Urban Magic

Covent Garden

Posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 in London | No Comments

How I have managed to get through over a year of this blog and not talked properly about Covent Garden is a mystery….

Okay, so, once upon a time, in the deepest darkest depths of the early modern period, Covent Garden was a proper fruit and vegetable market renowned for prostitution and gin.  It sat bang smack in the middle of all sorts of dubious goings on; riots, murders, bored aristocrats running wild, drunken locals and notorious playhouses where you really weren’t there for the quality of the verse.  In the Victorian era you could throw in the added joy of rookeries – slum areas where event the coppers went with fear, and where the easiest route from A-B was through someone’s basement or across the crumbling rooftops.  Yet somehow through all this Covent Garden hung on in there and in recent years has become one of the tourist-friendly, shopping-tastic hubs of central London.

So now you have posh restaurants, markets selling hand-crafted bits of stuff, fashion stores and soap shops, street performers on stilts or doing acrobatics while juggling knives.  (The phrase you are most likely to hear from any street performer… ‘ladies and gentlemen, reach into your pocket for some money to give to us to say thank you for our act… then fold it….’)  The performers are absolutely one of the draws of Covent Garden, savvy and spectacular and worth the watching; so are the musicians.  In the pit below the main covered market area you will find string quartets and opera singers doing the Good Bits from classic music, while in the cobbled streets around you can find anything from the greatest hits of Queen done on electric guitar and harmonica, to the Chinese sheng player churning out traditional classics of the motherland.  Sometimes you get larger structures coming in, from giant trampolines to the traditional merry-go-round of the fair and of course, the obligatory Punch and Judy Act which is forever associated with Covent Garden as its starting place and geographical patron.

There’s also plenty of more formal tourist-catch attractions.  The Royal Opera House dominates the eastern end of the market, and while the tickets are getting cheaper it remains the prime source of gentlemen in ties and women in silk dresses leaving the area in the later hours of the evening.  The London Transport Museum sits on the southern corner next to the warren of Jubilee Market, while the departure of the Theatre Museum next to that remains to this day something of a tragedy.  Restaurants abound, ranging from the silly, where a piece of bread and some butter in a jar can cost as much as a hot dog with extra onions from the vender below, to the slightly less discovered Thai and Vietnamese Restaurants tucked away at the end of half-seen alleys towards the river and Trafalgar Square.

St Pauls Church sits on the western corner of Covent Garden, with a churchyard round the back that is something of an escape route from the business of the market itself.  You’re also with easy throw of Drury Lane and all its theatres, Leicester Square and Holborn – do not, guys, do not take the underground between any of these stations and by the time you’ve got down to the Piccadilly Line platform and waited for the train, you could probably have walked the distance overground yourself.  Distances are deceptive in this part of town; judicious wiggling through unlikely streets is the secret.  Thinking of secrets, you’ll also find near Covent Garden the not-very-secret-at-all Masonic headquarters, based in a building about as subtle as a scud missile fired at an oil refinery, complete with little shops nearby offering various medals and bits of ribbon to denote this or that other highly hush-hush status within the order.

All things concluded, Covent Garden is a lot of fun and well worth visiting at pretty much any time, whether as a passer-by looking for an interesting shortcut between Cambridge Circus and Aldwych, or as a tourist looking for an interesting time.  The one rule is – don’t go there with too much cash in your pocket.  Despite your best intentions, you’ll probably spend it before you’re done.

North-South Divide

Posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 in London | 3 Comments

Someone once defined ‘nationalism’ as a state of not-being.  I am English because I am not French, I am Scottish because I am not, oh but so very much not English and so on and so forth.  While as definitions go it leaves a certain something to be desired, it does seem that a lot of what the sociologists lovingly call identity (and remember sociology is a subject where, if you can get ‘identity’ into the first three lines, you’ve won) is based on a state of not being the other bugger.  And so life gets filled up with these divides.  They start big – I am English because I am not French.  Then they refine – I am from Up North and therefore am rugged and strong, whereas he’s from Down South and is therefore wussy and smug.  (Or conversely, I am from Down South and am therefore cultivated and clever and he’s from Up North and therefore drinks a lot and grunts.)  In London this divide is just as strong as anywhere else, and the River Thames cuts the city up into a very strong North-South line.

