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Stef · at 1:00 am

St George's Circus; as yet unproven occult centre of London

Tracy's Brother and his girlfriend are over next week from New Zealand.

They never been to London before

Oooooooh exciting.

They're spending a few days with us and I had generously offered to work out a tour itinerary for their stay and to act as a guide. Tracy refused the offer point blank. She turned me down on the basis that she was concerned that her brother would spend a few days with me then go home with a warped and twisted view of London.

And there was me, already having gone to all the trouble of listing out the 'must see' places in town - Wood Green, Finsbury Park, the Holloway Road, East Ham, Lewisham, Stockwell; all that planning wasted.

It's long been a fantasy of mine to take a group of visitors around London and completely spoof them with bogus information. The challenge being to find credible alternatives for key London landmarks and remain completely convincing throughout. Sadly, this dream has yet to be realised and I usually have to content myself with less ambitious pleasures; pouring pints of superstrong lager and vicious chicken jalfrezis down the necks of unsuspecting visiting Italian relatives and their famously limp digestive systems, that sort of thing.

I think this all dates back to a school trip to Rome when I was about fourteen. On one particular day, and for some unknown reason, the teacher leading our group was totally hacked-off with the whole deal. He spent the entire day taking us around the city and solidly lying to us about what we were seeing throughout. 'That's the Trevi Fountain built by Harry Trevi in 1926. On Tuesdays the locals fill it with milk', 'This is the Parthenon (actually the Pantheon). Famous for being the place where the first Toblerones were made back in AD420', 'These are the Spanish steps, so named because they were made and imported from Germany. The Pope walks his ceremonial labradors up and down here three times every morning'. And so on. Whilst not of consistent high quality, the bullshit was sustained and entirely unscripted. At the end of the day the teacher handed us over to a colleague, got drunk and refused to speak to us any more. He was, and many ways still is, my hero.

Anyway, onto Plan B for our visitors next week. Under strict supervision from Tracy, in a controlled environment, I came up with five rough, themed itineraries:

Southbank walk from Lambeth Palace to Butlers Wharf (probably the best and most feature-packed city walk on Earth, if you’re a tourist that is)
Westminster / Buck House / Hyde Park
West End - Oxford Street / Soho / Leicester Square / Covent Garden / Trafalgar Square
Primrose Hill / Regents Park / Camden
St Pauls / Tower of London / Leadenhall Market / Brick Lane / Petticoat Lane

Yawn. We'll barely scratch Lambeth and Hackney hardly gets a look in. And as for Woolwich, forget it.

The only concession Tracy is planning is to allow me to point out the occult symbolism behind the shape, height and alignment of various structures that we see. That's not going to sustain me for very long. Maybe I'll be able to sneak some bullshit in when she's not looking …

Top occult/ esoteric features of London landmarks that I've already mentioned elsewhere in the past include …

Big Ben is 316ft high - the same width as the outer circle at Stone Henge
Nelson's Column and The Monument are both 202ft high and are actually sundials
St Pauls Cathedral is 365ft high, a replica of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and aligned 8 degrees off East-West so that it points to Temple Church
The occult centre of London is in St George's Circus, Lambeth (OK, I haven’t got round to proving that one conclusively yet).

Come to think of it, I haven't worked on my thesis about the hidden geometry of London for ages. Maybe I'll spend part of the weekend doing some research i.e. drinking scotch and staring at aerial photos of London until I hallucinate. It's a lot of fun I can tell you.