There was a time when I used to hate London. I thought of it as a compound of tourist hotspots, rude locals and (admittedly quite useful) airports. Back then, I didn’t have much interest in graphic novels, either. My opinion on both has since reversed, and it’s in no small part due to the incomparable work of speculative historical fiction that is From Hell; written by Alan Moore, and brought vividly to life through the artwork of Eddie Campbell.
The following tour of London was inspired by the book – a gruelling 45-mile route visiting lesser known occult locations spread across the British capital, and connecting in its path a whole world of mythologies from Queen Boadicea to Jack the Ripper.
Make sure you’re sitting comfortably… this won’t be a short post.
Jack the Ripper, Alan Moore & The Art of Psychogeography
From Hell is a retelling of the story behind the 1888 Whitechapel Murders – casting Sir William Gull, revered physician to the royal family, as Jack the Ripper. Even the name of the book is a nod to the letter that the Ripper supposedly sent to investigators, featuring the address line: “From Hell.”
Much like Stephen Knight’s 1976 book, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, the ritualistic nature of these killings is woven into a larger masonic conspiracy reaching as high as the royal family. Knight’s book has been largely dismissed by historians… but it makes for a great story, nonetheless. Alan Moore goes a step beyond the Victorian-masonic angle, though; incorporating a broader set of theories about the occult history and sacred architecture of the city.
Gull, as he is portrayed in From Hell, is a raging misogynist. He is a high-ranking freemason (as was his historical namesake), with an obsession for occult symbolism, and his ‘Great Work,’ the Ripper murders, are conducted as a ritual intended to perpetuate the enslavement of femininity to man’s rule; alluded to often throughout the book as the sun (or logical, masculine, left-brain) conquering the powers of the moon (the abstract, feminine, right).
By Gull’s own admission, he is merely feeding the magic laid down by past generations of architects and masons; men who arranged their occult creations – masculine totems, phallic obelisks – into powerful sigils across the city’s face to form a pentagram binding London. As Gull puts it, “The moon bound in stars, architects, Apollonians, harnessing subconscious energies to chain madness within forms of reason; conquering, subjugating.”
It is during the book’s fourth chapter that the grand design is revealed; a scene in which the Ripper takes his coachman, John Netley, on a tour of the capital while explaining the historic significance and esoteric power of the symbols that they pass. Sir William Gull leads the coach on a chaotic route around London – by way of monuments and obelisks, lost rivers, battlefields, temples and churches – before arriving at last at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Here he marks these destinations on a map, drawing lines connecting each, to reveal how they form a giant pentagram across the city: a five-pointed star with St Paul’s positioned in its perfect centre.
After travelling the pentagram (in an anti-clockwise fashion, which in hermetic tradition forms an ‘invoking’ pentagram), Gull feeds the stones with blood – the ritualistic murder of five prostitutes, by which deeds he’ll be remembered as Jack the Ripper.
Essentially, the result is an occult psychogeography of London; a study not of stones, but rather a very personal exploration of the meanings etched into them… and the subtle yet pervasive effect these have on the people who live in their shadows. “Encoded in this city’s stones are symbols thunderous enough to rouse the sleeping Gods submerged beneath the sea-bed of our dreams,” the fictional Gull tells us.
From Hell really is a phenomenal book; and a clear demonstration, if ever such were needed, that the graphic novel format is well capable of matching traditional publishing in terms of intellectual punch. Nevertheless, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell were not the first to describe psychogeographical patterns within London’s occult heritage; and neither was From Hell the first book to speculate links between the Whitechapel murders and the layout of the streets on which they occurred.
Before the journey begins then, it’s worth considering first the architect whose name appears time and time again in conjunction with London’s occult monuments; a man who in the 18th century dominated London with his pagan aberrations rising from consecrated soil: the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor.
The Devil’s Architect
“Hawksmoor… That vast dark intricate cathedral mind, whose birdshit-coloured stones defined this century”
Alan Moore, From Hell
Nicholas Hawksmoor was an English architect – and active freemason – who rose to prominence around the turn of the 18th century. In 1680, at the age of 18, he was taken on as a clerk to the legendary architect Sir Christopher Wren; and Hawksmoor worked with Wren on notable landmarks such as Hampton Court Palace and St Paul’s Cathedral.
As his career blossomed, Hawksmoor would later become a leading proponent of the English Baroque style; designing halls, palaces and abbeys, as well as producing work for both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Of all his masterpieces however, Hawksmoor is best known for his series of London churches.
In 1711, parliament passed an Act for the building of Fifty New Churches and Nicholas Hawksmoor was appointed as surveyor to an architectural commission established in response. Of the proposed 50, only 12 were ever finished – of which six were designed by Hawksmoor alone, and a further two by Hawksmoor in collaboration with a fellow architect, John James.
