Norwood: Hilly and Proud!

Grange Hill to Elmer’s End (or more prosaically, Upper Norwood to Lower Norwood)

Bank Holiday Monday, what we would have called Whitsun once upon a time. The wettest day of the year so far. Just the day to go for an evening stroll through leafy Norwood. I left home about 6.30 (Abi left not much later to go to see Cabaret at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue. I’m told its wonderful) got a bus to Brockley Rise…

…then 122 down to Crystal Palace, then I got on the first bus that came along and round the houses down past Gypsy Hill and Beulah Hill (less Biblio-romantically called “Bewley’s Farm” on old maps) to Spa Hill by the David Livingstone Primary School. Yes, Norwood is hilly and proud of it.

I don’t know it well, but I think I like Upper Norwood. For reasons I don’t understand it is nice. There are places you come across (if you wander round London) that are for some reason or other more pleasant than you expected. That make you smile to find them. Not the coolest or the richest or the most trendy or the most fun places. Maybe its partly low expectations. No-one demands much from a visit to Osidge, or to Cricklewood and Willesden Green, or to the denser parts of Penge, so when you find them to be slightly less boring than you feared, your easily-pleasedness is stroked.

Norwood is one of those nice places, or at least the streets between Upper Norwood and Thornton Heath are. Maybe its the combination of high density and greenness and a feeling of openness. Maybe its the way Croydon council have preserved and labeled loads of pathways and twittens between streets, so everything is penetrable. Maybe its the way social and ethnic diversity has been added to what was mostly a lower-middle-class/respectable-working-class Victorian suburb without quite overwhelming it. Maybe its the hills providing views over or out of London. Maybe it just reminds me of home. Maybe there are waves of evangelical niceness pulsing down over the landscape from Spurgeon’s College. Or else its the unpretentious radio waves from the transmitter at the top of the hill – the original ITV TV mast, but now used for Channel 5 TV and local commercial radio stations on MW and DAB, with the UHF being just the hot backup for the 70m taller and much flashier Crystal Palace transmitter. There must be some beneficial effect from living in the shadow of Kiss FM.

If this was America perhaps the Baptists would make a bid to take over the transmitter and broadcast Christian TV. There can’t be many many unused TV transmitters with thirteen and a half million people in the footprint. But as it is, Norwood is a nice place.

My PC seems to have lost my photos of Spurgeon’s College (amongst other things). Try again tomorrow.

I decided that if it was past 8.20pm when I got to the Goat House bridge (where there is no Goat House Tavern any more) I’d look for a pub for a quick drink then get the bus back, but if not I’d extend the walk a little. It was 8.18. So off over the railway and past some flats…

…and into South Norwood Country Park, Which was beautiful quite unexpected, and very wet. Flatter than I expected, with a lot of drainage ditches lined with thorn and elder running between small open areas of grass, nettles, and brambles with tall herbs like cow parsley and hogweed and and some larger trees. Quite a bit of ash and some oak. Almost heathland, but chalk underfoot. I have no idea how it came to be there. By the amount of concrete and brick rubble lying around I guess it might have been built on once. Its hard to be sure in the near-dark but I don’t think I saw many mature trees.

Remarkably empty for a park probably not as much as a quarter of a square mile in extent. Just me in the middle and a couple of dogwalkers working round the edge. Maybe Croydonians don’t like walking in woods in the pouring rain in the evening. Birdsong everywhere. I wish I could identify birds by their song but I usually can’t and I only got a good look at one largish bird perching on a lookout branch in the gloaming and much as I tried to make it a short-eared own it was a crow. It looks like a place for warblers. I could fantasise that there were nightjars there, but I expect that the place is much too small.

Even if there were any it was a little wet for them to be about. This years weather can’t have helped insect-eating birds. An unusually hot and dry early spring, followed by a sodden May. At the end of March and beginning of April London was not only hotter than New York (not unusual at that date) but hotter than LA and Houston – and Melbourne. Almost as hot as Sydney and Cairo. By the end of April the temperature was hotter than our summer average. This last week of May has been cooler than the last week of March was. And its been raining for days. That’s great for plants which got an early start with spring sunshine and no frosts, and are being watered during the long days of cool light, which is more important to them than intense sunshine (most native plants can’t make much use of direct bright sunshine anyway, much of the benefit is lost by photorespiration and increased metabolic rate). But many insects like it the other way round. Damp winters and springs to get the grubs going, then hot dry smelly weather for them to fly around and bother people. And what insects like swifts and nightjars like. I fear they are having a bad year.

And I lost my way and turned too far south on Footpath 666 and ended up at Arena tram stop and had to yomp up the dual carriageway to the uninterpretable junction at Elmer’s End for two pints of Spitfire in the William IV and a bus home.

No photos of the Park yet, as it was getting dark and however lovely the light seems when you are in it, trees don’t photograph well after sunset in the rain. Maybe later.

I’ll be back.

Queue for Kew

To Kew Gardens, to meet some people who use the Ship of Fools forums. Kew as always wonderful. A little late for the lilacs, too early for the lilies. The Temperate House is a bit orderly these days but the Palm House delightful. Not much to say about it that fits here really, except that everybody should go.

They seem to like queues though. A queue to pay to get in, a queue to get a cup or tea, a queue to get into the Waterlily House (with a great exhibition of chilis and some Very Important Sub-Tropical Wetland Plants in the corners), a queue to pay for the book I bought. (Garden Natural History by Stefan Buczacki, one of the latest in the Collins New Naturalist series which must be one of the great cultural products of Britain – and one or two of which are among the best natural history books we have – I think everyone should have read Mountains and Moorlands by WH Pearsall)

A lot of queuing to spend an afternoon in one of London’s best parks, which is also one of the country’s best displays of the variety of living things (its more a zoo for plants than an example of a garden types, though it has plenty of those as well), and most of all perhaps one of the top three or four centres for research into taxonony and systematics and evolution in the whole world. Trust me, I’m a botanist.

And I still can’t remember what pollinates horse chestnuts.

Then to the Dove at Hammersmith, one of the iconic riverside pubs and scene of quite a few meets. And they do keep their London Pride well. Fun, though it was crowded and too wet to sit outside.

Threw myself on the mercy of the London bus system to get back home and worked my way from Hammersmith to Wandsworth, then a 37 to Peckham, and a 21 home. With a pint or two on the way.

Overheard on train leaving London Bridge towards Waterloo:

“We’re passing the old Market Tavern. I used to drink in the other one, the Globe. That Richard Harris, you know, the film star, used to come in in the morning. You know, it was open in the morning ‘cos of the market porters. Open from six to eight. Hw used to come in two or three times a month. Drunk as a fish.”

Boom boom boom again

Another fire in a small industrial building by the railway here, the third in less than three weeks. London Bridge station closed again The Dartford and Hayes trains are all being diverted to Victoria. So they will run through Nunhead, on the line for whch this blog is named.

All this and someone set fire to the Cutty Sark. South East London’s burning down, burning down.

