Night-Visiting Songs

Very early on Thursday morning, really just 40 minutes after midnight I had a pair of night visitors. It was my old flat-mate Paul Farley and his pal Neil a producer from Radio 4. They were making a programme, to be broadcast in July as part of a series called London Nights about different people’s experience of nocturnal London. Paul wanted me to recount some of the tales that I’d told him about Kings Cross and living here and also to verify some of his memories from his years here. It had been in Kings Cross that Paul decided he was going to give poetry a go and signed up for the late Michael Donaghy’s evening class at City University; the rest, as they say, is history.

Thus we had a wide-ranging chat over a bottle of wine (it had been a good five years since we previously met) recalling episodes like the early morning caller claiming to be a neighbour and wanting to borrow some kitchen foil as he was “going fishing and needed something to wrap his sandwiches in”; this was a time when you’d regularly find uneaten Kit-kats on the staircase minus their wrapping along with abandoned works. We talked about the crack houses, the prostitutes and the brothels; the night I heard someone shouting “get the shooters” in Midhope Street.

I told him about the days of Rough Trade Distribution being in Collier Street, and lunchtimes in The Malt And Hops (now The Ruby Lounge)on Caledonian Road with Claude Bessy, CP Lee and a host of others, and then sitting out afternoon closing time in cafes and flats around the station and Hillview. The time when Claude lost his bus pass, went to retrieve it from the station and was promptly arrested for possession of speed. He was fined £20 a sum recouped and more through the sale of CP’s hastily-recorded cassette Froggy Went A Courting.


Then there were the cats. In 2006 an oral history CD The Argyle Square Sound Trail was produced by the Kings Cross Voices project. There were amazing stories on there. It was the first time I ‘d heard of the Regent Theatre, formerly The Euston Music Hall, that stood where Camden Town Hall Extension now blights the landscape. It was all where I heard the tale of Fireworks. He was the caretaker based in Midhope House and on Saturday mornings he would bring buckets of water out into Midhope Courtyard which were used to drown excess kittens born on the estate during the previous week. Apparently it was a popular spectator sport for the local kids, but for me it conjured the vision of a pack of ghostly cats swarming around the courtyard.


And then we got on to the whole idea of Kings Cross as a place of power, a crossing point of strong creative currents, of ley lines if you will. The Vale Royal, the Intelligent Playground, the visionary metropolis evoked by Blake in his Golden Quatrain:

The fields from Islington to Marylebone
To Primrose Hill and Saint Johns Wood:
Were builded over with pillars of gold,
And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.

And from thence we came to Rimbaud and Aidan Andrew Dun; of whom more later.