Paris - autour de Ménilmontant

The broken spine of the battered L'Indispensable has been taped up, restoring my Paris street plan to service.

It is randomly flicked open to reveal the northern sector of the 20th arrondissement.  An upturned plonk glass (appropriately, a ballon Paris) is plonked down on the page and a circle is drawn where the rim falls.
We start at 10 in the morning but 7 o'clock on the map, emerging from the Métro Gambetta and take the short walk to join the ring.

When a lone shop on a street sells flowers this usually denotes the proximity of a hospital or a cemetery and as this one is at the corner of the Avenue du Père Lachaise we know that the blooms are mainly destined for the dead.
At this cemetery gate we are near the commemorative monuments to foreign troops who gave their lives fighting for France.  This explains
why the inscription here is in Armenian, and it may go some way towards explaining architectural choices that seem outside the Parisian stylebook.
I would like to be more respectful, but I can only see a giant stone lemon-squeezer here.

We set aside morbidity, greet one of the many Père Lachaise cats, and regain the circle proper.  We don't leave commemorative inscriptions behind, however, as we notice, on the pavement, an outdated invitation to attend a pop-up show given by Le Hors Humain, a latter-day Houdini, and street stunt man.  Check him out here.   http://www.pbase.com/rollier/horshumain  I find myself  mentally transported back to the banks of the River Tyne in Newcastle, where, every Sunday morning at the quayside market, my youthful self would witness a life-scarred Irish-American have himself chained and padlocked prior to hurling himself into the then insanitary watery blackness.


Strange happenings abound in this area; giant spermatozoa emerge from the drains and high-tail it into the ventilation systems on the Avenue Gambetta in search of eggs. 

Nor have we left memento mori behind.  Events of 70 years ago resurge from the multitude of such plaques as this one which recalls the resistance activity of Fernande Onimus who gave secret shelter to numerous allied airmen via the Comet Line, an act which, when she was denounced by informers, cost her her life.






Do you sometimes think that contemporary urban street lack colour? 
If so, take yourself to the place Martin Nadaud

where the Lang/Baumann group, who specialise in publicly sponsored art in public places have made us see this neighbourhood differently for a while.

Round the corner, a 19th century  fairy-tale cement villa, seemingly sprouting from a petrified forest is menaced on all sides by amorphous blocks.  These outlying arrondissements of Paris are packed with these curious survivals, reminders that these hilly areas were once a succession of villages haphazardly developed because of the increasing demands of central Paris for raw materials - water, stone (here in the form of gypsum for sculpted façades) or for their strategic position in the era of new-fangled wireless communication.







There are handsome Art Déco piles which have been flexibly adapted to modern urban living while others, less propitious for change of function, seem to be literally dissolving into obscurity...




Ménilmontant and Belleville lay outside the taxation boundary marked by the wall of the Farmers General and therefore attracted impecunious bohemian communities who lived by their wits and their ability to make a living by entertaining others.  The combination of cheap living and the joining-up of villages into suburbs as housing for the emergent working classes encouraged artists to pool their resources as providers of popular entertainment, giving rise to the variety theatres and guingettes of Belleville which eventually stretched up the hill to Télégraphe.  Aristide Bruant, Piaf, Charles Trenet, Maurice Chevalier ....

Belleville has resurged and re-branded; other centres further out have managed to preserve their function as community 'arts' venues with an inviting shabby chic feel, such as La Bellevilloise on the rue Boyer.

Depictions of the area in film (e.g. Jaques Becker's Casque d'or (1952) probably helped to exaggerate the reputation of the area as edgy and violent, particularly after dark.  Today it feels quiet and safe, though this unofficial commemoration of an act of alleged police brutality testifies to currents of socio-political tension.  There are pockets of 'street' counter-culture which this fly-posting reflects.

In any stroll around Paris with an eye for the architecture, always expect the unexpected. Within a hundred metres we can gaze up at a 19th century evocation of flamboyant Gothic, or a giant pile of moderne-styled bricks.  That's how we did public baths in 1930, and now we do it this way:

Two minutes away, we can find ourselves in the quiet cobbled streets of a village enclave (cats, flower pots, mimosa, wisteria) resisting being gobbled up by the mushrooming city appartment blocks.  Around the edge of my circle there are several happy survivals of 'village' Paris, such as the Villa de l'Hermitage, where some cunning writing of covenants restricted building to two storeys and banned all non-residential activity, keeping developers at bay at the cost of constant vigilance.  

