a Dirty Martini

Winchester Geese

While I refind my blogging "mojo" thought I'd leave you with this since it fits nicely with the post below. A lamb, heart and ribbon tied to the gates of CrossBones graveyard, Borough, near London Bridge - unconsecrated ground used since medieval times for poor burials, where London's prostitutes were buried throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.  It's sad and fascinating history is neatly summarised here and worth a click. When they briefly excavated the grounds in the 90s they uncovered bodies piled upon bodies.  They examined 148 19th century corpses. One third were perinatal, another 10% were babies under one year, the adults were women aged around 38.  Tests showed that those buried had died of smallpox, tuberculosis, Pagets disease and syphillis. The gates to the grounds are covered in ribbons, tokens, flowers and gifts left by Londoners as a sort of people's shrine ( I have other photos). Locals are trying to preserve the grounds, to save them from the perpetual rhythm of modern London, the building of swanky glass fronted office blocks. The name "Winchester Geese" was given to prostitutes licenced to the Bishop of Winchester (the King's Chancellor) since 1161, to work in the Liberty of the Clink. In his 1603 Survey of London Stow writes:

'I have heard of ancient men, of good credit, report that these single women were forbidden the rites of the church, so long as they continued that sinful life, and were excluded from Christian burial, if they were not reconciled before their death. And therefore there was a plot of ground called the Single Woman's churchyard, appointed for them far from the parish church.'

Pieces of London

Everything about the area I posted photos of , a week ago, I adore.  It’s where my parents met.  On a double decker bus. My mother was quite taken with my father's broad shoulders in his oversized coat as he travelled over from the East End, she told me. It made him stand out. It’s where they worked.  And my earliest memory is of my father, a smoky office full of jovial journos on Fleet Street (one of whom suggested my name when I was born apparently) and the noise of the machines pushing out newspapers, pointed out to me, far too small to understand, by my dad. This was around about the time they were forced to pack up in the face of the digital age and move over to Wapping. Another publishing revolution had hit the global newspaper industry and which started in Fleet Street. 

I also remember being quite young and sitting with one of my parents colleagues in a pub somewhere around there.  She seemed about 80 to me but was nowhere near that age, her hair pulled up and away from a friendly mischievous face, gazing at me over her half glasses and lecturing me on the importance of cigarettes and adventure in a girl’s life.  I think I later would argue that point with my parents and fled off to North Africa to sit in bedouin tents instead of accompanying the family to America. 

Fleet Street has some of London’s most characterful boozers and abundant drinking dens. It’s where Dickens hung out. If you venture off the side alleys you find some serious ancient history, much of it unnoticed, many stories untold.  And it’s where my father gazed down and snapped the crowds applauding a beautiful Princess called Diana on her way to get married at the top of the road in St Pauls'.   Wartime bombs cleared the area around our great cathedral and a penniless Britain put up grey drab concrete slabs to surround it, something my father never understood. Europe regails its magnficent churches with fine piazzas, we gave St Pauls a car park.  A few years ago they did away with that and rebuilt Paternoster Square.  But for the hideous Starbucks that snuck in there, it is finally and fittingly superb. 

Over towards Holborn by way of Chancery Lane you reach the diamond district of Hatton Garden. Every shop is Jewish owned and the cafes squeezed between the numerous diamond dens serve up the best sandwiches in town, if salt beef and pickles are your thing.   That street cleverly hides the oldest catholic church in England where in a 3 day feast Henry VIII served up stuffed swans to honour the first of his unfortunate wives.  And squeezed down a little Dickensian alleyway you can find a teeny tiny boozer with an ancient tree growing in the middle of it, around which Elizabeth the I ‘danced the maypole’ and more recently where my mum and dad would drink when they were ‘courting’ (as they say). The Germans levelled much of it but you can still visit the crypt in the stunning church and what they rebuilt. What survived make London what it is.