His churches are unusual, to say the least. They feature obelisks in place of steeples, pyramids for towers, imitation sacrificial altars appearing in stead of arches – a rich language of symbols that seem to contradict, perhaps even mock, the architectural vocabulary of traditional Christian churches. With a range of ancient, pre-Christian and pagan influences clearly demonstrated in his work, it wasn’t long before Nicholas Hawksmoor’s own religious beliefs were called into question.
“Hawksmoor was no Christian,” explains Sir William Gull in From Hell. “His pagan works perpetuate the occult teachings of the ancient Dionysiac Architects, his greatest influence.”
In his 1975 collection of poems titled Lud Heat, the psychogeographer Iain Sinclair interpreted the style of Hawksmoor’s churches to suggest themes of Theistic Satanism. Ten years later, Peter Ackroyd published a novel in which Hawksmoor himself is represented as a devil-worshipper, terrorising London with occult architecture. Even the very creed of these churches could itself be said to support an ideology of misogyny; they were built for the Anglican Church, a religious movement founded to validate the misdeeds of a murderous, womanising king.
It was out of such theories that Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell created From Hell, developing the idea of this ‘Devil’s Architect’ and presenting his work as the inspiration for Jack the Ripper’s series of ritual sacrifices.
Besides the unconventional styling of Hawksmoor’s work, the above authors – and others – have noted the arrangement of these churches within the city. Iain Sinclair drew a constellation between the buildings, to form an Egyptian hieroglyph that might have been intended by the architect to work some spell across the city it encompassed. Farfetched, perhaps… but also extremely Victorian in its painstaking subtlety.
There have been other maps drawn too, still larger patterns sketched out to link Hawksmoor’s churches to additional London locations with occult significance. A recently proposed map, for example, appears via Duane McLemore on Flickr and incorporates contemporary symbols such as the London Eye (which, thanks to its triangular supports and ‘eye’ symbolism, has been likened by some theorists to the esoteric emblem of the ‘all-seeing eye’).
Ultimately though, my own route had to be the pentagram featured in the pages of From Hell. This book was my introduction to the subject; so that more than just visiting the occult sites of London, I would be paying homage to one of my favourite works of literature.
I drew my own map, plugging the locations from Gull’s tour into Google to create a pinpoint route around the capital. They formed an accurate pentagram, just as the book had promised.
Before I set off however, I decided to set myself a couple of ground rules.
Firstly: No Tube. For complete authenticity, I ought to have tackled the route on a horse-drawn cart. With that option ruled out though, it would have to be buses. It was crucial that I travelled overground if I was to get a real sense of the streets, the stones, the spirit of London; the fabric by which each destination connected to the next. While the London Underground is a wonder in its own right, I have always felt that it kills dead any attempt to actually connect with the city as a whole, to understand it, or to get a feel for its true layout.
And secondly: No Distractions. I permitted myself no phone, no Internet, and no contact with anyone save for those I met in the course of my quest. I packed just two books with me; a London A-Z map, and my copy of From Hell. I wouldn’t enter buildings either, or get waylaid at any one location, but rather immerse myself completely in the external symbolism of these churches and obelisks and lesser-known sacred sites.
I would follow the Ripper’s path, as closely as was possible in a London 140 years removed, and in so doing I would painstakingly recreate Alan Moore’s greater ritual of the pentagram.
Brook Street
8.30 am. I tumbled off the tube at Bond Street, carried with the crowd. The commuter rush was a wall-to-wall mass of tie clips, smart phones and coffee cups; a veritable army flooding into Mayfair to occupy cubicles, shops and offices for the best part of the day. I wondered briefly where I would be by the time they finished their days’ labours – and then I was outside, carried into daylight by the wave of churning bodies.
The crowds thinned out as I turned onto Davies Street, passing between rows of bricks and railings before taking a right onto Brook Street. There was something I found grimly uniform about these houses; about Mayfair’s architecture in general. Clean, plain arches, the continuous black fence with its aggressive spikes, token shrubs and climbing plants placed here and there in pots in a vain effort to break up the monotony of overpriced bricks and columns. The place felt lacking, if not in character, perhaps just in imagination.
I found my target here: 74 Brook Street. This had been the home of Sir William Gull – both the historical figure, and Alan Moore’s character – and it was from here that he’d set out that day on his grand tour of London’s occult secrets.
The building was much the same as its neighbours; the only quirk of originality here being the semi-circular window above the door. I stood in the doorway, facing the street, and took a moment step into character.
Turning to walk back east on Brook Street, I passed plaques pinned up on walls: at number 23, the one-time home of Jimi Hendrix; George Handel’s house at number 25. Back on Oxford Street I met my carriage, the number 8 bus to Chancery Lane. It was a slow journey, the roads mired in traffic – the choked arteries feeding the heart of London. I noted, from my elevated seat, that almost every car had just a single occupant.
