What the City Remembers

A renamed square goes on answering to its old name for decades. Nobody I know calls it Unity Square. It was the Haymarket for two hundred years, then it was renamed in 1998 after a council vote that I am told was close, and it is still the Haymarket to anyone over forty and to most of the bus drivers.

For a month I walked the same two-mile route at dawn, before the delivery vans and the joggers, and wrote down what had changed since the day before and what had quietly stayed the same. The list of things that stayed the same was always longer.

Fig. 2. Windows on Mercer Lane, lit before the shops open. Drawing by Almanac.

Two miles at dawn

The route never changed:

1. Start at my front door on Calder Road.

2. Down past the shuttered launderette.

3. Over the railway at the footbridge.

4. Along Station Parade to the library.

5. Through the Haymarket.

6. Home along the canal towpath.

Two miles, give or take, about forty minutes at the pace of someone carrying a notebook. I started on the first of October and finished on the thirty-first. I missed two mornings, one to a cold and one to an alarm I slept through.

Dawn mattered more than I expected. In October it arrives at around a quarter past seven, early enough that the city has not yet put its face on. Somewhere around the footbridge, every day, there is a minute when street light and daylight are in the air at once and everything looks slightly unreal, like a set that has been built and not yet used.

I wrote in a small notebook with a pencil, standing still, which made me look either like an inspector or like someone who had lost something. A man walking a greyhound asked me on the ninth day whether I was from the council. I said no. He seemed disappointed.

The stubborn details

A painted advertisement for a bakery that closed in 1974 is still visible on a brick wall on Mercer Lane when the light is low. It says PELL & DAUGHTER, and underneath, fainter, BREAD DAILY, and underneath that something I could never manage to read. At noon you would walk straight past it. At dawn, with the sun coming in flat from the east, the old lettering stands up from the brick like a watermark.

A kerb near the station is worn smooth in one spot where, for decades, people have stepped off to cross against the lights. The proper crossing is twenty yards further on, and nobody uses it. A bench outside the library has a small brass plaque so polished by hands that the name is almost gone. I can make out “In memory of” and what might be “Eileen”. People touch it when they sit down. Almost everybody does.

A city does not remember in monuments. It remembers in the places where people kept doing the same small thing for a very long time.

A city does not remember in monuments. It remembers in the places where people kept doing the same small thing for a very long time. There is a war memorial in the Haymarket, and it is handsome, and I don’t think I saw anyone look at it once in thirty-one days. The kerb, on the other hand, is in constant use.

None of these details are protected. No one would notice if they disappeared. But together they are the city’s memory, more honest than any museum because nobody arranged them.

What changes overnight

The list of changes was shorter but more restless. A skip appeared outside number 40 Station Parade and was full by the end of the week. A café on the corner of the Haymarket changed its name from Ground Floor to Groundwork. A shopping trolley went into the canal by the lock on the twelfth and was still there on the thirty-first, slowly becoming part of the canal.

The things that stayed tended to stay completely, and the things that went tended to go overnight, so that I would arrive at a spot and know something was missing before I could say what it was. On the twentieth it was a hand-painted sign in a window on Mercer Lane that had said ROOMS for as long as I have lived here.

Over twenty-nine walks I recorded forty-one changes I could be sure of, and I stopped counting the things that stayed the same somewhere past three hundred, because it began to feel like counting the bricks.

Asking the archive

In the third week I took a photograph of the bakery sign up to the local studies room on the top floor of the library, which smells of radiator dust and old card. It is run by a woman called Margery Thew, who has worked there for twenty-six years and who listened to my description with the face of someone being told about a bird they have already seen many times. “Pell’s,” she said. “Everybody asks about Pell’s.”

She brought out a trade directory from 1931, which listed Samuel Pell, baker, at 3 Mercer Lane, and one from 1952, which listed Ada Pell, baker and confectioner, at the same address. Samuel had died in 1947. Ada was his daughter, and she ran the shop on her own for twenty-seven years without ever repainting the sign to take her father off it. I found that more moving than I can easily explain. She was the daughter. She was also, by then, the whole business.

The line I had never been able to read turned out to be WEDDINGS & CHRISTENINGS. Margery found it in a photograph of Mercer Lane from 1958, in which the sign is fresh and a woman who may be Ada is standing in the doorway with her arms folded. I spent most of a Thursday afternoon with that picture, and at ten to five Margery said, kindly, that she would need the box back.

