Idle Thoughts on London Walks

The current Brexit business hasn’t left much time for London Walks, let alone Idle Thoughts. This week, I barely got further than Borough Market where the guy at Elsey and Bent’s greengrocers was getting very stroppy with a Chinese tourist who’d put his camera bag on top of the heritage tomato display. Quite right too! If you want to touch it, buy it.

Mind you, they weren’t always so picky. When I first used to go up to the Borough with my dad – 1954ish? – it was a wholesale market, and E&B only sold spuds. You could pee up against the hundredweight hessian sacks in those days, and nobody turned a hair. Dad used to nip next door to the Wheatsheaf for a livener with the potato merchant, who’d lost an arm in the war, and they left me to play on the wooden steps of the potato loft (now a Neal’s Yard Remedies outlet!)

The market has definitely been chintzed up, like much of inner London. They fined me 50 quid a few years back for dropping a dog end. Little consolation that the market Gestapo were imposing Southwark Council municipal diktats rather than a directive from Brussels.

Anyway, back to the ‘50s. It was grimy, it was smokey. We kids loved the swirling drama of the ’52 Smog that killed 4,000 people. The Festival of Britain the year before was magic!

Boris Johnson was at that time minus 13 and David Cameron was an even fainter glimmer in his aristocratic parents’ eyes. If their contemporary foetuses in Syria or Eritrea had been given the choice, they would have been daft not to pop out in England.

It’s all a matter of luck, really. We never know where we’re going to be born. I get the same frisson as everyone else about Dunkirk and the Battle of Waterloo and the Normandy Landings. But I wasn’t actually there. Be careful about how you summon up these ghosts.

I voted “NO” in 1975. I’m an anarchist, so in principle I don’t vote. Rational people should be able to do better. However. my best mate Terry said that I HAD to vote if Harold Wilson called a referendum. It was like a bet. Our side lost and, a bit like in cricket, the best side won. Our argument in those days was that the European project was geared to capitalist multinational corporations who would end up running our lives. That ship, I fear, has sailed, and since then you’ve all conspired in surrendering yourselves to the “market” economy. That includes those who weren’t even born then.

I’d just say, that as someone who voted “No” in ’75, that I never accused our opponents of being traitors; we never accused them of being anti-democratic; we didn’t bash immigrants; we didn’t say nasty things about Germans. Essentially, we were civilised. You can’t manage that? Fuck you!

 

Ol’ swivel eyes himself sailed past today. From the river bank at Tower Bridge, I looked for Farage in vain aboard the lead trawler, but it turned out the besuited Brexiters were wobbling up the Thames on a pleasure boat, the aptly named Edwardian.

Not much of a turnout on our stretch of the river beyond the usual bunch of bemused tourists and a couple of camera crews. I told the lady from China TV that I thought it was a pretty good propaganda stunt by the Outers. “We Brits are a maritime nation,” I opined for the benefit of viewers in Beijing, “so you can’t really go wrong if you sign up a few trawlermen to your cause.”

It’s true, isn’t it? Everyone has a warm glow about our brave fishermen upon the sea, even if many people’s connection to the piscatorial is these days limited to frozen Vietnamese shrimps from the supermarket or the whiting in kitty’s canned dinner.

I’m not sure we should have much sympathy though for the flagship in Nigel’s “Vote Leave” fleet. The Scottish-registered Christina S was involved in a £63m illegal fishing scam a few years back and its owner was among a dozen people who ended up in the dock.

The Out crowd had to cope with a rival demo from remainers, whose theme song – “I’m in with the in-crowd” – blasted out across the river from a slightly bigger pleasure boat than Nigel’s. It also blasted out a few fishing facts for the UKIP gang, pointing out the British industry is in fact thriving and selling two-thirds of its catch to the EU. Small operators have been pushed out, not so much by the EU as by the big operators whose quotas are doled out in Westminster. Example: trawlers involved in the above-mentioned fishing scam were part-owned by a firm that controls 12 percent of the country’s quotas.

The Chinese TV lady put me on the spot by asking how I thought the public would vote. Could go either way, I said. The EU was an imperfect institution, I told her, but on balance I thought it was positive. Trouble was if people voted “OUT”, they couldn’t later change their mind.

I told her I personally was particularly worried that Brexit would leave the country at the mercy of the profoundly dodgy right-wing populists who, over my shoulder at that very moment, were floating back down the Thames.