It goes something like this…

I am from North London, and therefore have experience of real London.  I can actually find an underground station without having to ride a bus for an hour and a half, I am within easy throwing distance of Hampstead Heath, Ally Pally, Soho, Westminster, the Golden Mile, the Tower of London, the BT Tower, Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Leicester Square, the British Museum and so on and so forth.  My side of London is rich with history, eighteenth century mansions and nineteenth century terraces, in my part of town you can find pretty much anything anywhere and don’t have to shop at Argos to achieve it, in short, all things considered, North London, it’s where the action is at.  Poor South Londoners – all that suburban landscape with nothing of any note in it, semi-detached houses looking exactly like the next street of semi-detached houses and my god but you have to wait for the train to get anywhere and you’ll be so lucky if it happens to be going that way to begin with.  Urban poverty, transport failure and commercial decline – south London, who’d live there?

Whereas!  As a South Londoner the thought goes something like this…

You ignorant North London smug bastards, you have no idea what you’re missing.  We’ve got Richmond Park, Clapham Common, greenery everywhere, room to move in, low rents and big houses, some of the best curry that London has to offer.  We’ve got rich and thriving local communities, we’ve got easy access to mainline trains to carry us swiftly to places like Brighton and other non-London destinations wherever they happen to be.  We can get bags of exotic vegetables at half the price you lot can, actually find a place to park, and hell, the London Eye, London Aquarium, Tate Modern and Globe Theatre are all on our side of the river so you lot just take your inner city squalor and rising crime rates and piss off back to Barnet you ignorant Northern gits.

I’m very firmly a North Londoner.  I did dally with the concept of South for a while, and can sorta see the other guy’s point of view, but no.  Sorry.  I remain up north and up north is where I intend to stay.  However!  Even once you’ve chosen your side of the river, there’s still more dividing up to do.  I am from Hackney, therefore naturally dislike Tottenham – not because the borough has done anything personal to offend me, but merely because it’s good to have someone to look down on, whether for geographical or footballing reasons, who can say?  Equally, my nearest borough growing up was Islington, where the sense of ‘oh god, not Hackney, what a dump’ was unmistakable.   As someone from the vaguely eastern corner of the city, I naturally view the West with deep suspicion.  Where is Acton anyway and were North, East, Central and West Acton stations really the best names that could be come up with for the local area?  Is Knightsbridge a real place?  Do people really shop at Harrods?  Really? Wherever you go there’s always someone to look down on and feel pleased not to be… even if, as luck would have it, they’re looking back at you and thinking exactly the same thing…

Travelcard Crazy

Posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 in Glossary, London | 2 Comments

I walk everywhere.  But once in a very blue moon I find myself the proud owner of a day travelcard, zones 1-4, and I go just a little bit travelcard crazy…

In the world of urban magic, this is a genuine medical problem.  Magic long since passed the point where a griffon’s feather was a source of power – true power lies in the Zones 1-6 London Travelcard, good for free transport on every bus, tube, tram, light railway and overground service within Greater London, and a hefty discount on the river bus too.  I mean, if this isn’t urban power in ticket form then frankly, nothing is.  And like all things with surplus power attached, it’s perfectly possible to go mad with a travelcard; thus, a traveller may find himself standing at Leicester Square wondering how to get to Piccadilly Circus and sure, the two are visible one to the other, but oh no!  When in possession of a travelcard something as simple and easy as walking fifty yards is unforgivable!   Trains must be caught, buses must be used – as many as possible, ideally – and even if they take you miles out of your way you’ve still gotta use them, because that is the magic of a travelcard.

When I was a kid I went to school in Hammersmith.  Grew up on the other side of town, mind you – right on the other side of town in Hackney.  (‘Is that anywhere near Kensington High Street?’ asked one perfectly affable 12 year old in a geography lesson once, when we were discussing our home boroughs.  The answer, dear reader, would be a resounding no.)  I had a travelcard, and prided myself on never quite taking the same route into and from school every day.  I circled round my final destination like a hungry vulture in a butcher’s maze, sometimes striking from the north via Piccadilly Line and a bus, sometimes from the south via Northern Line and a different combination of buses, for Hackney is not renowned for its tube connections.  I took the Hammersmith and City Line for a while, until I realised that the stations between Goldhawk Road and Royal Oak were full of bigger, scarier people than me in my baby-pink school uniform.  (It wasn’t a uniform big on dignity.)  Then I switched to the Piccadilly; then realised that the Piccadilly didn’t have anything on the Victoria Line, then discovered that actually, a Victoria-Northern Line combo was a deadly weapon.  Violin lessons in the Barbican were an especial treat, as I had an option on at least five perfectly justifiable tube stops I could get off at each of which would lead, in roughly even times, through entirely labyrinthine passages, to the same destination from a completely different direction.  Travelcard craziness was how I got to know most of central London, picking my way between tube stops with the reckless disregard of someone who knows that if I do get horribly lost, there’ll be a bus to somewhere where there’ll be a tube to somewhere else where I’ll probably be able to pick up a route I vaguely know in a reasonable direction.

