by Tim Moore
I didn’t have the heart to tell him.
We forced open a reluctant door and entered the control room built in 1935 – another Frank Pick legacy – to replace the one so regularly peppered with turbine shrapnel. Rarely have I entered a realm of such eerie magnificence. Part-signal box, part-Frankenstein’s laboratory, it was the sort of place Dr No would have held his final stand-off had James Bond been played by a young Cary Grant. ‘No one’s been in here since 1961,’ said Martin, doodling on the dusty wood-block floor with a boot heel. Of the three desks I’d seen manned by sober, whitecoated baldies in a thirties photograph one remained, looking out from on high over the apparently unmanned and oddly silent turbine house. In 1905 that hall below had been tightly packed and stacked with bulbous, polished machines, each the size of a locomotive; now, a modest bank of blue drums, occupying a distant and lonely corner, effortlessly whirred out two million kilowatt hours a day. As I was personally gratified to hear Martin explain, this represented a four-fold increase in his establishment’s output of juice.
Beneath a fancy glass dome roofed over with concrete to keep the Luftwaffe out, I wandered about in the dark between gauges and panels, pinging a disconnected bell dome on the controller’s desk and opening a drawer full of Bakelite identification plates and coils of fibre-sheathed cable. At this point a formidable and upsetting metallic slam echoed abruptly from behind one of the huge slate-insulated panels.
‘That’s a 600-volt open knife switch,’ said a distant voice that suddenly didn’t sound as much like Martin’s as I’d have wished. In the until gloom I couldn’t see him, and half-crouched as I was in the desk’s knee-space I certainly hoped he couldn’t see me. ‘It was all live current here then – no other way.’ There was a shuffle of footsteps, then a torch clicked on and shot a streak of pale yellow that panned slowly towards me across the church-like floor. ‘Forty volts can kill, you know.’
‘Martin!’ I blurted, employing the upper end of my vocal register.
A little click and light filled the room. ‘Sorry,’ said Martin blandly, squinting over from the far end of the control room as I quickly straightened myself. ‘Silly place for a light switch. Ten years here and I still get lost.’
Down we went, along further cold and empty corridors walled with Victorian-school-lavatory tiles, past vintage Underground maps and old mahogany plan chests with tarnished brass handles. In an establishment that once publicly trumpeted a rapacious lust for only the very filthiest fossil fuels it was peculiar to see a recycling bin neatly labelled ‘Torch batteries only’. Finally, through a smeared window, I saw someone else: a man in hard hat and overalls, out on what had been the coaling dock, shovelling wet leaves from some sort of grating into a wheelbarrow.
‘Is that a full-time job?’ I said with a slight smirk.
Martin shot me a stern look. ‘That’s the water screen,’ he said, importantly. ‘We take 57 million gallons off the Thames every day to cool the machinery: we have to pay the water board to take the cold water out and pay them again to put the warm water back. If that screen gets blocked we’ve had it – one day we took 250 tons of leaves out.’ If he’d been trying to impress me he’d succeeded. Looking at the leaf-lifter I now felt a calming, warm sense of continuity – here at last, here at least, was one Londoner whose job description had not changed for a century.
‘So has it ever been blocked?’
Martin fixed the distant opposite bank with a look as flinty as a bearded man in shorts can realistically hope to muster. ‘Boxing Day 1999,’ he said, his voice thickening. ‘Lost the juice for eleven seconds.’
Martin’s lonely office, which we presently reached after a further disorienting blunder though industro-corporate history, was blessed with a harbourmaster’s wonderview, its flaky-painted windows welcoming in a compass sweep of grand river prospects. At the edge of the coaling dock a cormorant stood as if crucified, drying its wings; in the background, a District line train sucked up the Lots Road juice as it rattled across a bridge towards Wimbledon.
‘You’ll miss that view,’ I said, thinking of the prime penthouse this would shortly become. Martin nodded once and issued a lengthy, nasal sigh. Twenty-five years he’d worked for London Transport, starting out at the Chiswick bus works.
‘That’s an industrial park now and all,’ he said, not as matter-of-factly as he might have intended.
