Alexandra Park, crépuscule

I had been cooped all day at the Library. When I got home, against the night, I was restless, walkative. To see a place in the dark. Alas, so few places will be dark in the city, what with all the sodium lampadaires. Nothing is handsome in dun orange, nothing promissory. One has to find a natural darkness to obtain the possibility of promise. This can be achieved even in daylight. I had found it in the blank corridors and walkways in the weekend shadow of Tower 42; in the hard cavern under the Westway as it crosses Wood Lane, the sun overhead making the dark more spectral and unreal, a gasmasked youth spraying a wall—I had not courage enough to take a picture—and also beside Old Billingsgate, under a rickety jetty beneath Water Lane, at low tide, beyond the comfort of tourists, where the shingle gave way to debris, sand, quick and fungal underfoot, and the river lapped insouciantly at my shoes.

But at night, a natural darkness is found only in the city's parks. Someday after midnight, jump a gate at Regent's Park, cross the boating lake, walk out onto the broad grasses to the north, where we played cricket at school, walk until the trees around the lake are black masses far behind, and the trees edging the Zoo are black masses far ahead. There is no comparable space in London, locked alone in the Park, the sky and the earth differentiated only in shade.

I did not have the benefit of Regent's Park within walking distance. So I made for Alexandra Park, only ten minutes from my door—a space dominated by the palace at the top of the hill, but concealing a reasonable variety within its borders. It was not yet twilight. My path is always through the development, the New River Village. This is, of course, not a village. It is not even like a village. It is a series of contemporary apartment blocks in the young professional style: featureless surfaces, glass, lots of white, a few stilts, empty mock-modernist sculpture, awkward angles, sad stretches of grass, plastic windows and balconies in lime green and purple. They've added a gym and a minuscule art gallery, and built a restaurant into the old canal pumphouse, but still the place has no life. The whole very much resembles an architect's drawing, the sort you see on billboards outside construction-sites. There are a lot of these in the city. I am glad to have one here, at the edge of the park, to cleanse the palate. Walk five minutes into the Village, alongside the canal if you like, or on the tricky pavement shingle, and you are no longer in the redbrick Edwardian wastes of North London. You curve around the back of the Village, and find the old council houses of the Campsbourne Estate, and facing them the reservoir, a dilapidated playground, and then, the entrance to the park.


The reservoir, in fact, is one of the park's secret attractions. Along the eastern edge of the slope down from the palace, hidden by trees. There are three openings to it, from the path (above) that leads up to Bedford Road on the hill.


Each of these latent ways leads to a viewpoint onto the reservoir. I stopped at each, methodically. A man was walking his collies, allowing each off the leash in turn, to yap and frolic, each returning, conscientiously, in a few moments, to restraint, as would I, soon enough. I had a decent shot of a giant slug, the light was still enough, just.


When I first came walking here, I was delighted to find these viewpoints furnished, behind the railings, with wooden frames, against which one can rest to look at the reservoir, and luxuriant with quisquilian foliage. I have long felt an affection for reservoirs, as against ponds and lakes, say those of the Heath. Man finds the basic forms of nature and recreates them; in the process those forms are made meaningful. Pyramids and temples gave purpose and meaning to the mountain, houses gave meaning to the cave, canals to the river, and so reservoirs to the lake. The reservoir is not as grand or impressive as the lake, but it is more significant. It refuses to be beautiful or pretty; rather, its beauty springs from the possibility of meaning.

The other great aesthetic appeal of a reservoir is its privacy. As part of the industrial landscape, you can only ever approach a reservoir, observe it through a fence or other barrier. You can never grasp the meaning of the water, and so never exhaust it. In this taste I find a reflex in myself of the ancient love of order, of hierarchy: the devout kept from the tabernacle. Better to have mystery, the awe of the invisible—subterranean, mechanical, hieratic—than to be left with an open society, bright surfaces, transparency. In such a city, nobody could experience a pleasure like this, a sublime profanation.


The new reservoir buildings, above, completed this year, are a great disappointment. The ideal reservoir architecture is castellar, like the Edwardian turrets around Lockwood, or the brute concrete hulk (1955) on Siward's Howe, north of York. These are dismal, plastic barns, with bathetic curving roofs, which might have housed a furniture superstore out on the M1. I remember these structures still as skeletons, incomplete. Then they were terrific. Now they dilute and spoil the oppressive intimacy of the landscape.


The sun finally set for good, 8.46 pm, behind another wall of trees ringing the pitches. Let the trees be dull, let the grass be dull, let the barn and stands be dull. Let us seek an aesthetic equipollence in the twilight. I find this an underrated mood. It is a shame, for the city, all cities, excel particularly in it. I hurry up the hill, approaching the palace from the east, through the rose garden—prim and clipped, as you would expect, so as to balance out the lower slopes. In the gloom I can see the inglory of North London spread out into the distance. 7.8 miles away, One Canada Square, the tallest building in the city, but soon to be usurped from this throne, winks sadly at me, as if in acknowledgement of impending senescence. The bus passes, empty, a lit cell passing up to Muswell Hill, through the unsung park. The dusk allows the palace none of the sham magnificence it enjoys during the day, leaving it shabby, ungainly, not sure what to do with itself, and so melancholy, magnificent. It is not beautiful, not like the other Victorian follies, and this cannot be disguised by pointing a camera cleverly. And so it has the park it deserves; or the park has the palace it deserves. The authenticity is commendable.


Returning to Hornsey, down the western slopes, this was as close as I could come to the cricket fields of Regent's Park. The camera would not serve the scene, but you have the idea. The far lights of Wood Green add and detract in equal measure. It is a fair walk, not cold, and there is food on the table, and work still to be done. I do not count the two hours in my log of strolls; I saw nothing new, but only newly the old. The one is material to be memorised; the other, to be cherished and remembered.