Titanic: A city's legacy of loss

It takes just a couple of minutes to walk from one end of Southampton’s Oxford Street to the other. But that’s plenty of time to experience just what the Titanic tragedy means to the city that crewed the great ship.

At No 2 Oxford Street, second class steward George Hinckley and vegetable cook James Hutchinson both lost their lives. Three doors down the flat-fronted terrace, third-class steward Bernard Taylor didn’t come back to No 5.

Directly across the street, where No 66 stood, saloon steward Arthur Lawrence, bedroom steward Mr F Ford and third class steward Mr H P Hill all died. As did their next-door neighbour at 67, a German third-class interpreter steward called L Muller.

His house-mate, bath steward James Widgery, was the street’s one Titanic survivor.

Many more men, whose last addresses were Oxford Street’s boarding houses, hotels and the towering red-brick Sailors’ Home, now a Salvation Army hostel, lost their lives when the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank on the night of 14-15 April 1912.

In total, 538 crew from Southampton died. Not much short of the 600 civilians who died during the bombing of the city throughout World War II.

The City of Southampton is approaching the Titanic’s centenary with gusto.

A spanking new SeaCity museum opened on April 10, the anniversary of the ship’s departure. Its interactive exhibits let visitors pilot the Titanic out of Southampton Water; see how they would cope fuelling the boilers with coal; and try their luck at spotting an iceberg using century-old equipment.

Exactly 100 years after the Titanic slipped anchor from Berth 44, which is now the Ocean Dock from which cruise ships still depart, there was an ambitious re-enactment of her leaving on 10 April 1912. The 1929 vintage Tug Tender Calshot stood in for the liner, a recording of the Titanic’s whistle sounded, and a flotilla of ships in Southampton Water hooted in response.

Oxford Street, which is just a few hundred yards from the Titanic’s departure point, played its part. They sell Titanic White Star ale on hand pump in The Grapes, the pub which was the last drinking place for many crew members before they joined the ship. Traders in this now upmarket restaurant district got together recently for a celebration that included “special menus, a Titanic trail… costumed characters and …a special maritime-themed market of local artists and creatives.”

But, despite all the razzmatazz, the loss of the Titanic is still a personal tragedy in Southampton. And because of that, reactions to the 100^th anniversary are more profound than all the feverish activity might suggest.

It is estimated that one in four households in the city’s seafaring heart were touched by the tragedy. Because of that, many Southampton families have a story to tell and mine is no exception. Mercifully, ours is not one of personal tragedy, although it is inextricably wrapped up in what happened on the night of 14-15 April 1912 in the North Atlantic.

My grandfather’s brother, George Bull, was chief clerk of the White Star Line, owners of the Titanic. One of his duties was to deliver valuable items to the line’s ships just before departure, including uncut diamonds bound for New York, and to collect the final, confirmed, passenger lists. He carried out those duties on the Titanic, and was the last crew member to leave before she set sail.

Shortly before the voyage, his great friend Reginald Barker, who was assistant purser on the Titanic, and who sadly perished, asked him to look after his pet grey parrot, rather predictably named Polly, while he was at sea. Polly perched in her brass cage, suspended by a hook from the ceiling of George and Clarissa Bull’s Southampton sitting room, for 15 years or more after her owner died.

George Bull’s son, my great uncle Douglas, now 91 but still hale and hearty, says of the tragedy: “The loss of the Titanic was like the loss of a child for Southampton.”

And, like any deeply personal loss, it wasn’t one the city spoke of very readily to outsiders. But can it really be so powerful a century later?

The Revd Julian Davies, rector of St Mary’s, where he officiates at the annual remembrance service, says: “It’s incredibly real, three generations on. The service is very moving. It touches a very deep and raw part of the city’s experience.” This year’s commemoration, on Sunday [April 15], will have heightened significance.

Mr Davies speaks of a community still in great pain, and only just coming to terms with the tragedy and the personal hurt caused to their families.

