Fitzrovia Phantasmagoria: Notes for a Newman Passagenwerk

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FITZROVIA PHANTASMAGORIA: NOTES FOR A NEWMAN PASSAGENWERK An eye slowly opens onto a nocturnal vision of London’s Fitzrovia. We are watching Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a controversial cult film first released in 1959. Within moments of introducing us to Mark Lewis, the duffel-coated protagonist, Powell places the spectator in the voyeuristic position of a peeping tom. The eye of the audience is aligned with the cine-camera concealed in Lewis’s duffel-coat. We gaze in vivid colour onto the lamplit artifice of Upper Rathbone Place through the cross-hairs of the lens.1 In a prophetic gesture towards the violence of subsequent events, a woman in a red skirt stares at the disembodied limbs and torsos of mannequins in a shop window while she waits alone on this deserted street.2 The woman is Dora, a prostitute who tells Lewis plainly: ‘It’ll be two quid’. The director unswervingly implicates the audience in this transaction, forcing the spectator to gaze through the camera’s viewfinder while following Dora back towards an adjacent passageway. As we turn into this covered alley, the cross-hairs of the lens target the back of her neck between her badly dyed blonde hair and the red-blonde corpse of her fox-fur wrap. If we pause the film on a felicitous frame, we can delve into the optical unconscious of the image, taking our time to read a street sign bolted to the brickwork wall that Dora passes in a state of habitual distraction. Above the blood-red characters of the W1 postcode, black letters on a white background inform us that we are in Newman Passage.

It seems appropriate while paused on the threshold of Newman Passage to comment on the title of this essay and its playfully serious reference to the work of Walter Benjamin. The fragments of text that constitute Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project are arranged in thematic folders that cover a broad range of topics from Boredom to Baudelaire, Fashion to The Flâneur, Idleness to Iron Construction. These folders are known as convolutes and comprise a series of notes and often lengthy quotations that Benjamin sequenced into a provisional order. The work was an experiment in literary montage that occupied Benjamin for the last thirteen years of his life, a period largely marked by enforced exile from his native Germany after the rise to power of the Nazis, during which the financial and physical

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Upper Rathbone Place currently bears the name Rathbone Street. For an alternative account of this opening scene, see Laura Mulvey, ‘The Light that Fails: A Commentary on Peeping Tom’, in The Cinema of Michael Powell: International Perspectives on an English Film-Maker, ed. by Ian Christie and Andrew Moor (London: BFI, 2005), pp. 143-55. 2 In his convolute on prostitution and gambling, Walter Benjamin writes: ‘The corset as the torso’s arcade.’ [O1a,3]. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 492.

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circumstances he found himself in became increasingly precarious. An intriguing conceptual entrance to the Arcades Project involves Benjamin’s use of the term phantasmagoria. The term initially signified a magic lantern show in which the projector or ‘Phantascope’ was concealed (like the camera secreted in Mark Lewis’s duffel-coat) while the projectionist deployed an array of smoke and mirrors and auditory effects to create the illusion of a procession of ghosts. The term quickly escaped the confines of its theatrical milieu to be applied more generally to any mental condition that involved hallucinatory experience.3 Benjamin tunes in to this latter sense when he studies the supernatural vocabulary that recurs in various places throughout the work of Karl Marx, particularly via the phantasmagorical relations between things that invert the reified social relations between people that underpins Marx’s discussion of the fetish character of the commodity. Benjamin identifies the phantasmagoria as both a relevant technological object and a resonant key term from the very era with which his materialist history is principally concerned: the early nineteenth century. The Arcades Project is also referred to as the Passagenwerk after the Parisian passages or arcades that form the hub around which the diverse convolutes are orientated. From this perspective, the emergence in the early nineteenth century of the architectural form of the arcade as a novel urban space where commodities and consumers were on display coincides with the birth of capitalist modernity and the increasing colonization of everyday life by the commodity form. Sensitized to the literal and metaphorical implications of the different architectural typologies of the era, Benjamin wrote two capsule summaries or exposés of the evolving Arcades Project, the first in 1935 and the second in 1939. In both versions, he juxtaposes historical figures with what could be categorized as a combination of scripted or spontaneous spaces: Arcades, World Exhibitions, the Interior, the Streets of Paris, Barricades. What follows will circulate around ideas of the scripted and the spontaneous, the coincidental and the composed, in relation to the architectural and cultural convolutions associated with Newman Passage. These convolutions also form a pleasingly vague port of entry into certain preoccupations that have in recent decades become characteristic components of London psychogeography.

For a compelling discussion of the importance of the phantasmagoria as a concept in Benjamin’s work, see Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1993). On the history of the phantasmagoria, see also Terry Castle, ‘Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie’, Critical Inquiry, 15.1 (Autumn 1988), 27-61. 3

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Press play and let the next few seconds of Peeping Tom unfold uninterrupted as Dora opens a door in the side of the passageway and ascends a staircase. Built in 1746, Newman Passage can be viewed as a stark brickwork precursor to the iron and glass Parisian arcades through which Benjamin’s disruptive study spirals. By bringing together the prostitute and the nascent arcade of Newman Passage, Peeping Tom loosely juxtaposes the same examples of a ‘dialectical image’ that Benjamin discusses in his 1935 exposé when outlining the project’s main themes. The film foregrounds Dora as the primary commodity for sale. For Benjamin, the prostitute is both ‘seller and sold in one’, a figure that explicitly unites the commodity form with the usually encrypted social relations of production and consumption.4 The corollary, that all work is prostitution, is a familiar sentiment within architecture perhaps best exemplified by Philip Johnson’s frequent description of himself as a ‘whore’. But to return to the narrative point of the scene as we ascend to Dora’s rather prosaic bedsit, with the emphasis on point for those already familiar with how the victims are killed in this film, a point soon to be repeated but not yet revealed in all its distorted psychological horror, it is also useful to recall the technical analogy that Benjamin makes in his ‘Work of Art’ essay between the surgeon penetrating the body of the patient and the cameraman penetrating deeply into the web of reality. This analogy develops an earlier observation in the same essay that the ‘audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera’.5 Our eye is perfectly level with the lens of the camera, all the technical trappings of the film shoot would be revealed if we were to step back a fraction from our given position of identification. The phantasmagoria would dissolve as cables and cameras, equipment and technicians revealed the artifice behind the recording of this illusory reality. It is not that Benjamin thinks that the spectators of a film are so ill-informed as to believe that what they are watching is real, it is that they are so well-trained in disabling that knowledge (in much the same way that they habitually disregard the architecture that surrounds them) that the filmmakers can potentially manipulate their emotions. From a metafictional perspective, Powell directly addresses this process in later scenes in Peeping Tom that occur in a film studio where a fictional film within the film is being made about a killer on the loose. Tellingly, Powell’s psychopathic Lewis is the focus-puller on set. But a similar subversion occurs in this opening scene where Benjamin’s observation regarding the audience’s identification is literally enacted by the placing of the viewer in the position of the cine4

Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 10. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 219-53 (p. 230). 5

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camera whose cross-hairs remind us of the narrative presence of a fictional camera through which we imagine ourselves to be looking. The complexity of the nested gaze within which the plot of Peeping Tom unwinds includes a gradual dissociation of the spectator’s perspective from that directly located with Lewis. While this movement enables an audience to develop a kind of perverse sympathy for a serial killer, the tightly controlled arc of Powell’s film does not fit the stereotype of an exploitative slasher flick in which an audience is asked to gratuitously relish the murder of young women. Its concern is with the gap between fantasy and reality in which the violence not only fails to satisfy either the protagonist or the conventionally masculine gaze of the audience but also produces an ambience of psychological unease irrespective of gender.6 By emphasizing the wider implications of violence in what could be categorized as a society of the spectacle, Peeping Tom resists superficial interpretations of its generic status as a thriller or a horror movie. In Benjamin’s optimistic analysis of the potential of film, by interrupting the ideological continuum of the present with alternative possibilities for a different way of organizing social and political reality such moments offer a technological variation on the Brechtian alienation effect and contain the potential for a radical awakening from the dream sleep of passive contemplation in which the spectators dwell. The radical design and content of the Arcades Project is intended to prompt a similar response in the reader, its fragments of quotations interrupted from their initial context anticipating the use of détournement by Guy Debord to activate a corresponding methodology for similarly revolutionary ends in The Society of the Spectacle.7 Debord’s role in formulating the theory and practice of psychogeography is also the default setting for defining that problematic term. In his seminal text ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, Debord described the psychogeographical investigations undertaken by himself and other members of the Letterist International in the mid-1950s as research ‘on the arrangement of the elements of the urban setting, in close relation with the sensations they provoke’. Fine tuning the parameters of his definition, Debord observed that psychogeography ‘could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of

