The Situationists and the Old Kent Road

'Make petrified conditions dance by singing them their own tune.. don't call us, do it yourself!'

The tagline at the top of the Bureau of Public Secrets website articulates very nicely a project we've been working on. It's about the Old Kent Road, which we've all lived or live near and have driven, ridden and walked up and down too many times to count. The magazine or booklet or whatever it ends up being will be part objectiv and part romantic, some essays and some pictures. I don't think it'll matter whether it's the decriptude or the sly beauty of the Road that it ends up waffling on about.

Hopelessly sentimental as it may be, I love the idea of singing the Old Kent Road its own song, reflective of its oddball alliances (the churches sitting above nightclubs is always a favourite) and really rather hidden identity. Empty car-parks and drive-thru take-aways may be all a cursory glance reveals but there are richer and more subtle truths, histories and dynamics at play. I'm just happy to be doing something that challenges the flippant dismissal the area receives at the hands of the rest of London, let alone the sodding Monopoly board.



I went to Foyles to check out the London history section, and amongst the beautifully illustrated tomes on Islington, Camden, Ealing, Hyde Park, Battersea and Clapham, the only book about South East London was a slender seemingly self-published book of oral histories of Bermondsey. Which I'm all for, but what I'm saying is for a entire quarter of London - Peckham, Camberwell, Southwark and Lewisham, Bermondsey - to be so totally overlooked is kind of indicative. Who gives a shit about South East London and the Old Kent Road? If you're looking for caricature Lahndan you're bound to venture further norf to Bow Bells and start banging on about the Krays and the Old East End. Even the Victorian writers who went undercover to expose the truth about how the 'other half' lived did so in the East End. And obviously once you've made a concession to slum dwellers in your overview of London, you'll be back to looking at the gratuitously, historically picturesque, the Cheyne Walks, the Hampstead Villages, the Eel Pie Islands. And again, I'm not slagging off the obviously pretty, I'm just saying our corner of South East London deserves its own songs to be sung at it too..

Through the Bureau of Public Secrets, I've found a Guy Debord essay called Critique of Urban Geography from 1955. I think what these situationists were talking about in terms of urbanism foreshadows today's fashion for psychogeography, and I kind of have the feeling their ideas and aims might align really rather nicely with ours.