A London swimmer's stolen summer days in the silky socialist waters of the Serpentine

It has become a bit of a ritual, but a summer is not a summer for me without at least one hot, sunny, stolen day at the Serpentine Lido in Hyde Park.

I went three days ago, and the magic was still there, as strong as ever. As strong as it was, perhaps, way back in  1930 when the so-called "Lansbury's Lido" opened in Hyde Park, allowing mixed-sex open-air  bathing in the Serpentine for the first time.  See for yourself in this amazing footage from British Pathé.


George Lansbury, the radical socialist,  pacifist,  reformer, campaigning MP and Labour Party Leader (1932-35), who was determined to give ordinary Londoners a taste of the open-air bathing pleasures available at the seaside, right here in the centre of the richest, most royal area of the capital city.

I first went back in the mid-1970s, and kept going through to the mid 1980s. I remember being there on the day of Live Aid - a hot Saturday afternoon, I was listening on the walkman radio. You could feel the vibrations from Wembley in the hot air.

At the time the place was under threat, there were constant health scares about the water , and people generally grimaced when you said you'd been swimming there: "Oh, how could you, it's all slimy and stinky and all those old men in speedos…."

Back in those days I was a 27 year old in Speedos, and yes, there was a bit of slime under the toes as you inched your way down the slope into those greeny-brown waters. But it was benign slime,  a soft layer of weedy mud. This was real water - the Serpentine is fed by natural springs and the submerged River Westbourne - and it felt totally different to the chlorinated refined stuff you get in swimming pools. It feels soft and silky, it feels gorgeous against the skin

The crowds who went down to the Serpentine in those hot summers of 80 and 81 were very different to the diehard members of the Serpentine Swimming Club, the ones who did lengths every morning, every day of the year, before going off to work.

The "father" of the Lido, George Lansbury,
headed a successful campaign in the
 1920s to get affordable open air swimming for
 all Londoners in the heart of the city.

The great thing here was we could all co-exist - the serious swimmers and the hedonistically sun-worshippers, the narcissists and the creative skivers, taking a few hours out from their office jobs. God, how we all love that place, that little Oasis in the centre of the metropolis.

I would go with a book, a bottle of water, something to eat, Palmer's cocoa butter skin cream and plenty of cigarettes. I would lie there and wait, and sure enough before long the spaces next to me would be filled with all manny of chambering young and not-so-young swimmers. There was a strange community about the place - as if we all belonged to some slightly secret club.

We were the lazy ones, the sun-addicts, young and old, we mixed with the hordes of Spanish and Californian and Brazilian and Italian and South African and Australian backpacker tourists who found the place a bit like home from home.

.
The Serpentine Lido has so much going for it - a little bit of paradise, saved for the people of London and the world by idealistic socialists of the early 20th century.

The place still has that democratic feel. The entry fee is less than for most of the stingy local authority pools around the outer boroughs - and if the weather's good you get the feeling of being in some private club, soaking up the sun in your skimpy swimming gear as the crazy centre of capitalism goes about its greedy business a few hundred yards away.

Although, as one very long-term fan of the Lido  - she had been coming here since 1958 - told me,  they built the  Lido on the wrong side of the lake. "it's north facing, so to get the best of the afternoon sun you have to  turn away from the water," she laughed.

Clapham Old Town: A good place for single people who wish to remain single

This bit "of urban regeneration" around the Pavement/Polygon area of Clapham has already come in for some stick here - most of all for its murderous, Alice-In-Wonderland approach to bike lanes.

There's another aspect which only became startlingly clear right at the end of the project. This charming "piazza" where Claphamites (not Sodomites or Catamites, you understand) can stroll around showing off their very expensive designer gear and haircuts to each other.

We are single and we will damn well stay single: Clapham Old
Town's new public space  boasts seating arrangements are great
for the aggressively anti-social: don't invade my space, OK yah?

Sure, the mustard yellow surfacing of large areas of this "piazza" will not flatter many skin tones, but at least it's a big open space with no cars; well not many cars - going over it.