For a consistently penetrating reading of perversion, sexuality, and the economy of ‘looking’ within the film, see Parveen Adams ‘Father, can’t you see I’m filming?’, in The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 90-107. 7 See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 2004). 6

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individuals’.8 Stressing the contingency and speculative status of psychogeography as a term, Debord avoids detailing specific restrictions on its applicability. Arguably, such details would have proved problematic to delineate during this early stage of development: although Debord also highlights the need for a methodology of constant ‘critique and self-critique’ regarding the bold hypotheses that result from psychogeographical investigation. From another angle, for Debord to sustain the term’s operative flexibility as a tool for radically transforming the everyday experience of the city, it was important to resist replicating the kinds of prescriptive perspectives and delimited possibilities that he had begun to identify as part of the urban planner’s lexicon of social control. As part of a ‘revolutionary transformation of the world’, psychogeography is ultimately designed to stimulate an awakening in the ‘masses’ of ‘the conditions that are imposed on them in all domains of life, and to the practical means of changing them’. By literally incorporating ‘geography’, psychogeography maintains a link with a ‘materialist perspective’ capable of registering the causal connections between ‘objective nature’ and social and economic structures.9 Outlining the scope of psychogeography in its adjectival form, Debord advances yet more definitional disclaimers: The adjective psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.10 In its emphasis on ‘a rather pleasing vagueness’, this passage also provides an important reference point for considering how other investigations that ‘reflect the same spirit of discovery’, however different in surface appearance, have the potential to be classified as psychogeography. One of the touchstones for this psychogeographical ‘spirit of discovery’ involves studying how the disregarded spaces and unremarked rhythms of city life have a capacity to expose existing conditions of alienation and reveal a potential for liberation. As a practical application of critical urbanism, psychogeography originated as part of a tool-kit for this liberation. It became a form of active engagement with the environment through the spatial practice of the dérive, a method of sensitizing oneself to the barely perceptible shifts in the psychological contours of the city, of becoming attentive to the ways in which one’s Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a critique of geography’ in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. by Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989), pp. 5-8 (p. 5). 9 Debord, ‘Critique of Urban Geography’, in Knabb, SI Anthology, p. 8. 10 Debord, ‘Critique of Urban Geography’, in Knabb, SI Anthology, p. 5. 8

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experience is conditioned by the space through which one drifts, of gathering information on the arrangement of the components of each of the unities of ambience encountered while drifting and to chart what Debord termed ‘their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses’. Deploying such methods one ‘measures the distances that effectively separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them’. One can then survey the urban plaques tournantes that confirm the ‘central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points’.11 Using this method, the city was supposed to materialize as a fragmented landscape where encrypted lines of force could be decoded to illuminate the spectacle’s diffusion of power.

Back in her bedsit in the plaque tournante of Newman Passage, Dora screams into the lens. Suddenly, the disorientating credit sequence for Peeping Tom is set in motion, replaying the previous scene, returning us to Upper Rathbone Place in nocturnal Fitzrovia. The immediacy of the camera eye has now been replaced with a black-and-white projection on a screen within a screen. We are now watching Lewis in his private projection room watching the murder that he has recently committed. The film abounds in such repetitions and visual echoes, creating a self-reflexive labyrinth of suggestive symmetries through different iterations of similar patterns, symbols, colours, plots, and settings. The script was written by Leo Marks who had been a cryptographer during the Second World War. By the time he was twenty-four, Marks was in charge of an entire section of the Special Operations Executive that dealt with training secret agents and receiving their coded messages from occupied Europe. During this period Marks sensitized himself to the setting and breaking of code, understanding that the key to code-breaking involved listening for frequencies of repetition that could then be deciphered to reveal the patterns of mutation and transposition around which the code had been generated. Duly sensitized, Marks began listening for repetitionfrequencies everywhere, even deducing the menstrual cycles of female colleagues from periodic slippages in the usual high standard of their work.12 As a child, Marks had been brought up in 84 Charing Cross Road. The antiquarian bookshop celebrated in the book and film of that name was co-owned and run by his father. Marks became fascinated by the coded prices that appeared on each of the books and quickly learnt how to decipher their meaning. Another early influence on Marks’s interest in codes had been his reading of the methodology deployed by Freud when listening to his patients. At the end of the 1950s, Marks was invited 11 12

Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive’, in Knabb, pp.50-54 (p. 53). See Leo Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War 1941-1945 (London: HarperCollins, 1998).

