Harry Brown. Starring Michael Caine and a number of kids from an infamous housing estate in the Elephant and Castle where the film's story is set. I love the references to the area and the Old Kent Road. I know it well. If the roads we drive around in our lives are like bones, the Old Kent Road would be a solid backbone in mine.
It filled me with melancholy. As a teen it was the link road between south London where I was born and grew up and the places I wanted to be. It connected me to the various clubs, bars and buzzingness of central London. To life. It's a long dreery dual carriageway over what used to be the old Roman road that ran from Dover to Holyhead. Chaucer's pilgrims travelled it on their way to Canterbury. It looks lifeless but it isn't. Inside the houses and estates there is life. The kind noone cares for.
It winds, vertebrae by vertebrae, from the Elephant and Castle all the way to New Cross Gate, with Peckham , its gangs and bloody shootings on a regular basis, and a long bank of industrial estates and business parks flanking it all the way, like ugly mottled grey flesh. Huge old pubs like the Old Kent Gin Palace once lingered awkwardly, harking back to a Victorian era when Gin palaces were Las Vegas beautiful. The Palace became frequented by mafia types before being obliterated to a hiccuping rest.
Now it's McDonalds, KFC, Toys R Us, hoardings, adverts, empty car parks, run down shops, Nail bars and seedy massage parlours. A newsagents' window has a "tall, exotic, Brazilian beauty" offering the "ultimate massage". It's a safari park of world cuisines too. Every possible type of international cuisine you can imagine from South American to Polish to Ethiopian and the red and white sign advertising an undying devotion to halal. The El Aztec catering service for tacos unlimited, the Parillada del Sur, dishing out masses of meat "tipica Bolivia". Not to mention the Auberge patisserie, the Bar Afrik, the Tawfiq Cappucino, El Paso and El Turkistan. There's a Tesco, of course. Like some kind of mighty food church. Plus The Ryad Halal Emporium and the Bangladeshi grocer. There's also the Miami Health Centre, the Mount Zion Church, "the dwelling place of God". And the Bali Car Wash.
The commercial offerings reflect the disjointed society. Immigrant and underclass, grubby and brutal, just as they feature in the film. In the underclass little distinguishes men and women in just how violent and detached and brutally ugly they have become. I hate them. Apathy and stagnation, a lack of will to live and to make the most of life, grimy tracksuits drinking Special Brew, chain-smoking Rothmans and swearing at kids, or worse behind closed doors, wandering aimlessly down the road with a head most of the way inside a family sized bucket of KFC, their daily food staple. Gangs, immigrants, hoodies rub shoulders with one another uneasily. I twice encountered a machete wielding Jamaican on my dart from work to the train station, where I would sit in the bleak November chill, avidly reading Black Hawk Down, unaware that half of Mogadishu had wound up living not 10 feet from me as a result of that tragic US exploit. There used to be urban myths about Russian arms deals at the drive through McDonalds. I don't think they were myths.
The long and giggly drive back from the Ministry of Sound club after an amazing 12 hours of glittery glowing bliss made the journey back seem irrelevant and surreal. The inside of that club was a universe away from what surrounded it. I have come to love that drive for what it meant, even if we would get through it as quickly as possible and never ever stop, driving carefully, wide Ecstacy-eyed and drug-tinglingly conscious of being stopped by the cops. A few women drivers were carjacked at traffic lights and brutally gang raped by Jamaican gangs. I would keep watch for that big green and white sign at the Bricklayer's Arms, it's po faced symbolism: "Straight on to The Channel, Dover and Peckham".
'A' lived there when he arrived in London, working as a waiter at the Savoy while learning English, bussing it back at 2am to a single room he shared with 12 other men. The place smelled heavily and constantly of black bean feijoada and one man's feet. It's the cheapest place on a Monopoly board for a reason. The ancestral London of Albert Chevalier's music hall songs and loveable cockneys, like our Mr Caine, who noted that it had changed a touch since he grew up there but who still seemed attached to it. He made some wise remarks about the vicious form of machismo on display there in 2009. I nodded along.
That towering and terrifying Estate and the blood curdling underpass feature in the film and stick in my mind.
The Thomas A Beckett pub, part of boxing history, still remains but was transformed into Beckett's Estate Agents. Plenty of boxing clubs are dotted about. Aside from this lingering Cockney tradition, elsewhere it also retains an element of British charm, buried in there in between the Divine Gospel Ministries,the ubiquitous Money Transfer Centres, Phils Garment Design for tribal wedding dresses and people hunting for God and Mammon in the Divine Bookshop. "The World Turned Upside Down" pub. It's name steeped in British irony, cocky smiles and unstifled humour. It bangs out karaoke on 'Wacky Wednesdays', now minus the blue smoke rising as that brown lace sinks.






