Guerilla advertising brings London's SUV drivers down to size

Well it's an old joke and maybe a bit childish, but after multiple bad experiences with the drivers of these fearsome things in London I couldn't help but smile at this poster featured on the Londonist website.

A Birmingham-based artist known on instagram as fokawolf has been busy in London over the past week or two, with lots of subversive posters pasted up in the busiest localities - including this beauty to be found in the Brick Lane area. Apparently that's a genuine phone number and the artist has already had some interesting answerphone enquiries about this NHS offer.

Of course when it comes to  SUVs and luxury 4x4s I have plenty of previous. I'm a cyclist, yes, but also a pedestrian and a car driver. I've found these bloated vehicles to be not only the most aggressive and arrogant of road users but also plain nuisances, they way they block pavements and narrow back streets with their morbidly obese bodywork. But be patient, read on.

fokawolf's other London-themed efforts include a satirical take on the moped-mugger phenomenon, a worthy poke at the heat suffered by passengers on the Central Line, and an even better poke at the inexplicably popular London Eye ("only £74 per rotation").

It's worth checking out their instagram feed for loads of other timely takes on what passes for life in 2018 UK.

Clapham's last real junk shop given two months to clear out

Closing down sale of the last century: Peter and his son outside their Prescott Place shop, which looks set to disappear for good by November 

Walking east down Clapham High Street, it's very easy to miss a hidden survivor of an old but almost extinct London institution - the pavement junk-shop.

Next time you walk this sticky main drag, keep to the north side pavement, and when you get to Prescott Place (just after Snappy Snaps) look to the left and you'll see a scene that looks more like a bit of Brick Lane in the 1980s rather than Clapham in 2015.

The narrow street, which has one of Clapham's best known gay bars, the Two Brewers, on one corner, is also home to Peter Chrysostomou's second-hand store. When it's open, all manner of stuff - pictures, furniture, coats, old radios, books, potted plants, hatstands, boots, you name it …are spilling out of his store-rooms across a non-existent pavement and onto the double-yellow lines. The interior looks too crammed with stuff to enter.

Eager bargain hunters know this is a great place for nosing out old frames, china, glass, an ancient camera...you name it….Clapham's very own one-man flea-market. Surely this little bit of old London will be treasured by the new generations of style-conscious hipster-yuppies?

Not a bit of it. Peter has been served notice of eviction, and has just had one possibly final stay of execution, two months after the expiry of his lease.

He's now facing demands he clears out the premises by November 15. So the big sign advertising his  long-running "Closing down sale" is finally, sadly, going to be true.

On one of the shelves outside there are two picture frames, each containing what looks like a page of text torn out of magazines. The articles are both about the house in Clapham High Street that once belonged to the widow of Captain James Cook,  Elizabeth.  I am not sure if these are there for information or for sale, and try to catch the owner's eye. But he's shutting up for the day and framed pages are put away before I can read any of the detail.

So I decide to come back another day, and I ask him about the "Closing down sale" and how much longer he'll be there. He immediately seems suspicious: "Why? Who are you? A taxman?"

 I assure him I'm just a drifting unemployed refugee from the modern world, a low-grade scavenger of stories,  and then he opens up a lot and starts listing the various authorities by whom he's being chased. "Police, Fire Brigade, council, all the people in uniform…"

They are, he says, all out to get him and this time there seems to be no hope of avoiding the ultimate killer blow, eviction. "I've been in Clapham 50 years" he says. "But this will be the end of it."

I have no idea about the rights and wrongs of Peter's case. He's understandably stressed and distressed and feels hemmed in by people who just want to make him and his shop disappear.

All I know is that the sort of place Peter runs is now a seriously endangered species in London. It's a truly scarce commodity that should be valued. You walk past all these dreary chain stores, or even worse the endless estate agents occasionally punctuated by silly overpriced food stores or gift shops, then you see down this dark narrow street a glimpse of a pre-(Falklands)-war world of bartering, thrift, bargaining, men in big coats arguing over a bit of furniture, it's all straight out of an Ealing comedy or something earlier.

It's also real, and as such will inevitably die. But does it have to die so soon? In this new age of Mr Cameron's austerity, there are an awful lot of us who need to pick up some stuff dirt cheap, and I haven't seen many decent saucepans at the 99p Shop recently.

Peter has a son who tells me his shop used to be on the High Street, in what is now a Trinity Hospice Charity shop. This is double-edged blow for me. It reminds me that I am here as part of an attempt to update an earlier entry on the best charity shops in the SW quarter. It also reminds me I once worked for these Trinity Hospice shops. And it reminds me that charity shops - much as I love them - have severely cannibalised the second-hand retail trade. Charities have insuperable financial advantages over all their independent retail rivals. They pay no tax or VAT, they get low or zero rents, they get their stock for free and they don't pay most of their staff.

