N17

To deepest North London to see my daughter who is staying at a friend’s house for a while. Walking back to Seven Sisters tube I go another way from the road I came by and misread the map. I don’t mean I went the wrong way, but I failed to guess what sort of place I was walking through. There’s a circular street called Clyde Circus. On the map it looks like the sort of street plan I associate with 1930s or later council estates. But when I got there its actually very late Victorian terraces and quite posh. I should have paid attention to the words rather than the pictures. Anywhere called “Beaconsfield Road” is likely to be a long straight street of late 19th century “villas” (because almost certainly named after Lord Beaconsfield AKA Benjamin Disraeli, who died in 1881).

North London feels different from South London. (for a valus of “South London” that is I suppose more or less South East London inner suburbia). At any given distance from town it tends to be more inner-urban, with a more developed and denser infrastructure, perhaps more sophisticated, and also somehow less provisional. It feels like they finished building it. And fewer of those dark streets. S

And it really is a quick way back to the tube.

Not that that did any good. Hoping to be back home just after midnight I tried to change to the Northern Line for London Bidge at King’s Cross. Arrived on the platform about twenty past eleven and waited, and waited. No southbound train on the indicators. Just when I was starting to think about looking for a bus they did the Inspector Sands announcement, Sensible passengers started leaving immediately. A few minutes later they did the evacuation alarm and we all made our way to the surface. False alarm it turned out but at five to midnight I was at the back end of St Pancras watching the staff try not to have a fight with an aggressive drunk. So out to the bus stop, and three cigarettes later (waiting for 63, 171, 436) was back at Lewisham at nearly half past one.

Then I still had to change the washing in the machine do some other stuff to get ready for tmorrow and fell asleep in an upright chair which is why I am blogging this now.

Can I go to bed and get up in two or three hours? I am about to find out.

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:

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!

Pseudo-aleatoric traverse of North London by bus.

When done properly the idea is to get on the first bus going anywhere, get off where it goes, get on a bus going somewhere else, , see where you end up, then work your way back home – preferably by bus.

It helps not to have a goal. Last week, I did have a sort of goal, if not a very big one, because someone had more or less challenged me to go to the Grahame Park council estate in Hendon.

There was an argument about dangerous bits of London. Someone was saying there were “no go” districts of London where it isn’t safe to walk the streets if you were a white Christian. I think that’s nonsense. I’d claim, that there aren’t any, or at least nowhere much less safe than anywhere else – in particular I think there is no neighbourhood in London where you are very likely to be in danger because of your apparent ethnicity or religion. And if there was such a place – which there isn’t – the people in danger would be more likely to be Asian-looking Muslims rather than whiote Christians. So I asked for an example and they suggested Grahame Park in Hendon.

A long bus journey across London is a great way to get a feel for the local diversity
There are very few neighbourhoods where most people are of the same ethnicity (and nearly all of them are white and English) and probably nowhere where almost everybody is (not even the Bengalis east of Brick Lane) . But the nature of the minorities changes, often on a very fine basis

Exactly where I live there is no majority but white British people are the largest minority. The second largest is probably West Africans, with large (and growing) numbers of Tamils, and also a lot of Eastern and Central Europeans, But you only have to cross the main road to find more West Indians, or walk a short way in the other direction to see more Chinese, Turks, and Somalis.

On Sunday morning after church I get on a 21 bus in Lewisham most of the other passengers are black women, and I guess most of them African. Which os pretty par for the course. If I can believe the census (& I suppose I can) only about a fifth of the population round here are black but I’d guess that more like half of the people you see in the streets are and most of the bus passengers. Maybe the white people are more likely to stay in doors, or maybe they mostly have cars.

Late spring flowers everywhere – it’s lilac time in Brockley and there are other shrubs and hedges in bloom everywhere.

At New Cross quite a lot of young white people get on. Goldsmiths students maybe? Getting the bus because its cheaper, or because of the engineering work on the railway? As we move up Old Kent Road more spanish-speakers get on, and a few Asians and a man who looks Turkish (not that you can tell who is Turkish or not by looking at people)

Almost all those putative Goldsmith’s students and all but two or three of the black and Hispanic people get off at London Bridge and are replaced by a small number of older people, an Asian family and some Dutch tourists. They do little more than cross the river – by Bank there are maybe twelve left on the whole bus.

Delay at Moorgate as the road is reduced to single track by a tower crane lifting airconditioning units up a building. If I had had my camera out of my bag at the time I could have taken a photo of one going up maybe a metre from the upstairs window I was sitting at. I suppose it was safe…

The big metal arches over Old Street Station loom at the top of Moorgate like the famous tusks in Mombasa (which I’ve seen) or Saddam’s crossed swords at Baghdad (which I haven’t buy we all know them from telly). Except that, this being London, they aren’t some bombastic nationalist statement – we gave up building those in the 1920s – but the support for a giant advertising hoarding.

Back into residential areas north of Old Street, and things take a turn for the poorer (thoug not a s poor as Lewisham and New Cross – not that the houses are any different, similar Edwardian “villas” and slightly older terraces of three or even four story houses – but the people and the cars seem more prosperous). And they still have joggers in this part of the world. White middle class ones who look sane. Down south half the joggers look like they are in training for boxing and half the rest shout religious slogans at you. Or is that just Loampit Vale?

Of the bus at Newington Green and walk around for a little. Lots of apparently 30-something women with flowery dresses, some of them wearing flowery dresses. Turkish bakeries and pastry shops and four or five cafes or bars with green or organic style, some with blues music coming out. Some Turkish people hanging around (this time I know they are Turkish Cypriot because I hear them talking in a mixture of Turkish and English) , a few of them drinking cans of lager. One of them a scruffy overweight middle-aged woman with a shaved head wearing a Judge Dredd T-shirt, shouting and drinking Holsten Pils. If this is the mythical Londonistan, these guys are going native pretty fast. Two teenage girls, also Turkish I think, long black wavy hair. wearing pretty dresses and figure-revealing tight black T-shirts and huge hoop ear-rings.

Another bus, and north towards Wood Green. We’re moving very slowly in a traffic jam. Horse chestnut in flower at Clissold Park. For me this is a trip back in time. I tend to associate different parts of London with different times. Brownswood Road and the are the late 1980s but the water tower and the New River are the early 80s or even late 70s. Views of the Stoke Newington reservoirs on the other side of a council estate – glimpses of dinghy sails at the ends of short streets. If I remember correct there used to be huge houses that were run-down cheap hotels, and the HQs of small charities and political organisations. And it seems I do – some o them are still here though a lot have been redeveloped into posh flats. And the ethnic mix changes again – Greeks alongside Turks, more Africans, and the Asians seem to be Muslims rather than Hindu.