He clapped a bare hand on a bare thigh and out we went. Wordlessly I followed Martin across rain-varnished cobbles and into the boiler house, past the meaty base of one of those chimneys, between the old narrow-gauge rail tracks, beneath enormous pieces of heritage hardware whose rusting name plates listed manufacturers that all ended in Bros and hailed from Wakefield, Newcastle-upon-Tyne or even London NW1: Euston Road’s postcode. As we tramped up the gantry stairs and walkways I detected the first ambient evidence – both thermal and sonic – of the production of those two million kilowatt hours a day. At last I could forgive Martin his shorts.
‘This was the first steel-framed building in Britain,’ he said as we climbed into a quieter hall, one relieved of so much redundant machinery that someone had found space to paint out a badminton court. I was about to put him right when I realised I’d been wrong: Lots Road 1905; the Ritz 1906. I shook my head in muted awe, contemplating an age when London built its power stations and luxury hotels to the same innovative and exacting standards, and was equally proud of both. ‘And in fact the first of any sort built to metric specifications: it was a German design.’ Oh.
Five minutes later I was doffing my hard hat by the security desk. ‘It’s a working museum here, really,’ said Martin, shaking my hand with a prolonged intensity that suggested he was working himself up to something. ‘The London County Council,’ he announced suddenly; I’d seen their monogram all over Lots Road. ‘Take a look at any 4-inch soil pipe in the world,’ he continued, an invitation I could only be half sure was rhetorical, ‘and you’ll find LCC stamped on it.’ He paused impressively and I grasped exactly what he was trying to say: this was just how I’d felt seeing those imperial measurements set in the wall at Trafalgar Square.
Realising his time was running out, with an eager blurt he tried to express a number of points at once. ‘This place is riddled with asbestos, you know. It’s all over the coal bunkers and mixed into most of the concrete. Riddled. And there’s a refuse transfer station next door, and a sewage pumping house.’ He stopped as abruptly as he’d started.
‘Well, that’s a few things for any future residents to bear in mind,’ I said on cue, eliciting a disingenuous shrug. It was his last shot at saving Lots Road, to keep the working museum working.
Outside in the car, doing my board/token/dice thing, I ruminated upon Lots Road’s inestimable ninety-six-year contribution to London. Just as Bazalgette’s Water Works had kept us healthy, so this Electric Company had kept us wealthy: taking millions to work and home again, facilitating London’s rapid suburban expansion.
Distractedly I concluded my business – a six to Marlborough Street: a small tut; a four to Chance: ah – a Get Out of Jail Free; a ten to Oxford Street. But as I drove away between the Porschepaddocked pavements, I stole a final glance up at those chimneys and reluctantly concluded that, as proud as Lots Road’s heritage undoubtedly was, it really wasn’t terribly twenty-first century to contemplate Europe’s most extensive mass-transit network droning to a halt because some pipe got blocked with leaves.
CHAPTER 15
The Greens
ORIGINALLY PART OF the Roman road from Hampshire to Suffolk, Oxford Street was thus titled only in the late eighteenth century when the relevantly named earl acquired the land along which it ran. Until then it had been generally known as Tyburn Way, after the infamous gallows – equipped to dispatch twenty-four felons simultaneously – near its western conclusion. Most Mondays for two hundred years an open cartload of malefactors rolled from Newgate Prison all the way down what is now Oxford Street, jeered and abused by drunk spectators. Anyo
ne who missed the fun could always meet up with the hangman in a Fleet Street tavern and buy the rope off him at sixpence an inch.
Only when the gallows were removed in 1783 could Oxford Street begin to attract the right class of resident, and even then well away from the horrendous slums of St Giles around the eastern end, a place where things happened that made estate agents work that bit harder, things like the 1818 brewery explosion in which eight people were drowned in a flood of beer.
Perhaps as a result it never quite made the grade as a ponced-up residential street, and was soon known for theatres, music halls, ice rinks and – yes – shops. Because, let’s face it, that’s what the green set is all about: Vic had been given his fun with the oranges – all that cops and robbers business is blatantly boys’ stuff – and Marge got her turn with streets Oxford, Bond and Regent, then as now London’s premier retail thoroughfares. Around the turn of the century the street’s drapers and dress makers were gradually supplanted by the first modern department stores. Waring & Gillow arrived in 1906 and Debenham soon after, but the Oxford Street we know today was effectively born in 1909 when American retailer Gordon Selfridge opened his vast store, which you won’t be interested to hear sneaked the bronze in that steel-framed-building race.
