The coming of the railways and trams transformed Edgware from a hay-producing rural backwater into a crowded adjunct of London itself. In 1932 the parish became a part of Hendon, and Station Road rapidly developed in the early 1930s, with cinemas and stores opening all along a busy thoroughfare.
Born the year after the Jarrow march, a resident called Brenda Franklin told the BBC People’s War site, ‘Our address was 7 Millais Gardens, Mollison Way, Edgware. Edgware was right on the edge of London then – a sizeable sprawl of the mid-thirties house building explosion. Miles of mostly terraced, Bauhaus-influenced, wide-windowed houses occupied by respectable upper working class families with aspirations. I think that most were quite happy in their brand new easy-to-run houses in the leafy suburbs.’
The marchers would have walked down some of these new streets and emerged along burgeoning Station Road, finding Edgware in the grip of its feverish transformation from outlying village into London’s maddening vital edge itself. It must have made them wonder what Jarrow would feel like when they returned, as they soon would. Homesick as they may well might have been, this was a prospect that still evoked dread. One confided to a journalist, ‘The first morning is what I’m afraid of. It’ll be getting up and looking out of the window on the same old sight – Jarrow – knowing that there’s nothing, nothing at all to do. My feet hurt terribly, but all the same it’s been a holiday. While you’re marching, you don’t think.’
After quietly comfortable Radlett, Edgware feels hardier, edgier, noisier. There’s no pretty, languid sedate Sunday mood here. This could be any day in the rough hinterland of the city, the buses and cabs elbowing for space, honking and revving; the cheap convenience stores fluorescent and crowded. I realise that I’ve never felt entirely at home in the London suburbs, affluent or otherwise. Perhaps it was my bad experiences at the eastern extremities of the Central Line during a glum, brief sojourn there in the late 1980s but I’ll think I’ll always feel unmoored and out of sorts here in the transient, fragmentary, ad hoc nature of these places, by the crowded streets of people who always appear stressed and unhappy and just passing through. Or is that the three weeks on the road talking, in a tired, whiny little voice? Possibly.
Happily, the distinctive neon outline of a rotating kebab tells me that I have found Keren’s old alma mater, the cleanest kebab shop in Edgware, which shall diplomatically remain nameless of course. I find a table in the midst of the diverse urban bustle of teenage couples, Turkish cabbies and the odd solo oddball like me, shoving his massive rucksack awkwardly under the table and ordering expansively, randomly, hungrily in a way that makes the small dark-eyed girl behind the counter laugh as she repeats it, ‘OK, so that’s large doner, kacik, sucuk sausage, patlican, large Efes beer, pitta, salad …’
These are always strange but nicely meditative moments, these, becalmed somewhere new after the relentlessness of the road. I cover the table in books and notes, devices and maps but end up paying attention to none of them, drinking in the changing atmosphere of the café instead. A smart, neat older woman comes in slightly diffidently, one hand on her pearls and the other dipping her glasses as she peers at the laminated menu on the wall as uncomprehendingly as if it were the shattered frozen landscape of a Jovian moon. Her awkwardness is not assuaged by the large, burly, moustachioed Middle Eastern proprietor behind the counter asking, ‘Do you live nearby then, love?’ as he sharpens and wipes a huge, glistening blade of obscure function, entirely innocently but unnervingly. A little girl and her dad, clearly regulars, enter and are welcomed warmly by all (‘Hello Princess! Give us a kiss!’). They begin an order of great length and complexity with much discussion. Princess turns out to be boisterous, wildly voluble and just the charming side of irritating.
‘This door is rubbish [swinging on door] – you need to get a new door,’ she pouts.
‘Will you give me the money, Princess?’ says the blade-wielding owner, sweetly.
‘No! Ask your mummy and daddy for the money!’
‘Ah, (sadly but tenderly) my mummy and daddy are in Turkey. Do you know what Turkey is?’
‘Yes, it’s like a chicken you can eat.’
