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Non-Existent Part Of Hampstead NW3?

I have no idea what any of you meant. Could one of you Brits translate for us over here?

In case you're still wondering, dogging is the practice of going to an unpopulated site at night to partake in anonymous group sex - normally one woman with a bunch of guys who take it in turns. The gay version as per George Michael/Hampstead Heath is I believe known as cottaging.

No doubt it happens in the US as well but I don't know the term for it there.
 
I've had early afternoon TV on a fair bit recently (it's for the dog, honest!), and the repeats of The Sweeney are making me nostalgic for London in the mid/late 70's, before it got all glitzed and glammed and when there were still rows of houses bearing war time damage. It's like a little bit of history, with guns.
Me too. If you have a spare hour or so occasionally, it's worth looking at the website Reel Streets. Shows images of film locations from the 30's onwards and a current image of how the location looks now, many of course of London.
 
I've discovered You Tube has loads of "social history" videos, showing documentaries of areas that I know.
I then hit an emotional paradox:
I see and recognise an area I know well at that time. Nostalgia boils over me! Shop names I recognise, clothes I wore, even the names on busses ...
Then I realise I'm watching a "historical documentary", a recording of a time in which I actually took part in. I am history.

I'm a bit awed. I'm a bit honoured. I'm also a bit depressed that I am a part of life that is in history books ... and I was raised to think that history was about dead people. :)
 
I've discovered You Tube has loads of "social history" videos, showing documentaries of areas that I know.
I then hit an emotional paradox:
I see and recognise an area I know well at that time. Nostalgia boils over me! Shop names I recognise, clothes I wore, even the names on busses ...
Then I realise I'm watching a "historical documentary", a recording of a time in which I actually took part in. I am history.

I'm a bit awed. I'm a bit honoured. I'm also a bit depressed that I am a part of life that is in history books ... and I was raised to think that history was about dead people. :)

It's like when you find out students are taught the 1970s as history now.
 
I've discovered You Tube has loads of "social history" videos, showing documentaries of areas that I know.
I then hit an emotional paradox:
I see and recognise an area I know well at that time. Nostalgia boils over me! Shop names I recognise, clothes I wore, even the names on busses ...
Then I realise I'm watching a "historical documentary", a recording of a time in which I actually took part in. I am history.

I'm a bit awed. I'm a bit honoured. I'm also a bit depressed that I am a part of life that is in history books ... and I was raised to think that history was about dead people. :)
I particularly like the restored Mitchell and Kenyon films from 1902 ish. Amazing to see such familiar to me places as Bradford, Halifax and the Fylde coast. Strange to think that the masses of people filmed will have long since passed, but a lot of buildings, streets and roads still remain as they were. BFI films are also interesting to watch.
 
It's like when you find out students are taught the 1970s as history now.
Or the feeling you get when you go into a museum and see something on display that you grew up using. I had this in the Castle Museum in York, where they have rooms set up as they would have been at various periods in history. A twin tub washing machine is NOT AN HISTORICAL ARTIFACT! My mum had one until 1987!
 
I've discovered You Tube has loads of "social history" videos, showing documentaries of areas that I know.
I then hit an emotional paradox:
I see and recognise an area I know well at that time. Nostalgia boils over me! Shop names I recognise, clothes I wore, even the names on busses ...
Then I realise I'm watching a "historical documentary", a recording of a time in which I actually took part in. I am history.

I'm a bit awed. I'm a bit honoured. I'm also a bit depressed that I am a part of life that is in history books ... and I was raised to think that history was about dead people. :)

Molly Dineen's Heart of the Angel does this to me every time.

To quote myself, from several other threads:

I’ve always thought that our more recent past – even the one we’ve been through ourselves – is somehow more mythical and ungraspable than a historical past we were never part of.

It was watching Molly Dineen's documentary that first inspired that thought.