I get off and walk around somewhere between Palmer’s Green and Bound’s Green for a bit, then get on a 232 bus to see where it goes and write up some notes on what I just saw. One bad thing about looking at London from the top of a moving bus is that the notes I took on the bus from Wood Green onwards are illegible… apparently there is something interesting about the Wood Green Spiritualist Church and a little Anglican parish hall nearby – but I can’t remember or decipher what it was There is a huge “Assembly Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses”. Why not “Kingdom Hall”? Most of their buildings seem to be Kingdom Halls. Is is some sort of regional centre, a Watchtower Cathedral? Or a social rather than a religious institution? Or just a different name?

And round the North Circular – which isn’t one of the scenic parts of London and is one of the noisier and smellier – and off the bis again at Henly’s Corner on Finchley road where the trouble is getting over the road. as the cars come fast and at irregular intervals and there are vast complex but obscure systems of pedestrian routings to the traffic lights on the Great North Way, but in the end I find them and launch myself into the north-eastern reaches of Hendon. Which get very boring very quickly, so I sneak off down a side street and find myself walking amongst suburban houses that look as if they were built for Pooter’s grandchildren – bank clerks and taxi drivers. But I think the area has gone upmarket since then. You can tell the people by the cars. A lot of them seem strangely similar. If not identical. Some driveways have two identical cars – same model, same year, same upholstery, same colour. Unisex taken to extreme? Or company cars. They are all very clean as well. Clean enough that they look as if someone gets paid to clean them. Some of the gardens look as if people get paid to tidy them as well. One or two have signs with the phone number of the company that does it.

There are houses with odd extensions, and strangely massive gateways and fences, and obvious alarm systems, A lot of the place seems to have been upmarketed [can I say that? "upgraded" sounds wrong] beyond the expectations of the original builders. Its as if the people who live there are living a packaged corporate lifestyle that really wants more space. But this near to London that kind of space comes REALLY expensive.The streets are narrower than the cars in them want to be in. Mercedes, BMWs, Range Rovers. One Maserati. How many people keep Maseratis in the street?

The cultural mix? I hardly see anyone. Apart from a couple of dodgy dog walkers, and one bloke who looks like a bodyguard, there aren’t many people in these streets. Some family parties getting into and out of cars. Most white, some Asian, hardly any black. I think I hear Eastern European accents. If forced to guess I’d guess mostly Jewish.

Another turn back towards the main road – the A1 approaching M1 Junction 2 – and the whole feel changes again. The houses are still mostly 1920s or 1930s mock-tudorbethan, or 1960s and 1970s imitations of those imitations, with a sprinkling of places that look like they were designed by genuine architects, and a few 1990s brick boxes, but the few visible people are suddenly almost all Asian. There is a man who smiles at me from a car as he waits at a pedestrian crossing, an old lady in a sari waiting on a doorstep, two young Indian-looking women stepping out of a car driven by a man with a turban and a huge beard. And a very large house with a sign saying “Mirpuri Lodge”.

Dodge round a corner and into a very nice park called Sunny Hill Park. It is sunny and there are hills. People walking dogs, kids playing football, twenty-somethings playing tennis, families with babies, the usual suspects.

Its getting hot and I haven’t eaten since a cup of tea and a couple of biscuits at church seven hours ago. There ought to be a cafe. There is a cafe, the Sunnyhill Cafe. The food is kosher – it says so on the menu – there are fizzy drinks with Hebrew writing on the cans, and the waiters are mostly very friendly-looking blonde women with Eastern European accents. I have a huge sloppy felafel salad and pitta. I can hear the noise of the cars on the M1.

It takes quite a while and about half a mile of walking to negotiate the subway under Watford Way and find a walking route through shedlands around the motoway junction and a pedestrian bridge over the motorway and the mainline railway out of Euston. At that finally brings me to Grahame Park.

There’s not actually that much to say about Grahame Park. Its big. Its divided into a few districts each with a different style of building. Mostly low-rise high-density brick-build sub-brutalist flats with a few large medium-rise slabs or spines and quite a lot or more ordinary newer houses round the outskirts. Its penetrable navigable on foot. Its not exactly pretty but its a damn sight better-looking than a lot of other such places. Most of the streets and blocks are named after things to do with aircraft. Is this the site of the old Hendon Airport? I can’t say I felt at all scared. And to the person who said it was a no-go area because of all the evil Somalis around, all I can say is they must have been somewhere else that day.

I didn’t manage to take many photos because there were people around for a change. Kids playing in the street. And I tend not to take photos of kids playing in the street on the foolish principle that some people don’t like strange middle-aged men hanging round taking pictures of their children. And most of the few photos I took seem to have just got messed up by me trying to upload them to Flickr on the day my subscription ran out… maybe more later.

By 7pm I’m on Edgware Road and looking for a pub. There are lots of pubs. It takes a while to find one that sells real ale and doesn’t have lots of crap music coming of of it.

I am the only customer. The two barmaids are very pleasant Australians. I realise that when in a strange bit of London I avoid exactly the sort of pubs I frequent in my own bit of London.

And a bus down to Kilburn Park Station and being reminded just what a nightmare of tunnels and staircases it is to get out of the Bakerloo Line at Elephant and Castle station by the Walworth Road exit.

Nutter’s Platt

Friday’s intention was to walk south out of Lower Penwortham (the other side of the river Ribble from Preston) to Longton or Lostock Hall or maybe Leyland (where the cars came from). Perhaps even to Chorley (though that might have wanted a bus back). But I woke up too late. And then I fell asleep again. And it was the afternoon and late and dinner was going to be cooked and there wasn’t much walking time.

But I’d been indoors (except for a brief visit to the pub on Thursday) so a walk was needed so I went down the mysterious path beside the Methodist church to see where it went.

And it is a little mysterious because its dead straight and connects with other paths (as paths usually do because they are so often older than the buildings around them) and many of those paths in that district are old tramways or torn-up rails but the north end of this path crosses the road and hits the river in a dead straight line just about ten metres from the old bridge at Preston Riverside – right by the Bridge Inn – and at an angle that looks far too sharp for any tram to turn. And that bridge doesn’t look at all like a tram bridge, its older and cobbled. So what was the path before?

[Commenting on my own post I was an idiot when I wrote that. There is a ruined tram bridge right beside the old bridge. I have known it was there for nearly twenty years:]

[On the other hand the old bridge at Penwortham is pretty wonderful. And once upon a time it would have been the main north-south road west of the Pennines. No wonder 18th-century armies had trouble moving around]

Anyway, up the path through or past playing fields and onto a bridge over the new dual carriageway (Penwortham Bypass?) and through some suburban estates mainly (as far as I can tell) occupied by overmadeup teenage girls who shout at boys on bicycles “Stewart! I saw you at school this afternoon!”

Penwortham is what I think of as a classic suburb. Which is a term I made up myself when walking round London and I am sure there are all sorts of geographers and town planners and people who have different names for it. Its basically residential, but quite high density. There are little clusters of small shops and public buildings here and there at road junctions. Perhaps they are the remnants of pre-existing villages, or little 1960s shopping centres or maybe they just mark some shop opened by an enterprising woman in the days before planning permission. There’s one where Cop Lane meets Pope Lane in Penwortham, with the Black Bull pub (which an old man told me was the oldest in the Preston area, which seems unlikely), a launderette, a fake tan shop (do people really pay to be dyed orange?), an Italian takeaway called “Puccini’s” (with pictures of the great man himself on the walls) and some sort of school.

These places are different from high-density inner suburbs which have a natural network of streets with ribbon-developments or corner shops or small businesses that bind them together (except where post-1945 ideas of planning have allowed the local council to destroy the network with big blocks) Though the road leading through Lower Penwortham from the old bridge towards Pope Lane (Leyland Road or Penwortham Lane) has enough buildings that look as if they used to be shops to give me the feeling that it was once one of those stretched-out natural shopping ribbons – as the housing there is late 19th or more likely very early 20th century (you can tell by residential street names – Gaskell, Buller, Stanley – later twentieth century town councillors short of a name for rapidly might have named a street in some Poet’s Corner for Elizabeth Gaskell and maybe even Henry Morton Stanley (though unlike her he didn’t deserve it) but hardly Redvers Buller) it looks more like an extension of the higher density more urban or inner-suburban building over he river from Preston than it does any autonomous growth of Penwortham.

They are also different from outer suburbs which are too low-density for walking to the shops so have commercial centres you have to drive to. Though that is the visual image most people have when they thin of “suburb”. These “classic suburbs” are the creation of the bus, the tram, and local councils. And with buses rare and trams extinct and councils powerless they are now not what they used to be. Almost anyone will walk a quarter of a mile to a corner shop or a church or a pub or a primary school. Not that many people will walk a mile to get to them if they have a car instead. And once they get in the car they are off out of their locality to wherever.

Why Pope Lane? Is it some survival of Lancashire catholicism? Or just named after some bloke called Pope?

There is a kind of suburban house here that I’ve not seen many of in London (though there are some in Worthing and in the outskirts of Ipswich – why does “outskirts of Ipswich” sound like a Middle English poem?) Low-rise, often just single-story, more or less filling their plot. Small gardens – too much at the front, not enough at the back – one or more likely two garages built into the house (do they call them “car ports?”) approached by a little drive that is the only obvious way in – there seems to be no separate pedestrian access as if no-one is expected to arrive on foot. Big ornate gates that often look as if they are operated electrically and have pillars with classical style bits of garden-centre sculpture on them. Huge hedges or fences often only a metre or two in front of the windows. I imagine they are lovely inside, but from outside they look like houses I would hate.

If you walk to the end of Pope Lane you get to Nutter’s Platt. As far as I can tell the name is more interesting than the place. It seems to be a large lorry-ridden roundabout where some 1960s dual carriageways meet. With fields on one side – real fields with crops in them – and a little suburb called Kingsfold on the other. I don’t think its the Kingsfold the hymn tune was named after.

I turned left walked along the side of the road (The A582 to Leyland) for a little well but it was getting dark (I said I got up late) and the road was noisy and smelly and full of cars driving home so I cut into the first footpath I found and jumped over a stile and over a muddy field. Yhere is a lot of mud round there. On the map many of the fields are called this-that-or-the-other “Moss” and the little burns or streams or ditches are called “gutters”. Which is a clue to the nature of the ground. I was glad I was wearing my boots.

More of those houses on Bee Lane. On the map the houses round here are called this-that-and-the-other “farm”. But they are not farms any more. They are suburban houses and the residents are driving back from work. I pass a few walking from their cars to their doors. “Alright?” they say, in an uncommittal Lancashire way.

I heard a bird calling. Again and again and again. I’d love to be able to recognise birds by their calls. I’m crap at it. I guess that goes along with not being able to sing myself. Often I’ve had to relearn the songs of bird like garden warblers and blackcaps and willow warblers in the summer, because I’ve forgotten them from the year before. Each year its new. This wasn’t a warbler. (Not in February in Lancashire after dark) Maybe it was a short-eared owl. I want it to have been a short-eared owl. But for all I know it could have been some sort of plover.

There was one place that looked like a real farm. A yong woman was walking out of it into some kind of concrete outhouse. A little dog in a coat dashed out and barked at me. The woman yelled at the dog and apologised to me. I said it was alright and walked on. You always walk on when a dog goes for you, even if its a little one. As I walked away I could here another, older woman talking to her. “What was that all about?” She sounded cross.

Down into Park Lane in Penwortham and I see a church spire in the near dark. It looks huge. I mean really huge, the biggest thing for miles. None of the Penwortham churches can be that big? The tower is is taller than any building near it, and the spire on top of the tower a lot taller than that. Of course it isn’t one of the Penwortham churches, it is St Walburge’s, a Roman Catholic church in Preston on the sother side of the river well over a mile away. Famously one of the tallest spires in England. It doesn’t look that big when you are near it.

Overheard in the pub that night: “I hate being called a ‘milf’. Even my fifteen-year-old daughter said it. I don’t know where she got it from” A conversation interuppted by the arrival of a young woman who for all I know could have been the fifteen-year-old daughter. I think that might be the first time I have ever heard the word “milf” spoken. I only know it from webpages.

Later on in the same pub, landlord to distressed young barmaid: “get some water in a glass and throw it on it!”. I found out later that there had been a fire in a bin outside where customers smoke. The landlord seemed neither suprised nor worried.

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.

I knew South-East London was tough, but I never knew it was this bad.

When I was a little Evangelical they told us we should walk along the King’s Highway every day. Well, I found it, its in Plumstead. So I walked along it. And they have some very strange things up there!

This must be the ultimate Charlton supporters weapon against Millwall.

The second picture is repeated from the previous post because I like it a lot and its just at the end of the street. In fact its more or less my favourite picture so far this year. And no-one looked at it on Flickr yet! The relevant words are in the yesterday’s blog entry.

All four of these photos were taken within about a hundred yards of each other.

And a few more I didn’t post before:

Erith, land of sheds

The centre of Erith is marked by a giant brightly-coloured ceramic sculpture of three-in-a-bed oral fish sex right by the great big roundabout in front of the Town Hall. The photos is work-friendly, unless your boss is a moralising, monagamist herring.

