John Cale in New Cross

Ecstatic Gaucho is a seemingly locally-based blogger with, for instance, posts on the Brockley snow bride and the New Cross Knight (of which more soon). But I was particularly intrigued by his mention a couple of weeks ago that he had ‘Just seen John Cale getting out of a black cab in front of Goldsmiths College as I cycled past’.

It is well known that Cale studied music at Goldsmiths in the early 1960s before heading to New York and forming the Velvet Underground. According to his autobiography, he was voted ‘most hateful student’ by college heads of department and caused a minor scandal at an end of year concert in 1963 by playing avant-garde pieces of music such as La Monte Young’s ‘X for Henry Flint’ accompanied by the radical composer Cornelius Cardew and a rowdy audience. He also got reprimanded on a teaching placement in a local school for reading a class of 8-year-olds ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ - although the kids apparently loved it (Victor, What’s Welsh for Zen – the autobiography of John Cale, 1999).

In a 2003 interview he recalled a recent visit back to New Cross: 'I did go down to Goldsmiths and I thought my God nothing has changed. I mean the traffic is still shit. The way the whole convergence outside the building and everything else. The women’s dorm is gone which is a crying shame... I used to run upstairs up to the art department all the time. It was a lot of fun. They were all wearing mini skirts and you know, all the action was upstairs in the art department. I mean you’re around all these different kind of influences'.

Wonder what he was doing back in New Cross this month?

Picture: the world's coolest ever band, The Velvet Underground with Andy Warhol, John Cale sitting down:

David Jones

David Jones (1895-1974) was an Anglo-Welsh artist and modernist poet. He was born in Howson Road, Brockley and studied at Camberwell College of Art before being sent to fight on the Western Front in the First World War. Later he joined Eric Gill and others in the artists' colony in Ditchling (Sussex).

His best known work, In Parenthesis, is informed by his war experiences - Jones is listed as one of 16 war poets on a memorial in Westminster Abbey. According to the wikipedia article 'Jones continued to visit his family home in Brockley until the mid 1930s and some of his sketches depict the house and garden.' In any event, despite dying in Harrow, he was buried in Crofton Park.

Picture: The Maid at No.37 by David Jones (1926). I did wonder whether this might have been drawn locally, but I don't think it can be Howson Road as the houses there only have two storeys.

London and Brighton

The London and Brighton pub in Queens Road (SE15) closed last year, another casualty in the replacement of pubs by housing: London & Quadrant Housing Trust are planning to redevelop the site with flats. For the time being though it is still functioning as some kind of social space, as the pub has been squatted and used for gigs and parties. It has also been redecorated on the outside with this mural:

The road not taken

Some literary graffiti appeared last week on this path in Elephant Road Park (behind the Elephant and Castle rail station). The quote 'Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference' is from Robert Frost's poem The Road not Taken.

Free Indiepop in Brixton

If indiepop is your thing, there's a great free gig tonight (Thursday 26th March) at Jamm in Brixton (261 Brixton Road) put on by the ever wonderful How Does it Feel. Line up includes:

Esiotrot - "Velvet Underground filtered through a secondhand tape-recorder and a collection of Postcard Records".

Hexicon - "the sound of mellow hillbillies tripping in the countryside," reckon Artrocker.

Allo Darlin' - "Ukulele-sporting former singer with The Darlings who plays infectious indiepop that sounds like a stripped down Camera Obscura"

Beacons - duo playing folk-tinged indiepop.Doors 7.30pmBeacons 8pm-8.30pmAllo Darlin' 8.45pm-9.15pmHexicon 9.30pm-10pmEsiotrot 10.15pm-10.45pm

Doors are at 7.30pm, first band on at 8pm, and it's all over by 11pm.

Greenwich Market

Greenwich Phantom brings the sad news of the closure of the 'village market' (that's the second-hand flea market), noting correctly that this was 'one of the very last bastions of old, scruffy Greenwich before we're forced to hand the baton of bohemianism over to Deptford, and acclimatise ourselves to a future of conformity and blandness'.

This was also one of the last remnants of Greenwich's former status as a second hand book centre (other than the excellent Halcyon Books). I used to like to trawling through the stalls for the kind of obscure out of print books that you didn't even know you were looking for. And of course there were the characters on the stalls. Last year when I picked up a copy of Stewart Home's Mind Invaders book there, the stallholder - without any prompting from me, or awareness that I know Stewart - told me solemnly that Home was a member of the OTO magical order! Of all Stewart's achievements, managing to create a persona that has entered into the folklore of conspiracy-minded South London market traders must be one of the greatest.

There are still some 'nice' things to be had in the main Greenwich Market and elsewhere, but that's just the trouble. If you're not looking for something nice like a Christmas present for your mum, there's less and less to be found in Greenwich and certainly very little unexpected.

All is not lost, there are a still a few interesting stalls in the second hand market next to the cinema, and I gather that some stalls may be moving up there from the village market. But that really could be the last stand for second hand Greenwich.

Jade Goody of Bermondsey

Every paper today seems to have the face of Jade Goody on the front page today, following her death at the weekend. I've certainly got nothing to add, but one thing that has really bugged me in the last few weeks coverage has been the constant reference to her selling her dying moments to the press in order to ensure that her kids get a good education.

Of course I've got nothing against her wanting to give her children a good start in life but there's a sub text here - the suggestion that you can only get a good education by paying for it. Perhaps also a suggestion that in places like Bermondsey, where Jade grew up, comprehensive schools can only turn out people who have never heard of East Anglia. Or less subtly, that working class people are thick (although it might be possible to rescue a few of them if they are removed from their social environment).