I would have used Angel tube around the time that the documentary was made (and climbed those stairs on more than one occasion). I find it both familiar, and mythical - somehow, at the same time.

We tend to compartmentalise and package the past - we talk about the 60's, the 80's, the Noughties as if they are regulated quantities with fixed boundaries. But, when I look back at a time I knew, and try and place myself in it, I get a mix of before, now, soon and later which makes my place in it almost impossible to fix effectively; not because the passage of time has degraded my memory and made it so, but because every moment really is actually a mix of before, now, soon and later - and that's what I'm recalling.

(Heart of the Angel is available on BBC iplayer.)
 
Molly Dineen's Heart of the Angel does this to me every time.

To quote myself, from several other threads:

I’ve always thought that our more recent past – even the one we’ve been through ourselves – is somehow more mythical and ungraspable than a historical past we were never part of.

It was watching Molly Dineen's documentary that first inspired that thought.

I would have used Angel tube around the time that the documentary was made (and climbed those stairs on more than one occasion). I find it both familiar, and mythical - somehow, at the same time.

We tend to compartmentalise and package the past - we talk about the 60's, the 80's, the Noughties as if they are regulated quantities with fixed boundaries. But, when I look back at a time I knew, and try and place myself in it, I get a mix of before, now, soon and later which makes my place in it almost impossible to fix effectively; not because the passage of time has degraded my memory and made it so, but because every moment really is actually a mix of before, now, soon and later - and that's what I'm recalling.

(Heart of the Angel is available on BBC iplayer.)
Is this, perhaps, the essence of 'hauntology'? A mythologising of events actually lived through? A colouring of our pasts with a hint of red-tinted specs and a shading in at the edges with the dark of dream and imagining?

It's easier to do that with lived experience. Everything else comes ready-filtered through others perceptions, while we have to filter our own, ourselves.
 
In case you're still wondering, dogging is the practice of going to an unpopulated site at night to partake in anonymous group sex - normally one woman with a bunch of guys who take it in turns. The gay version as per George Michael/Hampstead Heath is I believe known as cottaging.

No doubt it happens in the US as well but I don't know the term for it there.

I thought cottaging was in public toilets? Outdoors for gay men is "cruising", I think.
 
I thought cottaging was in public toilets? Outdoors for gay men is "cruising", I think.

Yes, a 'cottage' is Polari for a public toilet.

Thus - in the BBC comedy series, Round the Horne - Sandy's observation to Kenneth Horne that Julian is 'a miracle of dexterity at the cottage upright'.

Oh no, my mistake - he was talking about cottage upright pianos; really, he was.
 
I thought cottaging was in public toilets? Outdoors for gay men is "cruising", I think.
Yes, a 'cottage' is Polari for a public toilet.

Thus - in the BBC comedy series, Round the Horne - Sandy's observation to Kenneth Horne that Julian is 'a miracle of dexterity at the cottage upright'.

Oh no, my mistake - he was talking about cottage upright pianos; really, he was.

I'm wearing my orthopedic shoes so I stand corrected.
 
The only place I've ever been properly mazed was - of all places - Bloomsbury, which is not at all particularly difficult to negotiate. It's also an area I'm very familiar with.

My excuse at the time was that I was incredibly tired. I'd just worked two or three unplanned overnighters, had virtually no sleep in that time, and was also coming down with flu like symptoms. I was trying to get from just east of the British Museum to Euston Station, which is a very straightforward journey, and no distance, and I'd done the route - or very close to it - many times before.

But I got stuck in a loop. It was dark and raining and rush-hour. I knew exactly where I was going, but I kept getting it wrong and would find myself back were I'd already been without really knowing how. I can visualise the journey now, and realise that for some reason I was allowing myself to be pulled westward even though I knew it was not the direction I needed.

It is possibly one of the most disconcerting experiences I've ever had - and I'd compare it to some of the descriptions I've read of people getting 'stuck' in fairy raths and the like.