Selfridge coined the catchphrase ‘the customer is always right’, though despite the determined efforts of his ruinous later life failed to interest quotation compilers in ‘the boss is always in the casino with a couple of drunk sisters’. Just as the cinemas lured patrons in by posting their cosy interior temperatures out on the street, so Selfridge wooed women off the pavement with a promise of warmth, excitement and flushable porcelain fixtures, welcoming even those who had no intention of buying anything. Carpets and electric lighting – both then unheard of in retail establishments – and ranks of female lift attendants standing to attention . . . ‘I was lonely,’ read a desperately poignant early advert, ‘so I went to the biggest and brightest place I could think of . . . I went to Selfridge’s.’ Almost thirty years later that towering colonnaded façade – deliberately suggesting a temple of shopping – remained a source of wonder. On Mass Observation day two Welshmen stood in awe before Selfridge’s: ‘It’s as long as our main street,’ breathed one to the other. So elaborate were the store’s external decorations for the 1937 Coronation that the enormous gold lions and medals were promptly snapped up afterwards by an Indian rajah looking to tart up his palace.
If Gordon set the agenda, then his neighbours proved astonishingly adept at copying it. Department stores soon filled nearly the entire mile of Oxford Street, flanking a scene that in the thirties was almost indistinguishable from today’s: a fearful ruck of taxis and double-deckers (forty of the latter in one memorable image); pavements of inadequate girth massed with shoppers; shops bedecked with familiarly phrased slogans – ‘Gigantic shoe sale: stupendous bargains in fashion shoes at break-up prices’; ‘Kodak: you press the button, we do the rest’. Only telltale advertised fixations with permanent waves and making-do-and-mending – one banner promised to repair any umbrella within twenty minutes – date the photos.
But at the same time the street had never quite been able to shake off the slightly rough-and-ready reputation of its Tyburn/beer-flood days. Mass Observation reports mention ‘good-looking, partly drunken girls’ wearing the hats of the sailors they’ve picked up. An observer working a night shift at Boots Oxford Street branch reported four customers in the hour after 2 a.m.: ‘three to buy aspirins and one, a Cambridge undergraduate, to buy a draught for his friend outside who had just swallowed two bottles of sherry.’
Oxford Street has, in effect, proven ever-tolerant of questionable individual behaviour. Thomas De Quincey spent much time with the street’s prostitutes and bought that first fateful dose of opium at a chemist’s whose site is now appositely occupied by an establishment entitled New Look. The three-card tricksters were still at it until recently, as were the fake perfume scam artists.
Most famous of all, though it’s a shame to bracket him with opium eaters and con merchants, was Stanley Green, a little man with round glasses, a crumpled raincoat and a slightly squashed peaked cap who one day in 1968 and almost every subsequent morning for the next twenty-five years caught the Central line to Oxford Circus from his home in the distant suburb of Northolt. On his lap throughout the journey and above his head throughout the ensuing day-long tramp up and down Oxford Street was a placard, unforgettably headlined ‘LESS PASSION FROM LESS PROTEIN’.
Beneath this arresting introduction were detailed the sources of nature’s most dangerous nutritional aphrodisiac – ‘MEAT FISH BIRD; EGG/CHEESE; PEAS incl. lentils BEANS; NUTS’ – as well as notice of an additional threat that seemed to have occurred to Stanley at some later point in his crusade: ‘SITTING’. This eclectic manifesto was described in more detail in leaflets as waywardly typeset as ransom demands, and after weaving warily around Stanley for the third time in a mid-teenage afternoon I bought one. Even the price was mad – by craftily electing to charge 12p Stanley involved me, as most of his customers, in the protracted mutual fumbling of coins of minor denomination.
