Original subtitles

NARRATOR: It is a journey to the end of the world.

It is seven years since I last saw Robinson...

on the day I left England when he saw me off at the quayside.

I have heard from him from time to time during my travels...

but now he's written that he urgently wishes to see me...

that he is on the verge of a breakthrough in his investigations...

and that I should come as soon as possible before it is too late.

[Slow orchestral instrumental music]

NARRATOR: Dirty Old Blighty...

and the educated, economically backward, bizarre.

A catalogue of modern miseries...

with its fake traditions, its Irish war...

its militarism and secrecy, its silly old judges...

its hatred of intellectuals, its ill-health and bad food...

its sexual repression, its hypocrisy and racism...

and its indolence.

It's so exotic. It's so homemade.

[Slow orchestral instrumental music continues]

NARRATOR: I have arrived as a ship's photographer on a cruise ship...

in which the berths cost ?4000 a week.

Robinson lives in the way that people were said to live in the cities of the Soviet Union.

His income is small, but he saves most of it.

He isn't poor because he lacks money...

but because everything he wants is unobtainable.

He lives on what he earns in one or two days a week teaching...

in the school of fine art and architecture of the University of Barking.

Like many autodidacts, he is prone to misconceptions about his subjects.

But as there is no one at the university to oversee him...

his position is relatively secure.

Robinson reads Montaigne.

"It is good to be born in depraved times...

"for by comparison with others, you are reckoned virtuous at little cost."

It is now generally agreed that Montaigne lived for a time in London...

in a house in Wardour Street...

the first of a number of French writers who found themselves exiled here.

NARRATOR: Robinson studies the work of this group.

Mallarme who lived nearby. Rimbaud and Verlaine...

Marcel Schwob, the translator of Defoe, De Quincey, and Robert Louis Stevenson...

and Baudelaire, who translated Edgar Allan Poe.

Baudelaire never actually set foot in England...

but his mother was born in London and spoke English as a child.

Apart from his academic work...

Robinson hardly ever leaves the flat except to go to the supermarket.

When he used to visit friends abroad, his social life was transformed.

He became an enthusiastic flaneur...

astonishing his hosts with his stamina and generosity.

But for several years, he has not left the country...

as he wrestles with what he calls, "the problem of London".

For him, shopping is an experience of overwhelming poignancy...

as the labels on imported goods evoke such longing...

for the journeys abroad that he no longer feels able to make.

[Pleasant instrumental music]

Robinson and I lived together for many years...

during which we intermittently maintained...

an uneasy bickering, sexual relationship.

Robinson is a supporter of constitutional reform.

On January 30, we took the bus to Whitehall.

It is the 343rd anniversary of the execution of King Charles I...

by the revolutionary government of 1649.

Every year, groups of Anglo-Catholics and other ultra-monarchists...

lay wreathes at his statue, before holding a ceremony at the banqueting house...

where the king was beheaded on a scaffold set up outside one of the windows.

"The failure of the English revolution," said Robinson, "is all around us...

"in the Westminster constitution, in Ireland...

"and poisoning English attitudes to Europe."

The Wreathe remained hanging on the statue's plinth for several weeks...

during which I gradually renewed my familiarity with the city.

Everywhere we went, there was an atmosphere of conspiracy and intrigue.

NARRATOR: Robinson lives in Vauxhall...

a district famous for its associations with Sherlock Holmes.

He listens to the gateposts at the entrance to the park.

[Children screaming excitedly]

[Siren wailing]

Robinson is worried about the future of the park, about the buses...

the 2B from Baker Street in Victoria...

and the 88 from Oxford Circus in Westminster...

and about the library, all of which will be under threat...

if the government does not lose the election.

Robinson explained to me the nature of his project...

and took me to some of the sites he was studying.

NARRATOR: "Romanticism," wrote Baudelaire...

"is precisely situated neither in choice of subjects...

"nor in exact truth, but in a mode of feeling."

For Robinson, the essence of a romantic life...

is in the ability to get outside one's self...

to see one's self as if from outside...

to see one's self as it were in a romance.

He was searching for the location of a memory...

a vivid recollection of a street of small factories backing on to a canal...

but they no longer exist.

And he has adopted the neighbourhood as a site for exercises...

in psychic landscaping, drifting, and free association.

He seemed to be attempting to travel through time.

I had the idea that he had sent for me...

to be the witness and chronicler of these explorations...

in what he thought might be the last months of his life.

NARRATOR: Robinson is not a conservationist...

but he misses the smell of cigarette ash and urine that used to linger...

in the neo-Georgian phone boxes that appear on London postcards.

He is preparing his own series of postcards of contemporary London.

We visited Lincoln's Inn Fields and he asked some of the residents to pose for him.

I was shocked at the increase in the numbers of people sleeping out...

in the seven years I had been away...

but Robinson seems quite accustomed to it.

He rarely gives anyone money, at least not when I'm with him.

He took me to the War Museum, formerly Bedlam...

the Bethlehem Royal Hospital for the Caribbean saint.

He told me that many of the homeless who sleep out in Central London...

are ex-service men and women, or former psychiatric patients.

London, he says, is a city under siege from a suburban government...

which uses homelessness, pollution, crime...

and the most expensive and rundown public transport system...

of any metropolitan city in Europe as weapons...

against Londoners' lingering desire for the freedoms of city life.

[Melancholic instrumental music]

NARRATOR: Across the road from Robinson's flat...

in what used to be a video shop, a driving school has opened...

run and mostly patronised by Portuguese people...

who have settled in the district increasingly in the past few years.

Robinson has decided we should get out more.

He had thought that he might learn to drive...

but now he says it would be better if we walk.

[Melancholic instrumental music continues]

NARRATOR: He has asked me to accompany him on a series of journeys...

each one prompted by an aspect of his project.

The first is to be a pilgrimage to the sources of English romanticism.

On March 10, we set out for Strawberry Hill, the house of Horace Walpole...

but were distracted by events on Wandsworth Common.

The bomb had gone off at 7:10 that morning.

We'd heard the bang, but had not realized what it was.

It was two days after the 19th anniversary...

of the bombs of the Old Bailey in 1973...

the first IRA attack on London.

Again, having been away for such a long time...

I found it strange how quickly these events are forgotten by the general public.

When I asked him, Robinson could remember the mortar attack...

on Downing Street in February the year before...

but not the eight or so devices since.

He seemed to have become conditioned to the idea...

that what was happening in Ireland did not have much to do with him.

March 10 was Budget Day.

In the afternoon, the chancellor of the exchequer produced a tax cut...

smaller than expected...

to complement the newspaper stories about the opposition's spending plans.

On the following day, the election date was finally announced.

With the city unimpressed by the budget...

?10 billion were wiped off share values on the London Stock Exchange.

On March 12, we set off again, crossing Clapham Common in the rush hour.

[Melancholic instrumental music continues]

NARRATOR: Robinson took out his guide book.

At Strawberry Hill in 1765...

Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto...

the novel that established the genre of English Gothic fiction.

The house is not far from Teddington Lock, the limit of the tidal river...

and with it, the jurisdiction of the Port of London Authority.

"Twickenham," said Robinson, "is the site of the first attempts...

"to transform the world by looking at the landscape."

In Radnor Gardens, we met two musicians from Peru...

and had the idea that we should stay the night there...

and walk with them to Brentford in the morning.

When we awoke, it was spring.

[Lively instrumental music]

[Birds chirping]

NARRATOR: He told me that Turner used to walk along the river here...

and showed me Joshua Reynolds' house on Richmond Hill...

with its view along the valley.

[Lively music]

NARRATOR: We left river at Isleworth to detour around Syon Park...

fearing violence from the owner's lackeys...

and found ourselves on the Old Court Road to Bristol...

a notorious haunt of highwaymen.

We had assumed that we could stay the night in a coaching inn...

but the landlord swore at us and said he had better ways of making a living.

So we carried on to Kew.

[Lively music continues]

NARRATOR: The next day, Robinson had to go to work at Barking, and I was left alone.

I spent the morning reading, then drifted on to Mortlake...

where he joined me in the evening.

We lay down by the water's edge and fell asleep.

In the nostalgias of the electronic age...

hunter-gatherer economists supported affluent egalitarian societies...

saturated with understanding of inner experience and proficient in art.

Even in the Kalahari Desert...

the working week seldom exceeded 20 hours...

and half the population was skilled in healing, rainmaking, or hunting magic...

by means of visions and out-of-body travel...

in ceremonies of music, dance, and trance.

The next morning, we walked to Hammersmith...

and rested outside the house of William Morris.

We remembered what we used to think of as the future:

Sophisticated engineering, low consumption...

renewable energy, public transport.

But just now, London is all waste without a future...

its public spaces either void...

or the stage sets for spectacles of 19th century reaction...

endlessly re-enacted for television.

"Most of the traffic on river now," said Robinson...

"is rubbish on its way to landfill sites in Essex."

Half a million tonnes a year from the depots of Battersea and Wandsworth Bridge.

"Sometimes," he said, "at Battersea Reach...

"where trains that carry spent uranium cross the river at night...

"sometimes I see the whole city as a monument to Rimbaud."

Crystal-grey skies, a strange pattern of bridges...

these straight, those arched...

others descending, or slanting at angles to the first...

and these figures recurring in the other lighted circuits of the canal...

but all so long and light...

that the banks loaded with domes sink and diminish.

A few of these bridges are still encumbered with hovels.

Others support poles, signals, frail parapets.

Minor chords cross each other and slip away.

Ropes rise up the banks.

One distinguishes a red jacket, perhaps other costumes...

and musical instruments.

Are these popular tunes?

Fragments of manorial concerts?

Remnants of public hymns?

The water is grey, and blue...

wide as an arm of the sea.