The thick proles line was certainly pursued by The Daily Mail in an infamous 2007 article about Goody's old school: 'Here come the kids out of Bacon’s College, Rotherhithe, South-East London. Their faces were mostly deep inside sinister hoods and they were arguing all the way along the pavement. Jade walked home this way. Bacon’s was her school. She learned a lot in there. How to become a millionaire was the best. She almost certainly could get herself defined as a moron. Look the word up. She qualifies' etc. etc. (shamefully The Daily Hate is actually printed just behind the school in Surrey Quays, but I bet their journalists never set foot in the area unless they are on a search and destroy mission).

The fact is that Bacon's is very good state school which aspirational parents from far and wide would kill to get their kids into. Perhaps Jade's dad could use Goody's money to buy a house in the catchment area, then they can get a good education for free!

Nunhead Cemeteries

If you have any time tomorrow (Sunday) you must get down to the 'Nunhead and District Municipal Museum and Art Gallery' at 80 Gellatly Road SE14 - your last chance to see it between 2 pm and 6 pm. Coming under the umbrella of the Telegraph Hill Festival Open Studios it so much more than 'come and look at my etchings and have a glass of wine'. It is a vastly ambitious reimagining of the history of the local area, with tales of archaeology, music hall, space exploration and much more. All this and artefacts from The Nunhead Cemeteries complete with fanzine and this text purporting to be from Simon Reynolds' Rip it Up and Start Again: post-punk 1978-84:


'Looking back at the post-punk landscape we see a zone dominated by the tower blocks built by the successful career bands, skyscrapers made from albums, music paper cuttings, CD reissues, and adoring retrospectives in glossy magazines. What is often overlooked are the derelict buildings, abandoned vehicles and urban detritus left behind by the many outfits who flickered briefly in this explosion of creativity and just as quickly vanished without trace.

The paradigmatic example might be The Nunhead Cemeteries, a band who have disappeared from the record just as surely as if they had been interred in the vaults of the South London Victorian burial ground from which they took their name. Their existence is only attested to in contemporary local fanzines with micro-circulation (notably the equally obscure Thy Nunheed Chronicle), and they seemingly left behind no sonic echo whatsoever. Recently however, a few demo tracks from late 1978 have surfaced online, providing a tantalising vista of one of the many lost highways of the post-punk period.

If some post-punk bands relished the careful cultivation of an intellectual aura, even they still bore the marks of an insular Anglo-Saxon culture of hostility to critical thought. Reference points such as Dostoyevsky (Magazine) or Wittgenstein and Gramsci (Scritti Politti), all long dead, hardly attested to an engagement with the cutting edge of contintental debates around feminism, Marxism, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis. Even when Scritti got around to mentioning Jacques Derrida, in their 1982 song of the same name, they mispronounced his surname.

On the evidence of these few poorly recorded morsels, The Nunhead Cemeteries were precociously up to date. (Disco)urs Amoreux takes its name from Fragments d’un discours amoreux by Roland Barthes, only published in France the year before (1977). Presumably they themselves translated the parts of the text they read in the track, since this was several months before the appearance of an English translation published under the name A Lover’s Discourse.
Skank Bloc Brockley also suggests a Parisian connection, quoting from Toni Negri’s ‘Marx beyond Marx’ talks on the Grundrisse given at the Ecole Normale Superieure in ’78. The track seems to be an oblique answer to Scritti’s Skank Bloc Bologna, citing a chunk of that groundbreaking work on racism, Policing the Crisis (1978) by Stuart Hall and others – to hint perhaps that antagonisms between police and black youth on the streets of South London were at least as important as the Euro-Communist town halls ‘somewhere in Italy’. Brockley is the area immediately adjacent to Nunhead, the birthplace of Lovers Rock and close to the scene of the violent anti-National Front protests of the 1977 Battle of Lewisham.

What caused the demise of The Nunhead Cemeteries is unknown. Perhaps they were just too clever by half in a time of Peter and the Test Tube Babies and ‘Batman in the Launderette’. It was to be almost twenty years before such intelligence was again to find even a marginal foothold on the fringes of popular music and it is perhaps no surprise that members of The Nunhead Cemeteries are believed to have been involved in Dead By Dawn, the Brixton-based mid-1990s speedcore-Deleuzian war dance machine that combined club nights with intense practico-theoretical discussions'.

The Museum is playing a demo tape from the band - we hope to put up the recordings here shortly.

The Mysterium in Greenwich

Last month's Moving Gallery -The Mysterium - a collaboration between Deptford's Laban dancers and Greenwich's Trinity musicians - more than lived up to its promise, in fact it was one of the best Transpontine nights out for some time. The grand buildings of the Old Royal Naval College (now home to Trinity College of Music) were transformed for the night into a space for numerous music and dance performances.

Review at History is Made at Night

BUG meets Superman

Brockley Ukulele Group's most recent Sunday session at the Amersham Arms (8th March) was fairly packed and was enlivened by the support of Superman Revenge Squad. The latter had some good pop culture referencing storytelling songs (did I imagine it, or did one song really mention Brookside's Billy Corkhill?), with rapid fire spoken word sections. A couple of songs about his beloved Croydon too - one of which, When Everyone's Dead, imagined spending the end of the world as the last man alive wandering around the Whitgift Centre.

BUG's next Sunday Uke Box is at the Amersham Arms on April 12th - flyer below.



(nb - the photo on the flyer was taken in Washington in 1920, it is not actually a photo of BUG!)

Brockley Graffiti

The hoardings around the site of the demolished Maypole pub in Mantle Road are becoming something of a street newspaper with a running commentary on the state of the economy. Last year there was some anti-Gordon Brown graffiti there, the latest offering on the recently replaced hoardings just says 'Good Morning Capitalism, Morning!'

I guess it's supposed to be a little reminder to Brockley Station commuters that they are working for 'The Man' - like anybody needs reminding (and as every good Marxist knows, the people working for capitalism are also those with the power to change it). Alternatively it could be interpreted as a slightly more abstract site specific slogan referring to the derelict site and the absence of the promised building work there - an example of the new dawn of capitalism unable to deliver on its promises to meet human needs (in this case housing)?

