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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look on the bright side, it might never happen.

The destruction of the Battersea Bridge Road mural and its aftermath: why property developers love 'Art', but hate art….

Nuclear Dawn - an inadequate photo of Brian Barnes'
amazing Brixton mural, which gives you a taste of what
we have all lost in the destruction of his biggest work,
The Good, the bad and the ugly on Battersea Bridge
Road, back at the dawn of Thatcherism (1979)

Since visiting Embassy Gardens, with its blingy public art and its splendid new Waitrose - I've had this nagging feeling, a sort of sense of mismatch and angst.

Can't get the strange sight of former Young British Artist Sarah Lucas's sculpture gracing the granite paving slabs of property developer Ballymore's crowning glory,  slap bang in the middle of the monstrous Battersea-Nine Elms-Vauxhall killing fields, out of this tiny mind.

We all know how much property developers love Art. Like a dog approaching fox shit, they want to roll in the stuff so that some of its magic rubs off on them, and onto the properties they are busily promoting. If they could just get a whiff of Bacon or Lucien Freud, just a dab of  Hirst or the essence of Emin, or best of  all….a little sprinkling of Bxxkxy….they would be so thrilled.

But look: they build a pug-ugly block on reclaimed brownfield marshland, or redevelop a former school or hospital or prison,  and sell their luxury apartments for £1,500 per square foot.

What rank amateurs!

Just think how much a square foot of a Banksy or a Basquiat or a Rothko would be worth.

No wonder they are so keen to get these names into their brochures.

A bit of the right sort of 'Art' in the right place - that is, not impeding their schemes to make billions out of millions. But it does have to be the right sort of art, in the right place. Art with a big fat "A" for asset, the sort dealers and auctioneers thrive on. Art with the capital F: we are rich and clever, you are  nothing: Fuck right off! And leave us here to appreciate this 'Art'.

It hasn't always been this way.  Or maybe it has.

Back in the 1970s, during the first phase of Battersea's gentrification, community art came up against property and lost out in a big way.

It happened about a mile to the west of the current mega-development. The factory of one of Battersea's biggest employers,  Morgan Crucible, was on the south-west corner of  Battersea Bridge, and it fronted the river most of the way down Battersea Church Street.

It was a big piece of prime riverside property, and after the company relocated in the early 70s the factory was left empty. Local residents launched a campaign to keep this space for the community, and the Wandsworth Mural Group, run by local RCA-trained muralist Brian Barnes, got to work on  London's biggest ever mural.

There's an excellent interview with Brian Barnes  by Julian Vigo on her Endoplasm site, in which Barnes explains how he asked locals what they'd like to see in place of the factory - and it was this dream landscape of an open-air swimming pool,  human-scale housing, factories to work in, car-free streets for kids to play in, and plenty of buses,  that went into the mural.

Against this utopian vision, Barnes and his fellow muralists knew about the forces they were up against - bent politicians and town-planners, the press, greedy developers, cynical capitalists - and these went into the painting as well, along with their henchmen, the cops. Hence the title, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

This mural, as I remember it, stretched all along the factory's boundary wall from the foot of the bridge all the way down to the junction with Battersea Church Street. It took Barnes and about 60 volunteers two years to paint. It was completed in late 1978, and at 276 feet long by up to 18 foot high, was one of the biggest murals in the UK.

Despite its satire and sharp political message, the mural gained praise from high quarters, and was apparently on the way to getting legal protection when, in the middle of the night of June 6 1979, the entire wall was demolished by Morgan Crucible's contractors.

This underhand behaviour by the owners, who knew they'd face a big public protest if they'd attempted this in the daylight,  set the scene for age of Thatcherism and all that followed.

Go there now and you see what looks like a smart housing estate from the outer suburbs, nicely planned and nicely maintained and nicely private. Perfectly bland residential architecture with one of the best views on the Thames, across to Chelsea Reach.

Sadly I have no photos of that great lost mural. You can get some idea of its scale and ambition from the always excellent London Mural Preservation Site, which also features many of the artist's other works. There's also an excellent 53-minute Arts Council funded  film, Morgan's Wall,  made in 1978, which you can buy or watch online from Concorde Media. The film looks at some of the other contemporary murals around the country and shows clearly why so many artists at that time chose to paint on exterior walls in public places rather than on canvas for private collectors.

Also worth a look is another interview: The man behind South London's murals - Brian Barnes, (Londoner #96) for the 1000 Londoners project.

Here's what the public got in compensation for the destruction of that
magnificent and utopian mural: the bland housing development of
Morgan's Walk and this even blander piece of sculpture

Well, at least we can now walk  along the riverside public path. Oh, and the developers even left a bit of art to cheer us up. Unfortunately it's a piece of sculpture so anodyne you wonder if it's ironically so: it's called In Town and it's by the late John Ravera.

Looking to illustrate this piece, I went to the site of one of Brain Barnes' many later murals - the Stockwell Deep Shelter War Memorial.

This famous piece of public art is currently almost totally obscured by those ubiquitous orange and green barriers and plastic fencing, as Lambeth 

undertakes another of its local prettification schemes - you know, wider pavements, a few sad trees in pots, those single-seater benches our co-operative council has fallen in love with. They are always set at slightly odd, suggestive angles, as if the planner had seen one too many 1940s noir movies where cops and narks exchange information in a public place.

Anyway, Stockwell is all set to follow Clapham Old Town into this utopian vision of public space.

Laugh! Cry!

The upshot being I took no photos. So you can make do with a much earlier shot of an earlier photo of  what I think is this artist's best work - the Brixton Nuclear Apocalypse. Hard to photograph, and suffering from neglect, this piece has some of the cinematic power that the old Battersea murals had in buckets. Love it while you can.

Brian Barnes, the Battersea Bridge muralist, is still very much alive and still kicking. In 2010 he hit the headlines again for adding a portrait of Jean Charles de Menezes to his famous War Memorial mural in Stockwell.

RIP Mauleverer Road mural - it really has gone this time

It's gone: the Mauleverer Road mural has been reduced to rubble to make space for new apartment blocks. 

Lonely horse: the only part of the 1980s mural that the
demolishers have spared (as of 29 May) are the horses in a stable at the
 west end of the original work.

In case previous reports left you with any hope,  it's our sad duty to report the beautiful 1980s mural on the wall of the old Tuborg Brewery in Mauleverer Road, London SW2 has now been demolished.

As you can see, the entire wall has gone, leaving just the bottom half of the "stables" in the original mural intact.

Those poor horses now look out at piles of rubble and demolition teams rather than at the luscious visions of rus in urbe those community artists dreamt up so wonderfully about 32 years ago.

The property developers will no doubt reap huge profits from the new homes going up in its place.  But Brixton (well, all of London actually)  really is another little bit poorer for this loss.

Paradise Lost: another little bit of Brixton's cultural heritage is demolished

This small detail from the Mauleverer Road mural was
 still visible today (11 May 2015): but if you want to see
any of it you have to move fast,  as the demolition
seems to be starting up again.

For the last few weeks, locals  and visitors to Mauleverer Road in Brixton have been faced with a sorry sight: one the area's  biggest and best known murals, showing scenes from local history, has been half-demolished.

You almost wish someone would finish of this dirty job, and put the much-loved painting out of its misery.

The Mauleverer Road mural was painted by a group of artists in the early 1980s, and it has already survived one demolition attempt, thanks to prompt local campaigning. The story of its creation,  and its role in the local community, is told in detail on the excellent London Mural Preservation Society website.

This time, however, it seems the luck has run out. Demolition began back in April but for whatever reason, it seems the builders are stretching it out , removing one layer or two layers of brick every week or so.

The last time I dared to look (on Monday 11 May) the main wall was cut down to less than half its original height, so that most of the woodland scenes a had gone, as well as half the formal garden (above right) and half the Caribbean beach scene. The horses in their stables were still intact and apparently they might be spared, as this part of the outer wall is to be retained - or so I heard.

But even if they are, the integrity of this great work with its many hidden jokes and references, will be lost forever. To those who love this mural, myself included, this seems like a form of torture, or at least of unmitigated cruelty to works of community art. Why is this happening?


As so often with these community murals - many of which were created in the heady years of peak squatting and resistance to the the Thatcher government - the painting came as a complete surprise to any visitors to this otherwise quiet,  unremarkable street, a few blocks south of Acre Lane. It covers one of the huge brick walls of the old Tuborg brewery, which had a frontage on Mandrell Road and which closed, according to another blog (Painted Signs and Mosaics), over 30 years ago. This brewery had clearly occupied old carrier's stables, hence the horses and stable doors at the western end of the mural (these are still intact)*.

Discussion on the Brixton Buzz blog  forum reveals that he building was later used as a distribution depot for the yuppie clothing retailer The White Stuff, but that too has moved away. The whole building now looks set to be turned into apartments. Let's hope they are at least as visually pleasing and imaginative and become as much loved by the local community as the artwork they are replacing (opens sick bag, turns away).

Here are a few more pics of what we are losing:

Wgen they finished the mural in 1983, the artists - Jane Gifford,
Mick Harrison,  Caroline Thorp, Ruth Blench - added their
signatures to the Punch and Judy stall

The painted horses in their stables reflect the original use of this building - even before it was a brewery, there were stables here for carrier horses and donkeys serving all of London and its suburbs.

* Sad footnote - as of 19.05.15 it looks like the horses and stable doors are going to go as well - a glimpse of what's left of the mural last night suggested the whole length of the wall has now been levelled down to about 2m above pavement height.