But if it's wonderful for good old-fashioned Clapham yuppy posturing, it's definitely not meant to encourage socialising.

Look at the seats the council has so thoughtfully provided for our rather onanistic population.

Yes, they are all one-seater affairs, placed at weird angles to each other. As though wanting to stop people reading newspapers over your shoulder or whatever.

Just far apart enough to make conversation difficult.

You see, if you want to socialise in SW4 you are meant to go to one of the designated places - a bar or restaurant or "patisserie" or "brasserie" or whatever - and pay through the nose for it.

Of course, there's the Common for the Common folk, like me.

Clapham comes up smelling of Bread and Roses (sort of)

Having consistently slagged off my own neighbourhood in this blog, I decided - over a lovely £3 pint of Guinness at the Bread & Roses pub in Clapham Manor Street - that in all fairness I should praise the good aspects of this fair borough.

Poetry guaranteed to lift the spirits even after
the grimmest Northern Line commute
 -  thanks to the cultured staff of Clapham North tube station

There's the first and one of the best things about the SW4 area - this pub is just as good as it ever was, and by that I mean it feels to me just the same as it did in 2004. In fact, not even the prices seem to have changed much, and while the street it is in has undoubtedly seen a five-fold increase in house-prices, the local people seems just as mixed-up and crazy and strange as ever they did.

With all the high-visibility gentrification and ruggerisation of this area, of yummy-mummification of
twixt-commons nappy zone, the banker-wankers of old-town, and boot club anti-tummification of the common itself, you can be forgiven for forgetting that Clapham is still a deeply diverse place, it still has a great clump of deep roots, as deep as the deep shelters at Clapham South where the first post-war West Indian migrant workers were supposed to sleep.

Lots of good reasons to like the place, starting as soon as you exit the Northern Line at Clapham North and read their daily quote chalked up on a board as you head for the ticket barrier.

Whoever chooses these has some genius, setting you in a frame of mind to appreciate the true spirit of this once radical borough. Remember this is where the Clapham Sect met to push through the biggest humanitarian reform in British history - abolition of the slave trade.

Hard to imagine it now beneath the onslaught of Range Rovers and yummy mummies and chaps in rugger-shirts, this place til quite recently was favoured by the left-leaning, the bohemians. Hence the HQ of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in Clapham High Street, the trade union HQs in Old Town, the former squats in Rectory Grove.

All going or gone, now, but before it all disappears completely, do something!

Crazy re-paving scheme makes little sense in Clapham Old Town

Can anyone explain what has been gained by the latest  crazy paving "improvement" scheme around Clapham Old Town?

The Polygon seemed to work quite well as a one-way system. At least as a pedestrian or a cyclist you knew where the cars were coming from, and there was a conveniently-sited zebra crossing just outside the old library.

Now there's two way traffic on this road, the crossing has gone 50 metres north - not far, but still a pain if you're in a hurry or in any way disabled - and the third side of the polygon (the bit that goes past Sainsburys is still open to traffic going south  - sometimes - and bikes going both ways).

A cyclist having just crossed this busy road in Clapham Old Town, and
now being directed to cross it, again, might well ask: "wtf??"

In fact for cyclists the new layout seems particularly mad and maddening.
There's one of those classic London cycle lanes that comes to an abrupt stop when it has to cross the combined streams of traffic heading south on the Pavement road. Then the lane continues occupying apparently half the width of Old Town road.  But there is traffic coming straight at you! (See what one Lambeth cyclists' group has to say here).

As for the repaving, the plantings of sad trees in little yellow plots, silly street furniture,  and the taming of the far north-east corner patch of common grassland - well, it all looks just like that terribly bland "regeneration" stuff you see around every new luxury housing project.

Mooching around the vomit-coloured "public space" or "piazza" or whatever they want to call those strange bits between the old pub, the smart restaurant and the old public loos, I can't help but wondering who the hell this is all meant to please.

