Elephant's Memory

Central Leicester, February 2016

At first glance, the site depicted here may not look like much.  At best, it might just look like more evidence of my madness; sorry - I mean my fascination with lacunae and interim sites of transformation within the urban landscape.  There’s no doubt it also feeds into my even more current interest in visualising absences, erasures and what is ‘there-but-no-longer-there’.  Even seen in those terms, it’s not an especially spectacular example, although my camera was delighted to record those pleasing traces of long-lost staircases.

However, for a couple of reasons, the site has slightly more significance than might at first meet the eye.  It lies in a slightly overlooked backwater of central Leicester, on the corner of Wharf Street South and Gladstone Street, in a down-at-heel neighbourhood of sporadic light industry and more recent housing.  Even within living memory, this was a far more bustling, (if slightly edgy), district, and the site is actually located close to Leicester’s old Central Telephone Exchange building, and once futuristic Lee Circle Multi-Story Car Park, (both of which have featured here before).  What commercial activity lingers on now seems vestigial at best, and the most obvious contemporary life-signs come from the largely Asian and North African denizens who drift through in waves, between the City Centre and nearby Belgrave or St Matthews Estate.

Wharf Street South, Central Leicester, February 2016

In a previous professional incarnation, I worked as a Scenic & Display Artist for a company - based just round the corner, and used to regularly visit the building that once stood on the vacant corner plot.  In those days, it housed a Motor Factor’s business, - where we often purchased car paints and related sundries.  In the course of such workaday errands, I wondered about the building’s former usage, intrigued by its rather ornate frieze, and how the structure appeared to have been abruptly truncated, - suggesting it had once been at least one story taller.

Hints and rumours at the time suggested some connection with the tragic story of Joseph Cary Merrick, - preserved in popular memory as The Elephant Man; and a little research suggests this may in fact be the case.  Merrick’s struggle to find some place in society, despite the hideous deformities that blighted his short life, is pretty well-known, both from fictions, such as David Lynch’s film ‘The Elephant Man’, (1980), and from slightly patchy contemporary accounts.  What is certainly known is that he was born just a few metres away, in Lee Street.  It’s also the case that, during the years Merrick scraped a living as a theatrical Freak Show attraction, his Impresario, Sam Torr owned a theatre, - The Palace Of Varieties, on the very site under discussion.

Joseph Carey Merrick: 'The Elephant Man', c.1889

                                                                                                      

Film Poster: David Lynch (Dir.), 'The Elephant Man', Brooksfilms/Universal Pictures/
Paramount Pictures, 1980

As is usually the way with such Psychogeographic conjecture, there’s a certain amount of ‘what - if’ about all of this.  There’s no explicit evidence that Merrick actually appeared at The Gaiety, although it would seem more than likely.  That establishment was itself rebuilt in 1893, - as the building I knew; and it continued to operate as a theatre, and later a cinema, well into mid twentieth century.  Therefore, Merrick can never have physically climbed those actual staircases; yet it’s almost impossible not to imagine him doing so in the poetic imagination.  What’s more important is that some resonance of his passing seems to cling to the site, - and indeed to the wider neighbourhood.  This aspect of imaginative projection is what actually interests me most about the whole Pychogeographic project, - far more than any stickling over strict, historical accuracy.

Joseph Carey Merrick, 1888

In passing, I note that a certain raffish reputation always clung to the once-energetic Wharf Street area.  The Gaiety rubbed shoulders with a Pawn Shop, which possibly doubled as a brothel, - and may itself have been a nexus for amorous liaisons of the more commercial variety.  During my period of employment up the road, the prophylactic remnants of such activities regularly punctuated our car park; not to mention the day The Police fished a discarded murder weapon from the roof of our premises.  On another occasion, I left a nearby Techno All-Nighter, around dawn, to witness a quartet of primary-age urchins sitting in a parked car they’d smashed up, whilst making “brrm, brrm” noises.  Some things change; others – not so much.