London, building by building – Laying the foundation
(This post is intended to be one of a series covering my seldom-updated and seldom-viewed YouTube channel – 'London, building by building'. Subsequent entries will consist of the script for a single episode, along with my accompanying chapter notes.)
At the age of four, I travelled up to London, on the train, with my grandparents. We visited the Zoo in Regent's Park and, in the space of a few hours, I rode on the backs of both a camel and an elephant. Ever since that day, the city has been a treasure chest of adventure and ordeal. Many of my best and worst experiences have occurred inside its shifting boundaries.
At the age of 18, I studied, for a year, at a private college that was located in a pair of adjoining town houses on Palace Gate, a few metres down the road from the Round Pond entrance to Kensington Gardens. It was at this point in my life that I began to explore the winding twists and turns of London's frequently baffling urban topography, and slowly but surely built up an internal map of the city, connecting the disparate Underground Stations. It was always a surprise when I wandered from one familiar area into another and realised that these two parts of London, that I had previously viewed as separate entities, were in fact connected to each other.
At the turn of the millennium, I briefly moved to the city to study for an NVQ. During that time I resided in what was, to all intents and purposes, a brothel, south of the river in Tooting, at the arse end of the Northern Line.
Many years later, having run out of options, I slept rough in what was then an overgrown corner of the churchyard at St Sepulchre-Without-Newgate, a stone's throw from St Paul's Cathedral, resting my head on a brittle mosaic of weathered stone that fallen from the bell tower. I slept under London skies and was awoken before dawn by the sound of delivery lorries. I was harassed and badly beaten – the first time by another homeless man who was obviously extremely mentally ill; the second time by a gang of around 12 black youths, who made it clear that the colour of my skin was a decisive factor in their decision to attack me. I thought they were going to kill me.
I once didn't drink for two days. I didn't eat for eight days. I lost so much weight that my trousers slipped down my waist and the inner seam of the crotch flayed all of the skin off my inner thighs, making every footstep agony. I changed the dressings, that the walk-in medical centre had provided, in a filthy toilet cubicle. I couldn't get the pads to stick to the bare expanses of weeping flesh. They weren't big enough for the job.
I experienced an isolation that was so profound I felt my sense of personal identity ebbing away. I avoided my gaze in the mirror. When, by accident, I caught a glimpse of myself, I did not recognise the face that stared back at me. The people all around me seemed to be more real than I was to myself. When somebody called me by my name it came as a jarring mental blow, as if I had been shaken from a stupor.
The makings of a channel
For many years I harboured an urge to create a YouTube channel that would shine a spotlight on some aspect of London, and would articulate the mix of feelings that I have for this city, which has both nurtured and harmed me.
At first it was just a pipe dream; something that I thought about intermittently. However, after a while, these notions began to crystallise into an idea: Since I enjoy roaming the city, but seldom visit its attractions, or venture inside any of its buildings, I decided I would focus on the exterior architecture, which I could photograph and use as background images in my videos. I came up with a name for the channel – 'London, building by building'. Each episode would cover the history of an individual building within London. I reasoned that this would provide me with enough source material to keep things ticking over for a while. At the time of writing I have created two videos for the channel and am close to finishing a third. I still have a lot of ground to cover if I am to include a summary of every building in the Capital.
Having come up with a concept, a number of obvious problems presented themselves:
I lacked the audio equipment to create the kind of video that I had in mind, and very little money to purchase what I needed. I was eventually able to pick up a decent low-end microphone for a reasonable price. The internet proved to be a reliable source of sound and video editing software. My previous computer (a second-hand tower PC around 13 years of age) laboured, often to the point of fan-assisted breathlessness, to cope with the demands made by these programs.
A bigger problem was my voice, which is weak and does not lend itself naturally to articulate narration. To address this issue, I began doing vocal exercises. I followed these by readings from a book of poems by Ted Hughes, titled 'The River' – a magnificent collection and as good of an introduction as any to this literary giant's unmatched powers of description.
These vocal exercises and readings have been an ongoing process that pays out dividends slowly. They have become a source of fascination for my pet chameleon, Frederic, who cannot hear my voice, but knows that something is up and approaches the front of his vivarium curiously, probably in the hope that locusts might be forthcoming.
Another issue was my strong dislike for carrying out research, which was unfortunately going to be an essential and unavoidable part of any trawl through the layered history of the Capital.
I came up with a solution to this problem one afternoon while I was lying, flat on my back, on the floor of the study, attempting to fathom-out a kink in the plot of a short story that I was writing: I would produce a fictional history of London that would be rooted in reality by not tied to it. After all, there were already plenty of Bloggers and YouTubers who covered the history of the capital in far more depth and with far more panache than I could ever hope to manage. This allowed me the opportunity to gradually introduce a background narrative that would connect the individual videos. It also opened up the possibility of tying the channel into the parallel version of our world where all of my fictional writing takes place.
