Night Visit – researching a story

I am deep in researching and creating ‘Night Visit’ the culmination of my artist residency at The Swedenborg Society. The performance will be premiered on 20 October 2012 as part of  The Bloomsbury Festival.

Swedenborg was born in Stockholm in 1688 and died in London in 1772. He found London a place where he could unreservedly explore his spiritual ideas, and had the freedom to write and publish ideas that would have been controversial, even prohibited in Sweden. It is heartening that London still embraces freedom of speech.

To help me create my stories I wanted to see the places where Swedenborg had lived when he was in London. He spent much time in Clerkenwell, living at 26 Cold Bath Square, and The Red Lion Tavern on Warner Street where he had the transformative vision that changed the direction of his life. He visited Fetter Lane where his publishers were based, and also spent time with a group of Moravians. His walked to his printers near St Paul’s. And at the end of his life lived on Wellclose Square by Wilton’s Music Hall, near to the Swedish Church where he was buried.

“By horse, by carriage, by ship, on foot, Emmanuel travelled, from Upsalla to Gothenburg, Amsterdam to Versailles, Greenwich to St Paul’s, Copenhagen to Stockholm, Berlin to the Hartz mountains, Hotel d’Hamborg to Siena, Stockholm to Clarkenwell, Oxford to Westminster Abbey, Ellsinore to Zurich, Cologne to Leipzig, Stockholm to Fetter Lane, Cold Bath Square to the Red Lion Tavern, Stockholm to Shadwell. But he wanted to go where no one else had been. He wanted to travel to other worlds.”                                                                                                                  From ‘Night Visit’, Sally Pomme Clayton, 2012

Clerkenwell was an area of monasteries, natural springs and holy wells. The  River Fleet ran below the green hills of Mount Pleasant. Spring water rose up in the centre of Cold Bath Square and was renowned for its coldness and healing properties. A summer-house bath was built in the centre of the square, and people came to take the waters for well-being.

I walked around Mount Pleasant. It had become a prison, and is now the Post Office sorting office, but the boundaries of the original fields remain and you can still sense how it would have looked. Cold Bath Square is no longer a complete square. Number 26 is not even there any more, half the square has been built over.

Warner Street was full of industrial buildings. Fetter Lane transformed by metal and glass. The Swedish Church had been pulled down. Swedenborg’s remains were re-interred in Uppsala Cathedral in the 1900’s. But in place of the church is a patch of green called ‘Swedenborg Gardens’.

I felt as if I was looking at London through Swedenborg’s eyes. As if time had collapsed, and he had come back to find everything had changed. 200 years does not seem a long time, and I found it shocking that hardly anything at all remained. But the water and springs still run under the concrete and tarmac of Clerkenwell. And I did catch a glimpse of the Clerk’s Well, one of  the sacred wells, through a glass window on Farringdon Road!