Smokingboot

Boris Lermontov: "The Ballet of The Red Shoes" is from a fairy tale by Hans Andersen. It is the story of a young girl who is devoured with an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of Red Shoes. She gets the shoes and goes to the dance. For a time, all goes well and she is very happy. At the end of the evening she is tired and wants to go home, but the Red Shoes are not tired. In fact, the Red Shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the street, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the Red Shoes go on.

Julian Craster:What happens in the end?

Boris Lermontov: Oh, in the end, she dies.

Of course she does. Cheers Boris.

I travelled in search of the Red Shoes last night, though it would be unsporting to talk too much of it except to say it is seriously worth one's attention (http://www.secretcinema.org/) But I can at least speak of the lands I wandered.

See, Whitechapel and the East End fluctuates between happening and hopeless. Around Jack the Ripper's old stomping ground there's redux, and only hints remain of how menacing it might have been. There are still ugly bits, boring bits and dangerous bits, but you're probably all right unless you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Admittedly, at the wrong time any place is wrong...

But there's no right time in Wapping.

I got there at 5.30. Dark, deserted. No high street I could find. Big council estates tower over victorian functionality, warren meets alleyway. There are lots of sneaky walkways right down to the riverside, so close but so strange...you can hear the water lapping once the traffic stops. I found an easy path to the edge, but it passed a nice big dark basement carpark , perfect for robbery. Do you think muggers pay architects to design these places? I crept alongside it anyway because I was curious. There were footprints on the sand, up from the river to the steps. All we needed was fog.

This is the creepiest part of London I have ever found. Evocative for sure, but you couldn't pay me to live here.