Categories: uncategorized
Tags: london, urbanwalks, church
Date: 30 December 2006 04:22:44
I've been spending a lot of time in north London over the last few days because my Mum is staying at my brother's house. (He's not there at the moment himself - another story) We were there over Christmas for three nights and I've been up once before and so far twice since.
My main problem with the district is what to call it. Its the northernmost cranny of the London Borough of Islington, in the angle between Holloway Road and Seven Sisters Road. And more precisely is an island of once rather upmarket housing between Hornsey Road, narrow, full of Turkish clubs and shops, and Stroud Green Road, which becomes Crouch Hill round the corner, once an island of West Indian settlement in a mainly white district, and now surprisingly trendy, if still a little downmarket of nextdoor Crouch End, full of theme bars, traditional bakeries, and delicatessens - but we are unreliably informed that Dave Stewart, Bob Hoskins, Lily Allen, Gillian Anderson, Ho Chi Minh, Marina Sirtis, Josette Simon, and most famously Bob Dylan got there first - almost as cool as New Cross!. Climbing up the Northern Heights, full of infill and rebuilding, very densely populated. The local authority ward is "Tollington" but no-ones ever heard of that. I suspect that mildly dishonest estate agents would sell it as "Finsbury Park", and very dishonest ones as "Crouch Hill". But both those places are on the border of Hornsey, nowadays in the London Borough of Harringay - which apparently started as a typographical error for "Hornsey". Or perhaps the other way round. Hornsey Road is not Hornsey, its the road to Hornsey. We'll have to settle for "Upper Holloway" in the knowledge that most people who hear that name would think of somewhere about a mile to west. Most of the few people who know anything about the detailed layout of inner London suburbs that is,
On Christmas Eve we went to St. Thomas's Finsbury Park (same street as the better-known mosque) for midnight mass. Wonderful place. Well it was then. Enough incense to blur the edges of the robes of the gold-clad priests against the golden east-facing altar with traditional Christmas carols with dodgy new words bowdlerised by brain-dead Anglo-Catholics from the New Engerlish Horribymnal. All this and a woman celebrant too. Wonderful. Our clothes still smelled of incense the next day.
On Sunday morning and Christmas Day we worshipped at the parish church, St. Mark's Tollington Park (Rt. Rev. Preb. +Sandy Millar, NSM incumb.) which was really rather nice. I was half expecting - no, be honest, three-quarters expecting - a congregation of young middle-class white couples with excessively clean children, but it wasn't like that. Well, it was at first, but this was a real Anglican church. Most people arrived late. I sat down two minutes into the service at the back of a mostly white congregation, and stood up an hour later in the middle of a typically Inner London congregation, maybe 40% black , 50% white, the balance made up by Asians. In fact a lot more diverse, both by ethnicity and age, than St. Thomas's.
Bishop Sandy can certainly preach. Twenty-five minutes of decent rambling evangelicalism, with a gospel challenge at the end. Illustrative quotes from Thomas Merton, the Book of Common Prayer, St. Francis, and the Times. As well as that dubious anecdote about the secret police who burst into a church and said everyone had to leave or they would be shot - I know you know it, so there is no point in repeating it. The burden of the Christmas Eve sermon being that just as we prepare materially for Christmas - food, drink, decorations, presents - so we should be preparing ourselves spiritually for receiving the gift of Jesus Christ. The early church decided, and the Reformers agreed, that today is still the Fourth Sunday of Advent in the church calendar. Which is why we are talking about John the Baptist this morning, and waiting till evening to talk about the baby Jesus.
If I was giving point scores it would be eight out of ten for delivery, nine out of ten for content, but maybe only five out of ten for form and structure - it was all good stuff but you had to keep awake to see how it fitted into his theme. But a good sermon, and we could do with more preachers like him.