This Other London

by John Rogers

  The previous evening I’d rewarded myself for the two hours’ research with an episode of Sean Lock’s sitcom 15 Storeys High, a lost TV classic that got left out behind the estate bins. Lock plays a character called Vince, ‘the most sullen man in Britain’, who lives on the fifteenth floor of a South London tower block with his naively cheerful flatmate, Errol. It’s a view of tower-block living that you rarely see on the telly. Vince has a job for a start, as a lifeguard at Ladywell Baths. The main storyline of each episode is broken up with surreal vignettes of the people living in other flats on the estate, like the table-tennis obsessed brothers, Billy Bailey’s self-indulgent guitar teacher and Peter Serafinowicz’s wannabe boy band manager. ‘Good,’ Nick says, as I tell him about it while admiring the view from his balcony. ‘I’m glad someone has shown a positive view of people who live in tower blocks, so I don’t have to.’

  Finally heading out an hour later than planned Nick feeds the remaining two cats that live in the abandoned garages outside. We stop on the metal footbridge over the six throbbing lanes of the Hendon Way and take in the view northwards towards the Book of Dave landscape – the London that will endure if somehow the Mayans got it right and a biblical flood is on its way at some point in the afternoon before 3 p.m., after which it would be 22 December in Australia and the world would be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Nick points out the landmarks – tower blocks in Hendon, ‘Mill Hill promontory’ with the green-domed roof of the National Institute of Medical Research mentioned both in the Book of Dave and Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital, the Hampstead Massif, or the Isle of Ham in The Book of Dave. Finally, far away, a blur in the distance above the rooftops, ‘the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire Tertiary Escarpment’, the subject of Nick’s book Scarp. This belt of high land in front of us has been as much an inspiration to the roadside prose writers of the 21st century as the Lake District was to the Romantic poets. Expect boarding houses and hearty weekend breaks on Scarp and Mill Hill in the next century.

  The bridge takes us on to Cricklewood Lane, once the heart of Britain’s aerospace industry. Handley Page aircraft manufacturer had both its factory located here and an aerodrome nearby. It was a Handley Page plane that made that first commercial flight from Hounslow Heath in 1919 (at that stage there were no customs facilities at Cricklewood). The Cricklewood Aerodrome was to have the unwanted distinction of being the site of the first passenger air crash in Britain. As far as I can tell the site of the factory is now occupied by a Virgin gym. In between it had a brief spell as a boutique film studio, where the cult horror flick Hellraiser was made.

  Nick and I admire a crumbling factory next door. The date 1913 is stamped into the flue at the top of the iron drainpipe. A slippery alleyway running down the side is littered with fly-tipped rubbish – the usual collection of mattresses and black bin-liners – not worthy of the Bob and Roberta Smith ‘unofficial sculpture’ tagline. It’s a beautiful building, and would have been part of what was once a thriving industrial zone. There was so much creativity and production going on in Cricklewood they even had time to reinvent the humble potato into the nation’s favourite snack food at the first Smith’s crisps factory.

  Cricklewood was also where theatre entrepreneur Oswald Stoll opened a film studio in 1919. Maybe he was drawn in by the ‘Wood’ in the name, simply substituting ‘Crickle’ for ‘Holly’, hoping some of the stardust would rub off along the way. Amongst the first productions was an ambitious early venture in colour film using a process called Prizma Color (the alternative to Technicolor). Made in 1922, The Glorious Adventure was a sprawling epic set during the Great Fire of London and co-starring the Duke of Rutland’s daughter, who was reckoned to be the ‘most beautiful woman in England’ (by the Duke of Rutland). Stoll even brought over a Hollywood director to Cricklewood to take the helm, Sheffield-born J. Stuart Blackton, who had directed a whole string of studio pictures dating back to 1897.

  Where the Hollywood moguls had built their empires in the California desert, the British impresarios headed to the industrial fringe of London. Around the same time, silent Shakespeare productions were made in Walthamstow and a young Alfred Hitchcock was starting his career at Gainsborough Studios in the backstreets on the border between Islington and Hackney.