Why Erith? I’m still trying to redirect Stuff and Thingy towards south-east London (if only because of the looming East
Greenwich) so I dreamed up the idea of trying out the bus routes but an 89 came before the 108 so I got on it instead to see where it went and it went to almost to Slade Green. Almost because the passengers – myself, one small drunk old lady, and about two dozen 14 or 15 year-old white boys from Bexleyheath with short hair and crutches whose idea of fun was talking very loudly about how well they had handled themselves at some mythical fight outside a nightclub, saying not-at-all work-friendly things about young women and the size of their genitals, planning to defraud the railway company, and running up and down the stairs screaming – all got kicked off outside a pub about two stops short of Slade Green station at a council estate with and a view of the Dartford Bridge, and some real ships. Big ones.

So I walked back towards London and found myself walking up a long gently curving dual carriageway with giant sheds on either side. Not garden sheds but the sort of huge aluminium clad box that could contain a shop or a factory or a warehouse, and mostly did, this being the nearest London has to a genuine industrial area.

That, as far as Lesnes Abbey (which there is more of left than I thought – you can clearly see the ground-plan where the church used to be) and I got bored of dual carriageways and sheds and so into the woods. Lesnes Abbey Wood to start with (hence “Abbey Wood” station) and over to Plumstead to meet up with the place the walk of a fortnight ago ended.

Once upon a time British botanists indulged themselves in a futile Quest for a Genuine Wild Wood (our version of the almost as futile Quest for the Historical Jesus) with various naturalists putting forward the argument for this that or the other stand of trees never having been felled for agriculture or for some reason resembling a real natural woodland. Whatever that is, as in these islands humans are older than the woods, we’ve been here longer. We have lots of so-called “ancient woods” that have been around since before about 1600, but there are probably no woods that were never managed by humans, at least for a few centuries (and some of them for many centuries continually).

And it is not clear whether or not a “natural” Natural British Woodland would be one that resembles the woods that existed before the introduction of agriculture, or one that resembles the woods that might have existed had agriculture never been introduced,or one that had never been subjected to agriculture, or one that contains only native British species (that is plants that got here between the ice going away and the North Sea coming back), or one that resembles the woodlands that might have been here at this stage in previous ice ages, or one that was simply left alone to look after itself for a few centuries – and all of those are different.

Whatever, there are a dozen or so bits of woodland in England that someone or other claims to be the last, or the only, or the best, or the biggest piece of wildwood in the country. And apart from a two or three really weird stunted oakwoods in the north or west (and ignoring the claims of the some of the obviously artificial old deer parks such as Hatfield or Hainault or Petworth or Epping or the New Forest which preserve an artificially high density of large grazing animals which makes them in some ways more “natural” than any other woods since our ancestors killed off the mammoths and bison and wild cattle) just about all tof them are in historical Kent and Sussex, and some of the best ones now in the more industrialised suburbs of South East London, including Abbey Wood and Oxleas wood only a short busride away, which preserve more of the look and feel of the ancient countryside of England than just about anywhere else in the country, in bits of dogwalking rough land on the hills between some of London’s grottier council estates. Someone noticed a few years ago and invented the Green Chain Walk which (if unlike me, you don’t like walking through the council estates and industrial areas and concretey bits) will take your from Crystal Palace to the Thames at Erith through as many (more?) diverse little woodlands as any other walk in England.

But the most notable wood today wasn’t one of the ancient ones at all. I’ve never been to Bostall Wood before. Its lovely. Or at least the part of it I wandered through is. A very strange wood, hard to read. The trees on the flat past of the wood that I walked through are are mostly beech and birch. No ash or oak, not even a sycamore, but there is the occasional pine. Very little undergrowth, easy to walk through (which might be because so many people and dogs walk through it) and apparently very few characteristic woodland herbaceaous plants (though maybe thats because this is October, I should go back in April or May) The nearest to an understory is holly, with some brambles around, there seems to be or very little if any hazel or elder or small oak (though the steep edges of the wood are full of oak). Just over the road in Lesnes Abbey Woods I’d seen oak and ash and elder and hornbeam and holly and some cherries or other Prunus and Viburnum andClematis and ivy and dozens of other plants.

Here its quite different. Nearly all the tree trunks are quite thin – is that because they are close together or just because they are still quite young? Its obviously quite a new wood.

Most of the trees are perhaps not much older than I am. But is it self-seeded or planted? And who plants dense beech woods, or birch at all? And if self-seeded why no ash or sycamore? They get anywhere. Or oak? There is abundant oak, piles of acorns, just hundreds or even tens of metres away. And where did those pines come from? Did this use to be a golf course or some kind of public park?

Whatever the reason for it (whcih I might be able to disover by looking at my bookshelf but I haven’t yet because its more fun speculating) It’s beautiful. The ground is covered with golden-bronze beech-leaves and crunchy beech-mast. There are park benches to sit on, from the Green Chain Walk people. The sunset filters through the trees wonderfully. It smells nice.

Historical Archives of the First Circumnavigation of London

Select the map for a bigger picture:

This was a series of walks done, IIRC, in about 2001/2002. The idea was I would take a train out to the last station in zone two, then walk round to the outermost zone two station on the next line. So dividing the walk into a series of a couple of dozen stages round London. some only a few hundred metres (I tended to go on little excursions in that case) the longest being only a few hours walk, so they could be fitted in to an evening after work (followed by a quick pint in whichever local pub seemed nicest), or a Sunday afternoon stroll and still be back in time for the 6.30 service.

It started by taking the first train up to town from Lewisham (which went, not surprisingly, to London Bridge) then getting on the first tube train out of town, which took me to Willesden Green. So the first walk was something like Willesden Green to Kensal Green, the next Kensal Green to Kensal Rise and so on anti-clockwise (in tune with the natural rotation of the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy ) until I found myself back there a year or more later.

The pattern of walks tends to break down in the southern part, Herne Hill to Brockley is a longer stage than I wanted to do, and goes almost entirely through streets I have walked all over before, so I diverted down through Dulwich for variety. And it also breaks down in the downriver section where you need to go all the way to Woolwich to cross the river on foot and the stage ran (before the DLR extension) from Greenwich to Silvertown because you aren’t supposed to walk through the Blackwall tunnel. Though I walked past both ends of it.

Not that I would want to walk through the Blackwall tunnel. I’ve both walked and cycled through the Rotherhithe tunnel and its not recommended for the asthmatic and bronchitic. Or anyone remotely scared of playing with traffic. Its a bit like being trapped in a smelly dirty hole in the ground with a couple of hundred cars and a few dozen big diesel lorries, all belching fumes. In fact it IS being trapped in a smelly dirty hole in the ground with a couple of hundred cars and a few dozen big diesel lorries, all belching fumes. Its worse on the bike. You can’t use the narrow walkway so you have to share the road with the motors. And its a lot longer than it looks on the surface (I have no idea where it goes under the river but it certainly isn’t straight across ), and whichever way you go the second half is continually uphill for about half a mile, straining your lungs while being forced to cycle in the path of the motor vehicles whose drivers are getting angrier and angrier.