Two final ironies here: the bit of the road here that really desperately needs work - Rookery Road and North Side between Macaulay Road and the old library - the resurfacing has still not happened. And - well, maybe this is the cleverest thing so far here - they have installed a set of benches, or seats: but they are single seats. Not park benches where three or four people can sit together.

Single seats - for the modern Clapham resident, single-mindedly making the millions they need to live here. Think on it.

The Chase: Clapham's street of no shame

Each day I come home across the northern corner of Clapham Common, then turn right into my street.

Over the road are the beautiful walled gardens of Trinity Hospice, wonderful at any time of year, but especially so in spring, with its abundant wisteria and blossoming trees. This hospice - rightly venerated across the city - still operates according to the policies of its founders, that is - offering a place to anyone i need within its catchment area, regardless of anything else, wealth included.

If only the rest of this street, my street, where I have lived since 1985, could adhere to such policies.

Up on the wall to your left as you turn the corner from Northside into The Chase are two plaques.  Not genuine blue plaques denoting former residents of historical significance. No, these are a less impressive blue, one mid-blue, one dark, but they are not the real thing, not real London Blue Plaques.

Instead,  they are privatised plaques, essentially boasts, commemorating two street parties held in this road, one for the queen's 60th anniversary of accession to the throne,  possibly, and the other for the royal family wedding, a year or so later.

I can't remember the exact dates but I do remember the rather off-putting invitations, stuffed through our front doors back then. They invited us all to join in honouring said royals at "street parties".

 The Chase would be closed to traffic and the residents were invited to buy tickets for a feast in honour of, well I suppose the Queen herself, and ... I can''t remember who the others were - possibly Charles' son's wedding to Ms K. Middleton?

I have no interest in  England's royal family. They seem in some cases to be rather silly, annoying people, I am never sure why they are given the opportunity to comment so often. I do not generally believe them when they speak, it seems like they are actors, voicing someone else's lines.

 I'm sure they'd have similar or even stronger feelings about me. You can't really hate them, they are too bland.  The ones I loathe are the media arse-lickers who seem to think we all want them to plaster photos of these dreary folk all over the front pages of newspapers, and all over every TV news bulletin.

So, I have to admit, it rather annoys me every day, seeing these plaques commemorating these events which gave a few well-heeled households in this street the chance to advertise their patriotism and their connections and their good taste in catering to each other. It is still, in this country, a matter of who you know, or worse still, where you went to school or university.

But why did they have to stick these plates on the wall? It is the equivalent of me putting huge photos of Castro or Che Guevara or even poor old Ken Livingstone over my windows.

I wish I had a similar wall onto which I could screw plaques reflecting my own political views. Living on the top floor of a decaying chunk of jerry-built housing - one the luftwaffe should have put out of its misery, but narrowly missed - I do not.

I wish I had had the nerve to organise a street party  to mark the 25th anniversary of the death of this street's one truly great recent resident, Angela Carter. That might be something good: but I'm sure her many friends and fans and family me members will do something good, in 2017, for this great author.

It happens that there is a genuine Blue Plaque on a house in this street, directly opposite where I live. It marks the spot where the Japanese novelist, Natsume Soseki, spent a couple of extremely unhappy and uncomfortable years in London in a miserable Clapham boarding house. That house is now worth approximately £2.5 million. Or perhaps much more...

I doubt if many people will visit this part of Clapham to see where some wealthy residents glugged a lot of champagne in honour of the royals on those days. By contrast, almost every day through the summer, taxis and minibuses stop outside 80 The Chase to disgorge Japansese tourists, young and old, here to pay tribute to Japan's answer to Dickens or Henry James, and to visit the small museum in the flat at no 80b.

Maybe a Japanese themed street party would tick all our boxes?

Meanwhile, another "only in The Chase" sighting today - one of those home-made posters asking people to pick up their dog's shit. Only in this case, it came with a bag of Bob Marten's poo-bags, just in case the shames owners had forgotten to bring their own.

