This Other London

by John Rogers

  Ignoring another set of signs declaring the path closed, a view of Battersea Power Station opens up on the next bend of the river. Nine Elms Reach takes its name from the line of trees that were a valuable navigation aid to the Thames watermen. I spent a day out on the river one summer with a Freeman of the Thames who was proudly part of a long line of watermen stretching back centuries. He told me how when he was doing his long apprenticeship the river was so busy in these parts you could skip across from one bank to the other between the barges. The river is quiet today, just an orange powerboat skimming around a single moored barge. The seagulls seem unperturbed by the snow as they come in to land where the waves tiredly bellyflop over the shingle shoreline. Nicholas Barton writes in The Lost Rivers of London of a tidal loop at Nine Elms that formed an island. Battersea was originally ‘Patricsey’ or ‘Peter’s Island’, along with Chels-ea and Thorn-ey Island.

  View of the Thames at Nine Elms

  The land was drained and put to use. At one point Nine Elms was noted for the quality of its honey. Now it’s at the heart of what The Economist has called the biggest single redevelopment in London since the Great Fire of 1666. It’s being labelled ‘London’s Third City’ after the Square Mile and Westminster. ‘Stratford City’ is already old news with its hand up at the back of the class, vying for attention: ‘Please sir, sir, but I thought I was the “Third City”.’

  Projected images of the finished development show a Blade Runner skyline magicked out of the Thameside mud, with Battersea Power Station the sole reminder that the area had any kind of past before this developer’s Year Zero. Whereas London’s first two cities are characterized by their idiosyncratic street plans and isolated tall buildings, this Third City is a virtual cloud metropolis – a clusterfuck of skyscrapers. Visitors from Houston or Hong Kong will feel curiously at home, which is just as well as the US will have its new embassy here and it’s believed that the Chinese will move in next door. No more noisy anti-war demonstrations and annoying displays by Falun Gong devotees.

  Mayor Boris Johnson got so excited that he declared it ‘represents the final piece of the jigsaw that completes the central area of London’ and his old university chum George Osborne came up with £1 billion of public money to pay for two new Northern Line stations, at Battersea and Nine Elms. They must really like the developers of Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station to build them their own tube stations when most of south-east London remains off the network.

  The sculpture of Father Thames fighting a posse of angry-looking eels on William Henry Walk will have to go. The US Embassy is boasting about grand new public gardens that will bring back memories of the famous pleasure grounds at Vauxhall and Battersea – they’d better make sure there are prostitutes and drunken brawls to make it properly authentic.

  In the middle of a global economic crisis that has prompted austerity measures forcing millions of people into poverty you have to ask where the billions are coming from to build this missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. The Economist reports that investors include an Irish group and ‘Malaysia’s state-backed investment fund’. In a world of uncertainty, building blocks of flats on a bog apparently represents a sound investment.

  Let them build their Third City but you can’t help feeling that the river might have the last word. The Thames will eventually call in the loan and the area will be returned to flooded marshland. The river and its tributaries made London, not a conglomeration of foreign property speculators out for a quick buck. The ancient encampments at Horsenden Hill, Brentford, Hounslow Heath, Erith, Leyton and Barking gaze on with the look of an old head watching a young fool staggering drunk in the street.

  What would Robinson make of all this? His investigations led him to the conclusion that ‘the true identity of London is its absence, as a city it no longer exists … London was the first metropolis to disappear’ – sucked into a sink hole created by the Nine Elms development that he couldn’t have imagined in the beleaguered last years of the Thatcher regime.

  The snowflakes are getting bigger. It’s becoming bleak by the river. This is an area passed through rather than lingered in and studied. The hounds are howling in Battersea Dogs Home. Wilted flowers are tied to the railing by the bus stop under the railway bridge. In the shadow of Battersea Power Station I went by a workman trudging towards the iconic structure weighed down by a tool belt and heavy box. I considered asking him how it was coming along but he had a weary, defeated look in his eyes. It was time to turn away from this future gated community of architectural phalluses frottaging the grey skies like a pervert in a nice suit on the Northern Line at rush hour. I’m bound for the open Commons.

