Low Culture Essay: Anna Doble on Patrick Keiller’s London

Troubled by facts that felt like fiction, Anna Doble feared Patrick Keiller's 1994 film might all be an in-joke. But, as she writes in this month's Low Culture Essay, it created a magic-real place that she would later explore through the music of artists like Saint Etienne and Real Lies.

On a grey and overcast day in 1994, I watched oddly tranquil images of an unfamiliar city spool before me on the TV set in my parents’ living room. A mysterious narrator speaks of a “journey to the end of the world” over a shot of Tower Bridge, implying this famous structure is acting as some kind of portal. The voice continues, describing Britain’s fake traditions, ill health, bad food and sexual repression. I felt both downbeat and uplifted as the camera shifts from the Thames to a dried-up urban waterway, still and historic like a postcard on one of those dusty revolving racks in a seaside town. Beside a giant Victorian gasholder are sepia mud banks that might be a place for a horse in a Turner painting to stop and drink.

 When I saw Patrick Keiller’s 85-minute film London for the first time I couldn’t resist its oddly magnetic pull as I started to negotiate for myself the interactions between music, place and memory. On the same currents there are tributaries and journeys downstream: around the same time, Saint Etienne released the album So Tough (1993) with its London cafes and wistful characters. Far ahead, so distant that the horizon is not yet touching the sky, a group called Real Lies would write lyrics about men who drink in A-road pubs on the outskirts, failing to spot the promise of escape in the rave flyers pinned up by the door.

London is an essay on “a city in decline”, something is reinforced again and again in the narration that is at its heart a poem, delivered with a public information urgency by actor Paul Scofield. The narrator’s fictional identity is never revealed. All we know is that he is the intellectual companion and sometime lover of Robinson, the irritable but idealistic figure at the centre of events. London is the first in a trilogy of films about England’s capital city, followed by Robinson In Space and Robinson In Ruins; all of them set in UK general election years.

My first viewing of London started my own mental journey from my upbringing in North Yorkshire to the capital. Who was Robinson, the beleaguered art lecturer at the heart of the film, and what did he want me to know? The narrator describes a breakthrough in Robinson’s “investigations” but, in between Baudrillard quotes and “exercises in psychic landscaping” there’s no real clue as to what is being investigated other than the nebulous “problem of London”. What is urgent is the sense of journeys being taken, both through the politics of the day and a pilgrimage to the source of English romanticism. Through Robinson, there is nostalgia in the smell of urine in a phone box.