At the time I was in the process of meticulously plotting a lengthy novel; one that remains only partially written and seems fated to never be finished. The passive antagonist of the book (if that makes sense) is The Unified Wells & Aquifers Company. They are loosely based on the London livery companies – a community of trade associations and guilds, the oldest of which – The Worshipful Company of Mercers – is over 600 years old. I thought that it would be interesting if the 'London, building by building' videos were presented as series of documentaries produced by the Company.
In formation
Having laid down these foundations, the format for the videos crystallised relatively quickly.
I concluded that I needed some kind of white noise playing quietly in the background while I narrated, to off-set my voice. For a while I toyed with birdsong. I stood on the front porch of our house at dawn and dusk, in the early Summer, and made some recordings on an iPod Nano.
Building on the conceit that these mini-documentaries were the work of The Unified Wells & Aquifers Company, I had been thinking about creating a fictional setting where the films would be produced and broadcast. I remembered a photograph that I had taken of a canal barge traversing the Thames in East London, one foggy Autumn morning, in 2008. The river was grey and choppy. The little boat bobbing on the surface struck me as being in a precarious state as it chugged toward the south bank. A river barge moored discretely somewhere along on the Capital's arterial waterway seemed like an appropriate base for a channel that was managed by a livery company whose remit was rivers, wells and natural springs. I was reminded of Cain's Book – a novel by Alexander Trocchi, which is set on a barge on the Husdon,
If the setting for the channel was going to be a river barge, then it made sense to replace the birdsong with the wash of breaking waves. Late one night, I wandered down to the beach at the bottom of the road where I live and recorded 25 minutes of the high tide pawing at the sand, using my body as a baffle to shield the tiny microphone from the erratic gusts of wind.
When it came to producing scripts, I knew that I wanted to create a rigid format based around reoccurring elements that would provide structure.
One of these elements is the monologue that opens every episode and which always mentions four fictional locations around London.
By way of example, the first Chapter of 'London, building by building' begins as follows:
“From the Shadwell tile beds, to the radio tower at Rontree.
“From Breslin Hill to Boyer Rose Underground Station
Broadcasting from a canal barge, adrift on the current, one Thames-bend east of Tower Bridge, this is London, building by building: A scattershot dive into the architectural past and present of the English capital, undertaken one building at a time. I am your guide Sam Redlark.”
This short introductory speech has been a fixture of every episode so far, the only changes being the fictional London landmarks mentioned in the first two lines.
The opening was inspired by a St Etienne song called Girl VII, where Sarah Cracknell recites a list of locations around London and much farther afield. The intention is to establish from the get go that the channel is set in a parallel London that exists in an alternative universe. For the sake of simplicity, I will call it London B.
I decided, fairly early on, that every episode would have a phony sponsor whose advert would be read out prior to the main content of the broadcast. I imagined that the kind of businesses who would want to associate themselves with a channel like 'London, building by building' would be borderline anachronisms, peddling archaic products to a diminishing niche audience. Thus far, the sponsors for the first two episodes have been Turpins' Enamelling Paste and Bagstaff's Library Guard Sun Sealant.
The motivating factor that first spurred me into creating the channel was an idea that I had for an animation that would be tagged onto the end of every chapter: A photograph of the building under discussion would form a background to the main part of each episode. When it was over, a small piece of this building would be dragged out of the image and onto a mock-up of museum display label, where it would be recontextualised as piece of archaeology.
In this manner, at the end of the first episode, a small section of the façade from the Shield House is transformed into a chunk of a first century Roman sundial, uncovered in Stepney, during the Crossrail development.
Although I have no background in animation, I was able to get fairly close to what I had imagined by performing the drag and drop manually, using GIMP (which bills itself as an “image manipulation program”. Others might call it a Photoshop alternative). I used a screen recorder to capture the process. I forget which one – it might be OBS studio.
The image in the closing credits, where I give a brief outline of what will be covered in the next episode, is a photograph of Spirit Quay in Wapping. It is the preserved remnant of a canal that once functioned as a conduit in and out of London Docks. Appropriately, the picture was taken on the same foggy Autumn morning as the image of the canal boat that opens each episode.
The sound was edited using Audacity. The episode was pieced together using the OpenShot video editor.
The opening and closing titles were created using Windows Movie Maker, back when I was still running Windows 7. This software is no longer free in Windows 10 – a source of some irritation to me, as it means that I have been unable to change the Roman numeral date at the end of each episode. I have yet to find a free video-editing program that can mimic the plug and play effects that I used to create these animations.
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You can visit London, building by building by clicking here.
If you are interested in my writing, then I have a short novella, titled 'The Missionary Dune' for sale as an eBook for the Kindle. You can view the book on the Amazon website and read the first chapter using the 'look inside' feature.
The Missionary Dune (Amazon.co.uk)
The Missionary Dune (Amazon.com)
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