A white ray falling from the height of the sky destroys this comedy.

Robinson believed that if he looked at it hard enough...

he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him...

the molecular basis of historical events.

And in this way, he hoped to see into the future.

[Slow instrumental music]

NARRATOR: In the TV news on the evening of March 31...

three opinion polls gave Labour a conclusive lead.

[Slow instrumental music continues]

NARRATOR: He had put aside ?630...

the price of a night in the suite of the Savoy...

where Monet had lived and worked for several months...

when he painted his series of views of the Thames.

[Lively organ music]

On April 6, he took me to see the Magnolias of St. Mary le Strand.

We spent the night at the Savoy, and the next morning...

Iooked out of Monet's window.

On one side, Westminster, on the other, County Hall...

the former seat of London's city government...

soon to be sold to a Japanese hotel consortium...

and St. Thomas' Hospital, under threat of closure or amalgamation.

On the South Bank, the whole district was threatened with commercial reconstruction.

In the last year before the election, London had become a political issue.

As far as the Tories were concerned...

London's self-government should be restricted...

to a number of inimical local bodies as it was in the 19th century...

while the real power in the capital was carved out between themselves...

and their friends in the City.

[Church bells tolling]

NARRATOR: It was the evening before polling day.

Robinson voted at the school in South Lambeth Road.

As a seaman, I had a postal vote which was registered in Westminster.

I expected the government would be narrowly defeated...

but Robinson did not trust the opinion polls...

which were, in any case, showing a last minute drift away from Labour.

Robinson told me about his dream.

He had fallen asleep on a Number 14 bus and woken up at the terminus...

opposite the Green Man on Putney Heath...

a place I knew only from its description...

in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

There were a number of men hanging about, mostly van drivers waiting for radio calls.

[Slow instrumental music]

NARRATOR: As soon as he got off the bus, he was gripped by a ghastly premonition.

In the bar, where he had tried to calm himself...

a grinning stranger told him that in the 18th century...

the Green Man stood opposite a gibbet.

He woke up trembling with fear and foreboding...

and could not sleep for the rest of the night.

In the evening, we passed the library in Charing Cross Road...

which was the polling station for the ward in which my vote was registered.

The city council had evidently not overlooked its opportunities...

to influence the choice of the voters.

Although here, too, the seat was unlikely to change hands.

At 4:00 a.m., we stood on the edge of the crowd in Smith Square.

It seemed there was no longer anything a Conservative government could do...

to cause it to be voted out of office.

We were living in a one-party state.

It is difficult to recall the shock with which we realised our alienation...

from the events that were taking place in front of us.

Robinson's first reaction was one of spleen.

"There were," he said, "no mitigating circumstances."

The press, the voting system, the impropriety of Tory party funding...

none of these could explain away the fact that the middle class in England...

had continued to vote Conservative because in their miserable hearts...

they still believed that it was in their interests to do so.

Robinson began to consider what the result would mean for him.

His flat would continue to deteriorate, and its rent increase.

He would be intimidated by vandalism and petty crime.

The bus service would get worse.

There would be more traffic and noise pollution...

and an increased risk of getting knocked down crossing the road.

There would be more drunks pissing in the street when he looked out of the window...

and more children taking drugs on the stairs when he came home at night.

His job would be at risk and subjected to interference.

His income would decrease.

He would drink more and less well.

He would be ill more often. He would die sooner.

For the old, or anyone with children, it would be much worse.

For London as a whole, there would now be no new elected metropolitan authority.

The public transport system would degenerate into chaos...

as it was deregulated and privatised.

There would be more road schemes. Hospitals would close.

As the social security system was dismantled...

there would be increased homelessness and crime...

with the police more often carrying guns.

The population would continue to decline as those who could, moved away...

and employers followed.

As Robinson went to work along the road that leads to Basildon...

he passed the print works of the Financial Times...

which had given its editorial support to Labour in the last days of the campaign.

[Alarm ringing]

NARRATOR: The bomb had gone off at 9:30 the previous evening.

Three people were killed and 91 injured.

It was the first of two explosions that night.

There was another at Staples Corner on the North Circular Road...

and it was positioned to spectacular effect...

shattering windows up to half a mile away.

Its target was London's insurance market.

As we waited with a group of journalists...

the police brought a man out through the cordon...

and he began to harangue us with conspiracy theories of all kinds.

Robinson immediately recognised this individual as a man after his own heart.

He was a man of the crowd.

After several hours, we were escorted to the scene of the explosion.

By Monday, the cordoned area had been so reduced...

that the public were able to come up to the end of Lime Street.

Most of the buildings in the vicinity were empty...

or still being examined by structural engineers.

Lloyds itself was hardly damaged.

On 14th, we visited the wreckage of the B&Q at Staples Corner.

Robinson remembered that he had once gone there to buy some bookshelves.

At the end of the morning, we went to Brent Cross to have lunch.

"If I were a poet" said Robinson, "this is the place I would come to, to write.

