This Other London

by John Rogers

  Along Half Moon Lane and through the gates of Brockwell Park I’m swimming against the tide of revellers leaving the Lambeth Country Show, face-painted children and cider-smelling adults tethered by balloons.

  What is left in Brockwell Park at the end of the weekend festivities are the die-hards, those not wanting to let go of South London’s premier event of the year. It’s a fluid mass of Crusties, Rastas, green-wellied Clapham Sloanes, dads with one kid on their shoulders and another in a papoose – the whole London melting pot spilled out onto the grass. The music is an Afro-folk-dub hybrid that would struggle to survive beyond the park gates. In the spirit of the rural country fair there are tents for various homemade concoctions and home-grown produce, and prizes are awarded for monster marrows and colossal courgettes cultivated in Lambeth backyards and allotments. If I’d been here earlier I could have carried away organic jams from Camberwell, artisan breads from Stockwell and craft beers brewed in Brixton. It is a peculiar ritual recalling the rustic past of these lush uplands. The red faces and flailing arms around the live stage and the beer tent indicate that it has clearly struck a chord with the locals.

  I’d originally planned to pack a swimming costume for this walk – to take a dip in Brockwell Lido. It looks like a glamorous bathing spot on friends’ Facebook pictures, an urban beach. Late one night in the mid-1990s the BBC broadcast a fantastic documentary about the lido; it seemed so exotic, like a rare treasure. Opened in 1937, relatively close to the open-air pool at Tooting Bec, it was based on the design of the lido at London Fields. Given the climate, it’s a great endorsement of the stoicism of Londoners that there are any open-air swimming baths in the city at all. By all accounts, Brockwell Lido is thriving and as fashionable today as the Dulwich Springs were in the 19th century.

  Leaving the festival stragglers behind I head out of the park towards Tulse Hill in search of the curious story recounted in Where London Sleeps of a Victorian observatory. Walter Bell described the private observatory built by William Huggins on Upper Tulse Hill, from where he pioneered the new science of astrophysics in the mid-1800s. From his house Huggins used the latest spectroscope technology to ‘solve the riddle of the stars’. The Mars Rover pootling around the Red Planet as I scan the house numbers might not have been able to reach Mars without Huggins’s discoveries about the chemical composition of the stars and their movements in relation to the earth.

  No. 90 Upper Tulse Hill, possibly one of the most significant addresses in British science, is now part of a long terrace of 1980s council houses. I scan the clouds to look into the same skies from which Huggins drew his groundbreaking discoveries. It’s an inauspicious spot, not even the highest point in the area. It’s difficult to imagine Professor Brian Cox standing here delivering one of his breathy pieces to camera as he popularizes for a mass TV audience the science Huggins helped open up.

  I sit down on a low wall and consider this as the conclusion to the walk. Back over at the velodrome the BBQ would be in full swing and hopefully the riders involved in the crash are back up on their feet and chomping into a burger. In Ladywell Fields the flowing waters of the Ravensbourne will be just starting to power the lights, projections and music as the festivities begin. Up in the heavens stars drift into alignment above Tulse Hill.

  From Tulse Hill I follow the course of a tributary that according to Barton flowed along Leander Road into the Effra. A few turns and I find myself on Brixton Hill opposite the notorious prison built in the 1850s for female convicts sentenced to transportation. You know you’re in Brixton when a woman casually walks past you with a blue carrier bag on her head. There’s a tangible increase of energy as you approach the centre of Brixton – it closes in from all sides. I imagine a young Vincent van Gogh wandering this way when he lived in Hackford Road, SW9 – no wonder he want mad. The young Dutchman fell in love with his landlady’s daughter, Ursula, who didn’t return his affections, so it would have been a forlorn Van Gogh moping round Brixton for some of those formative years. When working at a school in Isleworth in 1875 he wrote letters to his brother Theo describing walks he took into the suburbs and long strolls to the City beside hedges of hawthorn and blackberry, noting the frequency of elm trees.

  The traffic on Brixton Hill congests and congeals, sirens squeal as police cars snake through the fractured lines of vehicles. It’s a rude awakening after seven hours of hill walking. But by now I can’t seem to stop. In the end the walking becomes compulsive. Cresting Brixton Hill I’m still not completely sure where to terminate this schlep – the shimmering image of the Shard at London Bridge sitting perfectly in alignment with Brixton Road looks appealing. That is until I pass Electric Avenue.

