London is a palimpsest city where obsolete eras remain physically present

Evidence

Position Normal’s London is a city far distant from the corporate gloss of busy/ business London as it is from the tourist London of pageantry. The tour guide for this anachronistic city would be the James Mason in The London That Nobody Knows, the 1969 film directed by Norman Cohen and based on the book by Geoffrey Fletcher. It’s a palimpsest city, a space where many times are layered. Sometimes, when you walk down an unfamiliar street, you might stumble into aspects of it. Street markets that you’d imagined had closed long ago, shops that (so you think) couldn’t possibly survive into the 21st century, ripe old voices fit only for the Victorian music hall… — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 341

Categorization

• XREF: Palimpsest-city idea echoes Fisher’s recurrent hauntological geography and connects to the ADDENDUM grafting essay’s layered-time thinking. — connects to: Urban countercultures were actively erased from London’s official history — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 466; Brutalist architecture remains London’s most futuristic built environment — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2310
• CANDY: The idea that walking any unfamiliar street can stumble you into an era you thought dead is a portable, evocative observation.

Broader Connections

• Urban countercultures were actively erased from London’s official history #complicates (0.75) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 466