The Southbank is one of my most favourite places but not because it’s a place. Let me explain. Yes, ok, I could visit to the Southbank from just about anywhere in the country. It’s big enough and bold enough to suck people in from just about anywhere in the world, in fact. So I’m not just talking about the Southbank: I’m talking about the ability to make a short journey there; I’m talking about being in the same city as the Southbank . One of the best things about London and one of the things I’ll miss the most is that sense of connectedness, that sense that my paths take me to the Southbank and away from it again and back towards it: like there’s an invisible map of my feet, palimpsest-style, across the Charing Cross Bridge and back. The Southbank isn’t just a favourite place it’s a favourite walk:
- Start at Leicester Square.
- Go down Charing Cross Road.
- Walk past St. Martins, down towards Charing Cross Station.
- Go through the station and over the bridge.
- Get down to street-level.
- Walk along the Thames, past the restaurants, the skateboarders, the outdoor books.
- Keep going until you get to the Tate Modern and the Globe.
- Go over the bendy bridge, towards St Paul’s Cathedral.
- Walk through Paternoster Square.
- Finish up at St. Paul’s tube station.
There are so many favourite London places along that route. Silvermoon Bookshop has gone but I can feel its ghost as I walk past. Watkins Books and the pub selling nice pies on the corner are both still there, though I hardly ever visit them, so is the Crypt in the bottom of St Martin’s. Both the sense of being able to go there and the physical journey are an important part of the Southbank’s attraction: I can feel it pulling me in like a magnet.
I’m also talking about the places and experiences the Southbank contains. I’ve loved that walk and the way it has changed since I first moved to London nearly 20 years ago, but I only really felt the Southbank itself open up for me a few years ago: when I took part in Various Voices, a LGBT choir festival held in London in 2009. I had such an overwhelming sense of achievement and pride going to join hundreds of other gay people on the Southbank that summer. That was when I got a little chink of the Southbank wedged in my heart. I’ll try to break it down. These are all things I do in the place:
- Standing on the bridge, watching the buses and the boats and looking at St. Paul’s in the distance. Wishing I could capture it in a photograph and realising how impossible that is. Often, the coldness of standing on that bridge. Listening to / remembering those guys who used to play kettle drums.
- Wandering around the Royal Festival Hall.
- Sitting in the Royal Festival Hall. Just because it’s liberating that you can do nothing or write or read or drink tea.
- Eating in Wagamama or Canteen, just because it makes me think of all the times we’ve done it before.
- Eating at the Slow Food Market. This springs up outside Canteen sometimes. Such a lovely thing to be able to buy a burger or some noodles or a brownie and go and sit by the Thames. And that brings me to:
- Sitting by the Thames with a notebook. This is something I used to do years ago with serious intention. I mean I would go down there for that reason and fill pages and pages. Writing – writing anything at all – in a particular place for a particular amount of time is a way of turning off the internal censor for a while.
- Hanging out in Benugo. More recently, I’ve got a soft spot for Benugo, the bar in the British Film Institute. It’s pretty hard to find, which is part of the fun. We’ve only been there once without our Little One. That time we had cocktails. He’s fallen asleep for long enough for us to have brunch and read the papers on a couple of occasions.
- Watching the Thames and eating a posh lunch at the Skylon. Not very often but very memorable.
- Reading magazines in the Poetry Library.
- Walking back towards the tube. Leaving it behind. Knowing it will be there when I come back.