A new demographic marker - when Lime bikes descend like swarms of locusts

 Lime bikes are getting people's backs up in all parts of town, mainly for being thoughtlessly dumped on narrow pavements, blocking entrances, 

Here we're generally pro-bike, so it seems a shame to come down on these rental contraptions. But, apart from being a blot on the landscape (a grim achievement, given the beauty of a simple bicycle) and sometimes being ridden by dangerously careless or clueless individuals, these bikes are also a particular menace for other cyclists all over town.

For example, the racks for normal cycles outside most tube and rail stations in the most yuppified parts of London. (Sticking with the word yuppy for its perfect associations with young "professional" incomers to London, with plenty of money but little interest in the communities they barge into. The current use of Gen Z or X or Millennials seems ageist, too vague and too generalised).

You couldn't get more neo-yuppy than Clapham South, and that's where, at certain times, you'll see huge clusters of rental bikes around the station entrance. Trouble is those bikes are very heavy and very difficult to lug around, especially as they're locked/immobilised until you rent one. So you have to hunt for accessible bike parking.

Ironic to see full racks of Santander bikes about 30 yards down the road. 

I've never seen such a profusion of green, black and white plastic in other parts of town, but all around here they appear suddenly at some puzzling location, maybe near a new shop or café, where they're dumped and I suppose forgotten until the Lime collector does its rounds, if there is such a thing?

I've never tried one of these, mainly because they require use of a smartphone (I think).  I've tried Boris bikes and their equivalents in other European cities, and was generally impressed with their robustness and simplicity. But these were not electric-assisted and thus lighter (but still heavy by my standards).

As for Lime and their rivals, well it seems their time could be up. They are so dangerous for so many reasons. Brent Council is likely to be first to ban them unless they promise to provide designated parking places. But that would be very expensive to provide and also reduce their attractiveness to lazier commuters.

Only recently realised that the people taking phone snaps of these bikes are probably not bike-spotters but are taking them as evidence of where they dropped the thing. Oh, how very 2024, yee-euch.

Note to Brixton graffiti writers: thanks, nice...but we've too many yups here already

Some useful signposting on the overground rail bridge in Brixton High Street...trouble is they all tend to go right, straight to
the Pop Brixton container park....

That new bit of graffiti on Brixton's high-level rail bridge made a nice little photo-story for the Brixton Buzz site.

The writing is on the bridge. It reads: "Clapham that way, you 2D Flat White Tepid Colonialist Yuppy Wanker". There's an arrow pointing west down the Overground line towards the next stop: Clapham High Street.

Yes, it's fun, it's funny, it's to the point. Clapham was thoroughly yuppified back in the 80s - and that strange breed still prevails in much of SW4. But please, I've lived in the bloody area for longer than is reasonable, and the last thing we need is more of the buggers!

In reality the Yuppie has changed a bit since the 80s. Maybe the truest 2018 successor to the yup is the hipster with their artisanal this, their authentic that; the obsession with everything being just so. And of course they would not be seen dead in this postcode: strictly east and southeast London, please...

Vaguely hipsterish people I've met like to mock SW4: it's either Cla'am or Crapham. Probably the least fashionable place in all of London, from the viewpoint of Hackney Wick or Peckham Rye.

What used to be the yuppiest bits of SW4 are now colonised by corporate types - families with live-in au pairs and even chauffeurs living in huge houses. They are much, much richer than thou, antiquated Golf GTi driving yuppy of Peter York fame!

But keeping an Attenborough-ish, threatened species eye on the place, it's clear there are still millennial versions of real 80s-style Sloaney yups in Clapham, with a few differences. 1980s yuppies bought their crappy flats; the 2018 versions have to rent. They tend to share flats in the slightly cheaper parts of the area. Here they often mix with another strand of the young professional type: sports-mad Aussies, Kiwis and South Africans who for some reason still seem to love SW4. Probably it's the proximity of wide-open space on which to play games with strange shaped balls and frisbees.

How consoling it is that the young flock to our great open spaces at the first
real sniff of summer: May 19 2018, Clapham Common...

