The day Brixton came to Clapham (and Clapham tried not to notice)

It was undeniably a moment to relish - the sight of a crowd of chanting people, placards and banners waving, approaching Clapham Common. A big demo, marching on Clapham? When did that last happen?

Well, it happpened for a few hours on Saturday afternoon,when   #standuptolambeth's "Pink Protest" took a whole bundle of Lambeth issues across the streets of the borough, all the way from Windrush Square in Brixton to the statue of Temperance on the north-east corner of the Common.

It was the day the people under threat of eviction from their homes on threatened Lambeth estates such as Cressingham Gardens and Central Hill at Crystal Palace joined forces with the "Defend the Ten anti-Library-cuts campaigners, plus representatives of small businesses kicked out of their premises in central Brixton - as well as a big group opposing the building of the Garden Bridge.

So it was a highly diverse group of about 200 people, united in spirit at least by their disgust at the way an elected Labour  council can take such an arrogant stance on so many deeply-felt issues.

As the march rounded the corner of Acre Lane and into Clapham Park Road, you could hear the chanting. "Clapham! Join Brixton! Oppose the Lambeth cuts" or stuff to that effect. The heart skipped a beat - maybe "radical Clapham" would turn out not to be just a topic for local historians?

But as the march began its final descent on what, for many, is now yuppy central, you realised that this bit of Lambeth is really much more interested in shopping at Waitrose, eating and drinking at the chi-chi caffs and posh restaurants lining the common, or pushing its designer sunglasses down and looking away. The very rich cashmere-draped types who have a disporportionate presence in this part of town do not like to be reminded that they share this patch with actual poor people.

I have no idea how many - if any -  Clapham residents joined the march. Some bystanders looked bemused, a few boozers jeered, but most (or so it seemed) did their best to ignore it.

Until, that is, the march reached one of the busiest traffic intersections in the area: the bit where the A24 splits from the A3 and also meets the Clapham Common one-way system.

At this complex junction, about half the marchers got across two roads and into the Common. Then th elights changed and the rest of the march, including the main sound system and the most vocal of the chanters, were stuck at the lights, with a couple of cops looking on.

As we waited, a couple of people sat down, and then one of the guys with a megaphone claled on everyone to sit down, and one by one people did, some sitting on the yellow box juncxtion of two of the busiest roads in Clapham.  The two or three police there made a few polite requests for people to get up and move once the lights had changed, but they didn't.

The great Clapham Common roadblock of October 2016. It lasted for all
of 15 minutes, but it didn't half annoy the local yuppies.

This changed everything. It had been a peaceful, orderly demonstration, marching an agreed route with police escort.

Now it was a different sort of protest: a refusal to move, a blockage of three busy lanes of three busy roads. The police switched from demo-escort to traffic cops, holding traffic, letting one or two through when there was the chance.

We sat and awaited instructions from the de facto leader of this impromptu protest, a youngish guy with a beard and a sound system. He handed the mic around and people started trying to explain what they were doing and why  - and why if others didn't join in, we'd only have ourselves to blame when the cuts got worse.

It was a crystal clear example of that moment when sanctioned "democratic" protest turns into a rebellion, even if only a very small one.

There must've been no more than 30 or 40 people sitting on the road junction, and the police were no longer smiling benignly at the protesters.  Within minutes huge queues of buses and cars had built up in three directions. Peak Saturday afternoon shopping traffic!

The previously cheery toots of car horns egging on the march turned into a blaring cacophony of outrage as dozens of angry drivers lost their rags. Looking at some of the smart occupants of these expsnive vehicles, you got a sense of the ire behind the designer shades: "How dare these oiks disrupt our Saturday afternoon shopping trip!"

This is more like it! Anyone with even one rebellious cell in their bodies could not help feeling that thrill of knowing you are disrupting "normal" goings on in the name of causes you believe are worth the disturbance and possible retribution. Like many other waverers, I sat down, and was offered bread and apples by the sound system crew.  And thinking, if only we had 500 here instead of 50 - then it would perhaps make a real impact. Where is social media when you need it?

But an argument was breaking out. The ones who'd started the sit-down said it was essential to stay put, and not to move until the police physically moved them out of the road. This, they said, was the only way anyone would take any notice: all the democratic routes had been tried many times and had always failed. All that was left was direct action. Disruption. Peaceful resistance. Civil disobedience.

To a great extent what he said was true: just think of all those marches and demos and public meetings and lobbyings we went to as part of the anti-library closure campaign last autumn through to April 2016, and the final sad ending of the Carnegie Library occupation.

Mind you we sat in the street outside Parliament in March 2003, but that didn't stop them voting to go to war. Maybe because not enough of us sat there, and not enough of us had the strength or courage to keep on doing it.

Lambeth Council had certainly shown itself to be an absolutely world class when it came to not listening to public opinion. It seems they took their lessons from their old leader, back in the days of "New" Labour.

The police issued an ultimatum: move or we move you. After five more minutes only the hard core of protesters remained on the road, and they kept up a very loud critique of the ones who were no longer with them.

It was a strange, difficult moment. At a crucial point a flashing blue light of an ambulance stuck on the one way system jolted people into a different sense of priority: there might be someone dying in there! We have to let them through! Of course the cops got the ambulance through with no trouble, no-one was going to stop that. But what about the buses...all those people, maybe their difficult lives were going to be made even worse by our action?

At the end of the day...there's always thiss sad moment at the end of demos in London. What do we do with all the placards?
Being good responsible Lambeth citizens, the answer of course is to recycle them, responsibly - at the next dmeo.

These are thoughts of the guilt-ridden middle-class would be activist, ever the pinko-liberal, the fence-sitting impotent one.

The remaining half or two thirds of the marchers were standing around near the paddling pool, waiting for everyone to arrive. Finally the roadblockers took a vote, and decided to move on. So although the great Clapham sit-down could not match last month's much more prolonged and effective affair in Brixton, it was noticed by a lot of people, and even made a top story on the Evening Standard website.

But for a different view of the events, check out this lovely photo-journalistic report of Saturday's demo on ourcity.london.

There were some stirring impromptu speeches to a crowd that had dwindled to a few dozen.

In the background, the church where the Clapham Sect had hatched its schemes to begin the parliamentary abolition of slavery nearly 200 years back. Around the statue, activists and hangers-on (me) discussed what could be done.

It should have been a much, much bigger affair. But the fact that it happened at all is a huge positive. If only a handful of previously unconcerned locals were made to be aware that something is wrong - no, plenty is wrong! - in the state of Lambeth, then it was  a success.

It's there, in the words: Clapham Common. Bring it all back home!

Here are a few more snaps from the demo....

Is it art, or is it "art', with a capital "F"?

"I'm thinking about going to Frieze but not really sure if I can be bothered..." OK but it is only thanks to the organisers of the
current Frieze Art Fair in Regent's Park that we get to see this rather fascinating work by Goshka Macuga for free in the
Frieze Sculpture Garden, open to all for the duration. So if what follows seems a bit bitter, a bit sour grapes,
please forgive me.

It's hardly news, but if you really do need to get your nose rubbed in the reality of what the "art" world truly is these days, then hop off the tube at Regents PArk.

We are in Frieze season. A whole lot of horrible white plastic prefabs are dumped on the that south-east corner of the park, and people with lots of money or friends in the business are encouraged to dress up a bit and go and look at a few thousand square metres of what the world's most successful galleries reckon are the hottest things in contemporary art.

But because it's in London, England, it has become much more about who goes, when, and with whom, and where they go afterwards, and what they wore. And what food was served, by whom.

Oh, the art? Yes, that was...interestingly... the same old stuff, served up by some of the same old names, and a few newer names. The sieve has been shaken (as it is each year) and few more jewelled characters are allowed to enter the great sandpit of modern art.

Frieze has become one more bit of London's social season, a nice return to elitism after the mock democracy of the Proms.

This is the art world equivalent of the arms industry beanfeast down at Excel in docklands. It's just another very successful trade show; a place to sell, a place to buy.

