by Tim Bradford
I come to a little bridge with three arches, where the Westbourne goes, then disappears underground again, down into a little valley through the Rose Garden. I follow the valley and head towards a French flag at Albert Gate and Knightsbridge.
The Clash mention Knightsbridge in their song ‘1977’.
In 1977
knives in West Eleven
it ain’t so lucky to be rich
Sten guns in Knightsbridge.
Danger stranger
You better paint your face
No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones.
Was this a reaction against what they saw as a wealthy and privileged part of the city? Or did they, with their Situationist slogan T-shirts, feel a certain rivalry with the punk boutiques in the West End? But the Clash weren’t all talk – they lived the revolutionary vibe. In early 1978 bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Topper Headon went on a Baader-Meinhof-style rampage against what they saw as the forces of oppression. From a rooftop in Camden Town they took potshots at racing pigeons, those evil birds that shit on your head and that in their competitiveness are the very embodiments of capitalism. They were arrested and fined £800. But their point had been made.
Sadly, I hero-worshipped the Clash and decided to make myself a pair of bondage trousers, using an old school uniform and a load of zips. I think I ended up accidentally sewing them to the jeans I was wearing, which wasn’t very punk. I also decorated my guitar, Simonon style. Where he used Jackson Pollockesque splashes of paint, I rubbed on some Batman transfers.
Heading south, I pass Doric columns on big fuck-off houses, the streets full of BMWs, Mercedes and Jags.3 A group of middle-aged workmen are repairing the stucco of one of the old houses, reeking of strong perfume. Maybe they’re part of some ancient City company, guild or sect which insists on fine bodily odours. The Worshipful 217 Company of Nice-Smelling Gentlemen? Cross onto Lowndes Street and there are seventies flats with balconies, Ray Ward gunsmiths (does he sell Stens?), sleeveless green quilted ‘Jobo’ jackets and general hunting products for folk who like to blast stuff out of the sky, shops with leopardskin picture frames, art galleries with Constable copies in gilt frames. Left down Cadogan Place and straight on, past bald cockney blokes with tattoos, skinny loud blokes pushing barrows around, everyone jabbering to each other or themselves, daytime radio bland-pop blaring out of car radios. I have a peek in an estate agent’s window and there’s a three-bedroom flat in this square going for one and a half million. It’s got a marble bath, so that’s all right then. I start sneezing, that psychosomatic thing I get when I’m allergic to an area.
‘Gardens. Private. No dogs. No cycling. No ballgames. No music. No vandalism.’ No working-class people. No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones? William Wilberforce lived in one of these houses. I look through a door, the interior is in traditional style but is cold and austere, empty and drab. Beautiful pinched brown statuesque sixty-something women totter about, hints of their glory days in the way they hold themselves.
Through Cliveden Place and Sloane Square and into Bourne Street, then back to the river again. Battersea Power Station towers over the rooftops. This is a forgotten Georgian village crammed with little cottages. It’s got everything the villagers need – a posh women’s hair stylists and an upmarket estate agent. Looking at the chicks walking about here, they don’t eat much anyway – lots of fit, tanned, not exactly pretty Lady Di-lookalikes with shopping bags, wearing white. There’s a factory round here churning them out.
Down from Sloane Square, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood had a shop, Sex, in the King’s Road, where they put together the Pistols in 1975. It was like an early version of that Popstars programme – they’d check out the kids who came into the shop to see if they’d look good in the band. The Pistols was a marketing and branding phenomenon years ahead of its time. Unfortunately for Male, they forgot to choose people who’d go along with the plan indefinitely. One of the myths of punk is that the Sex Pistols and the Clash all went to public schools and would all have gone on to lucrative jobs in the City if they hadn’t been plucked from the ballroom circuit by their respective managers. At that time Britain was toff crazy and the escapades of the royal family and other aristocrats filled the newspapers. Although they came from the same smart set, there was intense rivalry between them, due to the fact that the Pistols went to Eton and the Clash were Old Harrovians.