Leaving some time later, I find the White Hart hotel where the Rotary Club of Edgware treated the marchers to tomato soup, steak and kidney pud and apple pie. It’s still there though it has changed its name. To the Change of Hart. Whether this is hilarious or dreadful, I find myself no longer able to tell. But I do know that tomorrow, Halloween, will mean the end of my long, strange trip and that London, tricking or treating, awaits.
STAGE TWENTY-TWO
EDGWARE TO MARBLE ARCH
31 October, 8 miles
London is the most dynamic city in the world today. Sure, it has always been an international hub … but it has never sizzled like it sizzles today. Other cities in the UK make grand claims and have their devotees and champions but Manchester, Edinburgh, Leeds etc pale before the might, sight, sounds, churn and fire of London. And those who disagree are just expressing the politics of envy.
Dylan Jones, London Rules
The thing is, most people in London are tired of life. You’ve only got to witness the queues in the Westfield multistorey or the reaction to a crying baby on the Tube to realise that this is a city that exists permanently at the end of its rope … It’s the last metropolis in a sinking country on a starving continent, an island within an island oozing out into the Home Counties like an unstoppable concrete oil spill.
Clive Martin, ‘Reasons London is the Worst Place Ever’, Vice
I’m in a bagel shop in Cricklewood on the hottest Halloween since records began, reading up on my iPad about London, whose swaggering presence has been waiting for me like an unpaid bill since Jarrow. I feel that this might be the strangest day of a long, strange trip. The bagel shop promised free wifi and air conditioning, and, fair enough, you might not normally need the latter on the last day of October in England, but it can deliver neither. So having walked from Edgware already this morning, I sit, a glaze of damp across my chest, arms and forehead, having emerged out of the maze of dead residential backstreets, onto Cricklewood Broadway (formerly Watling Street).
I like the difference in tone of the above quotes, the second from Clive Martin in Vice magazine, sour and sharply truthful, the former from London Rules by Dylan Jones (who I know and like, if rarely completely agree with) full of the breezy superiority that so annoys us troglodytes of the north. Almost 200 of those came stomping through Cricklewood 80 years ago this morning, and now I follow belatedly in their wake; hot, sweaty, thirsty but not I think, pace Dylan Jones, envious.
Of all the queasy, weaselly, mealy-mouthed lickspittle dismissals in modern English, nothing compares to that phrase the ‘politics of envy’. Effectively, it reduces people’s desire for proper schools, houses, jobs and health care to no more than a jealousy for some nice brogues they once saw in GQ. It is both smug and vacuous and it is, of course, partly why Brexit Britain gave Islington a bloody nose though Islington still doesn’t have the common sense or humility to see it.
Today is the last day of the Jarrow march. I was up and off early because I had a date at Westminster. If I could be there before noon, Tracy Brabin had very kindly agreed to meet me at the Commons and for this last day, I wanted the feel of the Jarrow marchers’ entry into London, albeit that theirs was in the torrential rain and murk of a thirties Halloween and mine is in shirt sleeves, perspiring, under a freakish late October sun on the warmest morning of my 22 so far. I wash down the last of the salt beef and dill pickle with some sweet, scorching black coffee and push through the door into simmering Cricklewood.
Like Balls Pond Road, Golders Green, Surbiton or East Cheam, Cricklewood is one of those London locales that were once staples of British radio and TV comedy. The Two Ronnies, The Goodies, Hello Cheeky, all would regularly use these venerable names as handy ciphers as suggestive of tedious, drab London suburbia as Cleckheaton, Wigan and Goole were of northern bleakness when used
by Les Dawson or Norman Collier. Cricklewood: is it the sound of the name with its evocative English tweeness, or could it be the place itself that has made this commuter backwater a synonym for genteel nothingness?
