Call out the instigators: some of Clapham's radicals remembered

Clapham and radical: a pairing of words that you really wouldn't expect to hear these days. Could there really be anything radical about this yuppy-infested, vomit-splattered playground for the wealthy rugger-buggers of south west London?

Well, yes. Even as recently as 30 years ago the place still had a slightly louche reputation, and was home to a motley collection of squatters, freethinkers, progressive writers, and hard-left politicos.

Most of them are now gone, dead or driven out by wave after wave of property-hungry bankers and their ilk, not to mention a distinctly un-cooperative council.

So a talk on Clapham's Radical and Mutual Past, given at Clapham Library this week as part of the Lambeth Heritage Festival, seemed to be something not to miss. An essential corrective to popular impressions of this now universally derided posh boozers' borough. As we were to learn, many of Clapham's early radicals wouldn't touch the booze at all.

At 7pm a small audience assembled at bottom of the pit that is the new Clapham Library. The talk was to be given by the well-known local historian Sean Creighton, with assistance from Lambeth Archive's Jon Newman.

What followed was essentially a chronological account of the many and various political activists, trade unionists, reformers, writers and others who had lived in or worked in the Clapham - Battersea area, from the early 19th to the mid-20th centuries.

The lecture started with a big name - Annie Besant, the influential early feminist, secularist and

Social reformer Annie Besant was born
in Clapham in 1874 - but moved to leafy
Gipsy Hill later in life.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

advocate of social justice who is perhaps best known for her role in the matchwomen's strike at the Bryant & May factory in 1888. Annie Besant was born in Clapham, but she only lived there up to the age of 5, so her inclusion in this talk was slightly questionable. Her Blue Plaque is on a house in Gipsy Hill, where she lived in her 20s.

Nevertheless her name and her work chimed with many of the other radicals mentioned in this exhaustive tour through Clapham's past. Mr Creighton has previously written extensively on Battersea, Wandsworth and Nine Elms. As became clear in this talk, much of Clapham's activism was inextricably linked with the more densely-populated working class areas around the railway works of Nine Elms and Clapham Junction, and the industrial riverside of Battersea.

But not all of it. Some radicalism originated from on high, from religious sects. Mr Creighton gave an early namecheck to the abolitionists who are perhaps this area's most famous "radicals" - although as became very clear, Wilberforce and his colleagues in the Clapham Sect were radical only in this respect: they wanted to abolish slavery, but they also wanted to maintain the status quo in British society.

Moreover, as was pointed out, they shared the already wealthy area with many of their supposed enemies - slaveowners favoured the large villas that lined the edges of Clapham Common. Then as now it was a place for the exceedingly wealthy to live in conspicuous luxury; and apart form the issue of slavery, they shared many of the same attitudes and worshipped at the same churches.

The next part of the lecture looked at the growth of radicalism nationally in response to the repressive Acts of Parliament in the late Napoleonic era, the suppression of large public meetings, sedition and attacks on  the radical press.  Mr Creighton discovered that around 80 Clapham residents subscribed to the radical publication, The Prompter.

The area was also played a part in the growth of the Friendly Societies, Benefit Societies and Union Societies. Interesting that these people originally met in pubs - The Plough and The Sun Inn in Clapham old town, back in 1824, as well as the Tim Bobbin. Hence the continuing presence of trade union offices in Clapham Old Town, or - as in the case of the present day construction workers union UCATT, in nearby Abbeville Road.

Another pub, the Duke of York in Lark Hall Lane, hosted the local branch of the London Working Men's Association, which played a big part in Chartist movement of the 1830s and 40s. The role of Clapham's pubs in political activism was traced right through to the creation of London's only Union-owned pub, The Bread and Roses in Clapham Manor Street, by the Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Union Council, a direct descendant of these earlier workers' associations.

All of this was fascinating stuff and entirely new to me at least: you have to take your hat off to Sean Creighton for the thoroughness of his research. I particularly enjoyed his take on the "Clarions" movement of the 1900s, which was taken up with great enthusiasm in this area. The underlying idea he said, was "to make politics less boring" - and that efforts had to be made to re-engage the average working man or woman.

What better way to do this than to combine politics with the latest and most fashionable craze of the 1900s, cycling? Apparently large groups of Clapham and Battersea socialist cyclists took off on weekend rides into the Surrey lanes to spread the word amongst the reportedly rather apathetic rural workers.

