth, telling me every now and then; ‘You’re getting bigger every time I see you.’ 

This is our part of Dublin, where we have watched the streets change each season.  The place where you emerged into existence.  It’s waiting here to welcome you home.

***

Hannah-Louise is a former journalist, turned advertising executive and writer, who is interested in the way our past and present intersect to form and shape us. She has written about family, places she loves, and formerly, celebrity culture, for national press publications, and is currently working on her first long-form fictional work (and growing her first child). You can follow her on Medium, or catch her avoiding books on the reality of childbirth as she searches for calm waters to swim in around Ireland.

Five Questions for... Malte Brandenburg

Photo: Malte Brandenburg

By Sara Bellini

Malte Brandenburg is a photographer based in Copenhagen. In his creative practice he looks for simplicity and symmetry and in the past he has often found them in Berlin buildings. Housing spaces are explored both in their aesthetics as well as their urbanistic context and social value. After the pandemic changed his travelling plans, Malte is now finalising some projects while exploring the familiar streets of Copenhagen with his camera. 

What does home mean to you?

That is a tricky question for me as I left my home town Berlin almost thirteen years ago and moved to Copenhagen. I still feel attached to Berlin, but at the same time the city becomes more and more foreign to me. And vice versa Copenhagen was for a number of years just a city I lived in, without the feeling that this is my home. It was somewhat in between, which was strange. However, after a while I found the right corner here for me and finally clicked with Copenhagen. Strangely though, I also feel more independent from where I am, as long as I'm with my family, it's difficult to describe. I guess they are my own little biotope :-).

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I have a very special connection to a place in Berlin called Gropiusstadt, a settlement of various tower blocks designed by Walter Gropius in the south of Berlin. I grew up nearby and had a couple of friends there and also had to pass through to get to the local swimming pool, which is why I spent quite a bit of time between these tower blocks. It always felt like a very surreal place to me, because of the sheer amount of concrete reaching into the sky.

Photo: Malte Brandenburg

I could not fathom that almost 50 000 people lived there. Also from a sociological point of view it's a quite interesting place and how it has changed within a relatively short period of time. This place was one of the first topics I was drawn to when I started to focus my photography more and more on urban architecture. I still return to Gropiusstadt on a regular basis.

What is beyond your front door?

Beyond my front door there are friends, a nice park and the beach, which I appreciate a lot. About 40 meters away there is also one of the best bakeries in town with shelves of sourdough bread!

What place would you most like to visit?

I would like to travel through Eastern Europe, all the way to Russia. I am fascinated by the culture and especially the food.

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now?

I am currently reading Agent to the Stars, a novel by John Scalzi about an alien race on earth that hires a PR agent in order to manage the revelation of their presence to humanity - it's hilarious! I also just finished The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan documentary. One of the best documentaries I have seen. I might be biased though, as he was a bit of a childhood idol. In terms of music, I listen a lot to Moi Caprice these days, a Danish band I discovered by accident, because the lead singer's daughter goes into the same class as my son.  

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Find out more about Malte Brandenburg on his website and Instagram.

These streets are life: Withington

Photo: Gursh Nijjar

By Andrew Edgeworth:

Borders are many things; physical, lines on a map, constitutional, binding. But most are psychological. There is a contrast where borders are concerned and while they may not all be manned by armed guards and Government backed, society ensures they remain in place.

In a springtime induced fugue I set out to clear my head, a walk through a neighbourhood I’d come to know over the past twelve months or so. Leaving Ballbrook Avenue I headed on to Palatine Road; the birthplace and home of that great Manchester institution, Factory Records. A blue plaque of commemoration is hidden from all but the most observant. You can still see the spectre of the irascible Tony Wilson on the squalid balcony, gazing down at you, fag in hand. 

In the grounds of one of the horrendously named apartment blocks, (Mottram Manor, Barry Court) the corpse of a cat lies in the undergrowth. The locus delicti unknown, but it had undoubtedly come to rest here in its final moments. In fairness there are worse places to call it a day than under a juniper bush. Had it been run over or poisoned? Who knows? It was not a time to tarry. 

It is here that the Christie hospital seeps into Didsbury gradually, like expanding foam. Every new piece of it is shinier and grander than the last. Progress is signposted by disinfected metals and floor to ceiling strip lights. At one of the many entrances are groups of smokers waiting for death on the pavement, their chemotherapy drips in tow.

The Christie is a non-smoking site

I struggle for a collective noun, the scene neither suburban nor hospice, presents a moral dilemma which forces me onwards. 

Adjacent to me, residents of an anonymous halfway house patrol the pavement in various states of unease. Cigarettes and alcohol hold sway.

Just beyond them the inmates of a nursing home stare on blankly from secure balconies. A vast complex with hourly blue light visits. 

St Cuthbert’s Church stands on the corner of Marriott Street and its foodbank is now just as much a source of salvation. Money is tight and time tighter.

