Visiting Paddington Station in 2022, while taking a first ride on the newly-opened Elizabeth Line, I’m reminded of an involvement with this same station (one I hardly use these days) way back in the 1970’s, when I was a new boy in London and spent several years distributing poems – street poems, as we called them – in streets and railway stations, primarily around London, but also in many other towns up and down the country.
This was at the instigation of Mr. Bongo Mike, who was already well-known as the London Street Poet when I met him.(Actually he was the second London Street Poet, the first one having been Street Talking Pete, but he was no longer active at this time.)
So we’re back in 1975, I’ve joined Mike in his literary venture, distributing a few of my poems and some of his, making a precarious but hugely satisfying living at it, and I’m on the concourse of Paddington Station one Sunday afternoon in June, making a sales pitch in the manner first demonstrated to me in Victoria Station by Mike himself, approaching people randomly with some such line as, “Hello, I’m a street poet, would you like a poem to take home with you”, or “…I’d like to give you a poem to put on your wall” (Mike’s favouite), or….well, any one of various other lines you might think of.
Well, I have noticed a uniformed police officer some way off, who I think may be observing me, though I’m not sure. After a few minutes he does approach me, saying “Can you come with me to the office, I want to talk with you”.
I say, “Well, can we not have the conversation here? I mean, if you want me to leave, I’ll just go, no problem” (Or words to that effect. You would technically need a licence to distribute printed matter in a train station, though if you just “got on with it” you were usually ok – but if the police got involved you would have to disappear, and maybe give them a few free poems, depending on their mood!).
He insists that I go with him, so I do, and once inside the office at the edge of the concourse I am verbally assailed by two other officers, who accuse me of being a vagrant, and make various other derogatory remarks. I suppose I might have become a little heated myself, and the eventual result was that I was driven off to Paddington Green Police Station where I was put in a cell for a while, before finally being informed that I was being charged with trespass on the railway, and should appear at Marylebone Magistrates Court the following morning.
When I saw Mike that evening he said “Oh well, maybe it’s a good thing. You’ll find it very character-building fighting a court case. Go to a library and study the law books. You should represent yourself.”
So I did. And because I pleaded Not Guilty, the hearing was postponed at first until the end of July, and then again until the end of September. By chance I ran into an old school friend who had been at Cambridge with me, and was now working at the Home Office, who agreed to come as a character witness; then a former teacher from the same school, and a vicar who lived across the road from where I was squatting, both gave me written character references; and I had a few meetings with a young lawyer who gave me some advice pro bono on procedural matters at court.
In those days, as the accused, you knew only what was written on your charge sheet, i.e. what law you were accused of breaking; you did not know, in advance, what account the arresting officer was going to give, in the courtroom, of what it was that you were doing that caused them to arrest you. I believe this practice has been changed in the meantime, but it meant then that, as the defendant, you had no idea what story the officer was going to tell. (Or as a cynic might put it, what lies he was going to dream up!)
For months I worried and fretted, preparing my case, based on what I remembered of the event; but when the day came the policeman told a story that was indeed – I’m sorry to say – a work of pure fiction. He told the court that he had seen me follow two old ladies around the station and look in their handbags, and that when he spoke to me he had ordered me to leave the station, but I had refused to go.
Now that, looked at rationally, does seem to be an implausible scenario on two counts – not merely because a saint such as I am (!) would simply never do such a thing, but because, even assuming I had, surely the last thing I would then do, upon realizing that a police officer had been watching me, would be to refuse to leave! It makes no sense at all.
But I had – naively, I suppose – been assuming that his story would in general terms resemble the facts as I remembered them, and I had prepared some searching questions to ask, on that basis. As it was, I was completely flabbergasted. I blustered to no real effect for some minutes, but really could think of nothing better to say than to demand to know from the J.P.’s if I was being charged with trespass on the railway or with looking in ladies’ handbags.
The J.P.’s confirmed that the handbags were not included in the charge. And when the time came to give my evidence, I obviously presented the picture of events as I remembered them – much as I have described them above. My character witness confirmed that he had known me at school and at Cambridge, and that he didn’t think it was probable that I would be looking in strange ladies’ handbags in a railway station.
And in my summing up I argued that, if my evidence were to be believed (and really it was the more credible account) then whatever the rights and wrongs of my selling poems on the station concourse, I couldn’t be guilty of trespass because, far from refusing to leave, I had in fact offered to leave, but had been detained at the officer’s insistence.
[The law of trespass – which curiously is only a criminal offence where it happens on railway property – actually describes the forbidden act as “wilful trespass”, which in practice means that you have to have been given a warning, and have then refused to leave, before you can be considered to have broken the law.]
The J.P.’s retired, and on coming back returned the verdict of guilty: there had been a technical trespass, but they would give me an absolute discharge. And the clerk of the court came up to speak to my witness and me afterwards, and informed us – in a friendly sort of way – that he’d been to Oxford.
Which was all sort of pally and alright, in the sense that I didn’t suffer a punishment, and more importantly didn’t have a criminal record, but it did feel like an illogical fudge, and if I had not already been driven mad for four months worrying about the whole thing, I might even have appealed. But it was going to be a difficult business trying to distribute poems at Paddington station in future anyway, even if I did win an appeal. So on balance I decided to just swallow it – which was of course a bit sad, because the street poems had actually been quite popular in Paddington . But there were other stations to try…
….one of these being Kings Cross, where there was both a concourse for the mainline station at street level, and beneath that, at a lower level, a ticket hall for the tube station (both of them suitable locations for my work); meaning that I was to become familiar, over several years, with the layout of the station itself, and with the network of passages connecting the underground ticket hall of the tube station to both the mainline concourse above, and to the street outside and even to the nearby St Pancras Station. And thereby hangs a tale, which I shall leave for another day……
And lastly a picture of Paddington Station, entitled simply “The Railway Station”, completed in 1862 by the British artist William Powell Frith, who specialised in painting crowd scenes of everyday life.
The two gentlemen in top hats on the right of the picture (one carrying what looks like a set of handcuffs) are apparently police detectives, apprehending for unspecified reasons a gentleman who may be having his shoes cleaned – the incident being observed by a station porter on their left. Perhaps the gentleman in question had been trying to sell his poems? (Let’s hope he hadn’t been looking in old ladies’ handbags!)
The Story Of Situation Art 