I've started staying in this area again on my fairly regular trips to London. The other night I went out with the express intention of retracing the route to see if it helped elucidate the experience. (I've been around there very many times since that episode - but never really examined it in situ.)

I recall walking south down Montagu Street and then turning right (west) onto Great Russell Street - where, on the corner with Bloomsbury Street (which runs north, becoming Gower Street past Bedford Square) I took leave of my then partner, who was working in Soho.

I can pinpoint almost the exact spot my compass went all Bermuda Triangle: on the east side of Bloomsbury Street a few paces just south of the opening into Bedford Avenue (the other side of the road).

My journey should have been straight on, up Gower Street - take a right (Torrington/Byng Place) - take a left (Gordon Square) - cross Euston Road.

It couldn't have been much more straightforward - even if I hadn't done it many times before. But I couldn't do it - it's like I kept bumping into an invisible barrier that kept diverting me westwards; it 's still utterly mystifying.

I reckon I'm going to draw some sort of geomantic line of woo including Aickman's house, Treadwell's Books (Occultist and Spritual) and the great omphalos buried in the foundations of Centre Point (come on - the names a giveaway). That's what Iain Sinclair would do.
 
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I've started staying in this area again on my fairly regular trips to London. The other night I went out with the express intention of retracing the route to see if it helped elucidate the experience. (I've been around there very many times since that episode - but never really examined it in situ.)

I recall walking south down Montagu Street and then turning right (west) onto Great Russell Street - where, on the corner with Bloomsbury Street (which runs north, becoming Gower Street past Bedford Square) I took leave of my then partner, who was working in Soho.

I can pinpoint almost the exact spot my compass went all Bermuda Triangle: on the east side of Bloomsbury Street a few paces just south of the opening into Bedford Avenue (the other side of the road).

My journey should have been straight on, up Gower Street - take a right (Torrington/Byng Place) - take a left (Gordon Square) - cross Euston Road.

It couldn't have been much more straightforward - even if I hadn't done it many times before. But I couldn't do it - it's like I kept bumping into an invisible barrier that kept diverting me westwards; it 's still utterly mystifying.

I reckon I'm going to draw some sort of geomantic line of woo including Aickman's house, Treadwell's Books (Occultist and Spritual) and the great omphalos buried in the foundations of Centre Point (come on - the names a giveaway). That's what Iain Sinclair would do.
I’ve had a similar experience getting lost in that part of london Spooks. I was meeting some friends in the Lamb pub, located in Lamb conduit street. I work close by to London Bridge and have walked from my work to the Lamb many many times. However near Christmas a few years ago, I left work heading to the Lamb, and got completely and totally lost.


My preferred route took me through Clerkenwell and then west towards Holborn, but somehow, I found myself In a part of west London I didn’t recognise.

I had to ask for directions in the end.
 
I used to regularly attend meetings in London. I walked the half mile from the station to the venue which involved "crossing" several road junctions by means of the pedestrian subways. One evening, not concentrating I came up at the wrong exit and without realising walked a few hundred yards along the wrong route. It took me half an hour to find my way back to a part I knew.
Some of those subways are huge underground pedestrian roundabouts with multiple exits, they are often crowded so very easy to miss a landmark in the press of people.
London is an interesting place but I can't say I enjoy travelling there.
 
I used to regularly attend meetings in London. I walked the half mile from the station to the venue which involved "crossing" several road junctions by means of the pedestrian subways. One evening, not concentrating I came up at the wrong exit and without realising walked a few hundred yards along the wrong route. It took me half an hour to find my way back to a part I knew.
Some of those subways are huge underground pedestrian roundabouts with multiple exits, they are often crowded so very easy to miss a landmark in the press of people.
London is an interesting place but I can't say I enjoy travelling there.
That reminds me of something that happened years ago in a subway in Aldgate. A bigwig was over visiting the London office from New York, and I was asked by my boss to escort the bigwig to a Brokers office in Aldgate for a meeting.

The entrance to the office block in Aldgate had been designed in a certain way, in which you could gain entrance to it by using the little maze of subway tunnels underneath the road system.

I’d never had any reason to venture down into this little maze of tunnels previously, so guessed what happened.????

45 minutes later we were still walking around in circles trying to find the entrance to the office block, with the bigwig growing more and more furious with me.

Found it in the end though, although by the time the bigwig made it into the meeting room, the meeting had been over for over 20 minutes. :):)

Not my coolest moment. :cool:
 
I’ve had a similar experience getting lost in that part of london Spooks. I was meeting some friends in the Lamb pub, located in Lamb conduit street. I work close by to London Bridge and have walked from my work to the Lamb many many times. However near Christmas a few years ago, I left work heading to the Lamb, and got completely and totally lost.

My preferred route took me through Clerkenwell and then west towards Holborn, but somehow, I found myself In a part of west London I didn’t recognise.

I had to ask for directions in the end.

It's really odd when this happens, isn't it? I think of myself as having a pretty good sense of direction, and I walk everywhere - which really helps build the mental map. I've had a few occasions where I've had to stop and do a bit of a reboot - but never anything like the incident mentioned above.

I actually really enjoy getting a bit lost - or simply heading off in random directions. I'm trying to recall who it was who suggested that anyone who enjoyed the urban experience should (along the lines of) walk always, look up often and get a little bit lost on a regular basis - I want to say Pevsner, or a modernish philosopher, but actually, I don't think it's either.
 
@Spookdaddy @Dick Turpin

I had a strange similar experience once.

I was driving a friend around Inner North West London, because they were from Birmingham.
Just to show them that part of the world.

And in spite of having been there quite a few times, I just could not find St. John's Wood High Street.

Every time I drove towards it, it was as if I was diverted away.


This was in the days long before Sat Nav etc.

@Spookdaddy

Did Iain Sinclair say that about getting a bit lost?
 
...Did Iain Sinclair say that about getting a bit lost?

Not him, no. I can quite believe he's said something along those lines - and the same for Ackroyd - but the specific reference I'm thinking of is less contemporary, and, now I come to think of it, may not even be English.
 
I've had early afternoon TV on a fair bit recently (it's for the dog, honest!), and the repeats of The Sweeney are making me nostalgic for London in the mid/late 70's, before it got all glitzed and glammed and when there were still rows of houses bearing war time damage. It's like a little bit of history, with guns.
I love The Sweeney for that reason too. The Long Good Friday's also a good watch on that front
 
I love The Sweeney for that reason too. The Long Good Friday's also a good watch on that front
Loved the Sweeny. incredible series.

I used to work with a chap whose dad was an actual DI in the flying squad, and the Dad told him that it was 100% spot on, especially the relationship between the DS and the DI i.e. Carter and Reagan.

Can’t say I’m a big fan of British Gangster movies though, including the long good Friday. Most British gangster films are all Cockney banter and violence with hardly story line and plot, (with the exception of lock stock, and snatch)

Although low budget (most of the actors agreed to do it for free) “My name is Lennie” is a decent watch, and very much true to actual events.
 
Loved the Sweeny. incredible series.

I used to work with a chap whose dad was an actual DI in the flying squad, and the Dad told him that it was 100% spot on, especially the relationship between the DS and the DI i.e. Carter and Reagan.

Can’t say I’m a big fan of British Gangster movies though, including the long good Friday. Most British gangster films are all Cockney banter and violence with hardly story line and plot, (with the exception of lock stock, and snatch)

Although low budget (most of the actors agreed to do it for free) “My name is Lennie” is a decent watch, and very much true to actual events.
A lot of the low budget ones are very "cockney gangster by numbers" but the Long Good Friday's got a fantastic plot and is a proper time capsule, both of London as Docklands changed and also the troubles. But there are some great British gangster movies like Sexy Beast, Villain with Richard Burton camping it up wildly and not forgetting Performance which is probably one of the greatest British movies of any genre
 
A lot of the low budget ones are very "cockney gangster by numbers" but the Long Good Friday's got a fantastic plot and is a proper time capsule, both of London as Docklands changed and also the troubles. But there are some great British gangster movies like Sexy Beast, Villain with Richard Burton camping it up wildly and not forgetting Performance which is probably one of the greatest British movies of any genre
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen performance, and you may be right about that film, but I can’t agree with either the others you mention.

