Another London

This week is the last chance to see 'Another London: International Photographers Capture City Life 1930-1980' at Tate Britain (it closes on 16 September). As other reviewers have noted,  I'm not sure that much of it really offers a view of  'another' city - if anything it suggests that great international photographers visiting London tended to reproduce a very familiar version of the city with guardsmen, buses, city gents in hats and cockney characters on market stalls. That was after all what the agencies and magazines they were working for expected to see - artfully executed tourist imagery. Of course there are still some great photographs which capture lost moments, like Edouard Boubat's picture of the 1950s working river by Tower Bridge, or Martine Franck's photo of a bored child in Greenwich at the time of the 1977 silver jubilee.

Another London gets better as you go around it though, and the last half of the exhibition lives up to its title with photographs documenting less commonly seen parts of London. I particularly liked Al Vandenberg's images of 1970s counter-cultural London and Neil Kenlock's pictures from the same period of Black Londoners. They may both have been migrants, from the US and Jamaica respectively, but both were settled in the city when they took their photos. Perhaps you really need to be embedded in a place for a while to step beyond the usual cliches. 

Neil Kinlock's photograph of the aftermath
 of a racist attack in Balham in 1972

One of Vandenberg's photos - featuring Lemmy (centre)

I also liked Leonard Freed's 1971 pictures of Hassidic Jews, though for a Londoner what is frustrating about these images and so many others in the exhibition is that they are simply labelled as London -whereas what you really want to know is whereabouts in London?

Are the contradictions of this exhibition simply about different perspectives of London, or are they representations of the real contradictions of London? In their essay accompanying the exhibition, Ben Gidley and Mike Gidley suggest the latter: 'London has always had an anachronistic relationship to England and Britain, and to Englishness and Britishness. In this representative photographic collection, we see images of pearly kings, milk bottles on the doorstep, guardsmen in bearskins, monarchist crowds and timber-lined pubs that point backwards to an imagined old England that tourists come here to see, while the modernity of its traffic and the relative exoticism of its hippies, Black Panthers and punks suggest a London jerked out of England by war and dislocating change' (in 'Another London: International Photographers Capture City Life 1930-1980', edited by Helen Delaney an Simon Baker, Tate, 2012)

Freedom for Tooting

Some friends of mine have recently moved from New Cross to Tooting, so as a parting gift Transpontine will take a rare roam into the western lands of South London to offer up some nuggets of cultural history from Tooting and Balham.

Tooting Popular Front


In the late 1970s comedy TV series Citizen Smith, the Tooting Popular Front was a fictitious South London revolutionary group with slogans including 'Freedom for Tooting' and 'Power to the People'.

In real life, Balham was arguably the birthplace of British Trotksyism. In the early 1930s, a group of South West London socialists were expelled from the Communist Party for their opposition to Stalin's policies. Their ranks included Hugo Dewar from Tooting CP, Reg Groves and Harry Wicks and they constituted themselves as the Balham Group of the International Left Opposition operating from 79 Bedford Rd, SW4; Groves later wrote a biography of the 'red priest' Conrad Noel, and indeed some of the Balham Group had been close to Noel's Anglo-Catholic socialist 'Catholic Crusade'.

Punk and stuff

Charlie Harper of punk band UK Subs was a hairdresser on Tooting Broadway when the band started out in 1977. Guitarist Nicky Garratt recalls: 'We based ourselves out of Charlie’s hairdressing salon... where we stored our battered Marshall P.A. system in the back room along with drums, amps, baskets of towels and a huge supply of hair care products. The Salon, became both meeting place and hang out over the next year mostly because it was one of the few places where Charlie could be found with any degree of certainty'. In Julien Temple's film Punk Can Take It (1979), based around the band's music, there a scene with Charlie Harper in the hairdressers.

Other musical connections include:

- Marc Bolan (T-Rex) went to Hillcroft School in Beechcroft Road, Tooting (now known as Ernest Bevin College) - as a teenager he lived in Sun Cottages, Summerstown;
- Captain Sensible of The Damned was born in Balham;
- Kirsty McColl started out in a band called The Tooting Frooties;
- Kitchens of Distinction did a song 'On Tooting Broadway Station':

Angela Carter

Writer Angela Carter grew up in Balham - her favourite building was the Granada Cinema in Tooting, where she went as a child with her father, as recalled in a 1992 BBC documentary: 'This cinema, with its mix of the real and false - real marble hugger-mugger with plaster, so you have to tap everything to see if it sounds hollow or solid - this apotheosis of the fake. There was a functioning cyclorama, in my day, clouds, stars, a sun, a moon, drifting across a painted sky. I held my breath in the gallery of mirrors - anything might materialise in those velvety depths, monsters, beauties, my own grown self. I would have been seven or eight. This was the first great public building that ever impinged on me - and even though it was then jam-packed with queues, the marble steps polished by uniformed ushers, all the same, from outside it was just a concrete bunker. So there was always the element of surprise. It was, like the unconscious itself - like cinema itself - public and private at the same time... I fell in love with cinema although I scarcely remember the movies I watched with my father, only the space in which we sat to watch them, where we sat with all those wonderful people waiting in the dark'.