  I turn down Queenstown Road munching a Twix, past mournful Victorian houses that look as if they’re blackened by soot from the 1950s. It’s possible to believe that they still get London’s infamous ‘pea-soupers’ down this way. Just a bridge away from Chelsea high society, it was the setting for Nell Dunn’s 1963 short stories of life in the Battersea slums, Up the Junction. The TV version, directed two years later by Ken Loach, brings to life the flirty girls with their saucy banter in the pub with the boys downing pints of Brown. Women packing chocolate Santas on a production line be-bop on their tea-break. The tally man spouts casual racism on his debt-collecting rounds. Teenage girls sing Beatles songs pushing prams under the bridge where I’m sheltering from the snow. ‘Used to meet him in a back alley off the Latchmere,’ says one. ‘I was the youngest bride in Battersea, married at fifteen, had Mike when I was fifteen and a half,’ recounts another. Blithely talking about one-night-stands and illicit trysts in the cabin of a ten-tonne truck. Sex in a derelict house with the coat on. Middle-aged lady in a sequined frock playing drums in the local. Young Mods talking about the four-minute warning in the greasy spoon whilst juggling the tomato-shaped ketchup bottle. Fighting with the Old Man in the street outside the pub. It was a shot of social realism from the south side of Swinging London.

  Things don’t look too different this end of Battersea around Queenstown Road Station – except the hairstyles aren’t as nice. ‘Let’s go swimming up the Common,’ one of the boys in the film suggests. That’s a good idea; it’s where I’m heading. Maybe I’ll buy some swimmers and a towel along the way to Tooting Bec.

  South London band Squeeze took the title of Nell Dunn’s book and twisted it into a glorious pop song that charted at No. 2 in 1979. The girl in their song was from Clapham rather than up from Tooting. The jauntiness of the relocation down the road matches the lifting gloom as the Common comes into sight. Tree roots burst through the pavement and I start to make plans to go to the cinema in the evening.

  The blizzard intensifies as I cross Clapham Common. It brings up memories of walking in snowy Fairfield, Iowa, turning away from the two-horse town and finding myself in a featureless white world. I had been rattling around the corridors of the Raj Health Spa, one of about three guests who I only saw at breakfast, where they were tied to an ayurvedic diet and I was craving sinking my teeth into something that had once had a heartbeat. Cabin fever drove me out along Jasmine Avenue to Highway No. 1 where I turned in the general direction of Lake Darling across fields a foot deep in snow.

  The Common lacks the vastness of the American Midwest, but at 220 acres it’s still a sizeable open space. When bought by the Local Board in 1874 it was ‘dedicated to the use and recreation of the public for ever’. Although house builders have exploited every available square of land around its borders the Common will forever remain free of their grasp. Various antiquarians describe it as a sort of ‘morass’ and that is how it appears today. Ducks paddle around in the deep mud, a cruel wind is sweeping in from Siberia, blowing snow horizontally through the bandstand and splattering the pages of my Geographia Atlas. The cold weather doesn’t seem to bother the toddlers weebling around in balls of warm clothing, scattering the ducks.

  As the snow deepened around me in Iowa and settled in a thick layer over my hat and coat I became aware that rambling acros
s fields in winter with the thermometer at minus 15 was probably a bit stupid, and turned back for the Raj. However bad the weather gets in South London I should be OK as long as I don’t lie down for a nap. I push on in the general direction of Balham.

  A wooded ridge runs across the end of Broomwood Road, which is folded neatly in half by the Falcon Brook running beneath the tarmac. The Falcon Brook is one of the many lost rivers of London that Nicholas Barton records in his book. The map of these rivers, alongside those still flowing above ground, reveal a vision of London as a city of waterways. These streams, rivers and brooks are all still there, gurgling away through sewer pipes and culverts. Like its Leytonstone cousin the Philly Brook, the Falcon occasionally blows out the street irons and pours on to the street just to remind us of its presence.

  Falcon Brook valley

  The ridge I’d seen is a line of trees running through the centre of Wandsworth Common. Dogs sniff around the boles of denuded oaks with their walkers hopping from foot to foot to keep warm. Robinson’s first walk to Strawberry Hill from Vauxhall ended here as the Common was closed after an IRA bomb had exploded near the train tracks. The bombing was part of a sequence of attacks on the rail network in the lead-up to the 1992 election. The Wandsworth bomb had gone off on Budget Day. Nobody was hurt.

  Wandsworth Common forms one corner of a triangle of common land with Clapham and Tooting that collectively amounts to 550 acres of publicly owned land. Just to the south of Tooting is Streatham Common with its 66 acres and nearby is Mitcham Common at an expansive 460 acres. To the west on the other side of the River Wandle is the huge Wimbledon Common covering 1,100 acres. From this high point on Wandsworth Common you are standing at the apex of the Free Lands of South London, three times the size of the City of London, populated not by major financial institutions but by joggers, dog-walkers, cruisers, ducks and earthworms. A metropolis governed by the laws of free access and common rights, enforced by gnarly-toothed gardeners and armies of litter pickers and bulb planters. This is London’s Third City – and it’s ours.

  I’m homing in now on the Martian crater. Streets branch off the bottom of the Common that would take me on various routes into Tooting. Ravenslea Road has an appropriately sounding medieval name to traverse to the ancient manor of Bec. The snow is getting bad, big, wet, blobby snowflakes that give you a slap on the face as they land. A woman struggles along the pavement with five heavy bags of shopping and audibly groans as she bends her head into the blizzard. I momentarily consider offering to give her a hand but then wonder how rude it would be to first enquire how far she has to go. If my act of kindness led too far in the opposite direction I might just lose the will to plough on. In the end my dedication to the quest outweighs my social conscience.

  Ravenslea Road sweeps into Balham via a DVD-rental shop with a life-sized stormtrooper in the window. I send a photo to the kids at home. My father shared his love of cricket with me and taught me how to bowl his leg-breaks; I have passed on my love of the original Star Wars movies to my sons and given them my Han Solo and Boba Fett action figures.

  Oliver instantly rings me, ‘Dad, where are you?’

  I resist the urge to say, ‘On the Death Star,’ and instead tell him the truth: ‘Balham.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ he reasonably asks, his world not yet extending south of the river.

  ‘Gateway to the South,’ I reply. ‘Look it up on YouTube.’

  The Balham Stormtrooper

  ‘Bal-ham, gateway to the south,’ intones the voice of the American newsreader played by ex-Goon Peter Sellers in a mock radio travelogue recorded in the 1960s. A place of ‘happy and contented people’. Fifty years on, the cafés and gastropubs look convivial and enticing – not to mention warm. The former Monkees star Micky Dolenz paid further tribute to Balham by turning Sellers’s monologue into a 20-minute film. Not long after this Dolenz produced and directed the popular sitcom Metal Mickey, starring a large, talking robot. In the opening scene of the first episode the grandmother throws darts at a board next to a large Squeeze poster. The grandmother was played by Irene Handl who had starred alongside Peter Sellers in the 1959 film I’m All Right Jack. All roads lead to Balham.

  Stretched out along the Roman Stane Street that runs through Balham, a beguiling urban legend has it that the Nazis planned to have their HQ in the huge 1930s art deco apartment block, Du Cane Court. The German invasion plans for Britain included penetrating London from the south along the military route built by the Romans for moving their legions between London and Chichester, Panzers and Nazi stormtroopers advancing along a way designed for chariots and legionnaires. The legend was given legs by the fact that Du Cane Court was spared from German bombs despite the area being pounded by the Luftwaffe. There is even the belief that seen from the air it’s built in the shape of a swastika. No matter how many times I rotated a swastika I couldn’t make it fit onto an aerial photo of Du Cane Court – there was always a spare arm sticking out. However, a Google search did turn up a list of Nazi Party members living in Britain in the lead-up to the Second World War, and one of them lived in Du Cane Court.

  The art deco Du Cane Court, Balham

  The launderette opposite Du Cane Court has a sign in its window notifying customers of Easter opening hours. The Easter Bunny would freeze to death if he came out of his warren now. The 1,000th jogger of the day goes past but this one has an iPad under his arm with headphones plugged into his skull. Things are getting weird as I home in on Mars.