But to take part you do need to be a serious player. Try to visit. Try to cross the outer circle road in the park, as gleaming black Mercs and Bentleys and Audis and Range Rovers swish through, a sort of funeral cortege for everything anyone ever held dear in the name of art.

Make sure you have your complimentary tickets at the ready, or that you are on Deutsche Bank's corporate sponsor guest list. Or that you have fifty quid or so at the ready to buy your way in. Just like Wimbledon or London Fashion Week or the Proms or (for all I know) Royal Ascot you need to be determined to get into these big society events during the season. It's all part of the territory, dearie, and it always has been ! (Says bitter and very twisted ex-hack).

Let's all thank Frieze for reminding us of this wonderful 1959 work by Lynn
Chadwick, Stranger III. It should stay here for ever.

Can you remember when Frieze was new and radical and belonged to bright anti-eastablishment things, all fresh out of Goldsmiths, or wherever?

No. Oh god, no. No dear, it was never like that, they were never banned from the established galleries. They were not the impressionists nor the expressionists nor the dadaists. They'd already learned lessons from Great Uncle Andy and daddy Charles.

The YBAs cohort knew much much better: they were the contemporaries of the bright kids who went into the big commercial banks in the newly-built Canary Wharf and knew how to leverage an equity release, how to talk up stock, how to play the media game, how to disappear at the crucial moment. But they are old hat, yesterday's papers anyway.

The new lot are even smarter. They know that cities like London being filled with brand new ultra-expensive apartments, all of which need art on their walls, just as they also need public sculpture in the spaces between the gigantic blocks and towers. What an opportunity! And what a wonderful vacuum for Frieze participants to fill, with plenty of love and care and devotion.

That's the new art. Try looking for it in Regent's Park. It could make your fortune - or it could bite you in the ass like half of one of that man's pickled sharks.

Or be like me, the eternal hypocrite, the voyeur, the gormless and grinning observer, the grateful flunky. The one who bows, scrapes and takes it up the backside for 40 years in exchange for a few hundred nectar points, and then eventually suffocates in his own regurgitated bile.

Enjoy the spectacle, lick up the salty morsels the super-rich scatter around themselves. They can't help it, it confirms their wealth.  At this year's Frieze they have allowed a few lovely pieces of sculpture to escape the fold, they are in the "free" zone. Go and see them: they might be better value than the stuff inside.

The Soseki statue that never was: a tale of two suburbs

Japanese author Natsume Soseki. This grave, diffident, hyper-sensitive soul spent many hours wandering on Clapham
Common, at the end of a street he was living in, unhappily. It might have seemed fitting to have a statue there to
memorialise those formative experiences of a great novelist. No such luck. You can see this nice 2010 bronze at the Soseki Museum in Clapham - but only until 2017, when the museum closes due to lack of funding.

A recent visit to the Natsume Soseki in London Museum reminded me of a row that blew up a quarter of a century ago relating to this deeply revered Japanese author, soon after I first moved into the area. This was the sad case of the Soseki memorial statue that never was.

It was a story of mutual cultural misunderstandings, of groaning bureaucracy, particularly on the British side, stirred up by a bunch of self-appointed guardians of local amenities, with (oh, surely I am not mistaken?) a nasty little dash of bad old English racial prejudice or xenophobia stirred into the mix.

It began in the early 1980s, when Japanese scholar and businessman Ikuo 'Sammy' Tsunematsu created the a museum in London dedicated to the Japanese author Natsume Soseki, which I wrote about last month. At around the same time he got support for the idea of erecting a statue to Soseki on Clapham Common, a short distance from the flat in which he spent the final 16 months of an unhappy but creatively crucial time in London.

No sooner was the idea out than the combined forces of local worthies, the Tory opposition on the council and the establishment (in the shape of its most deadly weapon, Whitehall bureaucracy), conspired to derail it.

At the time I was so annoyed by the opposition to the statue that I wrote to a local paper. The letter was never published but I am still puzzled by the animosity that the plan to erect a statue of a Japanese author on Clapham Common aroused. So puzzled that a few weeks back I visited the Lambeth Archives in the former Minet Library building on Knatchbull Road, to remind myself of the roots of this Anglo-Japanese co-operation pact that was never consummated.

