Solsticing...

The solstice was spent not at Glastonbury Festival or Stonehenge with thousands of others (I find it hard to love mud), but in London. After a meeting in Borough market, I went to the ongoing Shunt event underneath London Bridge station. Entering a doorway within the concourse, one enters an uncanny world, a magical catacomb, with video installations and strange theatre taking place in different spaces. In the middle, there is an opening into a double height space with a bar. Odd electronica bleeps and booms into the dank space. Some vegetation grows into the ceiling corners, despite the absence of light. It reminded me of the journey inside the Great Pyramid in Cairo.

After leaving the underworld, I walked up past Moorgate to Bunhill Fields, thinking again of Blake (he is buried there, as is Daniel De Foe). The cemetry was locked. The sky was a silvery crepuscular blue. I thought about the hidden spaces within cities, and how some hidden spaces are not really hidden at all - for what one might see there is the quite ordinary - whereas other spaces are hidden and can only remain hidden. If more people knew what took place there, it would change the way they think about the city, and about human behaviour. They remain concealed, occluded, at the margins of society.