Anyway, like I said, time to buy a new book and set off for new journeys. The map books are all coloured now, which is fine for almost every likely use EXCEPT marking where you went by filling in streets with yellow pens. It was all so much simpler when you could still buy a black and white A to Z.

Night journey through Bromley

The last two stages of the walk round Zones 4 and 5 were from Beckenham and Elmer’s End to Bromley, and then Bromley to Grove Park. Done mostly in the evening, mainly because Saturday being the Day of Rest I have trouble getting out of bed until after the early music programme happens on Radio Three. And then a nice bath is called for. So by the time I’ve bought some bread and juice and taken the bus down to the Outer Darkness of Suburbia, the sun isn’t far from setting.

To be honest there isn’t that much to say about the walk. Nothing very odd happened. I don;t think I had any stunning insights into the human condition or urban geography or even

The outer suburbs of south-east London would fit most people’s ideas of boring. In fact they are arguably the most boring places in Britain. (Though on the whole I prefer them to the outer suburbs of west London – more hills and fewer motorways

Beckenham is nicer than it sounds. Also higher density than you might think, at least near the centre of it. Lots of infill and little blocks of flats. And the scene is dominated by church towers. A sort of fake old town.

As you walk round the suburbs you are never out of earshot of suburban life, even in the middle of a largish park. Not just the ever-present noise of cars (I’m not sure there is anywhere in the south east of England you escape from that) but you can hear the odd snatches of talk, occasional shouts and raised voices, kicks of boot against ball, some partying teenagers, kids out late, now and again a dog barking. You can smell cooking too. Small whiffs of pizza or chips, a late season barbecue, Indian takeaways.

And then, fireworks. I’ve no idea why, or what it was all in aid of, but someone was letting off fireworks from their back garden somewhere round Langley Park. Maybe it was on Barnfield Wood Road. The first of the year. Fireworks always lift my heart. Just great fun.

Langley Park is apparently an Area of Special Residential Character whatever that means. (it seems to be a sort of conservation area for wealthy suburbs) Except they call it Park Langley on the signs.

The approach to Bromley town centre from the south west takes you through another one of those estates that turn out to be a lot higher density than you’d expect. Quite a successful layout for what it is, with shops and restaurants integrated into the blocks. But why so many blind-ended blocks? Neary all the blocks show blank brick walls at one or both ends, and quite a few do along their length as well, the houses set back behind walls and turned inwards. Its pathetic. It just makes dog toilets. Why not just put windows in end walls? It makes the rooms inside more pleasant and lets you overlook the public street, making everyone safer.

The worst are the seven or eight foot high walls at the sides or ends of gardens, or the fences out in front cutting the front of a block of flats off from the streets. Not only do they make even more dog toilets but they reduce the safety of the inhabitants. I suppose they think they will protect against burglars, but they won;t stop any professional thief who knows what he is doing, they won’t stop a fifteen-year-old pissed on cheap cider who doesn’t and they won’t stop a desperate junkie. The illusion of security while making us less safe.

Everyone I see in the street after dark seems to be in their teens or twenties. Where are the other 80% of the population?

Bromley town centre is not a pretty place any more. It looks like it might have been once, and its got some nice old buildings – and some nice modern buildings – but the sprawl of multiple-lane roads surrounding the overlarge overheated mall make it all a bit inhuman. Not as nasty as Romford (where is?), but not as lively as Croydon or Kingston and on a more inhuman scale than either.

And there are plenty of brutal little buildings tucked away at the back:

I started by getting on the first bus that went past the bottom of our street bound for anywhere beyond Lewisham, and it was a 136 to Grove Park. So I came back on the 136 from Grove Park. Which meant I had to get to Grove Park . And I didn’t fancy walking along Burnt Ash Hill so I went down into the Downham estate and back up again

Downham is in some ways the most unpleasant place I’ve been on my walks round London. Its also in some ways the most familiar. Its very similar to the sort of place my Dad’s relatives lived around Brighton when I was a kid. If it wasn’t for the absence of the South Downs it could almost be Moulscoombe, where Dad was brought up and only a mile or two from where we lived on a slightly newer estate.It is a similar product of the municipalised ebb of the Garden City movement. The Garden City was cut away from its economic and political roots and turned into the Garden Suburb, low-rise low-density council houses covering entire hillsides with families who didn’t have an economic reason to be there or enough money to get out. If they were allowed out. At Valeswood Road in Downham, just round the corner from where I was walking today, they actually built a wall across the street to cut off the LLC council estate from the private suburbs of Bromley. I always feel odd in Downham. Its too much like where I actually come from and don’t particularly want to go back to. I like more obviously urban places.

But seriously, if this is as bad as it gets we’re doing OK.

And where are the photos I took in Downham? I need to look at my camera again!

Well, I’m back.

OK, Sam walked a lot further than I did, and he didn’t go home every night on the bus. But I finished. It took five years (though two and a half of them were missed due to arthritis) but I have now done my second circumperegrination of London in Zones 4 & 5. I’ve walked through every one of he 30-something London boroughs and across all but two or three of them and visited every single London postal district and (if I include my first circumnavigation of London through zone 2 and 3) visited more or less very large council estate.

Only about a hundred miles. Which in three years of walking is less than a mile a week.

But I finished, I did it.

I have all these notes about Bromley I just wrote up in my notebook for a posting here. But I got back to the local and the landlady’s daughter gave birth earlier today. So there were drinks and more drinks and I’m a bit squiffy now. So maybe my account of walking through Bromley at night gets posted in a day or two when I get the photos online. Or maybe not.

One thing to say. I’ve quite genuinely now been everywhere in London. On my own, on foot, mostly after dark. Walking in to random pubs. Getting on busses. And no-one was ever nasty to me at all. London is a nice place.

But I did it. And I’m chuffed.

Playing by Faversham rules

There are certain rules by which English small towns are ordered. Some shared between them, others unique to particular towns – such as Faversham in Kent. Thanks to my stupendous powers of observation I can now share these with you, so you will never again be dazed and confused in Faversham. Over the weekend I spent all of twenty hours in in the town. During most of them I was either drinking or asleep or both. But so strong are my natural abilities in this line I can assure you I have got the placed pinned down already! The Rules are arranged in suras of decreasing order of length.

• The prosperity of a small town can be judged by the ratio of shops selling silly toys or expensive antiques or second-hand books or organic food (on the top of the fraction) to charity shops, junks shops and cheap antique shops (on the bottom of it). By that rule Corbridge is better-off than Faversham which is better-off than Lewes which is better-off than Woodbridge which is better-off than Chichester which is better-off than Huntingdon. (Note the failure of the North-South Divide in Small Town Land – this is partly because southern small towns have a quota of poor people who can’t afford to live in the city, and northern small towns have rich people who can afford not to)
• No-one of European appearance is allowed to work in a shop that sells food after 6pm. Walking down into Faversham on Saturday evening I passed maybe six takeaways and three restaurants, all staffed by Asians, but only one Asian-looking person in the street (a little boy riding a chopper bike down a twitten) But all the pubs, which are many, seemed to be run entirely by white people.
• Every small town has at least one pub with bare wooden floorboards populated by women in their twenties or thirties with piercings in uncomfortable looking places who drink cider and snakebite and put rock music recorded before they were born onto the juke box. In Faversham it seems to be called the Swan.