Now that I no longer need to commute across half a city to get to school, I have travelcards less frequently, and thus go a little bit more bonkers when I use them.  This weekend, for example, I needed to get from my home to the Old Kent Road for a job interview, and then to a wedding in Putney, and then back home. I can proudly report that I managed to achieve this, with my travelcard, through use of four tube lines, three buses, two mainline trains and if only the service had been running on a weekend, I damn well would have taken the riverbus too.  Sensible, level-headed geographical planning goes out of the window.  I see a bus heading vaguely west, and I am heading vaguely west, and I will jump on it with a cry of ‘ah hell, it’ll probably work out for the best!’   So all things considered, my advice to you would be… beware travelcard madness!  And perhaps every now and then, give into it too.

In Praise of Cally Rd Tube

Posted on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 in London | 5 Comments

So, there’s not much to recommend Caledonian Rd underground station.  It sits just north of half-way up the Cally Rd, more Holloway than it is Islington, opposite an uninteresting block of flats and a recycling/rubbish dump.  The nearest attraction of any real note is the Tennis Centre, and even that isn’t renowned for its bringing in of the punters.

But!  I love the Cally Rd tube station, for a number of reasons:

1.  The continual playing of classical music.  (I’m told that this is only ever really played at stations where it’s considered dangers of violence are high, in the theory that it’s hard to swagger tough when listening to Mozart.)

2.  The fact that, for whatever technical blip as yet unknown, there is a tendency of Piccadilly Line trains pulling into the station to announce their arrivals on the little orange LED panels inside the carriages like so:

The Next Station Is!!

Caledonian Road!

Which if nothing else, adds a certain zinginess to the event.

3.  The announcements at the station itself.  At every London underground station there is a continual display of when the next train is coming, at the bottom of which roll little announcements of the kind like There are delays on the Northern Line.  Please seek alternative routes.

However, at Cally Rd, someone has taken control of the system and now the messages read…

If you find an unattended bag, please report to the nearest member of staff.  Ta.

Amazing the difference a ‘Ta’ can make to proceedings.

4.  Art.  I mean, you may not call it art… but on the other hand, have you ever, in your life ever, seen a service update board that looks anything like this…

From a Reasonable Height… Pt.2

Posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 in London | 1 Comment

The speculation has come so close that I figure I may as well add the final photo that solves this particular mystery…

Looking East…

Looking North East….

Looking North North East!

Can you see where it is yet?  Who’d have thought a Novotel would have such interesting views…

From a Reasonable Height

Posted on Friday, May 21st, 2010 in London | 6 Comments

So, remember how every now and then I post up pictures and say ‘guess where these were taken from’?

It’s another one of those… ALTHOUGH… I’m actually holding back two pictures which would give you the immediate answer to your contemplations and there is already a stonking clue in one of them… so deep breath… are you sitting comfortably?

London Borough of Hackney

Posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 in London | 1 Comment

I was born and raised in Hackney.

Technically, if we’re going to wax literal about this, I was born in St.Bartholemew’s Hospital, Smithfields, the day after a nuclear disaster and a few months before the maternity ward shut down, and while this is not in Hackney, by dint of being within the sound of Bow Bells it does technically mean I’m supposed to be a cockney.  I mention this only because, as you might have guessed, dear reader, my syntax isn’t very cockney.  I am the product of my education, which was ridiculously academic, so don’t hold your breath if you’re looking for my blogger’s guide to rhyming slang; I’m just not your girl.  All this being so, Hackney is the borough where you were traditionally supposed to stumble on your cockneys, although you’re more likely to stumble on dialects of Farsi these days, and you’d probably have an easier time understanding if you did.

