Top and Bottoms

This is ‘city magick’ – the city as a ‘worldscraper’ – with

routes to the underworld and the sky city. In the bowels of
the Thistle Hotel (formerly
the Rougemont) the Duty
Manager mis-leads us to a
broom cupboard that he
believes to be a cell from
the old New Prison of the
early 1800s.

We find in another room, just off the dusty beige shell of a

former nightclub – closed down some years ago because of
trouble caused by marines from Lympstone Commando – a
framed plan for redecoration: the reception floor is marked
out in freemasonic chequerboard, while upstairs the result
is a blank square. Somewhere along the line someone made
a decision for discretion, or cost, or didn’t get it, or maybe
that the intention was enough. Another of the mytho-
geometries that is/isn’t there.

We cannot get into the cupola on the Exeter Central

Railway Station – there are
“sensitive materials” in the
office below.

There is a layer of devil and

dragon iconography around
the centre of Exeter, about
thirty feet up from street level: gargoyles on the cathedral, a
dragon high up on a roof in Goldsmiths Street, demon
imagery in terracotta red under the gables on the corner of
High Street and North Street, in Rackclose Lane look up
and there’s a Satan and a goblin erupting from the wall of a
house, the Lizard of War under Nike’s heal on top of the
Memorial in Northernhay Gardens – a layer of devils and
imaginary reptiles, then of seagulls, pigeons and falcons,
then of angels and then the Kennely/Heaviside layer. The
world seems to be readying itself to switch polarities, there
are growing magnetic anomalies slowly building up around
the poles, then the whole planet loops the loop
magnetically, conceptually invisible and effectively
apocalyptic.

In the top room of The River Church we are shown the

largest unsupported ceiling in the South West. The room
once used for illegal cock fighting. In Debenhams the
acting Store Manager would have taken us down to the
basement, but the Manager is ill and she is under-staffed
and very busy. We take a contact number, but we don’t
return. It’s not the moment.