The Cutty Sark is (or was) only about a mile from here. I passed it every day when I worked on the Island. It can be seen from the side door of our church. I haven’t got a picture of that view online at the moment, but I do have a few from Greenwich Park with the Cutty Sark just visible. Here is one I prepared earlier:

Click on it to see the bigger picture and links to others. You Know it Makes Sense.

Overheard on the more-than-usually-crowded bus:

“Stuart’s her-indoors is a psycho-killer bitch!

Well, she’s a bit crazy anyway.

She’s like, odd.

If he wants to watch football, Stuart has to buy her a pair of shoes. She, like, doesn’t let him get away with anything. He has to give her an item of clothing to go to the pub. And its not, like, a two-pound pair of flip-flops. Its like hundreds of pounds. Imagine what that sets you back if you add it to the cost of going out.

She’s like, very strict with him.”

Uttered, as nearly as fallible memory makes out, by one of three apparently very drunk twenty-something-in-the-city young men.

Its not like I’m jealous.

Overheard on a train from Charing Cross to Lewisham:

“Michael actually likes Justin. Lots of people don’t realise that. I’ve never seen him jump up and down for any fan the way he did in Japan. It’s not like I’m jealous. I’m not jealous, its l’m just like ‘I wish I had a bit of that’ but I’m not jealous. “

(rather attractive young black woman with a posh accent speaking very loudly into mobile)

From Pollard’s Hill to Norwood Junction

There is a hole in my knowledge of suburban South London. I’ve been familiar with Croydon at least since I was first at university back in the 1970s and I’ve often had reason to visit there. Now I live in Lewisham I sometimes go to Sydenham or Crystal Palace or even Penge because they are easy to get to by train or bus, being in the same radial sector of London, so I just need to go out and in and not round. Brixton I’ve been to, and I used to have friends in Stockwell and Clapham and Tooting. But, apart from the A23 (main road to Brighton via Croydon) and the mainline railway the gap between those places is much more anonymous from my point of view. Streatham, Tooting Common, Norbury, Thornton Heath (north of the Mayday, if the Mayday counts as Thornton Heath) haven’t really been on my radar.

So the next stage of my circumnavigation of London in Zones 4 and 5 was all exploration, at least for the first few miles.

Tube to Clapham Common then 255 bus to take me back to Pollard’s Hill, somewhere I didn’t even know existed till I walked up it last week.

This time I approached from the Mitcham side through a perhaps 1970s flat-rooved high-density low-rise estate that looked like a little version of the Ferrier at Kidbrooke at first, until I saw if from Pollard’s Hill and realised how huge it was. Pleased to find I could still steer through the little playing fields behind the estate and predict where the hole in the fence that gets me to the hill was – one of the few skills you learn being brought up in suburban council estates outside Brighton, followed by years of experience in walking round putting political leaflets in doors. I can nearly always find my way from a council estate to the nearest little municipal recreation ground or swing park.

The view from Pollard’s hill is wonderful (if you like looking at south London suburbia, which by now anyone reading this will have realised that I do. Almost 360 degrees, though you have to position yourself very carefully to look north thought the gaps between the houses. In some ways a bigger view than from Crystal Palace or Hilly Fields, perhaps because the hill, though not very high, stands more alone and falls off more steeply.

Where do white people go on Sundays? I mean, I’m white, I know where I go, I go to church and the pub and sometimes the shops and occasionally on bus-trips of bike rides or longish walks round London. But where are the rest of them? Not in our church (pretty obviously) but today not in the streets on the east side of Pollard’s Hill either. Today it mostly seemed to be Asian families wearing western clothes and driving BMWs. Its quite posh round there, Some private streets and lots of kempt leafy spaces.

Back to Norbury High Street (or whatever the A23 is called there) and up the other side through back streets. It seems to be a bit of a taxi suburb. The homes of cab drivers congregate in London. There are few streets round the back of Welling where you could almost believe about one house in five has a black taxi parked outside it. And there is a bigger load of them in Ilford. There seemed to be quite a few parked outside lockups and in little alleyways round Thornton Heath and Norbury. Quiet streets of semi-detached or largish terraced houses, mostly inter-war, very lace-curtain and respectable, often with front gardens, some looking like ex-Council places. One suspects that there are many large flat-screen TVs inside. The London working class moved a few notches upmarket and out to the suburbs, but not so far out as to make it hard to drive in to town. Who wants a two-hour journey home after their last fare of the night? Maybe if Welling is where the white drivers accumulate, and Asians in Ilford, black black cab drivers end up in Thornton Heath.

Up the hill towards the centre of Thornton Heath and houses getting shabbier and older – must have grown out north from Croydon rather than being developed south from inner London through Brixton or Sydenham – or perhaps more likely they merged from a little cluster of high-density nineteenth-century hosusing round each station, the sort of thing you see near every little station on the Brighton Line – even such exurban places as Hassocks or Balcombe (Or do I mean Barcombe? Very irritating that they are in the same county) can have a street or two of smaller older houses around the station. Before they filled in the gaps with the 1920s and 30s semis this must have been a little like a Surrey version of the MegaVillage One in Sussex (a name my brother-in-law gave to the network of “villages” north of the Downs between Lewes and Henfield and north almost to Hayward’s Heath). There is a web of roads connecting old centres that actually or almost join with each other, with nineteenth century streets at right-angles to them, and newer housing filling in the gaps. Large chunks of Thorton Heath could easily be in Brighton. The houses are almost identical to places like Ditchling Road.

Further up the hill through the little recreation ground towards Thornton Heath station and the old houses are grottier again, though older and larger. And much of the infill is council estate with the odd brutalist block, or else some very new estates of high density private housing. There’s a very flash old building just uphill from the station that has been turned into flats. Looks half-way between a posh French house and a church. The little square of new houses beneath it is called Reservoir Close so I guess it must be a waterworks building. Really flash

Now I can either turn left up through a very nice-looking park towards the little Croydon clone of the Crystal Palace mast and back to the Fields We Know that way, or I can drop down to Norwood Junction and get a 75 bus, The second option would join this walk to the route of one I did to Penge a few months ago, so I go for that.

And take a wrong turning on what I assumed was Whitehorse Road and ended up crossing the mainline railway and had to backtrack round the Palace ground to get to Norwood clocktower and a pint at the Alliance Tavern. And I was only five minutes late for evening service.

There are two ways to finish the circumnavigtion formally

In the first year of the walk I worked my way anticlockwise in stages round from Grove Park station (at Downham between Lewisham and Bromley)
to Mitcham via Beckton, Forest Gate, Enfield, Mill Hill, Harrow, Hillingdon, Whitton, Kingston, and Sutton (amongst other places). Not in a continuous set of walks but in a sequence of overlapping walks crossing each other zigzagging through each others routes.But there it rested for about two years longer than intended, In the gap I’ve visited Penge and Norwood a few times (and once the Norwoody bit of Streatham) and I’ve been to Beckenham Place Park. so I know have lines on my AtoZ connecting Norwood junction to Beckenham. I also went to Downham for a funeral and walked back to Lewisham. So I know have only two gaps, totalling less than a kilometre from to connect Beckenham to Grove Park. So I could join the dots with a couple of busrides and less than half an hour’s walking.

Or I can work my way east from Norwood Junction through Zone Four passing south of Beckenham through the outer reaches of Croydon – all those anonymous suburban stations in the litany of the Mid-Kent Railway and the old Crystal Palace line named after pubs and some now reborn as tramstops: Kent House, Clock House, Elmers End, Birkbeck, Bellingham, Beckenham, Bickley. That will keep the outerness going

(Piccies added Monday night)

Mitcham to Norbury, backwards

After the success (from my point of view – I had fun and my wonky knees held up) of last week’s walking round Preston I decided to reboot the second Circumnavigation of London. Which after all was what this blog was supposed to be about in the first place. I last managed any of the walk over a year ago, leaving my anticlockwise journey by stages through London Transport Zones 4 and 5 (with occasional excursions to Zone 6) off somewhere in the middle of Mitcham Common, which as far as I can tell is the only heath in the south of England with its very own tram station.

On Sunday afternoon after church I took a bus to Peckham, than another to Brixton, by which time the rain had turned from hat weather into umbrella weather so I bought myself one in Boots and walked down to take some photos of St Matthew’s Church. Not that I got any good ones because it was impossible to get a decent angle on it from the Brixton side, not without street furniture and leafy trees in the way. The rain didn’t help either. Maybe professional architectural photographers do all their work on sunny days in winter…

Down by bus through Streatham which has always been a rather anonymous place for me. I’ve been at least vaguely familiar with Brixton for all my adult life. Its the sort of place you go now and again, to see bands, or go to parties, or have a drink with friends. Its probably the only place more than a hundred metres south of the river that’s on the social map of most of London. I met my brother there once, walking in the street. “But I thought you never came to South London?” “This isn’t South London, its Brixton”. I’ve been familiar with Stockwell and Balham and Tooting at various times as well. Streatham though is a gap on the map, seen from a distance, wooded hills covered with middle-middle-class suburban homes, 1920s semis with small gardens and leafy streets. I’m never sure what London Borough its governed by either. Most of it feels like Croydon, but I think lots of it is run by Lambeth. It always surprises me that LB Lambeth goes to Gipsy Hill and right up to Crystal Palace where it borders on Croydon and Bromley. It just seems like a different part of London. Its as if Camden went up to the Wanstead Flats.

The main road through Streatham is familiar though, I must have been driven up and down it in other people’s cars hundreds of times, starting when I was in primary school with my Dad taking us to London to see his office, or up to Scotland to visit relatives. Its got rows of impressive redbrick Edwardian shopfronts, large mansion flats, and some of the brashest-looking places of entertainment in London, No, the brashest. They make the old gin palaces and boxing pubs of the Old Kent Road, or the nightclubs in Romford where fourteen year old boys go to get pissed, stare hopelessly at girls, beat each other up, and pass out on the street, look like models of restrained taste. I strongly suspect that the customers who use these places are not the people who live in the winding streets on the hillsides behind them.

Looking at my field AtoZ I realise that I can fill in the next block of my circumnavigation by getting off the bus just after Norbury station and walking up Pollard’s Hill than through to Mitcham Common. That will be back-tracking a little, taking the section clockwise rather than anti-clockwise, but at least it will fill in a gap. And I’m on the wrong bus to start this afternoon’s walk at Mitcham. It turns out I’m on the won bus to start at Pollard’s Hill either – we turn left just after Streatham Common and I get off two stops later and walk back to Norbury Station.

Unlike Streatham Hill and High Street I have no childhood or hitchhiking memory of Norbury High Street. I must have been driven down it, or gone along it on a bus, in order to get to Thornton Heath. But according to my master AtoZs (green lines for walking, yellow for cycling) I’ve never been there on my own steam. Its grottier than I expected. And suddenly Pakistani as well. Brixton is famously diverse, not as all-black as people who don’t know it think it is (or as Balham or parts of Peckham are), but white European faces are a minority in the streets. As you go south through Brixton Hill, Streatham Hill, and Streatham High Street the faces get whiter, and the clothes less stylish. Then suddenly I turn left near Norbury station and maybe half of the people in the street are Asians. Punjabi signs and Halal meat everywhere, though unlike similarly Muslim parts of North London, the people are mostly wearing European-style clothes and I only see one woman with her head covered. Yet one more piece in London’s ethnic jigsaw. Almost as obvious as the Brazilians in North Lambeth or the Koreans out beyond Wimbledon, and (to my ignorance of the district) as sudden and surprising as the tiny cluster of Japanese businesses and faces I found behind Hendon.

Radnor House in Norbury is one of the most unpleasant-looking new buildings I’ve seen in a long time. Blank walls at street level, tiny windows, no obvious doors, as if the only access is by car. A huge block that turns in on itself, posing as a place to escape from the nassty nassty street where strangers lurk. A storage facility for misanthropes who don’t even want to set eyes on their neighbours. Did the architects think it was a machine for living in? Or a machine for turning human beings into Tories?

I get to Pollard’s Hill about an hour later than I’d intended and start up it. The houses get larger, newer, and posher rapidly. By the top of the hill some of them are post-war and most are rather expensive looking. I’d marked the place in my A to Z years ago as a possible destination and I’ve forgotten why. The trouble is there was more than one reason for making such a mark. Sometimes it was a classic bit of high-density suburban layout I read about in Pevsner or elsewhere (there are some cool ones in Merton) Sometimes it was because of some notorious bit of suburban blue-plaquery – maybe John Major’s boyhood home, or ken Livingstone’s. Sometimes because I found a potential view on the map. maybe this was the latter, because although I had no idea as I was walking up it, the hill turns out to be a real hill, with a view in every direction – the St Helier Hospital, central Croydon, Crystal Palace. Howling wind and pouring rain didn’t help the photos though.

And, high-point of the day, if I position myself just right at the top of one of the side streets on the north side of the hill I can see Battersea Power Station in the distance!

RESULT!!

Maybe you had to be there.

Not much more to say, other than passing over a social boundary that coincides with a borough one, then past one of the many William Morris Schools, through a council estate, and onto Mitcham Common. Nice trees, lots of rain, cute goslings. Ending up on Cricket Green in Mitcham. Time for a pint of beer.

Another result. Pub called the Hooden on the green. A pint of very very nice Shepherd Neame Spitfire. Though its nearly five they are still doing food. I haven’t even had breakfast yet, just a cup of tea and a biscuit after church. Roast Sunday Lunch? Well, it smells nice, but I’e only got half an hour as I want to get back to church in time to do evil things to computers and projectors for the evening service. Have they anything lighter. No, only the cooked meal, but the barman will check. He does, and says the cook will make anything on the menu. I ask for a shrimp baguette, for £2.95 instead of the 5 to 7 quid they are charging for the full meal.

Can this be Britain? I ask for what I want rather than when they are wanting to sell me and they make it for me? Have I discovered the secret of power over catering staff?

