Eleven years on: where the hell did it all go wrong?

Mauleverer Road, SW2, January 2021: remembering a lost paradise.

At the end of its tenth year, this old blog is still spinning, much to its creator's surprise. Maybe not  at quite its youthful 33 and a third rpm, but at least at one story per season. 

So after a prolonged winter interlude,  it's time to take stock. The question hovering just above this acrylic as opposed to woollen hat is: Why bother?

The first postings appeared in February 2010, when I had the unlikely job of teaching web-based journalism to undergraduates. It seemed a good idea to have a blog of my own to practise on, before I attempted to show them how to do it. Poor dears.

The blog began with a post about the difficulty of finding stories that anyone else would want to read. I think that was also my first big mistake - no-one is interested in the agonies of would-be writers, except perhaps other failing writers.

The second post described my joy at finding the community/arts radio station Resonance FM, just as I crested that hill on the M11 as you drive south back into London, and see all those distant towers.

The  eclecticism of that station on 104 fm leeched itself into the fabric of this blog. I started to write about the things I enjoyed, such as vinyl LPs, tape, 35mm film, print as opposed to Kindle,  bikes, charity shops, cheap cafes, live music in pubs and dodgy bars, crumbling houses and so on.

The absurdity of the project (original title, Old Bill's Analogue Blog) just made it more necessary to do. Write abut things I valued most, with the realisation that they were all under various forms of threat (except, ironically, vinyl records, which were suddenly the height of fashion).

Over the next decade, the blog became peppered with outbursts about the impact of the most insidious weapon of social change - gentrification - on all the most desirable aspects of life in a city. 

The many attendant insults to the senses that gentrification inflicts: ridiculously expensive bars and restaurants and "artisan" outlets replacing useful shops; the cramming of every residential street with massive, ugly, noisy, expensive cars (worst of all, the increasingly vile SUVs); the inevitable driving away of older communities, replacing them with a brash, young(ish), wealthy and seemingly rather selfish monoculture. 

So, what's changed? Have three (to me equally) catastrophic events - austerity, Brexit and pandemic - made gentrifiers hide in their expensively created cellars? 

Sadly not. They are just digging bigger, deeper cellars. 

I'm going to use this and the next few posts to check back on some of the places and events written about in recent years, starting with a shocker in 2015 that was an eye-opener: the destruction of the Mauleverer Road mural in Brixton.

This story still smoulders in the memory. Those wonderful painted walls of the old brewery were a highlight of the backroad cycle route from here to to the old Lambeth College on Brixton Hill, where I was taking a course. 

These paintings of a tropical garden of Eden, fountains, luscious plants, trees, even a stable  with beautiful horses, transformed what would otherwise be a perfectly normal south London residential street. 

Read the original posts for more on the creation of these murals. The story since then has been just as dismal as expected. Having destroyed the art, the developers appeared to leave the site fallow for about three years. Some plywood hoardings went up, and at one point a few planters were added with some sad plants withering and uncared for. 

Peaking through the  shutters, you could see a massive hole in the ground, which at one point seems to be full of water. 

Finally, building got going, and now the development is complete. Go and take a look if you want to see how clever modern architects and builders are: they have created a carbon copy (no, a 3d-printer style copy) of the Victorian terraced house opposite. Except that these are stripped all character. It looks as though it could be an ironic and cynical response to Turner Prize winner Rachel Whiteread, who cast the inside of an old house just before it was demolished for redevelopment in Mile End. 

There's also a near-identical terrace of new four-bedroom Victorian style houses on the other side of the site, fronting on Mandrell Road.

Nearly all of the houses have To Let or For Sale boards up. You can snap one of these four-bed, three bathroom clones up for a mere £1.44million. And as the estate agent's blurb points out, you are within easy reach of "The Village", Market Row, the Ritzy and other attractions of an area which is not actually named in this blurb (Brixton).

So, there you go - you lose a life-enhancing piece of public art but you gain strangely unreal seeming copies of your own house. You almost wonder if the occupants will be as immaculate as these buildings - like those computer-generated smart, smiling young people who populate architects' impressions of all new developments. 

