Mark Fisher - LondonunderLondon (2005)

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane unclear approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:30

  This is the way to London town. He awoke, and focused. A dream or two waving from a couple of corners, quickly fading. Out of the crisp clean sheets, into the bathroom. Quite blind, still unautomatic. Chose the clothes from the wardrobe. Slacks with a crease, the brown shoes from Yugoslavia in a long gone style. The…

• 00:05:49

  Revealing sections of rooms with different patterns of peaked wallpaper and furniture. Often tangled with plants that had grown from seedlings blown through shattered windows. Many of the bigger buildings were amazingly well preserved though. He especially liked to walk into the Lyceum Ballroom on the Strand. And…

• 00:10:11

  The Ritz was lovely too. Almost completely obscured by trees rampant from Green Park. He would wake up to a gently moving undersea light filtered through leaves and branches. And go down the long corridors like the walkways of a submerged ship. Strolling out through the woods and over the bridge to the Houses…

• 00:14:55

  For long afterwards. He stood in the soft beams of sunshine. Diffused by the curtains. Caught for a moment in the stillness of the room. Watching the dust swirling slowly golden. Through patches of light. That fell across the carpets and furniture. Feeling a strange closeness to the vanished woman. Being here…

• 00:19:32

  There was a tentacle that went through the building and had an opening by the stairs, of thirty feet away to my right. There were creatures coming through it, and hovering away like birds, or huge brightly coloured moths. Moth creatures. It was so vast. Incredibly beautiful. But like it was... Like it was all deep…

• 00:26:33

  Slowly and continually, wildlife is moving in, deep and re-territorialised into all their space. A total concrete jungle, especially if you include all the crazy people, all of us skimming our own territories, mining our roots and parading the streets. Now I will walk down Bass Aspies, revisiting the world left…

• 00:40:55

  We lie gorged with food, torpid in the heat. We lie gorged with food, torpid in the heat. We lie gorged with food, torpid in the heat. We lie gorged with food, torpid in the heat. It seems totally incredible to me now that everyone spent that evening as though it were just like any other. From the railway station came…

• 00:51:26

  An alternative now builds itself out of radio station idemts and incidental music. Earworms breed the hunger for a space in which they can propagate, out beyond the pleasure principle, on the strobing plateaus of the day. The music of the night is a sound flow. The music of the day is a sound flow. The music…