It gets better. The “baguette” turns out as expected, to be a long roll with shrimps in some sort of slimy sauce in it. Americans and Australians should any be reading this, should know that when eating them Brits name that sort of crustaceans by size, “Shrimp” means little, maybe no bigger than a baby’s thumb. “Lobster” is big, the size of the baby’s arm or even leg. Or maybe the whole baby. “Prawn” is anything in between. So my shrimp sandwich contains a slimy pink sauce, which is not unpleasant, full of little lightly fried abdomens about the size of a bean. But the bread is good, and toasted. And there is a very English green salad – that is some lettuce leaves, and a few slices of tomato and cucumber, and a tiny piece of onion, with no dressing – not advertised but not unexpected.

What was unexpected was the chips. Lots of them. Half a plateful. Hot and crispy too, I’m almost embarrassed. Did I order this? Well I’m not going to complain. Did I pay for it? They’re not asking for more.

So in the end I do have a hot meal, of a sort, and another pint.

And I both got to church on time, and managed to see some Goldmith’s students having an intense learning experience with an overly complicated bit of equipment that seemed to be doing zoom shots of other students in the street.

Pretty Pictures of Preston and Penwortham

Hah! Had you fooled there!

I added some pictures (which link to more on flickr) to last week’s postings my trip to Preston. Which you can see about twenty-five centimetres below this one. Well you can on my screen anyway. YMMV.

The Day The Skip Stood Still

Seen on my way to the chemist’s:

(Select for link to pictures on Flickr)

Champagne SOAS

A snatch of conversation over heard while walking just outside work:

“… Champagne breakfast with the French ambassador.”

“I didn’t realise that you actually knew Sarkozy before …”

(Attractive young blond woman with very posh voice talking to young man with almost as posh a voice, in between SOAS and Birkbeck)

Anthroposophical?

Over heard on a train in London

“I met X going to the library – you know, the anthroposophical business…”

That’s not a word you hear every day.

Especially

Two business types in cheap suits, SE London or urban Kent accents (that’s “Estuary English” to the posh among you), one maybe in his twenties, one perhaps forty. Planning office coup. Colleague A, apparently, isn’t up to the job and needs a little help. Manager B has other things on her mind and anyway she isn’t “technical”. Things have come to a head due to some critical email that makes A. look very bad. Manager C. needs keeping out of it. The younger man was being subtly invited to “help” A, with the unspoken promise that soon he will get a promotion out of it, maybe even step into A.’s job if he has to go. I never quite worked out what business they were in, but it seemed to involve mobile phones and providing internet access to clients. I wondered if maybe they worked for NTL, sorry, Virgin Media. Trite advice was passed around – the best being “Keep the customer in the loop – even if there is bad news”. If it wasn’t for the suits (I don’t see a lot of suits these days) they could easily be the sort of blokes who drink in some of our local pubs. Maybe Charlton supporters rather than Millwall.

Then “anthroposophical”. Where did that come from?

There I was making up stories about 5-a-side football fans from Sidcup with a couple of A-levels and ten years experience cabling things up for BT getting themselves jobs in some kind of barrow-boy comms provider in the city, maybe even calling themselves a Consultancy, the IT equivalent of Estate Agents, and now they have a library and use words like “anthroposophical”.

The Quest for Upper Penwortham

Well, I found Higher Penwortham.

Quite different from Lower Penwortham. Large parts of it are very like a sort of northern version of Woodingdean. Other parts could be in Worthing, or some of the more downmarket bits of Hendon.

Lower Penwortham is basically a southward extension of Preston. Houses get newer as you get further from the bridge. One main street, with solid brick buildings that the builders probably called “substantial villas” when they were flogging them, a few side-streets from about 1890 to 1914, an few slightly sider streets with 1920s and 30s houses, and some (rather more upmarket) infill from the 1960s to now. It looks as if the builders of Broadgate in Preston got to the river, moved over and carried on.

The newest houses of all, being built in between Upper and Lower Penwortham, on the hill facing the bypass, seem the poshest of all. Some of them look as if they might be worth millions. But most are largish traditional-looking houses, made from apparently local brick, semis or even terraced, with quite small gardens, The gospel of redensification seems to have finally got even to these newly Tory suburbs. About time too, because the “bypass” is a huge gash in the landscape replacing the old railway, leading up to Preston, splitting what might once have almost been a town into two, and isolating the old church, St. Mary’s, at the end of a long and not-very-winding avenue. This is car territory now.

The church looks like a thoughtful 19th century restoration from outside but I only looked at it for a minute or two.

I spent more time in the graveyard with Victorian families that lost four children in as many years, followed by their father, but whose mother survived another thirty. Or one where the mother died aged 22, not long after her brother and her father, and only weeks before her son and then the father of her son. But her mother lived to see the 1930s, and her sister was “killed by enemy action” in 1941. And the memorials of men who made it to the second half of 1918 but still never came home are always poignant.

Beautiful wild garlic in flower all over the churchyard. All over the banks of the Ribble. It smells like Durham in the rain. If you are willing to go through some holes in fences you can get down from the churchyard to the banks of the river without having to go all the way back along Church Avenue and walk along the river for a while.

Then back up to the centre of Penwortham, for what its worth. Upper Penwortham is larger, more traditionally suburban than Lower. There is a rather sadly nostalgic shopping street, and quite a few more shops ribboned out in a big loop from Upper to Lower. 1910ish mostly at the street front, most converted to shops, some older Victorian buildings scattered around (& maybe a few much older). There are a few streets of 1920s and 30s housing and what looks like a small council estate, and some very swish new crescents and closes with Mercedes and Jags. It also seems to be getting posher as the houses get newer.

At the centre (such as it is) where Cop Lane meets Liverpool Road there is a watertower turned Estate Agents, some otherwise anonymous “Government Offices” (looks like 1950s or 1960s low-rise redbrick and prefab sheds with tarmac rooves that look like my old primary school), and a large attractive old pub, the Fleece. Slightly disappointing inside, a bit ersatz and chainlike (the staff wear uniforms, never a good sign in a pub) and the building is grossly overheated.

And yes, if you walk along Cop Lane to Pope Lane and carry on, it does turn into Leyland Road as it arrives back in Lower Penwortham, just after another small group of shops, a co-op and a health centre, and some rather more attractive pubs than the one on Liverpool Road. Well, they look nice enough outside, especially the Black Bull.

Next time, maybe.

Overheard in that pub in Upper Penwortham:

“I’ve got no time for all this software stuff. I just use my computer for what I want it for. I’m not interested in fiddling about with software.”

Then back to London by train. The wonderful London transport system isn’t so wonderful when you are arriving from outside and you’ve forgotten that your travelcard has expired. It must be even worse if you don’t know your way around. The wonderfully transparent and flexible London transport system becomes very opaque and intransigent when you have no weekly or monthly pass.

I found the bus stop at Euston and was going to get a 68 or 59 down to Waterloo and than another bus to Old Kent Road, but forgot that I didn’t have a ticket. They don’t sell tickets on central London buses any more, you have to get one from the machine by the side of the road. And it costs two pounds for a single or three pounds fifty for a one-day pass (the idea behind the outrageous prices being that you are supposed to have a pass, ideally an Oyster card). But the machine gives no change and accepts no small coins, so even though I had £3.50 in change I had to buy a £2 ticket.