"I feel instantly at home here."

We caught sight of a small intense man sitting near the fountain...

reading from a book by Walter Benjamin.

Robinson embraced this man and they talked for a long time.

But when he tried to call him later...

he found that the number was a public telephone in a street in Cricklewood...

and we never saw the man again.

[Crows cawing]

NARRATOR: At the other entrance to the park...

the gateposts had stopped talking since the election.

Robinson is a materialist, his vision of the universe, that of Lucretius.

He brooded for weeks over the election result, unable to reconcile...

the re-election of the government with his understanding of nature.

[Birds chirping]

NARRATOR: One day at the beginning of May...

we found ourselves in Leicester Square.

Leicester Square is a place of particular importance to Robinson.

He has imaginatively reconstructed it as a monument to Laurence Sterne...

who visited London in 1760...

following the first success of Tristram Shandy...

and was introduced to many leading figures of the day.

Robinson credits Sterne with the discovery of the cinema...

in his description of duration as the succession of ideas...

which follow and succeed each other in our minds...

like the images on the inside of a lanthorn...

turned round by the heat of a candle.

He was introduced to Joshua Reynolds...

who lived in the square at Number 47 and Reynolds painted his portrait.

Hogarth, who lived at Number 30 gave him illustrations...

for the frontispiece of his second edition...

and for his next two volumes which were published the following year.

In his enthusiasm for crowds and public places...

Robinson is a modernist.

Since our meeting with the writer at Brent Cross...

whenever he's occupied with his literary researches...

he takes the bus to Brixton market...

where he works in a cafe in one of the arcades.

He's trying to establish a connection...

between the Russian formalists of the revolutionary period...

with their interests in Sterne and Tristram Shandy...

and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire who visited Brixton in 1901.

He loves the modernity of Brixton.

Electric Avenue, the Bon Marche...

the railways crossing over Atlantic Road.

He'd tell me about the passengers of the SS Empire Windrush.

The first post-war immigrants recruited from Jamaica...

who were housed in the deep shelters under Clapham Common when they first arrived.

I was beginning to understand Robinson's method...

which seemed to be based on a belief that English culture...

had been irretrievably diverted by the English reaction to the French Revolution.

His interest in Sterne and other English writers of the 18th century...

and in the French poets who followed Baudelaire...

was an attempt to rebuild the city in which he found himself...

as if the 19th century had never happened.

Of course he's bound to fail.

In 1800, London's population was 850,000.

By 1900, it had grown to six-and-a-half million...

the largest city ever known.

In the middle of May, it was officially acknowledged...

that the secret services existed.

And responsibility for anti-terrorist operations...

was transferred from the Special Branch to Ml5.

From its new headquarters on Millbank, a tunnel was being built...

beneath the river to that of Ml6 at Vauxhall.

The cost of which had by then risen to ?240 million...

equivalent to that of eight new general hospitals.

It seemed that every day, we were faced with some new reminder...

of the absurdity of our circumstances.

Sunday, May 31 was the 50th anniversary...

of the allied bombing raid on Cologne in 1942.

It was also the birthday of the late Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris...

leader of Bomber Command in World War II...

the instigator of the saturation bombing of civilian populations in Germany.

Ignoring protests, including a plea from the mayor of Cologne...

the Bomber Command Association assisted by the Ministry of Defence...

has gone ahead with its plans for the statue's unveiling.

The Queen Mother was to arrive at 12:00.

Robinson remembered her in Humphrey Jennings' film...

sitting next to Kenneth Clark, the art historian...

at a concert by Dame Myra Hess at the National Gallery in 1941.

As she was speaking, a group of people began shouting...

"Murderer, mass murderer!"

She hesitated while police suppressed the demonstrators, then carried on.

Robinson said afterwards that throughout the event...

he found it impossible to stop thinking about his father.

But I have never met his father, so I didn't know what he meant.

On May 28th, the Canary Wharf Development...

on the Isle of Dogs had been taken into administration.

Robinson had up to now avoided this project.

But with its failure, he decided to adopt it...

as a monument to Rimbaud in memory of his wanderings in the London docks.

On June 4th, we passed through Leicester Square again...

and found it being officially reopened by the Queen...

who was to switch on a new electricity substation which had been built beneath it.

We heard that earlier, someone in the crowd had shouted:

"Pay your taxes, you scum"...

but there were no other incidents.

The next day, we set out on our second expedition.

Wilhelm Kostrowitzky...

a young man who later became the poet Guillaume Apollinaire...

visited London in 1901.

He had met an English governess, Annie Playden...

while working as a tutor in Germany.

When she returned to her family's home in Clapham North...

he followed, hoping to persuade her to marry him.

The name of Landor was familiar to Apollinaire...

from the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

And conjured up an image of idyllic domesticity.

Annie rejected him and emigrated to America...

leaving strict instructions that he was never to be told where she had gone.

Robinson was following up a rumour...

that Conan Doyle had once lived in the neighbourhood.