The area was also home to one of the first Co-op shops, in the Wandsworth Road, set up by the London and South West Railwaymens's Co-operative Society.

The area also had a big Irish population, linked, as in Camden Town, to the railways that cut huge

The great Irish poet W B Yeats lectured on
nationality and literature at the Clapham
branch of the Irish National League in 1892.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

swathes through the area. This was perhaps the reason for an appearance in 1892 of  the great Irish nationalist poet, W B Yeats, to speak at a Clapham Reform Club meeting which formally established the Irish Literary Society. A few days later he was back to talk about "nationality and literature" at the Clapham branch of the Irish National League.

This was just one of dozens of fascinating nuggets that emerged during Sean Creighton's hour-long talk. There were certain themes echoing through the decades of this area's working class history. It seemed to have the right combination of working class men and women on the one hand, and various radicals and firebrands from other parts of the country who settled here for a while, and catalysed change.

The British Socialist Party had some roots in the area, and this later became the Communist Party of Great Britain. Much later on and many splits later a revolutionary communist party offshoot, the Socialist Labour League, which later became the WRP,  famously had its HQ in Clapham, with the Redgraves as their most high profile supporters and members. Mr Creighton chose, perhaps wisely, not to cover this sadly scandalous last gasp of radical politics in the area.

Instead he ended on a possibly even stranger note - the story of last Labour MP for Clapham before the constituencies merged, Margaret McKay. She was a rebel and a true radical who flung herself into the great causes of the day, and had especial interest in the Middle East situation. She once built a replica of a Palestinian refugee camp in Trafalgar Square, much to the horror of her Labour cabinet colleagues. She was by all accounts an amazing woman with an incredible back-story (organising the Bradford worker's hunger march in 1929, meeting leading Soviets on her visits to Russia as a young communist in the 30s, among much else.)

Her reign in Clapham began in 1964, with Wilson and Labour on the ascendant, and ended in 1970, when everything was beginning to go wrong. It was also the beginning of a decade when Clapham once again became fashionable, and a new waves of younger, more leftist middle class types flooded in.

It was also an era of squatting, rent strikes, sit-ins, punk music and rebellious youth, plus the frictions of relations between black youth and the police. Another local character summed that last problem up in his inimitable style in the song Police Officer. Stockwell boy turned UK Reggae star Smiley Culture could also claim to be a bit of a radical in a cultural sense. You could say it's more of a Brixton story than a Clapham story - but as any historian knows, the two areas are umbilically linked.  And, by sweet coincidence,  Smiley is the subject of the next talk at Clapham Library, when author Asher Senator speaks about his book Smiley and Me on October 21. Be there - why not?!

"Clapham Common: even longer, noisier events" Tories say. If only....

When the music's over....After three days of music festivals attended by tens of thousands of fans, the grass of Clapham Common looked in surprisingly good nick.

A new free sheet dropped through the letterbox last week, with a big headline on the front page: "Clapham Common - Even longer, noisier events". Arriving just before the annual SW4 dance music fest that usually turns most of the common into a mudbath. But this year it did not rain, and there was a third day of music - the Madness "House of Common" reggae festival - tacked onto the end, using the same arena and stages.

The rain came after the festivals, so less than a week later the Common looked like nothing at all had happened there.

This paper - Clapham Matters - turns out to be  just a new version of the local Tory party's newsheet, hence making big news out of the latest flare-up in a very long running battle over what Clapham Common should be used for and who should decide. The headline in fact refers to a Lambeth Council plan to stage more events on the common next year, which was very old news by the middle of August when this paper arrived on our doormat.

Its events strategy, agreed on July 15, would allow up to eight major events (that it, likely to attract over 20,000 people) next year. It also proposes raising the maximum permitted volume of music.

Shock horror! (yaaawn...)

If you've read other posts on this blog you'll know I'm not Lambeth Council's biggest fan, especially on its libraries and housing policies. But if this rather dull, flat wide open bit of land can raise a lot of money to help fund better community services then I am all for it.

Red rags to the bulls of Clapham Tories, The Friends of Clapham Common, and Tory-led Wandsworth Council, all of whom are up in arms about what this will mean for their voters - the generally pretty damn stinking rich people who live in the big houses and apartments flanking wide open spaces.