CONFESSIONS: Saturdays: 11am-12pm

The penitent queue stretches back down Palatine Road every Monday lunchtime, and seems to get bigger by the week. In years gone by it would have made the front page of a national newspaper. Now we all put our heads down and shuffle past it on the opposite side of the road. 

Cross over the road my friend, ask anybody but the Government for a lend. 

But the faex populi are not welcome in Didsbury. The needy are an unwanted nuisance in the Tory version of Chorlton. They want their upcycled tables made from unwanted pallets. Just as long as there is still sufficient parking for Range Rovers outside of hipster brunch establishments. Withington is now a little too close for comfort. 

The crossroad with Wilmslow Road and Burton Road mark the unofficial, official start of Withington. An open air theme park for all walks of life, tightly crammed into a place that is different things to different people. Mamucium begins here!

The former White Lion pub is now a Sainsbury’s Local where kind students often sit on the ground outside with the local indigents sharing fags and sandwiches. Long-term cash machine tenants asking about that bizarre concept – spare change. Contactless payment now limits reward. 

The old Scala theatre has been demolished and replaced at the behest of Britannia Group and is now a vulgar set of flats complete with an out-of-place Costa coffee shop on the ground floor. 

Like all apartments they are mandatory luxury – you are no longer allowed, nice or mediocre apartments. No definition exists however. Opposite is yet another set of luxury apartments, balconies affording uneasy viewing for overpaying residents. A strategic reinventing of the local is underway. Old shopfronts have been replaced by bike rack balconies. In Didsbury blocks of apartments (never flats) are given names that couldn’t be further from reality; Alpine Court, Didsbury Gate, Larke Rise. Not so in Withington – they are only allowed a number.

On the main drag a commotion ensues at the bus stop by the now derelict municipal building. A hugely obese man is destroying his walking stick by repeatedly smashing it against the bus stop pole whilst shouting “BASTARD BUS DRIVER” at the top of his voice. The local pedestrians and motorists, despite being at very real risk of injury from flying pieces of cheap timber that are now flying around at all angles, remain oblivious to his protest. The 43 bus adds insult to injury by stopping at the pedestrian crossing a few yards further on. With no stick left he furiously shakes the handles of his wheeled walking frame. The obscenities continue.

Withington high street (Wilmslow Road) is much the same as many others that have suffered in recent years. There is not the spendthrift clientele of the South Manchester ‘villages’ to make it fashionable. The retail sector look is eclectic-poverty, trapped between eras and demography. An Eastern bloc supermarket peddles super strength lager, while charity shops appeal to the classier end of the market. Other businesses have been there since time immemorial and cling on like barnacles to a sea wreck. A laundrette that still runs on 50p pieces, the locksmiths with less life than a deadbolt.

The former bank is like all others in similar locations – derelict. Above the shop fronts, boarded up windows are strewn in graffiti, while at ground level slum dog estate agents prey on low income renters and those in full-time higher education.

Side alleys are not to be ventured down without purpose, the realm of backstreet MOT garages and taxi companies, a permanent haze of oil and cigarette smoke. It’s back-street traditional. Big men in dirty overalls. Big doors and big dogs.

And no ‘High Street’ is complete without boozers. The Victoria is your classic pub where anybody may be unwillingly plucked from the street at any given time to take part in karaoke. Leopard print and lipstick. Flat caps and vapes. Pints of cheap lager and even cheaper bitter. An eternal happy hour where nobody smiles. 

Albert Wilson’s is a more eccentric place altogether. A Sillitoesque corner bar with ceilings seemingly lowered by the weight of time and an uninviting doorway. Mysterious but not to the point of curiosity. 

Students and young professionals choose instead to seek out the safety of familiarity. A vegan café and a hipster bar with monosyllabic names where there appears to be a requirement to dress as if you’ve fallen through the sale rack in TK Maxx to be accepted (my generation of student was nowhere near as adventurous. We were just boring).

The street is now dividing slowly. To the East runs Egerton Crescent with its record store cum coffee-shop and post office. To the West is Copson Street. Another border is slowly materialising. 

The initial impression of Copson Street is one of pound shops in stiff competition, their wares taking over the pavement, an industrial scale operation for entire families each morning. The constant battle of tat outdoing tat. An entire oceans worth of non-recyclable plastic.  Plant pots, shopping trolleys and reusable food containers in a battle for passing trade attention.

More commotion. A man stood by the open door of a scaffolding flatbed truck energetically screams into a phone while inexplicably pointing to the directions he has taken to what is clearly the wrong address. 

I went right down there and then left back there…

I move on in exasperation, passed the mandatory mobile phone repair shop and bookmaker, complete with its FOBTs (fixed odds betting terminals) promising to ruin yet another life. 

The hub of the street in question however is undoubtedly the location of greasy spoon which sees the denizens of Withington flock daily for a bonne bouche. Come rain or shine the locals huddle at bolero style tables on the pavement, most of whom appear to the victims of widespread hypodontia. A sea of shipwrecked mouths pleading for a willing ear. 