To the north is Clerkenwell, the area once home to a nunnery and priory, breweries and gin distilleries. The rising poor population and a nasty (haunted) prison shipping off 'delinquants' to the colonies added a seedy air.  The Luftewaffe cleared most of the slums and Clerkenwell had a makeover in the 1990s.  It is now known for its warehouse conversions, nightclubs and restaurants, pubs and shops with personality. Like the Three Kings with its frankly bonkers papier mache figurines (Henry VIII, Elvis and Kong: the three kings) standing guard over the entrance to the collection of tat cluttering every available surface inside.  It’s a pity that the haze of rollie smoke that engulfed that place has been suctioned out by the nazi no smoking ban. Oh how I hate them.

Round the corner there is a medieval priory once home to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, better known as the Knights Hospitallers, who defended the Holy Land. What’s left is a stone gate which houses an intriguing museum for the St. John Ambulance…and opposite - the low medieval priory buildings can just be seen. They are breathtaking to stumble across.  Did you know the word hospital can be traced back to these guys? No, neither did I. Sat behind all this is some of London's first ever welfare housing. established by a philanthropic American who made his largest fortune in London, named George Peabody. There is a statue to him in the City. He gets a sizebable chunk of space on wiki too.

In its centre is Smithfield Market. A second cathedral. To meat. A tall beautiful pink and purple Victorian wrought-iron market frame work encasing dozens of butchers shops, flanked by enormous arctic lorries parked all around it from very early in the morning. By 7am they’re finished and stand there quite casually in their bloodied white coats drinking ale.  Bars dotted all around draw in the after-work and pre-club crowds, the two superclubs being Fabric, onetime meat cellar and Turnmills, the first club to obtain a 24-hour dance licence some 15 years ago (although the building now housing Turnmills is to become an office block).  Before it was a “superclub”  the latter was just an ‘ordinary’ sparkly club that drew underage renegade teens seeking adventure all the way from deepest darkest ‘saaarf’ (south) London by way of the Old Kent Road. With handfuls of drugs in our fists.

So the ‘adventure’ ladies name was Jean. She was my mum’s best friend.  She kept busy even after she retired.  She spent the last 2 months of her life up at the hospital in East London, bewildered and incognizant of the people who loved her following the sudden appearance of a brain tumour. She died early last year.  I couldn’t find the words to make my mum feel better at the time.  When it comes to adventure I don't think it gets much better than working in Fleet Street and living on a house boat on the Thames with my mum as she did. She made a remarkable impression on me too. Their houseboat sank inexplicably one day and took with it all their spangly stuff apparently. 

Nope, I wasn’t sure what to say to my mum to make her feel better then. Or now.  The bus my parents met on still winds it's way down Fleet Street. The same number bus as the one in the photo below. All I do know is I think about them all. And her friend. Her wise face and knowing glances, her cigarettes, my father, mother, their laughter, hard work and commitment to raising us. I think about where they all worked. And I know exactly why I love this area of London the best.   

Treasures

This is one of my most treasured possessions, photographed a little earlier. 

Silver Cutlery. Exciting huh? 

I tend to lose things like jewellery, even expensive pieces I have treasured. I'll brush an earring out when I push my hair from my face, rushing across a street. I can feel the little 'precious' drop onto my skin and then bounce into the road never to be seen again. A ring I am nervously twisting around and around a finger walking down the street will flick and bounce onto the pavement. I stood helpless as one ring I owned rolled into the road frustratingly just where I could see it,  only to be run over by a double decker bus. It was squashed firm and immoveable into the tarmac. It's still there. If you ever come to London and cross the bus lane near Italian Kitchen in Holborn you might catch a piece of inexpensive me glimmering in the black beneath your feet for what it's worth!