Well, I live about 5 minutes walk from the common so think I have right to a view as well. I love the Lambeth Country Show in Brockwell Park and wish we had similar free events on Clapham Common. I'm far too old for the EDM of SW4 but if it raises plenty of dosh for the council, so be it. I was around for part of that weekend and witnesed no serious anti-social behaviour. It was actually  rather good to see so many smiley young clubber types pouring across the common.

I have to say I am more worried about the way every weekend of the year the common is infested with the so-called military fitness groups of poor lycra clad souls being shouted at by bulked-up blokes in fatigues. How much does the council make out of these highly commercial and deeply unsightly activiti
es?

Does it charge commercial dog walkers? I know this will be unpopular but I think we're past the cur-to-human ratio tipping point. On any given weekday morning there seem to be about 6 dogs per human on the common. Even if they clear up all the crap, they don't  actually wash the grass, do they?

So - more paying music events, fine, let's have a wider range of music. Remember all those great open air concerts of the 80s, anti-Apartheid, CND, the reggae sunsplash, Archaos, and an event which, if I remember rightly, involved Transglobal Underground and Skunk Anansie and a lot of others out of the warehouse rave scene.

It is a Common, for heaven's sake, not a precious botanical garden or a private field for dog-walkers and sports lovers.

Mauleverer Road site still undeveloped a year after destruction of much-loved mural

Mauleverer Road, Brixton, in August 2016: So they take away a highly-regarded mural depicting a sort of urban paradise, and what do they replace it with? The lazy sods can't even be bothered to clear away the rubble. 

Here's another strong reason to dislike property developers: they destroy places that are treasured by local communities, then they leave them to rot for years, maybe waiting for land values to rise. Or maybe they caught a Brexit cold.

Something like this seems to have happened at Mauleverer Road in Brixton, which until last spring was the site of one of the best surviving community murals anywhere in London. When demolition was first threatened a few years back, local residents and the London Mural Preservation Society campaigned to save it.

Here's how it looked 16 months ago - the ghosts of the
ghosts of the dray horses that once slept in the stables
of the Mauleverer Road depot.

This stalled the proerty developers, but only for a year or so. Last April demolition work began. I photographed as much as I could of the mural as it gradually disappeared (and there are hundreds of good pictures online, to preserve the memory of this work).

Last week I went back to see what had taken its place. The answer was not very much, apart from some quite vigorous looking weeds growing on the rubble of a large open space, cleared for building last year.

Well, at least the neighbours across the road don't yet have to stare at another cluster of identikit yuppie townhouses or whatever it was these charming landgrabbers were threatening to throw up in this once fascinating backwater. And they won't yet have to fight over parking spaces with monster black SUVs or get woken at 5.45am by bankers revving their Maseratis up for a quick pre-rush hour dash into the city. Not yet, but it will probably come soon.

And here's another bit - a detail of the woodland scene at the eastern end of this massive mural. Even after 34 years
the quality of this work shines through, don't you think? Now it has been smashed to pieces. For the profit of some
builders and property developer types.

Brickbuilt, bland and breaking out all over town: welcome to the New London Housing Vernacular

Observers of the built environment have been debating a suitable name for a newish style of low(ish)-rise domestic apartment block architecture that is rampant in every borough of London, and in every town and suburb within commuting distance of the Great Wen.

Use the word "style" advisedly, since these ubiquitous erections appear to have been designed to be as stylistically anonymous as possible. The one truly defining feature is that they are nearly always faced with old-fashioned bricks. London stock bricks, not the yellow ones but the dull brown variety, the drabber the better. Bricks made out of Thames mud. That these bricks are no longer really structurally necessary - they're a skin, an adornment to a steel-framed block, hardly matters. What word usually follows the phrase "brick-built"? Precisely.

Recently one London website asked readers to suggest names for this  unexciting new architectural look. They came up with some good suggestions, my favourite was along the lines of "Buy-to-let-brutalism". Oddly I haven't been able to find this piece since.

In February, the FT's Edwin Heathcote also picked up on the style, and he made it sound like something quite important: "Are we seeing, for the first time in almost a century, an architecture that says something about the capital?"

Like others he noted that the real trend was to fit in with what is already there and generally loved: Georgian and Victorian terraces made out of London bricks. Hence, his name for the new style: Brickism. He gives some useful background on how this style developed, and notes a big influence from (ironically) European architects - but strictly those of a north European, chiefly Belgian protestant persuasion.