But he was unable to contact anyone who could help him.

At Stockwell, he took me to the bus garage.

I asked him where we were going and he said he would like to walk...

to London Bridge and through the city to Stoke Newington...

to find the school where Edgar Allan Poe had been a pupil.

The next morning we set off again.

It was hot and at lunch time, we stopped to rest...

outside the derelict hospital near the Oval Station.

Robinson tires easily.

He thinks there's something the matter with his liver.

Opposite St. Mark's Church, one of four built...

to commemorate the victory at Waterloo...

he showed me railings made of stretchers used in air raid shelters.

He told me how much he admired the design of the Routemaster buses...

which he said was based on techniques of aircraft construction...

developed during World War II.

And about Douglas Scott, their designer who taught at the Central School of Art.

He told me about the London County Council...

London's first Metropolitan authority...

which built thousands of flats all over London...

in the years between the two world wars.

Near the Elephant and Castle...

we met a couple who'd lived in a pre-fabricated temporary house...

since it was installed in 1965.

These buildings stood next to a hotel...

where groups of visiting school children often stayed.

It had originally been a hostel for homeless men.

One of many that had been converted into hotels...

in the days when hotel building in London attracted government subsidy.

Now it was rumoured to be in financial difficulties.

After 27 years in the house where they had brought up all their children...

they were reluctant to leave...

and had been offered nothing with comparable amenities.

But as their neighbours disappeared one by one...

the house was increasingly vulnerable.

And they no longer felt able to leave it for more than a couple of days.

The next morning, Robinson rested...

and I had been offered a ticket for the ceremony of Trooping the Colour.

Robinson was dismissive of my interests...

but I thought it unlikely that I would ever have the chance to see it again.

The custom of Trooping the Colour in honour of the sovereign's birthday...

was initiated in 1805.

The colours are those of the household regiments of Horse and Foot Guards...

the oldest of which were formed to accompany Charles II...

into exile in Flanders.

I was amazed at the contrast between the precision and splendour of the display...

and the squalor of the surrounding city and its suburbs.

I had read that the Bearskin cap...

was still worn in combat in the battles of the Crimean War.

Based on the caps of French grenadiers captured in 1762...

the bear skin has been worn by guardsmen since Waterloo...

the victory that restored reactionary governments throughout Europe.

Real fur is still used...

though there have been experiments with nylon.

This year there was a good deal of interest in the arrival of the Princess of Wales...

following the revelations about her private life.

I was lucky to have been offered a ticket for attendances by invitation only.

But my employment on the cruise ship...

had led to some unexpected introductions.

It was certainly an impressive display...

and the audience was appreciative despite the presence...

of large numbers of security personnel.

Two more bombs had gone off in the previous week.

I thought it odd how Londoners hardly seemed to notice...

the monarchy and its military trappings...

as I was constantly inconvenienced...

by their occupation of such large areas in the centre of the city.

In the afternoon, we resumed our journey at the elephantine castle...

from which buses leave for all parts of South London.

Robinson was an expert in the history of the Elephant and Castle.

He knew about all the buildings and their architects...

and the bureaucracy that had undermined their good intentions.

He was nostalgic for the period and would hear nothing said against it.

He told me that the Elephant did not really get its name...

from the Infanta of Castille who'd been engaged to Charles I...

but that the association always brought to mind the King's public execution.

He showed me Goldfinger's Alexander Fleming house...

nearly saved from demolition.

The next day was Sunday.

On Monday, we arrived at London Bridge Station in the evening rush hour.

[Soft instrumental music]

NARRATOR: London is a colonial city.

There was nothing here before the Romans came.

At 9:00 on Tuesday morning, we climbed up from the river bank...

and stood at the north end of London Bridge.

I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen...

of a metropolis considered modern...

because all known taste has been evaded in the furnishings...

and the exterior of the houses...

as well as in the layout of the city.

Here, you would fail to detect the least trace of any monument of superstition.

Morals and language are reduced to their simplest expression, at last.

These millions of people who do not even need to know each other...

manage their education, business, and old age so identically...

that the course of their lives must be several times less long...

than that which mad statistics calculate for the peoples of the continent.

The boundaries of the Roman city with its walls and gates...

are approximately those of the present day City of London.

The City which has become almost exclusively...

the preserve of international finance.

The City's residential population is about 6,000.

But 300,00 commute to work there daily.

Some over extremely long distances.

Its councillors are elected by both business and residential voters.

And it has its own police force, separate from the metropolitan police.

In the wall of the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation in Cannon Street...

is encased the last remaining fragment of the London Stone.

This, said Robinson, is the airborne vessel...

on which the magician Bladud flew to London, where he crashed on Ludgate Hill.

The last stone of a circle which stood on the site of St. Paul's.

I said I thought it was a Roman milestone, but he ignored me.

This is the stone that Jack Kade...

the Kentish rebel struck with his staff when he took possession of the city.