Peter Capaldi made a spoof documentary about British cinema called Cricklewood Greats, but its comic laureate was undoubtedly Alan Coren, writer, TV and radio panellist, former editor of Punch and The Listener and father of the modern media personalities Victoria and Giles. Coren styled himself ‘The Sage of Cricklewood’ and used the unloved area as a neglected eyrie from which to view the foibles of the world in hundreds of columns and parodic books such as The Cricklewood Tapestry, The Cricklewood Diet, A Year in Cricklewood and more. In their tribute to him, website This Is Local London said, ‘Coren almost did for his childhood home what the Brontes did for Haworth’. The London Evening Standard’s obituary writer made plain that finding out that Coren actually lived in Cricklewood had to be ‘a joke, I thought; so eminent a man could not possibly live in this mocked corner of north-west London, this nowhere between Kilburn and Colindale’.
Cricklewood follows the same spatial arrangement that’s been common on the last, southern leg of the journey, one that’s very different from northern towns. There the shops and offices and enterprise cluster haphazardly around a market square or town centre. Cricklewood, like Edgware and St Albans, comprises a single parade of commerce stretched out for a mile or two along the sides of an arrow-straight major road. It’s linear rather than ganglia, with terraced streets stacking up behind in a residential hinterland. Apart from its very heart, nowhere in London feels like a town to me in the way that northern towns do, confirming my (not entirely negative) view that Greater London is 50 or so little hamlets held together by a tube train system.
Perhaps it was the heat, or our old friend the pack, but it was hard to tell where Cricklewood ended and Kilburn began. There was no greeting sign, no border patrol, just an elision from one unremarkable bit of the capital to another and one prevalent old ethnic tradition to the next. From the late nineteenth century onwards there was an influx of Jewish immigrants to the area and by the time the Jarrow march passed through, three new synagogues had been built in a district which even acquired the jokey cod-Yiddish name Cricklevitch.
Kilburn though is, or was, the raucous heartland of London’s Irish community. They may now represent just 5 per cent of the population, much less than the Italians of Bedford, but their influence still permeates the district. Kilburn was prosperous briefly in the late 1860s and 70s when handsome villas abounded and a private school founded by A A Milne’s father was attended by both his son and H G Wells. But then the area faltered and became much poorer later in the century. The posh schools closed and the large villas were broken up into flats or took in lodgers, mainly Irishmen coming to work as labourers. These new Kilburnians were pouring in when the Jarrow men marched by and continued to do so for the next four decades. Their story is essentially that of the Bedford Italians and a thousand immigrant communities around the world; young men (and women) come to a new land desperate for work intending to make money and take it home. Instead they work hard, build lives and families here and keep alive a dream of the old country while bringing colour and energy to the new.
Those days seemed to have gone. A reporter from the Irish Times had visited over the summer and found the same surly resentments that were making themselves felt everywhere. Kerryman John O’Sullivan told him, ‘You go up the road there now and you don’t see one English, Irish, Welsh or Scottish face working.’ Kilburn’s dominant ethnic minority groups were once Irish and West Indian, now it is Somali and Polish. Almost all of the Kilburn Irish interviewed in the piece had voted to leave the EU. This ran contrary to the perceived geographical split over Brexit, the one that said that London was an island of internationalist liberalism while the north and Midlands had been lured towards UKIP and the right. The opinions of Kilburn, whose parent constituency Brent actually voted to remain by 60 per cent, showed what I had long thought to be the case, that class not region was the significant variable, and that the commentators of the metropolis had little notion of life or the mood of depressed, post-industrial England. I might have popped into the offices of Hampstead and Kilburn Labour Party to chat about this, but as I passed it was closed and shuttered.
With all due respect to Dylan Jones, this didn’t feel like any kind of international hub to me. Perhaps that ritzy marketing speak applies to a few postal codes around W1 or the City, but there was nothing here of the upscale vibrancy of Leeds. It was a dull plod from the fringes of London’s grubby urban edges to its congested heart, though of course with a certain ragged liveliness and colour. But no hills or rivers, no views nor trees, no stone-deep history, just a long strip of commerce, cheap and tatty. That can’t be helped of course; the same applies to Smethwick or Levenshulme or Hebburn. But none of those places make claims for themselves as London does or seeks to mythologise itself quite so desperately, dismissing everywhere else as envious and ‘chippy’. In fairness, novelist Zadie Smith, a former Kilburn resident who set her book NW here, wrote proudly but candidly of its unprepossessing nature when she wrote, ‘Kilburn bloody High Road. Not everyone wants to be a national treasure, after all, nor to be knighted, and not every building longs for a blue plaque or to be held up as a shining example of the “Best of British”. Not everything has to be part of the “national conversation”.’
