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So to hell with "Brixton Town Square". It is doomed. Even if they do clear all the crazies and the preachers away from the underground, and they are forced to move elsewhere it won't be to "Brixton Town Square". Real city life stubbornly and awkwardly fuses and knots in places to hand, irrational, cramped, impractical. In spite of the success of Covent Garden the "Town Square, Brixton" smacks just too much of a site calculatedly designated for bustle.

So much for the Authentic. Then there is the Exotic. And this is just as elusive and unreliable. Paris in the nineteenth century may, today, appear to have been definitively exotic. But for the artists there and then it was stuffy, it was bourgeois. There was a yearning for something quite other: for the Exotic, in
particular the Oriental, the fervidly imagined stews and harems of Constantinople. This yearning for the exotic was a particularly French thing: there are the paintings of Delacroix, the poems of de Musset (Namouna Conte Oriental), Baudelaire, Madame Bovary dreaming vaguely, of things oriental ("the Sultans, with their long pipes, swooning in arbours in the arms of dancing girls!") etc through to Loti or, more distasteful, essentially cynical renditions of the Exotic, Gauguin's Tahiti paintings, Puccini's Madama
Butterfly.

(By the way, even Orientals seek the oriental exotic. Through Singapore every night up Desker Road is pedalled a whole flotilla of stony-faced Japanese tourists in cycle rickshaws. As they round the corner a fusillade of flashbulbs illuminates a cluster of spectacular lady boys, who wiggle and squeal in their tiny dresses as the tourists are pedalled away again to the safety of their hotel.)

Tourism was an escape from the perceived lassitude of European bourgeois society. As Mallarme writes:

La chair est triste hélas et j'ai lu tous les livres…
Je partirai! Steamer balançant ta mature
Leve l'ancre pour une éxotique nature!

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