At the various grocery shops care workers of African descent fill shopping trolleys and suitcases on wheels with groceries. Students count change in their hands with a lamentable decision to make over one avocado or a packet of rice. 

Behind the retail sector, Victorian terraces run parallel to the main thoroughfare, gated alleyways act as a honeypot for fly-tippers. Six to a house or split into quick-fix flats, MDF warrens that give fire safety officers sleepless nights.

Nearby, on Mauldeth Road West, a ghost-bike is chained to a lamppost in tribute to Harry Sievey. A local musician and son of Frank Sidebottom creator, Chris Sievey, who perished when his bicycle collided with a car in 2017. 

But these streets are life. Withington is real life, not the show home façade of its snooty neighbour which looks down its nose at it from behind electric gates.

Withington is slowly evolving. High house prices have meant that the people who once fled it are now buying up property. No matter how ugly the new facades of apartment buildings are, investment is there. Once thriving, it hopes to thrive again while Didsbury watches on uneasily.

***

Andrew Edgeworth is a former journalist who has been writing fiction since 2013. He was awarded the 2017 Origins flash fiction prize was runner up in the 2019 Splash Fiction competition. His work has also been published by Fairlight Books. He lives in Manchester with his dog, Orwell.

Am I Alone In Dreaming Of Rubble

By David Lewis:

I am walking through a blunt triangle of empty terraced streets, dominated by a long low red brick church, closed and boarded up; a hole in the boards allows local children to once again play in the church porch.  It is starting to get dark.

Twenty years ago, in a period of deep, isolated research, I began to have dreams about Liverpool.  I was studying the city’s churches, curious about how they define the city; how their spires contribute to the roofline, how their architecture dominates a street, how the city is changed on the date of their demolition.  I worked alone, spending weeks in the city’s Records Office poring over memoirs and old street plans.   Days were spent immersed in the stark and beautiful photographs of Liverpool in its Victorian prime, and in the dark and destructive 1960s when many of the city’s older churches were demolished.  I took many long journeys to find the sooty, bruised survivors, only to discover that this destruction was ongoing.  In some cases I arrived only days after the final clearance, to a raw slash in the urban landscape, a sense of wounded stone and dust settling.  I began to see all buildings as temporary, as part of a rolling history of the fabric of the city.  Lines began to blur. 

And I started to dream.  Carl Jung famously dreamed of the city; mine were more prosaic. They have always been short and in black and white, and fall into two categories.  In the first, I can see small details of the city - street corners, ruined walls, unnamed streets reduced to fields of rubble.  Some districts appear time and again; Edge Hill, Toxteth, Netherfield Road, places that have been in a radical process of decay and regeneration since the 1960s. I started to record the dreams as accurately as I could, in a staccato, notebook style.  Sometimes they help me remember more detail; in other cases they are all that is left of the dream. 

Unknown derelict dockland streets, ironwork, weeds, tall closed warehouses.  A steep cobbled street called St George’s Place, behind a railway station. Early morning. 

The dreams were fuelled by the photographs, but I came to realise that they were also reviving memories.  The Liverpool of my childhood was a city partly in ruins, and blitz-memories were still strong.  Older people talked of evacuation to north Wales, of nights in air-raid shelters, of bombers over the city.  The destruction continued after the war, when in a spurt of self-loathing the city demolished with a frenzy, and on car journeys to visit relatives in the northern reaches of the city I saw miles of cleared terraced streets.  In those days all gaps in the landscape were known as ‘bommies’, a word which meant bomb sites but also bonfires; urban folk memory overlapped urban function.  I had a recurring dream of a large square black building in the middle of a demolished city, a composite view of the boarded-up churches and barely-open pubs I saw on the disappearing streets of north Liverpool. 

In the other dreams, I see residential areas associated with my grandfather’s family.  Vincent Lewis was born in 1904, and grew up surrounded by family in the working-class streets of Liverpool 8.   As a child I knew many of the streets with family connections, and as an adult it was these places that began to appear in different dreams; sometimes in ruins, sometimes full of people, sometimes just streets of alleyways and tall brick walls. 

Cockburn Street in the early morning.  There are no cars and the street is deserted but I can see down another cleared street to the Mersey below me, gleaming silver.  Tall walls behind me. 

I came to realise that all these dreams, these blurrings of old photograph and old memory, are a creative response to the demolition of my grandfather’s city.  The books I have written on Liverpool are an attempt to understand and articulate the Victorian city that is gradually disappearing.  Yet the pace of urban evolution is so quick that one day all our familiar places will have gone or been radically changed and everyday memories, however commonplace, will have become history.  I still walk the vulnerable city as often as I can, exploring and recording amputated streets, stretches of cobble and redundant warehouses.  Often after these long walks I dream once more of the city in ruins, feeling now that our rubble dreams tell us more than we know.      

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter