Despite lending its name to a Radio 4 parlour game, the complete rules of which are known only to chairman Humphrey Lyttelton’s ever-unspeaking assistant The Lovely Samantha, Mornington Crescent remains elusive. For years the station teetered on the brink of non-existence, and through much of the Nineties clung on as little more than a rumour between Euston and Camden Town, a ghostly, flickering presence between the twin wedges of blackness the tube trains sped through and occasionally – ahem – sat in. Sometimes for unsettlingly long periods of time. Yet when Mornington Crescent finally re-opened it was, hearteningly, everything that a tube station should be, from the glazed terracotta ox-blood tiles outside to the interior wood panelling, brass handrails and spiral staircase – at the head of which a neat little sign helpfully informed the entrant that there were 86 steps. Ah! If only London Underground could summon up the same spirit of punctiliousness when it comes to running a train service.
But what lies beyond the domain of the men in blue waistcoats? On leaving the station, the first thing that meets one’s eye is a statue to Richard Cobden, the Victorian statesman whose career was devoted to a seismically important political campaign now sunk into obscurity: the repeal of the Corn Laws. But, having established free trade as a fetish to which the British still bow, there he stands on the cusp of Camden Town – that haven of unfettered trading in improbable footwear and crystal meth – the folds of his frockcoat pelted with guano, his features almost entirely eroded by pollution. What does he think, as he contemplates the effects of the laissez-faire capitalism that he once espoused: the ruined subterranean public lavatory beneath his feet, the cider-drinking street waifs who congregate on the metal benches before him, and the Costa coffee bar just up the road with its somewhat bewildering claim to be “Italian about coffee”?
Perhaps the clearest victor, and victim, in Cobden’s new world of market forces lies a little way beyond his frozen gaze. The Carreras cigarette factory, built in 1928, manufactured some of the billions of cigarettes lit, puffed and extinguished throughout the British Empire during the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Nuclear Age. The factory’s architects were inspired by the contemporaneous discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and the building occupies an uneasy aesthetic space somewhere between Orwell’s Ministry of Love and the set of a Rudolph Valentino movie, with fluted, Egyptian-style pillars of bright blue and green enlivening an otherwise deathly corporate white. Two eight-foot-tall black cats stand guard at the entrance, with the faces of ten more imprisoned in the façade, their eerie yellow eyes looking out onto the desultory triangle of grass that is Harrington Square. Black Cat, coincidentally, was one of the seedily evocative brands manufactured therein, and was named after the moggy that basked in the window of the original Carreras shop on Wardour Street. Now the building houses offices and an elaborate-looking osteopathic practice, and the one small, plangent reminder of the age of the ubiquitous gasper is the little grilled depositories for visitors to stub out their cigarettes before entering.
It was here that Rimbaud wrote: "The caravans departed. And the Hotel Splendide was built in the chaos of ice and polar night."
Behind the Carreras factory is Mornington Crescent itself – an arc of wholly anonymous early Victorian terraced houses. In No. 6 lived Walter Sickert, painter of music halls, prostitutes and Edwardian despair. In 1907, the murder of a streetwalker, Emily Dimmock – her throat cut in a rented room in Camden Town – inspired Sickert to produce a number of paintings of crepuscular and enigmatic boudoir scenes, populated with sprawling young women and hand-wringing men. So emblematic did the murdered prostitute become in Sickert’s work that some have speculated his interest was more than artistic – crime-novelist Patricia Cornwell going so far as to identify him with Jack the Ripper. But why impugn the artist for the accomplishment of his imagination? And why indulge half-cocked theories, when contemporary Camden offers such sad, sordid, real-life echoes? By following Mornington Crescent round to Crowndale Road and the corner of Royal College Street, one comes to the site of a pub once named Slugger O’Toole’s, round the back of which Anthony Hardy, the so-called Camden Ripper, left bin-liners containing the dismembered corpses of his victims in the early years of our present century. The pub has now been demolished, and the only sign of any misdeeds is the graffito William Toner is going to jail for robbing parking metres scrawled across the estate agent’s board.
Hardy lived on Royal College Street and, further down, at No. 8, is the peeling Georgian terrace that absinthe-soaked teenage poetic genius Arthur Rimbaud shared with his lover Paul Verlaine. It was here, in Illuminations, that Rimbaud wrote: The caravans departed. And the Hotel Splendide was built in the chaos of ice and polar night. Which brings us back to Mornington Crescent. For at No. 25 stands the Crescent’s great curiosity: the Hotel Splendide. With its dirty stucco, pillar-flanked porch and ersatz Parisian signage, the Splendide is an almost theatrically exact definition of a seedy hotel. Was Rimbaud, rambling through the slum housing of London on some dark winter afternoon in 1873, inspired by the sight of this rhapsodically dilapidated hostelry, looming out of the dusk?
Sadly, it seems unlikely. In Rimbaud’s day, No. 25 was registered as part of the Inland Revenue, and the sign – the Splendide part of which has now fallen off (quite by accident, perhaps, one morning, onto the landlady’s head?) – did not exist in 1873. In fact, the building’s exact provenance is mysterious. One theory is that the Hotel Splendide looks like something out of a film because it is out of a film: the building was used as the set for a 1950s thriller starring that Adonis of the Odeons, Dirk Bogarde. Might it be, then, that the sign was erected for that purpose only, and remained there for fifty years or more purely as the result of some long-dead Ealing executive’s oversight or caprice? In short, could Mornington Crescent’s most notable landmark be as whimsical and quixotic as the game it has inspired?
Sadly, The Lovely Samantha was not available for comment.
This piece first appeared in Smoke magazine