Road Stories: New Writing Inspired by Exhibition Road - review

This collection of stories by some of our finest writers has been commissioned to celebrate the refurbishment of London’s cultural heartland
Frances Wilson9 August 2012

Road Stories: New Writing Inspired by Exhibition Road
edited by Mary Morris
(RBKC/Dream, £9.99)

In 1851, when she visited the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, Charlotte Brontë remarked that “its grandeur does not consist in one thing but in a unique assemblage of all things”. It was Prince Albert’s vision to preserve this quarter of London for the celebration of science and art, and today Exhibition Road — home to the Natural History and Science Museums, the V&A, and Imperial College — must contain a greater concentration of “all things”, from Diplodocus bones to Rigby & Peller bras, than any other kilometre on earth.

This collection of stories by some of our finest writers has been commissioned to celebrate the refurbishment of London’s cultural heartland. The aim is to capitalise on the “unique assemblage” that Exhibition Road has to offer: in terms of history and location alone, each story might be set at any point between 225 million years BC and the future, and take place anywhere from the Albert Hall to the Rings of Saturn. But with the exception of the surreal science-fiction love story by Russell Hoban (completed shortly before his death in December last year), Iain Sinclair’s “psychogeological” walk from Hackney to the great rocks of the Natural History Museum, and Clare Wigfall’s Meet the Monster, in which the fossilised remains of an ichthyosaur are found by a child in 1812 on the beach at Lyme Regis, it is not time and space but loneliness and race that most of the writers explore, in poignant tales about the present day.

The best of these is Kamila Shamsie’s perfectly poised Gold Medal Day in which Saqina, a Pakistani woman whose flat on Exhibition Road is used as a public convenience by her day-tripping relatives who don’t like using the loos in the museums, is inspired to change her life. Also excellent is An Eye that Seeks, by Lebanese writer Hanan Al-Shaykh, in which a homesick attendant at the V&A encounters a successful artist from his village in Yemen. Deborah Levy tells a strange tale about a hunchbacked copywriter who woos a glamorous anthropologist over vodkas at the Polish Club, while in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Photograph of the Prince, a pair of lovers visiting the V&A discuss the story behind a photograph taken in 1909. Gurnah’s reflections on the nature of representation and truth prove too heavy for the short story form but in A&V at the V&A Ali Smith explores with a lighter touch the theme of a couple reflecting on their relationship as they wander “this place named for lovers”.

Taken as a whole, these tales capture the imaginative force of Exhibition Road wonderfully well, while also giving us a snapshot of the state of the nation. Rich, relevant and surprisingly romantic — Charlotte Brontë would surely have approved.

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