PELL & DAUGHTER. BREAD DAILY. WEDDINGS & CHRISTENINGS.

Painted sign, 3 Mercer Lane, as photographed in 1958

Names that refuse to change

The renaming of the Haymarket shows how little control anyone has over what a place is called. The vote in 1998 was, I eventually learned, twenty-three to twenty-one. The new signs went up that summer. Nothing else happened. The number 14 still announces “Haymarket” in its recorded voice, because nobody ever re-recorded it.

It is not the only case. The footbridge over the railway is known locally as the Iron Steps, although it has been made of concrete since 1971. The canal is the Cut. A pub on Station Parade that changed its name three times in the 2000s is still called the Weighhouse by everyone, which was its name in 1890.

I think names stick because they are used out loud, and a council vote is not. You cannot legislate what someone shouts across a street to a friend. A name changes when the people who say it change, which takes about a generation, and until then the official name is a sort of costume the place wears for letters and maps.

The sign by the bus stop

One of the Unity Square signs, by the bus stop, has been painted over with the word HAYMARKET in careful white capitals. It has been cleaned off and painted again at least three times, by the look of the ghost layers underneath. I never saw anyone near it. It is the only new piece of lettering on the route that is trying to remember something, and it is also, technically, vandalism.

Who else is up

By the second week I had a cast. The man with the greyhound, whose name is Cyril, and whose dog is called Moth. A woman in a tabard who hosed down the step of Groundwork at exactly half past seven. A boy of about fifteen on a bike much too small for him, delivering newspapers. And a road sweeper called Len, who has swept Station Parade on the same early shift for nineteen years.

Len’s version

Len was the best source I found, better than the archive. He knew that the kerb near the station had been replaced once, in the late nineties, and that the new stone had started to wear in the same place within a few years, which suggests the habit belongs to the crossing and not to the stone. He had views on why nobody had fished the trolley out. “It’s the canal people’s,” he said. “Not mine. I’m pavements.”

He also told me something I have not been able to check and have decided to believe, which is that Ada Pell used to give the sweepers a loaf at the end of the week if there was one left over. The man who trained him had known her. So the bakery is remembered in at least two ways on Mercer Lane: in the brick, and in a story one road sweeper told another forty years ago while leaning on a brush.

Against nostalgia

I should admit the obvious doubt. A month of noticing old things can make you unbearable about them. My friend Hannah Drewe, who works in the council’s planning office and has heard me talk about the kerb more than anyone should have to, put it sharply over a drink at the Weighhouse. “You like the worn bits because you didn’t have to live through the wearing,” she said.

She has a point. The worn kerb is a lovely thing, but it is also evidence that for sixty years the crossing was in the wrong place and nobody moved it. The bakery is gone because, as Margery’s files suggested, it could not compete with the supermarket that opened in 1973, the same one now losing its trolleys to the canal. A city’s memory is not a museum, but it is not a kind one either. It keeps what was hard to remove, not what was good.

It keeps what was hard to remove, not what was good.

I do not think that means you should stop noticing. I think it means you should be careful what you conclude. We had a second drink and did not settle it.

Becoming part of it

If you live somewhere long enough, you become part of that memory too. Somewhere there is a patch of pavement worn slightly smoother because you, specifically, kept walking over it on your way to work. It is not a large contribution. It would take several hundred years of you to make a mark anyone could see. But it is there, and it is yours, and it will probably outlast most of what you do on a laptop.

Near the end of the month I went looking for my own mark, which is a vain thing to do and which I recommend. I have lived on Calder Road for eleven years. The front step is a single slab of sandstone, and on the left side, where I put my foot down every time I come home carrying shopping, it is very slightly dished. It might be me. It might be the woman who lived there before me, who stayed thirty years. I think it is probably mostly her. I am working on it.

I still walk the route, though not every day and not always at dawn. The trolley is still in the canal. The bakery sign is still on the wall. Cyril nods to me now, which I take to mean he has decided I am not from the council after all, or has stopped minding. If you want to try this yourself, go early, take a pencil and do not expect anything to happen for the first two weeks. It is mostly a matter of being there for the boring part.