By Harvey Morris

In the spirit of the times, I am moved to sound the alarm over the latest covert attempt to chip away at our ancient English freedoms that date back millennia to the time of Boudica and Hereward the Wake [Eds: Please get Mr. Gove to supply the exact dates]. My present concerns, however, must surely trump the narrow allegiances of these worthies to the liberties of suburban Essex and the Norfolk Broads. I raise my banner to preserve unrestricted access to the Thames Path.

Since the mists of 1996, this fluvial trail has allowed every free-born Londoner to walk alongside the watery artery from the Cotswolds at the thin end to the Thames Barrier at the thick end. This ancient freedom is now under threat. And not, for once, from Mr. Juncker.

First some background. The Thames downriver to Westminster was always fairly accessible to the casual urban rambler, mainly because not much got in the way. East from the Pool at London Bridge was another matter. Both banks, north and south, were a near solid wall of dock gates, factories, brewery yards and warehouses. It didn’t much matter, because who wanted to go near the smelly old Thames anyway? Certainly no one willingly chose to live there, which is perhaps why it’s where post-war local councils plonked some of their tenants.

But what a transformation! These days a bike shed with a river view will probably set you back half a mill. Since the docks moved out and the factories shut down, nearly every inch of the old industrial riverside has been upgraded to prime residential, whether it’s converted warehouses or new builds, with prices and residents to match. OK, so that’s meant a smarter set has moved in. Nothing wrong with that. Blokes who work in the City have every right to have a roof over their heads. Otherwise they might be sleeping under flyovers or in parks and behaving inappropriately towards our womenfolk at closing time because of their lack of cultural awareness. (Sorry, I think I just had a Farage moment).

Anyway, one of the things that drew newcomers to the river was the Thames Path, first proposed almost 50 years before its inauguration. It opened up areas into which the wary would not previously have strayed. Who would have dreamed that one day people would boast of gazumping their way into a pied-à-terre in Silvertown?

When the developers moved in, the deal was broadly speaking that new blocks had to maintain public access along their river frontages. No point having a Thames Path if you can’t walk down it, right? The downside is that not every incomer likes the prospect of the hoi polloi tramping past the balcony window at all hours of the day and night. The freeholders of some of these developments have found a solution – keep the gates shut, stick up a few spikes, CCTV cameras and a couple of Private Property signs. Then you can con the casual stroller that he’s straying into forbidden territory.

(I should perhaps add a note here for any foreign readers: contrary to popular belief, an Englishman’s home is not necessarily his castle. We have this weird form of tenure called “leasehold”, which means that you can cripple yourself with a lifetime mortgage and still not technically own the ground beneath your feet. The freehold is frequently held by anonymous entities that have names ending in Jersey LLP or Cayman Islands LLP. Like much else in modern Britain, London property has been great for hedge funds.)

Where does it come from, that “hedge” bit? I always visualise a hedgerow full of frantic wildlife squirrelling away the goodies for winter, with the bigger ones trying to make sure the little ones don’t get a share. But maybe I’ve got the derivation wrong.

It’s a funny old thing, language. You can so easily get the wrong end of the stick. For instance, I may not know where a hedge fund comes from, but I do know about business. Mothers at one time used to yell at their young offsping through the loo door to find out if they had “done their business yet”. For many of us of a certain age, it was our first introduction to the word. I still get a faint flush of pudeur when someone says, “I want to grow my business” or “business is the lifeblood of the economy.” Perhaps our generation’s resistance to doing anything as useful as going into business had less to do with politics than with infantile copraphobia.

But I digress. To get back to the right Path, I would urge all urban ramblers to head off down to the Thames – preferably east of the Tower – and assert your right to walk. Occasionally, this may involve remonstrating with some job’s-worth who’s intent on blocking your right of way. It’s a classic use it or lose it situation. Unless we insist on our right to roam on this public pathway, the developers will be able to say that their bits of it aren’t public after all. Along stretches of the path, north and south, you sometimes rarely encounter another soul. At Wapping and at Deptford, grass pokes up between the paving stones, a sure sign few have been past. It’s not all bijoux blocks. There’s plenty to see, of which more at a later date. So just get out there.