Every bright morning, every evening, the Common is a nightmare of grunting and sweating types, trying so noisily hard to get in trim like their bronzed Australasian neighbours.

But the core breed, yuppie lethargica, are most visible on the first really warm weekends of summer when they come out en masse and sit their well-fed, pastel-coloured-tailored-shorts-clad bottoms down on that little triangle of the Common nearest to the Old Town shops.
Sadly, they know nothing of re-cycling or even taking their litter (Prosecco bottles, etc) away with them. All the rubbish bins will be overflowing with over-stuffed orange Sainsburys carrier bags by early evening.

....but how sad that they so often neglect to take their rubbish
with them.

The richest ones (who live in the more expensive new builds in Old Town), will show off their powerful sports cars, often annoyingly revving the engines for no good reason at traffic lights. That really is wanker behaviour.

Yet, as one commenter on the Brixton Buzz story says, Clapham is actually a bit shit: it was always a byword for the "ordinary" suburb, ie mediocre, drab, stuffy. And it always will be.

It's not really a place, it's a collection of tube stations. It has no real centre: it's defined, if by anything, by a dirty open space - Clapham Common. The better bits to the north are either Stockwell borders or Battersea-Nine Elms borders. The better bits to the west around Lavender Hill are Battersea. The southern bits improve when they become Balham.

There are a couple of visibly smug areas - Clapham Old Town, Abbeville Road - that typify that first wave of well-heeled yuppiedom. Many of that first wave moved a bit west and south when they shacked up and had kids: hence Nappy Valley (really Battersea again, by Northcote Road, wrecking what was once a decent street market).

But there's a lot more to the social fabric of this district than the stereotype would have you believe. There's still a lot of social housing, and there are still a few hanging-on 1970s boho types, who, as we all now know, were actually the first essential phase of re-gentrification.

This blog has tried to throw some light on the social history of the area. But no-one, in recent years, has done more to reveal the many layers and deep and diverse roots of Clapham residents than the Jim Grover , who has had five acclaimed exhibitions in quick succession, all focusing on the area and the people who live, work and play here.

A fine example of a "Front Room" display cabinet, a rarity
now, but these took pride of place in many West Indian family
homes in south London back in the 60s. From Clapham-based
photographer Jim Grover's recent Windrush Generation
exhibition at the Oxo Gallery, London SE1.

photographer

His most recent show was Windrush: A Portrait of a Generation, a celebration of the West Indians who arrived in this part of south London 70 years ago. He got to know some of the original Windrush passengers and their children and grandchildren at his local church; as with all his work, he earned the trust of the people he wanted to portray before getting out his camera.

Other exhibitions have focused on the long-established Café Delight at Clapham North and its varied clientele; the double life (daytime and night-time) of much-maligned Clapham High Street; and the work of a priest at the church in Clapham Park Estate. It is already an impressive body of work that shows this area in a very different light to the media stereotype.

It's work like Jim Grover's, patient, painstaking, that truly reveals the complexity of a neighbourhood, of communities; lives that are led, families that flourish...others that do not. 

But thanks anyway graffiti people for reminding me of the way home. As for being a yuppie, well maybe 40 years ago. 2D? Well I guess I know what it means: bland, dull, fake. Flat, yes, flat white. But am neither smooth nor sane enough: I'm more like 5D. Flat-white? I prefer espresso. Tepid? Yeah, OK. Colonialist? Well, had to live somewhere. At least I got out out of Dalston just in time so that the real Dalstonites could move in. Wanker? Obviously.

Behold! The Nine Elms nightmare is becoming reality – and someone's put their foot in it

Nothing like a bit of public art to add the sheen of quality to the latest ghetto of luxury flats: but does Simon Fujiwara's colossal foot have a message for the wealthy occupants of the surrounding apartment blocks?

After years of watching the Battersea-Nine Elms development as it gradually blocked our views and filled our homes with dust,  there's now a little bit of this new heaven on earth that is more or less finished, so now we can see for ourselves what all the fuss has been about.

It's right in the middle of the two or more square miles of building sites that stretch from Battersea Park to Vauxhall Cross. As you ride west down Nine Elms lane, past the old New Covent Garden market and the commercial estates, you come to a small patch of wild grasses, very lush, and right in the middle of it is the sign, Embassy gardens.

This area, smartly abbreviated by its developer to Eg, will be the serious heart of the whole Nine Elms developments, even more so than Battersea Power Station. It will have both US and Dutch embassies. It will have super-luxury flats with walk-in access to the well-hyped "Sky Pool" (a glass bottomed swimming pool suspended between the  10th floors of two apartment blocks).

In the background you see the bulky cuboid building which looks like it might be the new US embassy.
A few yards further on you find the essential markers of any new luxury urban development: some obscure and  expensive-looking public art, and a lovely great big brand spanking new Waitrose supermarket.

The art is curious: a colossal disembodied foot, which seems to have trodden on a sharpened wedding ring before being violently removed form its unfortunate owner. This piece, called Modern Marriage 2015, is by a well-known artist, Simon Fujiwara.

It's not clear what it's made of: marble? No. Concrete? Maybe. Plastic? Most likely - it has that bland, smooth look as though it had come out of a 3D printer. One struggles to find  meaning in this piece: it definitely seems to be a warning, but a warning of what? Wedlock? The mind boggles.

A bit further on, between the Waitrose block and the next block, is what a first sight looks like a huge tin turd on the ground, or a massive discarded party balloon of the type used by The Mask to create balloon-poodles.

 Look again, it's a giant vegetable - possibly a courgette or cucumber, or maybe even a gherkin? Well, actually, it's a marrow, rather a skinny one, and it's in fact a bit of a tribute to the fruit and veg traders using the New Covent Garden market down the road. The artist is even more famous - Sarah Lucas, one of the Sensation YBAs, well known for shocking the establishment with fried eggs, frozen chickens, etc.

This piece? Well, it's lovely, made of bronze, ever so expensive. Very shiny, nice reflections.

Impressive.

It turns out there's a third piece of sculpture somewhere around here - but it wasn't immediately obvious where. This area had been designated as a "Destination by design" sculpture park by the developers of the Embassy Gardens area, The Ballymore Group.

The installation was curated by Norman Rosenthal, late of the RA, and apparently there will eventually be six permanent works there.


This is just across the road from the first completed residential area, the Riverlight development,  a set of six trapezoid blocks, about 12 to 15 storeys high.  These buildings sit like a wall or some sort of defensive barrier, a gigantic tank-trap, all

Riverlight apartments: this is a real photo, not a computer-generated architect's wet dream….

 along the river. For some reason they are colour-coded with bright green, yellow, orange, red and mauve panels. They're not particularly ugly, just brash and a bit silly, like those semi-finished holiday apartment blocks you see all along the coastline of southern Spain. Or those lurid green and orange office blocks, so dismal in their total lack of any interesting qualities,  that have ruined the area between St Giles and New Oxford Street, these from the distinguished architectural practice of Renzo Piano

According to the Nine Elms  developers, these apartments are now all sold, but there's very little sign of the proud new owners. Of course it's too early in the day: they'll all be at their desks in the City or Canary Wharf.

Walking up the stone-paved "street" between these blocks you get the feeling you're actually in one of those computer simulated images so beloved of property developers: it's all so clean and new and shiny!

But instead of the glamorous young yuppies in their yoga pants and Hugo Boss suits there are pairs of builders and surveyors in hi-vis jackets on their fag break.

They blocks - described in the developer's blurb as "pavilions" - are all ranged north-south, apparently to maximise access to the views across to Chelsea and Westminsters enjoyed by the occupants. Unfortunately, for everyone else living along the Wandsworth Road corridor,  these buildings are now the view, where once we could also see Westminster.

 Oh well.

Move just a little further west and there's a big hoarding around what used to be the massive Royal Mail south London depot, which was itself partly built on the old gas works. This area, according to one of those helpful boards put up by developers, is undergoing "remediation" by the BAM Nuttall group. It will eventually be a lovely park and …err….some more flats.

Remediation is a not a word I'd been familiar with, but when I look it up in the Merriam Webster dictionary, I have a "duh" moment. It is of course "the act or process of remedying" something - especially making something undesirable, desirable, or something unsafe, safe.

Squinting through the dirty plastic window so thoughtfully provided, you see mountains of
churned-up mud, some of it presumably polluted by all those old gas-making chemicals. It might make a good track for mountain biking or dry skiing.

So that's it. There are a couple of "streets" you can walk down,  a bit of grass, and all surrounded by many square kilometres of mud, dust, rubble and skeletal skyscrapers in waiting. And the massive trucks rushing up and down Nine Elms lane all day long.

Keep on trucking, as they used to say.

In fact, would you mind not keeping on trucking, please?

Will Lambeth really clamp down on Clapham's mucky yuppies?

Leaving home of a Friday morning, immediately stumble on a crime scene.

There, on the pavement.  The sticky police-tape, the bagged-up evidence is there for all to see. It's stacked outside the homes of the most probable culprits: hang on, it's stacked outside the house I live in!

Yep, check the picture - someone in this area has once again put great stinking, split plastic bags of foul rubbish out on the pavement, presumably expecting the council to magic it all away as part of the usual Friday morning collection.

In the old days, this sort of mess would have been blamed on the lower orders.  But in this part of "Clapham" in 2015, there are not really any lower orders left. There's no escaping the conclusion that the filthiest, dirtiest, least considerate residents are in almost every case, the filthy rich.

This is a street in which professionals think little of paying £1,600 per month to rent a horrible little second floor apartment.  Typically they are a young couple or a group of mates from "uni",  in their mid to late 20s, all with "very good" jobs in the city, or in law, or PR. Or, "sports marketing".

They have not come far from the yuppies of the1980s: they "work hard and they play hard". And noisily, and very messily. They don't have time to cook, because that would interfere with watching the rugby on their 48-in plasma-screens as they guzzle takeaway pizza jalfrezis and neck the tinnies.

They don't have time to sort the recycling, they don't even have time to take in the recycling bags so carefully left for them by the refuse collectors. They don't seem to know that re-cycling is something that happens on this street. They do not seem to realise that those large black plastic boxes on wheels are their dustbins.

I say this with much bitterness because it has been happening so often. Every goddamn week they throw out their rubbish, almost always on the wrong day, in the wrong plastic bags, straight onto the sidewalk. They maybe are animal lovers wishing to give the local foxes and rats a treat. Because the local foxes and rats come out after 2am and tear open the bags and spread the rubbish over the whole pavement, in their painstaking search for meat and blood and fat.

That wonderful mixture of broken glass, takeaway pizzas half-eaten and stuffed back into their boxes, leaking radioactive tikka masalas, half-empty tubs of coleslaw,  beer cans, discarded socks and underpants, murdered houseplants, half-eaten doughnuts. Chicken bones. Everything blobbed with ketchup or sump-oil mayo.

The local dog walkers and early-morning  runners are the first to encounter this vile scene: the dogs will add their pee-stain commentary and spread the mess a bit further.

Remember when Daily Mail readers used to rant about litter-strewn caravan sites and rubbish-filled squats? Well, compared to this lot,  squatters are clean and tidy to a fault. The lazy filth-merchants of this street are the owners of the ghastly brand-new Porsches, Maseratis and those weird squashed-down Range Rovers which elbow and prod each other for parking space. And use this straight wide road like a drag strip.

These porky lads in their loafers and rugby shirts and pushed-up sunglasses skip over the mess they've left as they head for the gym or the trading floor. The don't see it. They do not see anything, it would seem, apart from the big TV screens, their phones, their cars, their girlfriends who look and sound just like them, given a minor re-distribution of hair, and flesh and cashmere. They're in this shitty suburb for a year to 18 months, they pay through the nose for it, and they expect people to clear up after them - just as their mums and their nannies and their maids and their Oxbridge scouts did for them, from cradle onwards.

So, now they are enviro-criminals: will that change their behaviour?

In (reluctant) defence of Clapham

Murder on the Common: some of my best SW4 friends are crows. 

Heartily in agreement with all the Crap Towns stuff about how awful London is published earlier this week (See Daily Mail, etc). But a much better demolition job on the capital can be found on the Vice magazine website.