Never liked LGF – always thought the film was a bit stagey. Sexy beast, although a decent pic had a classically trained actor trying to play a cockney villain (Sir Ben never really pulled it off IMO) and Burton was laughable in the film Villain. “ad e’m quaking in their boots dahn in ‘ackney”

And don’t get me started on the Kemp brothers mate lol
 
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen performance, and you may be right about that film, but I can’t agree with either the others you mention.

Never liked LGF – always thought the film was a bit stagey. Sexy beast, although a decent pic had a classically trained actor trying to play a cockney villain (Sir Ben never really pulled it off IMO) and Burton was laughable in the film Villain. “ad e’m quaking in their boots dahn in ‘ackney”

And don’t get me started on the Kemp brothers mate lol
I'm not a fan of "Sir" Ben but he's bloody terrifying in Sexy Beast
 
There was a very decent gangster movie called Bull out late last year, not everyone liked the ending, but I found it nice and Fortean. Don't know what's happened to it since, though.
 
I haven't seen every British gangster film, but of those I have seen, my top five:

1.) The Long Good Friday - Gripping. Watch it over and over again.
2.) Sexy Beast - Powerful performances, combines OTT with understated. And I rate Ben Kingsley for pulling off his role.
3.) Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels - in your face, very reverent and funny.
4.) Layer Cake - Clever.
5.) Down Terrace - very very intense.

I have quite a few more to watch, and hope to comment when I have.

Of films that involve crime but do not quite 'fit" the genre, seek out The Reckoning.
It's a prototype for Get Carter, with some classic shots of London and Liverpool.

For a very grim film, see Mr In-Between.

And for a London heist type film, Love, Honour and Obey is a great laugh.

Performance is a standalone - authentic, but also so "out there" it's hard to know what on earth to make of it!

(I regard Heist films and "Hood" films as related but different genres.)

For those who want a glimpse of how some of non-tourist London looked in the past, Sparrows Can't Sing and Babylon are well worth a watch.
 
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I haven't seen every British gangster film, but of those I have seen, my top five:

1.) The Long Good Friday - Gripping. Watch it over and over again.
2.) Sexy Beast - Powerful performances, combines OTT with understated, And I rate Ben Kingsley for pulling off his role.
3.) Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels - in your face, very reverent and funny.
4.) Layer Cake - Clever.
5.) Down Terrace - very very intense.

I have quite a few more to watch, and hope to comment when I have.

Of films that involve crime but do not quite 'fit" the genre, seek out The Reckoning.
It's a prototype for Get Carter, with some classic shots of London and Liverpool.

For a very grim film, see Mr In-Between.

Performance is a standalone - authentic, but also so "out there" it's hard to know what on earth to make of it!

(I regard Heist films and "Hood" films as related but different genres.)

For those who want a glimpse of how some of non-tourist London looked in the past, Sparrows Can't Sing and Babylon are well worth a watch.

For a different take on “London gangster”, try Eastern Promises. lt’s about the activities of the Russian mafia in London. (Female fans of Viggo “Aragorn” Mortensen will - ahem! - find a lot to enjoy…)

maximus otter
 
I'm trying to recall who it was who suggested that anyone who enjoyed the urban experience should (along the lines of) walk always, look up often and get a little bit lost on a regular basis - I want to say Pevsner, or a modernish philosopher, but actually, I don't think it's either.
I think it was John Betjeman. Metroland, maybe?
 
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