  Stoll continued building his movie empire by the Edgware Road with films such as The Secret Kingdom (1925), Dick Turpin (1935) and Old Mother Riley (1937). The epics and musicals left Cricklewood in 1938 and it says much about its legacy that the BBC recently produced a spoof documentary called The Cricklewood Greats about an imaginary film studio parodying the earnest programmes about Ealing and Shepperton. There was no reference to the fact that a real documentary on the Greats of Cricklewood could have been made; Cricklewood was chosen as the last place you’d believe had been home to a venerable pillar of the British Film Industry. There’s now a Matalan on the site where the studios stood – the memory erased and replaced with a mockumentary and a clothes shop. It’s a shame Stoll didn’t have the chutzpah to spell out CRICKLEWOOD in enormous letters across Dudden Hill.

  From a thriving cluster of cutting-edge industries, Cricklewood became another of the London suburbs whose name worked as a punchline. The surreal sitcom The Goodies that ran through the 1970s both entertaining and baffling my young mind was set in Cricklewood, perhaps to act as a counterbalance to the otherwise bonkers nature of the plot and dialogue. Anything could happen in the Goodies’ Cricklewood – the last dodo would turn up there, they’d fall down a large hole and get eaten by a Tyrannosaurus rex, a new army camp is built as a children’s playground, and a kitten is accidentally given a growth formula, turning it into Kitten Kong.

  Cricklewood is now being sucked into a regeneration scheme known as ‘Brent Cross Cricklewood’ – effectively an extension of the shopping complex by the North Circular Road. From telecoms, crisps, film production and the birth of the aviation industry to a retail park in the space of a century. It’s not all doom and gloom, though – there’s a new Travelodge on Cricklewood Broadway.

  Nick and I duck into Tesco Metro for sandwich triple packs and bags of Walkers crisps, as Pepsico decided to rebrand Cricklewood’s most famous product.

  You can see that the Broadway once had a tinge of Edwardian glamour when it was the hub of the northern trolleybus routes. There’s a fine modernist building with what looks like the original blue tiling and grid-pattern windows peering down on the plastic Argos and Subway shop frontages below.

  The Broadway is part of the Edgware Road, which in turn is built along the route of the Roman Watling Street, which partly followed an existing Ancient British trackway linking St Albans to Canterbury. I’ve started to become blasé about walking Roman roads and ancient trackways in the way that I eventually got tired of Khmer temples and reclining Buddhas when I was backpacking in South East Asia. I’m far more drawn to the rows of Victorian railway-workers cottages set back off the road that look exactly like a street used in an episode of The Goodies I’d recently watched. Nick says the cottages have long since been tastefully converted and ‘occupied by desktop publishers and charity fundraisers’. The one-time supposedly ‘Loony Lefties’ that put the London Borough of Brent in the national press have gone mainstream, like the ideals that they were previously derided for.

  Brent was one of the London councils, along with Lambeth, Hackney and Haringey, targeted by the Tory press for their supposed bonkers policies in the mid-1980s. The red tops ached with fabricated stories of kids forced to sing ‘Baa, Baa, White Sheep’ and the banning of black bin-liners. When Brent East elected ‘Red Ken’ Livingstone as its MP in 1987 it was seen as being at the heart of this leftish scourge that believed in crazy things like gay rights, anti-racism and environmentalism – all ideas now adopted by the Tory party as conventional wisdom. Nobody even bothers to call Ken Livingstone ‘Red’ anymore. The genuinely bonkers Tory Boris Johnson, who replaced him as Mayor of London, merely painted Ken’s proposed municipal hire-bikes blue. N
ext he’ll replace them with penny farthings, and eventually space hoppers.

  We pass near Ken’s Cricklewood home as we make our way towards Gladstone Park. Nick poses outside St Michael’s Church to recreate a scene from a video I shot on a walk we did together in 2005 that followed a water main running across the region. I’d only just met Nick and this had been the second walk we’d done together, joined by a friend, Peter Knapp, a talented photographer. It had been my habit to take a camcorder on walks to document the route and the landscape. I’d been this doing throughout a two-year Arts Council-funded project with my sister in our home town of High Wycombe and the footage had been essential in justifying to the Arts Council what we’d done with their money. But every time I raised the camera to grab a few seconds of a view or a manhole cover Nick would step in front of the lens and deliver a burst of his philosophy of ‘deep topography’. Here outside St Michael’s he’d talked about how he was making legal ‘psychogeographic claims’ on areas of London that would include the walk along the water main, Bedfont Court Estate and the sewage treatment works at Rammey Marsh near Enfield. My artful shot panning across the Brent Valley to Harrow had been photo-bombed by Nick talking about mysterious ‘storage vats of regional memory’.