Not only did this say everything we all hate about London in a far cleverer,  funnier way than I could ever have managed - it also distilled another of my feelings: that if London is the worst place in the UK - no, the world - then Clapham is definitely the worst place to live in London.

So these days, when I say I live in Clapham (and sometimes I even lie and say I live  sort of in Stockwell/Vauxhall/Battersea borders) - I find myself adding things like, well it 's very convenient for transport or, well when I moved here it was still quite bohemian - etc.

Because all the things  in that Vice piece are true - especially the bit saying that, above all, what makes Clapham so, so ghastly is the people.

Not just the banker families with their SUVs parked nose-to-nose in Lilieshall Road, nor the scrubbed infants being dragged to the private schools on the common by their nannies, not just the stupid city boys renting their £600 a week shitty flats in identikit new build blocks on "Wingate Square",  not just the perfectly-formed gaggles of posh girls jogging and braying in their lustrous pink lycra, not just the shouty ex-squaddies running their profitable boot camps on the Common, not just the posh middle aged ladies with their three or four pedigree dogs moaning about their East European workmen....no, there are loads of other ghastly types living in this once unremarkable and now totally insufferable suburb.

But - and god I know hard this can be - we should remember these appalling characters are merely the most noticeable stratum of the local population, not the whole lot of us. These people are like the vile skin on a rich custard.  But I would also like you to believe that, crushed beneath this foul layer are  many perfectly good people who are indeed in need of your sympathy.

But not too much sympathy, because the area is in fact not too bad to live in, once you learn how to filter out or avoid the above-mentioned annoyances.

So here goes,  here are 10 not quite so awful things which perhaps make it possible to live in Clapham, all the above notwithstanding:

1. The charity shops, including a great Save the Children shop  near Clapham North tube, the FARA shops in Northcote Road and Lavender Hill, and the four Trinity Hospice charity shops. The latter vary greatly reflecting the social mix of their locales - cheap and cheerful on the High Street, a bit posh and pricey in Old Town, yummy mummy-rugby daddy in Northcote Road, and a wee bit Up the Junction on Lavender Hill.

2. Rectory Grove/ Rectory Gardens -  the last of the Clapham's old bohemian residentsfight repeated attempts by Lambeth council to evict them. Do read this brilliant entry on the Faded London blog, and especially the fascinating comments by jakartaass etc. See also some amazing photos on Sam C.'s Mixbook
of life in this tiny L-shaped street of early 19th century cottages. Arriving as squatters in the early 1970s, they gained short-life housing tencies from Lambeth, but are having to fight for their survival here as the stench of fat fat profits insinuates its way in the nostrils of their local authority landlords.

3. Clapham Common itself - a great place to get mugged on, to be gay-bashed on whether you are gay or not, to to be hit in the face by rugby balls and frisbees, to tread in dog shit, to be barged out of the way by joggers or shouted at by cyclists. Oh yes, that's just the start of it.
Still a nice place to lie down on and undress on a hot, a rare hot day. And it is home to some of Clapham's least offensive residents - a fine murder of crows.

4. The Clapham Sect  - the group of wealthy Christians who drove the movement for the abolition of slavery in the late 18th century used Clapham's Holy Trinity church as a base. They were also not great believers in alcohol, which is apparently explains the lack of pubs in many of the area's oldest residential areas.

5. Vivienne Westwood: apparently she still lives here, and has always said how much she likes Clapham, unlike so many famous people who once they make it get out. Wonder if Thunderclap Newman still breathes the air of SW4?

6. The new Clapham library: after years of expecting the worst, many of Clapham Public library users agree that the new building, inspired by the spiral-ramp design of the Guggenheim Museum in NYC, is
actually rather good. Andrew Logan's installation of broken mirrors and  bric-a-brac is also popular.
Another possibly good thing to come out of this is the  new Omnibus  community arts venutre being created in the old Library building on Clapham Common Northside.

Andrew Logan's mirror-mosaic-bric-a-brac
 sculptures outside the new Clapham
Public Library

7. Transport:  good that it has three tube stations, shame that they are all on the Northern Line. Buses are good and trains from the Juntion to anywhere in the universe - unless you want to get to Clapham High Street.