The silver above came to live with me via someone who worked at the Savoy hotel from where it all came. For a multitude of reasons it has cherished memories attached to it all, odd as that sounds. I never attended the great auction when London's most beloved old hotel closed it's doors to the public for a £100 million make over last year.  The place was tired and needed freshening up. It was an art deco gem, stuffed full of slightly dusty feeling history. The only hotel left that hadn't been pulled and pushed into 21st century "boutique" and "funky" mode. I liked that about it. It's black and white tiled foyer was so incredibly shiny, like ice. I once went arse over apex in my heels on one of the very few occasions I went to the famous American Bar inside the hotel. I was scraped up off the floor all red faced. Apparently "that happens all the time Mizz".

The American Bar is brilliantly described here:

The grandmother of all cocktail bars opened for business in the late 1890s, but found its feet in 1928, when Harry Craddock arrived to become Head Barman. Escaping the desert of Prohibition in the US, he proceeded to invigorate the London cocktail scene. Craddock invented the ghostly White Lady (dry gin, Cointreau, lemon juice) and, though he didn't quite invent the dry martini - it started life in New York - he "launched" it at the American Bar. His 1930 anthology The Savoy Cocktail Book (a facsimile is on sale) is a treasure trove of distilled nectars. The bar itself is a gleaming, art deco museum piece, discreetly lit, unflashily grand, hushed, a little staid and startlingly expensive - as well it might be since the drinks are mixed by Salim Khoury, nominated Barman of the Year by his peers. His Bloody Marys are volcanic. The walls are lined with photo portraits of the stars by Terry O'Neill (that's Elizabeth Taylor putting a fag in David Bowie's mouth) and a satirical painting of the Hollywood glamour-pusses who used to flock here. A young piano player tickles the ivories and sings old standards. When I took my daughter here for her 18th birthday, he played her Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me", ended with a cascading glissando, rose from the piano, strode over and impetuously kissed her hand. It may be an old warhorse of a cocktail bar, but it's still capable of friskiness.

Okay it may not be so romantic but that solid big cutlery is pretty damned old. I love it's old Savoy motif in the stems and silver patent marks. It's a little piece of London history that I'll always own. I love it to bits! I'm weird like that. 

Cabbies

(Ugh... the internet connection here is so awkward and so damn slow but I'll give this a shot)

I picked up a book to read recently all about London. Bought it in this gorgeous second hand bookshop on my road. 

.....I took a photo of the bookshop below with Judy Garland in the window on a wintery evening walk last Christmas.  Last Christmas already? Wow. I loved that walk and took a few pictures that night. I thought she looked beautiful...

Anyway. The book is so lovely (click on the link).  I've always wanted to describe taking a London cab. Sounds dull maybe but it's a real London experience that is much more than simply getting from A to B. And this is what the author writes about. About London cabbies. It is so sooooooo good, i'm posting the whole section:

John Russell - "London"

"When they walk out of Heathrow Airport after an eight or nine hours' journey, first-time visitors to London may well decide that the two most beautiful words in the English language are "Taxi, sir?" Those visitors are not wrong, either. If there were freshmen orientation for the foreign visitor to London, it is with those two words that it would start.

The London taxi is democracy made visible. One size fits all. Duke and dustman are treated alike. As a living space-even if our lease is for no more than a few minutes-the London taxi is ample, almost luxurious. Once inside the bulky, boxy, entirely hospitable interior, passengers sit back and sit high. Long legs are at home. The diesel engine minds its own business. The meter ticks away as if it were there simply to measure our thoughts and keep them steady.

Passengers can see out of course. But if they crave eyeball contact with their companions, the London taxi has a fabled potential for intimacy. Should they talk of this and that with the driver, they will be warmed by the sunshine of good manners. For the cab driver is the archetypal Londoner.

He knows his city from Adam & Eve Mansions, W8 to Zoar Street, SE1. He talks just enough, in an idiom as juicy as steak and kidney pudding.  

