East End Review

Tag: Travis Elborough

Atlas of Improbable Places – book review: ‘informative and enthusiastic, scholarly and amusing’

Statuesque: Atlas shoulders the weight of the world at Portmeirion, one of the featured places in the book. Photograph: Travis Elborough

On the outskirts of Mexico City, we’re told, are “the last vestiges of a gigantic and ancient system of canals, terracotta aqueducts and tens of thousands of man-made islands… called chinampas”, one of which has become known as the Island of Dolls.

This “terrifying attraction” was formerly home to a lone hermit, Don Julian Santana Barrera, who one day discovered the body of a young girl drowned in the canal.

The next day, the recluse found a doll washed up on the shore, which he believed must have belonged to the girl, so he attached it to a tree in her memory.

When another doll arrived, the “one-off tribute [turned] into an obsession and before long Don Julian was fishing about in the canal and scouring local rubbish dumps for more dolls to place in trees and to furnish his makeshift abode”.

The loner died in 2001, reputedly drowning in the same part of the canal as the girl, and the place has since grown into a gallery of hanging dolls, with visitors travelling to add to the collection. Oddly, “the life cycles of these anthropomorphic creations” are “alarmingly similar to our own”. It’s a curious and delightfully eerie tale.

Stoke Newington author Travis Elborough’s Atlas of Improbable Places is a collection of short essays describing some of the strangest and most historically-obscure locations across the globe. Split into six sections – Dream Creations, Deserted Destinations, Architectural Oddities, Floating Worlds, Otherworldly Spaces and Subterranean Realms – the peculiarities contained in this somewhat bizarre book are manifold.

Author Travis Elborough

From the aforementioned Isle of Dolls to a squatter metropolis in California, Ireland’s bloody and haunted Leap Hall, and media tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s never-completed mansion, there’s plenty of interest to explore.

Among the highlights is a fascinating account of the formation of a subterranean network of tunnels in the Canadian city of Moose Jaw, where a community of Chinese workers – who arrived to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway – were driven underground as scapegoats when the country slipped into recession.

And then there’s Wrangel Island, on which herds of woolly mammoths thrived while their kin were elsewhere dying out.

Elborough seems particularly intrigued, though, by the geographical remnants of the Soviet Union, and the articles resulting from this are invariably captivating.

He writes of a once closed Soviet city that could now “be taken for a vintage Soviet theme park”; of the Darvaza Crater, or Door to Hell, in Turkmenistan, where a team of Soviet geologists drilling for natural gas in 1971 “blundered and created a deep sinkhole oozing potentially poisonous methane vapours”, which they proceeded to set alight; and then also the acutely symbolic Hill of Crosses in Lithuania.

The release of Atlas of Improbable Places follows Elborough’s excellent A Walk in the Park, and it’s most certainly welcome. It’s informative and enthusiastic, scholarly and amusing. While it might seem tempting to pop this book in the loo and flick through it in short bursts, it’s best read in one or two long stints – not least because once started it’s nigh on impossible to put down.

Atlas of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World’s Most Unusual Corners is published by Aurum Press. ISBN: 978-1781315323. RRP: £20

October 6, 2016
A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution – book review

At leisure: a man cycles in Clissold Park

We all know the benefit of ‘fresh air’, even those of us who spend the majority of our urban lives hunched over computer screens or sprawled across sofas.

This common sense approach to the great outdoors is backed up by recent scientific research showing that exposure to green spaces reduces cardiovascular disease, mental health problems and overall mortality. What most of us don’t know is how our greens came to be what they are today.

Living in the city, you probably inhale most of your fresh air in a park, but in this you are lucky, for it is only relatively recently that urban greenery has been freely available for all to use.

In A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution, Hackney writer Travis Elborough charts the fascinating history of the little pockets of nature that most of us now take for granted.

We discover that the parks have their origins in blood sports, as the forebear of the curated modern green space was the medieval private game park. Virtually all early urban parks – or ‘pleasure gardens’ – were also private places, to which the masses were admitted only on payment of a fee.

Though that fee typically entitled park-goers access to a smorgasbord of lavish amusements and decorations; in 1742 even Mozart performed at one such venue, Ranelagh gardens in Chelsea.