“In my position I see the real human tragedy being expressed. The statistics are extraordinary. A quarter of homes lost someone in the poorer parts of the city – St Mary’s, Chapel and Northam.”

It is only in recent years, says Mr Davies, that the hurt caused by such wide-spread loss of life has been expressed: “It was only after 50 years that it began to be discussed,” he says. “It’s only 100 years on that it can be seen in perspective.”

Indeed, Alan Ackerman only learned his grandfather was lost on the Titanic a generation after the event. He says: “I knew he had died young but it wasn’t until we were on holiday one year -  I was married and in my thirties by that time - and I asked my dad how grandfather had died, and he said, ‘Oh, he was on the Titanic’. ‘WHAT!?’ And then the story came out.

“He was Joseph Ackerman, a pantryman, married with four children and with another on the way. My dad was 11 months old when his father died. Grandfather’s brother Albert was also on the ship, and also died. But dad didn’t know much more than that, so we started researching.

“Joseph was in the coal trade, but there was a bitter coal strike at the time. He’d signed-up for a recent voyage on the Oceana [another White Star ship] and again on the Titanic just to earn a bit of money. His body was recovered from the sea and he was taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia. All he had on him were his Oceana papers and a toothbrush.

“Sadly we don’t have a single picture of him.”

It wasn’t only the loss of parents, sons, breadwinners that makes the Titanic’s story such a painful one for Southampton. It was the suffering and deprivation that went on for decades afterwards.

Andrew Huckett of the Mission to Seafarers says: “The memories are bitter not just because of the tragedy itself but because of the way the families of those who died were treated. Of course, there was no social security or national health in those days, and many of the widows and orphans became destitute. There was a relief fund set up but the amounts given were enough just to stop people starving.”

When Douglas Piper’s maternal grandfather John Barnes, a fireman stoker, died on the Titanic he left a wife and six children. Mr Piper says: “My grandmother never remarried, she had six children to bring up and all she got was half a crown to spend at Liptons.”

One of those children suffered from Sydenhams Corea, a disease characterised by rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements affecting the face, feet and hands and known then as St Vitus Dance. Documents from the Titanic Relief Fund itemise regular payments of 3s/6d to keep him in an orphanage, and sums of 2s/6d for the family’s groceries stretching into the Twenties.

Mr Piper, now 78, comes from a family of Southampton merchant seamen. But that’s a tradition that is virtually extinct. He says: “All the males in my family were at sea, including me, now we haven’t got one. There’s just a few from here working on foreign ships.”

Mr Piper is uneasy at the level of interest the anniversary is provoking. The one event he will attend is the St Mary’s commemoration service. As secretary of the Merchant Navy Association he goes every year.

He was offered a ticket to the re-enactment of the Titanic’s departure from Southampton, but for him it was not appropriate: “I’m not so happy about that side of things. All this fuss.” And of the other, more commercial events, he adds: “There are too many people making a shilling out of it. People have got rich off the Titanic and I think that’s disgusting.”

One of Doug Piper’s complaints is that, until now, there has been no one memorial with the names of all those lost from the city. The SeaCity museum corrects that with a listing of the names of all who died, and photographs of many.

But perhaps no memorial can ever be enough. Maybe the plain truth is that no tribute, no exhibition, and certainly no entertainment, can do full justice to the pain the Titanic disaster has bequeathed on the city and its people.

Certainly the most profound engagement I felt with the tragedy of the Titanic was to simply walk some of the many streets – Oxford Street, Back of the Walls, Canal Walk, Orchard Lane, Orchard Place ­ – the now-quiet backways where death came to so many doors, and from where it casts such a long shadow on so many Southampton lives.
                                                                                          - Published: The Tablet, April 2012

The White Star office where George bull worked

George Bull as a young man

George and Clarissa Bull

Titanic memorial, Southampton

Oxford Street, Southampton

The Grapes, the old sailors' pub in Oxford Street, where they now sell Titanic ale

Our Lord in the Attic: Amsterdam's secret church

Little is left hidden in the red light district of Amsterdam.