The leaflet was entitled Eight Passion Proteins, and essentially summarised Stan’s philosophy on the perils of the libido and how these could be magnified by dabbling with foodstuffs heavy in amino acids, particularly while adopting a sedentary posture. If Stanley had been the hectoring type you might have heard teenagers shouting uncouth invitations to a bring-an-omelette barbecue picnic, but in fact I never heard him say anything except ‘Twelve pence, please,’ and ‘Guest of honour at your school sports day? I should be honoured.’
Stanley died in 1993, but lives on in the Museum of London, which holds copies of all his placards and booklets, and in our household, where ‘Passion Proteins’ is the derisive shorthand for any offbeat individual theory, most notably my insistence that bedroom slippers harbour contagion, which I don’t mind because I know I’m right and to prove it I’m getting some leaflets printed up.
In the post-Stanley era, CCTV has rather put the mockers on Oxford Street’s resident rogues and misfits. The perfume scammers, who spent most of their time sweeping their solvent-scented stock into a big plastic bread tray whenever the lookout spotted a silver-badged helmet, have now disappeared along with the fake-gold-chain boys and the sleight-of-hand artists. Peering over the heads and between the buses as I looked down from the Marble Arch end the only lofted placard in sight read GOLF SALE.
‘He’s a real little toad,’ said the jovially forthright director of the Oxford Street Association with reference to the sporting-goods proprietor who hires the tone-lowering human billboards. ‘Always pleads poverty, but every time I meet him he’s wearing five grand’s worth of gold.’
I’d met Sally Humphreys in her Selfridge’s office, situated in what you might call the store’s considerable back-stage area, and to prepare me for a day’s trundle up and down Britain’s busiest street was being treated to an overview of her kingdom. Stanley might have been barking mad but he wasn’t stupid: when I asked Sally for statistics, the first of many she dutifully trotted out was the stupendous revelation that over two hundred million people shop in Oxford Street a year, an enormous and ever-changing audience for his passion play. It’s also London’s most popular tourist destination, patronised by over two-thirds of all foreign visitors spending £1 billion a year in its commercial establishments; and at the peak Christmas period its workforce swells to an improbable 60,000. ‘A figure greater than the population of St Albans,’ read Sally from her factsheet, wearing an expression that suggested this comparison could perhaps be improved upon.
Well acquainted with the footpads and knocking shops that once characterised Oxford Street, Sally seemed almost regretful that what she called ‘the dodgy stuff’ was now limited to the retail tackiness embodied by the Golf Sale blokes and a plethora of crap-mart souvenir shops bookending the department stores. ‘Part of the joy of Oxford Street has always been that slightly se
edy aspect,’ she said, sparking up a fag as she consoled herself with residual memories of the street’s last resident character: the evangelical nudist who regularly wanders about Oxford Circus. ‘I watched him once on the CCTV. By the time the police turned up he was being asked by Japanese men to pose for snapshots with their wives.’
In the old days, even the bosses got in on the act. Sally revealed that Gordon Selfridge installed a secret lift to ferry young lady companions directly up to his office, and my research suggests Gordon’s neighbouring proprietors were influenced by rather more than his commercial methods. In 1907, slightly further up the Roman road in Bayswater, the eponymous proprietor of Whiteley’s was shot dead at his desk by a spurned illegitimate son, a crime arousing such sympathy that 200,000 Londoners signed a petition which successfully commuted the boy’s death sentence to life imprisonment. Those who revere the stores of the John Lewis Partnership as a lone beacon of honour and principle on high streets scarred by cynical chicanery might be interested to hear how the chain’s founder spent three weeks in Brixton Prison for continually flouting planning bye-laws; or how in 1906, hearing that his fellow department store proprietor Peter Jones was about to go tits up, old man Lewis ran all the way from Oxford Street to Sloane Square with £20,000 cash in his pocket: a brutal wad-on-the-table, take-it-or-leave-it offer Pete cravenly accepted.
After an enlightening résumé of the current commercial climate, Sally rounded off with a final volley of candour, railing against the ‘sodding buses’ that clog the street and bemoaning the ‘disaster’ that was Bird’s Eye’s recent sponsorship of Oxford Street’s Christmas lights, a verdict I can’t agree with as without them I’d never have heard my Esquire colleague Ivor encapsulate the event so memorably as ‘peas on earth’.
