Support small publishers. They reach the parts others do not reach. I
purchased a copy of ‘Real Bloomsbury’ by Nicholas Murray the other day, part of
the ‘Real’ series by the marvellous Bridgend imprint, Seren. Check them out.
Some wonderful poetry and general ‘Welsh-iana’. As well as poetry collections
by contemporary poets they publish town and regional guides – Real
Newport by the poet Ann Drysdale (‘Tidy’), Real Cardiff by series editor Peter
Finch, even Real Merthyr (‘Fair do’s) and Real Aberystwyth.
Now they’ve ventured over the border, and it's not Real Bristol or Real
Liverpool as one might expect – but Real Bloomsbury. The titles beg some
questions, of course. Is there a ‘false’ Bloomsbury, an ‘inauthentic’ Merthyr?
But you get the idea.
‘It gives a good walking tour of Bloomsbury,’ said the manager of Skoob
Books as I browsed in the Aladdin’s Cave basement they’ve been driven into by
vertiginous Brunswick rents. He’d been explaining as much to three American
tourists who’d clearly been wondering why it was full of second-hand books and
not the latest Harry Potter. It’s a second-hand book shop, ladies. The clue is
in the title.
‘It doesn’t mention us,’ he complained.
‘Ah, yes, but it does,’ I chirped. I’d had a sneak preview in the
library at Goodenough College and noticed a passing reference.
He flicked through the pages, looking for it. ‘But not in the index ...’
But it is there. As are Judd Books on Marchmont Street, various
statues, fountains, squares and gardens and more blue-plaques than you could
possibly take in on an afternoon’s stroll. As the blurb on the dust-jacket
tells us, ‘he even mentions Virginia Woolf.’
Another question begged – why Bloomsbury? Why has Seren bounded over Offa’s
Dyke and missed out Swindon (silly question), Marlborough, Reading (another silly
question) or Hounslow? Might it be because the London Welsh have their
Headquarters here, just on the boundary between Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell?
Some 30 years ago now I met some London Welsh by chance in a tremendous pub in
Holborn – which I’ve yet to find since. The Welsh are there. There in Llundain, chief city of the Island of the Mighty. There were there before David Jones marched away In Parenthesis (I bought a copy of that in Skoob), before they buried the head of Bendigeidfran under the White Hill where London's Tower now stands. They are there in
Bloomsbury among the academics and the students, the guest-houses and hotels,
the hospitals and the headquarters of all manner of wierd and wonderful
organisations. |
| 'An extremely accurate MAP of Mac.' |
For that reason, and many others, Bloomsbury deserves the Seren
treatment. Perhaps all towns do. Even Swindon. Give me a chance and I’ll write
one (well, not about Swindon). I’m tuned into genius loci and my eldest
daughter has taken to drawing mind-maps of the places she visits. She took
herself up to Macclesfield (Mac’) the other day to visit her grandmother in
hospital. She found her own way there by train and on foot and drew a map of
the place when she got home. The route
from the train station to the hospital takes in Poundland (‘Yes, everything’s
£1’), The Cheshire Building Society, a Big Sports Field, and a ‘wierd
school-like building – possibly a school?’ – which is the best description of
the exclusive King Edward’s School I’ve heard so far. There are also some ‘really
gorgeous old houses’, a ‘cute Victorian museum’ (‘Must visit, it has mummies
and stuff’).
‘It kind of counts as a day out,’ my daughter records, pathetically
perhaps, but then, we live in Cheshire. ‘It
also kind of counts as Manchester,’ she also observes, rather hyperbolically.
She is 16 and like I say, we do live in Cheshire ...
‘Weren’t Joy Division from here?’ she asks (she’s seen Control and
keeps nicking my albums), ‘Or was that Salford?’
Quick, someone write a Real Macclesfield and answer her questions.
