Book Cover

Forget Harry Potter. The most popular book on the Londoner's bookshelf is probably the A-Z, which has sold tens of millions of copies.

Attempting to find her way to a party one day in 1936 Phyllis Pearsall became frustrated at the poor state of street maps. In true British style, she resolved her annoyance by walking, notebook in hand, along the 3,000 miles of 20,000 London streets. She created what would become an icon of London, the A-Z Map, today usually sold in the form of a small book atlas. The A-Z gains a new edition each year as it is reprinted to show the shifting boundaries of the city, providing shape to the sprawl of suburbia, the concrete growth along the Thames, and the tendency of families to clump along the M25 ring road. As much as it records the geography of London, the A-Z documents the changing psychology of its inhabitants.

Mark Power's 26 Different Endings takes place inside the confines of Pearsall's A-Z. Travelling to the outskirts of each of 26 pages in his atlas, he illuminates the horizon of the city. What he finds encircling London is a vast moat of disappointment and absent dreams.

This is familiar territory for Power. A decade ago he published Shipping Forecast (Zelda Cheatle Press, 1996), in which he circumnavigated the coast of Britain, hopping between the sites of coastal weather stations. It must be difficult for foreigners to comprehend, but as with the A-Z, Britons reserve a peculiar affection for the shipping forecast. Broadcast over radio several times a day and read in the unique voice and verse of a moonlighting poet, the shipping forecast transmission joins the dots around the heart of the empire.

Such is the power of the shipping forecast to permeate popular culture that it shows up regularly in the lyrics of contemporary rock music by the likes of Blur, Beck, Radiohead, and The Prodigy. The shipping forecast and the A-Z represent the outer limits of not just where we are, but who we are. If the Shipping Forecast told of adventure with smatterings of danger and humour, then 26 Different Endings, despite its white blasted landscapes, is a dark forewarning of loss of identity.

For millennia London has been represented by expanding loops of 'inside' and 'outside' city limits. Almost 2000 years ago, the Romans built a fortified wall and moat around the small town they called Londinium. This London Wall delineated a clean edge between Londoners and non-Londoners. That other graphic icon of London, Harry Beck's Tube Map, today provides the loose definition of London's reach to many. Whether you reside inside or outside the underground's Circle Line confers an 'us or them' status somewhat akin to the Manhattan / New York City geographic divide. When the tube was expanded early in the twentieth century, outlying stations were created with deceptive names like 'Chalk Farm' to entice families to move the the falsely bucolic surrounds of the city (there has never been a farm at Chalk Farm).

Today, new families are sold a utopian vision of living beside the 'greenbelt' of eco-friendliness that is being wrapped around London. The nightmarish path to these dream locations is an asphalt circuit known as the M25, a 20 year old six lane orbital motorway that snakes around London and allows residents, albeit slowly, to move freely around the extent of London. Living outside the "concrete necklace" of the M25 renders you a second class Londoner to those within. It seems London's girth is expanding as fast as those of its populace.

What does this have to do with Mark Power and his 26 Different Endings, you may well ask. The images in this book show the promised land of where London ends. Or where it begins. Each picture shows frontier territory with the white sky of a foggy "not London" beyond. Appearance and disappearance at once. These are lands of bitumen, trees laid prone, delivery trucks, and empty suburbia. Depicted in melancholy scenes labelled A to Z is London's housing bubble, the extreme edge of the urban universe.

Time is as much as subject of anything here, and each photograph poses as the opening frame of short films that leave the viewer yearning for the "26 different endings" that lie in the near future. London has become the Village of the Damned. Looking at the photos I was reminded of an episode of "The Twilight Zone" I saw years ago. In it, a gang of tradesman lived their lives a mere 24 hours into the future. They worked feverishly to construct tomorrows houses, roads and infrastructure for the people about to arrive from yesterday, who were oblivious as to what they were stepping into. These photos may have been taken around London, but its message is just as relevant to any large Western city. As with Masataka Nakano's Tokyo Nobody photo book (Little More, 2000), it is the absence of people in a world made for people that chills.

Phyllis Pearsall and Mark Power are both practitioners of what is called psychogeography, a nebulous term if ever they was one, but is especially popular in Britain. The concept behind the label is an investigation into the effect of space upon the self through geographic experience. It has been popularised by the writer Iain Sinclair who, among other eneavours, walked around the circumference of London's M25 in London Orbital. With photographer Marc Atkins in tow (Snowy to Sinclair's Tintin), they embarked on a tale of London as defined by this smoggy London boundary. In Mind the Gap, photographer Simon James travelled to the the 24 different endings of London Underground's 12 tube lines. In it's foreword, that other famous wanderer Michael Palin notes the book tells of the gap "between dreams and reality. Mind the Gap in capturing the elusive appeal of the stations at the ends of the lines, gives gentle but perceptive insights into the way we live now."

Published in an edition of 1000 by Photoworks and recently released, 26 Different Endings is currently a little difficult to track down, although magnumphotos.com has copies in stock. There is special edition of 26 copies each with a different 14x11" print, signed and numbered 1/1. These are presented in clamshell boxes with a single letter from A to Z embossed on front. A clever device that I first saw in the 26-copy deluxe edition of Machiel Botman's book Rainchild (Schaden, 2004).

In a neat parallel, it is said that Phyllis Pearsall kept her hand-written index cards of London streets in 26 shoe boxes under her bed. Her ghost can be found in Mark Power's landscapes.

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