Here, generally, display is rather more to the point

But, pick your way past the brightly-lit shop windows with their array of human goods and you find something truly hidden – a secret Catholic church created in the loft of a 17^th century, canal-side merchant’s house on Oudezijds Voorburgwal.

Our Lord in the Attic, Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder, has been a church since 1661 – it celebrated its 350^th anniversary in May – and a museum since 1888.

It was the main place of worship forAmsterdam’s Catholics during two centuries of repression – following the so-called Alteration, which transferred power in the city to Protestants in 1578, and under which Catholics could worship, but not in places that were recognisably churches from the outside.

Visitor numbers increased dramatically in the early years of this century until, in the year 2005, 90,000 climbed the winding wooden staircases through the remarkably-intact former-home of merchant Jan Hartman to reach the galleried church above: so many that they became a serious problem.

The church was being profoundly damaged by the tramp of feet, the wet raincoats and hot breath of all those pilgrims.

Something had to be done. But what?

Could the damage and decline be reversed?

Would visitor numbers have to be cut?

And, if restoration were to be conducted –exactly what form should it take?

Our Lord in the Attic had been the surreptitious Catholic parish church forAmsterdam’s city centre for over two centuries, until St Nicolas’s church opposite Central Station was dedicated in 1887.

If the years were to be peeled painstaking back, which date should the restoration focus on?

Questions, questions.

A key member of the team that has had to find the answers is Thijs Boers, one of three curators at the museum, and responsible for the conservation effort.

Thijs says: “We had our gut feeling about the damage the visitors were causing, to the fabric, and to the climate in the building, but that was not enough. We needed to know for sure, we needed to get in the expertise to test this, so we could be certain what the threats to the building were – and how to deal with them.”

The museum turned to experts and organisations including the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, and the Getty Conservation Institute. A commission of experts was established.

Over two years these august bodies assessed the indoor climate, the condition of the collection of art and artefacts, of the building, of the impact of visitors, and also looked at the visitors’ experience.

There was good news early on: the house and church could cope with the numbers that wanted to visit it, if things were managed effectively. Key to that was to purchase the house next door, across the Heintje Hoekssteeg alley, which will become a visitors’ reception area, from which they could be delivered to the house through an underground passage, leaving the worst of the outdoors behind them.

But some of the other fundamentals were not nearly so straightforward. They involved what you might call a holistic approach to the restoration or, as Thijs puts it: “We needed to listen to the history of the house.”

If this were to be a conservation effort that successfully uncovered and sustained the house and the precious church with its commanding18^th century altarpiece showing the Baptism of Christ, it had to be done with empathy, and a great deal of research.

Thijs and his colleagues came up with guiding principles that have shaped the Euro10.5m restoration.

One was a radical departure from previous practice.

The house had been treated as a museum; a receptacle for artefacts but,

Thijs says: “We wanted to treat it as an historic house, and a home, with a church inside it.

“For instance, a painting in a particular room might be hung as it would in a museum, for maximum visibility but, from an historic perspective, a painting of that kind might never be placed there. Indeed, it might never have been in that room in a 17^th century house inAmsterdam.”

And then there were the stories of the dwellers in the house – or rather houses. Merchant Hartman also owned the two tucked behind it. The church, which holds a congregation of 150, runs the full length of their linked attics.

Thijs says: “We discovered we had three stories we wanted to tell: of the owner Jan Hartman; of the original priest, an Augustinian called Petrus Parmentie; and of the church itself.”

Hartman was an interesting example of social mobility. “He came toAmsterdam, as an apprentice to a baker, from his home of Coesfeld inGermany.

“Later he went into business selling hosiery. He was obviously a pretty good businessman – it was hard to move up – and he later became a trader in linen. You needed connections – family in the widest sense – in order to make your way in the city in those days, and he clearly had those.”

