INTRODUCTION
On the 18th November 1987 a fire broke out in the Underground station at London’s King’s Cross claiming the lives of 31 people. One unidentified victim, burned beyond all recognition, was known, for over 20 years, as ‘Body 115’, the mortuary tag they were assigned. King’s Cross (formerly Battle Bridge) was the also the site where Boudicca’s rebel army confronted the Roman garrison, setting Londinium ablaze and reducing it to ashes. Today, a rejuvenated gateway to Europe, its cafes, piazzas and boulevards mask a seedy and often squalid history. And from the rain-washed, subterranean underworld of King’s Cross, ‘Body 115’ emerges, a Virgil like figure to Noble’s Dante in this modern day homage to the ‘Divine Comedy’.
‘Body 115’ takes us from London to the heart of Italy, a voyage of discovery and recovery, embracing decay and gentrification, a sense of place and the need to escape. Invoking ancient rebellion and civil strife, modernity penetrates antiquity in this miniature epic. Through London runnels to picturesque Kent, we meet Marlowe at Millwall and Keats at Gravesend. We enter France through the limbo realm of a Calais refugee camp and lose ourselves in the slumbering battlefields of Flanders. We travel to Paris where poet-ghosts of yesteryear throng the backstreets of Montparnasse and, at last, to Milan, in a season of wet weather, we arrive to find that more than just the rain awaits.
“
I am from this degenerate city
fabled and condemned
from this country ridden into the sea
on the back of a bull
in a season of wet weather
I am Europa
I am your neighbour.
”
BODY 115 