Croydon and Chelsea
Categories: uncategorized, circumnavigation
Tags: london, urbanwalks
Date: 24 March 2006 14:37:45
Start as we don't mean to go on. No real walking yet. I actually did get to Croydon last weekend, though not for a walk but a drink, a Ship of Fools meeting in the Dog and Bull.
The centre of Croydon is an interesting place, London's most large-scale urban suburb, the sort of place that might be less unfamiliar to Americans than most, with a decent-sized central business district of its own. Back in the 1970s and 80s the council used to make absurd references to its "Manhattan skyline" in their publicity, but one of them must have bought a cheap flight to New York and seen what it really looks like and now they have stopped. But now they have trams. The trams are shiny.
The tram system works. Not because its cheaper or more efficient than buses (it isn't, except when heavily loaded) or faster (it depends) but because it looks serious. It plonks itself in front of cars and says "Hey! We mean it! Pay attention!" It excludes them by being there, a congestion charge on wires. The day it started central Croydon became a slightly more pleasant place to be in.
Which is one of the few recent changes in Croydon that has made it more pleasant. Like a lot of outer London suburbs its been ruined by traffic over the last few decades, Attempts to "pedestrianise" usually make things worse because they are almost always put through alongside an attempt to build a ring roads round the old centre, isolating it from the network of streets that keeps towns alive. (This happens to real towns as well as suburbs - Ipswich and Preston both have bad cases of it, only working well because the "ring road" only gets round half the centre not all of it because their respective rivers get in the way.) Add that to the habit of replanning large areas at once instead of a building at a time, and shopping malls dedicated to car traffic, and most better-off people driving out to large out of town stores to shop anyway, and you get a centre that is isolated and cut off from normal life once the high street shops close, dominated by huge chain pubs selling expensive lager to teenagers out on the piss.
Croydon's not as bad as some. Bromley is about the same, and Kingston is worse, and Romford is a shithole after 7pm on a Saturday. The time I got to Romford on my walk I looked around to see if there was a pub I fancied going to - there wasn't, so I tried the railway station for a train back and found seventeen police, with dogs, just keeping an eye on the kids. So I made my excuses and left - ending up lost on the ring road, and waiting for half an hour for a bus while some poor kid of about fourteen was abandoned by his mates and threw up all over the next bus shelter but one and lay down as if to collapse.
Croydon also had police on Saturday. And, even more worryingly, it had about half a dozen emergency ambulances parked on the High Street (which, Croydon being Croydon is only about the seventh most significant main street). The sort of things that you see when something blows up. Engines running. I hope it was an exercise of some sort.
And a queue to get into Wetherspoons. Where else has a queue to get into Wetherspoon's? It's a chain that prospers selling cheap real ale to broke middle-aged men. And where else does Wetherspoon's have bouncers? Ok, that's a rhetorical question - I saw someone get bounced from a Wetherspoon's in Argyll Street in Glasgow only just before Christmas. But bouncers are usually is enough to put me off a pub. Anywhere with bouncers must have people they don't want to get in. So either I'm one of the people they want to protect their other customers from, presumably because I am too old or fat or unfashionable for their sensitive eyes) in which case I don't want to be there, or else there is someone else who is trying to get in that the management want to protect me from. In which case I'll make it easier for them by not taking the risk of being there.
The shipmeet was good fun, if a little quiet (my photos of everyone might be for Another Place), the resolutely unbouncered Dog and Bull has nice people in it and good beer (not that expensive either) and on the way out we saw that the ambulances were still there. I hope they had warm coats.
Then at East Croydon Station an unexpected phone call from my cousin who has come down to London to see a Black Crowes concert on Sunday night and wonders if I want a pint on Sunday afternoon? I said yes of course. After all its a long way to come for a gig someone who works for the Forestry Commission in north-east Scotland. Though once he went, by public transport (plane, train, bus, taxi) to a remote village in the west of Ireland to see someone play in a pub. And went back the next day.
So on Sunday afternoon off to South Kensington and down the Fulham Road to have a drink in Finch's and find him already talking to a woman called Wendy who seems somehow to resemble a garrulous Sandy Toksvig. When the TV started showing the local derby between Chelsea and Fulham (why did we choose that day?) we went off to the Pig's Ear in Old Church Street. Which was a lot more crowded and I was almost certainly the oldest person present. Lovely beer though.
Its true about Chelsea. The pub, like the street, was full of attractive young women with posh accents who seem to have spent the gross national product of a small Central American nation on the kind of makeup that looks as if it isn't there. (I passed a shop and thought I saw two dummies in the window, they moved and they turned out to be real.) And, very different from Lewisham, nearly everyone was white & those that weren't were mostly east Asian.
Apparently it hasn't always been like that. It was a very mixed area once, before the seriously rich overflowed Belgravia to the west, and decided they no longer needed servants so they let out their mews to the upper middle classes. Those upper middle classes have now got as far as Fulham - which was a mostly working-class district in my own memory - and have got Hammersmith surrounded as they try to link up with their more suburban friends coming in from Chiswick and Turnham Green.
Not all the buildings are up-market Georgian terraces, gorgeous Queen Anne houses that we couldn't afford to rent breathing air in, or twee converted mews. I was impressed by Hereford Buildings built for Octavia Hill in the 1870s, once apparently "Chelsea's tenements", small flats for industrial workers, and now a posh-looking Gothick block of flats home to Royston Hughes, the first pensioner to be given an ASBO to prevent him using the tube.
And there is a dinky but of apparently 1970s (or later?) brutalism in the same street. I've no idea what it is but its wonderfully out of keeping with the area. You wouldn't get away with that these days. Not unless it was well over twenty stories high.
