Reading on Trains Number 23: The Enigma of Mornington Crescent.

Mornington Crescent is my favourite of all London street names, partly because it reminds me of the song, Morningtown Ride, made famous by The Seekers, whose music I love for its trenchant chord changes and the plaintive voice of Judith Durham, who always reminded me of the nicer sort of junior school teacher.

Morningtown Ride is a lullaby, written by the American folk singer, Malvina Reynolds, and its theme is a nocturnal train ride to the land of nod. The tune is so pretty as to be almost sinister, as are the lyrics: ‘Somewhere there is sunshine/Somewhere there is day’. You’d think kids on the brink of unconsciousness would require some more definite assurance that they would wake up again. In their version, The Seekers – accidentally, I assume – added a darker still overtone with the haunting line ‘Sandman swings the lantern/To show that all is well.’

There’s also something crepuscular about Mornington Crescent – the street, I mean, in spite of its sunny name. It dates from the 1820s, but there’s a battered, immediately pre-War quality about it: jaundiced stucco, a lot of dustbins, heavy net curtains. I once saw two elderly cockneys – man and woman – shambling along it, the woman saying to the man, ‘We had to wait for him to get back from the docks, didn’t we?’ Or did she say ‘dogs’, which would have been equally anachronistic?

The Crescent, reverberating continually to the sound of the West Coast Main line, is the opposite of a green space. In the late 1920s, its communal garden was sold off for the building of a cigarette factory, owned by Carreras, who made the Black Cat brand in that fantastical Egyptian-Deco building now rehabilitated as the home of British Heart Foundation, among other concerns. (And it’s absolutely bristling with ‘No Smoking’ signs.)

The Crescent was already going downhill when the Tube station of the same name was opened in 1907. That was the year of the Camden Town Murder – the killing, in 1907, of a prostitute called Emily Dimmock, which inspired a series of murky interiors by Walter Sickert, who lived on the Crescent at the time. Sickert had an interest in ‘true crime’, and his landlady at number 6 told him she believed Jack the Ripper had once lodged there, which prompted Sickert to paint Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, showing probably his own bedroom rendered in almost impenetrable darkness with some misshapen figure at the lace-curtained window.

(In the 1970s, a few literal-minded people began contending that Sickert actually was Jack the Ripper, and Mathew Sturgis, biographer of Sickert, felt obliged to confront this in a postscript, which begins ‘Walter Sickert was not Jack the Ripper’, Sturgis immediately adding that he says so with regret, ‘for the commercial prospects of any book claiming that someone is not Jack the Ripper must always be very much less than one suggesting somebody is.’)

The Tube station called Mornington Crescent takes on some of the dark, or at least, mysterious quality of the Crescent. It’s cartographically elusive, for a start. It was built as part of the Charing Cross Euston & Hampstead Railway, which runs through central London as what is now the West End branch of the Northern Line, as opposed to the City & South London Railway (which became the Bank Branch of the Northern Line). The tunnels north of Euston are horribly entangled and the Tube map offers only a crude caricature of the situation, showing two prongs of the Northern Line, which we are invited to imagine as being the prolongations of the West End and Bank branches as they narrow towards Camden Town. Because Mornington Crescent belongs to the West End branch, it is shown as being on the westerly prong but, strictly speaking, it should be on the easterly one, because the continuation north of the City branch from Euston swings west of the continuation of the West End branch.

(…That all quite clear?)

Harry Beck, creator of the Tube map, was tormented by where to put Mornington Crescent. In the first published version of the map in 1933, he had it on the easterly prong. Before the year was out, he’d moved it to the westerly one where it has remained ever since, but Beck slept with a copy of the map under his pillow in case inspiration should strike about how to depict more honestly the true situation of MC. In Mr Beck’s Underground Map, Ken Garland reproduces a page of doodles made by Beck of that section: little lines with small circles to indicate Euston, King’s Cross, Camden and that perpetual spanner in the works, Mornington Crescent. They resemble hieroglyphs, like the ‘Dancing Men’, in the Sherlock Holmes story. Alongside, Beck has scrawled the name of a piece of piano music he was perhaps listening to at the time: To A Wild Rose, by Edward MacDowell.