It is of him, as much of anyone else, that Osbert Sitwell in 1943 said 

" How is it possible not to love Londoners, with their understanding of life, their want of envy""

Summer

I think I've written this summer off weatherwise. I am starting to forget what it feels like to have the sun on my back. Everyone else is moaning about sticky hot summers. I just want it to stop raining and warm up. When summer is pleasant in England I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. When the sun shines and the sky is at least patchy blue, the temperature doesn't sore and stick consistently at a million unbearable degrees day after day after day. It just feels right. Pleasant. I want a little of that now please. Before the nights draw in completely and an evening til at least 9 pm basking in the late evening summer sunshine is totally out of the question.

Hyde Park

 

HM Household Cavalry

Mogadishu meets Krakow

So i went to see a 'shared ownership housing scheme' yesterday. My name came on the list and i got a letter inviting me to have half my mortgage subsidised by el gobierno because i'm a one salary income household and first time buyer priced out the market etc etc. Very exciting.

Except that it was at the top of the Old Kent Road.

Near where i was born, know it well, figured it might be changing and upcoming now so off i went. I took a cab at lunchtime because i wasn't sure which bus route would drop me closest. It's quite weird going back to somewhere you haven't been in a while. It's still the middle of nowwhere.

I know this when the cab driver gazes around as he drops me off and says: will you be okay? maybe i should wait?

This is still true:

Apathy and stagnation, a lack of will to live or to make the most of life, grimy tracksuits drinking Special Brew, chain-smoking Rothmans and swearing at kids or wandering aimlessly down the road with a head most of the way inside a family sized bucket of KFC.  Gangs, hoodies, a machete wielding local black man i remember, immigrants. It's fucking depressing.

Except that the area has more Poles now alongside the Somalis.

The building was amazing. The appartments are all beautiful. I had my interview. God knows if i swung it. I think i sound too posh but i can't be bothered to put on a south London accent. Saying that all the people viewing it with me were women - and looked and sounded like Trots and teachers, banging on about 'local authority meetings'.

According to the financial bloke i stand a chance so what the heck. None of my family agree with me. My father's response made me laugh:

Dear Alison, Mum showed me your EM re the flat. I have to say that I'm less than ecstatic about the prospect of you living in the Old Kent Rd for crying out loud. Heaven knows what kind of people live there in the area now. It was bad enough a few years ago. I would suggest that you think very carefully before committing to that address. Sorry to sound like a Debbie Downer but I'm telling you NO. Love, Dad

Debbie Downer? Where did he get that. That kind of sums it up for me. Though actually i'm going to apply anyway.

Here's an unrelated picture that made me laugh c/o Laurie

We should seek Independence

By 2020, London will be the fourth largest City economy in the world (behind Tokyo, New York and Los Angeles)

London is 5th in the growth chart, with 3% growth forecast for next year

London is ranked No 1 City for business in Europe

It is No 1 leading City for Global commerce

No 1 leading global Financial centre

There are £190bn worth of development projects underway

31,000 new homes being built

$80 billion worth of growth in London over the next five years

3rd busiest film production centre in the world

&....

3.3m consumers between the ages of 20-44 live in London..all of whom will benefit from Ken's proposed tramway down Oxford Street. The ONLY thing he has ever suggested that i actually like.

This Morning

 

Pieces of London

I’ve mentioned Soho. I’ve mentioned the Old Kent Road below. But I have a real affinity with one particular area of London.   Fleet Street and surrounds. 

Everything about this area I adore.  It’s where my parents met.  On a double decker bus.  It’s where they worked.  And my earliest memory is of my father, a smoky office full of jovial journos on Fleet Street (one of whom suggested my name when I was born apparently) and the noise of the machines pushing out newspapers, pointed out to me, far too small to understand, by my dad around about the time they were forced to pack up in the face of the digital age and move over to Wapping. 

I also remember being quite young and sitting with one of my parents colleagues in a pub somewhere.  She seemed about 60 to me but was nowhere near that age, her hair pulled up and away from a friendly mischievous face, gazing at me over her half glasses and lecturing me on the importance of cigarettes and adventure in a girl’s life.  I think I later would argue that point with my parents and fled off to North Africa to sit in bedouin tents instead of accompanying the family to America. 

