This Other London

by John Rogers

  Past S. Cohen’s emporium of wonderful clutter and through Sainsbury’s car park leads to one of the most significant of the old pleasure grounds – White Conduit House. Tolpuddle Street, named in honour of the mass march that mustered here in support of the martyrs, brings up a memory of another famous convict. One afternoon in 2005, with a baby Ollie strapped to my chest in a sling, I wandered into a large throng of photographers and TV crews penned in behind a barrier outside the police station opposite White Conduit House.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked the bobby at the door.

  ‘We’ve arrested a celebrity.’

  ‘What type?’ I probed, whilst the media throng listened for any snippets of info.

  ‘A singer.’

  ‘Any particular singer?’

  ‘Pete Doherty.’

  ‘Ah … Who’s he?’ I asked with my sleep-deprived baby brain.

  The policeman looked stumped. A cameraman eagerly jumped in to fill the silence.

  ‘He’s the lead singer of the Libertines.’ He then turned to the journo next to him, meekly saying, ‘That’s right, isn’t it? That is the name of the band?’

  Fame is hollow and transient in all its forms but White Conduit House held on to its for far longer than the Libertines or any of their spin-offs. It lives on as a Georgian restaurant, Little Georgia, but, high up, letters carved just beneath the eves spell out its former name. The Book of Days records that it marked ‘the extreme verge of London’, famous across the city for its hot loaves. There were firework displays during the week, balloon rides drew huge crowds and boxes for tea drinking hung with pictures were cut into the hedges of the long walks. A ballroom was built and archery practised in the extensive grounds.

  White Conduit House

  The small playground and Culpepper Community Garden behind Little Georgia could lay claim to being the true home of cricket. The nobility of London used to play cricket on White Conduit Fields until one of their bowlers, Thomas Lord, found a new ground in Marylebone and the world-famous MCC was born at Lord’s. The Georgian restaurant is closed so I can’t check to see if this famous connection is celebrated. When it was the Penny Farthing pub there was a framed blazer on the wall and near the fag machine a kind of dusty cricket monument made from a bat and pads resting on a leather kit bag. I only went there a couple of times; like White Conduit House of lore it became a haunt for ne’er-do-wells and eventually closed.

  I stopped to tie my shoelace on a low, circular brick wall topped with an iron railing that I’d never previously given much thought to. Its sole purpose seems to be to protect a patch of weeds, and gather fizzy-drink bottles and chocolate wrappers. It now strikes me as odd. Chambers has a sketch of the old stone casing of the conduit that gave its name to the pleasure grounds. It’s mentioned in 16th-century documents as feeding water to the Charterhouse in Clerkenwell via an aqueduct. By 1827 the conduit ‘was in a pitiable state of neglect’. Could this be it, the source of the spring, an oddity on the pavement? White Conduit House is holding on to its secrets.

  I pop into the cornershop across the road that kept me supplied with cans of beer and packets of Pampers during the years I lived on the Barnsbury Estate. Today I’m just buying a Twix. One day on the run to get the gas card charged up I walked in whilst a group of boys were excitedly regaling Borat behind the counter with the story of the suitcase they had just fished out of Regent’s Canal, which runs past the bottom of the estate. ‘There was a leg with half a bum,’ one said matter-of-factly. A torso and other limbs were recovered from the water. The police initially thought the victim had been murdered in a ritual killing. The Evening Standard headline ran ‘VOODOO FEAR OVER BODY IN REGENT’S PARK CANAL’. ‘RIPPER KILLING HORROR’ screamed the Islington Gazette. It turned out to be a young Somali woman, Nasra Ismail, who had been living in a homeless shelter in King’s Cross and working as a prostitute. She was murdered by an unemployed 53-year-old punter by the name of Daniel Archer who lived nearby in Conistone Way, close to the old Caledonian Cattle Market. I made a note on my blog that however much I loved the area we would move before the kids were old enough to go fishing.

  All is quiet as I slowly wander through the estate car park. Its pre-war U-shaped blocks felt like a comforting brick embrace in those skint but happy baby years. We lived in a one-bed ground-floor flat by the lift. In the days after we brought our first newborn home from the hospital people we’d never seen before came to the door with gifts and money. Bin-liners full of brand-name baby clothes were regularly left for us outside. After sleepless nights of crying, neighbours gently approached us the next day with suggested remedies and reassurances that everything would be all right. On warm evenings we put a fold-up table outside the front door, turning the paving slabs into a terrazzo. Friends came and sat on the ground, music oozed from flats above and met in the air, forming impromptu remixes. They were good times.