Hartman made a lot of his money from the practice of the city authorities of leasing tax collection rights to private collectors.

His faith was no doubt his main inspiration for building his church but, Thijs points out, it also made business sense.

Because Harman made most of his money from tax collection, his attics – which most merchants crammed with stock – were relatively unused. And he charged the priest rent on the church, and for his accommodation.

The other key consideration that shaped the restoration effort was this:  How do you choose where to go back to?

Thijs answers: “You go back to an ethical point but no further. By that I mean you go to the last period when the building was used for its original purpose – in our case as a church, before it became a museum in 1868.

“To go back much further, we’d have had to demolish the Baroque altar which was installed in the last big changes in the 18^th century, and remove the organ, installed in 1749. That wouldn’t be ethical.

“With all of these considerations combined, we narrowed the period of the restoration to between 1800 and 1868.”

Infact they were able to be much more precise; rooting their restoration in a specific year: “We had an inventory for 1862, and accounts from 1850 to 1870s, so the year 1862 as the focus for our restoration looked good.

“And one past priest had interviewed two old ladies who lived in one of the houses behind the church, and could tell him how things were done in the 19^th century.”

The work of restoring Our Lord In the Attic to the church it was in 1862 is 90 per cent complete. When it’s done, the monthly Mass will be reinstated. The two houses behind the main dwelling will be finished next year.

Then it just remains for the subterranean passageway to be dug from the new visitors’ centre to the house – which will be completed in 2013, assuming they don’t strike anything historically significant that halts their tunnelling. Thijs doesn’t joke about such things: “InAmsterdam, that can happen.”

Pilgrim with a price on his head

We were on a pilgrim hunt. "You can't miss them," I told the children. "They have wide-brimmed hats, a knee-length cloak and a staff from which they hang a cup made from a hollowed-out pumpkin. Five keys hand from their belts, symbolising the five Roman basilicas for which they were headed."

What will you give us," they asked, with a predictable lack of spirituality, "for each one we find?"

How do you put a price on the head of a pilgrim? The countless men and women who, throughout the Middle Ages, tackled the Via Francigena, the rough and dangerous road that took them from Canterbury right across France and northern Italy to the Holy City, had risked their lives to make this journey, For them, this was virtually the highway to Heaven. What was that worth in monetary terms? I thought hard.

"How about 1,000 lira each?" I asked, trusting that the children would not convert the sum into sterling and scorn my offer of 30p.

The deal was done. Now that pilgrims had a price on their heads, our journey had acquired fascination even for a seven-year-old and a 10-year old.

It was actually something of a miracle that we could follow the pilgrims' footsteps across a swath of northern Italy. Unlike the Pilgrims' Way through Kent, which had remained well marked and well used down the centuries, the Via Francigena disappeared a coupe of hundred years ago.

It has been rediscovered, thanks to a 10th-century Archbishop of Canterbury called Sigeric. He had to make the journey to Rome in the year 990, to receive from the Pope the symbolic pallium, the woollen stole work by archbishops. He recorded the 79 stopping places on his journey. That record, preserved in the British Museum, has made it possible for modern-day pilgrims to retrace his route.

our pilgrim hunt bean in the ancient town of Fidenza, at which point the Via Francigena swings south, skirting Parma, and races for Tuscany. Fidenza was a place of pilgrimage in itself, because of the fate of San Donnino, a martyr who, having converted to Christianity, fled the court of the Emperor Maxmimian, but was caught and decapitated in AD 291 on the banks of the city's River Stirone. Donnino managed to pick up his severed head and carry it to the opposite bank.

One of the miracles which which he was credited occurred when the bridge named after him, the Ponte di San Donnino, collapsed under the weight of a crush of pilgrims and yet none was injured. The event is faithfully recorded on the facade. So many pilgrims were shown falling into the water and then emerging on the bank that I had to negotiate a group rate of 5,000 lira with the children. Already I could see that pilgrimage can be an expensive business.