  

• Most locals never walk anywhere except to the pub. They all drive. So if you ask directions to anywhere and they tell you it is a long way away don’t believe them. They only ever go by car and have no idea how long it really takes to walk. London is the last stronghold of human-powered mobility in the country.
• All women are beautiful. Even the fat fourteen-year-olds sitting in the street between the Hole in the Wall and Wetherspoon’s, too pissed to get up, drooling into their bottles of cheap vodka and giggling at their slighly older mates pathetic attempts to chat up the bouncers.
• No-one can do simple artithmetic. The otherwise very wonderful
  Shepherd Neame shop webpage is advertising a case of 24 cans of Spitfire for £22 – and four cases for £110. That’s about 14p a can more expensive.
• All women aged between 16 and 60 are married with children. But that doesn’t stop them cuddling random blokes they just met. Even when their husbands are in the next room.
• If you go to the pub over the road from the station for one last pint before you return to London, you will miss your train. (Also known as the “Lansdowne Arms Rule”)
• Somewhere there is a pub full of people who look like they used to drink in bars in Brighton twenty-five years ago. If you talk to them it usually turns out that they did.
• There is a creek or a river. It usually doesn’t have enough water in it to float more than a rubber duck. This is why the small town is still a small town and not a big city.

  

• The older and narrower the roads, the nice the town. If there is anywhere called a “by-pass” you can be sure it is deadly.
• Sleeping outside on a bare wooden floor is often more comfortable than inside on a mattress. Until it rains.
  

• Middle-aged men who have been in the pub since lunchtime do not need to drink Margaritas after midnight.

  

• Ten-year old girls who play pool in pubs and know the words to Iron Maiden songs actually exist.
• Lax enforcement of the smoking ban is not confined to South London.
• Spitfire actually does taste better than Master Brew.
• It was a really great party, thanks Mark and Stella!

  

• Fish and chips is usually nicer outside London
  
• Breweries are larger behind than in front.
  

  

• Acts of Morris Dancing are perpetrated
• They no longer have cattle markets
• They still have Co-ops.
  

Eavesdropping

Its been a good weekend for found sentences.

(and I’ve been in five pubs, and saw people smoking indoors in three of them – so if the new law is going to work They are going to have to do a few pub landlords PDQ – I suspect they won’t)

Overheard in a street in Faversham:

“We can’t go in there. Children aren’t allowed in pubs”
“Its not a pub. Its a Wetherspoon’s”

(girl of about 11 or 12 talking to boy of similar age)

Overheard in a public lavatory:

“Did that English boy win the Grand Prix?”
“Dunno, do you mean Lewis?”
“Apparently he’s English now. The Great White fucking Hope of England. I’m sorry but I’ve been waiting a long time and now he’s English?”

(by their accents two thirty-something West Indian blokes)

Overheard in Catford:

“When I went to Jamaica I was in a club dancing and there was this woman with bleached blonde hair who stood on her head for about a whole minute. She was wearing a miniskirt and no underwear. It was disgusting man. I didn’t know where to look. She had this big blonde hair and brown arms and a fair skin and it was all out of a bottle cos I’m telling you her pussy was black, man. You wouldn’t have liked it if you saw it.”

(young black woman trying to persuade a white male friend to come to Dancehall raves with her)

Overheard in a street in Faversham:

(retching noise)
“Did you really smoke them all?”
“Take a look in that little alley!”

(Small blond boy of about 11 or 12 years old)

I was walking down that little alley at the time and this is what I saw:

Overheard on train:

“What have we done? What haven’t we done! Come and get us you lazy mare!”

(Middle-aged woman with strong south London accent talking to her mobile)

Overheard on train:

“But baseball! Baseball is catastrophe! If I have son and he likes baseball I kill him!”

(tall muscly young bloke with film-star looks and some kind of Slavic accent. Talking to a man who might have been Italian, sitting next to two rather flash looking blonde women who were chatting away in what might have been Russian or Serbian or Czech – I’m not good at identifying languages. I once mistook a group of Polish students for Spanish)

Smoking’s last day at the pub.

To Battersea briefly.

A. went to the Pride march, and I went to the Vicarage Tea Party. OK, it was the sort of Vicarage party with Rioja and Cotes du Rhone, and it wasn’t our vicarage, but it was over soon after eight and I missed the last episode of Dr Who – the things we suffer for the Faith.

Has Battersea changed or have I? When I first started visiting London back in the 19-ahem-0s I used to go to Battersea to see friends from Brighton. Some living in a squat, some in one of those slab blocks by the railway. It was one of the grottier bits of London as far as I could tell. Not so different from next-door Stockwell or Vauxhall.

But nowadays I read Battersea as posh.

Maybe it because I’ve been living in Lewisham or nearby for twenty-odd years and compared to South East London Battersea always was a bit upmarket. Maybe its because I’m remembering the area towards the river and this church is up almost on Wandsworth Common. Though even the shops by Clapham Junction (which never was in Clapham, its always been Battersea) are rather trendier and flashier than anywhere in the South East. (Maybe they always were – Battersea, unlike Lewisham, kept its department store, even if it is now only a Debenham’s) Or maybe its creeping Claphamisation. There were certainly plenty of bars with plate glass windows or cafes opening onto the street and rather unfeasibly cute 30-something mothers eating organic food with young kids and with skinny white-haired blokes who in Lewisham I would assume were the children;s grandfathers but here I suspect their fathers.

Round the back of the church a small high-density estate (“…nicely in scale, with pedestrian ways replacing some of the roads” according to Pevsner) that looks a lot like the one I saw in Jarrow the other week.

Then walking in the pouring rain through some medium-sized streets towards Clapham Common, (“Between the Commons” to estate agents) and a Blast from the Past at the sight of a house. Not because it was unusual but because it isn’t unusual any more. An ordinary house in an ordinary terrace, large bay windows with no net curtains or blinds, almost inviting passers-by to look in. You can see straight through what must have been two rooms knocked into one, with some sort of French doors or large window at the back, so you can see right through to the garden. The floor is polished bare floorboards, with maybe a round, shaggy, dark green rug towards one end. There are tasteful prints on the walls – these vaguely early 20th-century black-and-white drawings of dancers or tramps or something. There is a musical instrument of some sort. Two or three bookshelves, maybe one or two hundred books in them – more than most people will have but still nothing like as many as a vicar or sf fan might.

