Anatomy of Norbiton: a Circumambulatory by Toby Ferris

 

Here are some segments from a  walk around the bounds of Norbiton reproduced from Anatomy of Norbiton with Toby's permission. For the full text and his beautiful pictures see http://anatomyofnorbiton.org/circumambulatory.html 

'The logic of Norbiton’s streets has nothing to do with its circumference. Their grain is governed by the line of the railway, the routes into Kingston and Wimbledon. If you try to walk its perimeter you are forcing that grain, committing a minor spatial infraction.

 The same can be said of the streets of its interior: they do not lead to other places within Norbiton, but originate and terminate outside it. Their business is not with Norbiton, but across it.

When we walk the circumference of Norbiton, then, we do so as engineers of ideal space armed only with the string and sticks, the ambulatory measure, of our minds; we are engaged in the survey of the anfractuous, perhaps not properly existent fringe of an object which is only now coming into being: Norbiton: Ideal City. By plotting its rational limits, by walking its boundaries, we hope to conjour a more precise feel for it, and its putative interior.

In walking around—circumambulating—we mimic a cosmic rotation. To circumambulate with your right hand to the centre is a solar charm. Thus we circumambulate to blot out sins, to draw down propitious consequences; or to search out the dark side of our moons.

The Greeks, in a ceremony known as amphidromia, processed a new-born child at a brisk pace around the family hearth. Clockwise. According to Grimm¹ in Estonia, the father was obliged to run around the church during baptism. The Hindu bride walks three times around the hearth. Similar customs pertain in Rome, in ancient Japan, in orthodox Greek churches. Plutarch narrates that the Gaul Vercingetorix, before surrendering to Caesar, walked three times round the chair on which Caesar was sitting. Always clockwise.

And we, buried deep in some greater future’s mythical past, deep in Ur-Norbiton: we go widdershins, grinding our gears against the cosmic rotation.

I do not recall my leopard’s choice of direction, but in my head I picture it as counter-clockwise, the creature gently, insistently unwinding the skein of her animal soul.

 

The station is the Great Gate of Norbiton. It stands like a quest barrier on the northern rim of the ward.

Its main entrance is on the Coombe Road looking away from Norbiton; there is an exit also on Norbiton Avenue, leading into the fabled city. Its two platforms, running trains into Wimbledon and Waterloo and out to Kingston and beyond (the trains in fact loop back around the park and return to Waterloo by other routes) are connected by a subway. The borders of Norbiton proper follow the railway line: duck under by the subway and you’re in. Platform 1 is in Canbury; platform 2 is in Norbiton.

On platform 1 there is a modest coffee shed, run by Neville. Neville is fortyish, stout, frets over plastic cups and small change, makes a really very acceptable latté. The inside of the hut is decorated with paintings in which we recognise the hand of his children, vague infantile studies in medieval perspective, where daddy’s head is very big and the rest of the stuff of the world is jinked in anyhow wherever it will fit.

Clarke has a cappuccino sweetened with four little bags of artificial sweetener; Hunter Sidney has a cup of tea; I have a latté; Emmet Lloyd has what we’re having; and Kelley has nothing.

Kelley has his dogs with him: a pair of aristocratic loping greyhounds who pay no attention to any of us for the duration of the walk barring the occasional cock of an ear when Kelley speaks to them; they seem set on a mission of their own, moving through the space of their own contiguous city.

I am growing restless because Neville’s platform is more Canbury than Norbiton, so we drink up our frothy milk, thank Neville, and pass out on to the Coombe Road.

The circumambulation is under way.......'

'Leaving the station on the Coombe Hill side, we work our way up to the northern boundary along Station Road and then Gordon Road.

Gordon Road skirts the railway line and overlooks the back of the telephone exchange on Birkenhead Avenue. Just past the Big Yellow Storage Unit, and before rounding the dogleg at Wickes the builders’ merchant, a concealed path (Orchard Way) leads under the railway arch past Orchard Cottages and out of Norbiton.'

'The river itself is flat, placid, ankle deep. There are plastic bags caught in the weeds and bobbing plastic bottles, and the buzzing of river insects. Its banks are probably well known to children and teenagers, who are accustomed to getting down low to see the terrain, getting into the crawlspace of the world. But this is a little more than we bargained for and we continue, without discussion, down Villiers Road to Lower Marsh Lane, up the far side of the Hogsmill valley towards Surbiton.

Lower Marsh Lane has the feel of the country about it, or at least the feel of those fractal edges of London in its more ungoverned, less compacted use of space. Civ Clarke says that in Rome on an outlying road like this you’d find grubby boys herding goats or piling up washing machines on the hot scrubland by their gypsy encampments. But this is not scrubland; it was no doubt once marshy, the sludgy beds of the Hogsmill spreading itself out in choked oxbows and stagnant meanders. Now it is the sewage works, and the walker is surrounded by invisible wisps of light high gases. The security guards who patrol, we are informed, twenty-four hours a day behind the wire fences might from time to time be led astray in the small hours by the wills-o’-the-wisp, the sewage sprites, dancing over the rich soaked land, the big squelch of river valley and sewage seeping across the land. Perhaps they are sucked down, smiling delirious oracle smiles, to roam the silent dark lost forests for eternity.'