Tim Moore: What a capital game

After his various peregrinations across Europe for Frost on My Moustache, Continental Drifter and French Revolutions, all Tim Moore had to do for his latest travelogue--Do Not Pass Go (Yellow Jersey, £12, tpb, 31st October, 0224062638)--was to leave his west London home every morning with a one-day travelcard.

Moore's new book is a journey of exploration around London--the city in which he has spent all his life--based on the locations that feature on the Monopoly board.

He says he is banking for the success of the book on the fact that Monopoly is a source of nostalgic memories for huge numbers of people who spent the rainy afternoons of their childhood as the iron, the boot or the little dog, chasing around Mayfair and Pall Mall and squabbling furiously with their siblings. "Quarrelling and cheating is what most people remember about Monopoly," he says.

But this quirky theme also provides an appealingly oblique angle on the capital, avoiding many of London's tourist sites in favour of the minor but no less intriguing histories of King's Cross Station, Fenchurch Street or the Old Kent Road.

One of the first facts to emerge from Do Not Pass Go is that the streets chosen for the Monopoly board were always illogical and bizarre. As Moore puts it: "If you were going to pick 22 streets which represent London, why would you choose Pentonville Road? Why isn't Tottenham Court Road or Charing Cross Road there at the expense of somewhere like Vine Street?"

The answer, curiously enough, lies in the fact that the Waddington game, compiled in 1936, was put together by the company m.d. from Leeds, who knew next to nothing about London. He seems to have picked out the streets at random, on a quick visit to the capital with his secretary Marge.

"But frankly, it's as good a way as any to explore London, and there are fascinating stories for every single street," says Moore.

And a lot of the facts are both piquant and surprising: in 1936, London was the largest city on earth, with all of nine million people. "It was the world capital, and had changed so much in the 30 years before that, a lot more than it has done in the 60 years since."

The ultimate 1930s nightspot, the Café de Paris, was located in Coventry Street--probably the reason for the appearance of the street on the board--and it was here that the Prince of Wales was supposed to have had his assignations with Wallis Simpson. The city was also home to a mammoth chain of coffee houses: the Lyons Corner House, which had a central kitchen where they made all the pre-prepared meals, and one restaurant capable of seating 4,000 customers. "It was the Starbucks before Starbucks," says Moore.

The London of 1936 was also obsessed with traffic schemes, which Moore found intriguing: "Everyone knows that the traffic is awful, and streets which may have had some character in the 1930s, like Euston Road or Park Lane, don't have any character at all now, other than as a kind of urban motorway, which is fairly tragic. But in the 1930s they thought this was a bold new step in the right direction and that the car was king.

"It was interesting to find out who was responsible for the ridiculous flyover on the Old Kent Road which goes on for about four foot and then dumps you straight into the traffic at the other end, and that the planners thought this was a good idea--that they were doing London a big favour."

The Monopoly board idea also allows Moore rein for a few adventures, as with his visit to a Brazilian transsexual prostitute, located through a King's Cross telephone box ad, with whom he nervously whipped out his Monopoly board and played a quick game: "It was clearly by no means the weirdest thing he had been asked to do, maybe even not that day."

Or there was his shopping expedition to Bond Street, where--incensed by the fact that he was treated like a potential shoplifter by various shop attendants--Moore ended up nicking a teaspoon from one department store. "There's so little human spirit in those shops; it was clearly very, very immature to steal a teaspoon from Fenwicks, but it was very satisfying."

Occasionally he found he'd bitten off more than he could chew. A trip to Pentonville prison--located bang in the middle of London, off the Caledonian Road----to cover "Just Visiting", was more traumatic than expected. "I thought when I got there they'd just get some architectural historian in a bow tie to show me around the perimeter, but they let me straight in."

Not only was he unused to rubbing shoulders with prisoners, but Moore was spooked to discover that the executed bodies of notorious murderers Christie and Dr Crippen were buried under the prison lawn. Worse still was the original conception of the prison, a "new model prison" of the 1840s.

"In many ways the prison was ahead of its time, everyone had their own cell and toilet. But it was part of this deliberately soul-destroying Victorian idea that the way to rehabilitate someone was to crush their spirit. Prisoners had to wear these big hoods whenever they left their cell so they couldn't make any noise, and even prison officers wore special felt shoes to dampen all sound."

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