The far end of Mauleverer Road was redeveloped in the 1980s, and it's fascinating to see the totally different styles of domestic architecture. 

My jaundiced view of the new houses was challenged last time I cycled through, when a group of cheerful young people were unloading their stuff from a big van and were clearly moving in. 

A lovely new home for someone, in a fascinating area of London. And at least they will be looking out at the real Victorian houses over the road. 

Over the next few weeks (or months) the plan is to revisit plenty of old places and topics this blog snooped around over the past decade. They might include:

• The Tearooms des Artistes (RIP)
• Peter the Greek's Lock-up treasure shop (RIP)
• Lambeth Libraries (lost and found)
• Nine Elms disease (there's no vaccine)
• Er...lots of other things, with a south London bias.

Look on the bright side, it might never happen.

Studio Voltaire brings some southern warmth to Clapham High Street

Victorian chapel on the outside,  tropical school room inside: Studio Voltaire, housed in an old Mission Hall in Nelson's Row, Clapham, is home to a truly joyful installation by Venezualan artist Sol Calero

Clapham is certainly no Hoxton, Hackney Wick, nor Camberwell when it comes to the contemporary art scene - but it has at least one outstanding art space, Studio Voltaire, which right now has an amazing installation that should bring joy to young and old alike.

Studio Voltaire occupies a former Mission Hall and Sunday school in Nelson's Row, just behind the Methodist church and only a few yards from the vomit-puddled main drag of Clapham High Street.

Its latest exhibit is an installation by a Venezualan artist, Sol Calero, which opened last week.

The work is called La Escuela del Sur, (The school of the South), and it occupies the entire hall. When you walk in you are in a space that is both familiar and (at least for a North European native) truly strange. Calero has effectively rebuilt part of a Venezualan community school classroom inside this Victorian chapel-style school-room.

On a bright day, with sun streaming in through the big church windows, the whole place glows with the primary colours of the south - yellows, oranges, greens and reds. There are huge blackboards at each end covered with gorgeously stylised patterns of natural forms, and the ceiling is painted, panel by panel, in these different primary colours, a sort of aerial Mondrian.

 Parts of the floor are painted with   geometric patterns giving the illusion of a third dimension. There are little desks and chairs set out in rows, there's an art area with easels and art and craft materials ready for use, there are tropical plants climbing up and up, some raised wooden platforms forming a sort of walkway or landing stage, and corrugated plastic roofing over parts of the room.

It all seemed heart-lifitng to me, creating the kind of environment that will invoke pleasure and excitement in children and their teachers - as opposed to the fear and oppression created by a typical Victorian English school room.

In that sense the artist has certainly achieved what (according to the press release) she's aiming for - to show that the South is well ahead of the north in its understanding of the importance of emotional intelligence. The great thing is that local schools are going to be using this space, and it's fascinating that many new British schools (at least the progressive ones) strive to create environments just as bright and cheerful as these - at least for younger kids.

There's also - again according to the press release - a deeper political message here - in that this apparently child-friendly place could simply reinforce northern prejudices that the south is somehow childish, less mature, or maybe that it does not really know about "serious" education. Maybe an Oftsed inspector would be worried that it might be hard to get kids worried about SATs  in such an environment?

The artist has also painted a series of windows on the wall, each with a view out into a stylised glimpses of a sort of tropical paradise.  Is this also a comment on (as again the press release puts it) "the carnavalising identity of the Other"?

I have no idea. It does, however remind me of another, now forever lost work of art in this area - the Mauleverer Road murals, which were destroyed earlier this year by property developers.

This massive lost mural on the wall of a former brewery included scenes of lush formal gardens, and a trompe l'oeil window opening onto a typical Caribbean beach - as if designed to remind the West Indian families living in these  terraced houses at the time (the 1970s) of what they'd left behind.

This is just a personal reaction to an amazing bit of art work. All I can say is I loved it and hope plenty of people go along before the exhibition closes on December 6.