  ‘Electric Avenue’ was a hit in 1982 by Eddy Grant – ‘We’re gonna rock down to Electric Avenue’ (that’s off the top of my head after thirty years). The song is apparently about the riots of 1981 that put the area on the front pages and to this day still define Brixton in the minds of the general public. When I worked in a small gallery on Brixton Station Road, local author Alex Wheatle did a memorable reading from his novel East of Acre Lane. The book tells the back story of the events leading up to the riots from the perspective of a group of young black men finding their way in the world. The central character, Biscuit, is in the market on Electric Avenue looking for his girlfriend when the call to action goes up and the trouble kicks off.

  Biscuit, who was in Electric Avenue looking for Denise, heard the commotion. He ran to see what was happening and couldn’t believe his eyes as he reached Coldharbour Lane. Youths were hurling missiles at the police vehicles that were rushing to the scene. A car driven by a black man with a youth in the passenger seat, his T-shirt reddened, almost ran Biscuit over. ‘Bloodfire!’ he gasped. ‘Revolution ah start.’

  Brixton Market in full swing on a Saturday is one of the great sights of London and deserves to be the real reason for the area’s fame. The fishmongers, butchers, fruit and veg traders, the noise, the banter and the bustle. And the arcades. Thank God they saved the Brixton Arcades from the brief threat of being turned into Xeroxed malls.

  The influential German theorist Walter Benjamin created his seminal work, The Arcades Project, whiling away the hours in the covered precincts of early 20th-century Paris. The Brixton Arcades, in conjunction with the market, are every bit as beguiling and worthy of eulogy.

  Market Row, Brixton

  Benjamin saw the arcades as being like the portals to the underworld of ancient Greece, ‘a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise’. The arcades were ‘galleries leading into the city’s past’ that we pass during the day not realizing the wonders they hold. But then, ‘At night … their denser darkness bursts forth like a threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past – unless, that is, we have emboldened him to turn into the narrow lane.’ In the gloom, as a solitary street cleaner shovels up rotten veg and the fishmongers hose down the pavements, I feel ‘emboldened’, largely by hunger, to enter one of Brixton’s dream-like arcades.

  The covered bazaar of Market Row has been jazzed up, made all cool and Hoxton-trendy. Open-fronted eateries play host to well-dressed twenty-somethings. Maybe this is a portal into Brixton’s past as a Victorian middle-class enclave. The ackee and saltfish place that I used to go to ten years ago seems to have bitten the dust so I settle down on a self-consciously rickety stool in a tapas joint with a plate of bread and cured meat washed down by a bottle of Alhambra beer served in a fancy fluted glass.

  It’s difficult for any ‘dreams to arise’ as Blur’s Parklife album is throbbing through the speakers. Parklife is a great London musical statement from the mid-1990s when London’s greasy spoon caffs and greyhound stadiums were being rediscovered by popular culture. The album artwork features photos of Walthamstow Stadium, which, like Catford, has gone to the dogs. It looks as though the Brixton Arcades are still going strong, though, and Herne Hill Velodrome has a few years’ reprieve to produce a new crop of Olympic heroes.

  The hills
of South London are behind me as I trudge through the crowded High Street with touts offering tickets to that night’s gig at Brixton Academy. People ask for a pound with great eloquence and narrative aplom; there’s none of that ‘Can you spare some change?’ on Brixton High Street. You get an entire dramatic monologue.

  Outside the tube station a man dressed as a leprechaun in a skirt and holding a placard that says ‘Jesus Will Soon Come and Sweep All Politicians from Power’ dances a jig in a wide circle. ‘The costume and the dancing are just to get attention really,’ he tells me. ‘Music and dance are powerful things and have no barriers.’ He then produces a business card from his emerald-green waistcoat before booting up his stereo for the next performance.