I guess I should start off by explaining the title of this blog – London Borough of Hackney.  I’m a dead proud Hackney girl, not least because there’s a snotty knee-jerk reaction that happens generally in London when you mention the borough’s name, a certain curling of the lower lip or, in some cases a cry of ‘but is that safe?’  The estate agents would probably tell me that I grew up on ‘Islington borders’ – in other words, I nearly practically grew up in a borough that is in every way considered brighter, better, cleaner, safer and basically nicer than Hackney.  However, I mildly resent this accusation, since I can’t help but notice that the people on the other side of the borough line never describe themselves as being in ‘Hackney borders’ so why should I return the compliment?

Let’s not beat about the bush, there’s plenty about Hackney that’s wrong.  The local council once had a reputation for being one of the most corrupt in Britain, although I think in recent years there’s been so many councils that they’ve been reluctantly forced to relent.  The bureaucracy remains fiendish, but this may just be a common local borough trait.  (Certainly none of the boroughs I’ve lived in since have exactly gone out of their way to make life easier.)  There are plenty of grotty areas; Hackney possesses both a very large number of council estates of the kind that were built with an ideal in mind and not much sociological reasoning, and poverty remains a quiet under-note for much of its busy streets.  It is not a place for Waitroses or Starbucks, but rather the streets of Hackney are ruled by pound shops and greasy spoons and I for one kinda cheer for this.  Hackney has a reputation for gun and knife crime; whether this is earned I’m not in the best position to judge; with guns and knives there are also drugs.  If you look, you can find all of the above; however my one weak comfort to those who cringe at this thought is that if you don’t go looking, it’s not going to seek you out either.

But!  With all this doom and gloom out of the way, let me explain why I remain a proud Hackney girl.  For a start, I challenge anyone to enter the borough and not be able to find something of anything.  It’s a great big sprawling place, with its southern border stopping at Old Street, nudged right up next to the Corporation of London, the oldest part of the city where the bankers do their business behind extremely polished glass while wearing very expensive ties.  Its northern border makes it to Tottenham, a place where inner city density and suburban sprawl fight tooth and claw for which will be the winner.  (Currently 0-0.)  At the eastern edge, Hackney meets Tower Hamlets, and at the bottom edge of Mare Street the lampposts are hung with banners proclaiming each borough to be superior to its neighbour, as if the daily inhabitants might somehow want to reconsider their place in life while jostling for the Central Line at Bethnal Green.  It is a mixture of old and new; grand Victorian terraces, black and white houses with sashed windows, sit opposite 1960s orange brick council estates and all shop at the same local newsagent.  Rather optimistic council initiatives, such as bright white offices and the perhaps ironically named ‘Ability Plaza’ sit bang smack next to the old-made-new, such as the Hackney Empire.  The Empire was resurrected a few years ago from a run-down music hall with barely a lick of paint left on its walls to a brilliant, bright new theatre with all the extravagance of its past brightened and raised up.  Throughout the year you can find panto, comedy shows, high drama, amateur dramatics and soap opera all being acted out in fairly even quantity at moderate prices.  The Empire itself sits at the top of Mare Street, which is the nearest thing to a main thoroughfare that Central Hackney lays claim to, a mixture of grand terraces turned into shops selling mysterious unnamed root vegetables and hairdressers specialising in bright nails and the Afro style.

The ethnic diversity of Hackney is one of its most notable features.  Halal butchers and telephone shops specializing in cheap calls and money transfers to Jamaica, Sudan and Pakistan are as common as parking fines, and in the bustling market at Dalston Kingsland you would have to be blind to not be able to find cassettes of the greatest hits of Trinidad, or love music from Bollywood on sale in between the fish and cheap clothes stalls.  It is as easy to buy a sari as it is a pair of sandals, pide is as cheap as pizza and baklava is the dessert of choice.  Council leaflets to all its residents come in a minimum of eight languages, and no self-respecting Hackney library would be without its foreign language and gay interest sections.  There’s a large Orthodox Jewish community in Stamford Hill, noticeable a mile off for their uniform of black fur hats and black coats, smart suits and skullcaps, clustered to the edge of the railway lines that run out of Liverpool Street towards the north; around Green Lanes there is a Turkish community who, when Turkey came 3rd in the Football World Cup some years ago, drove round and round with the roofs of their cars open and flags waving, much to the chargrin of the Cypriot and Armenian communities that live up towards Wood Green.  On Stoke Newington High Street, one Turkish supermarket has set up shop inside what was once a mosque, a building covered almost entirely in green and blue mosiac tiles, while towards Clissold Park you can find church sat opposite a synagogue with only a kebab shop and some rather over-enthusiastic traffic to keep them apart.  Towards Whitechapel you will struggle to miss the minarets of the Suleyman Mosque, but it is far easier to not notice the Regents Canal as you cross it on your way heading south, running from Camden, through Islington, slicing across Hackney and finally moseying out towards the Lee River Valley. It is a place of transitory immigrants, people passing through on the way to somewhere more stable, as well as a borough where the newly settled plant their first solid roots; you don’t have to look hard in Dalston or Clapton to find a wedding dress, first or second hand.