I say "former" library - in fact, as you enter the Archives, you can see the dormant public library through the windows,  intact and abandoned, books still on shelves, a sort of Marie Celeste of a once much loved local library, a resting place and a refuge.

But thank god the Archive is still operating, and there are friendly staff on hand to help me unravel another little bit of the Soseki in London story - though this is actually about a non-event, and something that happened - sorry, didn't happen -  about 70 years after the great Japanese novelist's death.

I'd found the archive reference online and quoted the reference numbers. Within minutes I was sitting at a table with two neatly laced-up bundles of papers in front of me. I carefully untied the bow and began to go through hundreds of carbon copies, artists' impressions, architect's drawings and photocopies; letters, memos, telegrams, newspaper articles, the lot.

Not being a proper historian, I whizzed through these docs, looking for stories. What follows may not be a precise chronological account, but I hope it captures the spirit of that strange episode.

The idea was first mooted in public, so far as I can tell, at a conference on Soseki held in London in about 1986. It was at the Park Lane Hotel, and among the participants was the noted British poet, translator and Japanese literature expert, Anthony Thwaite.

The idea was fleshed out, and a suitable memorial with statue was designed in Japan. The municipality of Shinjuku, where Soseki was born, were involved and backed the idea, and Lambeth Council was approached for permission.

At the time Lambeth was keen to extend its town twinning programme, and it seems it jumped on this request as a good opportunity to build up a relationship with Shinjuku - which includes the commercial district and transport hub of Tokyo.

So Lambeth quickly gave its approval in priniciple to these plans. Little did it know that an exceedingly long and drawn out struggle was to follow, almost six years of it in all.

The first item I looked at was a set of drawings of the first version of the proposed statue. It depicted a life-size bronze statue of Soseki standing on a stone plinth of almost the same height, with a large bronze relief inscription set into the stone.

This was to be surrounded by a circle of stone benches, the whole thing covering an area of around 10 by 8 metres, to be built on the strip of the Common directly facing the southern end of The Chase.

This was the proposal that was agreed in principle by the Lambeth Amenities committee, but as soon as the agreement was made public, in June 1988,  there was uproar. Opponents of the scheme on the Council were soon joined by the conservationist groups, the Friends of Clapham Common and the The Clapham Antiquarian Society. The local press jumped on the story with glee - what an opportunity to run plenty of nudge-nudge, wink-wink, schoolboyish headlines.

The Evening Standard of 24 June 1988 had a field day: the "left-wing councillors" of Mrs Thatcher's least favourite London Borough had "red faces", it claimed, once they realised they were trying to twin Lambeth with the "famous red-light district of Tokyo".

It couldn't resist the seaside postcard approach: "Too much Eastern promise" ran one headline. Inevitably it got a quote from Lambeth's most famous madame, Cynthia Payne of Streatham.

Lambeth was not initially too bothered by this ridicule ( this was the era of constant attack on the so-called "loony left" politicians of the GLC). The joke was on the press, given how they seemed ignorant of the fact that Shinjuku was the location of  a wealthy and powerful commercial district at the time far outstripping the City of London.

The council regarded the whole plan, including the Soseki monument, as "a tangible demonstration of Lambeth's commitment to and celebration of  the cultural and ethnic diversity of our population".

Soon after this the plans were put out for public consultation.  There were 13 objections to the original proposal, with most of the complaints focusing on the inappropriate size of the memorial. Some were concerned the statue would  be a magnet for vandalism, others wondered whether certain British authors were not more deserving of a memorial here. (OK why not? Wouldn't it be lovely to have statues of Graham Greene, Pamela Hansford Johnson and Angela Carter as well? We could even have a literary sculpture park).

The anti-Japanese feeling sparked by the treatment of British p-o-w's during World War Two was also there, still bubbling away.

As a result, the Shinjuku team put together a revised and scaled down proposal. But although the new memorial was much smaller, it still provoked a storm of complaints. The Evening Standard excelled itself with the October 4 1989 headline, "Clapham fights the Japanese". In the story the Clapham Society was said to be "preparing to repel a Japanese invasion". The memorial was described as a "ponderous monstrosity" likely to be defaced.