  My regular commute usually started on the westbound Central Line platform at Leytonstone. Whilst waiting to travel the two stops to Stratford I felt teased by the ultimate destinations of the trains spelt out in orange dots on the display board. Ealing Broadway, West Ruislip, North Acton and Northolt urged me to abandon the tyranny of the day job and abscond to wander in the western suburbs, following my nose and being guided by the spirit of adventure. This was often my preferred method of travel; Lonely Planet and Rough Guides always seemed intent on negating unscheduled journeys, herding legions of backpackers onto their well-beaten tracks. In my early years in London I would occasionally stand at a bus stop and catch the first bus that came along, or sometimes it would be the fifth bus, and ride it to the end of route. I seemed to send up in Crouch End and Elephant and Castle a disproportionate number of times.

  This fantasy of actively getting lost at the end of the Central Line was still nagging me one lunch break rummaging around in Walden Books in Camden. I picked up Walter Jerrold’s Highways and Byways in Middlesex, published in 1909, with its title stamped into the deep-blue cover in gold Gothic lettering. Somebody once told me Walden was the inspiration for the sitcom Black Books. But the owner is a gentle, benign man, as opposed to Dylan Moran’s scowling, depressive, dipsomaniac Bernard Black – although the interiors of the two shops are uncannily alike. Black Books or not, Walden is a treasure trove of topographical literature.

  As I paid for my copy of Jerrold the owner handed me a complimentary pile of the Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society to pass on to my friend Nick Papadimitriou, who used to work in the shop and spent most of his wages there (Bernard Black was reluctant to sell any books, let alone give them away). Volume 55 features ‘“Our Lost Elysium” – Rural Middlesex: a pictorial essay’ by Michael Hammerson – a compilation of black and white photographs from the early part of the 20th century, a perfect companion to Highways and Byways. Knowing Nick would never relinquish any book about his beloved Middlesex I make photocopies of the pictures.

  Later in the week, on a cold, wet Sunday night, I wandered up to the Wetherspoon’s on Leytonstone High Road with the Jerrold, the photos and an A–Z. This is the pub that mops up the seekers of that last drink of the weekend with its midnight closing; the ‘end of the world’ feel as last orders approaches is one of the most poignant times of the week. I marked the sites of the photos on the A–Z, then read the corresponding pages in Highways and Byways. Mentally, a journey started to come to life. Standing at the bar, waiting for my pint of Terra Firma to settle, the faded pictures, the map and Jerrold’s words converge. The anticipation of a walk to join them together becomes tangible.

  With the maps, pictures and books spread out across the table, memories return of sitting in hostels planning the next move. A trek into the Golden Triangle, a near-death motorbike ride on the way to the temple complex at Sukhothai, an overnight coach journey from Mount Bromo along treacherous, winding roads with a driver buzzed out of his skull on tiny bottles of Thai ‘energy’ drinks. With the Lonely Planet next to useless, the word of mouth passed around in hostel dorms and cafés popular with backpackers became essential. This compendium of traveller folklore was scribbled into the margins of the monsoon-stained travel guide. That life is necessarily transitory, a journey that has to end somewhere. Looking around the Wetherspoon’s as the final pints are drained by Leytonstone’s finest, the backpacker trail took a crazily circuitous route to bring me here.

  I was ready to strike out west but had a full week’s work to negotiate first before I could escape into the ‘lost Elysium’ of rural Middlesex. The five days of commutes were put to good use, making notes, finding references, looking for hints and trails, dangling from the orange poles of the Overground from Stratford to Kentish Town West juggling books and sheaves of paper. The excitement of the coming venture built with each day. I forget to scowl at hipsters boarding the train at Hackney Central with their oversized bikes. I endure meetings in which the gabble of bullshit sounds as if it’s refracted through cotton wool, but the imagined gurgling of the River Brent through Greenford is crystal clear. I check BBC weather forecasts and tentatively see if I can interest the kids in joining me with references to Saxon burial grounds.

  The day before the expedition I decided to abandon the plan to ride the tube to its terminus and randomly drift from there. The photos of the ‘lost Elysium’ and the sketches in Jerrold fixed my mind on certain locations. There is a rustic scene of a footpath leading from Horsenden Hill to Sudbury Hill Station (1915) – a man and woman in Sunday best and straw boaters stand either side of a five-bar gate staring into the distance, their bikes propped against another gate next to the white post marking the footpath. One is captioned, ‘Cross Roads, Western Avenue, Perivale’ (1937), showing the intersection of two roads flanked by tall trees, surrounded by muddy fields with the first sproutings of the white buildings that would soon overrun the area. There’s a photo looking towards Perivale from Ealing taken in 1904, with Horsenden Hill rising above a landscape without a house or a factory in sight. Place a tower on the top of the hill and it could pass for the famous view of Glastonbury Tor.

