HOUSING//THINKING · ARCHIVE 01 · EVAN SASKIN
Origin Story: Outside The Knowledge
On a London street that barely qualified as one, I learned why the best places to live in the thick of a city are invisible.
Blue Lion is named after a street that barely qualifies as one.
In 2007 and 2008 my wife and I lived on Blue Lion Place, in a bright flat off Long Lane, not far from Bermondsey. Calling it a street is generous. It is a short drive connecting an old factory to a tertiary road — the kind of thing that exists because two other things needed joining, not because anyone ever planned a place there.
London’s geography is famously ancient and unknowable. The city is palimpsestic, written over itself again and again rather than laid out. The black cab drivers who master it are said to possess The Knowledge — capital T, capital K — and earning it takes years of riding the city on a scooter with a map clipped to the handlebars. The effect is not only mental. Researchers have found that the hippocampus of a working cabbie is measurably different from yours or mine. The city physically reshapes the people who learn it.
I have stumped black cab drivers with Blue Lion Place.
Not because it’s obscure. It’s central. It’s on the map, it’s findable, it has a postcode like anywhere else. I stumped them because it barely meets the definition of the thing they had memorised. It is below the resolution of The Knowledge. A street that is technically a street and functionally something else.
All the best places to live are a little squirrelled away.
That flat taught me something I have been chasing ever since. Not a hobbit hole, not a retreat, nothing rural about it — a sunny snug in the thick of the city, hidden in plain view. The address nobody can give you directions to. I didn’t have language for it at the time. I just noticed we were happy there, and that visitors always arrived slightly amazed the place existed at all.
If it doesn’t feel like Toronto, if it feels like a secret, that feeling is the closest thing this practice has to a founding value.
There is a lesson in here about where infill housing actually lives. It lives in the leftover geometry of the city — the odd lot, the short frontage, the platypus street, the parcel that every category fits about eighty per cent. These are the sites that are hardest to approve and hardest to finance, and they are also, not coincidentally, the ones people fall in love with once they are built.
I don’t know whether building a practice around that is a strategy or a weakness. Probably both. But I know what I was doing when I named the company, and I have been looking for the same street ever since.
Housing//Thinking is an archive of writing, talks and podcast appearances on housing policy, design and delivery. Blue Lion Building.