Of
Peter Richter
On a beautiful summer’s day, you stray a bit through the London district of Marylebone, where today you can only see billionaires and their baristas, who, however, can hardly be distinguished from one another. Then suddenly the floor opens up and you fall into a replica of Jarvis Cocker’s children’s room: Sheffield, the steel city, the most synthetic 1970s and of course “The North” in every respect, as it is always called on England’s motorway signs, where that is less a purely geographical than always a social and cultural indication of direction, if not a diagnosis. And that’s right in the middle of “The South”, where on the one hand posher couldn’t be, and where, on the other hand, the touching little “Gallery of Everything” on Chiltern Street was for a few weeks this summer the fountain through which one could just fall in amazement into the wonderland of Jarvis Cocker’s childhood (almost literally, by the way, viz a crazy steep basement staircase).