Hurrah!

Eras ain't what they used to be (RIP Marco Polo House)

Well, it wasn't much of grand era for the country I suppose - that rather shoddy two decades from 1984

to the great slump of 2008. But to see the demolition balls cracking into that weird white building on the south side of Chelsea Bridge was to feel once again the end of a part of my own life.

When I first moved to south west London in 1985, my mother would often come and stay. As her train approached Victoria she would see this almost cathedral-like shiny white block just across the rails from the grand old Battersea power station. Being a fan of all things new and shiny, she rather liked it - but not as much as she liked watching Concordes roaring overhead  from my balcony.

As I was soon to discover, this building was to be the headquarters of the Observer newspaper, then owned by a businessman called "Tiny" Rowland. The Observer hacks didn't seem too keen on being transplanted south of the River, and the newspaper itself went downhill. Eventually Rowland sold it to  the Guardian and  Marco Polo House fell empty.

As luck would have it,  the first official satellite broadcaster in the latter days of Mrs Thatcher's reign, BSB, was due to launch soon and needed a suitably impressive HQ building.

BSB was a blatant attempt by the broadcasting establishment to neutralise the upstart Sky TV, which had taken advantage of this age of white-hot de-regulation to start beaming about 6 channels into the UK - and charging for some of them. The ex-BBC and ex-ITV people running BSB were spending vast sums of money in all directions (anyone remember the "Squarial?") - and this flamboyant building in its off-beat location seemed to chime nicely with their aspirations.

I got to see inside Marco Polo house quite often, as from 1990 to 1996 I was working for business magazines Satellite Trader and Cable & Satellite Europe, covering the emergent new media industry of the 1980s. It all seemed very modern and flash and lovely - how could a broadcaster based in such super hi-tech surroundings possibly fail?

Oddly enough, it did fail, about a year later, and Murdoch's Sky very generously allowed itself to merge with the hopelessly fat and now deflated BSB to form BSkyB.

Marco Polo House immediately lost its first tenant and any BSB staff kept on had to work in the much less glamorous HQ of Sky TV on an industrial estate near Heathrow airport. For a while it housed the shopping channel, QVC, but it was clearly falling into disrepair.

Now it stands on the western edge of the biggest re-development zone in London (see Nine Elms disease articles) and is being swept away to make room for what seem like equally flashy blocks of flats.

From the shoulder-padded early 1980s to the skinny-jeaned 20-teens, a pretty dismal era really. Bad taste in the mouth, bad taste all round.

Nine Elms disease part XX: Skyline campaign brings good taste to the debate

At last, someone comes to the debate over London's resurgent skyscraper plague with matters other than money and politics in mind.

Writing in the Architect's Journal, former City of London planner  Peter Rees poured scorn on the quality of the new residential towers going up across London - but especially those in the Vauxhall/NineElms/Battersea developments.

He rather weakens his case by contrasting these "dumbed down" "investment towers" with some of the new buildings in the City that he was involved with - the Gherkin and the Cheesegrater, sure, but what about the repulsive "Walkie-Talkie"? Did the plans for that one not pass under his highly sensitive nose?

That apart, you just have to applaud the campaign's aims, but it looks like it's just too late. Certainly for those of us watching our lovely views across London being daily narrowed down by the shiny boxes of various shapes rising out of the old Battersea marshes.

In a separate article in the same magazine, Robert Bevan  singles out the hideous St George's Tower at Vauxhall, which is best known as the location of a helicopter crash last year. Great the way an architectural expert can really lay in to a nasty building - he attacks its joylessness, and the "cheap grey glass and steel" finish, at odds with the "cheap green glass" of the equally hideous winged towers next door/beneath.

Oddly, another recent and quite loud bit of architectural statement at Vauxhall is the subject of a preservation campaign. That's the shiny "ski jump" shelter at the massive bus station, all of which is now to be swept away under Lambeth's plans. Good luck, Kate Hoey MP et al!