So I got on a 59 or 68 (I for get which) and down to Aldwych, where the bus collided with a taxi. No-one was hurt, but the drivers got into an argument so the passengers disembarked and on to a 171, whose driver didn’t bother to make us pay again, which was actually better for me because it extended my two-quid ticket to Brockley, almost home. But knackered and carrying bags after midnight I didn’t fancy walking the last mile so I got off at New Cross and was then faced with having to get change for another two pound ticket. Where can you get change in New Cross? Well there are a couple of bars I could have gone in to, but I’d already had enough beer and was carrying too many bags for comfort and needed to get home, So to one of the grottier of the grotty kebab shops of New Cross to buy some chips.

They looked as if they were closing but fried some more for me. I felt almost guilty about making them do it. I didn’t really want to eat – I’d had dinner and also some sandwiches on the train, and chips seemed the most harmless purchase. A fizzy drink would have been cheaper but viler. An apparenlty pissed African bloke came in and asked for a chicken kebab, was told that there was only lamb left (though I could see two doner machines and one of them didn;t look like lamb to me. It didn;t look like chicken eitherm but I wasn’t about to investigate closely), he walked out, came back a few minutes later after talking to someone invisible outside in the street, asked for the lamb anyway and got into some complicated negotiating about the difference between a large doner for four pounds and a small for three, much to the frustration of the sellers. I think he actually only wanted a small one, but it seemed to be an matter of honour for him to not be seen to be caring about the price – the kebab shop people were, he said, from A-broad where all they are interested in is money, just like the government who put VAT on everything even ESOL lessons. (He’s not the only person I’ve heard moan about that – I wonder if the government has the slightest idea how many votes they lost over ESOL charges). But then an east-Asian couple came in, Chinese, or maybe Koreans. They didn’t order any food but asked the people serving if they knew any hotels nearby – there was a sort of just-off-the-boat feel to he conversation, not that very many boats call at Deptford any more – and then after somethinelse I didn’t catch, they asked if the women could use the toilet. She could, and they were told where it was, but her English wasn’t up to it (or maybe the perhaps Kurdish English she was listening to wasn’t up to it, even though it was little more than down the steps walk to the end and its on the left) so the man with her translated directions for her and the pissed small-kebab-eating man started parodying his language loudly. Sort of “Ah DONG wa PING-pang-ting” Sticky moment, for a moment. But everyone smiled it off and nothing happened. One of the things about people who work in kebab shops is that they use what are in effect floppy swords or large flensing knives to slice the meat of the giant doner sausage. I don’t know if this makes me feel safer or not.

The chips were nice.

Preston

Bank Holiday Monday was the circumnavigation of Preston. Starting and finishing in Penwortham, on the other side of the river – and now sadly represented by a Tory council – I wonder if they will change the rather unconservative-sounding slogan of the council: “Forward with South Ribble!”. Why do local councils need slogans and logos and brand identities anyway? And when they get them why are they always so naff? Redcar – “its not red and we can’t afford a car”. Why has anyone in the English-speaking world, even once since the 1970s, called any public building “The {whatever} Centre” or named any freeby news or propaganda sheet “The {whatever} Voice”.

Whatever. Starting and finishing in Penwortham and walking round the city but never quite going into the centre, trying to stick to inner suburbs or the transitional zone between the central and suburban areas. Which in a city the size and style of Preston isn’t at all hard to do – its not very big and its mostly all inner suburb, residential terraces, post-industrial refits.

Miller and Avenham Parks, along the river past Frenchwood, up past Fishwick…

(which sounds like it should be in Sussex) to Ribbleside, through Deepdale to the North End ground…

…then Moor Park and almost back into the centre, quick pint in the Lamb and Packet (local beer, regulars, some kids playing pool, county cricket on the TV), slower one in the Britannia Inn (at least six real ales, organic beer, pork scratchings, 70s music on the juke box, middle-aged bikers, rugby fans, some people discussing the location of the Dun Cow pub in Durham City (I could have told them!), a few elderly bearded blokes who seemed a little the worse for the afternoon and whose wives wanted them back for tea), backtrack out towards the docks, back up to behind the County Hall, (there is a pub that advertises “Disco’s ECT” as part of its exciting programme of entertainment), down to Broadgate, another pint or two in the Ribbleside Inn (a very different sort of pub, a bit downmarket of the others, bar staff and quite a few of the drinkers seem to have London accents, seems to have a few thirty-something mothers with premature wrinkles, too much makeup, and young kids in tow. I was asked to play killer pool by two of the kids) – and back over the old bridge to Penwortham.

There’s plenty to see round the north side of Preston. Well, there is if you find semi-ruined post-industrial desolation fascinating and or beautiful. Or if you are intellectually fascinated by the range of different solutions to the problem of packing in decent housing and open space into a high density urban network cheaply enough so that lots of not-very-well-off people can live there.

Oh well, maybe that’ll just be me then. Lots of nice houses, a few good parks, but still quite a lot of waste ground, places where buildings once were but now aren’t, gaps in the fabric of the urban continuum of a sort that you don’t see so much in the south any more (although there were lots in Peckham until about 1997).

Some dinky little mosques in a presumably new vernacular style, shiny dark red brick like the ones used in the posher terraced houses of a hundred years ago, slate rooves, little towers with with rather pretty little minaret tops to them, usually in green and gold, that look more Indian than specifically Muslim to me, but off-the-shelf panel doors and PVC double-glazed windows that could have been bought from B&Q.

I didn’t take many useful pictures of the mosques because people were using them or going in and out or at least standing around chatting and I tend to avoid looking as if I’m taking pictures of people rather than buildings (though will make exceptions for very public places and events)

A rather odd building near Burrow Road that looked cross between an engine shed, a church hall, and a ballroom.

And an apparently disused railway that doesn’t seem to go anywhere, but disappears underground just a block away from it

Preston has loads of good pubs, but they are all located in the same corner of town. In the unlikely event that anyone is reading this who is both intimately familiar with the geography of Preston, and not a member of my immediate family (who will know all this already) this is how you find the good pubs. They are nearly all in an area roughly bounded by Fishersgate to the south (the main shopping street, running from the bridge to the station to the museum square), by the town Market and Friargate and Adelphi Street to the east, and by the Lancashire County Hall to the west. I’m not so sure of the northern extent of the zone. I suspect it peters out before Plungington, maybe somewhere in the region of what used to be Lancashire Poly and is now the vital beating heart of the University of Central Lancashire. (Who can’t have either “ucl.” or “ucla.” as part of their DNS domain. Believe me, they tried. Well, believe third-hand rumour then. I never saw the application.).

Anyway, more research is needed.

Overheard from kids in Deepdale:

Two young children – maybe four years old? Possibly even younger? playing in the street. One of of those impossibly cute golden-ringletted little girls with a boy r perhaps her brother. She is trying, and failing very badly, to climb a drain pipe, he is failing to help her. I’m briefly worried that she is going to fall off backwards hand hurt her head. Which is probably silly as she is barely half my height off the ground and weighs perhaps one tenth of what I do. Older boy maybe 8 (crew cut, ManU shirt) cycles by and asks:

“Are you chasing Kim”

“Yes!”