Telegraph Hill Open Studios

It's the Telegraph Hill Festival Open Studios this weekend, a chance to see the work of local artists and let's be honest have a nose around to see how people have decorated their houses and whether their bookshelves suggest an interesting backstory. I am particularly intrigued by this one:

'Nunhead and District Municipal Museum and Art Gallery: The Trustees of the Museum invite you to the final opening of the Museum prior to its closing for major rebuilding on the 100th anniversary of the death of the Museum's founder, George Alfred Gellatly. Saturday 21st March and Sunday 22nd March, 2 pm to 6 pm at 80 Gellatly Road, SE14 5TT'.

Hels Bels Tels

Don't know how I haven't come across Hels Bels Tels before, seeing as this blogger is Catford based and seems to have good music taste. Thanks to her I now know that earlier this month a band called Los Mondo Bongos played at Dirty South (Lee High Road) featuring Mike Peters (the Alarm), Pablo Cook & Smiley (Mescaleros), Derek Forbes (Simple Minds) and Steve Harris (Gary Numan's band).

New Cross - New Shoreditch (again)

An article in last week's Time Out looked at the mushrooming of new clubs in South London, declaring that: 'Like a herd of hedonistic herbivores, the capital’s clubs have sought out fresh pastures south of the river. We map out London nightlife’s new southern stomping grounds'.

The sub heading 'Peckham and New Cross: The new Shoreditch' is hardly unprecedented - Time Out last called New Cross the New Shoreditch in 2007, and a few years before that the Standard declared it to be the New Hoxton (see here).

The acutal article is a bit more measured, acknowledging that 'Since the closure of the East London Line in December 2007, the clubbing majority has largely avoided New Cross and Peckham. The Amersham Arms is one of the only establishments left in New Cross offering hip late-night DJs, while in Peckham, warehouse labyrinth Area10 continues to host music and alternative performance. But the area’s isolation has given rise to another wave of more underground merrymakers. New artist-led project LuckyPDF is hoping to turn the area into an arty club hub once more. Among its many exhibitions in the lime-green Unity Centre, it throws monthly happening Nightfever where live bands meet Afro-inspired DJs and steaming noodles. There are also events at the Bussey Building, a looming former cricket bat factory that’s home to hundreds of artists. When the East London Line reopens in June 2010, the scene is set to erupt'.

Hmmm, the area's lively enough with gigs etc. but one pub with DJs and the odd art night hardly makes it clubbing central, compared with say Vauxhall or the London Bridge area also mentioned in the article.

Strangely no mention of the only actual medium size nightclub in New Cross - still packing them in after 20 years (longer if you count it's previous incarnations), even if it's no longer hip enough to feature on the Time Out radar. I refer of course to The Venue. Must admit I haven't been there for years either, but Darryl at 853 reports that a good night out is still to be had there.

Waldron Health Centre Consultation

Lewisham Primary Care Trust is consulting on plans to make the Waldron Health Centre in New Cross into a ‘GP-led health centre’, open seven days a week, from 8am-8pm. The plans have been criticised by some doctors and others, on grounds including its impact on other health services and on the quality of the relationship between GPs and patients - as well as concerns about putting the running of the centre out to tender.

Tomorrow night (Wednesday 11th March) there is a meeting to discuss this at the Amersham Vale Training Practice, Stanley Street, SE8 - 7 pm start. The meeting has been called Keep our NHS Public and Lewisham Pensioners Forum.

Kingsley Amis on New Cross

Kingsley Amis is certainly not my favourite South London writer - if he can be termed one on account of having been born in Clapham. His late period novel 'Stanley and the Women' (1984)includes a snooty anti-South London rant:

'It was raining busily away when I started on my dis­agreeable journey. I took the Apfelsine through the middle - straight down the hill, along past the office, across Blackfriars Bridge, to the Elephant and into the Old Kent Road... South of the river I was on home ground, or not far off. By the time I got to New Cross I had come to within five miles of where I had been born and brought up.

For all I knew, this part and that part had been different then, built at different times with different ideas, anyhow not interchangeable. That was no longer so, if it ever had been, unless perhaps you happened to have an eye for churches. Not that I cared, of course - I had left South London for good as soon as I had the chance. And yet in a sense what I saw from the Apfelsine was the same as ever, was cramped, thrown up on the cheap and never finished off, needing a lick of paint, half empty and every­where soiled, in fact very like my old part as noticed when travelling to and from an uncle's funeral a few weeks back. Half the parts south of the river were never proper places at all, just collections of assorted buildings filling up gaps and named after railway stations and bus garages. Most people I knew seemed to come from a place - Cliff Wain­wright and I got out of an area. This might have spared us various problems'.

Vege Breakfast at McLarens

The search for the perfect vegetarian breakfast is a lifelong quest. For me there are a number of essential agreements - eggs, mushrooms (not tinned), some kind of vegetarian sausage/bacon and some kind of potato product (such as hash browns. Price is also a factor - it should be roughly equivalent to the cost of meaty fry up in a local cafe (i.e. not restaurant prices).

For many years my favourite was the breakfast at Domali, the excellent vegetarian cafe in Crystal Palace. But now it has been pushed into second place by the breakfast at McLarens Bar and Grill in Honor Oak Park.The vege breakfast there includes scrambled egg, tarragon sausage, cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, potato wedges, beans and four slices of toast. Extra points for having a home made sausage rather than using a supermarket bought one and for offering (without being asked) an extra sausage when I said I didn't want beans. Extra extra points for running over the road to buy a new bottle of tabasco when they realized that the bottle I'd asked for was empty. All this for £4.45.

Lots of other good food on the menu including vegetarian dishes but it may be a while before I get beyond the breakfast.

(evidently I am not the only one who thinks so - see this analysis of the breakfast)
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Wild Horses and Peacocks on Sydenham Hill

There was some speculation in the comments to an earlier post about the mysteriously run down mansion on Sydenham Hill -a mystery partially solved by this strange story from the South London Press last month (23 Feb 2009):

'The Asbo owner of a mansion that was home to The Beatles has fled to the US owing thousands in court costs after mistreating animals. Tracey Thier, 48, had horses, peacocks and more than 60 Alsatians roaming around her 50-room Beltwood House home in Sydenham Hill, Dulwich. The animals attacked each other and people visiting or walking past the building. One woman’s injuries were so severe she needed plastic surgery.

Dogs would escape and attack members of the public, get electrocuted on railway lines and run into roads, causing traffic accidents. When Southwark council officers went to the Grade II listed mansion, there were so many puppies on the premises it was impossible to count them. Thier was given an Asbo banning her from keeping animals in December 2007, but breached the order four months later. Before she could be sentenced for the breaches, she fled the country and is believed to be hiding in the US'.



Apparently Beltwood House was sometimes used for club nights as La Funk Royale . There seems to be some doubt about the extent of The Beatles connection. At Sydenham Town Forum somebody quotes The Beatles Diary which states that on 29 August 1969 'George and several busloads of journalists attended the Apple Press launch of the Radha Krishna Temple’s first recording, 'Hare Krishna Mantra', in the gardens of a large country house in Sydenham. Indian food was served but no alcohol' - the assumption being that this was Beltwood House. Anybody know any more?

(there's some more pictures here).

Update: some discussion on this at East Dulwich Forum - apparently Beltwood was a students residence for radiography students at Kings College Hospital/Normanby College in the 1980s (and maybe earlier). Some memories of parties there too.

The Brixton Gay Community of the 1970's

Interesting event being put on by the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association:

'Squatting in Brixton: The Brixton Gay Community of the 1970's: A talk based on new research by Dr Matt Cook, Senior Lecturer in History, Birkbeck College .The South London Gay Liberation Front, the journal Gay Left and the Brixton Faeries were each linked to the squatting community, which in the mid 80s was absorbed into the Brixton Co-op. This talk describes the genesis and contours of the community, and explores the attempts by those involved to live differently'.

It takes place on Friday 13 March 2009, 7:30 - 9:00 pm at the Conway Hall Humanist Centre, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, London WC1 4RL (0207 242 8032).

A Wolf by the Thames

A wolf on the Millennium Bridge yesterday - and he wasn't the only one.

The Old Police Station, New Cross

This weekend (Saturday 28th February) sees the launch of a new art space in New Cross in a 1912 Police Station converted into gallery spaces and artist studios. The Old Police Station is at 114-116 Amersham Vale, SE14 (just right of the new police station).

The invite states: 'Laden with police processes and signage, the facility is an archeology of institutional structures with period rooms, cinematic prison cells, an old gym and operations yard. For the next 7 years, this architectural infrastructure will house 30 studios, multiple gallery and rehearsal rooms, independent project spaces, a potential residency programme, an on-line radio station - and a 'Members Club', the social hub of the building. Brought to you by Anthony Gross of temporarycontempoary [formerly based in the old Seager Distillery in Deptford], the Old Police Station is an artist-run project in the form of a 'do-it-yourself art centre' responding to the ever-increasing momentum of the local scene. It is an experimental cultural and economic model that aims at least for self-sufficiency'.

The launch party runs from 6 pm to 11 pm.

Goldsmiths Occupation

Earlier this month - from the 11 to 13 February - around 50 students at Goldsmiths students occupied the old Deptford Town Hall building in New Cross Road . They were successful in persuading Goldsmiths to offer two MA scholarships for Palestinian students of Al-Quds Open University in Nablus. The whole thing is documented on the Goldmsiths Occupation for Palestinian Scholarships blog.

Telegraph Hill Festival

The programme is out for the Telegraph Hill Festival (SE14/SE4), which runs from the 13th to the 29th March. There's lots of new events as well as festival perennials - this is its 15th year. Live music includes a jazz/world music night, Strawberry Thieves choir's night of radical song, an open mic night at Skehans pub, not to mention the community production of the Threepenny Opera. There is also a book group discussing the novel Waterland with its author, Graham Swift, who appparently lives locally. Full details at the festival website.

Telegraph Pub to Open

Tomorrow sees the Grand Opening of a new pub in New Cross/Telegraph Hill. Called 'The Telegraph a the Earl of Derby', as the name suggests it is effectively a refurbishment of the pub that has stood on Dennets Road for many years. However it's been a long time since the Derby closed, and there has been a comprehensive refit of the building. The owners seem to be Remarkable Restaurants who refurbished the George and Dragon in Acton, which has had good reviews.

They promise 'This is the pub Telegraph Hilll has been waiting for: real ales including London Pirde, Adnams, Chiswick Bitter, imported Czech Litovel lager. High quality modern British cuisine... real ales, real fires and real people'. It is officially open from 6pm tomorrow (Thursday 26th February).

White Hart lap dancing a step nearer

New blackout windows in the White Hart in New Cross suggest that the landlord is pushing ahead with plans to turn it from a pub to a strip club - possibly called Unique's judging from the lettering on the windows.

Anyway the matter is due to be discussed at the Telegraph Hill Ward Assembly next Monday night, 7pm in the Honor Oak Community Centre, Turnham Road. There will also be a discussion on some of the wider issues at a meeting on 'Pornography and Feminism' at Goldsmiths College (Small Hall Cinema) in New Cross on Tuesday 24th February at 6pm. Angela McRobbie and guests will be debating 'the purported post-feminist liberation of pole dancing and the mainstreaming of porn'. Unfortunately I won't be able to make it, but would be interested in hearing McRobbie's take all on this, as she is one of the few academics to have written anything insightful about one of my passions, the politics of dancing.

Incidentally - and unconnected to the pub or the lap dancing row - last Friday's South London Press reports that a group of teenagers were apparently shot at last week by a youth on a bicycle at Queens Road/New Cross Road junction near to the White Hart.

Woolworths New Cross

The demise of Woolworths has prompted some memories of the long gone Woolies in New Cross, in particular its catastrophic destruction by a Nazi V2 rocket during the Second World War. On the 25th November 1944, the store received a direct hit and the explosion caused both Woolworths and the Co-op next door to collapse on shoppers. 168 people were killed and 121 were seriously injured, the biggest loss of life in the V2 weapon campaign. There is a plaque on the wall above the entrance to Iceland, which now occupies the site.


A letter in the South London Press from somebody who was there recalls: 'The closing down of the Woolworths stores brought horrific memories back to me of the Woolworths store at New Cross Road, Deptford, which was packed with hundreds of Christmas shoppers in 1944 and received a direct hit [by V2 rocket]. A friend and I were at the scene within minutes. We gave an estimate of 800 people killed in the area. Bodies were put in Vestry Vans (dustcarts) by the score throughout the day. The government disguised the number to 170 to keep up people’s morale'.

It is undoubtedly true that during the war the government did disguise the extent of casualties in incidents like this, but it seems unlikely that the truth could be obscured for long after the war, and the 168 figure is supported by a list of those who died printed in 'Rations and Rubble: remembering Woolworths - the New Cross V2 Disaster, Saturday 25th November 1944' by Jess Steele (Deptford Forum, 1994). Still it's interesting that the story of many more dead has survived as urban folklore.

Another piece of folklore connected with this is the suggestion that the Woolworths that was rebuilt after the war (it reopened in 1960) was thought to be haunted and that a number of staff refused to work there as a result. The only source for this was an interesting site on Woolworths history that seems to have disappeared along with the company.

The Londonist has recently mapped all the V2 rocket sites in London.

This Heat

Excellent interview at The Quietus by Simon Reynolds with Charles Hayward about the great SE London post-punk experimentalists This Heat. Hayward mentions coming from Camberwell, going to Dulwich College with Phil Manzanera (of Roxy Music), squatting in Deptford, hanging out with Crass, and being inspired by fellow Deptfordites Alternative TV.

Two recording studios are highlighted, the famous Cold Storage: 'We came across this old disused meat fridge on Acre Lane, in Brixton. It had been turned into artist studios, Cold Storage. That gave us an incredible power base'; and the Workhouse on the Old Kent Road: 'we'd hooked up with Peter Jenner who ran this management company Blackhill Enterprises. Bit of a wide boy, he'd worked with Pink Floyd early on, Roy Harper, and at that time we hooked up with him he was having a lot of success with Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Jenner said: 'I've got half shares with Manfred Mann in this studio on the Old Kent Road called the Workhouse and while we're looking for a record deal for you, we’ll get you to start on that album...'

The latter, as mentioned here before, was where the Asda now stands, and was used by the Gang of Four, Ian Dury and many others.

Here's my favourite This Heat track, SPQR:



Charles Hayward is still performing in various musical projects, working at the Albany in Deptford with people with learning difficulties and doing stuff in his studio at Lewisham Arthouse on Lewisham Way.

The Mysterium

Whether moden dance is your thing or not, this event tonight at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich sounds very intriguing - the building itself is interesting enough. I've just bought tickets and there's still a few left from Greenwich Theatre Box Office on 020 8469 9500 (£10, £8 concessions):

Moving Gallery – The Mysterium
7:00 pm Trinity College of Music, King Charles Court, Old Royal Naval College

Using all the spaces of Sir Christopher Wren’s great baroque building, TrinityLaban and guest artists create an interpretation of Alexander Scriabin’s strange artistic prophecy The Mysterium: ‘All will be participants…with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation… mists and lights will modify the architectural contours…which will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium.’ Audience will freely move through the continuous simultaneous performances and installations - corridors, crevices, rooms, roofs, windows, staircases will all be used. Some will be areas just to peep into, others for interactive exploration.

There will be a chill-out room where listeners can lounge on pillows and be wafted away by sensuous colours and sounds, a construction of hoses and tubas, an Oracle, a Horror Chamber, an Aviary of interactive technology with music and birds, an homage to Rebecca Horn’s suspended grand piano (Concert for Anarchy, Tate Modern) where a corridor of practise rooms periodically erupts in pandemonium, a final denouement with the entire Trinity String Faculty creating Stephen Montague’s Snowscape, and many other surprises.The host of performers and creators include Daryl Runswick, Linda Hirst, Dominic Murcott, Oren Marshall, Kathy Crick, Gill Clarke, Martin Hargreaves, Nicholas Quinn, Rosemary Brandt, GéNIA, Philip Colman, Robert Coleridge, John Drever, Ian Mitchell, Charlotte Darbyshire, Susan Sentler, Alice Sara, GiGi Grady, Heni Hale, Jonathan Chadwick (AZ Theatre) and students and alumni from TrinityLaban.

Conceived and directed by Douglas Finch and Lizzi Kew-Ross. As the experience of this production doesn’t involve a precise beginning, audience are invited to enter the show any time between 7:00 and 7:30. The final performance with ‘Snowscape’ will happen in the courtyard at approximately 9:15. (Butler’s Bar will be open from 6:30 to 9:30)

Fuck the Whiteboard

Your ear to the ground, finger on the pulse Transpontine (er... actually I read it in Time Out) brings you news of Fuck the Whiteboard, a project by New Cross photography student Al Harley and Russ Tannen. Basically it involves going round to clubs and bars and getting the slightly worse for wear punters to write messages on a white board. Their blog features local nights at Goldsmiths Students Union and Amersham Arms (below).

Shunt and Other Uke Adventures

A busy week for Brockley Ukulele Group ended up with playing the Valentines Day party at the Amersham Arms last Saturday.

On the previous Sunday at the Amersham, BUG's monthly Sunday Uke Box session included guest appearances by Jude Cowan, The Strum Pets and Post-Puke (picture below), the latter a duo playing uke-accompanied cover versions of post punk songs by the likes of Bauhaus, Public Image Limited and The Cramps. BUG debuted a couple of new covers including Hefner's The Day that Thatcher Dies and Manu Chao's Desaparecido

Then on Thursday BUG played at the amazing Shunt Lounge, a complex of brick tunnels, shadows, art installations and performance spaces under London Bridge station. After about 45 minutes the PA blew, cutting the set shorter than planned - never underestimate the power of the uke! Shunt is being moved out later in the year to make way for part of the Shard of Glass building site, so get down there before it closes. It opens Wednesday to Sunday nights and has a late bar (entrance inside London Bridge tube on Joiner Street - posters below are on the wall at Shunt).

BUG will be playing a short set at the Montague Arms next Tuesday night (24th February) and then will be hosting their next Sunday Uke Box on March 8th at the Amersham Arms. Support is the hotly tipped Croydon singer Superman Revenge Squad, so get there in good time - 8 pm start, admission free.

Deptford Albany

Too much good stuff coming up at the Albany in Deptford to put here - besides you can check their website for yourself. Among the dates I have already put in my diary are a free Saturday afternoon Unplugged session with Glenn Tilbrook from Squeeze on Saturday 28 February; 24 Hour Poetry People with raps and rhymes from the excellent Excentral Tempest and Ventriloquist on Friday 20 March; and a Charlie Dark/Blacktronica club night on Saturday 4 July.

A lickle facktri up inna Brackly

Linton Kwesi Johnson published his poetry collection Inglan is a Bitch in 1980. LKJ is certainly one of South London's most distinctive voices - based for years in Brixton, he also studied at Goldsmiths in New Cross.

The title poem of Inglan is a Bitch mentions a crockery factory in Brockley (Brackly) - does anybody know if there really was such a factory? Anyway here he is performing it back in the day:



dem have a lickle facktri up inna Brackly
inna disya facktri all dem dhu is pack crackry
fi di laas fifteen years dem get mi laybah
now awftah fiteen years mi fall out a fayvah

mi know dem have work, work in abundant
yet still, dem mek mi redundant
now, at fifty-five mi gettin' quite ol'
yet still, dem sen' mi fi goh draw dole

Cafe Crema this month

Various events at Cafe Crema this month...

Thursday film nights: Feb 26th - Like Water for Chocolate; March 5th - Bergman's Wild Strawberries (£6 includes film plus polenta or homemade cake and a glass of wine...Arrive at 7.30 for food; film starts at 8.15)

Music nights: Thursday 19th Feb - 'London's finest rocksteady/ska band, The Delegators (£6); Friday 20th Feb - Cafe Crema piano jam...'New Orleans New Cross. Bring your banjoes, trombones, ukuleles, tambourines and voices. Piano's just been re-tuned and is now at concert pitch' (free); Saturday 28th Feb -The Woodsmen 'jiving country-noir hillbilly blues' (£6)

Cafe Crema, 306 New Cross Road London SE14 6AF. 2mins from New x Gate tube and mainline. Easy on buses. mob 07905 961 876/ 07905 552 571.

Amersham Arms Jumble/Craft Sales

I went along to the Amersham Arms in New Cross Road yesterday afternoon where Little Bazaar were holding an event - something between a cutesy/indie craft fair and a jumble sale, with stalls selling records, cakes, clothes, quirky jewellery etc. I gather that they will be putting on similar events every third Saturday afternoon of the month. Meanwhile, another group of people are putting on a monthly Saturday afternoon jumble sale, so the net effect will be a fortnightly jumble/craft sale in the back room of the pub - by my reckoning the next one will therefore be on 28th February.

Harry Brown

If you were around the Heygate Estate (Elephant and Castle) late last night you might have noticed a riot in progress, complete with petrol bombs and police snatch squads. But it wasn't for real - it was staged as part of the filming of a movie, Harry Brown, that features Michael Caine as a vigilante war veteran standing up to the young criminals in his area. Not sure about the slightly dubious 'Broken Britain' premise, but its interesting to see Caine returning to the area he grew up in.

Back of a Lorry in New Cross Road

The old Watling Street - now the A2, and in our part of town the New Cross Road - has been the main route between London and Dover since at least Roman times. So for thousands of years people entering London on their way from continental Europe have passed along it, including many fleeing wars, perecution and poverty. I love seeing the coaches from Poland, France etc. going along the road, with people staring out at New Cross as one of their first sights of London.

Unfortunately not everyone is made welcome. I felt very sorry for the 11 people pulled out of lorries by police last week. As reported in the Mercury: 'Police arrested 11 suspected illegal immigrants after stopping three Swiss-registered lorries in New Cross. The convoy of bright red vehicles, from the Basel-based Möbel furniture company, was stopped in New Cross Road, close to New Cross railway station, on Tuesday of last week'.

Who knows how many thousands of miles they had travelled or how much it cost them - no doubt they are now in prison (sorry 'detention centre') for the crime of being born in the wrong country with the wrong papers, with their brief view of New Cross no compensation at all.

Too Many Broken Hearts Have Fallen in the River

South East London Folklore Society are hosting a Valentine's event with a twist this Thursday 12th February with Chris Roberts your guide for a walk with the title 'Too Many Broken Hearts Have Fallen in the River' and featuring headless queens, golden castration devices, deceased lovers and phantom ex-wives. All these as well as voodoo, why life is cheaper on the surrey shore, sex, suicide and showmen on Tower Bridge and the usual medley of monsters, myth and folkloric fun and games you'd expect from SELFS opener for 2009.

It starts at 7.30pm at Hayes Galleria, London Bridge and ends about 90 minutes later (via London and Tower Bridges) with a chat about south east London folklore and mysteries at the Old Kings Head, Borough High Street. Walk is about ninety minutes and cunning weaves it's way along from London Bridge over Tower Bridge and back over London through Borough Market.