World War Two

In October 1940 at least 66 people died while sheltering at Balham tube station during a German air raid. The tunnel was flooded after a bomb fractured water mains. The incident features in Ian McEwan's novel Atonement, and in the film version of the book.

Angela Carter, Transpontine author

Angela Carter (1944-1992) died twenty years ago today, one of the great Transpontine writers. She spent her childhood in Balham, had an early job on the Croydon Advertiser, and lived her last years in Clapham.

The South London question is a recurring theme in her writings, none more so than in her 1991 novel Wise Children set in a fictional Bards Road in Brixton (presumably based on Shakespeare Road). The opening paragraphs go straight to the heart of the matter:

'Q. Why is London like Budapest?
A. Because it is two cities divided by a river.

Good morning! Let me introduce myself. My name is Dora Chance. Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks. Put it another way. If you’re from the States, think of Manhattan. Then think of Brookly. See what I mean? Or, for a Parisian, it might be a question of rive gauche, rive droite. With London, it’s the North and South divide. Me and Nora, that’s my sister, we’ve always lived on the left-hand side, the side the tourist rarely sees, the bastard side of Old Father Thames.


Once upon a time, you could make a crude distinction, thus: the rich lived amidst pleasant verdure in the North speedily whisked to exclusive shopping by abundant public transport while the poor eked out miserable existences in the South in circumstances of urban deprivation condemned to wait for hours at windswept bus-stops while sounds of marital violence, breaking glass and drunken song echoed around and it was cold and dark and smelled of fish and chips. But you can’t trust things to stay the same. There’s been a diaspora of the affluent, they jumped into their diesel Saabs and dispersed throughout the city’.

And of course she knew how to use the word Transpontine! In a review of Iain Sinclair's Downriver (London Review of Books, 1991) she compared Sinclair's East London to her more familiar territory:

'But I never went to Whitechapel until I was thirty, when I needed to go to the Freedom Bookshop (it was closed). The moment I came up out of the tube at Aldgate East, everything was different from what I was accustomed to. Sharp, hard-nosed, far more urban. I felt quite thecountry bumpkin, slow-moving, slow-witted, come in from the pastoral world of Clapham Common, Brockwell Park, Tooting Bec. People spoke differently, an accent with clatter and spikes to it. They focused their sharp, bright eyes directly on you: none of that colonialised, transpontine, slithering regard. The streets were different - wide, handsome boulevards, juxtaposed against bleak, mean, treacherous lanes and alleys. Cobblestones. It was an older London, by far, than mine. I smelled danger. I bristled like one of Iain Sinclair's inimitable dogs. Born in Wandsworth, raised in Lambeth - Lambeth, “the Bride, the Lamb's Wife”, according toWilliam Blake - nevertheless, I was scared shitless the first time I went to the East End'.

In a 1977 essay published in New Society, D'you mean South?, Carter reflected at length on growing up in South London (you can read the whole thing in Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings, published in 1993), including the girls' fashion styles:

'The girls, I remember, always had wild aspirations to style. Around their fifteenth summer, they spread out all their petals -- like flowers with only one season in which to cram all their blossoming. I recall a giggling flock of girls, some white, some black, at the tube station entrance in 1959. They must have assembled there in order to go "up west" (i.e., to the West End). They were as weird and wonderful as humanoid flora from outer space, their hair backcombed into towering beehives, skirts so tight you could see the clefts between their buttocks, and shoes with pointed tips that stuck out so far in front they had to stand sideways onthe escalators. There was a shoemaker in Brixton who custom-built these shoes to the girls' requirements.


It was a style they had invented all by themselves. They were shackled by those skirts,crippled by those shoes, as if the clothes they had selected symbolised the cramped expectations of their lives in the cruel confinements of sex and class. Their dandyism triumphed over the limitations of their circumstances, and made them objects of bizarre and self-created beauty, a triumph of mind over matter. My mother would never have let me go out looking like that. Hadn't I gone to a direct grant school?


After an absence, I now live in south London again. And the girls, I see, still do have a style all of their own. Last autumn, it was ankle-length, knife-edged pleated tartan skirts, with ankle socks and plastic sandals. This summer it seems to be a decorous punk - tapered jeans,rouge, and a lot of chains everywhere - as if to indicate that, however much things might seem to have changed, everything remains fundamentally the same'.

She also reflected in the same essay on the gentrification of Clapham, presumably in its early stages in 1977:

'When the bourgeoisie got priced out of, first, Hampstead and Highgate - how long ago it seems! - and then from Camden Town and Islington, and the alternatives got priced (who'd have thought it?) out of Ladbroke Grove, there was nowhere else for all, repeat all, the poor sods to go, was there? That's typical south London usage. Every statement is converted to a rhetorical question'.

The 1981 Riots in South London

Previously confidential Government papers released to the National Archives this week provide some fresh insights into the 1981 riots, which swept across England in July 1981. Included in the papers is some information on events in South London, which combined with contemporary press reports gives an idea of what happened in the area at that time.

Woolwich and Lewisham

 Included in the documents is a briefing from the F4 division of the Home Office (responsible for links with security services, special branch etc) with details from the Metropolitan Police of disturbances on Thursday 9th July: ‘At 7:24 pm 100 black youths and 50 white youths were reported at Woolwich, but there was no trouble… at 8.42 pm disturbances broke out at Woolwich, with youths throwing stones and overturning vehicles. Serials had previously been deployed to the Woolwich area for the Anti-Nazi League meeting and these, supplemented by the Special Patrol Group and Urgent Response Units deployed from Operations Room, moved into the area to prevent trouble… At 10.35 pm disturbances broke out at Lewisham … During this time the disturbances at Woolwich were continuing’. Statistics from the Met’s ‘R’ district (Woolwich) showed that 37 people had been arrested in Woolwich, with four minor injuries to police, 8 windows broken and two cars overturned. ‘P’ District (Lewisham) reported 10 arrests.

The Times reported these events the next day: 'London police quickly quelled what threatened to be a riot early yesterday evening in Woolwich, south-east London. About 200 black and Asian youths ran through the town centre smashing 15 shop windows and overturning two cars. There was some looting. The youths were outnumbered by police who quickly dispersed them. 27 arrests were made… In Lewisham, eight youths were arrested after clashes in which goods were looted from Chiesman’s department store. About 100 black youths in Deptford threw bottles at a police car (Times, 10 July 1981).

The Woolwich events seem to have been provoked by rumours of a racist skinhead invasion to attend a gig at the Tramshed (a similar occurence had led to the riots in Southall in the previous week). According to the Deptford and Peckham Mercury (16 July 1981), people initially gathered on the streets to defend local venues thought vulnerable to racist attack - groups were reported at local Sikh temples in Calderwood Street and Masons Hill (where an Anti Nazi League meting was taking place), a mosque in Thomas Street, and the Simba project (an African-Caribbean community group). An (untrue) rumour that the skinheads were arriving on the Woolwich ferry prompted hundreds of mainly young people to run down Powis Street, and it was here that shop windows were broken and cars overturned, with a tobacconist shop being looted.

The same paper reported that on that night too, bottles were thrown at police by a crowd on Tanners Hill, Deptford (presumably the same incident referred to in The Times). In Balham High Road 'Around 35 shops were damaged in a wave of violence which started shortly after midnight when some 200 youths roamed the streets. Worst hit was the Argos Discount Store where hundreds of pounds worth of goods were stolen' (South London Press, 14 July 1981). On the following Friday night, two cars were overturned in Daneville Road, Camberwell (Mercury, 16 July 1981), while 'a 15 year old youth was arrested in Rye Lane, Peckham, for allegedly throwing a petrol bomb at police'  (South London Press, 14 July 1981).

The trouble in Lewisham seems to have been fairly sporadic, prompting some self-congratulation from the police in the South London Press: 'Lewisham has escaped almost trouble free from a week of rioting in Britain's inner cities thanks to sensitive policing and public co-operation, a police chief said yesterday. Apart from a window being smashed at Chiesman's in Lewisham High-St, and a minor stone throwing incident in Sydenham on Saturday where three people were arrested, there have been no repeats of the mass looting and rioting which has hit many areas. Although many shopkeepers have taken the precaution of boarding up their windows and police have been issued with protective clothing and headgear, P District's acting commander Dennis Rowe said that he is "delighted" the borough has remained peaceful.

