London Undone

No Sleep 'Til Croydon

2010-04-21T09:30:00.000-07:00

One day, long after our civilisation has crumbled and centuries after mankind has died out, alien beings will land on earth and stand puzzled amid the ruins of Croydon, wondering what this strange place once was. They’ll surely realise that London was the capital and wonder why they’ve found what looks like the remains of a great civilisation only ten miles away. Could it have been a breakaway republic? Or was London destroyed first and this place built as a replacement? After pondering this and realising it will forever remain a mystery, the visitors will return to their home planet and silence will descend over Croydon once again.

Unloved and unlovely, Croydon always comes across as an unwelcome growth on the underbelly of London and instead of basking in the glory of its proximity to the capital seems to have developed a reputation for being everything that London isn’t; whilst one stands for excitement and progress the other has become almost a byword for everything that’s suburban and mundane. David Bowie reputedly used the phrase ‘That’s So Croydon!’ to refer to anything boring and unadventurous, and the only time I ever heard about the place was when the latest murder there was reported on the news. So I knew I had to visit. I caught the 264 bus from Tooting and set out on my historic journey. What would await me? A shiny vision of the future? A grimy vision of the past? Or just a sign saying ‘WELCOME TO CROYDON. NO FATAL STABBINGS FOR 3 DAYS’?

Before it got to Croydon the bus dragged me through Mitcham. I’d spent a miserable six months there working in a temporary job and knew it to be the graveyard of hope, dreams and civilisation, so felt a distinct sense of unease until we’d passed through it. Barely a mile from a London postcode, it’s a different world entirely, a no man’s land of pound shops and budget supermarkets, where the inhabitants seem to spend half their time in Wetherspoon’s and the other half screaming at inanimate objects in the street and wondering how their lives have evaporated right before their eyes. To confirm how far from civilisation it was, there was even a Farmfoods, the supermarket for people who think Iceland is a bit too upmarket. And if Mitcham was like this then what would my ultimate destination be like? It didn’t take long to find out. The skyline of downtown Croydon soon appeared on the horizon and before long we had arrived.

I wasn’t sure if Croydon counted as London. The buses and Greater London boundary said yes but everything else said no and in the end it was the postcode that ruled it out: CR0. I found it slightly sinister that the first part of a postcode could have a zero in it, as if it was telling me that Croydon was a blank slate with its own language and customs. It was once the future, and ambitious town planners tried to turn it into a dazzling metropolis in the decades following the war, but something went wrong in the early 1970s and they abandoned the place along with anyone else who had any sense. I’d always thought Croydon was a new town, a Milton Keynes to satellite London, but found out it’s actually in the Domesday Book. In Croydon, nothing is real and everything is permitted.

I warily began to explore the place. What do people do for kicks around here, I wondered, apart from stab each other? As far as I could see, Croydon was simply a sprawling suburb with a few office blocks and shopping centres planted in the middle, with some of them large and modern and others virtually abandoned and only housing the occasional strange shop. One was a Spud-U-Like, which I didn’t even know was a real shop as the only time I’d heard of it before was when Wayne and Waynetta Slob considered naming their baby Spudulika before settling on Frogmella. Another shop was selling flags and decorations to celebrate American Independence Day. What was this, I wondered? Was it just another case of people celebrating something without grasping the history behind it, like Catholics celebrating Guy Fawkes Night, or had Croydon slyly broken away from the United Kingdom to become the 51st state?

I walked on. I didn’t want to buy anything so it appeared that Croydon had little to offer me. It seemed that it had been forgotten for thirty years until new buildings were put up at the turn of the 21st century, so the brutalist architecture of the postwar era sat uncomfortably side by side with recently constructed futuristic creations, and whilst John Betjeman had freely slagged off Slough, his verses about Croydon were altogether more elegiac and mournful. Once again, Croydon was a town of paradoxes.

One more thing occurred to me: had Croydon deliberately cultivated its mundane image in the hope that London would overlook it the next time it undertook some ruthless expansionism? I’d seen how Mitcham had gone from a leafy village with a pond and cricket pitch to a faceless semi-suburb and wondered if Croydon was keeping a low profile in the hope of avoiding a similar fate.

