The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

Before hitting there, I walked past the road that led to the Blow-Up location which gave a faint hint of nostalgia for the high summer meandering I last saw it on. I had started here because this was the quickest way down to the first set of Spark stops on the walk a collection of increasingly repressive pubs and saloon bars. Every type of food seemed to be for sale and floating in essence in the air, accompanied by a range of multicoloured designs, meat laid out like crazy-paving and speakers blaring out so many different types of music as to almost feel the maddening schizophrenia that radios would no doubt be plagued by if sentient. I started by Peckham Rye Overground Station and walked along the pavement, taking in the constant barrage of sensory experience that the road provides. However, there was still plenty of places to visit and they handily marked a relatively linear route through Peckham’s more typical market roads right through to the Rye and eventually Honour Oak Park. With research, it turned out that, like the London created in Blow-Up which had last drawn me here, Spark had been working at her own London collage when portraying Peckham mixing a huge array of local inspirations and amalgamating several places from nearby Camberwell Green to mix the real with the fictional.

It was all there alongside a heavily detailed mapping of the area. Upon reading it, such an aura became more powerful, heightened from its original node of evocative cover art by an array of 1960s imagery secretaries, models of industrial business adapting to the new boom of importing advertising techniques from America and endless visits to a thriving and unpretentious pub/drinking culture. I noticed Muriel Spark’s 1960 novel, The Ballad Of Peckham Rye, whilst in a gallery shop on Southbank and was instantly taken by the overt 1960s aura given off by its cover. I was keen to explore the area again in spite of my location in West Dulwich being a surprisingly long walk – far longer than the measure of Dulwich generally seems when thinking of it simply as Lordship Lane – and so I sought to find some marker to define the parameters of the area in the hope of finding some happy accidents. I had only been to Peckham once before, both to take pictures for an article about the locations of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and to (eventually fail to) view a flat on Spare Room, advertised by a performance arts specialist from Goldsmiths whose videos consisted of tearing her clothes off in lecture halls. To ingratiate myself into newly living in South London, I was keen to find some boundary markers in the area to walk and explore.

It will be necessary to discover the spiritual well-spring, the glorious history of the place, before I am able to offer some impetus.” (1960, p.17). “I shall have to do research,” Dougal mused, “into their inner lives.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark