How do you put a city into words? Synthesising the vastness, the complexity and the contradictory; conveying the multiplicity of voices as if they could ever be perceived as a single sound; showing one moment in the life of a place that stretches back into many histories…

I’ve been looking and listening out for words that capture a sense of place, and in particular cities.  Halfway through Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson’s brilliant and powerful novel set in Belfast after the ceasefire, he pauses in his alternating character narratives to spend a chapter showing the reader his Belfast.  it is a place where ‘the streets smell stale and tired [...] Time seems passing and passed.  The city feels how it feels to grow old’ but where there is magic in the ghosts of whispered stories.  It is a city that can ’stick to your fingers like Sellotape’.  It becomes a living, breathing entity.  Over six pages McLiam Wilson manages to capture something of the life of this city, and perhaps something of the truth of all cities.  I wanted to share this:

Cities are simple things.  they are conglomerations of people.  Cities are complex things.  They are the geographical and emotional distillations of whole nations.  What makes a place a city has little to do with its size.  It has to do wth the speed at which its citizens walk, the cut of their clothes, the sound of their shouts.

But most of all cities are the meeting places of stories.  The men and women there are narratives, endlessley complex and intruiging.  The most humdrum of them constitutes a narrative that would defeat Tolstoy at his best and most voluminous [...] And in the end after generations and generations of the thousands and hundreds of thousands, the city itself begins to absorb narrative like a sponge, like paper absorbs ink.  The past and the present is written there.  The citizenry cannot fail to write there.  Their testimony is involuntary and complete.

I love the idea that a city expresses itself in the millions of stories that comprise it.  The vulgar, the violent, the moments of unexpected beauty.  I want to find this where I live.

Please suggest similarly brilliant evocations of city-ness!

A last word:

“In Belfast, in all cities, it is always present tense, and all the streets are Poetry Streets.”

That’s my advice to Plymouth, the city I currently call my (physical) home. We have an ambiguous relationship, Plymouth and I.  The claim it has on me is conditional.  When some people talk about home it’s like family, a loved thing that’s longed for and easily forgiven.  Me and my city, we’re a bit more distant. I’ve lived and worked here for years and I love the moments when it makes me proud, but if I’m honest my top two most frequently invoked emotions are embarrassment and disappointment.

I think one of the problems is that Plymouth isn’t good at telling stories about its present or its future. It doesn’t know where its going. Attempts at self-promotion come across as bluster and bravado –  it just gets it a little bit wrong. Case in point: one of the most recent rash of empty shops* is plastered in slogans of positive affirmation, presumably trying to inculcate some civic pride and engage Plymouth’s citizenry in…what? Some sort of public consultation exercise.  Phrases like ‘£250k invested in Christmas Lights’ cover a huge, decaying shell emptied by the economic downturn and the new mall, open 2 years and already hosting ‘to let’ signs.

‘Invested’ in Christmas Lights?

Anyway, having been inspired by the sideways looks that all the My Place poets are taking to place I’ve decided to look sideways at my own city and see if we can develop a more, er, functional relationship.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

*the old Virgin Megastore in the city centre, where I wasted many hours and pounds