On the other hand, I couldn’t help feeling slightly disappointed that Croydon wasn’t as bad as I’d expected or even hoped; I’d gone on a glorious summer’s day and although it meant that there was a parade of burnt and glistening flesh on display as the townsfolk tried to make the most of the sunshine, it made Croydon look… almost beautiful.

But not that beautiful. Soon I had exhausted Croydon’s charms and headed back to the bus stop. Never had Tooting seemed so cosmopolitan. Before long I was back on the 264 and as the Croydon skyline finally disappeared from view I felt a shiver run down my back.
I had been to Croydon.
I was still alive.

London Drinking Games

2010-03-07T13:19:00.000-08:00

I don't know if people still play drinking games and, thinking about it, I'm not sure why they ever did in the first place. Isn't drinking fun enough in the first place? And once people start drinking they talk an endless amount of bollocks, so the idea of people being stuck for things to say in a pub and having to find some other way to pass the time seems a bit unlikely.

Anyway, regardless of whether people still play drinking games, or whether they should (and I admit I've hardly set up this piece very well with this introduction) I have developed a London drinking game that, with your kind indulgence, I shall share with you now.

The first is loosely based on the drinking game where you name a famous person, then the person next to you has to name a famous person whose first name starts with the same letter as the last name of the person you said. To add further excitement to this already enthralling game, saying the name of someone whose first and last name start with the same initial (like Marilyn Monroe, for example) causes the direction of the game to reverse, so if you are going from person to person clockwise around the table it changes to anticlockwise.

But my version of this involves people whose surname is an area of London. When your turn comes you must name one, and here are some examples:

Robert, Mitcham - Paul, Merton - Harry, Enfield - Eric, Clapton - John, Leyton - Ian, Holloway - Branscombe, Richmond (a bit of an obscure one, that, but some may remember him for his role as Bobby Sixkiller in the 1990s US TV drama Renegade) - Simone De Beauvoir Town

I suppose you can do fictional characters too, like, Nigel, Tufnell Park. Or, possibly stretching it a bit, David Brent Cross. Plus if you can come up with a person whose first and last names are areas of London (though Charlton Heston is the only one I can think of) then the direction of the game changes.

Anyway, I'm sure you get the idea; once yet get the hang of this game it provides many minutes of fun and then many hours of boredom. Possibly a more exciting drinking game can be developed from this idea, but I'm afraid I can't be bothered to think of one.

Reading the London Novels: London Fields by Martin Amis

2010-02-14T10:23:00.000-08:00

I approached this book with high hopes, having been led to believe it was one of the Great London Novels but after reading a few hundred pages I began to feel something was lacking from the book. Hmm... What was it? Oh, yes - a plot!

Call me fussy, but if I read a 470 page novel then I kind of expect something to happen in it other than endless chapters about a man going to his local and playing darts. So, somewhat disappointed, I skimmed the rest of it then went on Wikipedia to see what happens in the end. I was, however, in for something of a surprise, as what I'd thought to be a fairly uneventful tale of a darts player who gets drawn into a murder is in fact (apparently) a chilling portrait of a broken and dystopian society on the cusp of a new millennium and the verge of apocalypse (and so on...) Which is to say that, as far as I could see, the critical opinion of this book bears very little resemblance to the book itself.

The main problem with London Fields, and most of Amis' work, is that he spends too much time thinking about how to tailor his work to the critics (by having predictably post-modern bits such as the narrator meeting the characters) at the same time as trying to scandalise his middlebrow audience (like calling one of his books Dead Babies - how very shocking!) He does this, however, at the expense of any emotional core; great art should come straight from the heart with little interference from the brain but this book is little more than a display of literary cleverness and the end result is that it's a largely cerebral and ultimately empty exercise.

And as if that wasn't disappointing enough, it isn't even set in London Fields, instead being mainly based around the oh-so-trendy trustafarian/tourist district of Portobello Road. The title's probably a metaphor for something, but a metaphor for what? Oh, who cares...

Reading the London Novels: Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky

2009-12-12T13:51:00.000-08:00

I have decided to read as many novels set in London as I can, then write about them. And here is the first one:

My A-Z claims to provide '29,800 streets in your pocket' and whilst that may nowadays be more numerically accurate there's no denying that Hamilton's version is a lot more poetic, contrasting the limitless possibilities that the capital is supposed to offer with the mundane, anonymous reality that usually greets those who come in such of them. For Hamilton's London is a dirty, booze-sodden, treacherous temptress, whose inhabitants are condemned to be forever disappointed and miserable, whether it's Bob, the waiter of the Midnight Bell pub around which the trilogy centres, who falls for a local prostitute and ends up losing both his money and his sanity to her, or Bella, the pub's barmaid who yearns for Bob but instead has to deal with the embarrassing attempts at seduction of her comically grotesque middle-aged suitor, Mr Eccles, or Jenny, the prostitute whom Bob falls for, who we later learn to have once been a mild mannered servant who went out one night and succumbed to the temptation of alcohol, which before she knew it had sent her on a downward spiral that included being involved in a fatal car crash, waking up in a strange man's house, losing her job and ending up working the streets.

In Hamilton's world the districts of the city are characters in themselves, and he uses the associations with them to colour the narrative: Chiswick represents well-to-do suburban mundanity, Soho is a sleazy blend of bright lights and half forgotten dreams disappearing in an alcoholic haze and Hampstead Heath represents escape from London and its problems, being above the city and looking down on it. No one turns the prosaic into the poetic better than Hamilton did.

So is this one of my favourite London novels? Why, yes, I do believe it is. And having found the best London novel so far I'm going to celebrate with a drink. Why, I shouldn't be surprised if, by this time tomorrow, I've lost every penny I have and/or metamorphosed into a fully-fledged prostitute...

Toilet Humour

2009-09-24T12:24:00.000-07:00

I have decided to branch out into obscene cartoons, and this is my first effort...

The End of the London Paper

2009-09-22T13:50:00.000-07:00

Now that the wind has carried the last solitary copy of thelondonpaper off the streets of the capital forever I can't help but wonder what will happen to distributors of the rival London Lite; with no one to talk to as they hand out papers in the wind and rain, will they grow despondent and eventually wither away and die? For whilst I had for a long time harboured a fantasy of one day seeing a fight between vendors of the rival papers, I eventually came to realise that they were more comrades than competitors, because although the papers themselves were rivals the overwhelming majority of commuters took copies of both. So this must have been a lonely week for distributors of London Lite as they returned to their pitches to ponder a solitary future as, after three years, the Freesheet Wars are over; London Lite has triumphed and thelondonpaper has closed.

Thelondonpaper will forever have a place in my heart as it was on their pages that I saw my name in print for the first time when they ran the now-classic 'Warning: Big Bum is Imminent' column (which you can read at the start of this very blog). Not having seen a copy of the paper that day, I didn't even know the column had appeared until almost ten at night, at which point I dashed to the nearest tube station but failed to find a copy until one came almost mythically floating down the staircase towards me, a copy so gnarled and twisted that I had to untangle it before tearing through it to find my piece.

And there it was: my name in print. I stood and gasped in disbelief. Thousands would have read my words. I was a printed author, and fame and fortune surely beckoned. Would I even make it home without being chased down the street, Beatlemania-style, by an adoring crowd? As it happened, I did. But that didn't stop me from being on a high for the next few days.

I sent a few more pieces in, and another one was printed, but then Time Out started to run things I'd written and so by then it was no longer my main focus. Still, I'll never forget where it began, and the excitement of seeing my name in print for the first time, knowing it was only a matter of time before the masses were inspired by my ideas to take to the streets and start a revolution (and whilst, strictly speaking, this hasn't happened yet, I imagine it will at some point in the very near future).

Thelondonpaper is dead.

Long live thelondonpaper.

London's Literary Locals

2009-06-18T10:04:00.000-07:00

My joint greatest writing achievement so far (along with my weekly Time Out column) - a full page lead article in Time Out's book section on London pubs that have featured in works of fiction.

Originally Published in Time Out London, June 18-24, 2009

The Green Man, Putney Heath, SW15 in HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds

Having found it deserted, Wells’ anonymous narrator reports that he spends the night ‘in the inn that stands at the top of Putney Hill’ but, unusually for someone who has broken into a pub, he doesn’t touch the booze as he has more pressing concerns, namely avoiding instant death at the hands of the Martians. Putney Heath was once an area so quiet that it became notorious for attacks by Highwaymen, but Wells’ protagonist is more concerned with avoiding the Martians and can’t fully enjoy the scenery as it’s scorched and littered with corpses following the invasion, so continues on his way into central London.

