In March 2014, which may or may not prove to be the peak of the lunacy, a property investment company called London Central Portfolio offered a new fund. It was quite conservative in a way, suggesting that if top-end flats continued growing at only 9 per cent, a small opportunity (formerly known as ‘a home’) worth £1.5 million now at that rate would become £36 million by the middle of the century. ‘Firmly sustainable,’ said Hugh Best, LCP’s investment director. ‘They have been growing at that level for forty years and we see no reason for that to change.’ The possibility of bloody revolution may not have been factored into the calculation.
Overall, the presence of the migrants has not necessarily been unpleasant. There is evidence that in this unmelting pot, many were importing the sterner attitudes of their backgrounds rather than fitting in with their new come-day-go-day domicile.
‘The effect has been to shift London to a more conservative version of itself,’ says Travers. ‘There are more children born in wedlock in Greater London than anywhere else in the UK. Smoking figures are lower in London. Alcohol consumption is lower in London. The homicide rate continues to go down. What we’re seeing, paradoxically, is Britain shifting back to the 1950s.’ Perhaps we could mark this development by restoring ACOrn, CHErrywood and SPEedwell to the telephone system.
Everywhere is churning. Brick Lane, E1, the most chameleon street in the ever-changing city, is starting to shrug off its Bangladeshi phase, undergoing a Hoxtonisation process as the retro clothes shops march southwards and the area takes its character from the ultra-cool kids at the London campus of the Italian fashion college Istituto Marangoni. The curry house owners appear to be cashing in and moving out, many following the same path from here to the north-west suburbs established by the Jews a century earlier. One curry house almost opposite the Brick Lane mosque had magically transformed into an Argentinian cantina the week before I was there. The mosque itself, formerly a synagogue, before that a chapel, may have to find yet another incarnation. A nightclub probably.
A few streets away on Whitechapel Road is the Blind Beggar, a pub with an extraordinarily rich history. It was named after the thirteenth-century legend of Henry de Montfort, blinded at the Battle of Evesham, who became so downwardly mobile that he ended up craving alms in Bethnal Green. And it was outside the pub that William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, preached his first sermon.
But nobody cares about that stuff. What they want to know is this:
On 9 March 1966 Ron Kray walked into the saloon bar of The Blind Beggar and shot George Cornell in the head using a 9mm Mauser. Legend would have it that this happened because Cornell had called Ronnie a ‘big fat poof’, in public, to which Ron obviously took offence and sought revenge. This story seems highly unlikely, according to reliable sources, and it is more likely the shooting occurred due to a ‘business disagreement’ involving the Richardson brothers.
That story comes from the pub’s own website. And at the bar you can buy not just T-shirts and ‘authentic Kray memorabilia’ but a splendid little booklet guiding you on a Kray Twins Walk as a memory of the days when Whitechapel did not have Bengali markets but was terrorised by nice white boys like Ronnie and his twin brother, Reggie. Among the stories in the booklet is an exchange between Ronnie and his Auntie Rose about why his eyebrows met above his nose. ‘It means you were born to hang, Ronnie love,’ she told him.
A few years earlier he would have done. But by the time the Krays were convicted of murder in 1969 (Ronnie for Cornell; both for the stabbing of Jack McVitie; neither for the other murders they might or might not have committed or ordered), capital punishment had been abandoned and so they mouldered in prison, trading on their celebrity, before emerging for some of the East End’s last great funerals, their own. Among the hundreds of wreaths at Reggie’s funeral, according to the booklet, were those saying ‘Legend’, ‘Free at Last’ and ‘Hero’.
Much of the Whitechapel in the booklet has gone now, including the Krays’ own home in Vallance Road. Many of London’s tourist destinations – the Tower of London, the Chamber of Horrors, the London Dungeon and so on – are based on a barbarous history. This one, well within living memory, does seem a little raw.
The other traditional redoubt of the gangsters was always Soho. More than anywhere, Soho is ever-changing; it is never what it was, as the locals are quick to mention, last year, last month, last week or last night. The characters have always all just died; some much-loved enterprise has always just closed. On another level it remains gloriously itself: a lake isle of louche living surrounded by conformity. Ronnie Scott’s is still there, opposite Bar Italia. Two Italian delis survive, as does the Algerian Coffee Stores. The Gay Hussar, home of cold cherry soup and goulash, is clinging on.
In autumn 2013 the police raided eighteen brothels, complaining that the workers were victims of human trafficking, which is not what the girls seemed to think. Prostitution has resisted control by the authorities throughout human history, a situation not expected to die out before humanity itself does. In Soho, as in the wider world, there has always been a homosexual subculture, which remained well hidden in the years of persecution. That has certainly changed. An area largely dedicated to the old Adam now caters somewhat less for Adam seeking Eve and more for Adam seeking Adam.
I was intrigued to know whether the crackdown had put paid to Soho’s most obvious brothel, located in a building whose ground floor, since last year, is now given over to a large emporium specialising in male underpants not available at M&S. As the sign in the window puts it: ‘Latex, Leather, Neoprene, Vinyl, Steel’. (Steel?) The door to upstairs was open and an ‘OPEN’ sign hung in the window, suggesting business as usual. But, as cautious now as when with John from school, I was reluctant to climb the stairs for fear of having to make an excuse and leave.
So I went into the shop. Behind the counter were a girl decked out as a punk, complete with holes in her head, and a young man. I asked if upstairs was still in the business it used to be in.
Responding with the righteous froideur of a 1950s landlady who had just discovered goings-on and insisted that hers was a respectable house, the indignant punk said loftily, ‘We have no idea about upstairs.’
I said that seemed surprising.
‘Seriously,’ said her companion. ‘We have no idea what you’re talking about.’
Oh well, they do say Londoners are less and less likely to know their neighbours.
It was William Cobbett who first called London the Great Wen (wen being a sebaceous cyst). That was when London was a fraction of its present size, both in administrative theory and in practice. But in every era London had quiet unknown areas where the essential but unsexy services could be maintained.
I first took the Docklands Light Railway to Pudding Mill Lane Station on 14 July 2005, eight days after London had been awarded the right to stage the 2012 Olympics, seven after the tube and bus suicide bombings that convulsed the capital and killed fifty-two innocent people, along with four guilty ones. The exit led on to Marshgate Lane, a street of reclamation yards, car-parts depots, concrete crushers, hotdip galvanisers and steel-fencing and wire-mesh distributors – plus a factory that prepared smoked salmon for the restaurant trade. The road also led to a small gut feeding the Lee Navigation Canal. Nothing had navigated there in many years except a great deal of weed and what looked like half a motorcycle. There was a heatwave: the streets were fly-blown as well as litter-strewn, and felt more like Delhi than London. Nothing to do with the people: there was no one about. Somewhere along the way I must have crossed what would become, seven years later, the finishing line in the Olympic Stadium.
I returned at intervals over those seven years, as the businesses were pushed out, like many of their workers, into the middle distance. This did not involve the brutal mass evictions that have taken place in other Olympic cities: an estimated 720,000 in Seoul before the 1988 Games; at least 1.25 million before Beijing 2008; an as yet unknown number prior to Rio 2016. It was
a very English process: grinding, petty, niggardly. Lance Forman, the head of the smoked salmon firm, H. Forman & Son, managed to get a site nearby without being exiled to Essex – an offer made hours before he was due to take the authorities to court – but only after years of devoting himself to the struggle rather than his business. When I returned in 2010, the area had already been sealed off. During the Games Pudding Mill Lane station was also closed; many signs advised spectators to walk to West Ham, a distance that might have taxed some of the athletes.
The Olympics themselves were a great triumph: opponents melted away (or at least kept quiet); the weather behaved; the volunteers smiled and had fun themselves; Britain won heaps of gold medals; and even non-sports-lovers enjoyed the party which, mainly at the beach volleyball on Horse Guards Parade, sometimes took on the character of a drunken debauch rather than a sporting event.
Normally after a city has hosted the Games the hangover is extreme. But London has been in a strange mood, at odds with the quiet desperation of the rest of the country. The Olympics have been admitted to the small pantheon of British institutions that are too holy to criticise except in the most guarded terms, along with Stephen Fry and Christmas. In March 2014 the area remained largely sealed off, with a security man forcing pedestrians off the Queen’s highway without any plausible basis in law, while facilities the country did not need were readied for their post-Olympic afterlife.
The alleged cost of the Games has remained fixed at £9 billion since it was upped from £3 billion in the early days of preparation, and this is almost never queried. Figures this glib are inherently untrustworthy. How many of us have any inherent understanding of what £9 billion gets you? Quite a few houses in Kensington Palace Gardens, for sure.
It would seem, at the very least, to people living across England in places where the councils can’t even repair the potholes, a great deal of money to spend on a new football ground for West Ham United, an oversized swimming-pool complex, a few bits and pieces, and a boost to the regeneration/gentrification of the East End, which would have happened anyway.
Wandering in Woolwich, I got a bit lost and found myself on a road that led nowhere in a Thames-side industrial estate. Moored there was a hulk, rotting away in a rather Dickensian manner and falling gently on the ebbing tide. This was the Royal Iris, an old Mersey ferry, built in 1950 and retired in 1991, as her bones started to get a bit too creaky for full-time working.
On Merseyside she was regarded as one of the great local characters: ‘the fish and chip boat’, because you could buy your supper on board. And the original plan was for the ship to stay in Liverpool as a nightclub. Then she was sold to a consortium who wanted her to be a nightclub in Cardiff instead. During the operation to remove her she broke free of her towline, like a cornered animal, and got injured in the process. She was removed to Cardiff anyway, where she rotted some more. There was an attempt to bring her back to the Mersey. It failed.
And so she was brought to Woolwich, where no one knew or cared about her. There was a nightclub plan here too. That was in 2002 and nothing has happened since. A pleasant young man called Darren is employed to look after her and is clearly a little bit in love. ‘You go down there,’ he said, pointing to the mud round the bow, ‘then look up and she’s really beautiful.’ Restoration, he insisted, was going to start soon. ‘There’ll be events on board. Not a nightclub. Corporates.’
Not here, I presumed. Darren shook his head and pointed upriver towards the glittering towers of Canary Wharf and beyond. This part of the capital is not an immediate candidate for regeneration. But it is London, and London has to have it all.
August 2013/February/March 2014
When the hotel inside the Shard, the Shangri-La, opened in May 2014, it emerged that the surrounding glass acted at night as a mirror, enabling guests in some hotel bedrooms to have a perfect view of goings-on in others. Details! Details!
40. From the Black Hill
HEREFORDSHIRE
The parishioners made their way towards Holy Communion shortly before 6 a.m. At the head of the procession was the Reverend Nicholas Lowton, vicar of Clodock and Longtown with Craswall, Llanveynoe, St Margaret’s, Michaelchurch Escley and Newton, who is not one of the younger breed of clergymen. Even so, Sunday best was not expected. The vicar himself was in dog collar and jeans. The dress code for most of the congregants comprised woolly hats and plenty of layers.
It was Easter morning and, despite having half a dozen relatively cosy churches to choose from, the vicar opted to celebrate the occasion on top of the spur off the easternmost ridge of the Black Mountains which hereabouts divides England from Wales – officially known as the Black Hill, usually referred to by the locals as the Cat’s Back. At dawn.
In practical terms the exercise was a great success. About fifty congregants made the short but stiff climb to the summit, compared to the zero who might have attended indoors at this hour. In spiritual terms the setting enabled Nicholas to make his point: ‘Moses met God at the top of the mountain. Elijah heard the still small voice on a mountain. Peter, James and John saw Christ transfigured on a mountain.’ Aesthetically, there was a problem. The idea was to see the sun rising in front of us to caress the soft Herefordshire countryside in the spring of the year. Not a chance. Thick fog engulfed the top: it was possible to see Nicholas, gamely bare-headed, grey hair flapping in the wintry breeze. Behind him, not exactly a pea-souper, but a thin grey gruel.