It was only in the Victorian era that the notion of the open access park took hold, with the young princess Victoria herself opening the first free park in Bath in 1830. The latter 19th century was the heyday of the urban park, as the recreational and ‘improvement’ needs of the industrial proletariat began to be recognised.

More parks were built between 1885 and 1914 than during any period before or since, and they benefitted from the period’s Arts-and-Craft style.

With its lake and pagoda, Victoria Park in Tower Hamlets was one of the most lavish of the royal parks laid out in London at that time. And famous 19th century arboretums at Loddiges and Abney Park in contemporary Hackney were widely-emulated models.

The nadir of the modern park was undoubtedly the period stretching from the post-war housing boom of the 1950s to the 1980s, when public places was gobbled up for redevelopment at an alarming rate.

Investment in open space also fell, and by the early 1990s many urban parks were dangerous, decaying relics.

A major 1994 report co-authored by Hackney historian Ken Worpole marked a turnaround in this trend, and parks enjoyed somewhat of a renaissance during the subsequent two decades on the back of National Lottery funding, only to fall victim to the austerity politics of the contemporary era.

With council spending on parks plummeting, land being sold for redevelopment and local authority grass increasingly being leased for paid events, parks are again facing a crisis that has prompted one call for all of London – 47 per cent of which is made up of green space – to be declared a national park.

In some senses this struggle is not new. One of the perennial moral and logistical challenges for park-keepers has been the surveillance of park use: who was to be allowed in, with what attire, and for what purpose.

The size and shape of men’s swimming shorts was a subject of regulation well into the 1930s, and the curtailment of sex in parks has been a losing battle from furtive couplings in Victorian pleasure gardens to wartime frolics in blacked out shrubbery to the hippy orgies of the 1960s.

Together with sex, politics has been one of the most consistent uses to which parks have been put down the centuries. From the 19th century open green space hosted electoral hustings, demonstrations and political gatherings of all sorts.

In 1948, Victoria Park proved a convenient place for Chartist meetings; on the eve of the First World War, Sylvia Pankhurst addressed anti-conscription gatherings there, and Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirts held rallies on the same grass in the 1930s.

Author Travis Elborough

Travis Elborough is known for his deft and quirky explorations of social history, including the Routemaster bus, vinyl records and the British seaside. This volume excels in this particular sub-genre; the prose is generally smooth, and often deliciously witty.

The book is also stuffed with fascinating titbits, such as the fact that Birkenhead Park near Liverpool was the inspiration for the design of New York’s Central Park, or that Alexandra Palace was used as an internment camp during the First World War, or that Victoria Park hosts the UK’s oldest continuous model boat club, dating from 1904.

So next time you wander over to your local park to soak in the summer sun, take along a copy of A Walk in the Park to show you how you got there.

A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution by Travis Elborough is published by Jonathan Cape RRP: £18.99 ISBN: 9780224099820

June 15, 2016
A Traveller’s Year: 365 Days of Travel Writing in Diaries, Journals and Letters – review

Author and historian Travis Elborough

In the dead of winter, the mind has a tendency to venture into warmer climes and imagine the adventures to be had there. But the holidays are over, and most of us face the daily grind through bleak grey days for weeks to come. What better way to escape than a good travel book?

A Traveller’s Year puts at one’s fingertips a cornucopia of travel writing, in small morsels. The book is made up of snippets of travellers’ journals and diaries from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Use of the calendar day as an organising principle means that the book is full of serendipitous incongruities of time and place.

A 1992 account by Max Décharné of a man in an American bar asking for his Guinness to be microwaved is immediately followed by James Boswell’s 1773 tale of his journey to the Isle of Skye with a seasick Samuel Johnson.

George Orwell relates how in 1936 Wigan “nearly everyone seems very badly dressed and youths on corners markedly less smart and rowdy than in London”; in the following entry, Mungo Park recounts that on a 1796 African trip “the king, whose name was Daisy Koorabarri, was not to be distinguished from his subjects by any superiority in point of dress; a bank of earth, about two feet high, upon which was spread a leopard skin, constituted the only mark of royal dignity.”

There are between one and three entries – ranging from half a page to two pages in total – for each day of the year. Those who like their text in small quantities can savour the book for a full twelve months, reading each day’s entries at the relevant point in the calendar.

