Blood and Thunder

I thought to myself, prior to heading to Sweden, why don't I read a classic Swedish novel while I'm there?  Immerse myself in the culture.  Get a bit of an insight.  It had to be contemporary, and set in Stockholm, and it definitely wasn't going to be one of those Girl In A Dragon Tattoo books because I've taken against them for no real reason at all.  I did a bit of scouting around and ended up on Let The Right One In.  I'd seen the film, years ago, and I vaguely remembered it was set in the suburbs of Stockholm.  That'll be good, I thought.  That's the kind of area I'm actually visiting.

What I hadn't realised was Let The Right One In isn't just set in a nameless, generic Stockholm district.  It is quite deliberately set in Blackeberg.  And when I say "set in Blackeberg", I mean "John Ajvide Lindqvist actually names the street and building the characters live in".  It's incredibly specific in its locale.  And as I sat in my hotel room reading the night before, a sense of dread began to set in.  Not because I was afraid of vampires, obviously.

The Blackeberg in Let The Right One in is a world of crime, bullying, graffiti, glue sniffing and general unpleasantness.  Admittedly, it's set in the early eighties, so there's a certain amount of distance involved, but it still made me wonder where I was heading.  

But first, I had to get there.  As the train pulled into Hässelby Strand station, the heavens opened.  I reluctantly pulled on my jacket.  I dislike wearing a coat at the best of times, but I especially hate wearing one when I'm in shorts; it feels counter intuitive, like wearing a bobble hat and a bikini.

This was a hell of a rainstorm, however, absolutely hammering it down, relentless and dark.  The skies were black above me.  I paused for the sign picture then hurried into a side street.

Unsurprisingly, nobody else was walking about.  One woman loitered in a bus shelter, but everyone else had decided to stay in and wait out the storm.  The water swirled down the road, overfilling the gutters, bouncing off roofs.  I thought back to the complimentary umbrella tucked behind the door in my hotel room, and wondered if I should've brought it out with me.  I hate umbrellas though.  I hate carrying them, and they're only ever semi-effective; a lot of you will still get wet.  There's that complex dance you have to do when you encounter someone else with one on the pavement, too, a little "you first - no you," which is always awkward.

I crossed over the railway and ended up on a long straight main road, where cars and trucks sped by.  I hugged the wall to try and avoid getting splashed, although by now the water had seeped into my socks and was clinging to my cold legs.  At least I won't be sweaty today, I thought grimly.

Hässelby Gård station was tucked under the railway viaduct, the shops outside closed, its plaza empty apart from a sole commuter rushing inside with an umbrella above her head.

I invite you to compare and contrast this picture with the one at Hässelby Strand to see just how wet I was.

My next station, Johannelund, was a bit of an outlier on the Tunnelbana network, for a few reasons.  For a start, it's the least used of all the 100 stations, to the extent that until fairly recently they closed it at weekends.  It was built to serve a nearby industrial park and so there was no reason for it to be open then.

It also, uniquely, has side by side platforms, rather than the island platform used everywhere else on the Tunnelbana.  And it's not received the same technology update the rest of the stations have.  The doors at the foot of the stairs were manual, for pete's sake; the first doors I'd had to open myself on the whole trip.  There was no lift.  And the exit was through a turnstile, rather than the swish ticket gates I'd seen everywhere else.

Johannelund was also where I'd have to briefly cancel my "walk to the next station" policy.  It sits in the crook of an elbow formed by the E4 and E275 highways.  This was why this spot was chosen for a junction to the new Stockholm Bypass - a huge underground tunnel which will arc right round the west of the city.  

When completed in - provisionally - 2030, this will be one of the longest road tunnels in the world.  Until then, there's a mess of building sites, road closures and construction vehicles spreading all across the city.  The construction of Traffic Interchange Vinsta means a lot of mess and restricted access for pedestrians - and Johanneland is right in the middle of it, as I've highlighted on the map.

I went down to the entrance, took my sign picture, then turned round and went back up again.  Of course, the relentless rain hadn't helped either.  If it had been good weather, I might've had a bit of a poke round, on the off chance that I could carry on.  As it was, sod that for a lark.

I returned to the platform to loiter.  It was an odd feeling, loitering here on the Tunnelbana.  By now I was used to turning up and going.  Having only a minute or two before the next train arrived.  This seemed like an absolute age.  It was actually less than ten minutes.

As we pulled into Vällingby I realised that name was familiar.  I tried to think why and remembered: it also featured in Let The Right One In.  Vällingby's leisure centre is where the paedophilic vampire familiar Håkan abducts and gases a naked teenage boy in the changing room so he can drain his blood, only to get caught and pour acid over his own face to try and kill himself and conceal his identity.  It's not exactly The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.

I thought to myself, I wonder if that leisure centre's nearby.  Then I realised that was slightly inappropriate.  It's not the nicest scene in the book, as you may have gathered, and going to take a picture of the outside of it seemed ghoulish in the extreme.

Besides, Vällingby was a pleasing town to visit without the promise of fictional attempted murder sites.  Vällingby was built as a New Town for Stockholm, inspired by both the Garden City movement in the UK and the creation of post-war New Towns there.  It welcomed its first residents in 1954 and they discovered a town built to satisfy all their needs - employment, residential, leisure.  (One of those early residents was Benny from ABBA, who played piano in the youth centre).  Vällingby Centrum shopping precinct, in particular, proved globally influential, with its long open arcades and concrete overhangs to protect pedestrians from the weather.  The hope was that people would live and work here and wouldn't need to commute into Stockholm, but that didn't quite work out.  It was none the less declared a success, and the model was copied across the city region - though, as with in the UK, the subsequent districts weren't built to the same quality or design standards.

