Saturday afternoon walk

Blackheath to Greenwich to Deptford – Sometimes Pubs Just Work (2)

My brother came down South of the River on Saturday for the first time in a while (he used to say he never did – when I bumped in to him in Brixton one night he said that it was honourary North London). He cycled to Blackheath, all the way from Holloway more or less) which took a little longer than he thought, especially the hill at the end (*) and we had some wonderful cider at the Princess of Wales. A license to print money that place, on a sunny summer Saturday.

Then down to Greenwich through the Park in the sunshine, and some noodles and more beer at a Vietnamese restaurant, and walk to Deptford and a final pint at the Dog and Bell:

And my brother says “where can I put my bike” and I say “over there on the bike racks”. We are civilised in Deptford these days. And he says “Is it safe” and I tell him it is. After the obligatory scare stories about Milton Court and the Pepys Estate of course. Not as dangerous as people make out. So we have beer and a fag in the back garden of the very very nice pub and I hear a few loud bangs that, if I knew what shots sounded like, might have been shots. And I walk my brother to Evelyn Street and put him on the right road for Rotherhithe, and wonder why such a traffic jam.

And I walk back towards the High Street and there are police everywhere and sirens and scene-of-the-crime types, and the roads taped off and I asked someone what was happening, and yes, it seems as if someone has been shot. So much for my telling everyone how not-dangerous Deptford is.

For some reason one of the blues-and-twos vans had “Metropolitan Police Marine Policing Unit” written on it. The river cops? Why? For a moment it was like being in the second series of The Wire

So back past the Cranbrook (where someone I have never met before bought me another pint) and to the local where there was some kind of party going on and various people there…

And I really ought to lay off booze for the next few days to give my liver a chance to recover.

Only in South East London could there ever be a fake Morley’s:

(*) Mildly irrelevant Pompous Geology Witter – why South London is steeper than North. London is (as NE Fule No) in a the London Basin, which is formed by tertiary [i.e. after-the-dinosaurs] deposits of sand and gravel and mud (much hrdened into clay) in a syncline,. a bowl-shaped fold in the underlying chalk. The Thames didn’t make the Thames Valley – the river flows through a valley that was made by a great fold in the earth running hundreds of miles east from the centre of southern England into Belgium and even Denmark (though the sea came in and washed most of it away during the Pleistocene…)

There are three steps up from the Thames to the sides of the basin. North of the river they come one after the other . First the river terraces, accumulated gunk on the edge of the flat alluvial basing of the post-glacial Thames. In Central London the river is at the northern edge of its little plain, so it buts onto the terraces – the Strand runs along it. Which why Trafalgar Square slopes, why Villiers Street is steep, why the north side of Waterloo Bridge is higher than the south and why Upper Thames Street is Upper and Lower Thames Street is Lower.

Then a mile or two back, the so-called Northern Heights – a line of hills of clay and sand, including Stamford Hill, Alexandra Palace, Muswell Hill, Hampstead, Highgate, Horsenden Hill, Hendon, Harrow and so on (I don’t know why there is such a wave of “H”s in suburban north-west London – it carries on in a big arc round the city to the not-at-all hilly Hillingdon, Hayes, Harlington, Heston, Heathrow and Hounslow.) There can be quite a steep scarp to this in places, you see it best round Archway and Highgate Tube, even though the hills themselves aren’t very high. I suppose its because the muddy clay isn’t very strong and collapsed in places, leaving natural quarry-like sides. (Not that I cam at all sure of that)

Then there is a another big flattish step, even a valley in places, until you get to the dip leading up to the Chilterns outside Greater London which are proper chalk Downs, and the start of the anticline, the other bit of the fold. They aren’t exactly high, not even as high as the South Downs (which are the real Downs of course) but they are proper hills and higher than anything you are likely to find in north London.

South of the river you get the same three steps but they all come at once. The terraces at the southern edge of the Thames floodplain run in a pretty straight line from Camberwell to Greenwich, abut five to ten metres above what used to be the marshes, which is why the old Roman road ran there. Peckham High Street, Queens Road, New Cross Road, and Deptford Broadway still follow the line. You can see it clearly around New Cross, where the roads and paths leading north go steeply down hill – the main roads have been levelled but the side roads and footpaths fall down fast. The original Deep Ford that Deptford is named for is the place that the Ravensbourne flows through these terraces into Deptford Creek.

But unlike north of the river these terraces butt on to the clay hills behind them, so the two steps up become one. And the chalk hills are immediately behind them. So if you go south from central London you rise immediately and almost continually from the Thames to the first of the North Downs. And – also unlike north London – the chalk isn’t very far under the clay. You can pick up chalk off the ground at Woolwich. There were lime pits in Blackheath and Lewisham where chalk was dug out by hand. The railway cuttings at Lewisham exposed chalk at St John’s – if you wanted to stretch a point you could make a rather stingy claim that Hilly Fields Park and St John’s Church were the northernmost gasp of the North Downs.