A young couple, maybe late twenties or early thirties. He is tall and thin and sitting on a chair, dressed all in black, clean-shaven with slightly spiky short hair. She is actually sitting on the floor, with her arm resting on the arm of the chair, smiling up at him in a Sergeant-where’s-mine-evoking sort of way. She’s wearing a chunky knitted jumper. Which she (or rather her mother at the same age) could have been wearing thirty years ago, except she probably wouldn’t have been wearing it on the first of July, such are the strange effects of global warming.

Back in 1967 or 1968 when we were kids helping our Dad campaign for the Labour Party for Brighton Council there were probably five hundred houses like that in Brighton (for all I know they might have been half of the whole number that there were in England) and it sometimes seemed as if we we knew all the inhabitants. These were the sort of Labour supporters who did not (as we had been) live on council estates or in little flats, but had just discovered that you could University lecturers (they were well-off in those pre-Thatcher days), advertising copywriters, architects, people you who didn’t quite seem to do anything for a living but mysteriously ended up working for the government next time Labour got in (and one or two, then in their twenties not in their fifties or sixties, who have been on the outer fringes of the Cabinet these last ten years)

Knocking through was all the rage, and white-washed minimalism and Chinese paper lanterns were big, though on the way out, moving through stripped pine towards “restoring” the “original features”. A fashion that still seems to have the artier half of the middle-middle-aged middle-middle class in its grip. It had just become possible to make a living by stripping out old Victorian and Edwardian decorations from poor people’s houses and selling them to the richer people moving in next door, as the middle classes started to move back into the city centres and inner suburbs. Though it took the government and councils twenty years to notice – so by the end of the 1970s you had councils still wanting to demolish terraces that were by now full of prosperous lawyers and well-informed accountants and replace them by slab blocks and dual carriageways in the name of redevelopment and regeneration, and by the middle of the 1980s millions of people all over the country had knocked through and pulled up carpets – though in a slightly jollier version of the style with walls brightly painted in solid colours, and shiny ethnic ornaments.

The thing that stopped me about this house was the way it was so very, very, exactly like my memories of houses years ago when all this was rare. Though of course it is probably all different really.

And of course no photos – as I’m not really given to taking pictures of people I don’t know just as they start a canoodle in their own living room. You can get arrested for that.

Later that same night, waiting in the rain on the north side of Clapham Common for a bus back to urban civilisation, a genuine bus-stop conversation. You don’t get many of those in the South of England. She perhaps 60, years old, from Glasgow. He (or she?) maybe in his thirties, very camp possibly Scouse accent. He being English wants to move on, she is up for a chat.

Had I heard about the idjits in Glasgow who drive a car into the airport? No, I hadn’t – I’d been at a party then walking for a couple of hours.

She reckons its a good thing, as they’ll all take notice in Glasgow now and do something about all the wee Paki shops. Apparently the trouble up there is that these Muslims and Pakis are all integrated. Not like Leeds where she lives now where they all keep themselves to themselves. The thing about the Scots – and especially about Rangers supporters – is that they take no shite. Or so I was told.

On the other hand she (like me) says she has both Protestants and Catholics in the family, so there cause of integration is perhps not yet lost.

They go indoors. I wait for a 37 bus to Peckham. When it gets to Clapham South a whole load of posh white people get off the bus, and lots of rather less posh black people get on. Battersea is behind me, and the last night of legal smoking in the pub ahead. Once in the pub I win 20 quid at Texas Hold’em which can’t be bad. Though between the beer and fags I must be down on the deal somehow.

The street my Dad was born in

So to Jarrow in the rain with a metro ticket, my camera, and a mobile phone which I use to phone my Mum, who still has my Dad’s birth certificate somewhere and can tell me what house he was born in eighty years ago, give or take a few weeks.

The first thing you see when you get off the Metro at Jarrow is the flyover of a dual carriageway that splits the town, or what’s left of it, in three. (*)

The second thing you see in Jarrow – though you can’t get to it easily because the road is in the way – is an uncovered shopping mall with intrusive metal security gates and calling itself the Viking Centre. Who on earth thought that up? In a thousand years time will Hamburg have an RAF Centre? Will New York boast an Al Qaida Tower? (**) Some shops boarded up, plenty of charity and discount shops. There’s no getting over it, Jarrow is still a poor town, even compared with Sunderland or Shields, never mind the centre of Newcastle. (***)

Anyway, I bought some batteries for my camera and set off round in circles to try to find these little streets, Monkton Road (or Street), Tyne Street, Albert Street (or Road) ad St Bede’s church, where my grandparents were married and all their children baptised. The church was easy enough. I suppose if it had been open I’d have gone in. Behind it streets named after Victorian statesmen with some rows of small houses with good back yards and alleys.

Loop back to the station rond the other side of the Viking Centre and over the railway. There’s an Albert Street behind the station.

The houses are a couple of grades above the smaller terraces round the Catholic Church, perhaps my great-grandparents weren’t quite as poor as some of their descendents made out. (****) Not too many photos, partly because the camera memory was filling up, partly because I was mostly walking though inhabited streets with people in them and it always feels a bit odd to take random photos of other people’s houses, partly becuse it was raining so heavily it was hard to take a good picture. Maybe I’ll go back some time when its slightly drier and colours show up better. It would be unfair, as well as a cliche, to take nothing but dull photos in the rain. Maybe I could finish them all in monochrome for the real stereotype.

At the end of Albert Road (Which is a street! Not a road!) there is a small and high-density low-rise modern estate, 1970s I’d guess, maybe newer. Quite attractive-looking as these things go. I think I’ve seen vaguely similar looking housing in a few places in South London (in Lewisham and perhaps Merton) and also up somewhere near Archway.

At the end of that, a bridge over the railway, with a few small new blocks of houses called Monkton Terrace just off it. Maybe that is where my Dad was born. Or maybe this road, which leads back towards St Bede’s and is now mostly a houseless roundabout, is Monkton Street (and or Road).

Well, here it is:

Not a lot of that was there in 1927 I guess.

There’s a St Bede’s School as well, that looks old enough to have been used by my older uncle Joe, and my aunt Vera. No phots there because odd men who stand at school gates at chucking-out-time and take photos of children they aren’t related to tend to end up explaining themselves to the police (or to irate parents and neighbours which could be worse) My Dad (Bob) and his younger brother Frank went to school in Brighton (and I think the older ones might have finished school there). The family moved around because my grandfather (who I never met) was in the army, but Dad was born in his grandparents house in Jarrow. When my grandfather died sometime in the 1930s I think, the family relocated in the Brighton area. Almost part of a mass migration, we had aunts and cousins and great-aunts and second-cousins all the way from Portsmouth to Hastings. The women went into domestic service or became nurses, (yes, just like Catherine Cookson) the men got jobs in the military or on the railway or in the post-office.

