it for eight years, watched London news on television, read the evening papers, ranged extensively through its streets to attend weddings and retirement parties or go on hare-brained quests for bargains in far-flung breakers' yards, and still I find that there are great fragments of it that I have not just never visited but never heard of. It constantly amazes me to read the Evening Standard or chat with an acquaintance and encounter some reference to a district that has managed to elude my ken for twenty-one years. 'We've just bought a little place in Fag End, near Tungsten Heath,' somebody will say and I'll think, I've never even heard of that. How can this possibly be?
I had stuck a London A-Z in my rucksack and came across it now while searching unsuccessfully for half a Mars bar I was sure was in there. Plucking it out, I idly leafed through its busy pages, as ever amazed and quietly excited to find it peppered with districts,1 villages, sometimes small swallowed cities whose names, I would swear, had not been there the last time I looked - Dudden Hill, Plashet, Snaresbrook, Fulwell Cross, Elthorne Heights, Higham Hill, Lessness Heath, Beacontree Heath, Bell Green, Vale of Health. And the thing is, I know that the next time I look there will be other, different names. It is as deep a mystery to me as the lost tablets of Titianca or the continuing appeal to millions of Noel Edmonds.
I have the greatest admiration for the A-Z and the way it scrupulously fixes and identifies every cricket ground and sewage works, every forgotten cemetery and wandering suburban close, and packs the densest names on to the tiniest, obscurest spaces. I flipped to the index and, for want of anything better to do, absorbed myself there. I calculated that there are 45,687 street names in London (give or take), including 21 Gloucester Roads (as well as a generous slew of Gloucester Crescents, Squares, Avenues and Closes), 32 Mayfields, 35 Cavendishes, 66 Orchards, 74 Victorias, 111 Station Roads or similar, 159 Churches, 25 Avenue Roads, 35 The Avenues, and other multiples without number. There are, however, surprisingly few really interesting sounding places. There are a few streets that sound like medical complaints (Glyceina Avenue, Shingles Lane, Burnfoot Avenue), a few that sound like names on an anatomical chart (Thyrapia and Pendula Roads), a few that sound vaguely unsavoury (Cold Blow Lane, Droop Street, Gutter Lane, Dicey Avenue), and a few that are pleasingly ridiculous (Coldbath Square, Glimpsing Green, Hamshades Close, Cactus Walk, Nutter Lane, The Butts), but there is very little that could be called truly arresting. I read once that in Elizabethan times there was a Gropecunt Lane somewhere in the City, but evidently no longer. I spent half an hour amusing myself in this way, pleased to be entering a metropolis of such dazzling and unknowable complexity, and had the bonus pleasure, when I returned the book to the bag, of finding the half-eaten Mars bar, its leading edge covered in a small festival of lint, which didn't do a great deal for the flavour but did add some useful bulk.
Victoria Station was swarming with the usual complement of lost-looking tourists, lurking touts and passed-out drunks. I can't remember the last time I saw anyone at Victoria who looked like he was there to catch a train. On my way out, three separate people enquired whether I had any spare change - 'No, but thank you for asking!' - which wouldn't have happened twenty years ago. Then, not only were panhandlers something of a novelty but they always had a good story about having lost their wallet and desperately needing £2 to get to Maidstone to donate bone marrow to their kid sister or something, but now they just flatly ask for money, which is quicker but less interesting.
I took a cab to Hazlitt's Hotel on Frith Street. I like Hazlitt's because it's intentionally obscure - it doesn't even have a sign out front - which puts you in a rare position of strength with your cab driver. Let me say right now that London cab drivers are, without question, the finest in the world. They're trustworthy, safe, generally friendly, always polite. They keep their vehicles spotless inside and out, and they will put themselves to the most extraordinary inconvenience to drop you at the front entrance of your destination. There are really only two odd things about them. One is that they cannot