Two old photos of Deptford Creek, just because I like them:

Not quite Colemanballs on a bus

Wonderfully strained turn of phrase overheard from a thirty-something bloke talking to his mobile. I think the subject of the conversation might have been Notts County football club. They certainly mentioned someone called Sven. Not quite Colemanballs on a bus, but getting there.

“For every Jack Walker there are probably a hundred non-Jack-Walkers so the odds are not in favour of him being Jack Walker”

“getting past the inheritance is the whole present priotity. You need a windfall to get out of debt.

“It’s football – this isn’t rtrade union stuff – its what you do on a Saturday. Its not about putting bread and jam on the table”

“… its what the Arabs are doing now – well nobody knows what they are doing but there is a striking similarity…”

“…lets just say our confidence in banks is not what it was”

“The Chairman of the club calls it ‘Disneyland””

“Time will tell.”

“Cynicism rules”

“There’s nothing like a good sex scandal to attract media attention. Its like the cherry on top of a really passionate cake”

“To change football culture you’re up against a hundred years of bad behaviour on the part of managers, players, AND fans”.

Forty Years on: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive…”

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive…
… but to be young was very heaven”

Where’s my jetpack?

This isn’t about London, but its my blog, and I can cry if I want to.

We’re perhaps coming to the end of the generation whose experience of the world and history in the making is mainly mediated through television. But it was my generation. And there are things we all remember seeing live on, or first hearing about from, TV that we will never forget. Lots of them are terrible things, there’s not much point in going through them. But some of them were wonderful.

I’ll never forget (I hope) seeing those pink rocks on Mars, and not quite understanding why almost no-one else in the crowded Student Union bar I was in was thrilled by it. Or Nelson Mandela walking out of prison.

But the most memorable of them all was Apollo 11, when I was 12 years old. And being allowed to stay up all night (almost) to see them leave the LEM and walk on the Moon. And still being awake in the morning when someone went out to get a copy of the paper, which was about little else, in my eyes anyway (was it the Observer? Was the landing on a Saturday?)

I think I’m off to the shop to get some American beer, if there is such a thing, to drink a toast to the Apollo Crew. Then maybe I’ll watch my DVD of Apollo 13 or The Right Stuff and have a good cry.

Not pretentious at all

Overheard on a train:

Someone who works with films was talking to someone who works with TV. Odd lines stuck out:

“He calls himself ‘Ironik’ spelled with a “K” but he takes himself more seriously than anyone I’ve ever met”

“You can guess the pitch – a cross between Flashdance and Fame but set in London”

“Only one person who has ever been in a film before”

“There are some theatre people involved – and that’s FATAL!”

“Charlotte Rampling has signed up for it, and that’s good”

“My credibility depends on this”

Late free lunch in Deptford

A meeting of the school governors of Lewisham Bridge school at 4.45 (its usually at six). And Lewisham Bridge is in a mess (Google it). The mess got worse. The kids are being bussed to the Mornington school near New Cross station, because our school is to be demolished and rebuilt as a 3-16 all-through school on the old site. Except it isn’t, because the Council didn’t apply for planning permission before the kids were “decanted” (as they say). And then English Heritage listed the building. And protestors occupied the school. And now the council is planning to move the school back for one year and move it out again and move back again a year after that (or maybe two). And its all a mess.

Because we started so early there was a two-hour gap between thay meetin and the next one I needed to go to and I used it to walk round Deptford High Street and in and out of the railway arches. Photos when I get the chance to upload some.

And yes, Deptford in the evening can be wonderful. I bought some little coloured glass jars
for a pound each. And saw lots of people of all sorts walking up and down, including a black bloke on a bicycle who stopped a friend on another bicycle outside a cheap Asian knick-knack shop (I ought to go back and buy a big cooking pan) and asked him out for a drink and said “I sold a Volvo today – three thousand quid”. Where else do people who sell cars ride bicycles? And I met J and H and N on Edward Street on their way from a quiet afternoon drink at the Dog and Bell (the Deptford pub that really isn’t like most people’s idea of Deptford – real ale, Belgian beer, all the day’s newspapers, and art exhibitions) and off to Brockley to buy some weed and go home and watch Dr Who videos.

And (not for the first time) I wondered why I always stay at work or in town so late. It might be good to spend more time in Deptford in daylight.

