Iain Sinclair hits SW8: the literary equivalent of a papal visit, in my book

Wandsworth Road Overground station: this where I and other  Clapham bumpkins can jump on a train to get to places such as Shoreditch where I can gawp at beautiful young hipsters. But it used to be an even more useful station.

So as promised I get my hands on Iain Sinclair's new book,  London Overground: A Day's Walk Around the Ginger Line,  and immediately commit the unspeakable crime of jumping straight to the bits about my home turf - the stretch of this more orange than ginger line between Denmark Hill and Clapham Junction.

Oh my god, he's walking through Will Self's manor, but by god he does it with style.

I think I did  Sinclair a disservice in the previous entry. His chapter on Angela Carter is superb, unusually warm for  him ( but perhaps he is softening in his late middle age?) and also fairly uncomplicated.

He relates various encounters with the writer over several decades - from earliest meetings when, as a secondhand book-dealer and aspiring writer, he went to her house to buy a load of surplus signed first editions left over from book signings.

Then there was the time of her high-profile review of his novel Downriver in the London Review of Books, in which - if I remember it rightly - she confesses to finding the East End quite alien and scary, what with its bustling streets and wide pavements.

And so on through the decades to the publishing and literary prize parties of her later career, right up to her death in 1992.

This new orbital route through London's inner suburbs - a zone 2 railway version of the M25 - is also a sort of literary merrygoround. Sinclair uses it to link Angela Carter to J G Ballard and his dystopian novels of the near future, set in places like Chelsea Harbour (Imperial Wharf station); thence to Michael Moorcock (the bard of W11, author of Mother London, etc, who nevertheless grew up in Norbury) and Muriel Spark (Peckham Rye, Ballad of…), all as he says strewn along the Overgound line like carelessly scattered pearls.

He speculates on how the line might have affected Carter's work, had she lived.  It seems odd to me that the Overground actually leapfrogs over the heartland of her fiction, which I always imagine to be a mix of Camberwell, Herne Hill, Brixton and Lavender Hill.

It's not just me, is i,t who find it odd that the trains do not stop in Brixton? But maybe this is in reality a mercy for Brixton, maybe it will be spared the blandification that this Ginger Line appears to be bringing to some of the neighbourhoods it serves. A visit to a metal-bashing garage under the arches of Loughborough Junction last week made me think all is not lost in this area, and that there's still some space for dread beat and blood style living in SW9; the world of the Magic Toyshop is not completely dead, nor completely swept to the outermost suburbs.

 But that's just sentimental, dear: look what they're planning for the nearby estate.

But, back to Carter. I often saw her, and literally bumped into her in the local Arundel Newsagents several times. I always wanted to say something to my literary heroine but never had the nerve. She sometimes smiled, though.

So, swiftly,  back to the case in hand. I can't help wondering, as he and his companion strode along from Wandsworth Road station to The Chase, if Sinclair's literary divining rod dipped at any point as it picked up, then lost, the faint traces of  CAR Hills, the recently re-incarcerated writer of short fiction, reviews and other journalism,  perhaps best known for his Clapham Omnibus column in Prospect magazine, back in the early 2000s.

Known to many locals as "Prince Charles of the Wandsworth Road", Hills would trudge up and down this drag many times a day, often heading for free lunches at various church halls, or off to one or other of his grim, short-lived employments. Or, on a Monday evening, on his way to my flat for white wine, Bombay mix and Marlene Dietrich records.

Had he lived in Hackney, I've no doubt he'd have ended up as a vaguely sinister character in one of Sinclair's works.

But that's a different entry: I must get back to this wretched Overground. Sinclair bemoans the loss of the old Dalston Juntion to Broad Street commuter line. Here we have a similar  grudge to bear. When CAR Hills lived here, what is now the Clapham to Peckham stretch of the Overgorund was part of the the delightfully underused Victoria to London bridge loop, a splendid alternative to the heaving Northern Line which hardly anyone seems to know about. Those little two-carriage trains got me to work in Wapping in relative comfort, the final walk over Tower Bridge capping the pleasant journey.

OK, so now I can get to the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Brick Lane in double-quick time. And yes I am that Clapham bumpkin he mentions. We feel all the more like a wrong-side-of-tracks community these days. Rather than enjoying South London for what it is, the newcomers are trying very hard to turn their bits into honorary North London outposts. It has already happened to much of Battersea and Clapham, Vauxhall, Southwark and Bermondsey, Elephant and Peckham are following on very fast.