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by Powell to write a screenplay for a Freud biopic only to discover that John Huston was already working on a similar project. As a replacement, Marks proposed his code-obsessed script for Peeping Tom.13 In an essay entitled ‘The Eye of Horror’, Carol J Clover explores the double vision of the film’s opening by tracking the ways in which the ‘present’ gaze is repeated by a ‘contemplative’ gaze.14 As an additional comment on this doubling, the cinematographer’s name – Otto Heller – is overlaid over the climax of the recorded murder. And as our murderer with a movie camera sinks into his director’s chair after seeming to orgasm through his contemplation of the killing, Michael Powell’s own name is overlaid on the projector. Clover’s focus on the doubling of the gaze can be usefully compared with Graeme Gilloch’s split-screen account of urban optics, in which Benjamin’s approach to film, phantasmagoria and the city is itself compared with the work of Siegfried Kracauer. Watching Berlin from his window in 1931, Kracauer differentiated between two types of cityscape – that which is deliberately constructed and that which fleetingly arises by a process of chance and improvisation. Gilloch notes how this distinction mirrors Kracauer’s later analysis of two competing cinematic tendencies: the ‘formative’, those elements structuring the narrative order of a film; and the ‘realist’, the camera’s capacity to capture the contingencies of everyday life, something akin to the technological model of Benjamin’s optical unconscious.15 Indeed, without abandoning Benjamin’s valuable insights, and at the risk of disappearing down a theoretical cul-de-sac like the one that runs south from the middle of Newman Passage, it seems that the coordinates of Kracauer’s theory could also be productively mapped onto Clover’s doubling of the gaze and other related Fitzrovian material filed under psychogeography. For Kracauer, as for Benjamin, there seemed to be no space or time for the contemplative gaze amongst the streets of the modern metropolis. The urban inhabitant of the early twentieth-century, like that of the early twenty-first, was immersed in a turbulent present, constantly bombarded and distracted by sensory stimuli while traversing the restless city: much as the gaze of Powell’s protagonist is interrupted by other onlookers 13

See Leo Marks, Michael Powell, Chris Rodley, Peeping Tom (London: Faber, 1998). Carol J. Clover, ‘The Eye of Horror’, in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing a Film, ed. by Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 184-230. Clover coined the term ‘final girl’ for the trope of the (usually virginal or less sexually predatory) survivor of slasher movies, a term applicable to Anna Massey’s character in Peeping Tom. See Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: BFI, 1992). 15 Graeme Gilloch, ‘Urban Optics: Film, Phantasmagoria and the City in Benjamin and Kracauer’, New Formations, 61 (Summer 2007), 115-31. See also Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 60-74. 14

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while trying to document the aftermath of his shocking act. These ideas of the doubling of the gaze and of the co-existence of the spontaneous and scripted city open up a navigable route that links Newman Passage to the emergence of a particular London psychogeography and its tendency to sensitize itself to the repetition-frequencies of certain sets of patterns.

In his autobiography A Life in Movies, Michael Powell implicitly references the kind of gooseflesh Gothic with which this variant psychogeography has come to be associated: If you want to know what Upper Rathbone Place looks like you can see it in the opening shots of Peeping Tom. There is a narrow arched passage – Newman Passage – leading though to Newman Street that gives you gooseflesh just to look at it: they say it is associated with Jack the Ripper.16 Although Powell’s rumour of a Ripper connection seems of doubtful historical provenance, the association resonates with the ongoing incorporation of the Whitechapel murders into the expanding constellation of London Gothic and its psychogeographical tributaries. Towards the end of the last millennium, Iain Sinclair’s delirious mapping of the occult alignments between the early eighteenth-century London churches designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor supplied a nascent London psychogeography with an infamous cluster of architectural pivotal points and an influential methodology for producing alternative narratives of the city and urban experience.17 In the wake of Sinclair’s continued association with the kinds of spatial and textual practice from which such speculative theses are derived, and the identification made by Sinclair and others in the 1990s that such imaginative speculations could be productively reconceptualized as psychogeography (enabling the Hawksmoor churches to be retrospectively designated as psychogeographical hubs equivalent to Debord’s plaques tournantes), it can be argued that the subsequent trajectory of this predominantly London strand of psychogeography has swerved away from the revolutionary impulses theorized by Debord towards a more literary phenomenon. The hermetic conspiracies and Gothic associations mischievously threaded throughout Sinclair’s work have been sampled by such diverse writers as Peter Ackroyd and Alan Moore. The relative popularity of the kind of London psychogeography commonly aligned with the increasingly melodramatic and Gothicized representations of the city found in the work of such writers have threatened to swamp the streets of Whitechapel with budding dérivistes for whom Jack the Ripper becomes 16 17

Michael Powell, A Life in Movies: An Autobiography (London: Faber, 2000), p. 217. See Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat (London: Albion Village Press, 1975).

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a disturbingly compelling synecdoche of the violence and criminality attached to specific locations. Preoccupied by examples of this ‘dark heritage’ and other phantasmagorical forms of the city’s secret histories and neglected spaces, London psychogeography has also provided marketable narratives that have contributed to the gentrification of certain neighbourhoods. The cultural history of Newman Passage is ripe for exploiting in this manner as billionaire property developers attempt a commercial rebranding of Fitzrovia into Noho (searching for a lucrative North-West passage North of Soho). Powell’s reference to the Gothic qualities of Newman Passage also connect to the writer Julian Maclaren-Ross – a key figure in the literary history of Fitzrovia – and to another paradigmatic narrative of late-Victorian urban Gothic: Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. An essay on Maclaren-Ross by Sinclair’s regular collaborator, the filmmaker and author Chris Petit, forms a convenient bridge between Powell’s film and these topics. Petit begins his essay by chronicling how in the early 1970s when he first came to London he began to track down film locations from Blow-Up, The Passenger, Performance, Frenzy. He writes: I would visit these places and feel a little less anonymous, a little more specific, and by patiently stitching them together I made my own map of the city [. . .] until fact and fiction blurred into myth. The most significant borderline between the two became Newman Passage, known but not discovered properly until seeing the opening of Michael Powell’s film Peeping Tom, with its sex murder in that alley. Newman Passage is not a portal, like the archway into Soho in Manette Street but a partly roofed, narrow alley-way with a hidden dog-leg, out of sight of either end. The lack of clear sight-lines, and the alley’s crooked cul-de-sac, are responsible for its sinister reputation and history of sexual assignations. It is the perfect movie location for a murder.18

Christopher Petit, ‘Newman Passage or J. Maclaren-Ross and the case of the Vanishing Writers’, in The Time Out Book of London Short Stories, ed. by Maria Lexton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), pp. 185-95 (p. 185). For an early acknowledgement of connections between Petit’s own films and Powell’s Peeping Tom, see Patricia Erens, ‘Home Movies in Commercial Narrative Film’, Journal of Film and Video, 38 (1986), 99-101. Erens identifies both Petit’s 1982 adaptation of An Unsuitable Job For a Woman and Peeping Tom as films in which home movies provide clues to our understanding of the actions of two different characters called Mark. Erens explains that in Peeping Tom ‘the main narrative and the home movies are so intertwined that it is difficult to separate them. Each comment self-reflexively on the other like Chinese boxes’ (p. 101). In the spirit of the same kind of self-reflexivity and compulsive associationism that haunts the psychogeography of Petit and Sinclair (and with which sustained research into that work can find itself replicating), it seems justified to comment that Petit had made a film titled Chinese Boxes the year before directing An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. 18

