Cab 1660 ...

which I've been driving the last few nights has a flash new computerised meter that, when you have a fare on board, shows the location you're driving through on the screen. Was stuck in traffic on the Cahill Expressway, approaching the bridge, where you do a 360 degree turn through a cutting chipped out sandstone, with a crew of film people going to a screening in Neutral Bay, when I happened to glance down and saw that we were in ... Gallows Hill. Stayed there for quite a while, maybe ten minutes. Time to think. Gallows Hill? Why was that still somewhere you could be? One of those buried places, a vestigial location whose name, for some reason, survives. Turns out you can still order flowers to be delivered to Gallows Hill, though I don't know of anyone who lives in, or goes to, or leaves that place. Essex Street is its more usual nomeclature. I had just been talking on the phone to a producer who suggested we meet next day at Guillotine, an editing suite in Redfern, so my neck still felt a little vulnerable. Later on I found that the no-mans-land on Oxford Street between Paddington and Bondi Junction is called Mill Hill. Ghost sails turning where the Reservoir now is, just above Victoria Barracks. I thought of White City, which I also drove past (or through), the other night, explaining to my fare why that name persists when all else that used to characterise the place has faded. Nothing to do with tennis. In a review by Peter Ackroyd of City of Disappearances, a book edited by Iain Sinclair, I read this sentence: What is the White City? A question I will try to answer elsewhere. It was a relief to quit Gallows Hill and join the roar of the traffic on the bridge, but also a sadness, to be leaving a place that no longer is, yet was, briefly, once more, and perhaps not again, if equivocably, inhabited.