  There was a strange atmosphere in the London air that afternoon. It was the day after a series of failed suicide attacks on the bus and tube network two weeks on from the devastating 7/7 bombings, and three of the attempted bombers were still on the loose. Jean Charles de Menezes had been executed by armed police officers at Stockwell Station that very morning. I’d felt particularly self-conscious carrying a rucksack on the Overground up to the Finchley Road.

  The walk seemed like a way to get a different perspective on the city at a time of collective trauma – a means to peer behind its cloak of intense paranoia. Walking removed us from the troubled psyche of the city as we engaged in a slightly ludicrous trek following an underground water pipe. For a few hours whatever else was going on felt distant – the logic of the quest was all that mattered.

  We eventually ended up behind an abandoned industrial unit somewhere near Stonebridge Park in the pitch black, using Pete’s camera flash to peer into a chasm that had opened up in the tarmac revealing a large pool of water – it looked like the kind of environment in which Gollum would happily thrive. Nick was over the moon. We’ve been walking together ever since.

  Excerpts of the video footage went on YouTube when it was still a relative novelty and soon ‘deep topography’ was being discussed at academic conferences held at provincial former polytechnics. I decided to give up attempting to film the landscape and just shoot Nick over the course of the year. I pitched it to the BBC as a ‘psychedelic Wainwright’. They turned it down. Commissioning editors at Channel 4 looked at me sympathetically, shaking their heads whilst worrying about the state of mine, but I made the film anyway. That’s how I’d ended up trying not to fall into the Grand Union Canal at Perivale and being portrayed as a ‘bat-eared sycophant’ played by Ron Howard in a Will Self novel. Russell Brand, Iain Sinclair and Will Self contributed in-depth interviews to the film. But mostly it was just me and Nick schlepping around. The final shoot was my first attempt at walking further than the end of my road after the knee operation, trudging out to Mogden Purification Works on a freezing December afternoon.

  The resulting film, The London Perambulator, was shown at festivals to sell-out audiences and had a special screening at the Curzon Soho. I sat down in the back row of the auditorium and reflected that if I hadn’t made the film I’d be in the audience myself. In the bar afterwards Nick was offered a lucrative publishing contract. We made a radio series for Resonance FM. BBC’s Newsnight asked permission to use clips from the film in a profile about Nick and deep topography. Since then I’d made another self-produced documentary profile, this time of the artist Bob and Roberta Smith, had worked on a multimillion-dollar project (not my own), and in an odd throwback to the plot of Walking to Hollywood had been dogged by a film crew for a week in Los Angeles.

  Now we were back where that journey had started, itself a stop-off on a longer backward journey to the project with Cathy in High Wycombe in which I’d first used old walking guides to open up a seemingly familiar landscape. That project was also part of a regression as I returned from my travels abroad finally realizing that the true adventure would be closer to home, itself a direct link to childhood walks with my father.

  As Nick strikes his pose in front of the church he assumes I’m taking a photo, but in fact he’s being captured in full 1080/24p HD video frozen in a rare moment of silence. After ten seconds I tell him I’m shooting video. Without breaking his stance, holding the distinctive green metal railings, he says, ‘We’re nourished by the Metropolitan Water Board Water Main. If they ever dug it up we’d shrivel and die; we’d end up working at Walmart for £4 a year.’

  St Michael’s was also the scene of another performance from the past. The church hall had been the home of the École Philippe Gaulier theatre school, famous for its clown training. This is where Sacha Baron Cohen learnt to become Ali G and Borat. Household names such as Helena Bonham Carter made their way to this nondescript suburban street to rediscover the secrets of the craft from the notoriously cranky old French maestro, Philippe Gaulier. I enrolled here to study Clown in 2000. It was a revelation.