Like I said,  I love charity shops (and my nearest and dearest will say I love them too much). But it's clear they more or less wiped out that whole tribe of junkshop entrepreneurs. Some of course have joined the charity bandwagon (because there is money to be made there still - the ragging, the occasional gem that be picked up for 50p  and flogged on to antiques geezers for 50 times the price.

But, overall, this massive retail shift has squeezed out the mid-range antiques shops, nearly all the low-price second-hand book shops, and many others. Old clothes shops now have to be "retro" or "vintage" to compete.

So, back to Peter. I am hoping to talk to him at more length soon. But if anyone has any reminiscences of this shop, or knew it in any way, or knew similar shops in their area that are still operating, please for pity's sake let me know!

The deep and deadly draw of Dalston

Late August 2013, I give in to a hidden urge. At first unrecognised as such, and yet it was irresistible.

Take the tube to Bank, change onto Central Line to Bethnal Green, and start walking north up Cambridge Heath Road.

Rationally, I told myself, I was going to see if my could find my friend George's studio. I had an address, but I suspected he'd packed up and gone. I didn't want to annoy him so I thought I'd just check out for signs of life.

Cambridge Heath Road seemed remarkably unchanged at that point, apart from the tarted-up Museum Of Childhood.

There's the place selling retread tyres straight out on to the pavement, there the all-day drinkers wandering around, not-so-old battered men in big overcoats on a hot day, dragging huge suitcases of pre-wheelie vintage. For a few blocks, it all seems more 1978 than 2013.

In earlier childhood, trips up East had been extended train, tube and bus affairs, all the way to Wanstead  to visit  godparents, or later to that strange shop in Leytonstone to buy ex-government laboratory equipment and - unthinkable now - chemicals for home-made fireworks. Beck & Sons, anyone?

A few years later, as an Oz-reading mini-anarchist,  freshly expelled from grammar school, I went with friends (or compadres) to a CND concert in Victoria park -  this was Easter 1970? All I remember are (a) the sneering and snarling skinheads and (b) Allen Ginsberg, that great mass of black hair and heard and black-rimmed glasses, chanting verses about America and its atom bomb.

Then in  April '78, a revelation of sorts.  It was the era of National Front rallies in Brick Lane, the murder of Altab Ali, the rise of the anti-Nazi League and Rock against Racism and their first big free festival in Victoria Park, Bethnal Green, that Easter.

To an already defeated 24-year-old living back with his dad in staunchly lower-middle-class south Croydon,  the East End was another country. It was  sort-of fascinating but also deeply terrifying for this pusilanimous and by now ridiculously outdated long-hair with his Oz and IT-fed ideals and his wretched addiciton to the easy life. But I had a 35mm camera and I had been to see Cartier Bresson exhibits and I needed material.

More to the point I badly needed re-educating in my musical taste: a bit late to the punk-meets-root-reggae party, but what an introduction.

After those brief excursions, I didn't really go back to the East in any big way until 1980, when I moved - quite reluctantly, I remember - to an undecorated flat in St Philips Road, E8. I had no firm idea of where Dalston was when I got the amazingly generous offer from a friend of a friend. I could stay in his half-finished 2-bed flat - the top half of a typical Victorian house he'd bought with a friend for about £12,000 about five years previously - for a notional payment of £25 a month. He would have lived there but was having to look after his ageing mum at her home in Hampstead.

"Reluctantly" to Dalston? Really, you were a foolish little snob, you had lived a year in Chelsea, and E8 in 1979 was not E8 today. But you had no choice, you'd been living cheap in a lovely flat in Beaufort Street, thanks to to kindness of a friend who became a sort of lifetime best-freind/saint, or protecting angel - and you'd been kicked out, literally,  for reasons too shameful to explain for the moment.

19 St Philips Road, Dalston, London
 E8.  £12k in the late 70s, 40 years
 and a lick of paint later it's worth
 around £1m

New kitchen and bathroom units had been installed a few years previously but never quite finished; the walls were bare plaster, the floors bare boards, the main living room on the first  floor was stuffed with all the furniture from all the other rooms which were, unsurprisingly, empty. I had companions in the form of mice who liked to nibble uncooked pasta, and the occasional burglar (they took my old Akai 1720 tape recorder, my only source of music, but none of the tapes).

The ground floor flat was a total contrast, and had been turned into a beautiful, minimalist but very comfortable flat for C, who worked as a film editor for the BBC and other, and his adorable cat. My landlord had also been a film editor, but now worked at the London Film School in Covent Garden. About once a quarter, at his request, I would take rent in a bulging brown envelope to his office in Shelton St,  hand over the cash with comic gestures of subterfuge or illicit dealing, and wander out past  all the beautiful young film students.

I never really appreciated my good luck. Working near Waterloo, an easy cycle ride each day, shopping for lovely cheap fruit and veg in Ridley Road market, going to the Rio for Wim Wenders films - what a life, you might think?

Well, at the time the allure of E8 and further East simply did not figure to my very conventional imagination. I still yearned for the already dead "alternative" bohemia of Portobello Road; I wanted to be a character in a Jerry Cornelius novel.

 I write now having put in the hours reading nearly all of Iain Sinclair's work. While I was sneaking off back west to look enviously at small flats in Notting Hill, Sinclair and his friends were laying the foundations for the revival of the East End in general . As we can see now (and as Sinclair himself suggests in Hackney, that Rose Red empire) these pioneers were grinding the spices for a lovely cultural stew. And provided the essential nourishments for the real beneficiaries of their self-mythologising, the property brokers and estate agents.

I don't remember Sinclair although he was living about three blocks away. I was aware of others of the early '70s "first wave" of gentrification, clever people who'd bought houses in the De Beauvoir Town area, and then crossed the Kingsland Road into Dalston - but an area that could still be described as "East Islington"by estate agents.  A vague  memory - true or false? - of one of the Freud granddaughters running a gorgeous bohemian household, in the next road west, maybe Parkholme, my landlords invited to their parties.

London Fields was a gentle stroll away and then there was the art-squatter street, Beck Road, which I  looked and yearned for that sort of communal, useful, agit-prop life, but it was only years later I  was made aware of the work of Genesis P and co.

So I could re-write history and say I loved Dalston and immersed myself in its community but it ain't true. Now, of course, I wish I'd stayed there. I wish of course that I'd offered to buy the flat.

Strolling though London Fields, late August 2013, you can almost smell the creativity in the air. Or is that the smell of money? An acoustic band with a beautiful girl singer are performing under a tree and being filmed by someone with a Super 8 camera. I eventually find St Phillips Road and see that no 19 has been re-pained, done up, but nothing outrageous - the area retains the shabby feel, in fact it is probably written into leases that it be retained.

Or maybe not. Can't help noting that the average price of terraces in this street is now around the £1million mark. I hope C and M  sold up at the right time.

Others are now realising that Dalston is no longer a place, a bit of Hackney or East Islington, it is truly a state of mind. What is Dalston? is a damn good question and one that this rather interesting researcher asked and tried to answer.

Ridley Road seems little changed by the new hip Dalston effect, thank God, but for how long?  Dalston Lane is on the verge of change, the horrible Kingsland shopping precinct is still just as horrible but that will change too. Dalston's already far too expensive for most, and the smart money has moved on to Hackney Wick or - even smarter - to Peckham, now just a few stops south on the London Overground.

As for you, stuck in 'effin SW: Idiot!

In orbital love

After many weeks dithering, took the new (and slightly bigger) version of the old little train from Wandsworth Road.

A bright Sunday lunchtime. Somehow elated after finding some bargain CDs at the local charity shops (Traffic, Pink Fairies, Bowie, Dylan, etc....) I shift from my default depressed mode to my default manic mode and almost run to the library to borrow something to read on what I expect to be a long train journey. I boorow a Flann O'Brien book and a biography of Man Ray.

The nearest station is now Clapham High Street, so that's where I head. People are up on the platform looking like normal travellers. In the past I remember  getting stoned right here on someone else's skunk fumes.  These were popular dealing and skinning up spots, in the very recent past.

Not any more. Perhaps. All has changed. Perhaps. It's now smartly branded "Overground" with the orange roundel and orange everything, and the trains are brand new - and quite disconcerting at first as all the seats are placed lengthways along the walls of the carriage, and you can see all the way up and down the train (unless it's going round a very tight corner).

But - it all seemed wonderfully efficient.

Seemed.

Am I beginning to thaw, to actually start loving the modern world, the post-modern, post Olympics, Boris Johnstonian London - the thing I sort of assumed I would hate, I must hate, I had no alternative but to hate?

Maybe. This is the old line but , once past Queen's Road Peckham you realise you're being transported into a shabby version of a brave new world, or at least a shabby old-new London.

Instead of humbly shuffling itself into London Bridge Station (having passed the Milwall football ground and that big waste-burning power station) it shoots off into the docklands, Surrey Quays, Canada Water, the fast-fading shine of that deeply depressing Canary Wharf business area - and then links back into the East London/North London Line.

It plunges into and out of cut-and-cover tunnels, flashes past some of the most fashionable spots in the the city (Hoxton, Dalson Jct etc) and rattles you through so many views of the Shard  and the Eye and Hawksmoor, and Brixton market, and and and and St Pauls and so on....you swear the whole thing was a London tourist board commercial.

So I suddenly find myself passing Wapping (christ, wish we'd had this  service when I was at TES) and then Whitechapel.

The marathon has been run but the streets are still full of beaming spectators with their souvenir bags, they're crowding up Brick Lane, I just want to find the old bike parts market further up towards Shoreditch.

By the time I get there the stalls are being dismantled, so I make do with 3.2kg of Cyprus potatoes for £1 and a couple of sacks of very ripe tomatoes and trundle on to Canonbury....

Yes, I am falling back in Love with London, and it's not just the weak sunshine that's repsonsible.