Then a Labour party meeting at 8pm (it would usually be 7.30 or 7.45) round the corner. And Steve Bullock (sorry, Sir Steve Bullock) the Mayor talking about Trust Schools and the proposals of “hard” federations and “soft” federations, and the proposed relationship between Goldsmith’s College and Deptford Green School and Addey’s School and Crossways (whatever that is) – which to be honest sounds like a good idea to me though the meeting was mostly against it – and another one between Colfe’s School and Catford High School and listened to the rest of us trying to tell him that all that means nothing to most people (the best contribution was from Laura Seabright who I think actually is a teacher at Deptford Green) and certainly isn’t going to win us the next election, either locally or nationally.

Actually in other ways it was a good meeting and we heard some really good stuff from Joan Ruddock, our MP, about a possible new railway station on Surrey Canal Road, and the upcoming Copenhagen talks on the environment, and some stuff they did in Greenland – but like the man said, all politics is local, and our schools are as local as you can get and we are fucking them up. Well, Lewisham Bridge, anyway.

So after two meetings and lots of walking and photos (& the last walk a very nice stroll to the bus-stop talking to a rather pleasant and intelligent House of Commons assistant I don’t think I’ve met before) I was feeling hungry and thirsty and possibly in need of a cigarette so into a pub at about 10.30pm and yes there is a darts match on and its the trophy competition at the end of the season and so I get a few pints of good beer and free burgers and salad off the barbecue and talk to G and K who aren’t even twenty yet and are running a door-to-door sales business in Gravesend and have bumped into their first cash-flow crisis and are having trouble paying their staff. And M who is more or less homeless and has been put into sheltered accomadation by the council and dislikes it hugely because she isn’t old enough for that yet and would rather live almost anywhere else but can’t so comes to the pub all evening instead of sitting around watching Big Brother on the TV and talking to the old folk waiting to die. And R & M talking about how nothern chips with gravy are better than our poncey southern chips. And T whose wife died from a heart attack a few years ago and is thinking about suing the doctors who had failed to diagnose a heart problem only a few days before. And TD talking about about – no, but this is a family-friendly blog

But if there is something better than free barbecue in a pub garden after two stressful meetings in one evening I don’t know what it is.

And it was all too much and I went home – and THEN they showed the fourth part of the current Torchwood story on TV. Which you really need to see. And is sort-of kind-of almost relevant.

And THEN they showed a repeat of the BBC TV coverage of the Apollo missions from forty years ago which I saw live at the time and you really need to see that as well… James Burke (remember him?) … Cliff Michelmore chewing his fingers for Apollo 13.

And tomorrow: to Bromsgrove – and beyond!

At least one 53 bus has aircon!

I’ve been walking round the Peckham Triangle in the last few weeks. That is the area bounded by Old Kent Road, Walworth Road/Camberwell Road, and Peckham Road/Peckham High Street/Queen’s Road that my mate Dave used to call “Barad Dur” back in the 1980s because of the view of the Gloucester Grove slab blocks from Burgess park. In those days about a kilometre of brick-clad slabs, connected by round towers at the corners, like a curtain wall defending North Peckham from Walworth.

Most of that’s gone now, but about half of the slabs are still there, much cleaned up:

No long walks just four or five strolls of an hour or so each on different days, taking a few pictures mostly of churches and blocks of flats, seeing how things have changed. Some of the pictues are on the Flickr linked from here. There will be more. Basically I just break my journey home somewhere in the area, walk a bit, then get on another bus. And – oh glory! – that was how I found that at lest one 53 bus has airconditioning upstairs. I hardly wanted to get off it. Let us all praise Scania!

Sunday’s walk took me right by Lakanal on the Sceaux Estate, in which six people had been killed in a fire the day before. I could still smell the fire – house fires have a distinctive smell I might never forget. You could see how the fire went along the corridors and out the windows at the end, which I imagine is how the people got trapped.

They were calling them “tower blocks” on the radio on Monday morning, which conjours up the wrong idea in most people’s minds. These are not point blocks they are slab blocks. “Streets in the sky” as they used to say, with flats opening up onto internal corridors. I’ve never been inside any of these blocks, though I have stayed with friends in vaguely similar buildings on the Pepys estate in Deptford and Doddington in Battersea (before they were done up) I think they are two-story flats with more than one internal entrance each.

From the outside it looks as if there are seven or eight flats in a row but only one stairwell or liftshaft. So its not obvious how you could escape if the fire was between you and the stairs. There was a smug patronising architect on the radio this morning blaming the residents for not escaping fast enough. He didn’t seem to get the point that the fire spread up and down so even if you had two entrances to your flat both accessible corridors might be blocked by fire.

I didn’t take any close-ups of the burned building, it felt a little ghoulish. Also I’m knackered & not really into getting all the URLs and re-arranging them onto the page. So the pictures can stay on Flickr for a bit longer.

Though I did take one of it seen through a gap between buildings on Peckham Road just to show how close it is to the Town Hall – the counil offices and the Art College back right on to the estate:

Whatever else they can be accused of, they certainly knew what these flats were like because they look at them every day out of their office windows.