For now at least, I was able to follow closely in the path trodden by Sir William Gull and his coachman. I changed to another bus – and on Gray’s Inn Road I met the 45 to King’s Cross Station.
Eddie Campbell had rendered a beautiful illustration of the station, and the building’s exterior remains largely unchanged since Victorian times. The brickwork hulk, its twin, semi-circular windows, always put me in mind of a face, a giant peering out from beneath the streets of London. The ornate St Pancras Station alongside, with its Victorian take on the Italian gothic style, only seemed to heighten the strange effect of the King’s Cross barrow.
I headed around the back of the throbbing station, toward the canal. There’s another London curiosity here, a little known ice cellar tucked away beneath the contemporary London Canal Museum. I had visited the King’s Cross Ice Well on a previous trip to the capital… it would have been contemporary to Jack the Ripper, too, a part of the landscape I was studying, but there was no time for detours on this trip. I had already taken almost an hour to get from the starting line to my first destination, the rather mundane construction site that stood before me now: the former Battle Bridge Road.
Battle Bridge Road
9.15 am. This first real stop on my tour required more than a little imagination to bring it to life. In the book Gull had explained, “…these black tenements, these soot encrusted walls… ‘twas here that womankind’s last hopes and dreams were put to sword.”
He referred to the death of Boadicea; or at least, to a Victorian-era myth that had located it at this spot.
Relatively little is known of the historical Boadicea, queen of the British Iceni tribe; and what is recorded comes solely through the histories of the Romans, her enemies. Boadicea’s husband, the king Prasutagus, had ruled in Britain as an ally of Rome. In his will he left the kingdom to their daughters, but after his death the Romans ignored the request – they annexed his lands, had Boadicea flogged and her daughters raped. This displeased the Iceni queen, who subsequently led a brutal and bloody rebellion against them. Leading an army of 100,000 Celts she destroyed Camulodunum (now Colchester), as well as Verulamium (St. Albans) and the commercial centre at Londinium (London).
Eventually, however, the Romans were able to regroup, and at the Battle of Watling Street they finally put down the British rebellion. Boadicea herself is said to have died in either 60 or 61 AD: some historians claim it was suicide, others, a death resulting from illness.
During the Victorian era – at the time of Sir William Gull and Jack the Ripper – Britain saw a revival of interest in Queen Boadicea. A statue titled ‘Boadicea and Her Daughters’ was erected on London’s Victoria Embankment. Poems were written, ships were named after her, and new mythologies suggested that she may even have died in battle somewhere near King’s Cross. One dubious legend would later claim that the queen’s grave is buried between the 9th and 10th platforms of King’s Cross Station.
Battle Bridge Road, around the back of the station, took its name from the village of Battle Bridge that once stood here on the bank of the River Fleet. The village is long gone though, the Fleet itself forced underground to become one of London’s ‘Lost Rivers.’ The claim that this place was named for a battle between the Romans and Iceni though, is unsupported by any historical evidence.
Sir William Gull’s theory, placing Battle Bridge Road as an ancient site symbolic of the crushed matriarchy – of womankind’s last hopes and dreams put to sword – well, it was tenuous at best.
There really wasn’t much left to see here, anyway. No “black tenements,” no “soot encrusted walls,” only a narrow street now lost beneath scaffold and Harris fencing, men in overalls slowly burying the past beneath a new development of glass and steel. Nearby, Battle Bridge Court illustrated the finished effect: a row of neat and well manicured homes, model city dwellings whose inhabitants likely had no idea of the ancient history from which their address had been derived.
My next stop was London Fields, a park up in Hackney.
Gull and Netley had taken Essex Road to Balls Pond Road, then Greenwood Road as far as Albion Drive on their way to London Fields. Outside the front of King’s Cross station, I found a bus driver; stood behind the shelter, smoking a cigarette while waiting for his ride. I asked if he knew the best route to London Fields.
“What you want to do,” he began, “is take the 477 to Balls Pond, then the 276 to Greenwood.” Or at least, that’s what I thought I’d heard. Perhaps it was the 476 and then the 277 after that; either way I had no idea where these places were and he reeled them off, between coughs, too fast for me to locate them on my map.
“Thanks,” I said, unsure, and got on the next bus headed in the direction of Hackney. I got off again somewhere in Bethnal Green, once I realised that my finger, attempting to trace the bus’s route along the pages of my map, had already missed and overshot my target.
I wasn’t far though, so I resolved to navigate the rest of the way on foot. Near Bethnal Green tube station, I stopped at a Caribbean fast food stand to get a coffee – but the coffee tasted like weak tea, lukewarm dishwater served in a polystyrene cup. The cup itself had already begun to crumble apart, I noticed. There were crumbs floating in the brown liquid and I decided to ditch it.
Sitting in the bus shelter, I consulted the map again – due north from here, it told me, and a little bit west. I headed north through the backstreets and found my way onto Temple Street, Pritchard’s Road, then over the bridge where it crosses Regent’s Canal. Finally I doubled back west through Dalston to meet Albion Drive.
My guide book drew particular emphasis to this street. The word ‘Albion’ is Celtic, the oldest known name for the island of Great Britain. The poet, painter, and – according to Gull – prophet, William Blake, had invoked the name in his 1793 poem, Visions of the Daughters of Albion:
“Enslaved, the daughters of Albion weep; a trembling lamentation,” he wrote, and I found myself thinking back to the story of Boadicea.
Strolling down the pleasant suburban street, along its rows of shiny new automobiles, the local postman gave me a friendly nod in passing. He probably thought I lived here. I stopped for a moment outside a pub, The Albion… and then picked up pace, and followed the street until it met with my next destination.
London Fields
11.00 am. Hackney takes its name from a 6th century Saxon settlement, that sat here on the banks of the brook: Haca’s Ey. Before that, during Roman times, these lands were marsh and forests. Rivers and streams, oak and hazel woods under the rule of the Catuvellauni Celts.
Hackney’s 17th century slums were largely wiped out by the Great Fire of 1666; the merchants moved in afterwards, and, as From Hell explains: “built suburbs that could not contain the overspill from the East End.” At its heart however, the London Fields remained exactly that: an empty, rural space that evolved from marshland to grazing pasture to urban park. The Hackney Brook meanwhile, now flows underground.
Besides historical interest alone, Alan Moore – via William Gull – had noted the significance here of “Hengest’s father, Ivalde Svigdur, murderer of Mani, the Teutonic Lunar deity.”
As such, it fit neatly into the developing narrative describing the suppression of the matriarchy, of solar, male symbols used in a rite to dominate the moon and femininity; as Gull states in the text, “‘Tis in the war of Sun and Moon that man steals woman’s power; that Left Brain conquers Right… that reason chains insanity.”
The Poetic Edda of Norse literature makes mention of ‘Máni’ as a personification of the moon; ‘Ivalde-Svigdur,’ meanwhile, makes several appearances in Donald Mackenzie’s 1912 collection of Teutonic Myth and Legend. When I tried to research the connection between these two characters however, I drew a blank.
Once again, I found the significance drawn about this place quite tenuous. “Here were goblets raised to toast the man who killed the moon,” the text claimed; just as they had presumably been raised in every other Saxon settlement in Albion.
I walked through the park, bought a coffee at a fast food stand – a real one this time – and sat for a while on a bench. London Fields felt pleasant enough, though somewhat underwhelming. Battle Bridge Road and Albion Drive had been underwhelming too; so far, I thought to myself, I hadn’t got anything from this tour that I couldn’t have learned simply by sitting at home and reading.
But the pay-off was yet to come… and I knew I had some treats in store, once I got to the Hawksmoor churches. I finished my coffee, and checked the map for my next destination.
Getting out of Hackney by bus looked to be just as messy as getting there had been; which is to say, probably not that difficult at all if you know the area. But unfortunately I did not, and so I opted to walk it. I retraced my steps, back through Haggerston, across the canal and through Shoreditch, overshooting the mark to loop down around Liverpool Street Station before turning back and heading north up City Road.
Bunhill Fields
12.40 pm. After the chaos of Liverpool Street – the crowds that surged around the station entrance, the traffic streaming to and from the heart of the capital – it was with enormous relief that I turned a corner from City Road and found myself, quite suddenly, in the green embrace of the cemetery.
The name of this place is derived from ‘Bone Hill,’ and it is possible that its use dates back to Saxon times. The burial ground was greatly expanded in 1549 however, when more than a thousand cartloads of bones were moved here from the demolished charnel house at St. Paul’s.
It was not a dead space altogether; not a dead-end necropolis, an out-of-town repository of stone and mortal remains, but rather this city-centre burial ground felt very much connected to the city itself. Paths wove from one end to another, shortcuts connecting the surrounding streets, criss-crossing between the stones. Workers in suits and high heels, ambling tourists with backpacks, pedestrians passing slowly through with phones pressed to their ears; if Bunhill Fields was a place of the dead nestled amongst the buzzing high-rises of central London, then these passers-by were the living amongst the dead amongst the living.
At the centre of Bunhill Fields I came across the gravestone of William Blake. Alan Moore’s Gull had associated Blake with the moon – with lunacy, prophecy and intuition, the realm of the right-brain. “England’s greatest Holy Fool,” he called him, and had noted how the grave itself was towered over by another monument, the obelisk-tomb of Daniel Defoe. The obelisk, of course, is an ancient phallic symbol: a sign of sun worship and masculinity, this one supposedly styled upon the Egyptian monuments raised to the sun god Atum at Heliopolis.
In a near corner I stopped for a moment, too, by the tomb of John Bunyan. It seemed fitting to pay tribute here to the author of the Pilgrim’s Progress; as I set out on my own pilgrimage, ending at St Paul’s, my Celestial City.
I have always enjoyed the hush reverence of cemeteries, and the atmosphere in Bunhill Fields was serene; a true urban oasis. I wanted to stay longer amongst the stones and moss, the gentle murmurs of the pigeons, though I felt a need to press on. The morning was gone, the sun past its apex, and four stops into this tour of Hawksmoor churches I was still yet to see a church.
I left Bunhill Fields through the north exit, making my way towards Old Street and another obelisk.
St. Luke’s, Oldfield
1.00 pm. Four and half hours had gone before I reached my first Hawksmoor. But, when I did, it appeared just as it had to my semi-fictional guides – an obelisk, rising ominously above the trees and buildings up ahead.
The steeple of St Luke’s was a far cry from the traditional church steeple; nevertheless this obelisk was not so aggressively out of place that one would necessarily have stopped to wonder how it got there; not nearly so anachronistic as some of the later monuments I’d visit.
Of the eight London churches bearing Hawksmoor’s mark, St. Luke’s was one of two that were built in collaboration with his fellow architect, John James. Raised in 1733 it was the west tower, its wings and steeple that were designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The church was closed in the 1960s, though – this marshy land had a tendency for subsidence, and after being deemed unsafe the building was left abandoned for 40 years. It is only recently that the church has been restored by the London Symphony Orchestra, and now it serves as a concert hall, rehearsal and recital space.
Tucked back from the road, the place felt very much a community hub. Couples sat on benches around the grassy churchyard. The lawn was filled with noisy chatter and city workers splayed across the grass to eat their midday sandwiches. Even the pigeons here seemed plump, with glossy feathers and bright eyes – nothing like the club-footed sky-rats that scavenge around London’s high-vaulted transport depots.
The obelisk itself was not so strange. The Victorians erected plenty of obelisks to commemorate battles and war heroes… just not usually attached to the top-end of a church.
When Hawksmoor built this obelisk atop St Luke’s, there had been critics, questions; his response was that the design harkened back to an earlier, purer form of Christianity, the symbols and monuments of the 4th century church. It did however bear a clear and overwhelming similarity to the pagan obelisks, typically raised in sun worship. As Alan Moore puts it; “He built an obelisk: Another altar to the Sun, and Masculinity, and Reason, with its cold erection stabbing at the sky.” The lunchtime crowds didn’t seem to take offence at the phallic totem, though.
I didn’t linger long beside St Luke’s, heading on instead towards my next destination: along Old Street to Goswell Road, and from there on up to Northampton Square.
After the striking steeple in Old Street, the significance here was harder to detect; impossible even, had the book not spelled it out for me. The name of this square was taken from William Compton, the 5th Marquess of Northampton and a prominent freemason. This square, supposedly, had been built with masonic money while Compton’s own parish in Northampton was home to another Hawksmoor work: his Easton Neston House.
Later I’d read that the current, 7th Marquess of Northampton, Spencer Compton, himself did a spell as Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England from 2001 until 2009.
For all these whispers of conspiracy and secret power however, the square itself was relatively average, pleasant and plain. A couple of men in high-visibility work jackets sat on a bench, sharing their lunch with the birds. Children played under the trees, on the grassy lawn that fanned out around a bandstand.
I exited the square through the southwest corner, heading down Wycliff Street, St. John Street, to Old Street, Clerkenwell then Theobalds Road, walking all the way into the heart of Bloomsbury before coming to a halt at an extravagantly Romanesque temple.
St. George’s, Bloomsbury
1.45 pm. St Luke’s had been an odd design for a church; but it wouldn’t have been hard to walk straight past without paying any attention to the unusual obelisk sat in place of a steeple. The same could not be said for St George’s Bloomsbury, however – an incredibly strange building that couldn’t help but command attention.
Bloomsbury is full of some very interesting architecture. The church stood just a few blocks from the British Museum, in a district filled with theatres, universities, monuments and a string of museums and curiosity collections. What made this structure strange, though, was its purpose – as it couldn’t have looked less like a church if it tried. The pillars that lined the front steps to the building, the off-centre pyramid that rose from one end of the roof; the figure of George I stood atop its peak, surrounded by lions and unicorns – the symbolism here was powerfully, overwhelmingly pre-Christian.
St. George’s was built from 1716 to 1731, the last of the London churches designed solely by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The peculiar design of the building owes in part to the odd-shaped plot of land on which it was built. A novel solution was required, which Hawksmoor found by aligning the church north-south (as opposed to the traditional east-west). The stepped tower above it was modelled on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, in Ancient Egypt. Meanwhile the portico was based, allegedly, on the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek, Lebanon.
Much like its sister back on Old Street, this church too had seen periods of decline. A £9.2 million restoration plan began only in 2002, re-glassing windows, laying new stone floors and bringing the building as close as possibly to its original design. Since 2014, the crypt of St George’s, Bloomsbury has housed the ‘Museum of Comedy.’