Fleet Street has some of London’s most characterful boozers and abundant drinking dens. It’s where Dickens hung out. If you venture off the side alleys you find some serious ancient history, much of it unnoticed, many stories untold.  And it’s where my father gazed down and snapped the crowds applauding Princess Diana on her way to get married.   Wartime bombs cleared the area around St Pauls and a penniless Britain put up grey drab concrete slabs to surround it, something he never understood. Europe regails its magnficent churches with fine piazzas, we gave St Pauls a car park.  A few years ago they did away with that and rebuilt Paternoster Square.  But for the frikkin Starbucks that snuck in there, it is superb. 

Over towards Holborn by way of Chancery Lane you reach the diamond district of Hatton Garden. Every shop is Jewish owned and the cafes squeezed between the numerous diamond dens serve up the best sandwiches in town, if salt beef and pickles are your thing.   That street cleverly hides the oldest catholic church in England where in a 3 day feast Henry VIII served up stuffed swans to honour the first of his unfortunate wives.  And squeezed down a little Dickensian alleyway you can find a teeny tiny boozer with an ancient tree growing in the middle of it, around which Elizabeth the I ‘danced the maypole’ and more recently where my mum and dad would drink when they were ‘courting’ (as they say). The Germans levelled much of it but you can still visit the crypt in the stunning church and what they rebuilt and what survived make London what it is.  Actually that pub and the Jewish diamond district can be briefly seen in the film Snatch.

To the north is Clerkenwell, the area once home to a nunnery and priory, breweries and gin distilleries. The rising poor population and a nasty (haunted) prison shipping off 'delinquants' to the colonies added a seedy air.  The Luftewaffe cleared most of the slums and Clerkenwell had a makeover in the 1990s.  It is now known for its warehouse conversions, nightclubs and restaurants, pubs and shops with personality. Like the Three Kings with its frankly bonkers papier mache figurines (Henry VIII, Elvis and Kong: the three kings) standing guard over the entrance to the collection of tat cluttering every available surface inside.  It’s a pity that the haze of rollie smoke that engulfed that place has been suctioned out by the nazi no smoking ban. Oh how I hate them.

Round the corner there is a medieval priory once home to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, better known as the Knights Hospitallers, who defended the Holy Land. What’s left is a stone gate which houses an intriguing museum for the St. John Ambulance…and opposite - the low medieval priory buildings can just be seen. They are breathtaking to stumble across.  Did you know the word hospital can be traced back to these guys? No, neither did I.

Okay, I’m kind of bouncing around all over the place here but in its centre is Smithfield Market.  A tall beautiful pink and purple Victorian wrought-iron market frame work encasing dozens of butchers shops, flanked by enormous arctic lorries parked all around it from very early in the morning. By 7am they’re finished and stand there quite casually in their bloodied white coats drinking ale.  Bars dotted all around draw in the after-work and pre-club crowds, the two superclubs being Fabric, onetime meat cellar and Turnmills, the first club to obtain a 24-hour dance licence some 15 years ago (although the building now housing Turnmills is to become an office block, the tossers).  Before it was a “superclub”  the latter was just an ‘ordinary’ sparkly gay club that drew underage renegade teens seeking adventure all the way from deepest darkest ‘saaarf’ (south) London by way of the Old Kent Road.

So the ‘adventure’ ladies name was Jean. She was my mum’s best friend.  She kept busy even after she retired.  She spent the last 2 months up at the hospital in East London, bewildered and incognizant of the people who loved her (following the sudden appearance of a brain tumour) and she died last night in her sleep.  I couldn’t find the words to make my mum feel better on the phone today.  When it comes to adventure I don't think it gets much better than working in Fleet Street and living on a house boat on the Thames with my mum – a boat which sank inexplicably one day and took with it all their spangly stuff. 

Nope, I wasn’t sure what to say to my mum to make her feel better.  All I do know is I think about her friend, her wise face and knowing glances, her cigarettes, where they worked and I know exactly why I love this area of London the best.