He urged us to go down to the land which we would be looking at if we could see it, and to spread the word of Christ’s love. But he is a shrewd as well as an eloquent preacher and knows when to stop, which was at the moment 500 toes were starting to go numb, so he just added, ‘Have a Happy Chr – Easter! Easter! It’s early!’ and bade us farewell. My immediate concern was not to spread any word at all but head back to bed. Still, Christ rose on Easter Day under far more difficult circumstances, and we all felt a little holier for having risen ourselves.
Had the weather permitted, we might have seen the Malverns, the ancient boundary between Herefordshire and Worcestershire, and perhaps even on a very clear day the Wrekin in distant Shropshire. And beneath us we would certainly have seen those parts of the vicar’s far-flung parishes not too tucked away in the clefts of the foothills: fifty square miles, bigger than Bristol, a third the size of Rutland; 1,150 people, three pubs, one shop, one vicar.
The area is known as the Golden Valley. Technically, that refers to the valley of the River Dore, which belongs to another priest, Ashley Evans, who until recently looked after fourteen churches, now rationalised to ten (plus a chapel). But the name is generally used to delineate all the little crinkles that occupy the whole south-western corner of Herefordshire.
Geographical details around here are a bit confused. The sixteen-mile-long ridge behind us that runs north to Hay-on-Wye and makes Wales invisible even on a clear day is one of the most striking features of the entire British landscape but has no name as such. Visitors tend to call it Offa’s Dyke, because the Offa’s Dyke footpath runs along it. But down here Offa didn’t need to build his pathetic dyke to keep out the Welsh; God had done his utmost by erecting a far sterner barrier.
The area became more widely known because of Bruce Chatwin’s exquisite 1982 novel, later a film, On the Black Hill, about two bachelor identical-twin farmers whose lives spanned most of the twentieth century. Such a pair of twins did live locally but, though the border was said in the book to run through their farmhouse, the Black Hill is entirely in England. The book/play/film Shadowlands, about crusty old C. S. Lewis falling in love, uses the Golden Valley as a motif: a half-remembered paradise. However, the only identifiable landscape in that film is Symonds Yat, on the banks of the Wye, miles away and a completely different part of Herefordshire.
Then again this border is in itself foggy: neighbouring Monmouthshire was technically part of England until 1974, though no one ever thought of it as English. This border is more elusive, more protean than the Scotti
sh equivalent. Ashley Evans has a church inside Wales, which does not happen up north; in rugby there are unpredictable loyalties; it is often hard to know who lives on which side of the line; and a pure Herefordshire accent has Welsh cadences. Welsh place names can be found halfway across the county, though the locals take a robustly English approach to pronunciation: the hill called Mynydd Ferddin is usually referred to as Money Farthing or Muddy Ferdin; the hamlet of Bagwyllydiart is just Baggy.
The situation is typified by the status of the eccentric book town of Hay. The Royal Mail thinks it’s in Herefordshire and the Welsh government thinks it’s in Wales; years ago Hay famously declared itself an independent kingdom, which was a stunt but one with a kernel of truth. And no one (yet) seriously envisages this as an international frontier. These are the Welsh Marches, decidedly plural.
We settled in the Golden Valley a quarter of a century ago. No time at all. There are church-school-shop-pub villages around here that look recognisably English, but the pattern of settlement is distinctly Celtic: scattered farmsteads, most with a damp sheep meadow or two but nothing like enough even to scratch a living. We live in one parish, have a patch of land over the brook in another; the muddled old Royal Mail insists we live in a third.
One recent visitor – from Worcestershire – told us we were in the most beautiful place he had ever seen: ‘What a wonderful life you must have!’ I rarely have the time to see it that way myself; nor, I suppose, had the generation upon generation who lived, fucked, strove and died on these unforgiving hillsides. But it is true that I pine whenever I am away from them, November to February partially excepted. My ideal retirement plan would be to continue living here with four clearly-defined seasons: spring, summer, autumn and Australia. But I hope to leave for good only horizontally and even then merely to St Margaret’s churchyard up the road. The place has that effect.
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