You might also want to put the date of the next SELFS event in your diary. On 12th March, David Boyle will be talking at the Old Kings Head on 'Fairy Superstition: Puck, Robin Goodfellow, the little people and other visitors'.

Walking New Cross (12): Briant Street

For many years after the Second World War, London was dotted with bombsites. Today a new kind of wasteland is beginning to emerge, of building sites abandoned as the global crisis continues.

Briant Street, in the ‘Kender Triangle’, is supposed to see the flagship for New Cross regeneration – the scene for a new public realm with housing, a health centre and a library. But work on the building site has ground to a halt as the private developer involved in the project has pulled out.
Capitalism functions (when it does) through a series of bets on the future. In the case of a project like this, investors are betting on being able to sell off private housing for more than it costs to build, and in turn betting that there will be people with the means to buy them. Today all bets are off, with a collapse of confidence in the future. The knock on effect is that regeneration plans for affordable housing and community facilities are under threat, as these have been based on another kind of gamble – that Council-owned land could be sold off for private housing at sufficient value to pay for these plans, or that private developments would generate large capital receipts that could be re-invested in community facilities. These bets too are off.

Meanwhile behind the hoardings on Briant Street there is a strange, almost lunar landscape. Mountains of rubble from the council housing demolished to make way for the new development, a crater-like hole in the ground, and an icy ‘lake’.

Most of the rest of Briant Street is blocks of flats, including the newish Pankhurst Close. There is also a London Electricity Service Station.

At the end of the street, on the corner of New Cross Road, there is another kind of dereliction – a boarded up pub, most recently known as ‘Down the Hatch’.

It’s easy to be depressed by sites like this, when you think of all the wasted potential to meet people’s needs that is represented by empty buildings and building sites. But the skills and resources to turn them into something useful are still here – wasted too at present in the form of laid-off building workers and warehouses full of unsold building materials. We just need to find another way of using them.

BNP in Bexley

Dave Hill on last week's East Wickham (Bexley) council election, with the alarming result: Con 798; BNP 790; Labour 700; LibDem 564; English Democrats 128.

(h/t 853)

Electric Elephant

The Walworth Road is fine for egg and chips (and you can chat to Frankie Fraser while you're eating them should you so wish), but it's not great for coffee. But now just off the Walworth you can get decent coffee, not to mention some reasonably priced fresh sandwiches and pastries, at the new Electric Elephant cafe. It's at 186a Crampton Street, open from 7:30 to 5:oo pm, Monday to Friday, 10 am to 3 pm on Saturday. If you go on a Thursday or Friday afternoon you could combine it with perusing the radical literature at 56a Info Shop and picking up some bargain veg at the Fareshares Food Co-op, also both on Crampton Street.

New (old) station for Brockley?

The fascinating Subterranea Britannica includes an account of the lost Brockley Lane rail station, which closed to passengers in 1917.

Standing on Brockley station platforms today you can watch trains pass overhead on the line that heads up to Nunhead and beyond. At one time these trains stopped at the nearby Brockley Lane station.

All that remains of the old station are the steps up to the former entrance on Brockley Road by Brockley cross... ...and the former stationmaster's house opposite. There was also a subway (presumably still there) from the entrance to the platform.


Nobody talks about new rail stations nowadays, but given that these trains still pass through Brockley is it really unimaginable that they could stop there once more, giving direct access to Victoria?

Presumably 'all' it would take would be some stairs, a couple of platforms and some kind of link to the existing Brockley station (so that you wouldn't actually need a separate station). The land where the old platforms stood is still unused, behind the hoardings at the corner of Mantle Road. Come to think about it, you could access platforms there directly from the existing northbound Brockley station platform.

(by the way, railway modelling enthusiast has done an elaborate model of a fictional Brockley Green station).

Snow Holiday

It feels like the winter Grand National Holiday is coming to an end, more cars on the road and sad looking half-melted snow sculptures. Still it was fun while it lasted. Some curmudgeonly characters have complained about the disruption to the usual work/school grind, but it's been great to see whole parts of the City turned into a playground for children of all ages, sledging on plastic trays, building snowmen and throwing snowballs.

Here's a few photos - from the top: Telegraph Hill top park on Monday; snowman in Telegraph Hill Park; snowman (or is it a snow-woman?) in Gellatly Road; side of a van in Drakefell Road.

(Brockley Central and Caroline's Miscellany have more local photos)

Snow blocks Tory New Cross Invasion

Snow and ice came to the aid of New Cross yesterday, as it prevented a visit by Tory leader David Cameron and his new pal Carol Vorderman. They were apparently due to visit Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham college (sites in Pepys and Jerningham Roads) to launch a new inititative on teaching maths.

Brockley Central has already noted that 'Vorderman is uniquely qualified to lead such a project, having capitalised on her adding-up skills to trouser a fortune plugging loan companies to the innumerate' (see Recess Monkey for more details of her dubious doings). In any event, even if Vorderman can add up that hardly makes her suited to reviewing the complex task of teaching numeracy. Still who needs educationalists when you can get washed up celebrities to determine education policy?

Wonder why Cameron chose Aske's? Politicians of all colours normally want to use schools within a short hop of Westminster (i.e. in inner London boroughs) for their publicity visits, and it is very hard for a school to say no to a visit. So maybe we shouldn't read too much into it. On the other hand, Telegraph Hill is the kind of demographic - often leftish middle class with memories of the days when the word 'Tory' was inevitably followed with the word 'scum' in everyday conversation - that Cameron hopes to swing with his faux 'I am a nice caring Liberal' routine. Whether the senior management of Aske's are cosying up to to Tories is another matter- even if the school does seem to go for a pseudo-Etonian ethos of private school trappings (ludicrous gowns for instance) and Victorian homilies ('serve and obey' is the school motto - hardly likely to encourage independent learning).

Anyway, snowballs at the ready in case there's an attempt to restage this visit.