He cycles off. Boy turns to girl

“Who’s Kim?
“I don’t know”

Two other children, maybe six or seven, run out of a back alley giggling, and off into some waste ground on the other side of the street.

“That must be Kim!”
“Lets chase him!”

In Preston accents so broad that if they had been Rochdale accents you could have been in a Gracie Fields biopic. IYSWIM. (I’m sure there must be some famous people with Preston accents but I can’t think who at the moment. And no, its not the same as the rest of Lancashire).

And I got sunburned. On a rainly day in Lancashire. I can get sunburned by spending more than an hour or two out of doors on a cloudy day.

And for my next trick: The Quest for the Lost Land of Higher Penwortham.

It must be round here somewhere. Try going up Leyland Road…

Euston

In my previous post I praised the train system in London for the excellent way it got me to Euston even though half of it was being dug up by blokes in shiny yellow suits. That’s all very well, but it was Euston it got me to.

There are many reasons why I’ve always preferred to go up north on the East Coast line rather than West Coast whenever I’ve had the choice. Its not just the the view, or the trains, or the comfort, or the timekeeping, or my idiotic preference fro anticlockwise loops. A large part of it is that King’s Cross is so much a nicer place to catch a train than Euston is.

Euston is the nastiest of all London’s mainline stations. Forget the appearance of the architecture (cheapo mid-60s international style airport lounge faced in dirty shiny fake stone) forget the supposed desecration of what went before (I’m to young to remember it), Euston just isn’t practical. It is inconvenient to use. It puts unnecessary difficulties in the way of passengers.

The trains themselves are set back very far from the street. If you approach from the main road you have to walk across a barren Euston Square – basically a dog toilet with one gay bar in the ruins of the gatehouse of the previous incarnation of the station, then through then up some concrete steps and under a sub-Corb office buildings raised above you on pilotes, across a rough concrete platform exposed to the open air and frequented by drunks and stray dogs, into the huge main concourse (in winter as unpleasantly hot as the outside is cold and windswept) right across it to the entrances to the train shed which lead to long ramps passing down to the staggered platforms. It can easily take a 300 meter walk to get to your train.

Navigating through the succession of spaces can be a nightmare if you aren’t used to it. And not just for pedestrians. The bus station is an overcomplex figure-of-eight loop of tarmac which has buses going in different directions along the same route crossing each other’s path – you can get gridlock inside the bus ranks at Euston.

The concrete forecourt is raised up above street level and accessed by anything from three to twenty steps, unless you know to approach it from the Drummond Street side or the south-west corner, under the old Inmarsat building, or you find the one kinky dog-legged path leading up by the door to the toilets of the bar. Start anywhere else – such as the middle bus station, or the road crossing to Friend’s House or New St Pancras Church, or anywhere on the east side of the station – and you need to make your way up steps. Of course people carrying heavy luggage, or with young children, or who have mobility problems, never use a mainline railway station. Only healthy young car-drivers with small handbags get on trains.

Once inside the concourse your route to the platforms is obstructed by the entrance to the tube station – it probably seemed a good idea at the time to put it slap inside the main doors but in practice it means that only about a third of the doors are much used, and in the rush hour when there are queues to get down the escalators – or at any time of the escalators are out of order – the middle third of the concourse is blocked by a crowd trying to go underground. Things aren’t improved by the astonishingly stupid siting of the information office which can easily have queues of thirty or so people waiting for it, sticking out into the concourse at right angles to the queue for the tube, making an L-shaped block of humanity breaking the concourse into separate zones. You will probably be in the wrong one.

It is as if the building wants the public to come in from underground or by taxi or car – there is no clear pedestrian route in and out from the busses or the street to trains. As if only inferior and unimportant people came by bus or on foot. The whole structure turns its back, or more accurately its side, against the people and looks in on itself, presenting barrier after barrier to anyone trying to access the inner sanctum where there are actually trains. It is unfriendly and intimidating especially to people with mobility problems, or who have a lot of luggage. The message is that passengers don’t count, you are merely on one of the many things a modern train needs to be provisioned with. Wait your turn.

And things are worse if you do have to wait. Passengers are herded into the rectangular concourse to wait for their trains. There is nowhere to sit. The area is too large to feel safe or comfortable in, too obstructed by the entrance to the underground, by tat shops and concessions to move around easily in, too far from the ticket office or the toilets or the bars.

And they make you wait. Like at Victoria or Liverpool Street (though unlike King’s Cross and perhaps Paddington) they are in the habit of not announcing the platform your train is to leave from until about five to ten minutes before hand. Sometimes not even that. Then there is a huge long walk down the ramp and along to the trains (your seat reservation is always at the far end unless you pay extra) Anyone with the slightest mobility problem has the greatest trouble getting there in the time allowed – you have to guess the end of the station you will be directed to (it has to be a guess as you can’t see the trains, they are hidden at the bottom of the ramps), and move towards the platform in time, obscuring your view of the big board which is deliberately placed to encourage you to stand as far as possible from the trains. And there is nowhere to sit If you have difficulty standing or walking Euston is not a welcoming place.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Victoria copes with perhaps four or five times the throughput of passengers in a similar-sized space, yet feels much less demeaning. When there are crowds gathered, at rush hour or if there are serious delays, there is a buzz about Victoria station, while Euston merely feels oppressive. Kings Cross is tiny by comparison, has about the same number of passengers as Euston (maybe even more) yet fits us into what is actually a rather pleasant space – or at least an interesting one. You can sit in a bar or cafe and see your train and the announcement boards. Charing Cross is even smaller, and has a similar number of passengers to Euston, though as an almost entirely commuter station it has less luggage an and averagely more sussed passenger.

Euston numbers platforms from left to right as passengers look at them.

Why?

Short of complete demolition and rebuilding its probably too late to do anything much about the layout now. But it could be improved. Strip out the kiosks and concessions, move them all outside, open up the concourse space, put in chairs or benches. Redirect the queues for info and taxis. Put some ticket machines in the concourse. Announce platform numbers BEFORE boarding starts. Maybe there is even room for a mezzanine floor at the front, or some retail in the airspace above the trainshed (as at Victoria or Liverpool Street).

Improve the outside. Remove the existing blocky little slab rooves cantilevered out of the front and put in much larger and higher and lighter ones – curved to avoid shading the very nice Robinia trees – to keep rain and a little sun off anyone waiting there. Move more of the sales outlets outside, replace crappy concrete tables with nice round wooden ones and a lot more seating, refocus the shops on the east side to to face more out into square. Simplify and re-route the buses.

But the best thing would be to tear it all down and start again. Ideally do something imaginative. But even if there is no imagination to be found, a retro copy of a typical 1860s terminus would be better than what is there now.

The Curse of the Lewisham Head End spreads to on-train catering.

To Lancashire to see my Mum’s new house

Great thing about living in a city with complex public transport is that there are so many ways to get anywhere. They may all be slow and unpleasant, but there are lots of them.