  This wasn’t the Zippo’s Circus or kids’ party clown – Gaulier preached an intense philosophy of comedy based on revealing your humanity and sensitivity. ‘Complicité’ was at the heart of the skill – this was learnt through a simple exercise involving garden canes; it seemed like a kind of magic. He told us that the clown had travelled far and suffered much, that’s why he always carried a suitcase around. I may have done the travelling bit but the suffering was to come over the course. If he thought your performance was boring he would quietly lead the rest of the class out of the room. ‘You don’t love us enough,’ he would say as they departed, ‘you may as well stay here alone, your performance will be just the same in an empty room.’ That was on good days. Other days you would simply be dismissed as a ‘cretin’ but then told to be ‘a superb cretin’. ‘The clown is an idiot with one idea.’ ‘When a clown is in the shit we love him.’ ‘Enjoy your flop and think you’ve done something amazing.’ These mantras were drilled into the class that had come together from all over the world, including some experienced professional actors and comedians, but in Philippe’s class we were all beginners.

  Making him crack so much as the faintest smile was one of the greatest feelings of achievement I’d ever experienced. I wish I’d bought my red nose along on the walk to hang on the gate. It’s a nursery now and kids are natural clowns; somehow most of us forget this skill in the rush to grow up.

  We stop in front of Cricklewood Pumping Station. It’s a building whose architecture by far transcends its function – it dwarves St Michael’s in both size and ambition. The tall, arched windows that flank the sides must flood the engine hall with brilliant sunshine at this time of day, illuminating the polished steam pumps. It was used as the engine room of the Titanic in the original 1958 Pinewood film, A Night to Remember. Nick had described the pumps in the grounds as ‘inlet valves for unmediated cosmic energy’. Its day-to-day job is much more prosaic – passing the water supply across North London, irrigating the homes of the ever-expanding suburbs. Even in the digital age we’re still dependent on these steam-punk fantasies to provide our most basic needs.

  Further along Olive Road it’s sad to see Cricklewood Library boarded up, the ‘Save Cricklewood Library’ sign still optimistically attached to the metal railing outside. The Kilburn Times reported that once Brent Council closed the library it reverted to its former owners, All Souls College, Oxford, who have been in possession of land in the area since at least the 15th century. There had been a determined campaign to run the library as a Community Space, and for a while neighbouring Kensal Rise Library was squatted in order to keep it alive. Local campaigners ran a su
ccessful pop-up library at the Cricklewood branch.

  Lately, the Kilburn Times reports that All Souls have decided to sell the land to a developer to build flats. There’s a bitter irony to a great and privileged educational institution selling off a library in a less affluent area. It’s somehow worse than the alarming rate at which pubs are being bought up by supermarkets: at least you can still buy beer and crisps at a Tesco Metro. I wouldn’t fancy your chances of borrowing a book from the people living in the new flats and using their internet for an hour, then picking up some leaflets for local Zumba classes before having a quick browse through Auto Trader on your way out.

  We move across Gladstone Park. As a gardener’s son I take umbrage at the naming of this former garden after a prime minister who merely used it as a place to unwind, whilst the nameless gardeners who tended and nurtured the grounds remain unhonoured. The house where Gladstone stayed has been demolished while the park prospers, so perhaps the gardeners have had the last laugh after all.

  The green parakeets I’d seen at Perivale churchyard are also here, roosting high in the bare boughs of a plane tree. A lady walking her dogs tells us that they escaped from London zoo in the 1960s and that there are now 40,000 breeding pairs. Nick instantly contradicts her: ‘I’d been told they escaped from Jimmy Page’s private aviary.’ They argue about this for some time, neither one backing down, and I’m willing Nick to concede that the zoo story is more plausible. His version sounds like yet another example of the colourful mythology surrounding Led Zeppelin. Next thing we know ‘Stairway to Heaven’ will have been written about this steeply ascending path through the park and John Bonham is buried on the summit of Dollis Hill (hence the litter of empty vodka bottles). The one thing they both agree on is that the parakeets are found all along the course of the Brent, the river seemingly providing these exotic tropical birds with an ideal habitat.