Beside the church, in a courtyard beneath the Egyptian pyramid and its grotesque, writhing beasts, a stall was selling coffee. It wasn’t until I sat down that I realised just how far I’d walked – from Bethnal Green to London Fields, back to Liverpool Street, To Old Street and from there to Bloomsbury – a distance of some six miles. My feet were growing tired, soles throbbing from relentless tarmac. The plan to travel this route largely by bus was not working out as planned; London buses don’t make a lot of sense to the uninitiated. The routes didn’t go where I wanted them to. More often than not, taking a bus would have meant waiting for an indeterminable length of time before travelling just a few stops closer to my destination – then walking the rest of the way. Hawksmoor’s churches may have been built to a pentagram plan, but London’s contemporary bus routes certainly were not.
Nevertheless, the next leg of the journey would simply not be walkable; and so I caught a bus from Bloomsbury to Oxford Circus, and from there another, this time headed west for Earls Court.
Earls Court
According to the book, this place had once been called ‘Billingswell’; itself derived from ‘Belinos’ Well,’ referring to a third century Celtic sun god. “Always the Sun!” my guide exclaimed. “Whether his name be Lud, Apollo… Helios or Atum. Be he Belinos or Bel… or Baal…”
Hopping off the bus outside the Earls Court tube station, I stepped right into a chaos of pedestrians – workers heading back from lunch breaks and tourists dragging heavy wheeled cases across the road, to and from the station’s entrance. I did note the blue police telephone box on the pavement outside – the only one of its kind left in the city – and joined the pair of smirking tourists who threw each other knowing grins as they photographed it from the far side of the road. It was no small task finding somewhere to stand, both road and pavement bustling as they were with passing traffic.
The place was a far cry from the sacred well the Celts had visited here all those centuries past; though I knew from previous visits that solitude could still be found not far off. I was just around the corner from Brompton Cemetery, one of London’s ‘Magnificent Seven,’ the grand Victorian burial grounds that would have been just recently opened at the time of Gull and Netley’s visit.
“These ancient stones awake in me a fearful appetite,” Gull had said on arriving in Earls Court. He’d eaten a kidney pie, so I too ate kidney pie; just over the street, at The Blackbird.
After lunch, I was back on the road. I caught a bus just outside the pub, the C1 headed eastward for Victoria. From the coach station it was another bus, up Buckingham Palace Road, past the royal residence and Westminster before meeting back with the Thames on the Victoria Embankment. The bus started and stopped, started and stopped, a heaving turnover of visitors and sightseers, Spanish students and Japanese families.
This part of town had been the first I’d ever seen of London, back on childhood visits: the tourist district. Riding through on public transport reminded how I’d gone so long with such little love for the capital.
Down by the riverside, following the pavement which mimicked the ancient curve of the water, I recalled a similar journey I’d made not long before. That time, however, I’d been some 10 feet below the street I now walked on; exploring cable runs that followed the course of the embankment.
I ought to have seen my next target long before I reached it, though the trees that lined the waterfront had conspired to keep it hidden; so that when I found myself looking up, quite suddenly, at a towering Egyptian monument, flanked by sphinxes at the water’s edge, it caught me entirely by surprise.
Cleopatra’s Needle
3.50 pm. Cleopatra’s Needle stands roughly 21m in height, formed from red granite and guarded by a pair of carved sphinxes. The needle first appeared sometime around 1450 BC, raised at Heliopolis and later inscribed with hieroglyphs praising the military conquests of Ramesses II.
The symbolism here was easy to read; a sun obelisk fashioned in worship of the Egyptian god Atum, the ‘Complete One,’ the Sun God of the Heliopolitan creation myth. From Hell makes a big fuss over the difficulties in getting the stone to London, and there’s the ring of the classic Egyptian curse myth about it.
In 1819, Egypt’s ruler gave the monument as a gift to the United Kingdom, commemorating British victories at the Battle of the Nile and the Battle of Alexandria. It would take 60 years to get it there. After nearly 2000 years buried in sand, the needle was eventually placed in a floating cylinder to be dragged to London behind a ship. Hitting a storm though, the floating cargo became uncontrollable – six volunteers drowned while trying to secure the monument. The cylinder was abandoned to the waves for four days, before finally being retrieved and erected beside the Thames in 1878.
In From Hell, Gull mentions the time capsule buried in the pedestal. It contained, among other things, a razor blade, coins, a map of London and twelve photographs of what were considered the best-looking English women of the time. Drawing connections here with the occult psychogeography of London, with misogyny and with the ritualistic throat cutting, the symbolic coin-arrangements of the Ripper crimes, takes little effort.
There are stories of ghosts here too, of a phantom that runs naked to the Thames before jumping in. The place has a reputation for suicides, allegedly, while other supernatural enthusiasts have suggested that the distant screams sometimes reported here are the voices of drowned sailors.