Which is why I associate a South Tyneside accent with old people. On the train from Pelaw to Jarrow there was a woman behind me who sounded just like some of my old aunts, now dead. I glanced round half expecting to see an old lady and saw a rather attractive blonde woman maybe in her early twenties, scolding a rather snotty-nosed little boy.

And how come the South Tyneside accent is different anyway? (*****) Where did it come from? Its not quite the same as Sunderland, even more like Newcastle, but it is different. I’ve met people who say they can tell Jarrow from Shields or Hebburn. (but then I’ve met people who say they can tell which colliery someone used to work in in County Durham by their voice) I don’t think I could. But I’m pretty sure I can hear the difference between them and Newcastle or Sunderland (which is not quite the same as telling which is which). Its not a very different kind of voice and there is a huge over lap but there is a difference. More sand and gravel in it somehow. Deeper and flatter.

And how is the accent sustained by such a small community? People are leaving all the time (though not so many coming any more). These places are within walking distance of each other (if you like walking round towns all day). Industrial Lancashire is even more diverse for accent and dialect (though I don’t think the Leeds area is (I’m open to correction), and the huge variety of Glasgow and Clydeside accents aren’t so geographically sorted as far as I can tell – I bet there is some real research on it somewhere) but they are based on a pre-existing network of market towns that had been industrialising slowly for a couple of centuries by the time the Depression hit and recording technology existed to preserve the voices.

South Tyneside and the industrial coast of Durham grew very fast in the late 19th century. Jarrow was a village without a railway station in 1850, probably larger than it is now by 1890. My own great grandparents were amongst the first generation of industrial workers there. Workers came from all over. Many, perhaps most, from the surrounding countryside of course, or from rural Yorkshire, or the older mining areas of Durham and Tyneside. Many from the south-west of England or from Wales, bringing skills in metal work and mining. Also skilled workers from Scotland, and small numbers from farther, Germany, Scandinavia, eastern Europe, (there is still a prominent Jewish community near South Shields). But the largest visible minority were from Ireland, both Protestants and Catholics, but more of the latter.

So the accent grew up in a generation. The oldest people I met who spoke it were born before the Great War. Their parents might not have spoken it – their grandparents certainly didn’t. The working-class South Tyneside culture that sent its men to London to crusade for jobs was only two generations deep. The Jarrow marcher’s grandfathers (maybe even some of their fathers) could have been iron miners in Wales, sheep-farmers in Northumberland or tailors in Galway.

Where did the accent come from? Is it the underlying local rural accent straightforwardly adopted by incomers? Did it spread downriver from Gateshead (and if so why is Sunderland so different, five miles away on the next river?) Is it simply a Tyneside accent modified by a large dose of Irish and Welsh? Is that what the Geordie accent itself is, a sort of Northumbrian Scouse? If so, why doesn’t it sound remotely Irish to me (maybe my ear just isn’t good enough)

And why does it seem (and this is purely anecdotal) that dialect is holding out on Wearside but not Tyneside. Just eavesdropping in the streets and on the trains, most voices I heard in Newcastle sounded clearly Northern, clearly North Eastern, but people were speaking standard English with a northern accent. If you wrote down what they said it would be pretty much the same as a southerner would have said. But over in Sunderland people really do say “aye” rather than “yes” and “gan” rather than “go” Or maybe that’s because the Metro floods with office workers at 5pm on a Friday, but the centre of Sunderland doesn’t.

As for Corbridge, where I’m staying, I couldn’t tell you how they speak. Everything from RP to Canadian it seems. This is a posh place. Though the handful of bored teenagers sitting in the bus shelter on Thursday night sounded like they could have come from anywhere between Whitely bay and Carlisle. Which I suppose they probably did. Durham’s just that little bit different again. Its a cliche to say its “softer” and has a “lilt” to it, and I couldn’t describe what I mean by those words, but it is and it does. Sort of sexy to be honest. And changing only slowly as you go up into the hills and over the top of England through to the West Coast and down to bump into Lancashire accents just outside Barrow.

So back to Newcastle on my way to the mythical beer festival, and a pint or two in the Percy Arms for old time’s sake.

Yes, they still have a rock disco there. Not that I went. Or have been for twenty-five years.

(*)Putting little loops of highway around or through town centres is almost always a social disaster and I expect it was here, though I’ve no memory of what it looked like before. All those “Inner ring roads” and “Civic Drives” and “Ring Ways” and so on rip gaps through the network of streets, block lines of sight, segregate people on each side of them and generally tear the fabric of the city apart. Roads unit people in the country and the outer suburbs but in the city and town centres and inner suburbs or high-density suburbs streets unite but roads divide. Even where the shops in the centre are prospering (like Preston or Croydon or that vomit-washed exhaust-wreathed suburban wasteland that used to be a town called Romford) inappropriately wide or fast roads cause social problems. Where its not, like Jarrow still isn’t, they just rub in the relative powerlessness of the locals compared with the more prosperous drive-pasts.

(**)The whole point of the early history of Jarrow, the only memorable point, the reason that it was well-known at all before they started building ships, was that St Paul’s monastery was there, which along with its sister St Peter’s down the coast at Sunderland (OK, OK, Monkwearmouth) are the real mother churches of Christianity in England. (Don’t believe what they tell you about those Kentish types). And the monks were forced out by the Vikings who were (as the story goes) doing their rape and pillage bit and went to Lindisfarne and then Durham. And thus was the Empire forged. OK, OK, we know that the Vikings were no-where near as bloody as painted, impoverished Nordic economic migrants, and they mostly settled down quite quickly and got on rather well with the English. But they did do a little bit of rape and pillage. And they did some of it right here, well, about five hundred yards down the road by Jarrow Slake and the little hill. Does any crime become an opportunity for commercial branding after enough time? I suppose it does. The Ten Bells in the East End called itself Jack the Ripper for a while but it was too much for most people to take. Maybe there will be a Myra Hindley Tea Shoppe at Ilkley.

(***)Obligatory nod to say yes, I realise that nowhere in Britain, maybe even nowhere in Europe, is now as poor as Jarrow was in the 1930s – there is relative poverty and there is absolute poverty and then they were absolutely poor. Any poorer and they would have died. Its really not like that now.

(****)But then neither was Jarrow or the industrial north-east as a whole in the 1890s or 1900s when these houses were perhaps built, it was the decline in shipbuilding after 1918 (and steel and coal and chemicals) that made it England’s most desperate town. Whatever JB Priestley said, these streets aren’t and weren’t all quite the same and there were gradations in poverty.

(*****) OK, OK, its shorthand. There is no “The South Tyneside Accent” There are very many idiolects which share more or fewer features with each other. And people move, both consciously and unconsciously, through a range of levels and usages. I know all that. Its a crude shorthand.

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.