Life Without Billboards
An exclusive short story by Matthew Turner
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At the end of last year we compiled a gift guide for London fiction. One of the writers we featured in that list was Matthew Turner, the author of Loom, a book we described as “capturing London as a character in a way no other book we’ve read in the past few years has managed to do” and which Matthew described as “for the kind of person who looks at a derelict mansion and instead of walking by its boarded up windows and overgrown grass, pauses for a minute to imagine what happened there.”
As we were talking to Matthew he admitted to us that he was also responsible for the ‘Life Without Billboards’ Instagram account, a rather eery collection of images documenting London’s blank commercial spaces.
Once we knew that we had to ask Matthew to write something for us. We asked for something that’s “not exactly short fiction but kind of sits on the borders of that” and he responded with something he describes as “a mix of travelogue, photo essay, and fiction.” We think it’s perfect and we’re incredibly happy we can publish it as our first bit of LiB fiction.
On the 23rd of March 2021 I was on the Thames foreshore, attempting to hit a metal buoy in the middle of the river.
The first few rocks I hurled were close, then gradually they landed further and further away as my arm began to get tired. I took off my belt, the leather Topman belt I've had since I was sixteen, and held it by both ends, letting the middle droop into a homemade slingshot. I’d seen people on the news doing this, with handkerchiefs wrapped around their faces, to fire stones and marbles at tanks.
I balanced a large rock in the loop and, careful not to disturb the stone, slowly arched my right arm back and quickly launched the rock towards the metal buoy. I already knew I’d hit it, and realised in the slow moments before it did that my eagerness for this to happen was partly due to my fear of what damage the stone might cause.
It gave a loud dong that reverberated both east and west down the wide and still river.
Looking in both directions I expected to see some kind of reaction. I thought the sound would have disturbed people, that they would have come onto their balconies -that I could see in the distance - to have a look at what was going on.
The streetlights were lit, the sun was hot and it had warmed the foreshore to the extent that I couldn't have taken off my shoes even if I had wanted to. The concrete embankment draped a cold shadow over me while also radiating heat.
I had been collecting fragments of porcelain smoking pipes for a few hours before I’d even noticed the metal buoy. At first, as usual, I couldn't find any of the little tubes. Then once my eyes picked out one and attuned themselves to the detail, cancelling out everything else around me, they were everywhere. Burning white in the light they looked like glitter against the grey stones around them, appearing as tiny holes piecing through the pebbles and rocks—making a night sky of the ground. It was the same, I knew, as what would happen to my eyes if I looked at the sun for too long and momentary holes were poked through the cityscape.
While the sound of the rock hitting the metal tub was still ringing along the banks of the river, I saw something half obscured by Vauxhall Bridge. I climbed up to the path running along the embankment to take a closer look, and saw it seemed to cut a neat square from Caffè Italia on Glyn Street. I had never seen the cafe open, and when I got closer to the cream-coloured square’s base I shifted aside some nettles that were hiding a blue plaque which read ‘Global’.
On the way home from Vauxhall to my flat on Clapham Common, I walked through the railway arches and down a path cutting across a quiet building site, where I had to pull my T-shirt over my mouth and nose to stop the dust making me cough.
At the junction of South Lambeth Road and Tradescant Road I saw another one with a terracotta glow hovering above Roosters Spot Peri Peri Chicken. I took a photo with my camera phone, as I did with the first one, and thought of fire places and the sandy yellow sunlight that streamed through my bedroom window all day and sometimes well into the night. Looking at the photo and making an adjustment to straighten the vertical perspective into more simple parallel lines, I was aware of the frame within the picture, the frame of the camera’s viewfinder, then that of the device I was viewing it on. I recalled the rectangular opening I passed through under the railway bridge on the Wandsworth Road and the tessellated sky I had seen in the high-rise apartment blocks by the bus station. Sun was reflecting off the windows all around me, voiding them, rendering their interiors as good as empty.
Near my flat I went into the corner shop and picked up a large bottle of water, a packet of digestive biscuits and a bag of Haribo Tangfastics past their sell-by date. I counted out my last few coins and placed them on the counter. Over the clutter of the shop - envelopes, toppled boxes, old newspapers, nappies, dusty chocolate bars - and through the hand print in the grimy window, the light was already fading. There were shrieking foxes in the road and gangs of parakeets shooting from one open window to the next. No cars were travelling to the city or towards Wandsworth and Richmond, yet still a speed camera flashed brightly stalling the motionless scene at a deeper level of stillness. I ate a few of the biscuits and walked past Wandsworth Road Overground Station. Further down the road I could see a bright opening, another one, this time rotated into the same position as a door, and felt like I would be able to step right through it.