'Although many of our officers have been drafted into other areas where there have been riots and the ones left behind have had to work long hours, they are still endeavouring to remain patient and to police the area sensitively... I am aware that while we have to continue to remain firm and to make those arrests that are correct, we can still keep sight of the need to be understanding. Through a concerted effort by our liaison officer and home beat constables along with a tremendous spirit of co-operation by local community groups, youth leaders and the general public we have been successful... We are even getting a feedback from a number of black and white youths who are proud of their borough saying "This is our town and we don't want to smash it up' (SLP 17 July 1981).

Many local black people probably had a less rosy view of community-police relations, particularly in the aftermath of the New Cross Fire in January 1981. Indeed there was renewed controversy in July when police warned that a planned New Cross Massacre Action Committee fundraiser couldn't go ahead for licensing reasons at the Evelyn 190 Centre in Evelyn Street, Deptford ('Clash over fire victims' disco', Mercury, 16 July 1981).

Battersea Park

Battersea was another flashpoint: 'A gang of youths attacked four policeman on Sunday afternoon [12 July], striking them to the tarmac floor of the roller skating rink in Battersea Park. Two PCs - Robert Smith and Brian Tullock - were rushed to hospital with serious head wounds. PC Smith needed 13 stitches. "It all started when we answered a call saying a car had been overturned in the park, said Det. Con. Larry Lawrence, "Four of us were in plain clothes but as soon as we identified ourselves we were attacked by about 20 youths carrying hockey sticks and wooden staves. The blows rained down on PC Smith and PC Tullock was given a severe kicking". Mr Lawrence said a crowd of 200 stood watching. "The only human touch there was a girl who took off her cardigan and wrapped it around PC Smith's head as he lay bleeding". A crowd of youths carrying hockey sticks and wooden staves ran through the park during the early evening damaging two cars and throwing petrol bombs at the police'.
 
'Later in the evening three policeman were injured in Francis Chichester Way when 35 youths hurled missiles and fire bombs at police lines. The incidents followed outbreaks of violence on Saturday night when 17 arrests were made in Queenstown Road and Falcon Road area' (South London Press, 14 July 1981).
 
Brixton

The main Brixton riots occurred in April 1981,  arguably setting off the whole cycle of 1981 uprisings. But in July there were two further outbreaks, first of all on Friday 10 July:

''Violence returned to the streets of Brixton this weekend, a few hours after Lord Scarman finished part one of his enquiry into the April riots. Large crowds clashed with police, cars were overturned and set alight, shops were attacked and looted only a short distance from Lambeth Town Hall where GLC leader Ken Livingstone was addressing an Anti Nazi League meeting. His audience had a grandstand view as officers fought looters... 31 officers were hurt and there were 157 arrests, mainly for looting and assaulting police.

Trouble started at about 4 pm when police arrested a Rastafarian called Maliki in Atlantic Road. A popular disc jockey and community leader Lloyd Coxsone (32) tried to intervene but was arrested for obstruction. Within minutes youths had set up barricades across Atlantic Road... Police reinforcements were quickly on the scene but at 4:30 a Panda car in Atlantic Road was overturned and set on fire. An unmarked car which came to its aid was also overturned and fired but officers escaped unhurt.

Outside the Atlantic pub [later renamed the Dogstar in the 1990s] black leaders used a loud hailer to appeal for calm. Mr Maliki told the crowd that Mr Coxsone had been released and urged them to disperse. But some youths had already taken advantage of the confrontation to start looting shops in Atlantic Road. Rattner's the jewellers were attacked at 4.30 and a mob then ran down Electric Lane to raid Curry's the electrical goods shop...

Police formed themselves up in squads of about a dozen men with a sergeant in command. They lined up along the main road, walking under cover of riot shields towards the crowds. They were apparently trying to disperse the mob along Effra Road and Brixton Hill... By 8.30 police had cleared the centre of Brixton' (Source: South London Press, 14 July 1981).

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited Brixton police station in the early hours of the 14 July, following a meeting at New Scotland Yard where predictably senior officers lobbied for greater police powers and more riot equipment (the National Archives papers include a report of this meeting, and of arrangements to provide riot helmets and plastic bullets from the army to the police).

Burning police car in Brixton 1981 (not sure if this was in April or July)

Railton Road raids

Then on 15 July there was further trouble in Brixton following controversial police raids on Railton Road. The Government papers in the National Archives includes a detailed report of these raids, supposedly prompted by reports that petrol bombs were being stored there. 

  

Eleven premises were raided, numbers 35, 37, 47, 52, 54 and 60 Railton Road under warrants obtained under Section 187 of the Licensing Act 1964 ‘suspected of being used for unlawful drinking’, and 50, 56, 58, 62 and 64 under section 6 of the Criminal Justice Act. Several of the properties were semi-derelict and due for demolition. 176 CID and uniformed officer were employed ‘to enter the premises and a further 391 officers were either held in reserve or employed in cordoning off the area’. The report admitted that ‘No evidence was found during the operation of the manufacture of petrol bombs or of premises being used for illegal drinking that evening. Seven people were arrested, all for minor offences’.

Details in the report do give some indication of social life on 'the frontline' (as that part of Railton Road was known) at that time: at 47 ‘a new record player and a small quantity of drugs were found’; at 54 Railton Road, there were ’25 to 30 people on the premises’; at 58 the police paid compensation for damage to a space invaders machine and a pool table; at 62 ‘The ground floor of these premises was used as a quasi-masonic temple and at the time of the raid two ceremonial swords were laid out on the floor and other items of regalia stored in a cabinet.’ (Report of Enquiry by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Dear into Police Operations in Railton Road, Brixton on Wednesday 15 July 1981).
This report downplays the extent of damage to people's homes, but locally there was intense anger at the way the raids had been conducted:

'Joseph Francis (17), who was asleep when the raid occurred, said his unlocked bedroom door was axed by two policemen. He said a woman and baby in the room were thrown to the floor when the mattress was dragged from under them and furniture was ripped open.
Mr. Gladstone McKenzie arrived at his shop, the Railton Free Off Licence, to find the door and windows smashed and the back room ransacked. He said he had always had a good relationship with the police and was shocked by the extent of the damage. Some upstairs windows looked as though they had been broken from are inside as most of the glass was lying outside.

One of the houses wrecked during Wednesday's raid had just had £4,000 of Inner City Partnership money spent on it. No. 50 Railton Road is owned by Lambeth Council and leased to the Railton Youth Club...

100 youths were involved in running fights with police in Railton-rd. on Wednesday night. Petrol bombs, stones and bottles were thrown and 10 officers were injured. The trouble started just after 11 p.m. when two cars were set alight and a barricade of corrugated iron and timber set up behind them. But the police, drawn up in strength at the junction of Railton-rd. and Coldharbour-lane, made no move. Masked youths, one carrying a long stave, then charged the police lines, hurling missiles but were quickly driven back. A fire engine attempting to reach the burning cars was stoned. There was another scare when a convoy of eight powerful motorbikes ridden by white youths roared through the riot area.

At 11.45 police started cautiously moving up Railton-rd behind a wall of riot shields and sealing off side roads. Another large force was meanwhile approaching from the Herne Hill end. It was at about this time that the first petrol bombs were thrown. By 12.15 the barricade was being removed and police were in control of the area, though they remained on guard for some hours' (South London Press, 17 July 1981).

The left in Brixton

A briefing report for Ministers included in  the National Archives papers highlighted the involvement in left-wing groups, particularly in the Brixton area: ‘There is considerable evidence of activity by extremist organisations that have been hit by some of the worst of the recent violence' though it acknowledged that 'It seems unlikely that in any major case extremists have actually instigated the violence’. The report doesn't say that the radical left seems to have been too fragmented into rival groups to co-ordinate any kind of large scale effective action, but it does provide evidence of this.

The report mentions the Labour Committee for the Defence of Brixton founded following the 1981 riots at the instigation of the ‘Militant Tendency’ and operating ‘from an address in Railton Road’; ‘the Workers Revolutionary Party has a books hop in Atlantic Road and a Youth Training Centre in Stockwell’; ‘the Revolutionary Communist Group has its headquarters in Railton Road’; ‘the Revolutionary Communist Party set up a Lambeth Unemployed Workers Group shortly before the Riots, and has since formed a South London Workers Against Racism group, similar to the East London Workers Against Racism which attracted some notoriety for organising vigilante patrols’; ‘the Race Today Collective has offices in Brixton. The edition [sic] of its magazine is Darcus Howe, who has been associated with campaigning in support of the H-block hunger strikes, the New Cross Massacre Action Committee’; ‘After the riot the Socialist Workers Party circulated a leaflet in Brixton in which it said “it was a magnificent way for Brixton to fight back"’ (Brief for a Debate on Recent Outbreaks of Civil Disorder in Great Britain).

The aftermath: riot training on Greenwich peninsula

As reported at Greenwich Phantom,  following the riots the River Way Police Holding and Training Centre was created for a couple of years on Greenwich peninsula (Greenwich Council published a critical report in 1984 on 'Riot Training in Greenwich'). The map shows that this included  a mock-up street and areas for petrol bomb, CS gas, water cannon and smoke grenade training.