Angela Carter makes it four Blue Plaques in one Clapham street ....but are they all what they seem?

Breaking months of silence to report a nugget of old news from this blighted corner of the blighted city. English Heritage has at last slapped one of their Blue Plaques on the house where the writer Angela Carter lived for the final 16 years of her life, at 107 The Chase, Clapham.

Those plastic-looking venetian blinds were certainly not there
when Angela Carter owned this house in Clapham. So
far as I remember most of the house of was painted deep
blood red.

This was reported in the Guardian on 11 September, but not in many other papers. I wonder who turned up to do the honours - and whether the plaque was covered with those rather camp little curtains on a drawstring, as happened at the unveiling of Natsume Soseki's plaque a decade ago, a few houses up in the same street.

I'm not sure where Angela Carter's work now stands in the literary world, but I do know that she meant a great deal to me. To anyone who had been turned on to the subversive delights of 'alternative' fiction and poetry in the late '60s, largely thanks to Penguin Books, Carter's fiery works were irresistible.

I read one of her early novels, The Magic Toyshop, on the top deck of the 68 bus, all the way from South Croydon Bus Garage to exotic Chalk Farm and what seemed the impossibly sophisticated world of NW3 hippie-dom.

En route the bus rumbled up and down the roller-coaster hills of south London - Beaulieu Hill, West Norwood, Tulse Hill,  Herne Hill and Camberwell. There was a specific corner on Norwood Road, SE24, opposite Brockwell park, which in the early November dusk seemed to me the perfect location of this story.

That area grew in imagination: I would dream about cycling to this Magic Toyshop. In my dream,  there was always a magic second-hand bookshop next door which also sold the best flapjack. And Brocks fireworks.

When, 25 years later I moved into a rickety 3rd floor flat in Clapham, I had no idea the author of that book lived in the same postal district.

Now I turn to her journalism more than her fiction. There's a great collection of her non-fiction writing called Shaking A Leg, which includes an article "D'you mean South?," written for New Society magazine in 1977. It's about South London in general and Clapham in particular, and says more about gentrification than anything else I have read. Although the process we see now is so much more aggressive,  more arrogant and selfish, it is essentially the same. And yet she clearly still loved living where she did live.

All this was the subject of an earlier post on this blog, written when the house where Natsume Soseki lodged for the last few months of his unhappy but productive stay in London got its plaque. Carter must have known Soseki lived a few houses up the street, but I don't think she ever references him.

For along time there was a tiny but fascinating Soseki Museum in a flat directly opposite this house. Sadly it closed, and the flat it occupied was sold, two years ago. I wrote about it here.

Nor (so far as I know) does Angela Carter ever mention Dorothy Dene, the artist's model and actress who lived for a while at 103 The Chase. Two doors and a hundred years apart: Dorothy Dene was for some years muse-in-chief to the Victorian painter, Frederic Lord Leighton (whose fancifully Arabesque house in Kensington is much as he left it, there for the visiting).

Notice the same brickwork and the same property-developer-approved grey
blinds two houses along from Angela Carter. I think Dorothy and her
employer/admired Lord Leighton would have favoured velvet curtains.

She stayed in Clapham for part of the 1880s, before Leighton helped her move to an altogether more respectable address in Kensington, from which she could more readily launch herself into the West End theatrical world.

There's a Blue Plaque on Dorothy Dene's  house as well - that's three in a row for this side of The Chase. It's only a Clapham Heritage platter, and not the full English Heritage monty. But, it looks the same. And there's an interesting essay on her life on the Clapham Society website.

There's a fourth, rather less convincing blue plaque in this now quite repulsively wealthy street, with its electric gates and Fort Knox front doors; of brickwork sand-blasted to a smooth blandness; plus paved-over front gardens to provide squatting space for an obese Range Rover or two.

This rather dubious memorial is at the southern end of The Chase, where it meets Clapham Common. On the side wall of a house there's one Blue roundel and two brown oblong plaques. They all commemorate street parties held to mark recent royal events - weddings etc. None of them is official: they do not even have the authority of a local history society.

All well and good, if you must show off your adoration of the family Windsor. Almost everyone who visits here comments on these plaques. The basic thing they ask is, how come you are you living in a street of monarchists? Who put those plaques there, and why?

They are mentioned by film-maker and author Adam Scovell in an excellent article on his blog Celluloid Wickerman,  "Wanders: Angel Carter's House". This was written a couple of years before the plaque arrived. His disappointment builds as he approaches his destination via the South Circular and a Clapham Common infested with people keeping fit in lycra. Seeing these bogus plaques at the end of Carter's street is another blow to his mental image of Carter's mythical south London habitat:

"It was a realisation that the road had changed, that it was now the antithesis of any of Carter’s visions in its gaudy celebration of monarchy. Walking on, the cars became expensive and the houses either empty or rammed with envy-inducing rooms of books."

I am afraid he would find even more expensive cars but fewer rooms crammed with books, in this street in October 2019.

It's embarrassing. I just wish someone had had a street party for Castro or Che or Karl Marx (or even  Groucho). Then maybe we could have a Red Plaque. Surely Lambeth council - once famously Red itself - would allow the balance?

Maybe Angela Carter, who looked forward to seeing a "Red Dawn over Clapham" - but sadly never did – might have agreed on this one.

'Tis the season to download some fine podcasts

The battered, dust-filled shoebox with the motley collection of Christmas decorations is once again dragged out of its hideaway above the hot water tank.

The remnants of five decades worth of tarnished tinsel, plastic baubles, one surviving glass bauble, papier maché angels, lights that no longer work. Add to this a 2009 Waitrose Xmas pudding with real cognac, a gift that has yet to be opened, and probably won't be - and you're ready to face the season.

For a decade or two my personal Advent treat was listening to John Peel's Festive 50 countdown. Then Peel died, the 50 was no more, and there was a big gap in that strange collection of repeated experiences that - for me - made Christmas Christmas.

But now that gap has been filled. Yep, I've acquired a new listening habit, the depleted stable of Christmas/New Year traditions has a new, very 21st century member. It's an Advent Calendar, but not the type that offers stale sickly chocolate behind cardboard shutters. It's Daniel Ruiz Tizon's Advent Calendar, a sequence of 24 daily podcasts recalling his past Christmases, and always asking the question: will it ever be possible to love Christmas again as much as we did in those distant times?

These bundles of memories, deeply autobiographical and rooted in a certain area of south London, but also deeply resonant for anyone who has grown up in the UK over the past few decades. Each 12 minute episode arrives like a little gift-wrapped memory bomb. I'm a lot older than Daniel but the references to life in the 80s and 90s are as powerful as any Proustian madeleine.

"When you live in Lambeth, you learn not to pick up the snow". Well, that was true in almost any urban area where dogs roamed the parks and pavements.

If you like your wine extra dry, your lemon very bitter, and your oil extra-virgin, this is the advent calendar for you. Catch it today: we're not even half way there yet. Listen, and like me get hooked. But don't cheat - one day at a time please. As with the chocolate variety, there was always one lirttle piggy who scoffed the whole lot on December 1, and suffered as a result.

Literature has Dickens' A Christmas Carol; TV has  The Snowman. Now podcasting has its own Christmas classic. Listen!

Has he really gone this time? One of the last of south-west London's old-style barbers seems to have shut up shop

Cycling along Landor Road towards Brixton, I see what I have dreading for years. I see that the best barber's shop in south London has finally closed, and I am so sad. I swear I will never have a haircut again.

For about the last three years Andy has been threatening to retire, and then always staying on another few months….but now it seems the era of Andy's in Landor Road is actually finished.

UPDATE: I AM HOPING THIS STORY WAS WRONG, OR PREMATURE AT LEAST - READ NEW STORY HERE!

What follows is a blog entry I wrote six months ago, expecting the shop to close that week:


 Get an education with your haircut in Landor Road

It's going to be another ending of another era, and this one is taking its time. Andy is the best mens' haird-cutter in south London, bar none. His little shop on Landor Road, halfway between Brixton and Clapham North, is one of those bright lights on any map of London's true centres of community.

Here for the last 30 years or so Andy has been cutting the hair of locals of all races, all ages, all conditions - although, by virtue of his trade, the vast majority of his customers are male. I started going there around ten years ago when my then favourite, Chris and Tony's in Northcote Road - closed down as yuppification swept up that street like wildfire.

Now people wil be paying five times as much to get their hair cut in  fake "retro" surroundings.

