Blake's mosaics in a non-existent street

Some new mosaics celebrating William Blake have just gone up to decorate the gloomy tunnels under the railway just west of Waterloo station (right).

Blake lived in Hercules Road from 1790 to 1800, during which time he wrote his celebrated poem The Tyger.

I chased them up yesterday to add to the William Blake section of the Taking Liberties bike tour map, which accompanies the British Library exhibition that ends next Sunday.

The mosaics are in Carlisle Lane South and Centaur Road, brightening up a nondescript area a few hundred metres from the station.

Exploring them all was yet another of those experiences perfect for bikes: too dull and attenuated to do on foot; unparkable by car (though this yellow Volvo, above right, somehow managed it in the bizarre Zen street mentioned below); too intricate and costly by public transport; but a modest delight by bike.


There are also some enjoyable mosaics in Boyce St, in front of Waterloo station, which reference Boticelli, Seurat, and possibly the Ribblehead Viaduct, though I'm not sure (right).

But I was just as intrigued by the status Boyce St itself, which seems an even Zenner street than Leigh Hunt St, mentioned in a previous post. It clearly exists, as this detail (right) of a Lambeth council map shows, and indeed was cited as the venue for the ante-station mosaics in various emailouts to us.

But it's invisible to Google, to Microsoft Live Search, to Multimaps... to everyone. It's just a walk-through under a railway arch (right), without buildings, without a road surface, without even a name plate. London's Zennest Zen street for cyclists.

London's secret 'Zen street'

Another miserable morning, with cheesegrater drizzle and a sky the colour of undergraduate laundry, so I cheered myself up en route to work with a visit to a Zen street.

Leigh Hunt Street (right), off Southwark Bridge Road in SE1, is hard to find on the map. In fact, Google and the London A to Z don't acknowledge its existence at all.

Maybe it hides Southwark council's nuclear bunker, or an underground weapons research establishment. But more probably its anonymity is because it's only 27 feet long, has no buildings on it, and goes nowhere: the street equivalent of one hand clapping. Presumably, it used to go somewhere, but was truncated when the park was created.

The street is listed on the excellent SE1 news website, so maybe it has just enough Internet validity for you to use it as a false address next time you have to supply one for an Internet competition. (The postcode, to judge by a search on the Land Registry's find a property facility, would be SE1 0EY or similar.)

It was being used as a car park on my visit this morning, but you can get an idea of its brevity from the pic. Until recently it was little more than a brick gazebo, as the image on one visitor's photo website shows ("eine absolut notwendige Strasse", he notes pithily - "a vital street").

It's nowhere near the shortest street in Britain (that's Ebenezer Place in Caithness, which is less than 7ft long, and has an address on it).


But is Leigh Hunt St the shortest in London? Curiously, a leading candidate for the 'genuine' shortest street in London is Clennam St, which is virtually next door. I paced it out: 18 strides, so around twice as long as Leigh Hunt. But Clennam St is a proper thoroughfare (for now: it's due for pedestrianisation) and even has a good pub on it - the Lord Clyde, which bizarrely is at no. 27. (The strides were paced out before going to the pub.)

There's something about Leigh Hunt's minimalism that I like, though. And for such an elusive thoroughfare, it has something of a history: it used to be called Lombard St, apparently.


A pleasant thing about taking in semi-arbitrary diversions like this is that it forces you to do a familiar journey by an unfamiliar route. In London that's always fun.

So, this morning, instead of my usual scoot over Waterloo Bridge I came over Southwark Bridge, which had some entertaining roadworks (right), and found myself going towards St Paul's up historic Watling Street - which, leading as it does to Holyhead, is a bit longer than Leigh Hunt.