In the South, on the hill in Greenwich park and from my fifth storey window in New Cross, my vista offers Canary Wharf flashing on a clear day, a sea of brick and trees, and London in the distance. Does this mean London is the North? No matter which direction I look or am looking from I tend to think of London as distant, something that is over there, North or South, East or West. A sense of London, this incomprehensible mass that is the city, is permanently elsewhere. Sitting in Deptford Memorial Park on Lewisham Way down the road from New Cross (already location-challenged by numerous place names) eyelevel reveals the blue sky, airplanes and birds. The airplanes move slowly and hypnotically — my gaze follows their path across the sky. The airplanes, they glide. The birds dance and sing. Sometime loners, sometimes a crowd— these birds and airplanes lift my glance north of a ground location. I notice, observe, transfixed. In this space of bird watching time flows differently — I can’t help but think I’ve slipped into somewhere else. I look around to see if anyone else notices these gliding signs. Direction. Walking North. Whether a wander or a destination walk, I lose my sense of location. Direction and location seem less relevant whilst moving. Time, space, and identity collapse into an in-between space. We seldom look at our surroundings. Streets and buildings, even those considered major monuments, are in everyday life little more than backgrounds for introverted thought, passages through which our bodies pass— in this sense cities are felt rather than seen, moved through rather than visually taken in. Anthony Vidler ‘Dead End Street, Warped Space’ Art Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture . MIT, 2002 My sense of being North has become an in-between space; North is looking up at the birds and airplanes — separate from the location on the ground; North is the distant never ending London to the north, an idea, a phenomenon, not a location. To be North walking to London is to enter another dimension with the birds and airplanes. The towering argyle sock of the Swiss Tower floats in and out of vision/existence triggered by the floating airplanes, a distraction simultaneously dislocating and reminding me of the here and now.
Katherine Bourke is a Canadian pho- tographer currently living in Berlin.
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