The Minet archives contain a great deal of correspondence between Lambeth council and its equivalents in Shinjuku, all very friendly and civil if rather stilted and often deadly slow. The mayor of Shinjuku, Katsutada Yamamoto,  paid two visits to Lambeth during this time, and he was always eager to praise the beauty of the trees on the Common, comparing them with the beauty of the cherry blossom season in Japan.

He was keen to stress that the statue should  enhance the "beauty of Clapham": it would not be on a grand scale like Nelson's column, but "not so small as to be hidden by the summer shrubbery".

The monument, he said, would become "A lasting symbol of UK- Japanese goodwill and friendship".

Despite these attempts to address the criticisms of the first proposed statue, the complaints did not go away. English Heritage said that while it did not categorically oppose the plan, nor did it wholly approve: it felt the statue was "just too big" and suggested one of its own blue plaques on the house where Soseki stayed would be a more fitting memorial.

The Hon Secretary of the Clapham Antiquarian Society was also a tireless campaigner against the "unwanted memorial".

"I can find no evidence that London played an important part in his life," he wrote. "In fact, quite the opposite, he hated it while he was living here."

Well, yes, perhaps he did. He was certainly depressed for much of his short time in London. But there are plenty of literary experts who maintain that it was the difficult London experience that made all the difference to Soseki's writing style, and set him on the course for greatness. You only have to read his few short pieces set in London to see how his imagination had been sparked by the place. See Soseki's The Tower of London.

Another local luminary, James Watson of the Clapham Society, wrote: "The Common is common land, not the suburb of a foreign city of which the people of Lambeth know little or nothing".

Yes, perhaps his assumption was right, but it seems odd to use ignorance as a good reason for not doing something to alleviate it.  Surely this was an opportunity to allow the people of Lambeth to learn a little bit about this distant land, so different and yet in some ways so similar to our own?

So the debate rumbled on, letters and telegrams and phone calls went back and forth, more official visits were arranged. 1988 became 1989, and then on 18 December the council approved the revised scheme. However the case was referred to the Department for the Environment and it still needed the Secretary of State's seal of approval. And this was not forthcoming.

On February 20 1990 the mayor Lambeth advised his peer in Shinjuku to get the Japanese ambassador in London to appeal directly to Chris Patten.

Events moved on at the ultra-slow pace known only to bureaucratic officials who - if not under instruction to kill a project by the slowest possible method - at least appear to be. Reasons for and against the statue continued to be traded throughout that year and the next.

One letter from a distinguished local resident to the Department of the Environment offered the only genuinely aesthetic objection to the monument that I could find: Mr Norman Marsh, CBE, said that the proposed statue looked like something designed for "a late Victorian or Edwardian cemetery".

Still in use - the Victorian cast-iron post box
50 yards up the street from where Soseki
lived, now a part of the Soseki in London
mythology

Maybe he was right. Who knows. A new enquiry began early in 1992, by which time there had been a mayoral election in Shinjuku. All changed, suddenly. There was a new mayor, and it was his sad duty to inform his Lambeth equivalent that it now seemed that funding was "unlikely to be forthcoming".

And then, yes, both Lambeth and Shinjuku authorities designed it was best to call it a day.

So ends the story of the Soseki statue, although you can see a fine portrait bust of the man in the museum at 80 The Chase.

Also, as is clear whenever a large coach of Japanese students pulls up outside, they have other ways of remebering the great writer. Often I have seen groups of students and even schoolchildren walk up the road to the late Victorian post-box. Many selfies are taken. This is the same box into which Soseki posted his many letters home, 114 years ago.

Then there's the English Heritage blue plaque. The occupants of that (now incredibly expensive) house must chuckle at the way their first floor windows are so often photographed in the summer months. Or maybe they don't notice.

Soseki himself, we can be sure, would have been greatly amused by the whole business.


* As a postscript, it was good to see that the local business website thisisclapham.co.uk has included Soseki in its promotional hoardings up by Clapham Common tube. Perhaps they could help press for a proper celebration of the centenary of his death later this year....?

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.