And yet to me most of these buildings seem far shallower. They look like the same old blocks, just

New London Vernacular reaches Railton Road, Brixton: note that, however

bland and restrained the building, the agents cannot resist keeping on

with their garish hoardings...

given a layer of scabby London bricks instead of polished aluminium or primary-coloured plastic or whatever was the previous fashion.

Well, for better or for worse, the architectural establishment seems to agree that there has been a real change. The name that has stuck, however,  is New London Vernacular (or New London Housing Vernacular) - and this naming has been sealed by a lengthy and learned article on the Urban Design London website.

The style was pinned down in 2012, when the extent of London's need for new housing finally hit home with the biggest developers. They needed something that was palatable, economic, and - perhaps most important of all - a style that could be adapted for both low and high-end buildings, social housing and luxury homes for the super-rich.

Writing on the Icon website, architectural writer Leo Hollis attacks the new style for its "moral laziness".

"The new London vernacular is dictated by the developers to mitigate risk," he writes. "Rather than appeal to the homely desires of the buyer, it prioritises the developer’s ability to shift product without friction."

A good place to get a sense of this usually bland but easily recognisable style is in the property agents' ads in the Wednesday edition of London's Evening Standard.

Block after block of them, all boasting that same dirty brown or fawn brickwork, the evenly spaced windows,  the text-book rules of proportion. Very often there'll be a branch of one of the well-known supermarkets taking up part of the ground floor.

NLV without bricks - but still distinctly part of the style, in this large new
development on Landor Road, Stockwell. Note the Costcutter at street level:
whose costs are we cutting here, though?

They are much politer buildings than the stuff that was going up five years earlier with thier multicoloured or powdered aluminium panels and weird shapes and angles, the bonkers mini-balconies sprouting from every wall and corner.

This new look is smart, smooth, restrained, anonymous,  inoffensive, frankly dull - and almost classless.  It is used both for luxury and "affordable" apartment blocks, although there are often noticeable differences in window size and quality of materials. Often you can't tell from the outside anything about the living spaces inside.

 At its best it echoes the elegance of the late Georgian terraces it so often shares streets with, following the classical rules of scale and proportions. That is, at its best.

High-end NLV houses in Macaulay Road, Clapham. Note how the
houses neatly pick up the roof, front door and window lines of the existing
Victorian terraces, as well as their brick colour, even though everything
 else is on a very different scale.

At its less good, the style is precisely as dismal as bad Victorian or Georgian speculative building, but without the occasional outburst of fancy brickwork which even the meanest of those old slums would often exhibit. There's no longer room for the pride in craftsmanship and bricklaying skills you can find in many a Victorian slum.

Instead you get big blank tracts of these bricks, bricks made out of the bones of old bricks, ground down, re-used, the ghosts exorcised. Window spaces punched in at regular intervals, as if on a BMW-owned assembly line. The new brickism faces the world and its lack of colour or spirit simply drains the life, the light and the colour from everything around it.

There's nothing intrinsically bad about this style, and in some cases it seems just right. The rebuild of the Lansdowne primary school in Stockwell adapts the brick-faced London vernacular look and

seems to make a decent job of it - so the style is by no means limited to residential property.

But at its worst, and in the sense in which it seems to be shutting the door on more adventurous design for all but the richest, the style stinks.

 It's the style for Brexit London. It's a style that says, look we don't need your foreign materials, your marbles and your eastern-bloc concrete and what have you - we're happy to be made out of the mud under our feet, yes, even including the filth we all drop into it every day of our lives.

If this is the new London vernacular style, it's speaking in the drab nasal monotones of a would-be UKIP councillor on the election trail, appealing as always to the basest desires and fears of a downtrodden, depressed and frightened public.

Catch it while you can: Clapham's Soseki Museum to close in 2017

The front room of the Soseki Museum in London. That harsh fluorescent strip lighting is definitely not 1901 vintage…

Strange, but true, that for the past 30 years I've lived two doors away from a tiny museum dedicated to a  novelist whose books I've enjoyed. I always wanted to visit this museum, but never quite got around to it, for all sorts of stupid reasons. Until last month.

Yes, finally I rounded up the courage to add my fingerprints to that battered but well-labelled buzzer outside number 80 The Chase, Clapham, and gained access to one of London's smallest, least known and least visited museums - the Soseki Museum in London.