Yet it is easy to gobble up months at a time, mesmerised by the mish-mash of contemporary concerns about wifi to seventeenth-century tales of travellers dining on beaver tail, bear and camel meat.

The format of the books means one is never bored with tedious accounts of the duller moments, as the editing has been craftily performed by others.

Many of the authors are professional writers, together with painters, explorers, botanists, political leaders and tourists. Most are Anglophone, including Samuel Pepys, Captain James Cook, Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Morris, Charles Dickens, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Alan Bennett and Bruce Chatwin. There is also a smattering of European and Indian writers such as Christopher Columbus, Michel de Montaigne, Simone de Beauvoir and Rajaram I, the Rajah of Kolhapoor.

The locales range from Easter Island (Jacob Roggeveen, 1722) to Brighton (which the Rajah of Bobbili likens to Bangalore) with all the continents in between.

One thing that strikes the modern reader is the arduousness of pre-modern journeys. Before the era of jet travel, voyages were truly exacting and the misery of travel is well documented in this volume. Writing in 1934, Wilfred Thesiger appears to take these dangers in his stride: “I have not seen any horse in Aussa, though I have seen some mules and donkeys. As I was going to bed I killed two tarantulas in my tent. Beastly things.”

The book also pulses with the wonder of foreign lands. Travelling in the US in 1846, Edwin Bryant marvels at the physical attributes of Native Americans: “Many of the women, for regularity of features and symmetry of figure, would bear off the palm of beauty from some of our most celebrated belles.

A portion of the Sioux women are decidedly beautiful.” In 1914 Ernest Shackleton describes Antarctic recreation: “We remained moored to a floe over the following day, the wind not having moderated; indeed it freshened to a gale in the afternoon, and the members of staff and crew took advantage of the pause to enjoy a vigorously contested game of football on the surface of the floe alongside the ship.”

And arriving in the Barbados in 1932, Evelyn Waugh finds welcome refreshment: “Dropped anchor about 7 and went ashore to the Aquatic club to bathe and drink rum swizzles. Returned to ship for breakfast and later went ashore to Bridgetown.”

This hardback volume is handsomely produced and includes a selection of vintage photographs that add considerably to the magic of the writing. Simone de Beauvoir tells of “becoming a different me” in New York, and with this delightful book, we can all share in the transformative powers of travel, a bit at a time.

A Traveller’s Year: 365 Days of Travel Writing in Diaries, Journals and Letters is compiled by Travis Elborough and Nick Rennison and published by Frances Lincoln Ltd. RRP: £25. ISBN: 9780711236080

January 31, 2016
Historian looks into the ‘tamed wildness’ of Victoria Park

Victoria Park Model Boat Club. Photograph: Travis Elborough

“There’s often a lot of condescension about the past. We need to understand that it’s different but also see the similarities,” historian Travis Elborough explains to me over a cup of tea.

The 44-year-old, who lives in Stoke Newington, has a knack for seeing into the soul of the London landscape. His books include a history of the Routemaster bus and the peculiar story of how London Bridge was transported to Arizona after being bought by an American oil tycoon in the 1960s.

These days Elborough’s attentions have turned to parks –Victoria Park specifically – after he was named Chisenhale Gallery Victoria Park Residency artist for 2014–15.

“I’m interested in the civic and the municipal and that 19th century transformation of our urban spaces that you have in places like Victoria Park,” Elborough says.

Victoria Park is the oldest purpose built park in London and the only royal park not located in the western part of the city. It opened in 1845, as a response to the outbreaks of cholera and typhoid in the densely populated East End that were fast spreading to the affluent West End.

How Victoria Park came about, to keep the “poor and bedraggled” of East London away from the wide streets and squares of the West End, is well documented. What Elborough intends to highlight is more how people interact with urban spaces, and how the parks’ functions change alongside society.

“It sits opposite the Olympic Park, and the Games were an attempt to improve an area through sport and regenerate it. There are parallels between that and the development of Victoria Park as well, not via sport but via housing,” he says.

Elborough tells me about James Pennethorne, who designed Victoria Park. Pennethorne had worked with John Nash on Regent’s Park, a notable feature of which is the surrounding luxury housing.

“There is an attempt to repeat that at first in Victoria Park. The original plan was to have quite grand park-side mansions and crescents, but there just wasn’t the interest because the East End still had quite a negative vibe to it, and the canal that passes on one side was a working canal.”