Robinson could not strike the stone, but he was inspired by it...

and declared Cannon Street to be a sacred site...

and the Number 15 a sacred bus route.

[Slow instrumental music]

[Slow instrumental music heightens]

NARRATOR: At lunch time, it began to rain.

[Thunder rumbling]

NARRATOR: In the city, the slump had exposed the weaknesses of its institutions...

Lloyds in particular...

where many names, including 47 Conservative MPs...

were facing either bankruptcy or heavy losses.

On top of which the City bomb had left the insurance market...

with ?800 million worth of damage.

But it was difficult to distinguish from the building sites...

which had been so numerous just a few years before.

The eastward expansion of the city's territories...

seemed to have stalled, if only temporarily...

at Spitalfields on the east side of Bishopsgate...

where two worlds co-existed awkwardly.

Robinson told me that there were 40 million square feet...

of empty office space in London, 16 million in the City.

On the other side of Bishopsgate at Broadgate...

a fear of redundancy was in the air.

It was beginning to look as if the City of London...

might start to lose its international position once the slump was over.

Beneath us, the evening rush hour was beginning.

We waited, watching people getting on the trains.

The next day, we left the city and found ourselves in Arnold Circus...

the centre of the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch.

This was the first housing development...

undertaken by the London County Council in 1897.

In Robinson's nostalgia...

it was a fragment of a golden age, a utopia...

and he contemplated it for hours.

By the time we returned to our route in Kingsland Road...

it was the middle of the afternoon and we went no further that day.

In the morning, we started at the Geffrye Museum...

where we visited the cabinet of curiosities of John Evelyn...

the 17th century diarist.

Robinson sees himself as an amateur of similar significance...

and hopes that his work, though not unprecedented...

will be as influential.

By midday, we'd reached Ridley Road...

and were nearing our destination in Stoke Newington.

As we wandered through the market, he became much happier and relaxed...

and began to talk more positively about London's future.

I was not convinced by this.

London has always struck me as a city full of interesting people...

most of whom, like Robinson, would prefer to be elsewhere.

That afternoon, when we looked for the place where Poe had gone to school...

we could find no trace of it, but opposite, just across the road...

was the house in which Daniel Defoe had written Robinson Crusoe.

Robinson was devastated by this discovery.

He had gone looking for the man of the crowd...

and found instead, shipwreck...

and the vision of Protestant isolation.

For weeks, he read long into the night...

until towards the end of August, he began to venture out again...

with the fresh eyes of the convalescent.

At first, he went only to the library to consult the encyclopaedias.

He told me about the Metropolitan Police.

In all the years he'd lived in South London, he said...

he'd hardly ever seen them stop a motorist who was white.

Then we went to the Oval to look at the cricket.

[Spectators clapping]

[Siren wailing in the distance]

NARRATOR: By the end of the month, he was ready for the carnival.

He asked me if I found it strange...

that the largest street festival in Europe should take place in London...

the most unsociable and reactionary of cities.

I said that I didn't find it strange at all...

for only in the most unsociable of cities would there be a space for it.

And in any case, for many people, London was not at all unsociable.

[Lively Oriental instrumental music playing]

NARRATOR: I told him that the great Bartholomew Fair...

used to take place at the same time at the end of August.

It was held for centuries at Smithfield until banned in 1855...

as an offence to pubic dignity and morals.

The next day, we went for a walk in the West End.

The house in which Rimbaud and Verlaine lived as lovers...

was demolished in 1938 to make way for a telephone exchange...

where a monument to their tempestuous relationship has been erected.

Robinson is experimenting again with time travel.

On September 7, the anniversary of their arrival in London in 1872...

he took me to Piccadilly Circus...

where he hoped he might make some new discovery.

He told me how they improved their English...

by reading Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym...

another tale of an Atlantic sea voyage...

of shipwreck and deprivation...

which ends unfinished, with the revelation that the earth is hollow...

and open at the poles.

[Slow orchestral instrumental music]

NARRATOR: But his discovery was in the street.

He told me that Rimbaud in particular...

found the strangeness of the Victorian metropolis conducive to work.

He spent long days wandering in the docks...

where drugs were easily available.

Robinson told me the story of another exile...

the Russian socialist, Alexander Herzen...

who arrived in London at the end of August, 1852...

and lived initially in Trafalgar Square, in Morris Hotel...

demolished when South Africa House was built in 1935.

That evening, he read from Herzen's Memoirs.

There is no town in the world which is more adapted...

for training one away from people...

and training one into solitude, than London.

The manner of life, the distances, the climate...

the very multitude of the population in which personality vanishes...

all this together with the absence of continental diversions...

conduces to the same effect.

One who knows how to live alone has nothing to fear from the tedium of London.

The life here, like the air here, is bad for the weak, for the frail...

for one who seeks a prop outside himself...

for one who seeks welcome, sympathy, attention.

The moral lungs here must be as strong as the physical lungs...

whose task it is to separate oxygen from the smoky fog.