There are a few memorable highlights of my late morning in Kilburn though. Jessica, a longstanding Kilburnian of Jamaican descent, spots me marvelling at a grand art deco building across the road, shielding my eyes from the dazzling sun to take in its impressive white tower.
‘Great isn’t it? Ian Dury and Kilburn and the High Roads played there a lot.’ It is the Gaumont State Cinema and for Jessica it has memories not just of late 1970s funk punk but ‘Saturday morning cinema for ten pence. It’s got one of those amazing pop up organs and a gorgeous art deco staircase that’s all curving brass. Every now and then they open it up to the public and let you have a look.’
They, I ask?
Jessica rolls her eyes. ‘The Happy Clappies, they’ve had it for about 15 years.’
More properly, ‘they’ are the Ruach City Church who offer ‘lively, multicultural evangelical ministry with faith and bible classes’. Had I known it then, I would have impressed Jessica, who had by now gone into the Al Rouche Super Market to do some shopping, by telling her that you could add to Ian and his Blockheads, Larry Adler, Gracie Fields and George Formby, who all played at the Kilburn State on its opening night of 30 December 1937 in a concert broadcast by the BBC. When it opened it was one of the largest auditoriums in the world, a colossal piece of Italianate architecture whose art deco skyscraper frontage was designed to ape that of the Empire State Building. (‘Ape’ I think is a good King Kong joke here. No? Oh, please yourself, as Frankie Howerd would say. He played here too by the way.)
Kilburn was once renowned across the capital as a lively and popular place for public entertainment. Entrepreneurs established several variety theatres and the High Road rang with a good-natured rowdiness that it became famed for. Ian Dury’s first band were named Kilburn and the High Roads in its honour.
It is quieter now. In the noughties, the London Tourist Board tried to brand Kilburn High Road ‘Music Mile’, specialising in Irish and country music played live. But most of the famous pubs, like the legendary Biddy Mulligans, are now gone, reborn as discount stores, gyms or computer repair shops.
The A5 London to Holyhead trunk road winds on to Maida Vale. When the marchers passed along this road, the BBC had not long acquired the Maida Vale skating rink a few blocks away for orchestral purposes and it is now the home to the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It was where most of John Peel’s radio sessions were recorded and every significant talent (and quite a few insignificant ones) in British alternative and progressive music recorded such sessions here. A blue plaque above a studio door will tell you that this is
where Bing Crosby recorded his last session in 1977. I was once showing rock superstars REM around the studios and pointed this plaque out. Mike Mills and Peter Buck were genuinely interested but singer Michael Stipe barked, ‘Can we just get on please!’ Buck and Mills gave me a collective apologetic look that suggested to me the band was not long for this world, and it wasn’t.
On the other side of the A5, you will find perhaps the world’s most famous zebra crossing outside the EMI studios on Abbey Road in St John’s Wood. As the marchers passed, Pablo Casals was headed here to record Bach’s Cello Suites. Four years before, Elgar had conducted the teen prodigy Yehudi Menuhin in a performance of his own violin concerto. Over the next few years, everyone from Fats Waller to Vaughan Williams would beat a path to this corner of north London. Had I time, I would have taken a detour to see what bizarre, touching, inappropriate new graffiti had been written on its low white wall. This is a place of pilgrimage for Beatle obsessives from around the world who come from São Paolo and Tromsø and Lagos to have their pictures taken walking in step on the crossing as featured on the Beatles’ Abbey Road sleeve. They then normally write something quite odd. ‘John! Happiness is a Warm Gun, from Mexico!’ was particularly unforgettable. I’m not sure even the language barrier accounts for thinking a gun reference an appropriate tribute to the shot and slain Beatle.
Long Road from Jarrow Page 34