In Paris you can be in very different places in a very short time.  Psychogeoraphically, one can be in more than one place at the same time.

At one end of the rue Haxo, for example, we are firmly in bourgeois suburban Paris, playing mental noughts and crosses with our wall of privacy on either side of our 'keep-out' coffered door:

But swing round and our opposite neighbours are hangin' ten in Tahiti

Street configurations often hide the past, which is, as we know, a foreign country. There were boulevards here before Haussmann swung his wrecking ball to build new ones.  Here we are on the boulevard Mortier, on the line of the petite ceinture, where the little steam trains have been replaced by trams.  Trams like wide avenues, and here is one prepared earlier, at the time of the First Empire.  See where the modern houses curve round on the old building line?

This old city-limit ring is psychogeographically detectable, hugging the whole length of the modern Périphérique on the inside.  That would be an interesting stroll ....

Before the recent tramway, there were trains - a circular line (the Chemin de Fer de la Petite Ceinture), which should surely never have been discontinued, chuffed usefully around the entirety of Paris.  Parts of the line were gradually abandoned, others incorporated into the métro and suburban rail network, while other sections remain derelict but extant.  Plans are afoot to re-open some public transport on some sections, with cycle tracks and a 'greenway'.  These people are heading up the plans:  http://www.petiteceinture.org/La-Petite-Ceinture-dans-le-20e.html

There is more to urban strolling than meets the eye, yet what meets the eye has endless fascination.    

 

 

      

   

  

Strictly Coombe Prancing

Here is your starter for 10:  What links the following collection of celebrities?: Dwight D Eisenhower, Jimmy Tarbuck, Saddam Hussein, Rupert Murdoch, John Galsworthy, and Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood?

While you are thinking, I'll explain that this (sub)urban tramp was once again initiated by random selection of a page in the London A-Z.    On page 119,  the haphazard placing of the up-turned wineglass narrowly missed the Berrylands Sewage Works and perfectly delineated the Coombe Estate, Kingston - a small slice of England whose existence had hitherto passed me by.  If you've read a previous derive, you'll know that I describe the circle, then walk it, then describe what I walked. 

To return to our poser, the celebrity list have all lived here on the Coombe Estate at some time - though I've stretched a point with two potentates, Saddam and Rupert, as it was their respective daughters in residence. I'd like to think the dads dropped in for tea, though, before being humbled in very different ways.  (Imagine them swapping humblings).  They could have been joined by Dame Nellie Melba - perhaps she contributed the pudding.

It's raining quite hard and it's unseasonally cold.  In my first hour of rambling past pile after pile of some of England's most expensive domestic real estate, I see literally no-one.  Are they in?  Have the electric gates malfunctioned and are they skeletalised with gin and tonic still in hand?  Are they at one of their other homes somewhere even grander?  Like Grand Cayman or the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg?

As a non-resident, my right to be here depends on whether I am in a car or on foot.  As a foot-slogging psychogeographer I exult in my unimpeded right of way through the hood of the latter-day versions of Galsworthy's Men of Property.  Motorists arriving at one end of the estate (though, curiously, not at the other) will find themselves confronted by Checkpoint Charlie (actually I'm not sure whether he is called Charlie, but the evening duty chap is Bill) to whom you must declare yourself if visiting an inmate.  If your credentials are in order and you trade the right banter, the 'right of using' the road is temporarily conferred on you.  

If you are on foot, the lack of regulation paving-block footpaths is a pleasant omission - you get to walk on trottoirs that are quaintly improvised, country-style, and look almost unofficial.  Judging by the high top-end SUV count, the locals don't have much need for footpaths, but as I stride out alone, I feel like Rupert Bear strolling through Nutwood while all his pals have been confined indoors by their mummies.  These pleasant paths run out, though, as the Council takes over again in the cheaper parts of the 'hood.

Kingston lay on the London to Portsmouth Road in the days of coach-and-horse travel, and the topography of this hill was later handy as the location for one of the Telegraph Stations along the route.  I suspect the locality still has some Telegraph readers to this day.

Your domestic admin is a tough call if you live here - you had better be loaded enough to employ an administrator, because the financial relationship between you,  the Council and your residents' association is fraught with complexity, depending on whether your road is 'scheduled' or 'private'.  You will get used to words like 'private' if you live here.  And to words like 'no' 'unauthorised' 'strictly forbidden' 'no right of way'.  If this wasn't such a nice and pleasant area ('pleasant' is appropriate, as part of it is named 'Mount Pleasant') a great deal of signage could be saved  by having the single legend 'fuck off'.

Golf is the game hereabouts.  One of the courses claims to be 'Surrey's friendliest' and I am sure it is very welcoming indeed to those whose demeanour passes muster with the members.  You have a few hurdles to overcome before the friendliness kicks in, however, and please don't think of dropping your Rupert trousers in the car park.  Oh, and tuck your shirt in, and make sure it has a collar.

As I pass the smart schools in grand houses which the Galsworthys once owned, I reflect that John Galsworthy's mission was to 'satirise the insular, snobbish, and acquisitive attitudes and suffocating moral codes of sections of the upper middle classes' (1) in the hope of shaming them into expurgation.  Was his work in vain?

Jimmy

Jerry (2)

My derives take me across the whole spectrum of advantage and deprivation.  Why is it that the only times I feel uncomfortable and unsafe when walking are when I pass through 'gated' communities, with their warning notices, security guards, and the paraphernalia of electronic security devices?  But on reflection, perhaps the fear of crime is justified by some malevolent genius loci, for this hill was the stamping ground of cut-purse Jerry Abershaw(e), riding out from his boozing base at the Bald Face Stag.  Jerry looks a cheekie chappy, not unlike Jimmy Tarbuck in his prime.  But Jimmy is much more morally upright.

I suspect that old money is cheek-by-jowl with new wealth in this neck of the coombe.  I'm sure some is hard-earned and hard won.  But some, judging by one or two house names, fell from the skies.  I mean names such as 'Poolswinner' 'Jackpot Manor' 'Taxhaven' 'Banker's Bonus' and 'El Gordo'.  Actually, I made these up - I won't use the similar ones I actually saw to protect the innocent, and my arse.

On the south perimeter of my circle, where the the housing is more modest, I have a cheery brief exchange - the only greeting of the day -  with a bloke who is bringing his shopping home from Asda (further up the hill, Ocado fetches it for you).

In the posh areas, neo-Georgian, mock Tudor and New England 'cottage' styles prevail, along with vernacular builds about which the Prince of Wales would be extatic.  

There is an occasional eccentric outbreak of modernism.  Wasn't this house in the Jacques Tati film 'Mon Oncle'?

                           

But the last sections of my derive (I can't do an acute accent in this thing) are largely through the uniform ubiquity of suburban England.

Suburban England

I end up in Norbiton, which I feel is the  locus-nexus of the English tv sitcom. (It's true that the Goods lived in Surbiton, Terry and June were over in Purley, and the aspiring Hancock lusted after the posher end of East Cheam, but somehow Norbiton is all of these as well as itself.  And Norbiton (thinly disguised as a fictional Climthorpe) was the place from which Reggie Perrin commuted to the hq of Sunshine Desserts.  I didn't get where I am today without knowing that.  Was Norbiton the reason why he disappeared into the sea leaving behind, like Stonehouse, a pile of clothes?

Reggie Perrin

'Climthorpe'

Having completed my circle with time on my hands and rain down my neck I enbussed (a term borrowed from Will Self) for Kingston centre-ville hoping to feel the aura of the erstwhile throne of English kings.  The commercial centre of Kingston is more like everywhere else in England than everywhere else is.  I suppose the traces of medieval layout in the bends of the streets save it from being a non-place, but the overwhelming plethora of chain-only shops is such that I got the impression that this was a board game in which all the brand names had been thrown in the air and allowed to implant themselves where they landed.  Two rival independent shops selling artists' materials, and the not-so-ubiquitous Heal's and Bentall's stand out among the dreary predictability of the usual suspects.  I didn't have long ... did I miss anything?  I certainly did miss, through lack of prior homework, one source of unique treasure, the Eadweard Muybridge (weareard Saxon-inspired forename) archive at the Kingston Museum.  Must go back.

(1) Wikipedia
(2) http://www.stand-and-deliver.org.uk/highwaymen/jerry_abershaw.htm