  Perivale from Ealing in 1904, from ‘“Our Lost Elysium” – Rural Middlesex: a pictorial essay’, by Michael Hammerson, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society 55, 2004

  Lining the photos up on the map, a course opens up on the page that follows an ancient trackway down through Ealing to Hanwell. A publication celebrating the jubilee of the now defunct Middlesex County Council in 1939 describes the three Neolithic roads that ran from the crossing of the Thames at Brentford:

  The first ran eastwards through the districts known to-day as Strand-on-the-Green, Chiswick, Fulham and Chelsea to Charing Cross; the second led between Hanwell and Ealing over Horsenden and Sudbury Hills to Brockley Hill at Stanmore, where there was an encampment, and the third went by way of Hanwell and Hayes to the ford across the River Colne at Uxbridge.

  ***

  It’s Remembrance Sunday with brilliant clear blue skies when I find myself at the work-a-day tube platform. I’m heading west for the first time since the walk out to Hounslow Heath in May, when I’d been tempted by a turning to Hanwell off the punishing Great West Road but had, thankfully, resisted. Today, that would be where I’d hope to end up by the early 4.15 sunset to take in the glory of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Wharncliffe Viaduct.

  Clattering north on the Piccadilly Line to Sudbury Hill the tube driver announced that there would be two minutes’ silence at 11 a.m., ‘unless there is an emergency,’ he reassures us. Tube drivers are amongst the great heroes of London, stately guardians of our daily travels. They’re up there with late-night shopkeepers who serve after-hours booze and emergency Calpol (the two go well together), and the staff of sandwich bars who seem to remember how many sugars you take if you buy your coffee from them more than once.

  The Wembley Arch appears over the rooftops near Alperton before I alight at Sudbury Hill. It’s easy to take the architecture of the London Underground for granted. Most of the time you’re in a hurry, the ticket machines don’t work, you can’t find your Oyster card, the carriage is packed and somebody is playing grime remixes through the speaker of their phone. B
ut the stations on this branch of the Piccadilly Line are beautiful enough to induce Stendhal syndrome, the condition suffered by people when they are overwhelmed by the beauty of the art and architecture of a particular place. Sudbury Hill is another modernist jewel created by architect Charles Holden, who also built the University of London’s Senate House, famous for its appearance in Ghostbusters.

  Holden designed over 50 tube stations from the 1920s onwards, including the labyrinthine ‘ambulatory’ of Piccadilly Circus and the domed Valhalla at Gants Hill that was a tribute to the opulent Moscow Metro. The Royal Institute of British Architects stated that ‘it was the largest building programme in the capital shaped by a single architect since Christopher Wren rebuilt the City churches destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.’

  Holden built Sudbury Hill in 1931 and according to its English Heritage listing it still sports many of its original features, including the casements around the tall ticket-hall window with its distinctive period roundel with enlarged U and D in UndergrounD. It’s in the maligned corners of suburbia that the real architectural gems are hidden, like the early-modernist experimental housing block at Pinner Court and the Bauhaus-influenced Eastcote town centre.

  In the early part of the 20th century London Transport actively encouraged commuters to head into Metroland through a series of beautiful underground posters. One from 1912 shows Constable-like chocolate-box scenery of a babbling brook – with overhanging oak and elm trees – winding itself through a lush green pasture with the caption, ‘To Snatch Space in Green Pastures and Beside Still Waters Book to Alperton, Sudbury or South Harrow’. The ‘New Suburb’ of Sudbury Hill itself was advertised in 1916 with the slogan, ‘Live Where It Is Only a Step from Your Front Door into the Country’, then beneath this the more practical sell: ‘Cheap Seasons, Cheap Fares, Cheap Rents, Special Trains for Workers Mornings & Evenings’. And the advert that I have responded to 103 years after it was plastered on District Line platforms: ‘Book to Perivale, Sudbury or Harrow for Field-Path Rambles in Old-Fashioned Country’.