The day Theresa May stole Clapham's big radio moment

Clapham High Street - here and now, but not on the BBC Radio London Robert Elms show last week thanks to Mrs May's election announcement...but where, oh where, was the wonderful Maxwell Hutchinson?

Was listening to Radio London Tuesday morning.

As, to be honest, I often do....working at home, you know, self-employed teacher....freelance writer and editor...you know, well I will get back to jobseeking when I've had one more coffee. And listened to the wonderful and Reverend Professor Maxwell Hutchinson on the Robert Elms radio show on BBC Radio London - a local radio station that is often more interesting and intelligent than many of the national channels.

That man - the very Rev Prof Max - is quite a wonder. He's a great entertainer and educator on his many and various special subjects - architecture and the built environment, music, the Church and all manner of ecclesiastical matters....and much more. I think he is a world authority on Frankincense. And myrhh.

He's been doing this for ages, alongside running a successful architectural practice and being president of the RIBA, as well as a lay deacon. A couple of years back he had a bad, serious stroke. He was off air for months. But Mr Elms and his very loyal, very solid band of listeners, kept the idea of Max alive. By his own account, Mr Elms and his many listeners helped to keep Max alive. And Max came back and again turns up on the show every week, often on location as a sort of Kolly Kibber character - find Max in your Manor!

This week, the Rev Professor was supposed to be in my manor. I did not know this til 10am Tuesday when I tuned in my dodgy transistor to 94.9fm.

Poor old Robert Elms was having to deal with people from Clapham; he could hardly conceal his distaste for the place. He cheered up when someone pointed out Clapham Junction was in Battersea and it was only through snobbery they changed the name to Clapham.

A crescent moon over the bell-tower of Clapham's Holy Trinity
church: maybe Maxwell Hutchinson was somewhere around
this historic building, marooned like a ship on Clapham
Common.

You could sort of tell from the way he enunciated "Clapham" (and even slipped in a naughty "Cla'am" which was bound to annoy some SW4 listeners) that he did not have his usual enthusiasm for this Manor: too posh by 'alf, too silly, was what he  perhaps was half-secretly thinking. ALso it has the disadvatage of being south of the river, and just south of Chelsea.

I sort of agree with Mr Elms ...but I also agree with the caller who said Clapham had always been up-and-coming. But it never actually arrived. Which is (in my view) its saving grace. The High Street is still pleasingly scruffy. It's quite a horrible place but it is also mixed enough to remind you that the Henrys and Banker-wankers and so on are only the most recent and actually quite thin layer of this suburb's social geology.

There is still enough social housing in Clapham to ensure that the Henry&Henrietta brigade never completely colonise. Nor any other group of transients, my own lot of of 80s chancers included.

Then Mr Elms was talking to some chap who represented Clapham Common, a preservation society. He was in fact in Spain as he spoke. He did a so-so job, hardly exciting much interest in the long and outrageous history of this odd open space. Instead he kept telling us there were lots of fun runs. 'Fun run' is surely oxymoronic. He mentioned also 'Australian rules' football and dog-walkers. Yes, alas he was right - that is now what the Common is about. Sport, fitness, dogs and their owners. And in summer, young people eating huge picnics and drinking lots of champagne or prosecco from Sainsburys then leaving all the rubbish on the grass afterwards.

What about the 1985 (?) AntiApartheid free concert? Dr John? Alternative Miss World? Sunsplash? Archaos? Desmond Dekker at the Bandstand? Remember that, do you? etc?

Look, you know I am  a big critic of what has happened around here, and I wouldn't trust myself to defend it now, to be honest, even though it has served me well over three decades - but when we're on a global radio show, we need to stick together, right?

Well, I was waiting with some trepidation to find out what would be said.

Or maybe he was here, Old Clapham Library on the North Side of the
Common. This building was eventually saved and became what is now
the Omnibus, a well-used arts centre which is currently showing
Jim Grover's excellent photos of Clapham High Street life,
low, high and higher.

I was waiting for the chance to ring and tell Mr Elms about the Bread and Roses pub, almost the last place in Clapham I still feel very positive about. A trade union pub with music, free music, theatre and more! The Studio Voltaire contemporary art organisation also seems like a very good thing, deserving of much more praise than it gets. I'd have tried to mention that as well.

But I was also waiting for Jim Grover, the photographer of 48 hours on Clapham High Street, who was due to appear on the show to talk about his book and photo-exhibition at the Omnibus Arts centre.

And above all - I was waiting to find out where in Clapham the Rev Prof had chosen - and even more trepidation as to who he might meet. I began to fantasise. Maybe he will be outside the Holy Trinity Church on the Common - home of the Clapham Sect, one of the key places where the abolition of the slave trade gained momentum.

I think that would be the obvious place for Maxwell Hutchinson to set up shop - a church (albeit not that interesting, architecturally) - with some powerful history, and right by the popular paddling pool and temperance statue to boot.

Or maybe he was at the the new Library. Flashy noughties public-private rip-off architecture. No café any more!

This would have been a good place for the Prof Maxwell Hutchinson to hang out
with his Radio London crew: outside the new Clapham Library, half way down
 the High Street. Andrew Logan's mirrored artworks spelling out "Library"
are popular with all age groups and are arguably more interesting than
the building they stand in front of. 

Or perhaps in one of the leafy upper-crust streets or squares...or in Venn Street, a pleasant enough place. Or maybe he was at the Old Library, now the Omnibus Arts Centre - that would have made sense, especially as those High Street photos are on exhibition there right now.

So yes, I was waiting....and then Theresa May said she wanted a general election, and that was that! The rest of the show was devoted to political analysis and speculation, inevitably and properly, of course.

Ah well, maybe it was for the best.

Clapham is such an odd place now. I don't think it fits Robert Elm's idea of the sort of place real "one of us" Londoners live. Maybe it was once. It does not seem that sort of a place any more, even though, in reality, it of course is.

Clapham. Marginal but not edgy. Common, yes, very common. But not cheap, and certainly not very cheerful. Unless you have a city bonus to spend.

Black Georgians at BCA - feeling the echoes on the streets of south-west London

Brixton's Black Cultural Archives goes back to the eighteenth century for this small but powerful exhibition for the autumn: Black Georgians - the shock of the familiar.

The walls of the BCA's main gallery are lined with old prints, cartoons, paintings, documents, and quotes, focusing on the lives of some of the estimated 15,000 black Africans who lived in the British Isles in the tumultuous era, 1714 - 1830.

The "shock" of the title refers partly to the fact that there were so many Africans living in Britain so long ago. The exhibition makes the point that while a handful of former slaves found  fame, acceptance and wealth, the majority lived in the same abject poverty as most of the indigenous population. Many escaped slavery only to find themselves in an equally bad, possibly even more humiliating position of domestic servitude - which has sinister echoes in present day London.

There were the exceptions, and one of these rather steals the show by the sheer beauty of her portrait. It's only in reproduction here, but the amazing double portrait of  Dido Belle and her cousin Elizabeth Lindsay,  attributed to Johann Zoffany (1779) is stunning, and haunting. No wonder they use half of it for the posters.

So, two posh girls showing off in their finery in their millionaire uncle's back garden in Hampstead - what's so great about that? Well, the one on the left is black, and she's so full of life, so animated, it's hard to believe the painting's over  200 years old.

Her strong personality shines straight out at us, almost defiantly. She's pointing at her own face, as if to say, "Yep. I'm black, and yep, she's my cousin. So, why the hell are your staring at me like that?"

She's half standing, holding a bowl of fruit, as though she might have been about to offer them to the other girl…but no, she also appears to be on the verge of skipping away from her cousin, who's put out her arm as if to pull her back. Yes it's one of those wonderful, playful paintings that can be read in many ways.

There she is: the BCA poster featuring the mysterious portrait of
 Dido Belle, outside the BCA on Windrush Square, Brixton.

Dido's story is as amazing as her appearance. Her mother was a slave, Maria Belle, her father a naval officer, Sir John Lindsay. As the story goes, Lindsay "rescued" Maria from a Spanish ship his fleet had captured, and took her as his concubine. Their daughter was born in 1761. Four years later, Lindsay took her back to London and left her with his esteemed uncle, Sir William Murray, who happened to be the Lord Chief Justice and owned Kenwood house. But he also held surprisingly radical views and was respected by the abolitionists. It's been suggested that Dido herself could well have had a part in changing his views, and looking at her you can well believe this.  In his care, Dido was brought up as a "gentlewoman" alongside her cousin Elizabeth Murray, who's the other girl in the painting.

But despite  enjoying many of the privileges of aristocratic life, she was not always treated as an equal. For example, she did not join the family for formal meals. But nor was she treated like a servant, and seemed to enjoy a deal of fun as companion to her cousin.

Another exhibit caught my attention for a different reason: it's a list of the names of some of the African boys brought to England to attend a new and distinctly experimental African Academy, which opened in 1799 at No. 8  Rectory Grove, Clapham. A little later it was moved the Church Buildings on Clapham Common Northside, not far from Holy Trinity church where the Clapham Sect met and worshiped.

The list, inscribed in black ink on parchment in that marvellous copperplate style, conceals an incredibly sad story that isn't actually told here:

8 Rectory Grove, Clapham: now a house worth millions, but in 1799
the site of the African Academy, a misguided and ultimately tragic
educational experiment.

what's actually so good about this exhibitions the way it triggers curiosity, intrigue, with just the right amount of info, the right quotes, and lots of very provocative prints and cartoons from the collections of

I could never claim to be a local history freak, but this small, thought-provoking exhibition set me off on a maniacal quest to find out more about this strange, ultimately very sad school.  Because one of the first things I found out was that, within five years of its opening, all but six of the original 21 African pupils had died, either from pneumonia due to the harsh winters and damp conditions, or from a measles outbreak one summer.  The school (not surprisingly) was closed  in 1805.

The story of the African Academy is told with extraordinary poignancy in the letters home from some of the pupils, on the Learning Zone website. 

I was leaving the exhibition, curiosity fired up. The text alongside each of the exhibits nearly always ended with a question: "Why? How would you have felt…? And so on. And this approach, which in some museums just seems a bit annoying, really worked here. Because we don't know enough.

The resonances, from the Caribbean to Kenwood to Clapham, and the horror of slavery. Then the thought of those unfortunate, shivering African boys, many were the sons of tribal chieftains in their home countries, being marched across the muddy Common for compulsory attendance at church services.

The same Common which - 150 years later - the great great grandchildren of some of their enslvaed fellow-countrymen would be taken to from the SS Windrush, for temporary lodging in the deep air-raid shelters of Clapham South. It's such a strange bit of geographical coincidence: did the Ministry of Labour's planners in 1953 realise this, or was it just simple expediency? There were surely plenty of other disused deep shelters around the underground network, many in the East End near to the docks.

Thinking such thoughts, I was about leave the BCA when one of the two members of staff chatting at the reception counter asked me what I'd thought of the expo. This was a  tall, softly spoken guy with great dreadlocks, tied back and right down his back. We chatted for a bit. When I told him I now wrote mainly for my own blog he looked a bit disappointed  ("Another blogger!") - but really just seemed genuinely interested to know my views, and to talk about Brixton and Clapham and history and the Archives.

As he spoke, I thought he might be the curator of the exhibition (who I had heard on radio, his name was S I Martin, the historian and slave trade expert). So I ask him, and he says…"No, I'm the director…" Yep, it was Paul Reid, one of the small group of people whose work over decades has made this dream, a beautiful building to house this archive in Brixton, into a reality.

And as you leave the BCA, you'll find yourself further detained by the colourful installation in the courtyard - a new take on the old pavilions and pergolas of London's 18th century pleasure gardens, such as the one just up the road in Vauxhall. It's the work of Brixton-based design studio 2MZ, and like everything else here it brings together many different cultural influences. Catch it in a bit of late autumnal sunshine and it's a true joy to behold!

2MZ's "Pleasure Garden" installation in the courtyard of the Black Cultural Archives