by Tim Moore
But it shouldn’t have been, because Councillor Haynes – as he had been respectfully referred to by every receptionist and security guard I’d spoken to – was both a lovely chap and an almost soundlessly mild-mannered one. ‘These days the EU flag is about as radical as we get,’ he joked in a sort of parched gasp. That drain he’d laughed like had, in truth, been more of a dripping pipette, and as he ushered me out of his office’s old-school disorder into a nearby staff room my ear was already almost in his mouth. Pat’s micro-decibelled man-and-boy account of the borough’s post-Monopoly history couldn’t hope to compete with the resident percolator, let alone the industrial photocopiers behind us. Someone came in with a many-paged report, and after they hit the green button I missed the whole of the 1970s.
Spooling back to the decade of his birth, Pat spoke of a healthy population of blue-collar Islingtonians in poorly remunerated manual jobs: railway workers, print workers, clock makers and, above all, postmen at the huge sorting office in what had been the Agricultural Hall (and is now, inevitably, the Business Design Centre). The noise and filth of the railways had already driven middle-class residents further north in search of a quiet suburb such as Islington had once been, but had also attracted industries; as these in turn began to decline so the population shrank.
Pat had no trouble compiling a lengthy roll call of consequent local casualties: theatres upon whose boards Oscar Wilde had trodden, Pat’s old school, cinemas, the pub opposite what he still called ‘the Corner House’. ‘We knocked down a lot of places we shouldn’t,’ he said, holding his hand up a lot higher than the current breed of don’t-blame-me politicians are ever prepared to.
Labour won control of the London County Council for the first time in 1934, and under Herbert Morrison’s leadership embarked on a major rehousing schedule. By 1939 more than 300 acres of London slums were named ‘clearance areas’, many of them in Islington, which along with the neighbouring boroughs of Finsbury and St Pancras had been declared among the capital’s poorest and most overcrowded under the terms of the 1935 Housing Act. Ready as ever with an offensive snobbism, Harold Clunn described Islington’s Monopoly-era artisan dwellings being ‘as stunted in their proportions as the majority of their inhabitants were wanting in their moral character’.
New low-rise LCC blocks emerged in clusters around the borough, offering the sort of unfamiliar amenities that spawned Tory jokes about families storing coal in the bath. But even after the war three-quarters of Islington households had no running water, and well into the sixties plenty of families were still living in single rooms in dilapidated nineteenth-century terraces. A leaflet Pat had drawn up for the Islington Fabian Society revealed that as late as 1965, 332,313 ‘warm baths’ were being taken in the borough’s five public bath houses each year by residents whose homes lacked such facilities; by 1990 this had fallen to under 9,000. But at the same time Islington’s population continued to decline, down by almost 50 per cent during that twenty-five-year period to 165,000.
With the streets literally half-empty, the great street markets started closing down and what Pat sagely referred to as ‘useful shops’ gave way to the first bistros and antique stalls catering for that pioneering wave of gentrificationists. Morrison’s LCC had drawn up the green belt legislation that stopped London’s ever-outward suburban expansion, and encouraged by government grants the middle classes returned to tart up Islington’s now-desirable old houses. Some sort of class Rubicon was crossed when the Wimpy Bar shut down in the late eighties, ending a position in the front line of tobacco consumption Islington had held since Walter Raleigh lit up on Upper Street.
‘It wasn’t the first time we’d had the yuppies in,’ Pat murmured benignly, betraying no personal bitterness at the middle-class invasion. ‘Gentrification happened over a hundred years ago when the clerks set up here because they could walk into the City. As soon as the City revived in the eighties it happened again: three stops down the Tube from Angel and you’re at Bank.’ It was all cyclical, Pat seemed to be saying. In a few years the haves will become the hads, and Islington’s population will once again be depolarised into a borough of have-nots.
With reference to this latter group, Pat spoke of ‘the classic inner-city thing’: pensioners, single mothers, asylum seekers, a lot of drugs and criminals – ‘more than our fair share of both’. Two-thirds of Islingtonians are council tenants and two-thirds of them are on benefits. Perhaps the most telling insight into Islington’s condition is that the borough is burdened with the nation’s highest proportion of children in care. ‘If there is any resentment,’ he said, ‘it’s down to middle-class council-tax whingers who don’t want to know that it costs forty grand a year to keep a kid in care.’
Pat drained his coffee and squinted up at the clock. ‘Have you ever played Monopoly?’ I asked as he rose to bid me farewell. Councillor Haynes chuckled softly, nodding in fond recollection. ‘I think the first time,’ he began, but then someone a few corridors away turned on a vacuum cleaner and twenty minutes later I was back at the top of Pentonville Road, none the wiser.
Presenting as it did an opportunity to chart the awesome rise and farcical fall of the Corner House, I was indebted to Vic and Marge for their auspicious lunch at the Angel. I could see, however, that it was going to be difficult to generate equal enthusiasm for the road they walked up to get there.
Named after Henry Penton, the landowner on whose grounds it was laid out in the 1770s, Pentonville was one of London’s first manufactured suburbs: a new town, in effect, along what was then still called the New Road. In an age when craftsmen and tradespeople could still make fortunes, many walking under those filigreed fanlights into Pentonville Road’s grand, five-floor residences were organ builders or clock makers. John Betjeman’s grandfather, a ‘fancy cabinet maker’, constructed the first tantalus – ‘a case in which spirit bottles may be locked with their contents tantalisingly visible’ – in his Pentonville Road residence.
Rescued from Fagin’s clutches by Mr Brownlow, Oliver Twist is so astounded by the fragrant splendour of his benefactor’s Pentonville surroundings that in Lionel Bart’s musical he throws open the window and – capturing the spirit of Dickens if not the precise vocabulary – invites all-comers in song not just to buy the wonderful morning, but have it boxed and wrapped in a ribbon for his extended perusal. For Oliver it represented a virtual voyage right round the early Victorian Monopoly board, from the square after GO to what at that time might easily have been the one before it.
So swift was Pentonville’s decline that less than a hundred years on it had been reeled all the way back from dark blue to light. The arrival of London’s first penitentiary for fallen women can’t have helped, but again it was the opening of the big mainline stations down the road which put the heaviest damper on those what’s-yours-worth after-dinner house-price blatherings. To preserve the road’s sense of airy distinction, bye-laws forbade the erection of buildings within 50 feet of the road; but as the well-heeled residents moved on and further out unscrupulous developers filled in those grand front lawns with workshops and retail premises, creating a peculiar street-within-a-street effect that still lingers in places. It was as if having heard the old not-in-my-back-yard rallying cry, some hardfaced landlord had replied – no problem, sunshine: we’ll stick it in your front garden. By the time Vic and Marge walked up it the industrial concerns described by Pat Haynes were well entrenched: sheet-metal workers, chandlers, safe manufacturers, asbestos traders, a huge Lilley and Skinner boot factory and at No. 230, what my 1933 directory described as ‘Samuel Friedentag, incandescent fittings dealer’. Add in a horse trader, another Corner House and the headquarters of the London Master Bakers’ and Confectioners’ Protection Society and you have a peerless selection of those concerns most poorly equipped to deal with London’s post-war commercial climate.
Established at No. 25 Pentonville Road in the 1860s, in 1933 Thomas S. Jones Ltd stopped manufacturing their famous organs and in desperation beg
an turning out toys; the year after Vic and Marge walked past they closed for good. Once so desirable, this part of the capital – the blue properties are alone on the board in featuring an N in their postcodes – had declined so far by the thirties that Harold Clunn walked through Islington sneering how ‘almost anything was good enough for the people of North London’.
And seventy years later the last of Pentonville Road’s original arch-windowed townhouses, two-million-quid jobs anywhere else, now wallowed in Withnailesque decay: seven bells on every abused front door and upside-down shopping trolleys in the gardens. Appositely encapsulated in one of my London guides as ‘battered reminders’ of the district’s distant hauteur, these abruptly gave way to a cheerless, post-industrial wasteland as Pentonville Road swooped mournfully down to King’s Cross and Hellogabbyspeaking. The lost-cat note on a bus shelter represented a poignant farewell to the living metropolis; thereafter the pavements were as empty as most of the buildings laid along them. Neatly complemented by another trouserflappingly, hand-clappingly cold and blustery afternoon, it seemed a prospect purged of humanity.
I used to drive up to Pentonville Road with my father to consummate our shared love for the improbable bargain: there was a cheap mirror place, I recall, and a cheap tile warehouse and a paint merchant and a printer equally deserving of that most exhilarating of adjectives. We once drove home from the Pentonville Road – no minor round trip – dangerously cocooned in an enormous sheet of foam rubber, an item whose obscure utility never concerned me at the time, nor even when we moved house thirteen years later and it turned up, still unscathed, in the shed.
Of all Pentonville’s noisy commercial concerns – bandsaw makers, tin-box manufacturers, gravel merchants – only a couple of printing firms and garages are still keeping the muted faith. The sole premises still trading under the same name was, once more, a pub – but from the horribly scabbed monarch on its sign to the nuclear winter hanging baskets beneath, the George IV was a hopelessly moribund establishment. All the everything-must-go emporia had apparently kept their eponymous vow, and passing the boarded-up windows I felt the same wistful loss last experienced when nothing the demise of the self-styled ‘Mr Cheap Potatoes’, a greengrocer on Wandsworth Road who’d been around long enough to endow me with a derogatory spousal nickname.
Leaning into the wind-tunnel blast whipping around their ankles, I approached a pair of ungainly coppered-glass office stacks and with a now practised eye immediately detected an absence of vital signs. Walking past the dusty reflective glazings, noting as I did so the browned and wrinkled sheaves of junk mail strewn about mothballed reception areas, I came to what would have been the tradesmen’s entrance and beheld two lonely female security personnel eyeing me though a grimy revolving door. It was staggering: these buildings couldn’t have been more than twenty years old.
Realising the skeleton staff would have plotted my progress up to and around their establishment on CCTV I hoisted a nothing-to-hide wave; moments later I was being reluctantly informed that the blocks were the property of NatWest and the Royal Bank of Scotland – ‘and they’re both coming back any day now’. Naturally this was patent cobblers – I felt like a telephone salesman being told the kitchen had just burst into flames – but by shepherding away a potential squatter they were just doing their job. So close to the street people of King’s Cross, though, it seemed a preposterous waste of roofs over heads: you could put up 1,000 vagrants in each of these buildings. Yes, they might wee in the pot plants and race each other up and down the corridors in typists’ chairs, but so what? Only twenty years old they might be, but in today’s image-obsessed commercial climate no major corporation would contemplate occupying such tired looking premises without a ground-up overhaul.
It was the same at the hulking carcass of the former Girobank headquarters opposite, and a couple of other unidentified blocks, all of them reinforcing the lesson of Pentonville Road, that London was no longer being built to last. The Victorians always had one eye on posterity – consider Bazalgette and his sewers – and there was nothing flimsy about Shell Mex House and those other totalitarian structures that went up in the thirties. But the modern capital was characterised by a sort of cynical built-in obsolescence, and to compare most of its recent edifices with their surviving forefathers is to hold a pair of hand-stitched brogues up against last year’s Nikes.
Pentonville Road flattened out as it neared King’s Cross, and though there was some life after all that burned out and boarded up death it was hardly radiating good health. The pavements were busy again, but the human traffic had failed its MOT: in 200 yards I notched up five on the begometer.
The streets around The Angel might have been to hell and back, but this end of Pentonville seemed to have lost the return half of its ticket. Despite the regular turnover of residents around Upper Street as the gentrificationists sold up for a plump profit and moved on, a sense of community, of joie de vivre, had somehow been maintained; arriving at Pentonville’s ramshackle conclusion I felt as if Ralph McTell had just taken me by the hand and led me though the streets of London.
It was all monumentally squalid and woebegone, and as if to remind myself just how bad it had been I turned to look back up towards The Angel. And as I did so, answering a prayer that hadn’t even been asked, she presented me with a miracle, a sign that set me off towards home with a kittenish spring in my step and a sense that London’s heart was still somehow in the right place. Beyond the empty office blocks and beneath Pentonville Road’s lofty, scarred brow, my gaze was interrupted by a distant but still strident legend I had obscurely endeavoured to overlook among the light-industrial ruins: FOAM CUT TO SIZE.
*
Of the many motorcycles that passed as I waited in gusty morning sun at the junction of Euston and Tottenham Court roads, none promised acceptable temporary accommodation for my buttocks. Filthy, scarred courier bikes, wanky executives on over-chromed retro-machines, trainee cabbies dangerously preoccupied with acquiring The Knowledge via route maps clipboarded to their scooter handlebars. There was a particularly bad moment when an L-plated pizza-boy wobbled to an adjacent halt in the bus lane, but frankly I’d merrily have budged up beside his vegetarian hot ones the moment that fearsome black beast throbbed purposefully up to the kerb.
Its first name was Yamaha, though I can’t quite remember its second, something stark and brutal slashed across a flank in Gothic Manga, something like Bastard or Fistfuck. The matchingly clothed rider slowly lifted one black glove in recognition, then slapped the other imperatively on the tiny pillion seat behind him. The Pall I’d met at a recent Icelandic Society gathering was a freckled psychiatrist from Reykjavik. The one raising his tinted visor in recognition before me was a leathered contract killer from hell.
I have rather a large skull, larger anyway than Pall’s wife, whose helmet I now wedged my head into, thereby extruding its fleshier features through the face slot in a painfully puckered gurn. Attempting intelligible speech through that cat’s bottom of a mouth was a challenge, but then with the top half of my ears folded down over their holes I could hardly hear myself try. ‘Don’t move about,’ bellowed Pall as he dropped his visor and turned on the ignition. ‘Just sit there like a sack of potatoes.’
Few life forms suffer more consistently awful ends than the potato, and with the exhaust already sautéing my right ankle I could only hope a peeled mash-up didn’t lie in store. The purpose of this exercise was to try and hack through the twenty-four-hour logjam that is Euston’s Road’s defining characteristic: four wheels bad, two wheels good. Before leaving home I’d checked the traffic cameras on the BBC local news, and as ever the one pointed down Euston Road depicted a poorly laid out yet astonishingly popular car park. It was now 9.37 a.m.; the rush hour had long since peaked but the pace was still slurry-like. Perfect.
Only as we barrelled through the back alleys towards Euston Road’s western extremity at Great Portland Street, bumping between bollards and briefly traversing a pedest
rian zone, did I belatedly remember an enduring truth, one that saw the Royal Navy repelled by a plucky armada of cod trawlers and coastguard vessels, one that sent my sixty-five-year-old father-in-law running – running – ahead of me towards the almost perpendicular summit of Reykjavik’s nearest mountain: if you’re looking for somewhere to throw down a gauntlet, don’t choose the feet of an Icelander.
‘Just a little creative licence,’ came the muffled shout as my head whiplashed back and we roared between a facing set of no-entry roundels. Utterly disoriented and distantly picturing Pall’s diploma from the takes-one-to-know-one school of psychiatric diagnosis, it was all I could do to check my watch as we leaned into a sharp right-hander and there before us lay the Euston Road, a mile of fumes and frustration, six lanes of noisy stasis, each separated from the next by a thin corridor of tarmac, one of which we were soon careering through, wing mirrors almost flicking our elbows.
In an era of side-impact airbags and tamper-proof jam-jar safety buttons how could this shriekingly reckless lunacy be permitted? Some of it, of course, was not, but Pall’s occasionally cavalier approach to the technicalities of traffic control was by no means the most unsettling aspect of our progress. With my previous experience of motorised two-wheel transport restricted to machines of or below 90cc, I had to fight off a powerful urge to unhook my hands from the grip handle behind my clenched buttocks and clasp them urgently around Pall’s leathered waist. I fixed both eyes on my own fisheyed reflection in Pall’s polished black helmet, Euston Road’s erratic skyline haloed around it as we slalomed through the hot and stagnant aisles of vans and buses.
Pall banked the bike into the mouth of the dual-carriageway underpass, and scything between Transits I caught a flash of the Euston Tower, a startlingly dated construction that has the air of Bratislava’s tallest building, circa 1974. Remember the famous early photo of the Beatles leaping joyfully, limbs akimbo, over a ridge of earthy rubble? That’s right: it was shot on the bulldozed remains of a venerable community of shops, warehouses and restaurants demolished to make way for that underpass and its surrounding commercial edifices. It took almost the whole of the sixties to knock down all those old buildings, and consulting my 1933 directory while awaiting Pall I’d understood why. There were just so many of them: three pubs, five Italian-run sweetshops, six teashops and dining rooms, three tobacconists, no fewer than fifteen car dealers or garages and perhaps a hundred other concerns from machine-gun manufacturers to a fantastic marble merchant whose statue-stuffed yard I’d seen in a photograph.
