20 Years of Transpontine!

So Transpontine blog is 20 years old! On October 9th 2004 the blog was launched with a couple of posts about local bands and a notice of a talk on witch trials.  That pretty much reflects the initial impetus for the blog  - there was a sense that there was a lot of interesting stuff going on around us that was not really being documented anywhere. Specifically myself and Scott (who co-founded it with me and contributed for first few years) were involved in the South East London Folklore Society, going to lots of gigs that became known as part of the New Cross scene and also participating in the South London Radical History Group who had recently lost their base after the eviction of the Use Your Loaf social centre squat in Deptford High Street. The focus at the start was particularly on New Cross, Deptford and Brockley but over the years Transpontine has roamed over South London.

For me at the start blogging was just a free, convenient and accessible way of publishing stuff online. During the early days of the Internet, I had a couple of websites on GeoCities. It was quite clunky to use and eventually vanished – the first of many lessons in the contingent and temporary nature of online content.

With Blogger and then Wordpress it was much easier to create posts, and I really liked the equality of access. Everybody's content looked reasonably professional and clear to read, unlike say with printed publishing where it was very difficult for do it yourself producers to compete with the quality of glossy colour magazines.

Basically, anybody with anything to say, could now get it out there to a global audience though in many cases it wasn't a mass readership people were looking for, but to connect with others sharing their niche interests. There were communities of bloggers responding in quick time to each others posts and sometimes meeting up in the 'real world'. Locally there were meet ups in the pub of Lewisham based bloggers, and some of those people have been friends ever since. I missed the night that one Lewisham blogger of a Conservative bent turned up - yes future Conservative Party leadership hopeful James Cleverly! I liked blogging so much that I've also been doing another music/politics one for quite a few years, History is Made at Night.

Music writer Simon Reynolds is one who has stuck to blogging even if it is not the social media cutting edge it once was. Writing for The Guardian last year he argued:  'Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zero responsibility to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created'.

In recent years my blogging here has become quite sporadic; Transpontine functions for me now something like a  public diary as well as a notepad for interesting historical and other fragments I have come across. But over 20 years it has accumulated into quite a record of parts of SE London life that interest me. Ironically considering the often announced death of blogging some of the things featured 20 years ago now have barely a trace left online as the online forums, email lists and myspace sites where they once thrived have come and gone. The blog remains as a historical record and I am glad that the site is now one of those that is regularly backed up by the British Library. There's a reasonable chance that the blog will outlast Twitter and Facebook. Start your own blog it's not too late!

I am particularly proud that some of the historical posts have resurrected often undocumented places and scenes and in the process acted as strange attractors to people looking for evidence of past experiences and leaving amazing comments that enrich the original content. Also proud to have helped revive the use of the word Transpontine! In a small way I hope that blogs like this have helped redress the previous balance in London writing away from a bias towards central and north London. 

So what next? Well I often think that the time spent on blogging could have generated several books, though arguably the blog has had a much greater reach than any book I would have produced.  But I am close to finishing a book covering the social and cultural history of New Cross so watch this space for news of this shortly!

Some favourite posts....

There have been 3,111 posts on Transpontine over the last 20 years. At first these were mainly short listings, and even adding photos was tricky. Later things occasionally got more substantial. Here's a selection of some of my favourite posts.

Music has always been a big part of the blog, lots of local up and coming artists have been featured in the Music Monday slot and some more well known ones - who can forget finding out about the A-ha Sydenham connection or Marvin Gaye in Deptford? My personal favourite music post though was the one about Katy B, Ikonica and Nunhead bakers. Also important to me were Little Earthquakes.... Independent Record Labels in SE London (2017) and  No Frills Band and 20 years of South London folk sessions. I have enjoyed documenting countless musical, TV and film connections to the Rivoli Ballroom in Crofton Park.

Looking back on older scenes my speculative post on where the South London mods might have hung out in the 1960s has got some great comments over the years, as have others on the  History of the New Cross House/Goldsmiths Tavern and Last Orders at the Montague Arms.

Some times I have been able to document contemporary movements and events as they happened, like the great Save Lewisham Hospital demos in 2012,  Covid 19 Street Art (2020) and Black Lives Matter in South London (2021).

Anti-racism and anti-fascism has been a strong thread throughout including the The New Cross Fire 1981: the Bleakest Moment  and the 'Battle of Lewisham'  (see Lewisham 77: Myth and Anti-fascist history). For links to many articles on these themes see Lewisham Stands Against Racism, Again (2024). 

The history threads have led me down some interesting byways, loved discovering more about Peckham nightclubs, Catford syndicalists,  a SE London trans marriage in 1954 and occult connections at the Horniman museum.

Neil, Transpontine, October 2024