  Our flat was sold by the landlord and the new owner has raised a high fence around the front door. There’s no sign of Brian, who used to sit outside his front door like a sentinel, even in cold weather like today. It strikes me that I’m walking on the path to the toddler playground where Ollie took his first steps outside. As soon as he was confident on his feet he insisted I take him on night-time laps of the estate, stopping to examine every cigarette butt and snail that we passed. Kids are natural urban explorers.

  I’m tempted to follow the toddler trail down to Regent’s Canal, where it emerges from the tunnel running from the other side of Angel. But that would take me on a wholly other drift – I have my sights set firmly on Hornsey.

  The end block of the estate on Copenhagen Street is called Copenhagen House – both take their name from Copenhagen Fields, which now lies under the Market Estate, further north off the Cally. In 1795 a crowd of 40,000 people gathered at Copenhagen House Inn in support of the London Corresponding Society, which was committed to the idea of universal suffrage and parliamentary reform. It was from here that up to 100,000 supporters of the Tolpuddle Martyrs marched.

  The inn had been one of the original pleasure gardens that drew city folk north. ‘Sex workers use the park and accost people on Market Road,’ warned a bulletin put out by the Friends of Caledonian Park in 2005. The working girls had been pushed north by the development of King’s Cross. The pleasure grounds and old cattle market were taken over by pimps, prostitutes, kerb-crawlers, and undercover police surveillance twitching in the bushes. Men reading their papers on the park benches were approached for business. The Islington Gazette carried the gruesome story of a prostitute picked up in Market Road then pushed out of a seven-and-a-half-tonne lorry and crushed to death under its back wheels after rowing about the cost of oral sex. The estate deteriorated badly over the years and residents were quoted in the Gazette describing it as ‘hell’. The tall Victorian clock tower left over from its time in the Caledonian Cattle Market stuck out as an incongruous remnant of its momentous past life. Pock-marked murals in the courtyard were further echoes, along with the gin palaces in the undergrowth. The estate was eventually demolished and rebuilt from the ground up.

  Heading into Barnard Park I pass the dodgy Irish boozer where I’d seen a pre-fame Russell Brand perform to an audience of three people, including the staff. Russell had been part of that group of comedians I’d met in the rehearsal room above a pub in Hounslow. Whilst others had gradually fallen away he’d steadily refined his craft over the ensuing years and here he was headlining the gig. As I’d walked in the door the barman had passed me on the way out with a bleeding head. When Russell arrived the MC announced that the gig had been cancelled because there wasn’t an audience, assuring him that he’d still be paid. This didn’t deter Russell. Not only did he perform for the few that were there but he put on a bravura extended set. The barman’s blood and broken glass on the floor were quickly forgotten. He performed the same material two years later to a packed Albert Hall live on Channel 4 as he was being catapulted into the national consciousness. Som
e of the seeds of that triumph had been sown in the empty pub on Copenhagen Street.

  Barnard Park was a schizophrenic place. Islington has such a paucity of open spaces that it can ill afford them to suffer from such mental instability. At night teenagers engaged in bacchanalian frenzies. Next morning, pushing Ollie and later baby Joe to the swings in a pram, you’d have to dodge burnt-out scooters and clear up the smashed Smirnoff bottles. Once it was safe, Oliver would hold us hostage in the playground for up to five hours straight, gleefully moving from the geodesic climbing frame to the concrete sandpit (the sand had been removed because it was full of broken glass) and on to the Zebedee things, round and round, Joe watching him from the pram with a Zen-like gaze.

  Seven years later a man in an anorak on his own wistfully gazing into an empty children’s playground probably looks odd but there’s nobody around so it doesn’t matter. I’d been hoping for an early shot of spring but instead it’s been bitterly cold. In the time that I’m standing reminiscing about a pre-Xbox era the sun breaks through and the temperature lifts by a degree or two.