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In Memoirs of the Forties, Maclaren-Ross sketches a series of captivating portraits of Fitzrovia’s bohemian milieu. In a section titled ‘Fitzrovian Nights’, he stitches together his own map of the quarter by categorizing the pubs of Rathbone Place together with their patrons and other neighbourhood landmarks. Like Petit, Maclaren-Ross includes a capsule summary of Newman Passage that also references its sinister and sexual aspects alongside its cinematic qualities. He explains that it had the nickname: Jekyll and Hyde Alley because it was the sort of place through which Mr Hyde flourishing his stick rushes low-angle on the screen: this passage contained a pub called the Beerhouse because spirits were not served there, and behind it, to the left, was a warehouse yard piled with cardboard boxes into which one sometimes guided girls in order to become better acquainted.19 To loiter, as it were, around this passage about Newman Passage, the Jekyll and Hyde reference, like Powell’s suggested Ripper association, aligns the convoluted angles of Newman Passage with the deviant and deviating tradition of London Gothic. By the mid1950s, Maclaren-Ross’s penchant for self-mythologizing had deteriorated into what could be characterized as a Gothic paranoia exacerbated by his unrequited obsession with George Orwell’s widow, Sonia Orwell, the ‘Venus of the Euston Road’. Orwell’s connection to Fitzrovia is well-documented. The Newman Arms next to Newman Passage is reputed to be the prole pub in 1984. While pursuing Sonia Orwell, Maclaren-Ross insisted on being addressed as Mr Hyde and claimed that he had been possessed by Stevenson’s villain.20 The stick he visualizes Hyde flourishing while rushing ‘low-angle on the screen’, corresponds to his own silver-topped cane. ‘Fucking dandy. Flourishing that stick’, said Dylan Thomas in reaction to Maclaren-Ross’s appearance as they wandered through war-time Fitzrovia after a day in their shared office at Strand Films.21 Such elective affinities and compulsive associationism are the staple of London psychogeography. Reframing Kracauer’s coordinates through Stevenson’s novella, we could plot Hyde’s unconstrained behavior onto the spontaneous and coincidental, while the austere self-control exemplified by the lawyer Utterson represents a systematic adherence to the scripted and composed. Another angle of approach would focus on Jekyll’s elegant town house. Although situated in a respectable West End square, the back door through which he enters and exits after transforming into

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Julian Maclaren-Ross, Memoirs of the Forties (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 [1965]), p. 154. See Petit, ‘Newman Passage’, p. 192. For a comprehensive account of the life and work of Maclaren-Ross, see Paul Willets, Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia (Stockport: Dewi Lewis, 2003), p. 288. 21 Maclaren-Ross, Memoirs of the Forties, p. 123. 20

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Hyde leads into an impoverished neighbourhood that more closely resembles an East End slum. As Roger Luckhurst has persuasively argued this ‘physical split reinforces the division of personality: London becomes a psychic topography’.22 In conclusion, both through its physical presence and through its cultural representations, Newman Passage can also be viewed as a psychic topography that acts as a veritable Fitzrovian phantasmagoria. In this reading, the division of personality that Stevenson projects onto the physical city is replaced by a dialectical movement between the co-existing spaces and temporalities identified by Kracaeur and Clover. Newman Passage is where the present gaze of the contemporary city meets the contemplative gaze of that city’s haunting and traumatic repetitions. Instead of connecting London’s West End and East End through the staggered architecture of Jekyll’s residence, Fitzrovia’s own Jekyll and Hyde Alley connects the ways in which, to repeat Petit’s phrase, ‘fact and fiction’ blur into ‘myth’. Composed as part of the Berners Estate, Newman Passage is a Georgian scripted space. Yet to be coated with a veneer of heritage, it is also a place that unofficially encourages the development of an ‘antiquarian eye’.23 Walking down the echoing flagstones, the speculative time-traveller can mentally screen out traces of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Meanwhile, especially at night, uncertainty arises as to just what kind of spontaneous encounter lies hidden immediately around the corner. In the strange case of Newman Passage, such moments contain the potential for psychopathic figures like Jack the Ripper, Mr Hyde, or Powell’s Mark Lewis to be projected into a phantasmagorical existence. Finally, to borrow again from Benjamin, and bearing in mind the architectural form of the space, we could summarize the preceding by saying that Newman Passage telescopes the past through the present.24 This is neither to deny or to forget that we are constantly, simultaneously, negotiating the actual and imagined cities that we haunt: a process through which London is always becoming a kind of psychic topography, a city ripe for its variant psychogeographers to ravish like vampires or ravage like vultures, or simply to record like voyeurs of a film that always deserves another viewing.

Roger Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. vii-xxxii (pp. xxviii-xxix). 23 Rob Young describes the ‘antiquarian eye’ as ‘a mental trick comparable to the way that makers of period films and costume dramas are required to compose shots in order to exclude modern features’. See Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music (London: Faber, 2010), p. 53. 24 Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 471. 22