Calling all hunters and collectors, rummagers and moochers...here's a totally biassed and subjective update on the best London charity shops for book-lovers

One of the surprisingly few charity shops in Brixton is also one of the best in London - especially for lovers of music and
vintage clothes. This shop is so popular it's given its name to the junction of Brixton High Street and Stockwell Road - now
unofficially Barnado's Corner.

Sorry – four and a half years late, here's the promised update of an early Microgroove posting, Charity shop pecking order for the hopeless bibliomane, from March 2014.

Half a decade has not radically changed the London charity shops scene. Shops have opened and closed, the charities have become more professional (not always good news for the punters) and - given the aftershocks of the recession and Brexit vote, the nature of donations has changed. Maybe people are hanging on to their stuff a little longer, but for sure there are more people out there desperately looking for good cheap clothes, and the bargains keep on coming.

And for the most part they all still welcome ancient moochers like myself (Have to thank novelist Howard Jacobson for this word, as explained in his BBC Radio 4 Point of View programme, In Praise of Mooching).

Anyway, here's another totally subjective review of the charity shop scene in the areas I have happily mooched around in the past year or so, as of autumn 2018.

 I'm still visiting the same old shops, but have also gone further afield, rummaging through the cast off books, CDs, jackets and coffee-mugs of neighbourhoods as far-flung as Forest Hill,  Blackheath, East Dulwich, Streatham, Tooting, and even up north to Highgate,  Hampstead, Finsbury Park, Upper Street, Dalston, Kilburn High Road, and beyond. Does such a beyond exist? Good question. Charity shops in the outer suburbs and the Home Counties is a whole different subject, which I might (but probably won't) return to one day.

Some good new finds included the British Heart Foundation Books and Music shop at 94 Streatham High Road. This shop immediately makes anyone used to old-fashioned secondhand book and record shops at home. It's packed with stuff: give yourself and hour or two to do it justice.

It's not far from one of the biggest Oxfam shops in South London, on the other side of the suburban motorway aka the A23 Brighton Road. It's maybe a personal thing but I find those massive Oxfams (the one in Kingsland Road, another in Tooting) almost too much of a good thing.

Streatham High Road is a bit of a charity shop nirvana, with samples of all the main names popping up along its seemingly never-ending length. These shops are fed by the young families inhabiting the vast areas of residential streets surrounding it, and the quality of the gear is good. There's also a healthy traffic on these pavements so bargains go quickly. Yet, fine as many of these shops seemed, there was not one that stood out or made it to any notional, personal top ten.

Fabulous, imaginative, topical window displays are a
feature of all the best charity shops, but few
beat this one at Barnado's in Brixton

Two miles further north, however,  on the same arterial road, in central Brixton, there's a real gem.

Surprisingly, this stretch has only one charity shop - but what a shop!

Brixton's Barnado's shop  entered this entirely subjective, incomplete and unfair Top Ten all those years back, at number 10.

The big news is that this same shop has now soared to the Number One spot, knocking that old favourite,  Clapham High Street's Save the Children store, into a very close second place.

Barnados was always good, but last year it re-branded itself as a music specialist shop, and there's certainly a lot of interesting material there for lovers of alternative, reggae, Jazz, folk, dance and generally left field music, vinyl and CD, as you'd expect in this area, and in a shop opposite the Brixton Academy.

It's also good for secondhand guitars, drums, musical instruments of all types and PA equipment: but when they come in, they go very, very fast!

This shop has provided me with several favourite jackets and shirts. I still curse myself for not snapping up the beautiful old Super 8 movie camera in a leather case I saw there a few months ago. The shop has always provided good, often unusual bargains: eg, brand new XXXL string vests in Rasta colours, old film cameras, typewriters and other curios. Plus, friendly and helpful staff.

A new entrant takes the number three spot, despite being very small: the delightful Children of the Mekong shop which opened in Lavender Hill last year. Good quality clothes, good value books, CDs and DVDs, and some nice Vietnamese craftwork gifts.

With its regular sales and attractive window displays, this is a friendly shop run chiefly, it seems, by French and Vietnamese volunteers. Just recently, they seem to have reduced the book stock, which if it's a deliberate change is a shame....but even so I'm giving this small local contender a high placing in my latest, ridiculously subjective league table of charity shops within a 30-minute bike or tube ride from my home. The fact this shop is only three minute's walk is perhaps a factor. Unfair or what? But the staff are delightful.

Another newcomer is at number 4. Well, sort of new, in the sense that this is awarded to two shops - the original store in Battersea Park Road run by the Wandsworth HIV awareness charity Oasis (now just one shop, the clothes and furniture stores having merged), and its big new sibling in Clapham Old Town.

The Battersea Park Road shop is thankfully just as old-school as it always was - a big, quite gloomy shop with masses of books, CDs, toys (including, on one visit, some very scary china dolls), glass, pots and pans, bric-a-brac of all sorts. It's like something out of a non-existent Angela Carter short story.

This new OASIS shop in Clapham is big and cheerful, occupying the site of a former rather pricey fashion store in the Polygon area of Clapham Old Town (one of the poshest parts of SW4, it must be said - so much the better).

It's a magnificent shop on three floors, including a whole room of books. I popped in to check it out a few weeks ago and emerged about 90 minutes later with a bagful of books. If it caries on like this for a while, this store will be a contender for my personal number one.

The big MIND shop on Wandsworth Road can remain in its comfortable 5th place, if I can combine it with another MIND shop I've come to like in Highgate.

The SW8 store is a busy and truly cheerful shop crammed with stuff, close to the big 1920s Larkhall Estate. It's also not far from the new Nine Elms luxury flat developments: maybe they'll get some new customers!

The shop has always been good for the occasional surprise bargain, such as a set of lovely Italian Bialetti Moka coffee makers and interesting books and DVDs. It also seems very good for kids' stuff, clothes, toys, books, etc.

It now happily shares the slot with another excellent MIND shop, the double-fronted one on Archway Road opposite Highgate tube station. It's perhaps stretching the 30 minutes travel limit, unless you're very lucky with the Northern Line. This is a double dose of charity shop goodness: clothes and bric a brac in the first shop, books, CDs and records in the knocked-through next door shop.

In the original poll, the FARA shops in Northcote Road, Gloucester Road, Battersea Park Road and Balham scored well, and they continue to do so. The Northcote Road shops is especially good for designery casual menswear - presumably cast offs from all the well-heeled yummy young dads in this Nappy Valley district. Also, good for picture frames, lampshades, luggage, mirrors, ...oh, everything, even the occasional guitar. The Gloucester Road branch has a similarly delightful basement, and the clothes are seriously upmarket but NOT overpriced.

FARA has a slightly less posh and gloriously dark shop with a big menswear and book basement in Pimlico, with another branch selling retro Vintage clothing just around the corner in Tatchbrook Street. So FARA earns a good number 6 slot, and could easily return to a higher slot!

But none of them has served up the occasional brilliant bargain or surprising little treasure that they were so good at three years ago. So FARA shops stay where they were, in the upper to middle region of the chart. There's one in Earlsfield which is also worth a visit. They are certainly some of the most aesthetically pleasing shops to visit: all their staff seem to have some genius o for making a great display out of whatever arrives in the donation bags.

The Oxfam Bookshop in Portobello Road - great for art books,
classics, languages,  jazz and classical records, CDs, DVDs

Moving South East, I'm still giving plenty of points to the Herne Hill Oxfams. The general store nearly always has excellent music (often plenty of 60s and 70s vinyl) and recently has been good for men's clothes. The shop has that good feel you get only from the care of a regular team of long-serving staff.

Just over the road is a fine example of Oxfam's specialist bookshops. This one has very good art, Classics, history and general fiction sections. It's got a real bookshop feel, and the staff are usually very helpful.

There's another thing about these shops that annoys me: their idea of a "Cult Literature" section. This immediately begs the question, what is cult fiction? Who decides that Vladimir Nabokov or  JG Ballard or Angela Carter are cult rather than mainstream? Herman Hesse is a sort of blameless king of the cult novels, dating back to the days when he was "re-discovered" by the hippies, and read alongside Carlos Castenada, Tolkien,  and that stuff about Ley Lines and alien land artists.

And yet DH Lawrence - another big cult-like following there - is nearly always given Modern Classic status.

So, it is subjective. Why split them this way? Of course Oxfam is not the real guilty party here: they're following the lead of many highly respected dealers.

The Oxfam Book Shops in Balham and Portobello Road are consistently good as well; I've scored many fine art books in these shops, although the £2.99 flat rate for paperback novels sometimes seems a bit steep.

And these Oxfam bookshops really are great, they take such care to categorise and display their books in pleasing ways, they encourage browsing and even loitering. Their biggest shop, in Upper Street, Islington, is a marvel. I've kept it out of the chart only for the reason that it's not a general charity shop.

World's End, Chelsea and Pimlico are further charity shop hotspots, each with a good Oxfam. In the West End, both the Goodge Street and Drury Lane Oxfam branches are worth a serious browse.

Strange to say, in all those wanderings, I've yet to find a shop that's significantly better than the best shops in the SW2, 4, 8 and 11 postcodes. This corner, inner south-west London, is blessed with the variety of its charity shops.

One chain that started in this area, supporting Trinity Hospice on Clapham Common, has grown and also added "Royal" to its name - at the same time concentrating even more on upmarket clothing with prices to match.

Some of the new stores, such as the one in St John's Road, Clapham Junction, have no books or music. If you're after Hugo Boss seconds, this is the place for you. There's a newish one in Camberwell, in that 60s shopping arcade next to Morrisons, which has a good feel, and the old Clapham High Street branch is as good and diverse as it ever was, with plenty of good book and  music bargains.

But overall their move towards high-end clothing does nothing for me, and it's sad to see that once marvellous book and music shop in Kensington Church Street is now serving as overspill for the adjacent clothes shop. Then again, I know what a briliant place the Hospice is: and I know that these shops exist only to provide as much funding as possible to keep it going. Maybe it's a change in society, or the changes in media technology - but there's clearly more profit to be made form clothes and shoes and accessories than from books, records and CDs.

SW4 has some good and surprising one-off shops supporting local charities.  One well-established shop is the Ace of Clubs homeless charity shop at 8 Clapham Park Road, just round the corner from Clapham Common tube station. It has plenty of books and the higgledy-piggledy feel of a true charity shop, the sort of place you sense you might unearth a true gem, if only you look a little harder.

There's also a long-established shop by Clapham North tube run by the well-being charity Green Light London which is good for clothes and new age stuff, crystals and joss-sticks as well as occasional book and DVD bargains. Great that it's still surviving, like dipping back into the 70s each time you visit.

Like I said, this "league table" is totally personal,  and in fact bonkers - what you have for realise is that any charity shop anywhere win the country could suddenly become number one, the moment some kindly soul drops of a couple of sacks of old Penguin Classics and their late uncle's 1960/70s vinyl collection.

But actually it takes a lot more than this to create a really good shop, charity or otherwise. As soon as you enter Barnados of Brixton and Save the Children  in Clapham, you detect the presence of a good, caring, imaginative and original management team. There's often good music playing, and the shelves and rails are tidied and  restocked regularly. There is space to look and browse.

There are some equally promising looking shops - I won't name them, but one is in Tooting, an even bigger one in Dalston, and a third in Streatham - that should be great but almost overwhelm you with the volume of  stuff. And then depress you when you realise you've already looked through most it, a few weeks back. Other shops - such as the big national BHF chain - often have excellent stock. Yet they all seem to follow the same shopfloor layout which means you have to squeeze through narrow gaps between clothes racks before you reach the books and other stuff.  I don't mind clutter, but this seems to be deliberately planned clutter, just like the way Debenhams puts a maze of perfume and cosmetics counters between the entrance and the stuff you want to look at.

Caught short in the city of steel bladders

It is always wonderful to find a public loo that's
well maintained and free. Thanks and praise be to
Westminster City Council for keeping this one at
the north end of Queensway open.

You only get to know the true meaning of "desperate" when you're an old bloke with limited cash and a weak bladder looking for somewhere to relieve yourself in London.

It happens so often that you begin almost unconsciously to limit your excursions and explorations to areas where you know you can get to a toilet easily and quickly.

Last week, doing what used to be a quite frequent stroll around the Dalston and Hoxton area, I quickly realised I no longer knew where to go.

No doubt apps exist which direct you straight to the nearest urinal....but ancient phone can only run a couple of apps at any given moment.

You could ask a policeman? Don't think so, especially now so many cops look like intergalactic stormtroopers with their big guns and armour.

So, what happens most often these days, you're forced to go into a pub, see if it's possible to slink into their loos without anyone noticing....and if not, buying a half of something. In my case, embarrassment prohibits the most obvious behaviour - asking the bar staff if they'd mind...in case they did.

So you end up temporarily relieved, but 20 minutes later that half of nasty lager is already tickling the nerve ends of your confused and inefficient bladder.

You could try a café, but be warned quite a few of the big-name chains keep their bogs locked; you have to beg for a key, which in the case of one such bar near St James Piccadilly, was attached to a massive chunk of heavy timber. Honestly, it is outrageous: charge £2.50 for maybe 20p worth of coffee, then don't make allowance for the highly diuretic effects of caffeine.

And whatever happened to those much-heralded scheme to pay private businesses (pubs, cafés etc) to allow the general public to use their loos? If anyone ever actually had satisfaction from one of these schemes, which were in the news about 15 years ago, do let us know.

When all else fails we often end up doing what an increasing number of desperate humans do in this city which no longer recognises any duty of care to the public - we find a dark, quiet (and usually very stinky) corner.

What's going on there? What is it with this crazy city, where even the most basic, pitiable needs of the elderly and weak-bladdered are turned into an opportunity to torment and humiliate, then part them from their cash?

London was one of the first big cities to introduce public toilets back in the mid-19th century, but then as now it was seen by many as an opportunity to turn a profit. Hence the phrase "to spend a penny". Mind you, in those days they did give their clients a superior piddling experience for their pennies.

It was still a penny when I was a kid - one of those big pre-decimal pennies that you dropped through a slot in the lock of the heavy green door to give you access to the WC. Urinals were usually free.

Now you're lucky to get a wee for less than 50p - although the recent brilliant decision to liberate toilets at the railway termini was a massive victory for common sense, health and decency.

Are we at last waking up from a 50 year slumber in which we allowed councils to close dozens of magnificent old loos, with their beautiful tiles and mosaic floors and brass fittings and stained glass?

These underground temples to the gods of excretion were a product of the Victorians' new found understanding of the importance of public hygiene; and also a desire to avoid, at all costs, the horror of men - and yes, women too -  pissing in the street. But, as so often, their efforts went way beyond the purely functional:  many of the public toilets built in the late 19th century were ridiculously ornate, expensively decorated with beautiful tiled floors, solid brass fittings, stained glass light-panes and mature oak seats.

There is a wonderful website - one of the absolute best - called Derelict London.
One of its most fascinating and indeed thrilling sections is devoted to derelict public conveniences.
They are exhaustively catalogued, with hi-res photos showing the extent of the vandalism which has been sanctioned for so long.

Once one of London's most beautiful subterranean loos -
the Chancery Lane conveniences - have fallen into this sorry
state, after being closed down back in the 90s. Good
lord, City of London Corporation, at least give this
rotting corpse a decent burial!

And yet, these places survive. They were built to last and last they did - through two wars and bombing raids - until in the 60s and 70s they were left to rot, and went into a rapid decline.

Councils no longer thought it necessary to employ attendants for every loo; rather than repair damage to the beautiful craftsmanship, the old tiles were often covered with cladding. In some men's loos, sheets of metal were erected between stalls, to discourage cottaging (See Broadwick Street gents, in Soho).

In some but not all cases, the underground loos were they replaced by those ugly and scary dalek-shaped  huts - self-cleaning loos, they were supposed to be. If you had the 20 or 50p required to use them, you then took a gamble on whether the sliding door would work, or decide to slide open mid-performance.

More recently, some of these subterranean caves of delightful convenience have been sold off, privatised to re-open as - believe it - bars and restaurants.

A beautiful, witty, useful and sadly short-lived idea...the
Kennington Cross ArtsLav. Need to check out if this is still
open...

One of the first to do so was outside the Hawksmoor church in Spitalfields. Another was the stinky gents at Clapham Common underground station, now just another eating and drinking place called, amusingly, Joe Public ( so presumably they kept some of the loos working).

Another old convenience had a different fate - the toilets at Kennington Cross in Lambeth famously became the  Artslav exhibition space in 2005. But that seems to have gone now too.

On a recent visit to Portobello Road, it was a really surprising delight to find that the Talbot Road conveniences were once again open and free to use. This is quite a gem in its way, with lovely tiled floors: the real joy (apart from the obvious physical relief) felt on using these loos was that they seemed just the same as they had about 20 years ago: no charge, no annoying notices, no bragging from any council or charity; no welded steel sheets; no turnstiles.

Thank you Portobello Road for giving me this relief,
and the free aesthetic high of once again walking over
that beautiful mosaic tiled floor (Talbot Street Lavs,
 London West 11)

It's obviously a great asset for the the market, which welcomes thousands of tourists from all over every weekend. Open up and liberate all those other locked and chained public loos across the city still in public ownership - can't the Mayor add this to his list of responsibilities? It would surely be a massive vote winner for Sadiq, as well as providing endless opportunities for witty pre-election sloganeering.

Meanwhile, like many thousands of other London street-crawlers, I will continue to rely on building my own mental map of free pee-ing places. They include, of course, public libraries (but even these are not always a good bet in these days of PFI-style operations); museums and art galleries (but it is such a shame that you might be forced to walk into the National Gallery with the sole genuine purpose of needing to take a leak, rather than wanting to check out a Holbein or a Vermeer); and, if you have the nerve and the swagger, any one of London's multitude of posh west-end hotel lobbies.

It is still shocking that some of the loos in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens charge for use; but the ones by the Serpentine Lido do not. Veteran Covent Garden frequenters might remember the wonderful and entertaining free public toilets neside St Paul's Church in the Piazza; memories of cheerful attendants and operatic music as you went about your business. Now, you have to pay - and on weekends, queue and then pay.

So,  praise and cheers for those who - against so much pressure, comparable indeed to bladder pressure at that - are keeping a few really useful public loos open. Huge praise, for example, to the staff at Finchley Road, Highbury and Islington, and New Cross stations - for keeping a free toilets open for all sexes. If these stations can do it - why not all the others?

Anyone who stands to be London mayor in the future must surely be asked to promise that - on their watch - every overground and underground station in the the Greater London area must have working, open, clean toilets for everyone! ENd of manifesto-style moan.....


Postscript: How encouraging, a couple of days after this was written, to open the May 2018 edition of the Brixton Bugle community newspaper and to find half a page devoted to a map of public conveniences in the Brixton area. There are plenty there that are new to me - but it is also accurate , showing for example that (very sadly) you now have to pay 20p to go into the formerly lifesaving Pope's Road toilets. No wonder they're complaining about people pissing in the street in the Electric Avenue area!

Turning anger into action: what happened when they built the Westway in W10

Golborne Road : a heady history of social
activism, art, cous-cous, jerk chicken,
brutalist architecture and custard pies

Apologies for some of previous bit on Nine Elms. Got carried away with sheer impotent anger, and anger, in written form, is not much use unless it happens to be written by Jonathan Swift.

As a balm to the soul, and as a source perhaps of hope - what do I do? Look back to the recent past, the one made so easily accessible by the damnably clever present.

You know it as: YouTube.  I watch one short video - in this case Giusi Vittorini's excellent 2003 short documentary on London life, The Morning Song - and immediately it throws up a list of related things that look irresistibly interesting.

This was the film that featured Clapham High Street's oldest established second-hand dealer Peter, along with  eight other Londoners from a wide range of backgrounds. Peter lent me a VHS of this, so I looked it up on YouTube - and there it was.

Next  thing I know, I am watching an enjoyable documentary about the history of Notting Hill, from the race riots of 1958 to the eponymous Hugh Grant movie and all that it stood for - above all accelerating gentrification.

This film,  Grove Roots, includes an account of the (often debated) genesis of the Carnival. There are some entertaining cameos, including Jeremy Corbyn's brother  Piers on the W10 squatters and their UDI for the republic of Frestonia on Freston and Bramley Roads.

It finishes and YouTube recommends another video, and this goes back over the same ground but from a tighter focus - the Goldborne Road area at the north end of Portobello. The film was called Wild West 10 - Golborne Stories of Struggle and Resistance.

This was the film that really hit me, showing as it does how in the 70s, it seemed normal to mobilise large sectors of the local population - tenants, squatters, black people, white people, hippies, punks - to resist the destruction of their amenities and their communities.

It's a glimpse of a very different view of what living in London could be about - community, compassion and creativity - one that was nearly wiped out in the 1980s.

The residents of W10 couldn't stop the authorities building the Westway back in 1964-70, but they did manage to secure the mile-long strip of land beneath it for community use.  They succeeded in making  Powis Square Gardens a public space with a big children's playground.

They couldnt stop the clearance of  the old "slum" terraces for the building of  Trellick Tower and the estates lining the Westway, but they did ensure that the council provided a nursery. It was only  by organising and taking direct action that they ensured the land next to the canal near Trellick Tower become a public park, Meanwhile Gardens, for which my old and much-missed friend Jonathan Phipps designed and helped created a Zen garden.

Some of the people most involved in these successful, hugely influential campaigns are interviewed. For example, John O'Malley of the Notting Hill People's Assiciation: "We encouraged people like Notting Hill Housing Trust to buy houses that they wouldn't otherwise have bought" he says. There was a realisation that " people living in properties don't have to be evicted…we don't have to hand these properties over to speculators..."

Instead, they organised and resisted, at one point, "locking the councillors up in All Saints Hall, overnight" until they came to a decision…which luckily was on the side of the campaigners.

We still have protests and demos and campaigns and sometimes they succeed, but more often not - partly because there's no longer the sense of solidarity and security, of strength in   numbers that a large and sympathetic trade union movement can provide…partly because the atmosphere of society has changed so much.

But then another  group of videos rise to the surface, covering the anti-road building protests of the 1990s, notably Claremont Road, E11 and the festival of resistance in 1994. It's worth checking out the Undercurrents films as well, too see the direct line from the Mutoid Waste Company stuff in W10 - through the rave scene, Glastonbury and Stonehenge travellers, and so back to east London and Leytonstonia.


As with the Westway, the thousands of people protesting here, for weeks on end, were a mix of local people and activists…in both cases, people were losing their homes, everything they knew was being swept away. And for what? To create roads which, as was clear then and is clear now, are insidiously killing us all with their pollution.

SO now - 2015. Nine Elms. A different set-up, it's not so much a case of destroying existing homes, nor beloved woodlands…but the longer-term effects will be just as damaging. 

Notting Hill, the Carnival, and the weird transitions between London postcodes

I spent most of last two days in London W10 and W11. Yes, am an addict, and my drug is the Notting Hill Carnival. Been there most years since 1977, sometimes just for a few snatched hours, sometimes - as this time - for the duration. Sometimes with friends or children, but more often alone.

This year was again wonderful, the weather was perfect, the crowds were huge but mainly amiable, the masqueraders seemed even more beautiful and talented than ever, the sounds were sharper, the scents sweeter, and the old medicine seemed to be as strong as ever it was.

God knows, I am 60, I could never dance in public and I am worse now than ever I was. I don't even get drunk or stoned, particularly,  but I do get very high on the atmosphere, on the sound and physical experience. Seven hours walking, two tins of Red Stripe and a pack of peanuts and ready for more.

The crowds today were by no means the biggest ever, and yet every so often you'd get into those human funnels where you realised you had no choice, you were no longer a free individual, you had to move according to the crowd, to get through to the next space.

During these progressions you make brief eye contact - and sometimes involuntary contact of large areas of other parts of the body - with dozens of strangers. Some are trying to dance, some are trying to move on, some are trying to sell you something, some are out of their heads with joy, some look frightened, some are threatening and (if you are lucky) elbowing you out of the way.

Typically, if the music's good, at the end of the tunnel I turn round and go back through it again, just for the hellish joy of it.

Try doing this in All Saint's Road at 4pm on the Monday of Carnival. Or on Ledbury Road, or around Gaz's on Talbot Road.

The route takes you back time and again to the Carnival procession, and each time you see to meet the same big Trinidadian floats with the pounding soca, the head-dresses and flour and chocolate-smearing and pigment-hurling and the ropes and the grinding of bodies against bodies and the machine-gunning electronic sounds, the MCs' endless goadings and geeings-up, their stern reproaches to a crowd which isn't responding enough, kicking up the dust.

And already it's 7.30pm and there's still a line of  six or so big floats lined up down Westbourne Grove, things seems to be cranked up beyond maximum for these last precious minutes of Carnival. We all know there's nothing to look forward to from tomorrow except nine months of winter.

Light fades, I'm off on a bike through the orderly streets of Bayswater, prim Moscow Road etc,  and through into the park, down by the Serpentine and suddenly gliding into a world which retrieves memories of Istanbul and Dubai, a Middle Eastern evening, families out wandering, threes of women in full black burka, the children let loose,  cycling, scooting, skating around their parents and big brothers and sisters, the families crowding out the café and restaurant, all moving, slowly in the same formations you might see in Beirut or Cairo or Riyadh, I suppose, I imagine.

It works tonight in that magic August twilight. The air still warm enough, and lightly scented from the rose gardens. It is still wonderfully balmy in the dark green dusk.  Next week it may well be gone, it will just be a London autumn evening. Cycling on, down across Knightsbridge, the streets choked with the huge parked Range Rovers and Bentleys and Mercs and so on of these families, often showing Gulf state number plates.

Two minutes later passing the bus queues around Sloane Square, lots of Carnival leavers finding their own routes back south of the river, the strange meetings of these different worlds within  two or three postcodes, from the Carnival heartland of W10 through the mixed ethnic flavours and dead poshness of W2,  W11, SW7,  SW3....then over the bridge into the  homeland horror of SW4.

Stranger still is the way I assume I know which person is the child of super-wealthy Gulf state family, in London for the summer, and which is the teenager trekking back home to some council flat in Streatham after another great Carnival.

On this August Bank Holiday evening, the scented groves of Hyde Park work some magic, and I am completely subject to its spell.

I know nothing but I once again feel like Jah Wobble's last lines on that Invaders of the Heart album, Take Me to God:  ".....I Love Everyone..... L-o-o-o-v-e-a-a-a-h-h-h!!!!"