There was nothing fake and everything genuinely and blessedly retro about Andy's and Chris And Tony's - just the names tell you a bit.

Anyway, as for Andy, he's now 67  and for the past two or three years has been planning to retire. In fact he should have retired four or five times over the past few months, but each time something seems to happen to the process of handing over the lease to his business. It's all much too complicated to go into here, but he always tells me about his place in Cyprus, the olive groves and vegetable plots, the grapes and other fruit, and then about his London allotment somewhere near Crystal Palace.

It seems there's always a story to every visit to Andy's. Some days it's just like a soap opera: a guy comes in with information on where to buy new wing mirrors for Andy's 1980s Merc, and a lengthy and heated discussion ensues, ending with Andy handing over a wad of cash to this guy.

Sometimes itinerant hairdressers wander in and ask if there's any work going. One guy who came in a few months back, a Kurd, he said, was particularly insistent. His English was  not  perfect but he said he had plenty of experience and had worked for many barbers around London.

"How many years?" Asks Andy.

"One year"

"Come back in five years", says Andy, adding, "It takes ten in all but I'll train you for the  last five."

The Kurd looks crestfallen and again asks for work, and Andy then  hands him the scissors, points to the thinning hair on my scalp, and says, "Show me what you can do".

The nice young Kurd goes at my horrible  greying hair with vigour. Almost immediately, Andy stops him.

"Not like that, no, you have to learn, it takes time". He then gives him the names and phone numbers of a couple of other local hairdressers who might employ him, and he's on his way.

Today, I go to Andy's for the first time in much too long. I always expect to see the shop shut and boarded up, but it's open and busy. And for the first time since I've been going there's a second hairdresser.

"My apprentice will start you off, number 3 on the sides, number 2 to set the line….if that's ok."

He gets to the work with the clippers. Almost immediately Andy stops him, takes the clippers, and shows him how it should be done - "Look, like this, rising through the hair as you go up, like a plane taking off, up, lift, lift!"

He tries again, and again Andy stops him. Then he holds his wrist and helps him lift the buzzing clippers at just the right angle.

"It should be natural, it will come to you in time, but only with lots of practice. I took me a year or two to get that right".

The next time I go, the young Kurd greets me, seats me, and sets to work with full confidence.  He even begins chatting, just like Andy did, the usual stuff.

The shop is full of very talkative men, one  guy, maybe 60ish, with quite a posh voice, is trying to explain the theories of James Frazer's The Golden Bough, which he says he has just read. The guy is wearing a long black leather coat which looks a bit too big on him. But he's articulate, talking faster and louder.

At first he and Andy were joking , but soon Andy just goes quiet and lets this guy carry on with what is becoming a rant. I realise he's probably one of the many regular customers Andy has who are having treatment at the hospital over the road. I've seen some men in here more or less in their hospital pyjamas.

Quite a few of Andy's customers seems to get their hair done for a big discount, or for goods in kind. There's a guy who helps keep Andy's ageing Mercedes on the road, another who cleans his windows. Sometimes people have only a couple of quid on them, and Andy lets them off - perhaps til next time - the other six quid. Yes, the standard charge, this year went up to an outrageous £8. Cost of living.
This is one of London's best men's hairdresser, in zone 2. A barber's shop in London SW9, in 2015, a perfect haircut  for the price of two coffees and a bun.

That was written early this year - and now he really has  gone. 

Well, no, it did still shock me to see the shop locked and with for rent signs in the windows. It seems the owners wants to rent it to another hairdressers, but you can be sure it will a very different sort of place.
That generation of Greek and Turkish and Italian hairdressers who came to England, many of them in the 1950s and 60s, is dying out.

Last time I went there Andy said he might still work for a bit in another shop, owned by a relative, in Tooting. I must go there - because there's no-one else in this city who I'd trust to cut my hair. I will report back. 

UPDATE: MAYBE ANDY'S IS NOT FINISHED AFTER ALL - CHECK OUT LATEST POSTING!!

Baldrick's London knicker-twist

Arise, Sir Tony Robinson, to accept the Microgroove Award (2014) for the most easily missed non-sequitur on British radio in this year of our Lord, 2014.

The famous actor was being interviewed by diamond geezer Robert Elms for his weekly "Listed Londoner" feature on the BBC Radio London mid-day show.