The masses are saved by battling for their daily bread...

the commercial classes, by their absorption in heaping up wealth...

and all, by the bustle of business.

But nervous and romantic temperaments, fond of living among people...

fond of intellectual sloth...

and of idly luxuriating in emotion...

are bored to death here, and fall into despair.

Wandering Ionely about London, I lived through a great deal.

In the evening, when my son had gone to bed, I usually went out for a walk.

I scarcely ever went to see anyone.

I read the newspapers and stared in taverns at the alien race...

and lingered on the bridges across the Thames.

I used to sit and look, and my soul would grow quieter and more peaceful.

And so for all this, I came to love this fearful ant heap...

where every night, 100,000 men know not where they will lay their heads...

and the police often find women and children dead of hunger...

beside hotels where one cannot eat for less than ?2.

[Train approaching]

NARRATOR: The next day, in the vicinity of St. Paul's...

we found ourselves in a street that neither of us knew.

In fact, Robinson was convinced that the last time we had visited St. Paul's...

the street had not been there at all.

We heard music...

then laughter and voices...

but they were talking not in English, but in French.

We tried the door, but could not get in.

Robinson had wandered all over London for years...

searching for the conviviality of cafe life.

At last he had found it.

And where else but in the city with its ancient sanctuaries...

and superstitions?

He had thought that nothing of this had survived its occupation...

by the armies of banking and finance...

but now he predicted that the City would soon once again...

become the centre of Bohemian London.

In an empty bar in Fleet Street, once the misogynist haunt of hacks...

now incarcerated on the Isle of Dogs...

he outlined his scenario.

As the City decayed, it would be reclaimed by artists, poets and musicians...

the pioneers of urbanism...

as the docks and markets had been 20 years before.

But as we passed along the north side of St. Paul's...

he stopped and gazed intently...

at a figure which had been hidden behind the railings.

He remembered how soon the artists had been priced out of the docks...

by developments of offices and shopping malls.

He reflected that although the city may be in decline...

it would still be many years before the Bank of England...

reopened as a discotheque.

He said that London was now a city of fragments...

that were no longer organised around the centre...

and that if we were to find modernity anywhere...

it would be in the suburbs.

And so it was that we returned to the valley of the River Brent.

It was a few days after the collapse of the final attempts to prop up the pound...

and its withdrawal from the European exchange rate mechanism.

We contemplated an impoverished provincial future...

as European influence declined.

In the new circumstances, there would be even less willingness...

to invest in London's future.

We imagined a scenario in which the centre of the city continued to decline...

and activities previously thought of as urban...

began to take place in the suburbs.

Robinson was optimistic.

He predicted that we would discover vital new, artistic, and literary activity...

emerging everywhere...

as we followed the river through the suburbs of Northwest London.

[Birds chirping]

NARRATOR: Robinson was full of plans:

The poetry of the Electronic Age.

He imagined his studio overlooking the lake...

and we set out with a new sense of purpose toward Brent Park in Neasden.

[Upbeat orchestral instrumental music]

NARRATOR: In the supermarket, we found a cafe...

with friendly staff and pleasant, inexpensive food...

but there was no sign of anyone writing poetry.

At Ikea, the restaurant also seemed promising...

though it had given up selling wine and beer...

but the atmosphere was disappointing...

tainted by the ill humour that so often accompanies questions of interior design.

We had hoped to visit the restaurant at Wembley Stadium...

a design of Owen Williams...

but we could not get in.

In Ealing Road, Wembley, Robinson finally found...

the city life he'd been looking for.

And he spent the day there...

working in the cafes, reading, and writing in his notebooks.

The next day, we reached Hanger Lane...

and the river left the North Circular, flowing west...

alongside Western Avenue.

At Perivale, the river left the road and we followed it.

As we moved away from the main thoroughfares...

there were fewer people about.

We found ourselves on the edge of a large area of open space...

much of it without specific use.

[Lively instrumental music]

NARRATOR: At the golf course, one of several...

he imagined a reform of the game to make it more artistic.

[Lively instrumental music continues]

NARRATOR: Beyond Hanwell, the river is navigable...

from the point at which it meets the Grand Union Canal...

at the edge of the open land surrounding Osterley Park.

For all his talk about the city...

I had the idea that Robinson really felt at home here.

At Boston Manor, we sat outside in the gardens.

And he recalled the days he used to spend wandering in the outskirts of the city...

always longing to escape.

He told me the story of Baudelaire's journey to Mauritius...

and of the lifelong impression three weeks there made on him.

He told me of his desire to be nomadic...

and of his melancholy for all the people in the world...

their ways of life and their inventions...

swept away by violence and trade.

In the evening, we reached Brentford Basin where we heard music in the distance.

[Men singing in the distance]

NARRATOR: It was our companions, Carlos and Aquiles...

who were living in a houseboat there.

We stayed with them for several days which we spend walking by the river.

[Lively music]

NARRATOR: The next Sunday, we returned to London.

