London

As a teenager I was obsessive about catching archive oddities when they were on TV. My first encounter with Geoffrey Fletcher was through the 1967 film based on his first book, ‘The London Nobody Knows’, which came out in 1962. I remember it was on ITV one afternoon at around 3pm. It’s a sort of documentary stroll around the city with James Mason which ignores all the obvious tourist favourites in favour of Chapel Market and Spitalfields tenements.

Watching it, what strikes you is how grim the bits of London that aren’t Carnaby Street are – the meths drinkers, shoeless kids and general dereliction. After I saw the film I clocked Fletcher’s name and found a Penguin copy of the book in Totnes, of all places. Then when the internet came along, I discovered he’d written all these other books – ‘London After Dark’, ‘Pearly Kingdom’, ‘The London Dickens Knew’. He went to Slade School of Art and drew sketches for the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, where he recorded the rapid rate of change in the capital in a column called ‘London Day by Day’. Feature continues

I know he lived in Bloomsbury and when he was a student and studied at the Slade, but otherwise I don’t know much about his life. But I like it that all I’ve got to go on is this very funny, very dry writing style, a bit like Anthony Lane in the New Yorker but with these PG Wodehouse-style flourishes. Of the gas lamp in Carting Lane by the side of the Savoy he writes: ‘I often tremble for its future,’ and he ‘goes out of his way to feast’ on this old hardware store near Cambridge Circus, even though he’s never bought anything there, ‘being quite unable or unwilling to screw or nail anything in’! He’s a bit like Pevsner, but more joyful. He celebrates the bits that Pevsner misses out; though I like Pevsner, too.

Fletcher loves bad gothic architecture, especially what he calls ‘Commissioners’ Gothic’ – functional, unromantic churches like St Luke’s in Chelsea. And he’s obsessed with toilets. His favourite is a Victorian one in Star Yard in Holborn where, he claims, the attendant once kept goldfish in the water tank: ‘Keeping fish in a lavatory tank is a delightfully rococo, or rather fin de siècle, idea, and might be copied with decorative results.’ (He admitted later that he’d made this story up.)

He’s an arch Tory, and part of his conservationist zeal is a desire not to let Old England crumble away. In the first book he complains that London’s dining rooms have all been replaced by cafés, but by the early ’80s he’s talking about the Regent Milk Bar on Edgware Road, saying how wonderful it is! I think he just likes things that are 30 or 40 years old and threatened with closure.

He must have been an influence on modern psychogeographers like Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. He’s certainly drawn to the same sort of places – Hoxton, Camberwell, Whitechapel – and he shares Ackroyd’s obsession with Hawksmoor. I like Sinclair in small doses. When Fletcher says, ‘I love Woolworths’, you believe him; but when Sinclair says, ‘I love walking round Dalston looking at nail shops,’ you think: Really? Do you? When we [Saint Etienne and Paul Kelly] made our film about the Lea Valley, ‘What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?’, I went on ‘The Culture Show’ with Iain Sinclair. He was going on about how great the lower Lea Valley was and how it was going to be ruined by the Olympics, and you just can’t make a sweeping statement like that. You can’t say, ‘This is all fine,’ because it’s clearly not. It needs a lot of money spent on it. It stinks and it’s really polluted. Obviously it has a charm of its own, but it’s not like saving a music hall.

Fletcher isn’t an inverted snob. He’s happy to admit that he loves Hampstead. One day, at a fair on the Heath, he overhears a man complaining that Hampstead isn’t thrilling enough and is so cross that he drops an ice cream down the back of his shirt.

Our decision to make films was directly inspired by him. Paul and I were always talking about what it would be like to remake ‘The London Nobody Knows’ now. Which bits would you film? When we made our album ‘Finisterre’ in 2002 we decided technology had come on sufficiently for us to be able to make a film that would run alongside it, so that you’d be able to watch the film and listen to the music at the same time. But the record company got cold feet, so we finished it ourselves and it became a film in its own right.

I love the way Fletcher puts a fresh twist on places I thought I knew, like the Camden Head pub in Islington. Thanks to him, I started noticing details like the bell-pushes by the tables for attracting the attention of the bar staff. They still work! He was obsessed with London and believed that ‘a man can do everything better in London: think better, eat and cheat better, even enjoy the country better’. His big worry was that office blocks would crowd out the ‘tawdry, extravagant and eccentric’ bits he loved. But that hasn’t happened yet.

I only learned recently that he died in 2004, after the time Paul and I tried to track him down. I feel very sad that I never got to speak to him.