And I've spent the last four weeks kicking myself for not visiting before, and for being so foolish. And yet, in a way, not visiting the museum I so much wanted to visit was quite a Sosekian thing. Why? Well, you need to read a bit of the man himself.

Natsume Soseki is usually described as one of Japan's most revered authors, and yet he is hardly known at all in the UK. Translations  of some of his books are in print, and from the few that I have read (I Am A Cat, The Three Cornered World, The Tower of London) ,  they repay any initial difficulty you may find in reading them.

There's a diffidence, a cloak of humility that conceals his extremely sharp perceptions of life around him.  He also has a wonderful habit of mocking himself, and - against all expectation - has the rare ability to make me laugh out loud, time and again. Yet he can evoke deep sadness as well. Rarely have the petty frustrations of a constrained life in a modest London suburb been conveyed with such precision.  You can get a good taste of all this in a collection of the short essays and stories written during his brief stay in five different, all rather squalid lodgings, The Tower of London. I think it's a good starting point, and the Peter Owen edition has a fascinating introduction by the translator, Damian Flanagan.

A slightly worse-for-wear Entryphone buzzer
lets you into the Soseki Museum: why did it take
me nearly 30 years to press that button?

It's a good idea to read a bit before you visit this museum, which is really more like a shrine. It was created and is still funded by a fan, the academic Ikuo Tsunematsu, who bought the first floor two-bedroom flat it occupies. The museum is now run by Mr Tsunematsu's wife, Yoshiko, who is a charming, friendly and ever-helpful curator. She'll answer as many or as few questions as you care to ask.

The museum is directly opposite the house - number 81 - that Soseki actually lived in for the final, deeply troubled 16 months of his stay in England.

It's quite hard, in deeply gentrified 21st century Clapham, to imagine that the well-scrubbed,  polished and immensely expensive four-floor family home on which the Soseki Blue Plaque is affixed was once a modest, rather gloomy boarding house.

But the museum is in the much scruffier old block opposite, a real bit of late Victorian jerrybuilding. I know this from bitter experience: I live in the same crumbling hulk.

Once you are buzzed in, you pass through a cluttered ground-floor hallway, high ceiling, cheap landlord's carpeting on the stairs, bicycles and pushchairs up against the wall, and then suddenly you enter a different world.

All the other flats in this block (apart, I should say, from mine) have been expensively done-up to 21st century yuppie tastes. The Soseki museum, however, is distinctly 20th century, although it's far from a recreation of the sort of decor Soseki himself would have endured in Clapham in 1901.

You pay your £4 entry fee, and are left to wander around, through rooms lined with old photos and prints and copies of documents, all relating to Soseki's time in London and the various people he met, and the places - such as Thomas Carlyle's house in Chelsea - that he visited.

There's a great collection of books and magazines, based mainly on Soseki's own collection (though most of these are not the original copies he owned).

In the back bedroom there's a good library of Soseki's publications in Japanese and English, as well as the many scholarly works devoted to his literature.

There's not much in the way of personal belongings or artefacts. But it doesn't matter: the air in the place belongs to Natsume Soseki, and once you start breathing it the world outside becomes a little darker, and stranger.

There's a very imposing bust of the man, a recent work by a Japanese artist, which presides over the library. This is surrounded by contemporary Japanese editions of some of his novels and poetry, with utterly gorgeous cover art.

He looks quite severe in this portrait: very much the late 19th century gentleman of the Meiji era.
I suppose Soseki can seem almost like our stereotype of a rather timid, socially-anxious, naive Japanese visitor from that era, when Japan was working hard to drag itself into the "modern world", of which London seemed  at that  point, to be the capital.

A portrait bust of Soseki by Hana Taharasako (2010) flanked by some
beautiful recent editions of his work.

He seems a very quiet, restrained writer - the opposite of a  Murakami, perhaps. But he does have the occasional flight into deepest, strangest fantasy, as in the title piece of that collection.

His writing seems to me to get under the skin of ordinary life, and then make us realise just how strange our ordinary lives really are.

If he's known at all in England, it's for this brief, generally miserable two-year residence in London, and what he wrote about this host nation.

One quote in particular: "The two years I spent in London were the most unpleasant years in my life. Among English gentlemen I lived in misery, like a poor dog that had strayed among a pack of wolves."