Entering the cathedral between the figures of two snarling lions - their fierceness tempered by the fact that they look more like tortoises in cardigans than kins of the jungle - we found the bones of San Donnino himself. They lie, with the severed skull placed on his chest, in an open-sided, 3rd century Roman sarcophagus in the crypt. The children crouched on the floor and peered in.

The Via Francigena passes alongside the cathedral and on through the heart of Fidenza. From there, it zig-zags south across the flat country to Fornovo, a market town beside the River Taro.

The landscape changes swiftly. The flat plains give way to mountains within an hour. Fornovo, where the road swings across the River Taro on a long low bridge, is the halfway point. In the riverbed, stumps of dark rock like standing stones show the line of the Roman bridge that the pilgrims used.

On the facade of the parish church of Santa Maria Asunta is another statue of a pilgrim. He has kept his basket, his keys and his staff, but has lost his head. I tried to negotiate a discount with the children, but without success.

At modern-day pilgrim might stop at the Touring Pub round the corner on the Via Vittoria Veneto, a concrete affair like a 1950s bus station, which offers Kilkenny Bitter.
From Fornovo, the land climbs up the valley of the River Sporzana until, at Bardone - little more than a group of houses gathered around a hilltop crossroads - it brings you to the church of Santa Maria. It was locked when we arrived, but a woman suddenly appeared with the key.

Inside, we came upon the statue of San Rocco. Passing through this area as a pilgrim and finding that many of the inhabitants had the plague, he nursed them devotedly, until succumbing to the disease himself. His statue was crowned with a halo, there was a fresh wound on his left thigh and he was accompanied by a little dog that carried a hunk of brad in its mouth. The wound symbolised his disease and the dog represented a faithful pent that brought him food daily once he had withdraw to the woods to die.

We lit a candle to him, hence qualifying for his protection against plague, leprosy and all manner of nasty skin diseases.

From here, the direct route is now a main road which, although it is not busy, is less congenial than the narrow that lane that clings to the side of the adjacent valley of the River Baganza. The scenery is dramatic now, with snowcapped mountains above, the roaring river below and, alongside us, the jagged, zig-zagging, exposed strata of the rock.

In Berceto, which was the final significant stopping place before the pilgrims crossed the Apennines,m the repaved Via Francigena passes right through the medieval town and past the door of the cathedral.

This was the most dramatic of all the churches we encountered. Inside, it was dark and unadorned, the stout grey pillars fading into the gloom. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I made out a startlingly lifelike - or rather deathlike - sight. In a halo of light and flowers lay a painted statue fo the dead Christ, dressed in a cream shroud open at the chest. This was a profoundly sombre and atmospheric place.

Our journey was close to its climax as we made the final climb up to the Cisa Pass which, at 3,400ft, is the gateway through the Apennines to Tuscany and the road south to Rome.

Modern travellers have the option of taking the autostrada which, with all of the audacity with which Italians build their motorways, crosses high above the valley floor in double-decker formation, one carriageway beneath the other, then burrows beneath the pass to emerge at a modest elevation on the other side.

That was not for us. We wound our way up through the chestnut woods to the silent village of Corchia, the last point of habitation before the pass. This is an authentic enough medieval village to satisfy the most exacting of historic drama producers. The main street is too narrow for the tiny Fiats that can get everywhere else in Italy. Corchia even spurns the traditional decoration on its houses - ochre or mustard-painted rendering and dark green shutters - in favour of plain grey stone and slate.

Corchia, which until 1943 was an iron and copper mining village, feels as though it clings to the very edge of the world. Which is how it must have struck the pilgrims, all those centuries ago, when, with staff, keys and a few worldly possessions on their backs, they passed through here, stood at the narrow eminence of the Cisa Pass and looked down on the warm Tuscan hills flowing invitingly south.

Today, of course, we could have climbed into the car and been in Rome before the pilgrims were on level ground again. But we turned back. The road beyond would be a whole new journey. Besides, with the price of pilgrims being what it is, I could not afford to go any further.