I noted nothing of the kind during my visit; there were tourists taking photographs. An unfortunate slumped in the corner, with his can of special brew. Across the river, meanwhile, the London Eye peered back at us. I stepped back to admire this all-seeing-eye flanked by Egyptian sphinxes; an Illuminati conspiracy theorist’s wet dream.
My next stop on the tour would take me south over the Thames. For the first while, at least, I’d be on foot. Down nearby Waterloo Bridge I went, and made the brisk 20-minute walk to Lambeth North.
Hercules Road & Old Bedlam
4.30 pm. Bedlam was perhaps one of the worst places in Victorian London; and William Blake once claimed that here the “mad had locked away the sane.” Founded in the 14th century as Bethlem Royal Hospital – a corruption itself from ‘Bethlehem’ – this place had served for hundreds of years as a lunatic asylum. The hospital isn’t there any more… in 1936 the central portion of the building was reopened as the Imperial War Museum.
Aside from the obvious gothic sensibilities of the place, there were deeper threads that linked this place to the narrative of my tour. It tied in nicely to this concept of a battle between sun and moon – a patriarchal institute for lunatics.
Around the side of the building, I took a moment to admire The Soviet War Memorial; something I’m more used to finding in Eastern Europe, here dedicated to the USSR’s sacrifices made in the fight against fascism during WWII.
Before I left Lambeth behind – another bus, south again – I stopped by Blake’s old house. Or at least, I tried to. Hercules Road has changed a lot since William Blake once lived there. It was significantly different to the Hercules Road of William Gull’s era, too. The house at Number 13, as best as I could tell, had once existed where there now stood a row of workshop units. This was the place where Blake had received his visions, where he had sat listening to the cries from Bedlam as he penned some of the finest works in English literature.
“Their language speaks direct to our unconscious mind,” Gull had said, and it reminded me also of H. P. Lovecraft; of Cthulhu and his dread elder gods, imprisoned for aeons and speaking directly to the dreaming minds of artists, poets and lunatics.
Blake’s legacy was almost entirely erased from this place, however – just one mention caught my eye, as I made my way back towards the bus stops. I passed by red brick apartment blocks, behind iron railings and neatly mown lawns. On the end of the nearest, a sign read William Blake Estate.
Herne Hill
5.20 pm. Next up was the southernmost point of Sir William Gull’s pentagram; to a part of London I’d never been before.
Herne Hill most likely takes its name from the Old English word ‘hyrne,’ which meant ‘corner.’ A more creative origin, however, ties it to the figure of ‘Herne the Hunter’: a ghost of English folklore who seems to have first appeared in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare described the character as a lone figure with “great ragg’d horns,” which hunted through Windsor Forest and, “shakes a chain; In a most hideous and dreadful manner.”
This myth of Herne the Hunter became popularised in Victorian times, and so it makes sense that the fictional Sir William Gull could have made the connection. The figure of Herne as an antlered hunter offers a clear parallel to Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt. Gull describes a Lunar goddess usurped, by, “a male pretender to her female throne.”
He made mention here of another subterranean waterway, and this time it was one I had seen for myself; the so-called Lost River Effra, that flows from here to its meeting with the Thames. Gull ties it to the narrative: “A thousand years ago, when it still knew the light of day, Canute sailed down it to attack the city from downstream.”
Anyone familiar with the legend of King Canute should grasp the significance there: the king who’d tried to control the tides, and thus to steal the powers of the moon.
Herne Hill itself – the conurbation, the busy street where I alighted from the bus, the nearby train station, the beer gardens and garages and hair salons – was unexciting at first glance. What history this place might once have had of horned men and Lunar gods seemed all but buried. As usual though, street names offered a tantalising lead: I noted the sign for ‘Half Moon Road’ as I alighted from the transport.
The streets of Herne Hill seemed flatter than the name might suggest; there was a hill nearby however, the grassy rise of a rolling, tree-dotted park that opened adjacent to the train station. I wondered if this incline had been Herne’s actual hill – and so I wandered through Brockwell Park, into the green and away from the noisy streets.
6.10 pm. By the time I came back down the hill I decided to stop for a swift half-pint in the Half Moon pub. Even without looking, I could feel the blisters growing inside my boots and I was eager to give my feet a moment’s rest.
I was pleasantly surprised to find the building so similar in appearance to Eddie Campbell’s illustration; inside, however, I didn’t sense a particularly warm welcome. There were flocks of office workers in suits, their ties loosened, shirts freshly unbuttoned, talking on mobile phones or shouting noisily about workplace politics. The air was filled with business jargon, the bar area heaving with elbows and hair gel and gold rings. Taking my half pint, I looked for a quiet corner to sit – but the quiet corners were still filled up with the last of the breakfast drinkers.