I got a bus to Lewisham Station intending to take the DLR to Bank and Northern Line to Euston. And then found that, as this is the dreaded Bank Holiday Weekend the DLR was closed from Mudchute to Westferry Circus. (In passing, one of the reasons so many car drivers think that trains are shit in Britain is that they only ever take them on non-working days – when they are usually shit – long-distance trains usually work fine on weekdays outside holiday times). So I took the mainline to London Bridge instead, intending to get the Northern Line to Euston. And got there to find that it was closed for track works as well, or at least the Bank branch was. So I got the Jubilee line to Waterloo, changed to the other side of the Northern Line, and went up that way, and still got there with 25 minutes to spare. Has I known about the tube I might have taken the train to Victoria instead and gone to Euston on the Victoria Line. Or had there been no trains at all at Lewisham I could have taken the bus to New Cross Gate and gone up to London Bridge from there – or possibly even got the East London Line to change to Jubilee at Canada Water or through to Whitechapel to get on the Met or the Hammersmith and City to Euston Square. Or if no tubes at all I could have carried on by bus to the Elephant or to Bricklayer’s Arms and another bus via Aldwych for there – a journey that to night only takes 40 minutes, not counting waiting time, but is probably a lot longer in the Saturday shopping times.

Try doing that with the once every third Tuesday services you get in most places.

complexity makes the system more redundant which makes it more robust and possibly more resilient.

That got damn near a train-spotting post….

We just passed Watford Junction.

Talking of trainspotting, this is a Virgin train and its a bank holiday so I suppose we are lucky its moving. No buffet though. I could do with a cup of tea I should have realised and got one at the station (even though it was Euston)

Either that or their brand-merge with NTL has infected the railway operation with whatever dread disease destroyed customer service from that Lewisham head-end, passed on from Videotron to cable and Wireless to NTL and now to Virgin. The Internet is fine, and the cable TV is more or less fine except taht it mysteriously needed a new box at our end that they didn’t tell us about till the bloke came round supposedly to fix the phone which doesn’t work and hasn’t worked for four months now, but a new phone company would make me take at least a day of work to install their line and this is cheap, considered as a way of paying for cable TV and Internet connections, so the phone is an optional extra really. Or in this case, not an extra, because Virgin/NTL don’t know how to make their phones work.

Train driver (or whoever does these things) just announced that “hopefully” a “we will be picking up a member of the onboard catering team” at Coventry or at Birmingham International. Halfway there & I bet it takes 40 minutes to get everything ready & then there will be a queue.

Why is it that when you start thinking about food and drink you want some? If I wasn’t on this train I’d probably still be in bed at the moment (12:30 on Saturday, a civilised time for a lie-in), or maybe just getting and having a bath wouldn’t have dreamed of getting food or tea yet.

We’ve been waiting at Rugby for a long time…

… and the food bloke finally got on at New Street, and didn’t open till we were well beyond Birmingham, and there were 18before me in the very slow queue including someone whose credit card didn’t work and who was 60p short (in the end another customer gave him the 60p because it was going on so long) and I was still in the queue at Stafford, and at Crewe, and got back to my seat just in time for Warrington.

But trains are good. Really.

A song for May Day

Happy International Workers Day!

I was browsing through Wikipedia, as you do, looking for something else entirely, and my attention was caught by a reference to the official US Army Song. I’d never heard of it (unlike the Navy & Marine songs which just about anyone who has ever watched old war films on TV must recognise). So I looked around a little and ended up chasing links for all sorts of military music, until I ran slap bang up against the Armchair General (which could be called the Tankie’s Friend) which has lots of Russian Civil War and Great Patriotic War songs (many are in fact links to Sovmusic or hymn.ru).

So I listened to some. At first almost as a joke, something to do, have a laugh at the overblown Stalinist language, so at variance to what was really going on. But I ended up with tears in my eyes. Yes, there are tinpot generals and synthetic heroics. There are also plain ordinary love songs, as wall as surrealistic absurdities like the one about the weapons-grade samovars, or “I am a Yak Fighter Plane”. I ended up with tears in my eyes of course. All those people really lived through all that. Some of them meant what they sang.

The Russian Revolution and Civil War, along with the Great War (of which they are a part in some ways), are the great tragedies of our modern European civilisation. And they are tragedies in ways that the Nazis weren’t. Nazis were (and are) unambiguously enemies of civilisation and culture and decency and freedom and law and art and music and life and hope and peace. They were the bad guys. The Communists were meant to be the good guys. And it turned into oppression and war and torture and death. They themselves thought they were the good guys, at least at first. Rosa Luxemburg supposedly could hardly believe what she heard about Dzershinsky and the Cheka. (that there were Western leftists who still belived in Leninsm and Stalinism as the last great hope of mankind in the 1920s, or even the 1930s just shows how little attention some of them were paying. Until 1942 of course when Hitler made it come truem, and they were our best hope). What the Nazis did to Europe was like having your kids shot by a burgular. What the Soviets did was more like being raped by the policeman you called in to investigate the crime. Both very wrong, but the second is more tragic, in the dramatic sense.

A lot of the songs on Armchari General are links to other web sites, particularly Sovmusic a deeply cool site of apparently unreconstructed Stalinists. And The history of the Russian National Anthems an exhaustive set of recordings of every version each of the half-dozen or so songs that have been a Russian national anthem in the last century or so, as well as other pieces opf music that quote them, or from which they may have been derived (including the UK and Danish anthems) and a whole heap of Tchaikovsky and Glinka and the anthems of each of the SSRs.

Our UK national anthem is so boring compared to most. But Russia had half a dozen before they settled again on the one you know from watching the Olympics on TV, mostly borrowed, all better than ours. The first one is the oddest, because it is our national anthem, it started as God Save the King translated into Russian, with the disparaging comments about Scots removed and a few Slavic twists to the melody. You’ll have heard it if you ever listen to any Russian orchestral music at all, their composers quote it repeatedly, most famously in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 where it is the main theme played against Marseillaise. I don’t know what makes Russian music sound Russian – some memory of Orthodox liturgy maybe. But whatever they did to the tune changes it from one of the most boring anthems there is into something that makes your hair stand on end.

After the Revolution they briefly flirted with the Marseillaise (which sounds weird in Russian) before settling on that other French song Internationale which doesn’t. That’s a song with a strange set of connotations. I didn’t feel at all happy about it for a while, not until Tianamen Square, when the demonstrators sang it and redeemed it. Once again we can look people in the face while singing it ourselves. But it isn’t a trivial song. Its not a joke.

Neither is Avanti Popolo, though it can sound like one. I tend to associate it with drunken parties at Labour conferences (though I’ve sung it at a drunken party at a Liberal Conference I gatecrashed once in the happy days before they had armed guards at such affairs) and particularly with Neil Kinnock in 1984. Or was it 1985? It seems so long ago now. Its always been a uniting song rather than a dividing one on the Left. Apart from the last word, which varies according to taste Somewhere today, someone is singng it.

I got downloads from AWS the impressively gigantic Italian anti-war site with links everywhere. (Navigation is hard though. Things often aren’t where you would expect. There are loads of MP3s and video clips, many linked to on other sites, but lots of the links and some of the files are duds. And its hard to tell which links are recordings and which not so I ended up looking at the html source… and then gave up. But there are hundreds of songs, many with alternative translations into different languages.)