Over into Pimlico Road/Ebury Street area with a little village green, Orange Square and a statue of Mozart. He lived round here for a few months and it’s where he wrote his first symphony in 1764. He was born in 1756, which means he was eight when he wrote it. Eight! If it happened nowadays the news headlines would be ‘Composer writes symphony in British house’. He stayed there for about seven weeks but couldn’t practise because of the noise, so he spent his time composing. He did his first public concert in nearby Ranelagh Gardens in 1764. I look in the window and there’s a tanned middle-aged bloke in an armchair, as if listening to classical music. Looks like an advert for something – Cup-a-Soup maybe or mail-order golden-oldie classics. Perhaps it’s a rule of the property that the owner can only listen to Mozart and he’s gone mad.
Chelsea were an early punk band who lost most of their members (like Billy Idol and Tony James) to other, more famous, groups and never really hit the big time. The singer was Gene October, who sounded a bit like Rick Astley. I never had any of their singles but I think my mate Kev did, possibly buying it off a bloke at school called ‘Moorey’ Moore, who once had a big purge of his record collection and who possibly spent the cash on more school dinners.
There’s a toilet in the square that is right above the Westbourne. Nearby, Travis Perkins’ Victorian wood yard is under threat of demolition after 150 years of continued use. There’s a save the wood yard campaign that I expect will get thousands out on the streets. I pop my head round the corner to look and it is indeed a beautiful thing, and seems familiar from televised Dickens novels. If I could find that spatula I made in first-year woodwork I would donate it to the cause.
UK Subs guitarist Nicky Garratt first moved to London at the start of 1977 and had a flat in Pimlico. In my mind the UK Subs were famous for having the oldest punk singer in the world. Vocalist Charlie Harper was absolutely ancient (thirty-one in their heyday, which obviously I now think is incredibly young).
The Westbourne flows under the army barracks at the end of Bloomfield Terrace. Is this the terrace where the Stranglers’ Duchess lived? There’s a big old early Victorian house right next door to the barracks and a bit of wall with a gap where it’s broken down. The garden is full of junk and standing near the back door are four blokes with white hats. Maybe it is the Stranglers. They all look middle aged and one of them certainly has a beard. One is digging in a big hole while the others look on. Are they trying to get into the barracks, a sort of reverse Escape From Colditz? Or maybe they’ve just escaped and they’re filling in the hole? And who are the white hats anyway? Templars? Knights of St John? Yellow hats, red hats, white hats. It’s getting confusing. I start to do a quick ten-second sketch of them. One of them looks up and sees me, then points out to his mates that they’re being watched. I do the chameleon thing where I try to merge with the bricks, but it doesn’t work so I smile awkwardly and quickly walk away.
I’m on Ebury Bridge Road now (presumably there was an Ebury Bridge over the Westbourne). At the back of the Ebury Bridge Estate, past a car park bloke in a green shirt slumped in a red chair reading a tabloid. There’s some massive block being demolished, a big old forties aircraft-hanger of a building with its guts pulled out, wires everywhere sticking out, metal twisted and spewing. Out onto Chelsea Bridge Road. Past some posh Peabody Trust flats and Jerome K. Jerome’s old gaff (no. 104). According to all sources the Westbourne flowed through what is now Ranelagh Gardens, then hit the Thames. There’s a dip in the road just in front of gardens’ main gate. I cross over Chelsea Embankment and the tide is pretty high up. There’s a whiff of dra
iny sewer and when I lean over the Thames wall I can just see the top of the tunnel arch where the Westbourne/Ranelagh Sewer enters the Thames. Like punk, the Westbourne was once clean and pure then got filled up with shit and eventually forgotten about. But to some people it will never die. Its spirit lives on.
Down in the sewer
Picking up on a lot of empty Coca Cola cans
And there sure are a lot of them around here.
How did I get down here
Well it’s a long story.
‘Down in the Sewer’, the Stranglers
(by kind permission of Complete Music)
Film Idea: the Story of Punk.
Malcolm McClaren lives in a house boat on the Serpentine with Vivienne Westwood. He hangs around in a local library and discovers that it used to be the Westbourne. He feels that rivers being covered up is like the working class being downtrodden. He starts the music movement which also has environmental goal of getting rivers brought back to surface. Glen Matlock is the river lover who wants to bring this about. But then McClaren becomes power crazy and decides river project is unimportant. Matlock wants the Pistols to be vanguards of movement for Jubilee. He is sacked, shot and dumped in river.
Helen Mirren – Vivienne Westwood
Gary Oldman – Malcolm McClaren
Tom Cruise – Glen Matlock
Ewan McGregor – Johnny Rotten
London Stories 10: The Secret Life of the Market Trader
* * *
In the early nineties I spent a year in South America and, while there, found that I had a gift, the sort of thing that can change people’s lives. I discovered I could hand-paint T-shirts and sell them for cash. When I saw the look on people’s faces when they went away with their painted clothing items, I realized that I had to share this gift with as many people as possible.
So when I returned to London in 1992 I decided I’d become an entrepreneur. I would get a stall in nearby Portobello Market and sell my hand – painted T-shirts and help create a happier world. I joined the National Market Traders’ Association and arrived early on Saturday morning to get my pitch. At first I was in a little covered market just before the railway bridge, then moved to a spot down the side of the Westway. It all went rather well. Although advertising slogans like ‘Get your expensive hand-painted T-shirts here!’ and ‘Wow! Fake iron-on transfers of Tommy Lawton!’ didn’t seem that clever, I sold five T-shirts the first week and eight the second. I also made some nice new mates, like the photographer, the hairdresser and the crazy old knife woman. Any kind of knife you wanted – pen knives, flick knives, hunting knives, butchers’ knives – the crazy old knife woman had got it. She’d sell them to anyone, but her main market seemed to be shifty hot-tempered adolescents. My only real competition was a bloke at the other end of Portobello Road who sold T-shirts with pictures of beefeaters, double-decker buses and Princess Diana for £2.99.
I saw myself becoming a permanent market trader, eking out the decades at my little stall. Then one evening I made the fatal mistake of taking my ‘business’ a bit too seriously, and wrote down some figures. What a shock. I calculated that I’d have to work 400,000 hours to make a million. OK, I thought, I can do it. I’ve got stamina. Trouble was, I would have to live to the soggy old age of 16, 660 if I was to achieve my goal. And that’s with no time off for sleep, sex, food, TV or beer. Flat out. Twenty-four hours a day. For 16,660 years. So if I decided to do the normal entrepreneur sixteen-hour day, what then? I was looking at 25,000 years. A nice round number. I’d have to discover the elixir of life. But if I did that I’d have no need for producing hand painted T-shirts. Basically the whole thing was such a non-production-line idea Henry Ford would have spun so fast in his grave he’d have melted.
But he’s decomposed anyway so who cares.
1 ‘Paying “Decent Respect” to World opinion on the Death Penalty’ by Harold Hongju Koh (Edward L. Barrett, Jnr. Lecture on Constitutional Law, University of California Davis Law Review)
2 The bed’s too clean
The water’s poison for the system
Then you know in your brain
LEAVE THE CAPITOL!
EXIT THIS ROMAN SHELL!
‘Leave the Capitol’ The Fall, from the album Slates
3 The Jags were a post-punk power pop combo who had a minor hit in 1979 with ‘I Got Your Number (Written on the Back of my Hand)’.
12. Fred the Cat and the River of the Dead
• Counter’s Creek – Kensal Green Cemetery to Chelsea
Deathly dream – holy wells – Kensal Green Cemetery – death, Victorian style – Timothy Leary – Don’t Look Now – competitive great-grandad – hurdler’s knee – my funeral arrangements – The Singing Ringing Tree – place memory – ghost pub – Ladbroke Grove – Little Wormwood Scrubs – Eurostar – dead pets – more cemeteries – Iuxury apartments – Chelsea Creek
Dream: A trip over lakes and rivers with a coffin. My grandad. Have to catch a train to get to the funeral. Trains keep getting cancelled. Going to miss the funeral. And I’m out in some sort of Everglades in England. Nice sunny day. There are fish in the water, which is beautiful and clean, can see the bottom. Worried about a shark I’ve seen so I don’t swim in it too long.
I phone my mum to tell her what’s happening – that dad and I, along with the body, will be late for the funeral. She says that she’s not sure he’s really dead now. Just gone missing. The police think they’ll be able to find him.