The density of buildings can often disguise secret patches of calm in Hackney as well.  Clissold Park, London Fields, Cambridge Heath, Bethnal Green and the sprawling marshy mass of Hackney Downs all seem to pop out between the buildings when you least expect them, a simple turn down a simple street like any other and bham, open grass and swings and people playing football badly.  Buses are the traveler’s means of choice in Hackney, almost entirely because it has barely a half dozen underground stations to claim as its own.  (Although all in the borough wait with baited breath to see what will happen to the East London and Crossrail projects, come the election…)  There are a few unlikely travel options available though… with the underground so dominant in north London, few really considers the potential of the mainline trains that chug out of Liverpool Street station and up the side of London Fields on route to the edge of the city, but they can illustrate with immense ease how a train can in ten minutes cover a distance that on foot would take an hour.  Likewise, there is the Overground railway, which has in its time been known by many names – ‘Silverlink Metro’, ‘North London Line’ or more often than not ‘you aren’t seriously thinking of taking that, are you’?  Recent years have improved on the Overground and it is now possible to get from Hackney Central to Camden on one train in one journey in roughly fifteen minutes without having to beat little old ladies over the head to do so.

So you see, when I say that I come from the London Borough of Hackney, I’m only giving its full name to make sure you understand… it’s not just any old place I grew up in…

The 39 Steps

Posted on Thursday, April 1st, 2010 in London, Misc. | 1 Comment

So!  I went to the theatre a few days ago, for the first time in ages.  The ironic thing about learning how to work in theatre, is that you never really have time to go and see the real thing… but anyway…  we found discount tickets to go and see a show in the West End, which is something I haven’t done for a while anyway, and after much negotiation we settled on the 39 Steps at the Criterion Theatre.

I’ve read the 39 Steps… I enjoy it… it’s part of a series of books by John Buchan in which his hero, Richard Hannay, fights conspiracies and unearths deadly, usually German, plots involving military secrets and occasionally illicit uses of hypnosis.  And I promise you, the upper lip has never been stiffer.  Danger and daring-do are the words,  and if the works can be summarized in any way, it’s probably by the sentiment ‘oh jolly gosh, I seem to have been shot’.  Only much, much better than that.

The phrase ‘oh jolly gosh’, while I’m sure it never actually appears in the works of John Buchan, does seem to have been the idea that was seized upon by the powers behind the theatre adaptation of the 39 Steps, with brilliant results.  The play is a rip off of all things Hitchcock, performed by 4 actors in 40 hats and the strategically materialized arm of one ASM, with a set for which the word versatile was really created.  It is honestly hilarious, exciting and basically, at the end of the day, just tonnes and tonnes of fun.  And for £10 a throw, all I can really add to this is… GO!

Through a Moderate Lens…

Posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2010 in London | 6 Comments

So, I went to a place today, and there was a view, and it was cool.  And this is it.  The question of course being for anyone curious…

… where was this?

Not quite a camera…

Posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 in London | 2 Comments

… but my phone, it turns out, has an internal camera.  As, in fact, does the phone of my friend, with whom I found myself crossing Blackfriar’s Bridge on one of those evenings when London really does its thing.  I sometimes get asked what I have in common with my characters, especially narrators like Matthew Swift.  There are a number of very obvious things I don’t have in common.  I’m not a) male b) magical or c) semi-possessed/psychotic.  But we do have something in common… we both like Thai food, and both love the river.  When tired, angry or upset, the river is the guaranteed place in all the city that will calm me down.