8. Angela Carter, Natsume Soseki, Graham Greene, etc, lived in Clapham for a while. OK, they are all dead and at least one of them hated living in Clapham - but at least the place has some literary connections. Amazing how often it appears in novels as the default place for lonely, failing types to live in bedsits, in the early 1960s.

9. Which leads straight on to Trinity Hospice  itself - the oldest hospice in the UK, and occupying a beautiful house  with even more beautiful gardens on the north side of the Common - which might seem more like a good reason, not  so much to live in Clapham, but to die there.

10. Finally, perhaps the best thing of all about this place - it's only about 10 minutes away from Brixton.

Angela Carter , a street in Clapham, and a homesick Japanese novelist

It's almost 30 years since I moved to this street. It was January 1985 - a very cold January. My father had just died, I was recovering from the funeral and all that fallout, and at exactly the same time I realised I was living in the same street as one of my favourite writers.

Clapham was a dirt cheap place to lodge
 when Soseki came here in the 1900s.
Two of the many often bewildered
 Japanese literary pilgrims photograph
 his Blue Plaque.

I remember going to buy a Sunday paper. I got back to my new  front door and realised, with a strangely un-panicked realisation, that I had forgotten my keys. There was snow blowing all around, settling lightly now. I was simply thrilled to have a new flat in what seemed to me at the time, a rather lovely street, wide and lined with beautiful, gaunt trees. And I no longer had a father.

Luckily the house was in scaffolding. I scaled the three or four ladders, I climbed over the parapet onto the roof, and  slithered down a drainpipe onto my own roof terrace and in through the bathroom window (I am too fat to do that now).

I made some coffee and started reading this plump bundle of newsprint. In the colour supplement, Ian McEwan was writing about visiting Angela Carter. As I read it I realised he was describing my own street. How the  terraced houses crowded together as if for mutual protection as they approached the social border of Wandsworth Road. How hers was one of those last houses before the badlands of the Battersea marshes and their sprawling estates.

How her famous visitors sauntered down the road, looking at house numbers, wondering, where on earth does she live?

I encountered her a few times in the newsagents, but I was a fan, awestruck, struck dumb, mumbling nonsense. "Hi. Keep well, it's freezing out there ...", etc.  Never daring to say how much I loved her writing.

After that I was always watching. I was so proud to have such a wonderful near neighbour. I found out all I could about her, and soon realised she was (like me) an aboriginal south Londoner.  She had even worked as a junior reporter for the Croydon Advertiser (I tried to get work experience there, they sent me away).

This amazing woman with her commanding presence, that face,  that beaming smile, the extraordinary cloud of grey hair, and then - not , as I remember, so long after, her child, the baby in the pushchair, the shy man who I imagined was her husband....

Soon after this, I discovered that another well-known writer had lived even closer. The Japanese novelist, Natsume Sōseki, had been sent to London as a young man, and had found miserable lodgings - about six doors up from where Angela Carter lived. Opposite  the house where he endured a foul
English winter is a small museum devoted to his works.  In the summer,  Soseki fans (usually middle-aged Japanese couples, or younger, often solitary, students) would arrive in The Chase to visit the museum, and to photograph the blue plaque. Often, I would see them looking puzzled,  and think, should I volunteer some information? Offer them tea? Then think, well, they will soon find what they seek - and the last thing they want is inadequate help from some bumbling, clumsy Englishman.

The Blue Plaque was added about five years ago, a crumb of comfort to those Soseki followers whose plans to erect a statue of the writer on Clapham Common had been thrown out after a particularly mean-minded and xenophobic campaign by the so-called "Friends of Clapham Common".

Angela Carter lived in Japan in her 20s, and I assume she was well aware of this connection. But was it a coincidence that she moved  into this street? As much as Soseki loathed London, and especially loathed Clapham, so Angela Carter seemed to feel at home here.

I wonder how she'd feel now, about this street, dominated as it is by super-rich city types with their Range Rovers and Aston Martins, their royal connections, their street parties for the queen's jubilee and the wedding of william and kate. I wish she was still around to ask, because now, having shed that vile false modesty and shyness of the hobbledehoy, I would ask her too.