  I performed stand-up in a pub on Bedford Hill, Balham. It was a venue where the Clash and U2 had played early in their careers. A vanload of comedians who went on to become household names had also ventured out onto its stage, which as I remember wasn’t a stage but a clearing amongst the tables and chairs with a mic on a stand. Noting the heritage of the venue I paraphrased a line used by stalwart MC Ivor Dembina to introduce me at my first gig, that if the gig went badly they could be the ones to say they saw me when I was shit. My diary records that the gig at the Bedford actually went OK. It was August 2002 and my eight-minute set, given over to sardonic opposition to the impending war with Iraq, with quips about a holy crusade against facial hair and sympathy for David Blunkett’s guide dog, seemed to go down well. So well in fact that I quit performing stand-up shortly afterwards – go out at the top is what they say.

  I turn away from Stane Street as it seamlessly bleeds into Tooting Broadway. Citizen Smith is nowhere to be seen. I look for revolutionary slogans daubed by the Tooting Popular Front, but there’s not so much as a Socialist Workers Party flyer stuck to a lamppost. Wolfie Smith, where are you now? The banking system has collapsed and they’re building a millionaires’ colony on the edge of Battersea subsidized with public money. No, he’s not here. Probably grown up, cut his hair, nurtured a beer gut and got a mortgage. I can chalk off one of those dubious achievements.

  Tooting was a favourite of music hall comedians looking for a cheap laugh (along with Wigan, for some reason). They have little in common now. Scanning the surface of Tooting today it’s hard to see what the gag would be. Club stand-ups get more laughs out of Luton or Brentwood.

  Rivulets of housing, criss-crossing like Barton’s map of the city’s watercourses, run off into Tooting Bec Common – a whole sea of separate lives piled up one on top of the other. Traipses to the supermarket to stock up on ready meals. Early-evening meet-ups at the Wheatsheaf by Tooting tube, hunched over a shared bottle of red wine, swapping confessions. Lads getting the pints in talking Championship Manager. Thousands of individual narratives unfolding behind illuminated windows.

  You step away from this urban soup once you walk on to Tooting Bec Common. The concerns of nesting rooks are the most pressing issues here. I slosh through deep, cold mud, the London Clay refusing to absorb the water from a long, slushy winter seemingly without end. Oak and hornbeam stand in a lake of flood-water, and brave daffodils that foolishly thought it was time to bloom cling to their roots. William Morden’s 1897 description o
f Tooting’s ‘swampy fields’ in The History of Tooting Graveney remains true in 2013. Morden writes that the name comes from the tribe of Totiagas. Another theory combines the name of the Celtic god Teut with ‘ing’ meaning ‘meadow’, to make it Teut’s Meadow.

  Bell’s 1926 chapter on Tooting focuses on its manorial records that stretch back to the early 1200s. These document the intimate transactions between the local people and the lord of the manor – a land-holding that came complete with its own ‘serfs’. You can imagine little Baldrick-like blokes in hoods and jerkins with warty noses scrambling around on Tooting Common, picking up firewood and nuts, poking around for mushrooms. The ‘Bec’ in Tooting comes from the Abbey of Bec in Normandy, which owned the land after the Conquest. Now it’s controlled by Wandsworth Council.

  Tooting Bec Common

  I spot a hawthorn in flower – a sign that spring isn’t a figment of my imagination. It brings back memories of the walk last May through Wyke Green and the hawthorn bushes in the sunshine.

  More wet snow slaps me in the face, bringing me back to reality. I start to question the whole purpose of coming out here today. There’s a woman in pink wellies walking her dog – at least she’s got an excuse. What’s mine? I remember. It wasn’t just to join together three of the South London commons or visit Robinson’s Vauxhall or look across the busy A24 at Du Cane Court. It was to visit Tooting Bec Lido – but where the hell is it?

  I’d walked the length of the common. Freezing mud had found its way through my Gore-Tex boots, the bacon roll and the Twix had worn off, and I couldn’t find the biggest open-air swimming pool in London. Maxwell writes of how wild elk roamed over this land in the distant past – if one managed to slip through a fold in time I’d make a jacket from its hide like Han Solo does with a Tauntaun on the ice planet of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. It could be worse, though – the average temperature of Tooting on Mars is around minus 60 and there are no Tauntauns or elks to keep you warm.