The Eighties weren't good to Vällingby, but further work at the turn of the millennium aimed to recapture its charms.  The buildings were refurbished and money poured into the area.  Whether it worked is debatable for the residents, but for me it seemed like a decent little town.  Admittedly, none of the shops were open, but that seems to be because all Swedish shops refuse to open before 10am; if you want to nip in to buy something on the way to work, you're bang out of luck.

I did a circuit, and happened across the Filmstaden Vällingby, the local cinema.  It was a wonderfully 1950s confection, the kind of place you'd go to see an extremely melodramatic Rock Hudson movie.  Pleasingly, it's still used to show movies, with some additional screens carved out under the square, while inside it's been restored to the full Danny and Sandy from Grease glory.  Admittedly, the Minions on the outside kind of ruined the effect.

I returned to the metro so I could get the train onto my next stop, Råcksta.  The first thing that grabs your attention there is the car park, a huge multi-storey right next to the platforms; they don't use the phrase park and ride but it's definitely implied.

Råcksta also gave me my first bit of Art, although admittedly I'd skipped some examples en route.  I completely missed the lacy steelwork at Vällingby, and I was so concerned with the rain that I walked right by the tile work at the Hässelbys.  (You'll be unsurprised to learn there is no art at Johannelund).  

At Råcksta, Mia E Göransson installed pale ceramic tiles with inlaid chestnut leaf images on the stairwell.  It's nice enough, but it seems more like an installation done to stop people from writing obscenities on the walls of the staircase, rather than actual art.  If you didn't know there was a ceramicist behind it you might not notice it at all.

When Vällingby was being laid out, it was given the shops, but Råcksta was home to the office workers, specifically, the headquarters of Vattenfall, the Swedish electricity company.  They've since moved to new premises and their colossal buildings have been converted into apartment blocks.

More and more residences have been built in what was once an employment centre as the way we work and live has shifted.  I walked from the vast open plazas beneath the towers to small streets of new coloured houses.  They came with parking spaces and roof terraces and solar panels and I wondered why we weren't copying the Swedes and building entire new towns of these.

At the end, a vast curved apartment block that looked like a demented cruise liner that had crashed inland.  I couldn't decide if I liked it or hated it.  It was so vulgar it almost got away with it.

I followed the hill downwards, behind a harassed looking mum with a pushchair who moved at an alarming speed.  She had places to go and needed to get there fast; that kid probably had insects splatted all over his teeth as she burned through.  On the roundabout, a fair was setting up for the weekend.  In the rain, the half-built fairground looked particularly pathetic.

A bounce at the bottom of the valley and then I was climbing into Blackeberg itself.  I realised I'd reached the street where Oskar and Eli live in the novel and I considered walking round to take a picture of the apartment block.  I decided not to, on the basis that this was probably a really common thing (in both senses of the word) for tourists to do.  I bet there's a constant stream of Goths wandering up here at the weekend and trying to have sex on the climbing frame.  You're trying to nip into town for a pint of milk and there's two people in Fields of the Nephilim t-shirts pretending to eat one another in your porch.  I did take a picture of the street sign though, but that's my schtick, so I'm allowed.  

Blackeberg wasn't the almost battleground portrayed in the novel, a mass of smackheads and drunkards and criminals, but you could sense how that wasn't too far off the truth.  There was an atmosphere, a fog of tiredness and stress in the people who passed me.  I'm not scared of vampires or werewolves or zombies; I don't spend my days fearful of a supernatural attack.  What makes me nervous are people, irrational, unpleasant people, people whose wants have overridden their socialisation.  The scariest part of Let The Right One In wasn't the sexually deviant undead creature without a face murdering wildly as he crossed Stockholm.  The scary parts were the thuggish bullies who attacked Oskar for no reason other than they could, or the glue-sniffers breaking and entering purely for something to do.  The cruelty men are capable of is far more terrifying than otherworldly horrors.

When they made the film of Let The Right One In, they mainly filmed it in northern Sweden, because the plot required constant snow and that way it was guaranteed.  They only filmed two parts of it in Stockholm.  The attack in the underpass was filmed in Råcksta, because they had one that fitted with the director's vision.  The only part that was actually filmed in Blackeberg were shots in the town centre around the Tunnelbana station, for the very good reason that there's no way you can fake that building.

Blackeberg station in Let The Right One In.

I was reaching the station from the lower entrance, not from the town square, but you still couldn't deny its brilliance.

Opened in 1952 and designed by architect Peter Celsing, Blackeberg is unlike any other station on the line, a show off for no reason other than it could.  Instead of the small ticket office leading to the platform, you suddenly have a wild expanse of curved concrete and a double staircase leading to the town square.

It's amazing how calming concrete can be.  That single mass of grey arcing over my head made me feel protected and warm.  I climbed the staircase so I could see the station from above.

Admittedly the modern clutter of lifts and ticket barriers has intruded on the elegance of the building, but still, you can't deny that ceiling.  Natural light streamed in from the windows but I imagine it looks incredible after dark, when the spotlights come into their own.

Wisely, The Art at Blackeberg doesn't try to compete with the ticket hall, and is all down at platform level.  Ruben Heleander filled gaps on the walls with coloured tile work, meant to evoke the four seasons, but it can't hold a candle to the grey above.

I waited for the train.  The rain had stopped by now.  The morning was developing nicely.  I'd just seen a beautiful brutalist station.  I was happy.  And then I felt a sharp pain on my throat, and everything went dark...