So whose body have we got, then? Nobody knows.
If you chart all the tributaries of the Thames onto a big map of London and stick it up on your wall (use Blu Tak, not those little white foam buds, which will tear the paint or wallpaper off leaving bare plaster) then stand back, two things become evident.
London looks like a big jellyfish.
Many of the rivers, deriving from springs, start in cemeteries. The connection with cemeteries originates in the development of Christianity – pagan shrines and places of worship were appropriated and turned into Christian sites. The old shrines would once perhaps have been holy wells, revered by the local population and thus, possibly, used as burial grounds.
Counter’s Creek, originally named after a Countess of Oxford who owned land in west London in the Middle Ages (Earl’s Court was named after her husband, Earl), rises in Kensal Green Cemetery, one of the most famous Victorian burial grounds in the capital. As the numbers of London’s middle classes expanded they grew tired of being comfortable, keeping servants and reading Jane Austen and were looking out for the next big thing. Death. And for a while, death became big business. Considering they were the kings of common sense, the Victorians were pretty barmy. The middle class saw aristos being sent off to the next life in mad quasi-Egyptian mausoleums and wanted a piece of the reincarnation action. They demanded high-class transport to the land of the dead with all the fantastic trappings offered by this life – rubbish gas lighting, top hats, side whiskers, corsets, sexual repression – plus immortality. And, so, they got it – and their gateway to paradise and immortality lay at the western end of the Harrow Road.
The nineteenth century made death exciting again. We are terrified of death in a way the Victorians – in fact most of our ancestors – wouldn’t have understood. Death is different now. When self-obsessed free love guru Timothy Leary died, his ashes were rocketed into outer space. Imagine the day when some alien life forms find his casket, think it is a gift of cosmic druggy stardust from hedonist planet Earth and snort it. Infuriated, and with noses full of powdered prophet, the aliens will probably obliterate the earth in a massive vengeful strike.
So far the London rivers have seemed like a life force but they can also represent death – that underworld journey. Counter’s Creek is London’s River Styx, particularly now it’s been buried itself. (Maybe that’s where the phrase ‘out in the styx’ originates, referring to places in the suburbs with no life.) The last time I had visited the area, Paradise by Way of Kensal Green was a bar on t
he main street with a comedy club upstairs. There were various up-and-coming stand ups that night and my friends and I were merciless in our heckling, reducing one guy almost to tears. In fact he completely died on stage. At the bar afterwards he asked why we did it. I didn’t have an answer. Perhaps, unbenownst to us, it was the influence of the nearby buried river, which flows in an almost dead straight line to the Thames, like an aquatic funerary path.
On a bright early summer day, I walk down through a gentle valley in the graveyard towards a burnt-out truck up ahead. Around it was a small rubbish dump and, behind that, the Grand Union Canal with an embankment on this side – there’s an old iron gate but it’s locked. I get the feeling they used to bring bodies here by barge. Reminded me of the death boat in Don’t Look Now. Except that film was a bit unrealistic – in real life would Julie Christie have even gone near Donald Sutherland, let alone shag him?
Somehow the area near the gate has mutated into an impromptu landfill site. Shopping trolleys and the usual detritus of city life (why go to all that effort to dump stuff here of all places?), mixed with more plaintive paraphernalia of the dead–‘Daddy’ spelled out in lights made of red plastic plants. Nearby is a small, melancholy, grave-grey stone.
It’s like walking though a country meadow full of 150 years’ worth of stone wheels, plinths and crosses, maybe a trick of a cosmic computer artist’s palette, dusted with wildflowers. Some of the graves are recent and too shiny, others are worn with time and the weather and seem comfortable in their anonymity and sleepiness, the illegible names long forgotten: Charles Babbage, Charles Blondin, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Wilkie Collins, Mary Gibson, Thomas Hancock, John Hobhouse, Thomas Hood, Joseph Hume, Leigh Hunt, Fanny Kemble, Freddie Mercury, Annabella Milbanke, William Molesworth, William Mulready, Robert Owen, Terrence Rattigan, Henry Russell, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, John Waterhouse, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde.