South London la la la

Place is very important to me. Without sounding OTT, geography’s the thing we’ve got in common. We inhabit space. We breathe in it. We fight over it. We shape it, and share it. And then we learn to share it better.

I grew up in a place called Herne Hill, South London. An in-between zone; no-man’s land. Not quite Brixton, not yet Dulwich, but with elements of both. I have lived either side of the Lambeth/Southwark borough divide that splits the hill like a seam. And I have lived on the north and south banks of the Effra, submerged stream that carves its way from the hills of Norwood through the villages of Dulwich, Brixton and Stockwell before meeting the Thames at Vauxhall. A long, thin poem I produced in 2001 about the river became a turning point in my writing. The river as an invisible, underground energy force we underestimate at our peril. It seeps into basements, up from manholes in the street. Harbinger of greater floods to come.

HERNE HILL. The very name a mystery. Competing visions trace the etymology to Old English hyrne (’the corner of a hill’) or an obselete surname, landowners from way back. Or, more conveniently, a contraction of ‘heron’? I remember herons basking in the park three streets away as kid. The poet Eric Mottram, I later discovered, had lived on Half Moon Lane: his local, my local. I quickly found and bought Mottram’s A Book of Herne (1975-81), which draws from that primal, sinister myth of Herne the Hunter, the antlered spectre. Forest god whose name enshrined in the urban landscape remembers when the Great North Wood stretched from Croydon to Camberwell (where I was born). I spent formative moments wandering (and wondering) its remnants, at Sydenham Hill. Once home to woodsmen, gypsies and a hermit, or two.

South London is my home. I’m proud of where I’m from (remember chanting “South London la la la” on the terraces of Selhurst Park). But ‘home’ is such a complex, problem word. ‘Place’ seems kinder, more humane, less fraught with notions of identity – who belongs where, who owns what land. I share this city with eight million others, many of whom will call it home, some birthright, some just passing through, and for many it’s a home of sorts, but other places call on them. London is a city of strangers, and always has been. It sucks you in and spits you out. That tension makes it strong, exciting and relentlessly new.

As a writer, remembering Ezra Pound’s injunction to ‘make it new’, I aim to capture that strangeness, the inherent violence of success. Or rather, not to capture, but to immerse myself within the fictions the urban landscape throws up. The city demonstrates civility – notions of etiquette, human behaviour. And the city has been made a blank canvas for utopian ideas. The great council estates of the 1960s, for instance. Or Wren’s geometric masterplan of London. But always, in the background, is the forest, the river, dark forces seeping in. The urban fox, scavenging at night. We bury metaphors, like we bury the past.