Tonight:
5°c
The rain was pouring, the wind outrageous as I pitched up to William Blake House on Sunday. The Irish Blakean and psychogeographer Niall McDevitt and poet-dandy Jeremy Reed were performing the spring edition of On Blake's Steps, a homage to the great visionary poet, who was born here in Soho's Marshall Street. In this weather, that took some devotion.
You need to look hard for worthwhile literary events in London. The Hay Festival in Wales, which has just announced as fascinating a line-up as ever, is the one to beat. Here we must content ourselves with the month-long Word Festival (www.londonwordfestival. com) under way in east London, which offers such quirks as a "live printing press".
The way to bring the printed word alive is not, generally, by chucking gimmicks at it but by taking it out on to the streets where it was forged - and even the least promising London lane is a theatre of history if you just look at it in the right way.
The house that bears Blake's name is a monstrosity of an apartment block, built in 1968 and giving on to a very forbidding wall - which makes for an excellent acoustic for intoning poetry, according to Jeremy. But as the start-time neared, though it stopped raining - "Blake has obviously pulled that one with God," noted Niall - it was still deemed prudent to escape the cold.
So the party of poets repaired to the King's Arms on Poland Street, and as we walked, Niall evoked the mud, the sewage and outdoor cooking here in Blake's day. "Look - that's where Percy Shelley sought refuge when he was kicked out of Oxford," he said, pointing to a vast mural facing a branch of Yo! Sushi. Somehow I'd never noticed it before.
Turns out the King's Arms is a gay pub a few doors down from where Blake wrote his great work Songs of Innocence in what is now a hairdresser's. He most likely popped here for pie and porter between bouts of inspiration and may have bumped into the order of Druids, who reconvened here in 1781. No doubt the Druids would have appreciated the paganism of the rainbow flag outside nowadays - and, who knows, perhaps some of the graffiti in the loo, too.
We gathered upstairs, where songs were sung, poems intoned and the spirit of Blake evoked above a pool table, while bemused locals stumbled in and out. I emerged blinking in the daylight a little transformed.
Most Sundays, "as a matter of religious observance", Niall leads a William Blake walk starting from Nails Inc in South Molton Street where Blake lived for most of his life. Whether you dig poetry or not, I would recommend it if you want to refresh your impressions of London. You may not see heaven in a wild flower, but a ghost in a nail parlour? That has to be a start.
RICHARD WATCHED
Watchmen at the IMAX
Amazed at how the look of the graphic novel has been brought to screen, but the apocalyptic feel of the book is missing. Why do so many directors confuse "dark" with "violent"?
Reader views (1)
A Ghost in a nail parlour? Wow. Beautiful
- Tibby, London, 10/03/2009 11:38
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