I had noticed that Robinson hardly ever goes into a pub.

He says he feels threatened by the atmosphere.

On Monday, October 12...

another bomb had gone off in a pub in St. Martin's Lane.

Five people were injured and one of them later died.

The bomb was the eighth in London within a week.

Robinson told me that he also never goes to clubs.

From the Athenian to the most provisional of lowlife nightclubs he says:

"The principle of exclusivity or fear of the mob...

"has poisoned social life in London."

It was the day after the announcement of the pit closures.

A week later, on the 21st...

the Miner's Union held a huge rally in Hyde Park.

This event marked the beginning of a period in which...

the government's failures and its bungling of the currency crisis...

had created a mood of such uncertainty...

that it was beginning to seem possible it might not survive the winter.

It was years since we'd seen such a large turnout...

of the Labour movement in London.

And when the rally marched through Kensington...

the extent of public support for the miners was thought surprising...

in such a wealthy district.

In the afternoon, there was a meeting at Central Hall, Westminster...

to lobby parliament in preparation for the House of Commons vote...

which was addressed by miners' MPs.

At about 10:30, the vote took place.

We watched the television crews on the green...

opposite the House of Commons.

The Tories' backbench rebels, threatened and cajoled...

had mostly given in.

The amended closure programme was passed...

with Ulster Unionists support by a majority of 13.

[Church bells tolling]

On the 25th, a massive protest march assembled on the Embankment.

Robinson and I marched with a group of his colleagues.

For once, there was a feeling of being in the majority...

tempered only by the reticence of middle class attendants...

of political demonstrations.

Though Robinson's solidarity was genuine enough...

as he knew he would soon be facing redundancy himself.

[Rain pattering]

NARRATOR: By the time we reached Hyde Park, the speakers had finished...

and 300,000 people were dispersing.

[Slow melancholic instrumental music]

NARRATOR: Robinson had been talking with a colleague who lives in Southall.

She invited us to spend the evening with her family celebrating Diwali.

The next day, we explored the landscapes that surround the airport.

[Airplane engines roaring]

NARRATOR: By nightfall, we'd reached Cranford on the Great West Road.

We spent the evening in a large tandoori restaurant...

writing up our notes...

and stayed the night in a hotel just across the road.

[Airplane engines roaring]

The next day was hot and we spent it in the atrium of the air-conditioned Hilton.

In the late afternoon, we came out and walked along...

the road next to the runway...

until we came to Hatton Cross where we took the Underground home.

[Airplane engines roaring]

NARRATOR: The next day, we came back again.

[Birds chirping]

NARRATOR: It was November 4, the night of the first Maastricht vote...

and the government faced possible defeat for the second time in two weeks...

but they held on again with a majority of three.

We watched the interviews:

First with an obscure MP from Norfolk who changed his mind at the last minute...

and then with one from Staffordshire who hadn't.

But we could make no sense of either of them.

Robinson began to talk as he often did of leaving the country...

but as always he had no idea where to go.

Life is a hospital where every patient...

is obsessed by the desire of changing beds.

One would like to supper opposite the stove...

another is sure he'd get well beside the window.

It always seems to me that I should be happy anywhere but where I am.

And this question of moving...

is one that I'm eternally discussing with my soul.

It was Guy Fawkes Night.

And we went to the bonfire in Kennington Park.

[Slow instrumental music]

[Slow instrumental music continues]

NARRATOR: On November 11, we boarded a Number 11 bus...

and travelled east towards the City.

Robinson told me that his work was nearly over.

He argued that the failure of London was rooted in the English fear of cities.

A Protestant fear of potpourri and socialism.

The fear of Europe...

that had disenfranchised Londoners and undermined their society.

He denounced the anachronisms of the City and its constitutional privileges.

In Fleet Street, I had to restrain his attempts at violence...

towards the Lord Mayor.

But later, when we stood on the portico of the Royal Exchange...

he became quiet and reflected.

For Londoners, London is obscured.

Too thinly spread, too private for anyone to know.

Its social life invisible, its government abolished.

Its institutions at the discretion of either monarchy or state.

Or the city, where at the historic centre...

there is nothing but a civic void...

which fills and empties daily with armies of clerks and dealers...

mostly citizens of other towns.

The true identity of London, he said, is in its absence.

As a city, it no longer exists.

In this alone, it is truly modern.

London was the first metropolis to disappear.

We walked home across Southwark Bridge in silence.

When we got back, I stood at the window.

In the nine months or so since I had returned to London...

a number of changes had taken place in the street where Robinson lived.

The street itself had been designated a red route.

A device to speed the flow of commuters from the suburbs to the centre.

During August, there'd been a spate of shop-breaking...

by a group of teenage boys...

so that all the shops across the road had fitted roller shutters...

and at night the pavement was now lined with aluminium.

The next morning, I woke at 5:30.

[Birds chirping]

[Slow melancholic instrumental music]

[Slow melancholic instrumental music continues]