Waterloo Sunset

Ok, here's a pop-quiz question. As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, what am I in?

Yes, I am in paradise.

And what does the dirty old river do?

Quite, it keeps flowing into the night.

I'm in Waterloo now, sitting on the first floor balcony of the Reef Bar, with its commanding view down the sweeping concourse of Waterloo Station.

So, if I were to tell you I was looking down at the millions of people, what would they be doing?

That's right, they'd be swarming like flies 'round Waterloo Underground.

Waterloo Sunset is one of those songs that millions of us know the words to. Ray Davies, its author and leader of The Kinks, is the poet laureate of London, and in this and a clutch of other delightfully evocative, catchy and unforgettable songs about the capital he has succeeded in chronicling its glamour, its seediness, its pleasures, its follies, and its homely suburbs better than anyone before or since.

He wrote Dedicated Follower of Fashion, which is about Carnaby Street, Regent Street and Leicester Square, Lola about Soho, and Muswell Hillbillies about his home turf up on the hill beyond Highgate. His song Victoria is, strictly, about the queen rather than the area, but you can stretch a point and add that in too.

Infact, so good is he at conjuring up the spirit of the capital city that you can take a Kinks Tour of London, starting at Waterloo, delving into the West End, heading north through Archway and ending up in Muswell Hill, singing his lyrics all the way.

And yet, remarkably, it's only by chance that Waterloo Sunset is so called. Originally the song was Liverpool Sunset, and hence the dirty old river would have been the Liver. But before it was recorded The Beatles came out with their Liverpool-inspired double-A side, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, and Ray decided that, rather than seeming to follow in their wake, he would transfer the location of his song to his home city.

And I for one am very glad that he did

From my Waterloo vantage point I can do what is most interesting about railway stations - watch people. Pensioners getting lost, policemen in twos, pigeons in flocks and at any one time at least a dozen fond farewells and heartfelt hellos. In Waterloo Sunset, Terry meets Julie every Friday night. Perhaps beneath the four faces of the station clock suspended, high above, from the glass roof.

These days, Waterloo is not so much a station, more a shopping mall. I could do any number of things here, eat any variety of food or drink, buy a shirt and tie, send an e-mail or text from a public phone, check out a Dali exhibition. There's even an impotence clinic.

Today, of course, the trains don’t just go to the suburban destinations carved into the stone of the war memorial arch - Surrey, Sussex, the Isle of Wight - but Paris, Brussels and Lille.

Waterloo Sunset conjures up the former incarnation, when for children like me the most exciting thing on the concourse was a cumbersome machine which, for 1d, and after much manoeuvering of a brass dial and tugging on a heavy iron lever, stamped out a narrow aluminium strip with your name on it.

When Terry and Julie left the station they crossed the river where, we are told, they feel safe and sound.

Ray Davies feels safe and sound in a little pub just across Waterloo Bridge in Savoy Street. I walk there, against a north wind, overtaking foreign students bent double beneath their backpacks like mountaineers. Ahead of me is the Shell-Mex building like an old fashioned petrol pump in white Portland stone, its prominent clock measuring hours rather than gallons.

The pub is the Savoy Tup. It's a rare find - an unimproved, unthemed, unspoilt pub in the heart of London. Its bar is plain, with a bare-board floor, cream-painted panel walls - the sort of place where Ray feels comfortable.

He mentions it in his book Waterloo Sunset, which is a curious blend of autobiography, fiction and myth-making.

A girl is asked "Who are you waiting for." And replies: "The man who wrote Waterloo Sunset. I've been in the bar at the Savoy every night, just as he said, but he never comes. He's not ready to leave the underground."

It sounds like whimsy, but its also a hint at the less than sunny side of Ray Davies. He is reputed, in 1973 when his marriage was breaking down, to have spent Christmas Day on the Circle Line, drinking cans of Kronenbourg.