And then I was off on one, building my little itunes playlist of vaguely left-wing songs.

A few more repositories of lefty lyrics:

Free Peace mp3s has some great newer songs. Check out Soylent Gringo! XPDNC has lots of links to union and labour stuff , not just music. There are union and left songs at Radical songs and unionsong.com (Lyrics, links, but no downloads that I could find).

Protest Records has a mind-bendingly braindead “interface” and New Songs For Peace is a UNESCO front! Some fun music at both though.

Avanti Popolo!

And here, extracted from itunes, is part of that lefty and anti-war playlist. Mostly found from those websites listed above (though some from CDs I have)

And yes, I do see that there is an incongruity between the Anthem of Soviet Union and The Green Fields of France

• A Change Is Gonna Come, Cooke Sam
• All Along The Watchtower, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix
• Another Man’s Cause, Levellers, Levellers, Levelling The Land
• Another War, The Compassionate Conservatives, Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Perle, n/a
• Anthem of Soviet Union
• Anthem of Tajik SSR, instrumental version
• Avanti Popolo
• Babylons’s Burning, The Ruts
• Bandiera rossa, Rundfunk-Blasorchester Leipzig
• Battle Of The Beanfield, Levellers, Levellers, Levelling The Land
• Battle of the Somme / The Freedom Come Ye All, (Luke Kelly and the Dubliners)
• bob dylan – masters of war
• Born In The U.S.A, Bruce Springsteen
• Both Sides the Tweed, Dick Gaughan
• Bush_War_Blues_(updated), Billy Bragg
• Children Crying,
• Dancing At Whitsun, Tim Hart And Maddy Prior, Tim Hart & Maddy Prior, Summer Solstice
• Dead Marshes (June Tabor? Coope, Boyes & Simpson?)
• Dirty Old Town, The Pogues, MacCall, Ewan, The Best Of The Pogues
• Drop The Hate, Fatboy Slim
• English Civil War, Levellers
• Far From Home, Levellers, Levellers, Levelling The Land
• Farewell tae the Haven, The McCalmans
• Folsom Prison Blues, Johnny Cash
• Four Stone Walls, Capercaillie
• Freedom Come All Ye, Dick Gaughan
• Go Down Moses, Grant Green
• Gresford Disaster, Albion Band
• Guantanamera, Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill & Celia Cruz
• Hanging On The Old Barbed Wire, Chumbawamba
• Hard Times Of Old England, Etchingham Steam Band
• Hard Times, Johnny Cash
• Highland Muster Roll, Ewan Mac Coll
• I Love The World, New Model Army, Robert Heaton, Thunder and Consolation
• I Pity The Poor Immigrant, Bob Dylan
• I Shall Not Be Moved, Johnny Cash
• If It Wisnae for the Union, Hamish Imlach
• Internationale (in Russian), Choir and orchestra of Soviet radio
• Internationale in Zulu
• Internationale, Billy Bragg
• Internationale, Sheffield Socialist Choir, Pierre Degeyter, Watch Out (tape)
• Its_a_long_way_to_tipperary
• James Connolly, Christy Moore
• Jerusalem Revisited, Panta Rhei + Coope, Boyes & Simpson
• Joe Hill, Paul Robeson
• Julie (New Version), Levellers
• The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, June Tabor
• La Marseillaise, Mireille Mathieu, Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle
• Le déserteur, Boris Vian
• Let Start A War
• Liberty Song, Levellers, Levellers, Levelling The Land
• Lili Marleen In German, Marlene Dietrich
• L’Internationale
• Lonely London, Jah Wobble
• Lowlands Of Holland, Levellers
• Marche Slave, Op.
• Marseillaise, United States Navy Band, Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle
• Marsh tankistov, Petr Kirichek, Petr Kirichek,
• More Axe, Bob Marley & The Wailers, Anonymous, The Very Best Of The Early Years
• Mothers, Daughters, Wives, Judy Small
• No Mans Land, June Tabor
• No Man’s Land, Eric Bogle
• No More Heroes, Stranglers
• North by North (Arthur Johnstone)
• One Piece at a Time Johnny Cash
• One Way, Levellers, Levellers, Levelling The Land
• Plains Song, Paul Robeson
• Poor Old Horse, Albion Band
• Protect And Survive, Runrig
• Ragged Heroes, Albion Band
• Ravenscraig, Runrig
• Red Flag, Alan Bush
• Redemption Song (With Joe Strummer), Johnny Cash
• Ride ‘Em Jewboy, Kinky Friedman
• Riverside_Live
• Rose of No-Man’s Land
• SA National Anthem,
• Salve Regina
• Samovary – Samopaly, Ansambl Pesni & Plyaski
• Sell Your Labour, Not Your Soul, Brian McNeill
• Shipbuilding,
• Sikelela_iAfrika_Africaanas, Nkosi
• Slavery Days, Burning Spear
• Small Axe, Bob Marley & The Wailers, Bob Marley, The Very Best Of The Early Years
• Smashing Of The Van, Chumbawamba
• Stand Together, Ceolbeg
• Tear Down These Walls, Runrig
• The Ballad Of Ira Hayes, Kinky Friedman
• The Blantyre Explosion, Ewan MacColl
• The Bloody Fileds Of Flanders, Panta Rhei + Coope, Boyes & Simpson
• The Boatman, Levellers, Levellers, Levelling The Land
• The Contract, Eric Bogle
• The Diggers Song, Chumbawamba
• The Game, Levellers, Levellers, Levelling The Land
• The Great American Novel, Martyn Joseph, Larry Norman, The Great American Novel
• The Man Comes Around, Johnny Cash
• The Manchester Rambler, Ewan Mac Coll
• The Press Gang, Ewan Mac Coll
• The River, Bruce Springsteen
• The Road, Levellers, Levellers, Levelling The Land
• The Triumph Of General Ludd, Chumbawamba
• They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore, Kinky Friedman
• Thing With War (Acoustic), Ben Okafor
• Thing With War, Ben Okafor
• This Train, Bob Marley & The Wailers, Trad. Arr: Bob Marley, The Very Best Of The Early Years
• Three Nights and a Sunday, Matt McGinn
• Tuvan Internationale, Huun-Huur-Tu
• Varag – Naverh
• War Baby (Live), Martyn Joseph, Tom Robinson & M Ramsden,
• Warning (Live), Levellers
• We Poor Labouring Men, Waterson:Carthy
• We Remember (Naming Of Names), Ewan Mac Coll
• We Will All Go Together When We Go, Tom Lehrer
• Where Have All The Flowers Gon, Marlene Dietrich
• Who’s Gonna Win The War, Hawkwind
• Will ‘ye go to Flanders, June Tabor
• Worker’s Marseillaise (Russian), Chamber choir of the Krupskaya Leningrad State Institute of Culture
• World Turned Upside Down, Chumbawamba
• Zhdi menja, Georgy Vinogradov, Georgy Vinogradov, http://retro.samnet.ru