The Shakespeare's Head, Arlington Way, EC1R, in BS Johnson's Albert Angelo

Johnson lived in nearby Myddleton Square during the 1960s, and this pub features in his 1964 novel when the eponymous narrator, a supply teacher and aspiring architect, wanders by it and remembers a recent incident there: ‘The Shakespeare’s Head. New pub. Old one fell down. Ten minutes after closing time one night, just as all the operalovers were wending their uplifted ways homeward, the front of the pub fell out. Just fell out into the road.’ Presumably noting the irony of a pub, rather than one of its inebriated customers, collapsing in the street at the end of the night, he then continues on his way.

The Jeremy Bentham, University Street, WC1E in Ian McEwan's Saturday

The philosopher Jeremy Bentham still attends weekly meetings at University College though it’s unlikely he says much as he died two hundred years ago and infamously requested that the college preserve his corpse. The nearby pub that bears his name appears in McEwan’s novel when its protagonist, Henry Perowne, fears he’s about to be attacked by the occupants of a car he’s just had an accident with and realises it’s unlikely that the pub’s customers will rush out to his rescue: 'Just up the street is a pub, the Jeremy Bentham. But if it's open this early, the drinkers are all inside in the warmth.'

The Sherlock Holmes, Northumberland Street, WC2N in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles

In its previous incarnation as the Northumberland Arms, this is believed to have been the inspiration for the Northumberland Hotel, where Sir Henry Baskerville stays in one of Conan Doyle’s most famous stories, and is now a Holmes theme pub housing a range of memorabilia including a sample of soil from Reichenbach Falls, the site of Holmes’ temporarily fatal encounter with Professor Moriarty. The great detective’s favourite recreational pursuits, however, have sadly long since been outlawed: you can’t light up a pipe in there because of the smoking ban and probably won’t be looked upon too favourably if you decide to try some cocaine either.

The Shakespeare, Buckingham Palace Road, SW1W, in Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square

Hamilton’s novel, set just before the outbreak of World War II, sees its main character, George Harvey Bone, go into the Shakespeare after getting off a train back from Brighton, but there’s something odd in the air: ‘He had some drinks at the 'Shakespeare' opposite Victoria, and everybody was very excited. There was a strange atmosphere altogether.' Obsessed with a woman and tormented by her indifference to him, the hapless Mr Bone drinks away what’s left of his sanity then returns home to Earl’s Court and murders the object of his affection before travelling to Maidenhead to commit a lonely suicide.

The Wheatsheaf, Stoney Street, SE1 in Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

Sinclair’s novel-cum-psychogeographical exploration of East End lore sees its characters enter the Wheatsheaf and find hidden meaning even in the pub’s decor, noting: ‘the bar has its own sense of what it should be: damp wood bowed like whalebone, cabin-close, engravings of the old city, its secret corners, obscure messages.’ Now relocated whilst work on the Thameslink extension is carried out, the Wheatsheaf witnesses a scenario that can surely only happen in an Iain Sinclair book: the resident pub bore, rather than ranting about football or immigration, offers his opinions on the suicidical eighteenth century poet Thomas Chatterton, so they make their excuses and leave...

In Cyberspace, No One Can Hear You Scream

2009-05-30T13:22:00.000-07:00

For a while this blog only contained my published pieces, and I toyed with the idea of leaving it like that, retaining its purity and making it surely the only blog in the world where every entry had previously appeared on the pages of a reputable journal. But after a while I relented; after all, it was hardly in keeping with the whole spirit of blogging and, anyway, with Time Out's Big Smoke section being axed, taking my weekly column with it, and with the imminent closure of the London Paper my current writing outlets will have vanished within a few weeks of each other and exiled me, for now, to a life on the web.

But in cyberspace there are no rules: no word limits, no deadlines, no editorial changes, no requirement to make a point and certainly no requirement to actually write anything good. Indeed, doesn't the whole concept of blogging highlight one of the major problems of the internet, chiefly that whilst in theory anyone in the world can read your work, in practice there are so many millions of blogs out there that many of them are read by no one other than the authors themselves?

And hasn't the internet been somewhat overrated in this regard? We're always being told about how it's a great way to get yourself noticed but every time someone like Lily Allen or Sandi Thom is supposedly discovered on the web it inevitably turns out they already had publicists and record companies behind them and it was all a publicity stunt. It's the same with any blog that supposedly becomes a word of mouth success; invariably it's been written by a journalist or author with a book to promote and whose PR has spent a huge amount of time and money to create that word of mouth success.

To paraphrase Sideshow Bob, I'm well aware of the irony of using a blog using the medium itself, but that doesn't change the fact that I've used my first blog to not only attack the system that supports it but to declare that, by and large, blogs are a waste of time. And that's not a very optimistic start, is it?*

* No, not really.

Meddling Middle Management

2009-04-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

Originally Published in the London Paper on 27th April 2009 as 'The Middle Men Caused This Mess'

As I travelled to work one morning in a crammed tube carriage with my head wedged into the armpit of a man I was sure I recognised from Channel Five's The World's Sweatiest Man I glumly reflected on my situation and realised that we were squashed together because our middle managers insisted we all start work at the same time, and we were stuck in a tunnel because TFL management had once again failed to prevent delays from occurring. But as I thought about it more I came to a startling conclusion: far from simply being an irritation as we go about our working lives, middle management are in fact responsible for virtually everything wrong with the world today.

To illustrate this, consider the following examples: first, there's the breakdown in law and order, which has largely come about because police officers have become so bogged down by quotas and paperwork set by managers that they no longer have time to chase criminals other than ones who can be easily convicted, meaning that muggers go free whilst prisons fill up with those insane criminal geniuses who put the wrong kind of plastics in their recycling bags. Then there's the economic crisis, which is usually blamed on bankers until you remember that it was triggered by the collapse in the US sub-prime mortgage market, and that came about because estate agents ran out of financially reliable people to sell mortgages to so started lending to inbred yokels in order to meet the never-ending targets set by their managers. The crisis then spread when middle managers across the world reacted with their traditional herd mentality: instead of devising original, long-term solutions to the problem they simply made people redundant so it looked like they were doing something.

It's the same if you look at any other situation, like how the NHS became more concerned with chasing targets than actually curing people, which raises an important question: why is it that the only people who can't see that middle managers do very little except obsess over irrelevant statistics and pointless rules, are the board of directors, the only ones who can do anything about them? Well, unfortunately I didn't have time to think of an explanation: when I got to work it was 9.01 so I had to spend the next two hours in a disciplinary meeting and then write a 10,000 word report on my unacceptable lateness...

Warning: Big Bum is Immiment

2009-03-11T19:34:00.000-07:00

Originally Printed in the London Paper, 11th March 2009

If you’re feeling guilty that we’re barely two months into 2009 but your New Year’s resolution is already a vague and distant memory then you should take comfort in the knowledge that this is traditionally the time of year when the government’s annual attempt to get the British public to lead healthier lives also fizzles out in cloud of disinterest. Each year it seems that the finest minds in Whitehall spend months racking their brains and then end up doing the same thing they do every year, namely producing a series of annoying TV ads and posters at bus stops that politely ask us to be healthier without offering any real incentive or assistance. Judging by this year’s efforts they have once again squandered a budget running to several hundred pounds so I’d like to offer the following suggestions of how they should spend next year's money if they really want to improve the nation's health...

First, if packs of cigarettes can carry health warnings and pictures of their effect on your health then why can’t fast food do the same? Hamburgers could come in wrappers saying ‘WARNING: EATING THIS CAN LEAD TO YOU DEVELOPING HEART DISEASE, CANCER AND A BIG, FAT, SAGGY ARSE’. This could be accompanied by a picture of a diseased heart, congested arteries or (as I suspect would be more effective) a big, fat, saggy arse.

Second, the number of smokers could be massively reduced with two simple TV adverts. The first would target young people who think smoking is cool by featuring uncool celebrities such as Cliff Richard and Anthea Turner praising the habit (possibly whilst enjoying a post-coital smoke together) and telling viewers that they can be as cool as them by smoking, and the second would be run during the break in the Jeremy Kyle Show and feature Gary Glitter lighting up whilst smiling knowlingly at the audience, guaranteeing a massive drop in smokers of a tabloid reading nature. With these two cheap but effective adverts a huge burden on the NHS would be lifted overnight.

My third idea is perhaps the most controversial: instead of launching another inane ad campaign the government could do something really outrageous like subsidizing leisure centres to the extent that it's not more expensive to go for a swim than it is to stuff your face in McDonald's. But that really is a crazy idea, isn't it?