Having talked at length about his favourite bits of London, his favourite buildings and open spaces, the Baldrick actor then asserted, without any particular irony, that he was a north London bloke through and through, and that in his opinion,  south London was something of "a contradiction in terms".

A question or two later, he is asked to name his favourite London film, book or play. He chooses John Lanchester's 2012 novel, Capital. The novel, he said, gave him an insight into the new London, the city of hedge funds and the meeting of extreme wealth and dire poverty, and of clashing ideologies.

So, Capital is clearly a powerful novel, the quintessential early-21st century London novel? But it is almost entirely - and very specifically - set in south London. South west London. Well,  Clapham, if you must know.

South London's east-west divide

North of the Thames, people seem to think of South London as one great undifferentiated blot of unpleasantness (with exceptions made for Greenwich and Dulwich, while Blackheath Village always was a minor southern outpost of Hampstead).

Anyone who lives, or has ever lived in a postcode beginning with 'S' will know how wrong this view is.

The east-west divide on the sunny side of the Thames is just as strong as the rivalries that can flare up between the benighted denizens of the W,  NW,  N and E zones.

And although there is no simple "S" postcode, there certainly is a central south London zone that has no interest in knowing what goers on either side of it. Central South London stretches from London Bridge to Vauxhall Bridge, and takes in Borough, Bermondsey, the Elephant, Kennington, Vauxhall and Stockwell, the zone tapering out in final southern glory at Brixton Hill.

Although Brixtons's codes are SW, it is just as much south London heartland as Lambeth Walk and Bermondsey Street.

Sticking strictly to inner London - roughly the same as zone 2 on the TfL map - you'd  have no trouble naming the adjoining South West and South East neighbourhoods.

SW - which of course shares a postcode prefix with some very posh neighbourhoods across the river - is simply Clapham, Battersea, Wandsworth, Balham, Putney. All of which suffer from their image as  being the not-quite-so-rich-bastards' alternatives to Fulham and Chelsea.

Similarly, for SE we have Camberwell, New Cross, Peckham, Deptford, Brockley and Lewisham. But these prickly places have no such shame, they do not need any reflected glory from north of the river.

So, what about all those other places? Tooting? That's the beginning of  outer south London, having more in common with Mitcham and Norbury.

Blackheath and Greenwich?  They are both distinctly different, they're not in the same game at all.

Blackheath, as already mentioned, is simply oh too nice to really be in the same borough as Lewisham, Eltham or Catford. Greenwich is a weird mix of historic royal Park, posh village (Crooms Hill etc)  and former naval base which also retains a hint of the scruffy Kentish estuarine resort.

Similarly, out in deep SW land, Richmond and Twickenham have more in common with the plump Thames Valley towns of Marlow or Henley than anything in London. Barnes, too, is truly Surrey-by-the-river.

So let's get back to the core SE and SW areas. What's the big difference?

The first, clinching factor is landscape. South East London is built on a range of hills - seven of them, just like Rome! - which lap like great waves towards the city. Rising above Brixton and its own hill, we have Tulse Hill, Herne Hill, Denmark Hill, Champions Hill, Knights Hill. Moving east again, Telegraph Hill, then further south, Stratham Hill, Gispy Hill, Forest Hill.

Overlooking Greenwich - providing the best view of London anywhere - we have the park and  Shooters Hill. On the southern horizon, the Sydenham hills of Crystal Palace with their twin TV towers.

SW, by contrast, is an unudulating plateau falling into marshland. Clapham, Wandsworth and Wimbledon commons are relatively flat. Lavender Hill is a gentle bump in the road. Putney has a hill, but it's mostly tarmac and the view from the top is just not up to the amazing views you get in south east London. Wimbledon has some mild hills but they tend to be associated with tennis players.

The topogrpahy means that SE London's parks are all far more interesting: contrast Greenwich Park, Brockwell Park, or Dulwich woods with the dull commons of SW4 and SW11. OK Richmond Park is beautiful but that's too far out to count.


The second big difference is public transport. SW has tube lines, SE does not. But SE now has the DLR as far as Lewisham and London Overground/East London line linking it with the great orbital movement of rail's version of the M25.