But then Soseki is hardly famous for his cheerful take on the world around him. The opening paragraph of one of his most celebrated and poetic works, The Three-Cornered World, concludes with the line: "It is not a very agreeable place to live in, this world of ours".

There's also the suggestion that Soseki was clinically depressed by the end of his time in London, and contemporary reports that his landlady, Miss Leale, and her other lodgers showed a great deal of concern and kindness towards this poor, lonely Japanese scholar.

At the time he was unknown, a poorly-paid academic on a government scholarship, here to deepen his understanding of English literature. His stipend was so measly that he couldn't, as he had hoped, afford to study at Cambridge University. Instead he retreated to a series of cheap lodging houses in gloomy London suburbs - Clapham being the final straw - and did some gentle exploring, and a great deal of book-buying.

But he also had some interesting times. His visits to the Shakespeare scholar, W J Craig, at UCL, and Thomas Carlyle's House in Chelsea, seemed to inspire him. His account of trying and failing to learn to ride a bicycle on the local streets are hilarious.

Some of his visionary walks through the unfriendly city make you think that Soseki was not just a great Japanese novelist, but also a precursor of some of the fundamental movements of 20th century art and literature - the surrealists, the flaneurs, and even the psycho-geographers of the later  20th century. Echoes can be detected in the writings of many big names, from Virginia Woolf right up to Iain Sinclair.

Soon after I moved into this area, there was a story in the local paper. Some self-appointed guardians of local amenities and history had blocked plans to erect a statue of the writer on Clapham Common, way back. I think that was quite soon after the museum opened.

 Whatever the reasons for the ultimate rejection,  it seemed to me to be a mean-minded
response to a proposal that was offered with only the very best of intentions. But it made me want to read his work.

It's hard to imagine that any such memorial could detract from this distinctly unlovely tract of south London common land. (There is said to be a file of correspondence relating to this, between the City of Shinjuku, Lambeth Council and Clapham Antiquarian Society, in the Lambeth Archives. I'm going to try to dig it out when I have a chance).

About 10 years later - I think it was in 2002 - Soseki finally got some local recognition with the

unveiling of an English Heritage Blue Plaque next to the first floor window on number 81 The Chase.

I happened to be in that day and saw the ceremony as it took place. Quite a few dignitaries turned up, including I think the Japanese ambassador, who presumably pulled the cord (or whatever it is you do), as well as the Lambeth mayor, etc. There were a few TV crews, presumably from Japanese broadcasters, as I never saw anything on UK tv.


Since then, the museum has been visited by a constant stream of Japanese tourists, whom I often notice from my lonely eyrie. They come in couples, or little groups, usually but not always middle-aged, some lone student types, couples in anoraks. They often seem bemused: how could their great national treasure have lived in such a dull street, they must be thinking. It's not even picturesquely scruffy any more.

They usually find the blue plaque on number 81 first, photograph it, then find the front door of 80.

Visitors have apparently included former prime minister of Japan and even  - at least according to this article in The Japan Times - the crown prince Naruhito. The article also explains why the museum is to close: the declining trickle of visitors is simply no longer enough to sustain a flat which must, after all, now be worth about half a million. They probably paid around £35,000 for it back in the early 1980s.

Soseki pilgrims reach their goal, 81 The
Chase. The museum is directly opposite
this house

Odd, that in an era when Japanese culture is increasingly popular in the UK - whether the novels of Haruki Murakami, the animated movies of the Studio Ghibli, or all the various shades of manga - that this touching tribute to one of the nation's biggest literary names cannot find a new backer. But maybe there are other plans.

Meanwhile, Clapham will become even drearier, and with even less in it to detain anyone with any interest in anything other than jogging, physical jerks on the common, dog-walking, sport, food, showing off  their wealth, royalty, cramming onto the Northern Line for the plum job in the city, revving up the Maserati or Aston Martin, and expensive boozing.

Meanwhile, for a more literary, highly thought-provoking account of a visit to this museum, read this fascinating entry on Dougal McNeill's blog, Nae Hauf-way Hoose .

Oh and by the way. Maybe the residents of this street - who seem to be so keen to hold expensive parties to honour people even richer themselves - should take note that on December 9th, 2016, we might be observing the 100th anniversary of Soseki's death. Perhaps a time to reconsider that statue?