Before this, part of the land that formed the park was called Bonner’s Fields, named after a Bishop of London who was an ‘enthusiastic burner of heretics’ during Queen Mary I’s reign. Another bit of it was nicknamed Botany Bay, as it was where convicted criminals hid to avoid being transported to Australia.

The book Elborough is currently writing features parks in Paris, New York and Germany. Its main focus, however, is Britain.

“In Britain, parks take on a particular characteristic which is different from other civic spaces. It’s partly because of Britain becoming the first fully industrialised nation so they become almost the fallowed field of the former agrarian society,” he says.

In the 18th century, the space on which Victoria Park is built was used for grazing animals and rough and ready sports, gambling and prize-fighting. When the park opened, however, it became a genteel space with a lake and railings around the paths, in keeping with the Victoria idea of the promenade.

Members of Victoria Park Model Boat club. Photograph: Travis Elborough

“Parks are both tamed wildness and are used to tame wildness,” says Elborough, whose research looks at how the evolution of team games such as crochet and tennis subverted the tamed nature of Pennethorne’s initial design.

Then there’s the political meetings and demonstrations that have occurred in Victoria Park: a major rally by the Chartists, a political speech by William Morris and one of the great Suffragette rallies on May Day in 1913.

“It’s a public space but it’s one which is controlled because there are rules about how you can behave. But then we subvert those rules, so there’s always that tension.”

As part of the Victoria Park residency, Elborough is hosting Games for May, a series of public events in which Elborough invites specialists and park users to consider how the physical landscape of the park has been formed through social ritual and technological invention.

This will include a workshop with Norman Lara from the Victoria Park Model Boating Club on 24 May, followed by a model boat regatta. Chisenhale Gallery has also commissioned Elborough to write a series of short texts to be published on the gallery’s website.

chisenhale.org.uk

May 15, 2015
How We Used to Live: a love letter to London

Hackney-based author Travis Elborough, author of How We Used to Live

How We Used To Live, which screened at last year’s London Film Festival and looks set to run on limited release this spring, is a love letter to a London that no longer exists, to that peculiar era after the Second World War when empire was dismantled yet Britain, and its capital city in particular, inspired a global cultural revolution.

Hackney-based writer Travis Elborough was one of a team of four who crafted the picture, along with members of pop group Saint Etienne Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, and the director Paul Kelly.

“As someone who usually writes books alone, I found it all enormously enjoyable and creatively quite liberating,” reflects Elborough.

The film is a story of the city told through footage collected from the BFI National Archive, with music from Saint Etienne and melancholic musings from Ian McShane’s narrator.

Setting the scene of the film, Elborough addresses its titular conceit: “The London of How We Used to Live is a London of landlines, vinyl records and cassettes, newspapers and news bulletins, its working days more readily defined, if not nine to five then something closer to it, its public transport still in public hands, ditto its utilities and much of its housing.”

But for all that the film is a celebration of yesteryear, How We Used To Live does not resort to ‘good old days’ sentimentality. “We can and probably do all worry that too much of the old stuff is getting lost, but equally the place would ossify if nothing ever changed,” Elborough says.

The film drifts back and forth in time and has a hypnotic, dream-like quality. This is best illustrated in a sequence where a curly-haired skateboarder glides down Tower Bridge, just barely avoiding pedestrians, while the music swells.

“That scene is just one of those absolute gems that you unearth when producing a film like this,” enthuses Elborough.

The narrative, spoken in McShane’s distinctive tone, amplifies this sense of London as a dream but is firmly rooted in reality. “The narrator is intended to be the kind of voice of memory, so we have things like defunct telephone dialling codes, the shipping forecast, and we have snippets of nursery rhymes, the names of roundabouts and road junctions, and quizzical remarks and questions, as well as thoughts about the city and London.”

An atmospheric documentary without coherent narrative is always going to be tough to sell to audiences, so how would Elborough pitch it? “How We Used to Live is The Spirit of ’45 for fans of Kent 45s – the classic northern soul label whose releases were cherished by mods back in the day,” he says. And if you understand that reference then this film was most certainly made for you.

See How We Used to Live at Curzon Soho on 16 April.

April 11, 2014