I have been thinking about writing this blog entry for a while, but I have not been sure how to go about it. Indeed, I am still unsure I have thought about it enough. I have lived in London for almost two years, and I think there is something about one’ relationship with space and area which is fundamentally different when you live in a city. That is to say, you see space differently in a city than when you live in a town. I grew up in a town in Cheshire; although, as a kid, it seemed a big enough place, looking back it now seems minute compared with the enormity of London.

The towns and villages of Cheshire are surrounded by countryside. Of one lived in, say, Congleton and wanted to go shopping in Macclesfield, you would have to get into a ca or onto a bus and travel the seven miles or so between the towns; there is a clear division between the two places, a definite space between them made up of fields. This is not the case in a mega-city like London. London itself is the size of Cheshire, by my reckoning, and indeed has it’s own subdivided areas, such as Charlton and Woolwich and so on. As shown on this map, which I came across a few days ago, such places were once clearly divided – before they became incorporated into London, they were towns unto their selves. That is presumably why Woolwich still refers to itself as a town with it’s own town centre, and Charlton is still referred to as a village.

The thing that I find a bit odd to reflect upon, as a writer, commentator and flaneur, is that these areas do not function in the same way that they usually do. A ‘town’ in

London is not the same as a ‘town’ elsewhere. Towns seem to occupy less geographical space in London than hey do outside of it. That is to say, the area known as Woolwich is far smaller than, say, the area known as Congleton; and although its called a village, I reckon Charlton is more akin in terms of the space it occupies to a hamlet. Areas with their own individual names are also much closer together than they are elsewhere: I can easily get to Woolwich in my chair from here in Charlton, but would be very reluctant to try driving between Congleton and Macclesfield – it is just too far. In fact, I think Woolwich is closer to us than my parents place is to Congleton town centre. Moreover, down here places blur: because there are no fields down here, no ‘buffer zone’ between places, only more houses, it is hard to say where Charlton ends and Woolwich begins.

This does strange things to how you perceive space and geography mentally. Your concept of what is near and what is far away changes. For example, my grandmother’s house in Harlesden can be no more than seven miles away from here as the crow flies, but in London terms, because the route we’d have to take to get there would be so complicated, my mental perception is that it is very far away. It is as if London is it’s own world with different geographic rules. You come to see space and area differently down here; you think less about direction and more about bus routes and traffic when considering how to get somewhere. I suppose Walter Benjamin was right when he said that living in a cit does strange things to one psychologically. I don’t thin I’m going anywhere with these mussing, and as I say they are probably incomplete, but it strikes me as odd that one’s sense of geography is so different down here.