More photos from the Soseki museum

Hundreds of framed photos line the walls, including these (in the entrance hall - note the 1970s Entryphone)  of visits to the museum by various dignitaries over the past two decades. 

Another shot of the Blue Plaque unveiling on a suitably miserable day early in 2002

Last but not least: the delightful curator of the Soseki Museum in London, Yoshi,
who has deep knowledge of the author and his time in London, and will patiently answer even
dumbest of questions from clueless neighbours like myself.

At last! ES magazine provides a reason to live in Clapham

Guilty pleasures can occasionally bear fruit.

One of my many such pleasures is to scan the celeb-stacked pages of ES magazine every Thursday. It's wonderful moan-fodder for pessimists, grumpy old farts, prigs and miserabilists like me.

Last week they featured yet another pair of posh young west London fashion gals,  Edie Campbell and Christabel MacGreevy. I started reading it because the name Edie made me think of the Warhol muse, but it turned out this was nothing to do with Ms Sedgwick, and rather more in the spirit of AbFab's Eddy.

Nevertheless I carried on reading, because despite everything they were indeed extremely good-looking. I even liked the look of their Itchy Scratchy Patches that you can buy from their website and iron onto your jeans. I can remember sewing pink velvet and green satin and orange corduroy patches onto ancient Levis jeans back in about 1974 so I am a natural customer.

After all the usual stuff about their wild times and their famous friends, they are asked where they like to go out. They giggle a bit but refuse to specify, and mock the types who will say things like "I will only be seen in Shoreditch…Peckham….etc"

They love to go all over London, and dear Christabel even has a studio in Camberwell and she does love it "down there" and she tries to spend as much time as she can "down there".

The cunning interviewer has another go: "Where would we never find you?"
They name a nightclub or two, then Edie asks Christabel, "Where would you never be seen dead now?"

"Fulham or Clapham. What happens in Clapham?" asks Christabel.

Yes! There we have it. You just have to imagine that look of disgust on her face as she enunciates "Clapham".

How great to have it so explicitly expressed: Clapham is now the antithesis of a fashionable or desirable place. It is still what it always was: an ugly, dull, mediocre place where people live. Another dismal zone 2 London suburb where a mixed bunch of types have washed up and are trying to get on with their lives. Let's face it, nearly all of them would rather be in Islington, Notting Hill or these days, Dalston or Bethnal Green!

Yes, there's a good deal of ghastliness in SW4.

We have all known this for ages, but to hear it spoken by such a fashionable young W11 thing is, oh, such a joy! Because, if such dear creatures feel this is the one place, the one thing they can be rude about without anyone telling them off for political incorrectness, etc etc…then surely that's one clear sign that this is where we (I am mean I) should be! We're just a few degrees off being on the cusp again!

Anyway, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Daniel Ruiz Tizon is even more available

Here's your chance to own a little bit of something very rare - and something that, as the glittering towers of Nine Elms continue to rise, will soon become as rare as  as an honest broker in the property business.

I'm talking about local, homegrown, SW8 talent, more specifically about a local writer, broadcaster, social commentator, stand-up performer, and podcaster supreme. I'm talking about a bloke who at the annoyingly young age of 42 has gone and published a book.

I'm talking about Daniel Ruiz Tizon, whose weekly radio show used to be a highlight of the Resonance FM schedules, and whose oblique, hilarious and sometimes tragic memoirs of life on the borders of the boroughs of Stockwell, Clapham, Brixton and Kennington have kept a growing band of fans and followers entertained and appalled for a decade or so.

I'm late arrival at the Tizon party and I see his output as  building up into a unique record of  life in communities that are on the verge of disappearing, or being dispersed to the edges of the metropolis, or expelled altogether from this disunited queendom. Daniel was the child of Spanish immigrants who settled in Lambeth in the 1960s. He's one of very few writers in this area fully qualified to talk about social change in the last four decades, and the impact of gentrification. And he does this in a way that is totally original, entirely his own.

Luckily for  us, and for future historians, the man himself has bundled together some of his best and most telling bits of writing, and made a book of it. Ok, it's an e-book, but that's still a book isn't it? It's called Me, Me, Me! - and you can get it for a mere £2.

I've said enough about Daniel, he's much better than I am at writing about himself and his strange but strangely familiar experiences. But, as a non-Kindle owner, I'm really hoping he'll produce a print version of this book, then he really will be Available, even to old sold farts like me.