Later, I sat on my roof overlooking the Battersea Power Station with white smoke coming out of its chimneys. This signal, I thought, could relate to the metal buoy I had disturbed with a rock. To the East the London Eye’s peak, that I hadn't seen turn in some time, was cresting the Nine Elms development. All the other gardens surrounding mine were largely covered in Japanese Knotweed that their owners hadn't been able to keep back, the cats were still there though casually stalking through it all. I remembered that from here I’d seen the fireworks being set off from Primrose Hill and people were shouting to me from other rooftop gardens. In the quiet a church bell I hadn't heard before rang out somewhere and pulling at my stomach was the subtle excitement of finding something.
I read that a portal is an opening in a wall of a building, gate or fortification, especially a grand entrance to an important structure, and it can be a gate, wardrobe or mirror that transports someone to a magical world. The article was illustrated with a painting by Mark Rothko, a patch of maroon frayed around the edges which the caption said depicted a threshold or portal. It described how Rothko had been influenced by the blind windows- windows filled with stone rather than glass - in Michelandelo’s Laurentian Library, that looked like openings to the courtyard outside, but would just have you hitting your head against another wall.
Down below me in the garden a cat was watching something and I couldn't see what it was, I heard another church bell ringing and it didn’t seem like it would stop. I found reference to ‘Global’, the name written across the base of each one I had spotted so far, and read:
Advertising is based on one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s the freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay.
The church bell was ringing. Before opening the roof hatch and climbing down the ladder back inside, I watched a murmuration of starlings looping between the terracotta chimneys and plane trees before they hovered for a moment in one large sinister cloud and set out towards the dome of St. Pauls Cathedral.
The next day I set out to find the three billboards at Waterloo, which the text I’d read the night before described as ‘prime’. Largely I stuck to the embankment to find my way, but at The Garden Museum a gust of wind blew the voices of people speaking across the river, they were saying ‘There are no words for it really.’ and ‘I just can’t seem to connect with him anymore.’ A fire engine and three police cars sped down the road on the River’s northern side.
I slipped down Norfolk Row in the opposite direction and into Archbishop’s Park. As I walked the tunnels under Waterloo Station, I listened to a recording about a man who had lived on a platform in front of a billboard, hanging over a busy highway on Route 22, for 10 years like some kind of hermit. The billboard, they said, was painted with the outline of a woman’s lips and the words ‘LOVE HOME’.
An anthropologist spoke: What happens when we take away all of the billboards? In the early 2000s they were removed from Sao Paulo, around 1500 of them, and advertising of all kinds, including flyers, was made illegal. Without the billboards to help navigate the city many of its inhabitants became lost, and without their neon lights shining down on the dark alleyways people felt less safe. They also found, when stripping away large billboards alongside major roads, entire favelas living in their large shadows, visually protected and fenced off by ads.
At the confluence of Mepham and York Road I saw the three Waterloo billboards in the darkness of the iron railway bridge. They were covered with blue paper that matched the colour of the sky and made it feel like I could see through the bridge’s large, brick-lined columns. A hole above brought down a crescent of light which smeared across the surface of the second billboard. On the frame of the third, I left three of the pipe fragment I had collected on the foreshore the day before.
To get home before sunset I walked along the railway tracks: Waterloo to Vauxhall, Vauxhall to Battersea Park. High-up on the tracks, elevated above the rooftops, if someone was watching me from a distance I might have looked like was a floating across the skyline. On a backstreet outside the tarmac concrete plant on Silverthorne Road the pavement was illuminated in dim gradients of red, green and orange. Something the anthropologist had said: The words spelled out by the moving red neon are not important. What matters is the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.
From the roof that night I looked down on all the streets and the railways lines branching off towards Victoria Station. London had become less defined by people and the character they bought to places, it was more different streams of air travelling down each street, the sun hitting one side of the pavement and how it changed throughout the day, the warmth and heat. The city was weather.
In my head I planned where I would go the next day and before going to bed I looked through the photos I had taken so far. They were holes in a city so tightly packed that it didn't seem to have space for them, monumental vacancies that could, from what I’d read, be filled with visual incarnations to help people dream of a future.