New Cross Inn in February

Lots of good stuff happening at the New Cross Inn this month. I won't list everything (you`can check for yourself at their myspace site), but a few highlights include:

- Thurs 5th Feburary - Ladyfest Goldsmiths - Celebrating Women's Creativity with bands including Toy Toy, Tiny Tigers, We Rock like Girls Don't, Helen McCookery Book, Bobby McGee and The Lovely Eggs.

- Mon 9th February -I SHOOK THE ROYAL THRONE - live hardcore punk from The Shitty Limits, Broken Arm, Fashion, The Sceptres.

- Every Tueday - 15 MINUTES OF PHAMOUS open mic night. Turn up early to get a slot.

Turner on Nunhead Hill

Tate Britain has a large collection of sketches and notebooks by the artist JMW Turner (1775-1851) including this sketch believed to have been painted from Nunhead Hill looking over towards St Paul's Cathedral.

Turner was obviously spending a lot of time in what is now South East London (then the rural Kent/Surrey border) at this time: in the same period (1796-97) he also painted Lewisham church, a kiln at Lewisham in the snow, a windmill on Blackheath, Greenwich Hospital from Crooms Hill and other local scenes, collected in what is now called the Wilson Sketchbook.

Nunhead Hill is now more commonly known as Nunhead Cemetery. There is still a clear view of St Pauls from the viewing point at the west end of the cemetery (go in the main entrance, turn right and follow the main track as it goes up to hill until you come to a bench facing towards central London). It is possible that the track on the left of the sketch is what is now Brockley Footpath - shown as a well defined track on maps from that time, and now running just outside the cemetery wall.

Misty view of St Pauls from Nunhead Hill/Nunhead Cemetery - I am sure on a clear day a good photographer could do better!

(thanks to Alan McArthur for spotting the Turner picture)

White Hart saga continues

The row goes on over the White Hart in New Cross planning to close as a pub and become a private members strip joint instead. Following the landlord successfully appealing to the magistrates court to overturn Lewisham Council's opposition to this, the Council's Licensing Team have arranged a public meeting to discuss it. It takes places on Monday 16th February, 7 pm to 9.30 pm, at the Barnes Wallis Centre, 74 Wildgoose Drive, New Cross. Further information from licensing@lewisham.gov.uk

Kate Bush in Brockley

This house in Wickham Road (number 44) was the launchpad for the career of arguably England's greatest singer songwriter: Kate Bush.

She actually grew up in a farmhouse in the similarly named Wickham Lane in Welling, where she famously wrote some of her later hit songs while still a child. She went to St. Joseph's Convent Grammar School (later the St Joseph's Campus of Bexley College).

In her late teens, having already been signed by EMI, she moved to Brockley where she lived in the middle flat at no.44 Wickham Road, sandwiched between her two brothers' flats.

In 1977 she fronted the KT Bush Band in local pubs, particularly the Rose of Lee in Lewisham (now Dirty South), as well as the Royal Albert in New Cross Road (later the Paradise Bar, now back to being the Royal Albert). The following year she released her first album, The Kick Inside, with her first single (Wuthering Heights) going to number one. That was the end of her playing down the pub, and in fact after a tour in 1979 she pretty much gave up live gigs altogether apart from the occasional appearance. Later she lived for many years in Court Road, between Mottingham and Eltham.

Thanks to Fred Vermorel for confirming the address; there are some references elsewhere (e.g. on Wikipedia) to Kate Bush living in Tressillian Road in Brockley - I don't think this is right, unless somebody is clear that she lived there as well as Wickham Road - the latter is definitely correct. By the way, I have heard that another well known musician lived in the same flat after Kate Bush, but not sure who - anybody know?

See Also: Kate Bush - The Brockley Demos - yes, she wrote Wuthering Heights in Wickham Road

A Fox in Vesta Road

When I lived outside of London I used to go hunt sabbing, spending Saturdays in a van chasing round the countryside trying to get between the unspeakable and the uneatable. In all that time I rarely saw a fox, other than the odd streak of red tearing across a field with hounds and horsey toffs in hot pursuit.

In London I see foxes all the time - but rarely one as healthy and comfortable looking as this one, sleeping soundly on the pavement in Vesta Road this morning at about 8 am, oblivious even to me and my dog. I actually thought it must be dead, but then it opened its eyes.

Blythe Hill Festival 2009

With forecasts of snow, summer afternoons in the park seem a long way off. But some people are planning ahead - this from Molly of the Friends of Blythe Hill Fields (a small park in Honor Oak Park off Brockley Rise for the unititated):

'Just to let you know that this year's Blythe Hill Fields festival takes place on June 27th and I am looking for willing participants. Last year was a great success and we are hoping to match it this year. We needs bands, singers, artists, dancers, drummers and entertainers of all kinds. Please put the word out and ask anyone keen to take part to email me at mollhench@hotmail.com'

The Female Shipwright: 18th century cross dressing

From the London Evening Post, 2 August 1773:

'A few days ago the wife of Mr. Slade, shipwright at Deptford, was delivered of a daughteer. It is remarkable that this gentlewoman is the same person who is not improperly stiled the Female Shipwright; for at the close of the last war, about the year 1759, on account of a love affair, when 15 or 16 years old, she left her parents, whose names were Lacy, dressed herself in man’s apparel, and went down to Chatham, where the carpenter of the Sandwich man of war took her for his servant, with whom she assumed the name of William Chandler. After living some time in this capacity, she bound herself apprentice to a shipwright, served the whole term, and worked at the business two years afterwards; and during this long period no suspicion was had, or discovery of her sex made, notwithstanding the many surprising incidents, illnesses, and hair-breadth escapes that attended her'.

(found at Rictor Norton. ed. "Some Cross-Dressing Women", part of his excellent Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook. The National Maritime has recently republished Female Shipwright, the autobiography of Mary Lacy)