  The nocturnal frenzies and scooter races of the local delinquents would have been audible to Tony Blair, who lived yards away in Richmond Crescent. The houses in Richmond Avenue curiously have sphinxes and obelisks either side of the steps up to the front door. Some of the sphinxes have their eyeballs painted in white, which gives them an unsettling look. It’s said they reflect the Victorian fascination with all things Egyptian when the houses were built. Graham Hancock believes that the sphinx in Giza is several thousand years older than previously thought and along with the pyramids represent part of a giant star-map laid out on earth pointing towards the Belt of Orion. I can’t work out if these sphinxes are aligned with the Belt of Orion but they do appear to be staring directly along the route to the northern heights.

  Sphinxes on Richmond Avenue

  Following the sphinxes’ gaze takes me across Thornhill Square, the mother of the Barnsbury squares. Barnsbury, like other parts of the borough, was depopulated after the war, houses were bomb-damaged, others neglected. It’s incredible now to think that some of the most sought-after property in London could barely be given away fifty years ago. The Luftwaffe could be said to have played a significant role in the gentrification of Islington through this process of war-time blight. As the city started to be rebuilt, one side of Caledonian Road was adopted by the property-savvy middle classes, the other spawned new council estates on the bomb-sites. Two Londons sit side by side.

  Coming through the Barnsbury streets of towering, white Victorian piles on a No. 153 bus from Hornsey as a student was like being on safari. We gawped out through the moving window at a curious habitat belonging to a different species. What was this secluded world where the houses were marked with Blue Plaques, we wondered? What were its customs and values? It felt like a world that we couldn’t access, visible only from the bus for a few stops before it had gone. It still retains that air of distance, even on foot. Chalk to the cheese of the pebbledash civilization of Sudbury.

  I’m tempted to stop for a pint in the Hemingford Arms. The inside looks like a bric-a-brac shop turned inside out. I sat one evening nervously sipping a pint under a huge antique pram dangling from the ceiling. There was an accordion and a tuba hanging over the table in front. I picked a book randomly off the shelf; it was Pilgrim’s Progress, this memory a message from the past urging me forward.

  Roman Way is within the sphinxes’ gaze and leads behind Pentonville Prison where Pete Doherty did his stir. He wrote a song about it for the Babyshambles album Albion. However ‘wicked and rough’ Doherty found his time, Pentonville had softened since it was built in the 1840s along the lines of a US ‘separate system’. All prisoners were held in solitary confinement in cells that were individually plumbed to prevent the convicts communicating by tapping the pipes. Five wings join in an all-seeing eye at the centre of a panopticon. The regime was so harsh it even upset the Victorians. How many men from these tough estates have ended up being incarcerated on the other side of the road in the ‘Ville’? Harper points out the irony that the prison is, in fact, in Barnsbury rather than Pentonville. Barnsbury Prison sounds a lot nicer but wouldn’t be good for the property prices or the dinner-party conversation.

  These are the kind of backstreets it’s easy to by-pass unless you have a functional reason to seek them out, an address sent by text inviting you to a party, an unusually cheap flat listed as ‘must-see’ in Loot, or you’re on a short-cut taken by a cabbie whose Knowledge extends beyond the tested ‘runs’. It’s a place between postcodes, N1 crunching against N7, with few people sure what to call it.

  I’m looking forward to a mooch among the oddities of Holloway Road. The ‘hollow-ways’ were sunken tracks leading between raised banks – here cutting a path straight up into the northern heights and out beyond London. Holloway Road was a place you could escape to and lose time. With no other plan, find your way to Holloway Road then follow your senses. It’s a place where things always seem to be occurring; you need your wits about you round here. A woman was randomly attacked with a samurai sword in the early hours of Christmas Eve. The No. 43 bus that travels up to Archway and ‘suicide bridge’ has its own crime statistics.

  There’s a shop with a window full of magic talismans, round metal pendants labelled ‘Circle of Life’, ‘Earth Star Flower’, ‘Dharma Wheel’, ‘Aphrodite’s Flower’. Inside are shelves of Protection Water, Money Sprays, potions to break jinxes. A woman casually calls a friend to ask if she would like her to pick anything up, a bit like if you were at the corner shop calling home to see if you needed any milk or bread. After a long pause she asks the lady behind the counter, ‘Have you got anything to ward off evil spirits?’ Then back on the phone to her friend: ‘Yep, they’ve got that but it’s fifteen quid. Do you still want it?’ The friend is clearly sensing psychic disturbance and is prepared to pay the price. Maybe she lives near Barnard Park. ‘Thanks, I’ll have that and might as well take a couple of housework potions as well.’

  The vintage-clothes shop has a rack of velvet jackets sorted into shades from red to blue. This leads to an assortment of 1970s tracksuit tops then leather jackets. I buy a half-price check shirt for my next trip to Walthamstow Village. Blood Brothers Tattoo Studio is boarded up – perhaps it was the name. These are the kinds of shops occultist writer Arthur Machen wrote that ‘stir the blood of the adventurer’ when he was passing through Holloway on his way to investigate a poltergeist case ‘in a certain northern quarter of London’. I’m on my way to the setting of the classic zombie romp Shaun of the Dead, so I sense a certain parallel across the 90-year divide between our journeys.

  I duck into the Coronet to use the toilet. It’s a cinema mutated into a cavernous Wetherspoon’s. Voices echo beneath the central dome, which outdoes the cupola of San Pietro in Little Italy. Old folk elegantly probe their fish and chips and peas, with a pint on the side to wash it down. Wetherspoon’s pubs are almost like an extension of the welfare state with the way they feed and shelter the elderly and the hard-up. A gallery of old-time movie stars stands over the door as you return to Holloway Road.

  The mansion blocks above the shops hold the luminous glow of the sun. The northern heights glimmer in the distance. There is a large campus of my alma mater, City Poly, now merged with North London Polytechnic to form London Metropolitan University. City Poly never had a new annexe built by an award-winning architect. Daniel Libeskind’s crumpled tin-foil graduate centre is called the Orion Building. Pulling out my Geographia Atlas, it’s too much to hope that it forms an alignment with the sphinxes on Richmond Avenue. I place a sheet of A4 across the pages following the line; Holloway Road runs at an angle pointing north-west, slicing across the sphinxes’ gaze. My finger follows the road to the point where the lines cross and I correlate that with the site of Libeskind’s building. The Orion Building sits directly in line with the sphinxes in Richmond Avenue, just as Graham Hancock believes the Great Sphinx in Egypt
is aligned with the Belt of Orion. A beautifully serendipitous accident emerges from the maze of houses, busy thoroughfares and a bestselling book about the mysteries of the ancient world.

  Into Hornsey Road and the ascent of the northern heights begins. Machen believed this was the territory to which you should bring the person who thinks they know London. Writing in Wonderful London in the 1920s he said, ‘Take him to the Hornsey Road and he will discover that his London is but a tiny island in the midst of an unknown, unnavigated sea.’ I spy a group of football fans with carrier bags from the Arsenal gift shop who seem to have just come to this realization. They could be refugees from the Gunners’ mauling by Bayern Munich the night before. The Emirates Stadium mushrooms out of the end of the road.

  Hornsey Road has that feel of a mysterious byway not recorded on any map, a glitch in the Matrix. Its original name was Devil’s Lane. ‘To the right and left strike off the long roads to worlds undreamed of,’ writes Machen of the streets that lead away to Stroud Green, Tollington and Finsbury Park.

  Hornsey Road’s judgemental windows

  Stucco around the windows above the eclectic mix of shop fronts belongs to the time of Machen’s visit. The arched detail next to dead square trimmings appears like a sequence of facial expressions – judgemental Victorian eyes gazing down on the people in the street below.

  Machen trundled up here by omnibus from King’s Cross. The neon lights on the side of the Hornsey Road Baths would have looked new-fangled in the 1920s. It was a fulcrum of community life where aside from a scrub-down in one of the slipper baths you could catch a concert or watch a boxing match. The bricks are burnished lust red by the late-afternoon sun. There is a tedious inevitability about its conversion into the entrance of a complex of ‘contemporary’ apartments. Machen’s omnibus terminated at the Hanley Arms with its polished granite pillars and elaborate, curled, golden ironwork. It lives on as a mosque and the buses rattle all the way up Hornsey Rise and on to Crouch End Broadway. A long cable dangles down from the satellite dishes on the roof above the launderette like a noose. It’s tempting to think that Hornsey Road has seen better days but I’m not sure it has.