Instead, I took to hovering outside in the pub’s miniature beer garden – the only space left to me – but the traffic sounds and second-hand cigarette smoke conspired to deny me any comfort. I took it for a message; this was not to be a day of relaxation, and the path ahead of me wasn’t one of comfort. My Great Work was calling; besides, I was so lost by now in street names and stones, that I was struggling to keep myself grounded in the present. My head was spinning with gods and goddesses, an overwhelming sense as if I were stood on the brink and staring into the abyss of an impossible, ancient conspiracy – I worried perhaps I was driving myself slightly insane – and it was a struggle to converse with normal people.
I had enjoyed Brockwell Park, its trees and open spaces, but the testosterone-charged atmosphere of this pub was too much. I knocked the drink back in one, and headed out to find my next bus.
On Half Moon Road I took a number 37 to Hanover Park, somewhere in the vicinity of Peckham. There I waited maybe 30 minutes for the next one – sat outside a supermarket watching the single mums with pushchairs, school children smoking round a plastic bin, a fight that nearly broke out between two young men, then didn’t, then almost did again, before they left the Morrisons forecourt arm in arm and laughing.
At one point an elderly woman asked me a question about the bus timetable. I tried to speak, couldn’t, shrugged then managed a quiet apology. She looked disappointed and I decided that I wasn’t handling Peckham very well.
The soles of my feet, meanwhile, were now throbbing with pain; they felt loose and puffy, like tender meat sponges, sending tremors of pain up my legs with every step. I wanted to take my boots off there in the bus stop – but I was scared I’d never fit my bloated, burning feet back into them.
My bus pulled up at last (a 78), and I swiped my Oyster card as I shuffled on past the driver. He didn’t look at me. I didn’t look at him. I got off the bus again at Druid Street.
Druid Street, I thought to myself, and smiled. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
St John Horsleydown
7.30 pm. St. John Horsleydown was another of Hawksmoor’s collaborations. It was built from 1726-33 and much like the other joint effort between these architects, John James had designed a simple, square body that Hawksmoor then topped with a highly unorthodox spire. Here the steeple took the form of a tapering column, finishing in a weathervane shaped as a comet.
Gull had described St John’s Horsleydown as, “An obelisk to loom above the bridge, streets, and lives that teem therein.” Sadly, though, this next church on the tour was long gone by the time I arrived. It had caught a German bomb in 1940, during the London Blitz; only its base survived. Since then, a red brick shell had been slapped on top of the stone foundations: the London City Mission, an organisation with bases spread right across the capital offering a Christian outreach program to bring the gospel to London citizens “living in poverty, on the margins of society or those from other cultures.”
“Because London needs Jesus,” explains the tagline on their website.
Deprived of the full effect of St John’s Horsleydown, I headed around the back to see what remained of the graveyard. There I might at least immerse myself in some green space, in something natural and timeless that would allow me the illusion of authenticity if just for a moment.
There were cracked memorial stones embedded into the church foundations; old gravestones pulled up, and leant in stacks against a far wall of the space. Dog-walkers crossed the lawn and the red bricks of the mission building, such a very different style to the original church, seemed to dominate the space with their own presence. I could sense no magic here.
By this stage in the day, the sun grown fat and lazy in the low sky while my body ached, my feet throbbed, I considered quitting my route prematurely. After my outlying point at Herne Hill, I was headed back towards the city centre – towards familiar sights and streets. I was headed back amongst the welcoming tube stations too, with their promise of swift and painless relief, an exit from the endless walking on busy London streets.
I thought about taking a break, going back home and finishing my pentagram another day. I had been at it almost 12 hours now, and most of those on foot – it seemed a fair effort.
Whatever I decided though, the next stop would be worth reaching first. I slipped into a stream of tourists and passed across Tower Bridge. I was tired, and it wasn’t until I reached the northern bank of the Thames that I realised I had deviated from Gull and Netley’s route: they had crossed at London Bridge, hitting the Monument before working clockwise around to the Tower of London; Instead I reached the Tower prematurely, and had to loop back round if I were to feature the Monument as well.
8.05 pm. The Monument to the Great Fire of London was finished in 1677, to commemorate the heroes and victims of the fire that ravaged the city the previous decade. It’s said to be the tallest free-standing stone column in the world, and was designed by Sir Christopher Wren: Hawksmoor’s tutor. During Sir William Gull’s lifetime a number of people jumped from the top of the tower in acts of suicide – leading to the installation of a mesh cage around the upper viewing deck, which remains in place to this day.
Charles Dickens once wrote of the place: “If the day were bright, you observed upon the house-tops, stretching far away, a long dark path; the shadow of the Monument.”
The Monument lies in a fold of pedestrianized streets behind Eastcheap, and here the neighbouring pub had spilled its patrons out to stand and drink and smoke among the stones. This crowd seemed much like the after-work drinkers