On the second day I took a bicycle and went down the Clapham Road, past Stockwell then Oval and locked up in Elephant and Castle next to a large brown building and exploding cherry blossoms. A ventilation shaft in the shape of a miniature cathedral made the sound of an aircraft continually taking off and three crows had surrounded a bin to catch a squirrel that had gone inside scavenging for food. Across the roundabout the demolition of the shopping centre had been halted and the site looked like it didn't know whether it was going to ruin or rising into a ruin. On Newington Road, near Ministry of Sound, I found a billboard shrouded in black tarpaulin and a quote, from something I had read a few years before, came back to me:
...in a passage of the Pseudodoxia Epidemica that I can no longer find that in the Holland of his time it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost for ever.
I cycled through Hammersmith and saw the murmuration again, heard all the manically flapping wings, traveling over towards the dome. The road to Heathrow Airport took me on the Chiswick Flyover and the Great West Road. From Hatton Cross I walked next to my bike, and in a fenced hotel carpark people were standing at a distance from one another wearing slippers and smoking cigarettes. Someone blew a whistle and they shuffled inside through a fire exit. Between the busy roads there were traveller encampments and skinny horses came towards me looking at my hands.
Sitting down on a grass hump at the end of Myrtle Ave I could see right down Heathrow Airport’s Southern runway. There should have been people having barbecues, taking photos of the airplanes coming in low over the terraces. There should have been vapour trails and the kerosene smell of aviation fuel in the air. I walked down a section of the motorway and nearby saw an outcrop of trees that looked angular in parts, like someone had cut some of their branches, and leaves attached to them, into straight lines.
I lay in the sun until it was nearly dark and cycled back via Westfield Shopping in White City to get some food from a vending machine. Exhausted I sat on bench outside Five Guys and drank a bottle Mountain Dew and ate a Mars bar. The light from a large panel of glowing white shined down on my hands making them look unreal, and when hitting the pavement, I saw, it transformed into a crimson red with green around it edges.
Later I read about how this scene could have felt and the signs the billboard could have projected:
To escape the horrors of present day life never raise your eyes. Look down at the sidewalk always, preserving the attitude of timid modesty. When you look only at the pavement you see the reflections of the sky signs in all sorts of fantastic shapes; alchemic symbols, talismanic characters, bizarre pantacles with suns, hammers, and anchors, and you can imagine yourself right in the midst of the Middle Ages.
I set out as the sun was rising the following day, to follow the murmurations and cross the river to the dome. I still felt tired from the long bike ride but I walked on below the tower of Tate Modern, over Millennium Bridge and up the hill towards St. Pauls. Overgrown flower beds, an overflowing fountain, traffic lights on red. I listened to Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys.
In the gardens surrounding St. Paul’s Cathedral the grass came up to my knees and ivy had spread across the paths and over benches. I heard sirens coming down from in the direction of The Old Bailey. It was largely dark under the canopy of trees. Maple, lime, ash and eucalyptus. Stripes of light pushed through the leaves and pollen, making the ground foliage look like it was fading into the air. I felt that if I were to step on it that my feet would fall through the ground.
The starlings were making a racket overhead, an overwhelming mass of them, and it made me wonder whether the trees were actually barren of leaves and the birds had taken their place. Vibrating leaves that might just fly away. A slight dip appeared and I pulled myself into a dense thicket from where the way forward seemed completely blocked, crossed with silver birch trunks and hatched with branches and the rubbish that had collected in them.
I kept pushing forward, and then like it was appearing through the surface of a pond, behind this chaos there was shape. An outline that put everything into its place; the branches within the frame glowed hot with a red hue that made them look as though there was a fire they were unaffected by, and those outside looked withered and burnt. I spent nearly an hour pulling aside branches, ivy and rubbish so I could see what was on the billboard. Eventually, protected from sun by the overgrowth, the bright red came through and I stepped back to see the scene as a whole. A Coca-Cola bottle on its side in a bed of ice and above it in white were the words ‘Together the Magic Happens’.
Voices, traffic and the circular motions of a street sweeper, I imagined them as best as I could. I crouched under the billboard and climbed a fence that separated the garden from the street. Standing on the other side I pictured people eating their lunch on the benches around the cathedral, talking as they crossed the road to Pret, waiting for buses to Dalston and Hackney. Still, there was no one. That night, before sleeping, I wrote ‘The simple lack of her is more to me than others’ presence.’ on the cover of a yellow exercise book and placed it on the bedside table.
You can find Matthew on Twitter here.
Read an excerpt from Loom here, or buy the book.