You'd never know, would you, that this house
 has  an interior straight out of the 1001
Nights….575 Wandsworth Road, now
 a National Trust property

Old Vauxhall and parts of Stockwell now exist virtually under the  shadow of the new wall of the Nine Elms Lane apartment blocks.

I like to imagine Sinclair and his mate glancing at the twin towers of Wandsworth Road, and wonder if they sensed the heavy, looming horrors of that massive property development just over the tracks. Poor, emasculated Battersea Power Station, its power removed, awaiting its new lightweight safe chimneys. As for the new 'affordable' housing and the promised linear park, well, I've not ever seen more oppressive architecture, not even in the suburbs of St Petersburg.

Sinclair and his companion will also have walked past 575 Wandsworth Road, the extraordinarily but I don't think there's a mention of this or its eccentric, multitalented owner. The house is now owned by the National Trust, open to visitors on a strictly limited basis.
decorated former home of the late poet, philosopher and civil servant, Khadambi Asalache (1935-2006),

But there's a mention of a Wandsworth Road junk shop where Sinclair's friend bought a "Bruce Chatwin draught excluder", something I can not even begin to visualise. (Shit, he means a book!)

But I do wonder if they went into my friend's shop (more of a vintage clothes and records shop than junk, or at least that's what I like to think), Eclectica; of course there are several other "junk shops" along this road.

I'm also excited that he gives an honourable mention to Russells, the British motorcycle spares shop in Falcon Road, which always makes me think of leather jackets, goggles, Up The Junction, early 1960s bikers racing over Chelsea Bridge on their BSA Gold Stars and Norton Featherbeds, their Triumph Bonnevilles and Matchless whatevers.

It's a beautiful survivor, and as Sinclair says there's an echo of Antonioni here - but it's a second echo, I am remembering a scene of Blow Up where he's driving through Brixton on his way to the park in his open Rolls, and he passes a long parade of shops, all painted red from top to toe.

And I know those shops, it's the Stockwell Road, where now there's a skatepark, but then it was owned by the big motorcycle dealers Pride and Clark. At 14, after school, the 109 bus to Brixton,  I used to lust after motorbikes in that shop. But was it really all red, or did Antonioni do one of his well-known paint jobs on it for effect?

All I really want to do is thank Iain Sinclair and his collaborators for another beautiful, essential book, which allows me to shudder about the present and the future as well as wallow in the past.

Right round the Ginger Line to catch Iain Sinclair's musings on underground Hackney and overground London

The Round Chapel, aka  the Clapton Park United Reform Church, was the suitably atmospheric venue for Iain Sinclair's readings from his latest work,  London Overground: A Day's Walk Around the Ginger Line

True to the ethos of this so-called blog, I tried to use only the most appropriate means of travel to reach the Lower Clapton Road for an evening with Iain Sinclair, who was kicking off a whole week of talks organised by the Hackney Historic Buildings Trust.

As Sinclair was billed to talk about both subterranean Hackney and his new book on walking the Overground, it seemed fair enough to travel both by Underground (Clapham North to Highbury and Islington on Northern and Victoria lines) and Overground (Highbury & Islington to Hackney Central). The journey took about half the expected time - so this clueless reporter arrived at the ancient St Augustine's Tower, on Mare Street, about an hour before the event was due to start.

Which was great for two reasons - first I had time to reacquaint myself with Hackney, and apart from the pedestrianisation of upper Mare Street, it seemed mercifully not too different to how I remember it in the early 1980s (so unlike London Fields just down the road, which seems to have a totally different atmosphere now).

This bit of Hackney is still almost aggressively ungentrified.  I mean by that that the streets are full of people, people of all ages and classes and races, and I suppose what I really mean too is that there are a lot of not very well-off people, these people are still in the majority. It's perverse to say this, but I like that. There are still plenty of ordinary cheap and cheerful shops, and not an artisanal bakers in sight (I did find an artisanal booze shop but that's a different thing altogether).

I remembered the bus station off wonderfully named Bohemia Street, and the famous church tower - but I had forgotten how lovely and extensive the old church grounds were, and how the graves have all been pushed to the perimeter and stacked up against the walls.

I had also forgotten that this talk was not in the old tower at all, but in the Round Chapel.  I'd never been there, and assumed it was somewhere near the old tower or the new church - but it wasn't. I enjoyed walking around Sutton Place with its immaculate Georgian terrace, and then headed up Lower Clapton Road on a hunch - and there it was , unmistakable and magnificent, the Round Chapel as beautifully restored by the HHBT, like some grandiose Roman temple dropped into the chaos of London E9.

