The Tower of the Lidless Eye rises anew!
Categories: circumnavigation, buildings-and-cities
Tags: cities, southlondon, london southlondon
Date: 05 October 2009 20:53:52
Well over twenty years ago, I walked back from town towards Nunhead through the North-Peckham Walworth triangle with my old mate Dave Turtle. I mean that piece of land surrounded on the west by Walworth Road and Camberwell Green, on the South by Peckham High Street and Queen's Road, and on the north-east by New Cross Road, Old Kent Road, and New Kent Road.
We walked across the bit of post-industrial desolation that was then just becoming Burgess Park - its quite pretty now but then it was basically a disused canal towpath connecting the abandoned church to the traveller's site by way of an old school building full of squatters and a car-breaking yard, and looked out at the ramparts of North Peckham to the south and the flats round Albany Street and the Heygate and Amersham Estates to the North.
The first time he saw it, Dave named the place "Barad Dur".
Here are those ramparts close-to:
Just a silly joke. OR SO WE THOUGHT!!!!!!
Then, I first saw IT a few months ago, rising over the collapsing brutalist mass that surrounds the Elephant and Castle. What was it? It is in this picture taken from North Peckham - follow the link to the larger picture and look at the tower you can see in the distance on the left:
Is that what it looks like?
I had to find out.
For many hot and dreary weeks I quested through the railway cuttings, arches and twittens of South East London to get a better view of this monstrosity.
Finally, from behind a parapet in a dingy and little-used part of Waterloo station, I got a good view:
Follow the link and open the larger the picture, IF YOU DARE. Look at the top of the new building. Is this not clearly the Tower of the Eye, Sauron's fastness in Barad-Dur, being rebuilt in South London?
Take a closer look:
CAN THERE BE ANY DOUBT?????
At the Elephant, after dark, I was able to approach unseen (I hope) almost to the base of the Evil Tower:
The picture is, I know, vague and distorted. I hardly dare approach the orc-works so close in daylight. (As if the evil within cared for the sun or the moon! Aaaaaah! I am already weary!)
Look at the horrible gaping windows with a ghastly pale gangrenous death-light of putrescense oozing from them:
This morning, in the rain, through distorted old plastic windows of the tunnel in the sky over Waterloo Road, I finally got a good picture. It looks almost beautiful, in its dull, damp, stony way:
BUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT???!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!