It's clear that SW's tube lines are actually the bane of its life - that hideous tract of the Northern Line from Kennington down to Morden is what attracted all the overpaid city workers to the area.

The next difference - wealth. Traditionally SW was richer, maybe because most of the money in Kensington and Chelsea tended to leach across the river to the nearest adjacent boroughs and then out down the A3 into the stockbroker belt.

But this is to oversimplify. Look at the architecture: by far the finest suburban villas of the 19th century were in SE postcodes. There's no better street of grand domestic architecture in all of London than Camberwell Grove.  The beautiful houses surrounding Blackheath and Greenwich parks are more elegant than any of that brash stuff in NW3.

Those were the days when the most successful actors and writers headed for the wooded slopes of south east London to escape the stinking wen.

The miserable clerk, meanwhile, were shunted towards the endless Victorian terraces of Clapham and Battersea. Comforting as these now seem,  they are pinched in comparison, and cynically repetitive.

Arts and entertainments is the next category, and again SE sweeps the board. Each of the centres - even including New Cross and Peckham - has internationally famous music and art venues, there's Horniman's Museum and the Dulwich art gallery, Depford's Laban Dance centre, Goldsmith's, and the joys of Camberwell.

Overall, you have to admit that SE London is the victor here: it always had the edge, to be honest.
After those vital three decades in the darkness, it has again been rising and shows no signs of falling away.  Peckham the new Dalston, etc.

Whereas SW is stale, saturated, and over-populated with the sort of recently-young couples with small kids who make you want to stay well away from all pubs on any day there's a big "rugger" game, and well away from all public spaces when the sun shines. Sorry, Clapham, but you blew it all away in about 1980 with the arrival of Foxtons and their yuppie clientele.

My advice - do the estate agent's old trick. Ditch the name, Clapham, replace it with "West Brixton".

Oh, and the last word on all this: the word is Death. We all die and need somewhere for our bodies or ashes to rest. SE London has two of London's "magnificent seven" Victorian cemeteries - Nunhead and West Norwood.  SW has none.

Lease Lend Cottage revisited

It's a strange question. Which is worse - the destruction caused by high explosive bombs dropped from German planes in the London Blitz of 1940-41, or the new vandalism of profi-hungry property developers in the syrupy postcodes of SW4 and Sw8?

Yes, we are back with my current favourite hyper-local topic - the demolition  of the former Lease Lend Cottage that existed almost in secret in Clapham, South London, from 1947 through to 2012.

To recap, a strange and rather wonderful old house with a beautiful, crazy garden, built entirely out of materials from  bombsites in the late 1940s, has just been destroyed.

According to local legend, it was built by a family who had survived the blitz,  on a plot of bomb-ruptured land between the remains of 70-76 The Chase, part of Hannington Road, and the flats on the corner of Macaulay Road.

A large part of this plot had been returned to chaos by German bombs that blasted some big old houses off the map of SW4 one night in 1940 or 41 (see the interactive Bomb Sights map of strikes on London, October 1940 - June 1941, - although I remember seeing a simpler print version of that map, which also covered the V1 and V2 strikes in the later years of the Second World War,  in the Croydon Advertiser, way, way back in the mid-1960s. Anyone else?)

Anyway, Lease Lend Cottage has gone. In its place - and now nearly finished - are four new houses crammed in to that space - and it's now clear that whoever buys into these rather dull-looking properties will have to be fond of the shade.

For a start, as we've seen, the houses are only two storeys (that must be thanks to initial opposition to the original submission?) and will get so little direct sunlight, surely they must be a health hazard. They are steeply overlooked by flats and houses on three sides, so privacy will have to be a closely-curtained matter. The amount of spcae around them for gardens, children's play area, etc, is very limited.

As also reported earlier, the new houses are built over a deep basement excavation, forming a lower-ground floor for bedrooms etc.

Agent Pendleton's has put the houses on the market already, with prices starting at £1,750,000 for the three-bed houses and £1,999,950 for the five-bedroom "end of terrace".

Finally,  a few days ago a hoarding went up outside advertising "four prestigious homes" in "Wardell Mews". Well, it ain't a mews and heaven knows where the rather posh-sounding Wardell comes from.  Still, it's probably just as well they didn't try to cash in on the historic name, as I feel some rather bad-tempered ghosts might start rattling their chains.

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.