New Cross Gate

By Harvey Morris

The sun’s out at last, so I thought it was time to get back on the road. Well, back on the street actually. Any street heading out from Tower Bridge for two or three miles in any direction – a four-cigarette walk, as the Greeks would call it. The daily jaunt is supposed to keep you fit, and just now there’s the added bonus of getting out of the house and avoiding the interminable referendum debate on Radio 4. Latest: Johnson today “warned” of EU immigration “risks”.

I thought I’d kick off the season by taking the back streets through Bermondsey to New Cross Gate. I grew up there from the age of 0 and wanted to check on what had happened to our old fish and chip shop since the Cypriot couple who last ran it sold up last year.

The Gate is one of those rare corners of inner London to have so far defied gentrification, although the makeover under way at The White Hart is a worrying sign. A post-war social history described the area – the dog end of the Old Kent Road for those who don’t know it – as one of the most run-down corners of what was then an almost terminally run-down London. But you don’t notice when you’re a kid, do you?

It would be easy to romanticise New Cross in the fifties as one of those white working class, chirpy Cockney, Passport to Pimlico neighbourhoods where you left your front door open, made each other endless cups of tea and, if you were old enough, reminisced about the good old days of the Blitz. The Gate was a bit like that, but then again it wasn’t.

Our neighbour at the chip shop was Mr. Posner who ran the dry cleaners. (it was reincarnated as a betting shop in the sixties and is now a West Indian jerk chicken store). Mr. Posner was a Polish Jew who managed to get out before the war. I knew him from such an early age that I don’t remember not knowing him. A bit like your parents. A real gentleman, who always wore a dark suit and tie as he sat behind his counter stitching the repairs.

Then there was Mr. Fonda, the ice cream man. He had a cart that said “Fonda’s” and he wore a flat cap. He was Italian, as were the Cacchiolis who ran the caff across the road. I think Papa Cacchioli was briefly interned in the war, until the government decided that “our” Italians were about as perilous as Pinnochio and let them out.

Big Mick lived round the corner in an alley off Besson Street. He and Mrs. Mick had come over from Ireland. Little Mick, my age, was the spitting image of his “black Irish” dad. They were the Romanians of their day.

Even the died-in-the-wool New Cross indigènes were quite exotic. You could forgive Mr. Cooper the Cobbler his northern adenoidal grumpiness when you found out he’d fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. Auntie Renee at the newsagents was Jewish, which only reinforced her Londonness. My mother was a Scot, which was about as British as you could get in those days.

Don’t get me wrong. There were plenty of salt-of-the-earth locals, whose connections to what had once been a staging post on the road to Canterbury no doubt stretched back to the dawn of time. I’m maybe thinking of the Cashman brothers, a dodgy little crew who went marauding in bowler hats a decade before The Clockwork Orange. They slung a half-brick at me one time but I never told my dad. I was scared he would kill them with one of those tricky commando moves he learned in the war.

He joined up the day war was declared in ’39. His later excuse was that he was maybe a bit pissed at the time. Dunkirk, No.8 Commando, the Western Desert, the Battle of Leros, and POW camp from which he escaped, convinced him that war was a really bad idea. He had a horror of seeing children in uniform. He never said I couldn’t join the Boy Scouts, but I never did.

He had this notion that if the youth from around the world could get together there wouldn’t be any more wars. Pity the poor German who ventured into our shop for a cod and chips or for directions to the Dover Road! He was immediately smothered with my father’s internationalist embrace. There was once a group of backpacking Rheinlanders who were persuaded to stay in our back loft for a month. I never liked to tell them that the hole in the asbestos roof was from a German firebomb.

I don’t know what dad would have made of Brexit. Sadly, he died even before we went into the Common Market. He was political with a small p and conservative with a small c. He didn’t trust mass movements after the war. The only people he ever had a bad word to say about were Randolph Churchill and Evelyn Waugh, who he had the misfortune to serve with in the Commandos. Oh hang on! He also despised Pierre Poujade, the Farage-like French right-wing populist of the 1950s.

Do you know what? He mainly hated, above all, those armchair warriors who were constantly banging on about the Battle of Britain spirit, parading up and down with their Union Jacks from the safety of their suburban golf clubs. Sound familiar?

When I got to the chip shop, there was a man in an orange vest and tin hat behind a health-and-safety barrier. “What are they going turn it into,” I asked him. “I grew up here.” He said, “Fish and chips gone! Apartamenti! Sorry, I Italian. No Speak English.”

“Plus ça change,” as we say in New Cross.