You could sort of tell it was going to be a Sinclair event; quite a few  blokes of a certain age, close cropped grey hair, black jeans, black jackets, not many hipsters to be honest. But inside the crowd was very similar to those at the National Trust talk on 575 Wandsworth Road I attended a few months back - local history buffs, solid, smiling white-haired couples, probably retired, in their late 60s or older, knowledgeable, affable, friendly, curious, intelligent, lovely people.

Oddly, Sinclair himself almost seemed to be part of  this demographic. Couldn't help thinking, hasn't he  aged  well? He's positively handsome, tall, slim, in slightly smarter jeans and shirt and specs than most of the audience - but then again, his distinct professorial look does set him apart. One of us, sort of, but also one of them. Not a hint of eccentricity there really, despite the high rounded dome of his skull. And so much the better, so much of that is affectation - but what he has in abundance, is passion! Energy!

He talked and read for an hour without break or sip of water, he got excited about his many subject, he went off on some of his famous, Sinclair-patented verbal riffs, rhapsodising the old Dalston to Broad Street line before fit was co-opted into Boris Johnson's shiny new world. A local journalist asked him to mention Haggerston Baths, which are (inevitably) threatened with closure and re-developing as luxury flats. No problem, he had already planned to talk about this amazing tunnel-like building.

I love how he compared the great mole-man of Hackney, William Lyttle (whose work, it seems is to be preserved and used by the hipsters, thank god, they do have their uses) with the present day burrowers of mega-basements, which are supposed to make their multi-million pound pinched terraced houses  something they can really feel rich in - with swimming pools, gyms and private cinemas, wine cellars and underground car -parks.

Probably that's where their staff have to live as well, Wellsian style. I like the way he got the Olympic Park perimeter fence into this discussion, as though it had been broken up and redistributed to hide their furtive diggings.

I love the way he pointed out how on parts of the overground, people are all reading books, then at certain points they all change and the new lot are all tapping at smartphones or tablets.

Getting to the Round Chapel itself, Sinclair's riffing hit a sort of Coltrane-style high with his remarks on how this place was  usually empty, and how it always had time to recover from the impact of a human audience, but how each group or congregation had left strange traces in the atmosphere of this great meeting hall.

I knew he had mentioned Angela Carter in the new book (which, to my shame, I have not yet read), and so I was hoping he'sd maybe talk a bit about this stage of the walk. It's amazing to think that one of the greatest psycho-geographical amblers on the planet has been wandering through one's own neighbourhood, and I was longing to find out what he thought of it all.

Clapham definitely needs some forensic dowsing, there's a lot of bad stuff here, and it comes out, occasionally, in terrible violence on the Common, in the gormless hedonism of Clapham High Street of summer Saturday evening, the vomiting, the fighting!

All that and the Clapham Sect and the  Temperance movement too. And poor old Natsume Soseki in his miserable bedsit on The Chase, 25 yards form the house where Angela Carter lived her final decades.

But he skipped this bit, and located poor Angela in Wandsworth, rather than in the Lambeth bit of Clapham where she lived and died. I think he was more excited by J G Ballard and Chelsea Harbour, and I can understand that - there is a real symbol of the changes of the last three decades, the 80s flash harry marina, and so on.

I'm sure he does her more justice in the book. I know he writes at length about another low-profile hero, the school of London painter Leon Kossoff,  who provides a neat link between the East end beauty of  Arnold Circus with the oceanic railways scenery of Willesden Junction.

One thing I don't know if Sinclair comments on is the strange way Overground leapfrogs over the whole of Brixton, just given passengers the slight frisson of  views of the dark interiors and backyards of the covered market, and glimpses of a heaving Electric Avenue. But then it clunks on, moaning, as Sinclair points out, in never quite consummated pre-orgasmic pleasure, to hit my  drab home station - Wandsowrth Road, and the short walk home past number 575.

Good, I have short-circuited this entry, which was well into the early stages of morbid tediousness. It's time to start reading the real thing, and to abandon this messy regurgitation of last night's Hackney word feast.

London Overground: A Day's Walk Around the Ginger Line by Iain Sinclair is published by Hamish Hamilton inn 4 June 2015, price £16.99

Choked, crushed, blinded by the dust - London's property gold rush is killing us in so many different ways

These massive mixer-trucks drive in and out of the Battersea depot at the rate of about one every three minutes throughout the working week

Cycling down Silverthorne Road, almost lose it hitting a ridge of what looks like concrete in the road. At the same time the Range Rover Evo in front fires a couple of small pebbles at me from its fat back tyres.

Approaching Queenstown Road, it's hard to see a thing. It's about the 101th windy day in a row, and the wind around here - anywhere in fact in the SW8 area - is always full of grit from the massive building sites of Nine Elms Lane.

The people responsible for erecting that monstrous barrier of high-rise, low-on-architectural-merit apartment blocks are getting at us local residents in so many different ways.

But we also have a major cement works to add to the fun - the big Lafarge Tarmac place at the junction of Queenstown and Silverthorne Roads.

The huge six-wheel cement mixer trucks seem to be on some endless convoy, roaring in from the north, filling up with ready-mix concrete or whatever, then charging off in all directions, presumably serving many other big construction sites in  west and south London, such as the old Chelsea Barracks site, as well as Nine Elms itself.

They're messing up our roads - particularly Silverthorne Road and parts of Queenstown Road, at junctions where the huge trucks often clip the kerbstones in their eagerness to get in and out of the cement depot extra fast. The newly-filled lorries often spill  bits of their load - hence all those lethal pebbles and the growing ridges of cement in these streets.

So for most of the local population, who will never be able to afford one of these new flats (and most of us probably wouldn't want one anyway), the developers are bringing a lot of pain and no joy whatsoever.  Look at the list of our woes:

• They're destroying our views of the river and central London
• They're clogging our roads with a constant stream of massive trucks taking away debris and delivering building materials.
• They're closing down pubs, clubs,  shops and colleges.
• They're killing and maiming cyclists and others with their high-speed dumper trucks.
• They're blinding and choking us with the dust thrown up by the constant pile-driving, demolition, digging, and so on during this unusually dry and windy spring.
• They're shattering our peace with the constant crashing and hammering and drilling and thundering of trucks emptying materials.
• When all this is finished what do we get? Another influx of a few thousand super-rich types with their hideous armoured cars,  a couple of new tube stops on a spur of the already overcrowded Northern Line, and a linear park which looks like it will be  yet another of those closely observed (by cctv) manicured public spaces a la Canada Water.

Call me a cynic. Everyone else does.

Getting the hots for a short-cut

Have been enjoying reading Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks, which, I have to agree with the Guardian, is "a joyous meditation on words, landscape and the relationship between the two. This is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather".

Thanks to this book we can rediscover not just some delightfully sonorous words, but the realities of nature which they describe. Such as "Smeuse", which according to MAcfarlane is an English dialect noun for “the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal”.

As soon as you know what "desire lines" are you start seeing them everywhere. Here's one on Clapham Common, south London - it provides a short cut link between two sections of cycle-paths, also avoiding a dog-leg on the dangerous rat-run of Windmill Lane.
Photo: Bill Hicks

Once you know the word you tend to notice the things they name more often. As I live almost entirely in an urban setting, you'd think there's be little use for such a glossary - but you 'd be wrong. LOndon is full of smeuses, even if they're more likely to caused by rats or pets or foxes than by field-mice.

London's parks are also full of another phrase which I first heard in a radio discussion of this book - "desire lines". Sadly these have little to do with illicit assignments in dark alleyways - a desire line, according to Websters, is "a path that pedestrians take informally, rather than taking a sidewalk or set route; e.g. a well-worn ribbon of dirt that one sees cutting across a patch of grass, or paths in the snow".

I did not have to cycle far from home to find my first desire line. It was in the middle of Clapham Common, and it's a path cyclists have worn, to create a quicker and safer route the the next bit of the cycle path from Cedars Road to Clapham SOuth.

I'm reminded of the goat-paths you see in the Atls Mountains, worn down by the hooves of grazing goats over centuries.

Will the destruction of Vauxhall bus station be a worthwhile sacrifice?

War of the worlds architecture always helped make your trip on the 77a to Tooting Broadway all the more interesting…but what will replace this strange and rather beautiful construction?

Totally torn by news in our Co-operative Council's monthly freesheet - Lambeth Talk - re the future of Vauxhall bus station.

According to the somewhat depleted free local government propaganda sheet, the planned redevelopment of the Vauxhall Cross area has been given a big "thumbs-up" by the electorate.

Now it does not take much planning knowledge to realise the this area is a vital gateway to the as-yet unfinished Nine Elms development - all those new residents are going to need slick new routes along which to drive their lovely Maseratis etc to and from their city or Canary Wharf jobs.

Sorry, a bias leaks out…so, back to the Lambeth/Transport for London plans, and back to the great idea that the traffic around this nightmare junction of major routes from five, no six big directions needs taming. It is at the moment a hideous racetrack, but with an oasis of calm and public transport beauty at its heart - Vauxhall Bus Station. This was re-built at massive cost in 2004, yes just a decade ago. And already it looks like a design classic of its strange times.

The new plans will involve scrapping the current one-way gyratory system and re-locating the many bus stops on both sides of the once-again two-way streets of the junction.

It's a strange call for many of us who have gradually come to love this weird construction of space-age aluminium ramps and weird metallic extrusions -- it is a good enough place to wait for a bus to any part of the city, but would be even better if there were free public loos and a decent café. The whole place seems to have been inspired by those silver Airstream trailers so beloved of Hollywoood  film stars. But it is beautifully executed, quite entertaining, and is also apparently eco-friendly as those crazy ramps leading nowhere  are actually covered in solar panels.

What exactly will the new plan bring? i tried to check the Lambeth website but access to this page:
http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/planning-and-building-control/vauxhall-spd/transforming-vauxhall-guide
 was denied.

Anyway it doesn't matter at all because -according to the aforementioned free sheet - "63 per cent support" for "proposals to redesign the existing bus station, providing safer, more attractive and more accessible facilities…."

So, that must be the killer - and I should shut up. All will be for the greater public good. Lambeth will fight for all our rights right to the bitter end, no worrying…

But meantime, I will be sad to lose that weird thrill I occasionally got of an autumn morning, seeing those silver ramps heading skywards, the gleaming buses churning their way through the tunnels, around and the Roman-style circus maximus track and back on the Cross and up and away over the bridge…

Somehow buses ruled in those days. Will they still rule in 2020?

Here's what I liked...

Catch it while you can - Vauxhall's space-age bus station is soon to be replaced with a far
more boring (and yes, maybe safer and more sensible) structure as part of the Vauxhall-
Nine Elms redevelopment plans.
Photos: Bill Hicks

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.

Forget the Chelsea Flower Show - what about the Clapham front garden no-show?

This has to be stopped - it's a crime ! A decade ago, all but one of those houses had thriving gardens, some with beautiful mature trees; the houses have been  bought and sold and gutted and re-gutted. All people want now is somewhere to park their fat-cat bonus-bought SUVs: the rest of us lose not only the beautiful gardens, but also our scarce on-street parking space. 

So pleased the RHS has fired a warning flare about the revolting habit of Britain's car-owning class to replace established front gardens, some of which had been lovingly tended for a century or more,  with a few slabs of stone or concrete.

The paving-over has reached drastic levels nationally - according to the RHS, over a quarter of front gardens are now concreted over, with the consequently terrible consequences for  wildlife, not to mention water-tables.

In this area, of the 10 large four-storey houses visible from my window,  all but two have destroyed their front gardens in the past 10 years.

They have all dug up and paved-over beautiful old front gardens, simply to turn them into miniature car-parks. In some cases, beautiful old trees have been felled.

As if these acts of vandalism against horticulture were not bad enough, think again about the implications.

For a start, they further reduce the absorbency of the land - this road pitches downhill steeply towards Battersea. If they get some bad flooding in the Nine Elms area soon, I will not be weeping on their behalf.

Of, but don't worry, the fuckers living in those developments will no doubt have some super-sewers dug especially for them, to ferry away their very large and smelly excrement. And of course they will all have blue chip insurance cover.

Meanwhile, up here, just walking along the street becomes more of a hazard: it seems that,  from every other house some fat cat or one of their unfortunate employees is trying to reverse the Audio SUV out of the paved -over front yard, just as you are trying to walk or cycle past.

It's hell, it is shit. Don't cycle up this street in SW4, the gap between parked BMW SUV's is already narrow enough: then there are the white vans delivering all those online purchases and the non-stop school-run or nursery run Range-Rovery manoeuvres. There are the supermarket deliveries, and then there are even vans coming to collect the dear family doggies for their daily walks.

I kid not, there are even vans coming to deliver new gardens, new chunks of flowering glory for the summer. If any of these new residents feels they are lacking in something  they go online and a van-full of experts arrives. And blocks the road for the duration for  the rest of us.

But - back to the point. Lambeth Council controls this street. Over a year ago they said they'd stop this ridiculous conversion of gardens into parking spots. And by the way, in case you didn't notice – each time they allow a garden to be concreted over, and a set of kerbstones to be lowered, they are depriving the local flat dwellers of another parking space.

We talk of winners and losers. After a while, chronic losers begin to get angry. Fucking angry!