From the Savoy Tup I walk along the Strand to Charing Cross. I take the northern line up towards Muswell Hill, stopping on the way at Archway, where the Archway Tavern had the distinction of appearing on the cover and inside the gatefold sleeve of the Muswell Hillbillies album. They weren't dumb enough to stand in their real local, I'll come to that later.

The pub is no longer the dark-wood and etched mirror place it was then, but somehow even more pertinent as a place to gaze into your beer and think, as Ray sang in Muswell Hillbillies, of coming from a nowhere kind of place and dream of a far romantic place you have never been - not Muswell Hill but New Orleans, (?)Oklahoma, Tennessee.

Then it's on to East Finchley station. From here, tree-lined Fortis Green takes me to Muswell Hill. If there is one street that can claim ownership of Ray Davies, this is it.

He was born here 56 years ago and grew up in a cramped house with his mum, dad and seven brothers and sisters. The pub where he first performed is in this road, and so is the grander house he bought when he became famous.

I find the Davies family home, 6 Denmark Terrace, just opposite the Clissold Arms. It's a Victorian brick semi with tiny bay windows attached to a joinery workshop. It was a musical home, with a piano in the parlour, to which Ray's parents Annie and Frederick would weave back from the Clissold Arms with a gang in tow for a singsong.

And it was here that, in 1964, Ray and his brother and fellow Kink Dave worked out the chords to You Really Got Me, the song that first put them at the top of the charts in August 1964.

The Clissold Arms is a real Kinks find. The large back bar has a display of Kinks memorabilia. Among them is a signed copy of the Kinks first single, Long Tall Sally, a guitar, a wall of photographs and a small brass plaque which reads:

Site of 1957 performing debut of

Ray and Dave Davies

Founding members of the Kinks.

Ray hasn't written about this street and the pub, but Dave has. His song Fortis Green goes:

"Mum would shout and scream when dad would come home drunk,
When she'd ask him where he'd been, he said 'Up the Clissold Arms',
Chattin' up some hussy, but he didn't mean no harm."

On my way up Fortis Green I had passed the home Ray bought when he got married. No. 87 is a large white-painted detached Victorian villa set back from the road with a gravel drive. He lived here in the late Sixties and early Seventies with Rasa, who he met when she was still a Bradford schoolgirl and mad-keen Kinks fan and saw them perform whenever she could, and his two daughters. It's Rasa's falsetto that you hear on the backing vocals of classic such as Sunny Afternoon.

Their schools were here, too. Fortismere School in Creighton Avenue, which was called William Grimshaw School when the brother attended and, on the other side of Fortis Green, St James Church of England Primary School. It's now in Woodside Avenue but when they attended was on Fortis Green opposite Fortismere Avenue.

I head off east into Muswell Hill, down Fortis Green Road with its deli, café, record store and bookshop, where Robbie Williams dominates the window display.

Where Sainsbury's now stands was once the Athenaeum, a dance hall that featured in the song Come Dancing. Athenaeum Place is still there alongside it, like a Ray Davies vignette - with a beggar on the corner, and rutted cobbles leading to a former orange brick Victorian church that is now an O'Neill's Irish bar.

I walk down Priory Road where the ground falls away and London is at your feet, first the trees and terraces of the lesser houses in the valley, then the City's tower blocks and Wren churches, finally Canary Wharf, grey and blinking in the winter sunlight

I find myself in another Kinks vignette as I reach the beer-sticky Northern Railway Tavern, step over a yawning dog in a tartan coat and pass a Baptist church with the sign reading "Heaven Knows when You were last Here".

I'm headed for the last outpost on my Kinks tour: their recording studios, Konk, on Tottenham Lane in Hornsey. A blue neon sign spells out the name above the door. It’s a windowless, beige-painted pebbledash place. Very anonymous, very North London rock star.

Why, such scenes are so evocative you could write a song about them. Or at least, you could if you were Ray Davies, the poet laureate of London.