Uberhauses (pardon my lack of umlaut)

Three or four of my microprojects coalesce in one photo!

Click on this photo to see a bigger version and read the words on the sign:

Not only a grotesque or silly signboard (the list is rapidly growing), not only an insight into the rebuilding of the bits of London tourist guides don’t go to, but also an absurd new word. Result!

What on earth is an “Uberhaus”? And why? Well, I know what it is, its a largish flat with an upstairs garden, (which might be on the roof, or on a big balcony, or on the roof of a next-door building such as a car-park). But why? But why do the estate agents think that peopel willing to part with half a million or more squids in order to live on a reclaimed gasworks with a view of the A13 flyover will be attracted by fake German?

At least I got in first. Google has 8 hits for the word – six of them are estate agents, one is an article in the Daily Telegraph and first on the list is my photo linked above, which was only posted on Flicker last night.

Confidential Destruction

From the wonderful people who brought you Route 666:

we can now have Confidential Destruction:

I suppose it goes along with the Quiet Apocalypse, the Private Calamity, the Modestly Reserved Little Extermination, and the Secretive Low-Key Obliteration

Maybe prices vary with how much destruction you buy. Destroy one, wreck one free.

Someone should tell Al Qaida.

Wandering around East Greenwich and Beyond

Been walking round East Greenwich as a side effect of attending church there for a few weeks as part of the Reader’s course. Taking lots of photos. This week they are mainly of the peninsula and up and down the Thames.

There are, I suspect, few Anglican churches in Inner London that have a grain elevator in the parish.

Can’t really think of anything relevant to say. Well, I did, but it had the word “palimpsest” in it as a metaphor, so its probably a bit pretentious! As before the pictures link back to bigger ones on Flickr. Not as pretty is the ones with smoke in from Tuesday though.

At last a use for Stave Hill.

At last a use for Stave Hill.

Stave Hill in Rotherhithe, on the site of a filled-in Surrey Dock, is an artificial mound at the end of a ceremonial way planted with various runically significant trees, which was built, along with other oddities like Hilly Fields Stone Circle, in the megalithic frenzy of the years 1999 and 2000 which rounded off England’s twenty-year love-affair with crop circles. Who knows – maybe if we could ask the folk who built Silbury or Stonehenge or the Long Man or the Nazca lines or Carnac why they did it maybe they would say “well, we were having a few pints in the pub and it seemed like a good idea at the time”.

But there is, I have now found out, a use for it. If there is something really bad going on in the East End you get a great view.

This was a clear cloudless blue sky – all the darkness in the sky was from a fire at Stratford, some miles away in north-east London, off to the left from the point of view of this picture.

I was on a bus on my way to work after a morning doing other things when I saw this:

So, just in case, I wandered round trying to find out what was going on and work out where the fire was. I wouldn’t want to get onto a train and find myself stuck in a tunnel as lines closed down or people were being evacuated past me. As it turned out the fire was miles east of where I work and there was no problem, but I was being very cautions until I either heard some news or got a good enough view to see where it was.

So I walked over to Stave Hill about a quarter of a mile away and got a view over the whole of south and east London. I reckon the cloud was at least five miles long and a mile high. An astonishing sight.

Bonfire 2007 (3) The principle of the thing.

Thinking about it over the last few days, with and without beer, I now tend to agree with the idea that Bonfire is a practical demonstration of liberty. Despite the rather overblown flowery language some of the Lewes societies use on their programmes.

Even – in fact especially – the burning of effigies of the living and the dead, offensive though that is. (This year Commercial Square burned a police superintendent on a rocket) It genuinely is a matter of free speech. If you are only free to say nice things you aren’t free. Free speech is the freedom to say evil and offensive things. Who would object to you saying only good things? If everyone burned in effigy was either safely dead, or obviously evil, then someone somewhere would be controlling who we are allowed to insult or protest against. If you can’t burn the Pope, who can you burn?

The same goes for meeting together in large numbers. Freedom of assembly and movement has to be the freedom to assemble in a way that might potentially worry or disturb some others. If you an only meet together in places where everyone agrees it is proper for you to meet, and in numbers that annoy nobody then you are not free to move and meet.

Burnings aside (and Bonfire is a memorial to real people who really were burned at the stake in Queen Mary’s time) Bonfire is our carnival, our folk festival. For a value of “our” that is more or less limited to the people of the little blob at the bottom-right-hand corner of England between the Thames and the Channel, and most especially to those born or brought up in East Sussex. And its something we do in public, together. Not a display put on for us by local government or some charity or a private company (though all those are involved). Its not commercialised, packaged, or marketed (though plenty of people make a little money out of it, and why not?) Its something we do of and for ourselves.

And its something we increasingly DON’T do. Public bonfires are dying out, being replaced by managed and controlled firework displays. I love fireworks but they aren’t the whole point of the thing, they are an added extra. Not that many people have bonfire parties in their own gardens any more. When I was a kid there were bonfires all over Brighton. Private ones in gardens – my parents had a Bonfire party every year when we lived in Woodingdean in the 1960s – but also communal ones. On open land outside the council estates, one more or less on the Downs, even one on the beach,. I think there was sometimes one on the Level. These were not, as far as I could tell, run by committees or some organised charity or other trying to raise money. None of your “British Lions” or Heart Foundations or whatever, worthy though they might be (I hated it when the Heart people hijacked the London to Brighton bikeride). They seemed to be mainly built by boys a little older than me nicking old furniture from dumps (and from the next estate’s bonfires) And we stopped doing it. Sometime in my teenage, the practice died out.

Which I think is why so many Brighton people go to Lewes, even those of us who no longer live in the South Country. Its the one place we can carry on participating in something we were brought up to and have been doing all our lives. Even if only by standing at the side of the road and cheering.

Talking of which, when one of the bands stopped outside St Anne’s and played God save the Queen and some of the crowd joined in, a man standing next to me raised his fist and gave us a verse of the Internationale. And it wasn’t even me

Bonfire 2007 (2) Lewes, Fifth of November

Late into town because of an apparently insanely intrusive policing policy at Brighton Station. Crash barriers and a huge snakey queue and passengers allowed on to trains in dribs and drabs by police or security staff at the carriage doors. I was queuing for over an hour, during which two trains left, one little more than half full, the other with at least some empty seats in every carriage, wile hundred of passengers were made to wait on another platform and watch them go. Then we finally got let onto a third train – and that was as crowded as the 08.27 to Charing Cross. Standing room only, aisles full of people, a dozen or more packed into every doorway. And we took over half an hour to get there because they were only letting people off the trains piecemeal at the other end – things were even more tightly controlled at Lewes, the Station Road being divided into four narrow paths by barriers forcing us to walk very slowly, and a complete line of police shoulder-to-shoulder at the bottom of Station Street by the Lansdowne Arms (which is where I would probably have tried to go on any night but Bonfire).

On the whole it was an astonishingly well-behaved crowd. Are people so passive in other countries? But I hate to think what it might have been like a few hours later when a lot more drink had been taken. What looks like a pointless bureaucratic irritation to a sober man at 6pm can seem a lot more like police provocation to the same man drunk at 11pm. Maybe next year I’ll change at Hayward’s Heath!

These things go in cycles. Apparently 1906 was a bad year. In the late 1970s and early 1980s things were quite tolerant. Then there were concerns about Cliffe’s reputation, and too much drinking, and too many oiks like us coming from Brighton and crowding out the pubs, and the usual fuss about rookies and rousers (i.e. home-made, or at least home-repurposed, bangers and jumping-jacks, although rather louder than the little fireworks that most people associate with those names). So they started to close the pubs one by one until the only place you could buy a pint in the centre of town (without being invited to the landlord’s private party) was the bar of Shelley’s Hotel (in these more tolerant years its the only place you can’t) Security became harsh in places, lots of police blocking the roads, barriers everywhere. Nothing very bad happened. So they relaxed a little in the 1990s and opened the bars again. Nothing very bad continued to happen.

Sometimes a clampdown is kicked off by a couple of Friday or Saturday Bonfires in a row, where the crowds are typically larger. Or by a change of guard at County Hall, or a new Chief Constable, eager to make their mark (that’s the rumour about the current situation) But after a year or two of nothing very bad happening the police begin to notice that large numbers of locals think they are behaving like prats and pull back a bit. Or take part in the marches themselves and start having fun. And it is rare for bad things to happen. Sussex Bonfire people tend to look after their safety rather well and the marchers more or less always know what they are doing, as do most of the regular spectators – and they (we) are a lot more used to it than people from some other parts of the world.

Anyway, I was about two hours late, and there was a huge press of crowd (more or less surrounded by police) completely blocking the way to the High Street. So I worked my round it and along Grange Road and then up the hill by St Pancras and Rotten Row and the little twitten that goes by St Anne’s Church, so I got into the churchyard just a few minutes after the Grand United Procession started.

St Anne’s churchyard is just about the best place to see the GUP from in some ways. I rarely manage to get down that far – we’re usually coming from the other direction, and have a few pints in one of the pubs further up the street. The church is at the top of the bottleneck in the High Street – a turn in the road, a steep place, a narrower than usual street – so its hard to get to other than from the back.

And while I was there I met an unexpected friend, a crystallographer who used to work at our college and whose parents live round the corner in St Anne’s Crescent. So I not only got to see the procession but had some rather nice lentil soup and mulled wine – but I had to leave to get further up the hill in time for another drink with the friends I had been expecting to see (and was staying with) before we saw the Borough procession on their way to their firesite.

As always the Borough fire site was wonderful. A REAL BONFIRE! And because we are so high up the hill, with a view all over town, we get to see everyone else’s fireworks as well, as three or four displays compete with each other and bangs and flashes echo off the Downs and the cliffs. I guess this year Borough was probably the loudest, and maybe the prettiest with at one point some sort of red and gold flares shooting across each other trailing showers of sparks in front of more or less continuous wall of pink flame. Cliffe as often the most spectacular with some huge aerial bursts that cast clear shadows in the crowd around me perhaps two miles away. And Commercial Square (I think – their firesite was in a close line of sight with another) maybe the flashiest, sending up rings and targets and a couple of times writing “2007″ in the sky with bursting mortars.

(As usual lots more pictures if you select the links)

Bonfire 2007 (1) Blackheath, 3rd November

The Blackheath fireworks are always a bit weird.(And it is only fireworks. There has been no real Bonfire there since some time in the 1980s – I think I was at the last one – a sad loss. Well, there is a funfair, ice cream stalls, disco music and the longest row of portaloos I remember ever seeing, but that doesn’t make up for no Bonfire) It starts when we walk up to the Heath. For miles around people leave their homes and all start walking in the same direction.

Someone must organise the evening – someone from the Borough Councils I suppose, they seem to be the ones through whom we pay for it – but no-one ever seems to announce it, or publicise it. Everyone who lives in Lewisham or Greenwich or Deptford just knows that on the nearest Saturday to Bonfire night (and some other big public occasions) you walk up to the Heath. So we all do. About four or five people in my street were leaving at the same time I was. A couple outside their front door pulling on wellies. A parent packing a child into a pushchair. With no interaction or co-ordination we all start walking in the same direction.

A few metres away we get to the main road. its not crowded with pedestrians (though the motor traffic is totally jammed as always on this night) there are only a few more than normal, but they are all going in the same direction. Slightly disconcerting in a way, Just a little bit odd.

As we walk down towards the station and round the corner into Lewisham Way more people join us from side-roads and shops and pubs. Most of them look happy, many of them have drinks in their hands. The pavements are now crowded. We are all doing the same thing but separately – we are in little parties of two or three or four, or walking on our own, but walking in parallel, all bound the same way. Its like those sentimental photographs of crowds walking to football matches through carless streets in the early 1900s, fans of opposing sides walking together. Or some sort of 1950s or early 1960s horror movie when everyone leaves their homes to eerie theremin or glass harmonica music and sets off to the meeting place or the alien landing site, with no idea why they are going. Keep watching the skies!

These streets aren’t car-free. They are blocked with cars and buses unable to move, jammed for miles. The police try to keep Shooter’s Hill and the A2 open – though they are reduced to a crawl – but every other road in the neighbourhood is blocked by thousands of happy walkers. People who don’t know what is going on look stunned. Has there been an accident? Is there some problem? Pity the poor bus-passenger.

The rest of us are having fun of course. It is fun, in a relaxing sort of social-solidarity way, all walking in the same direction together. It feels good. I take the back way up Granville Park rather than straight up Lewisham Hill which looks too full of people to be easy to walk along. For ten or fifteen minutes I wind up through the narrow tree-lined dark streets on the western slopes of the Heath, past Victorian and Edwardian “villas” and “mansions” and “cottages” whose asking price increases by a thousand pounds for every step you take (genuinely – if I had gone up the quick way it would have been more like a thousand pounds a foot – the Orchard and Lethbridge Estates and Sparta Street council flats at the bottom of the hill are among London’s lower-rent areas, houses on Dartmouth Row only a few hundred metres higher up the hill can fetch well over two million each more than similar houses in Lewisham)

By the time we got to Blackheath we were eighty thousand strong.

Blackheath always turns out to be bigger than it looks. Urban eyes overlooking it from the edge read it as a flattish open park or recreation ground, crossed by a few roads, and surrounded by large houses and hotels. You expect it to be a larger version of something like Parker’s Piece in Cambridge, or Hackney Downs, or Primrose Hill, or the Level in Brighton. Instead you find a confusing maze of larger and smaller bits and pieces of surprisingly wild open land and lawns and sports grounds mixed up with houses and churches and pubs and shops. As if someone had taken Hampstead and Hampstead Heath and mixed them up together, shaken not stirred, and laid them out at random. And it is only one part of a connected web of open spaces sprawling over suburban south-east London. Its north side overlooks the centre of Greenwich at The Point and is adjacent to the utterly different Greenwich Park, – London;s most beautiful large park, surrounded by its flint walls and landscaped centuries ago, to create a like Bushey park with a posher palace. To the south and east it merges into sports grounds and recreation grounds towards Kidbrook, which can then lead you south to Mottingham and almost to Bromley, or east via Charlton and the old woods on Shooter’s Hill and Plumstead back almost to the Thames at Erith (as in my previous posts here). You wouldn’t think there was a peat bog in inner London would you? I was lucky I was wearing my boots.

The fireworks, as always, were magnificent,

And so back to Lewisham and a party at the pub and more fireworks and foolishly staying out too late and almost not making it on time to church in Greenwich the next morning, which would have been embarrassing under the circumstances. I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been picked up by a passing evangelist from my home town in a car who stopped and asked me if I wanted a lift. Genuinely true. I walked into church beaming and grateful. Praise the Lord.

N (he knows who he is) would protest that he is not an evangelist, and if he ever was it was years ago. But he was good news to me on Sunday.