The Dark Streets of London

I’ve been going up and down to town by bus a lot more recently. Partly because I’ve been travelling later so miss the rush hours so buses can get around better, partly because I’ve been deliberately trying to see more of some parts of South East London. On Thursday when London reacted as badly to a whole centimetre of snow as it always does, I had to stay late at work and might have missed the last train so I set off on the 188 bus from Russell Square. Or tried to, the first bus was ten minutes late and it was after 1am when we got to the Elephant. So instead of getting off to wait beside Old Kent Road in the sleet to change to a bus to Lewisham I stayed on thinking to change to a 47 at Canada Water where I could wait under cover. Except of course the station was closed so I ended up waiting for nearly half an hour for an N47 at the bottom of Evelyn Street, with my boots sliding around on the ice. Well after 2am when I got home. Commute Fail. I should have known better than to trust the 47 after dark.

That part of London is about as dingy and gloomy as London gets, especially after midnight in the sleet and slush. I’ve been seeing a lot of it recently.
As well as using the 188 late at night, in the past few months I’ve sometimes had reason to take the number 1 bus from town towards the other end of Bermondsey in the early evening.

The first two or three times I went to the Elephant on a 68, and squeezed on to a packed number 1, but then I realised it was easier to walk to Tottenham Court Road and get on at the begining of the route and get a decent seat – the best one is on the top, at the front as every seven-year-old boy knows (why do people grow out of trying to sit there?)

London gets a lot dimmer as soon as the bus turns off Tower Bridge Road to Southwark Park Road. The streets are actually dark. There is less light around, there is less to see, the views are more restricted – there are very few long views except when Canary Wharf looms at the end of a street, for example when you turn left at the bottom of Galleywall Road into Rothrhithe New Roiad and look through or beyond the bridge.

The area is carved up into sections by long railway viaducts, and its dead flat so lots of sightlines are terminated by railway bridges or by the workshops and warehouses that line the track using the arches

There are few big blocks of flats until you get to Deptford and too many of the smaller ones (both council the new legoland-alike private blocks that want to grow up into “gated communities”) turn their backs on the street presenting a brick wall or a pointless fence to the street, and a little grassed over dog-toilet between that and the doorless (or even windowless) ground floors of the buildings. Between them and the warehouses and walls and hoardings around derelict old industrial buildings and post-industrial waste spaces, the narrow streets are all too often blind on both sides.

I know these streets well – this is pretty much one of my more usual cycling routes home – but things look different from the top of the bus. Its dingy and gloomy. There are few shops and they are mainly closed by this time of night. The street lights are sparse and that orange colour that doesn’t really illuminate brick so compared with central London – or even with Lewisham – there isn’t that much visible outside the windows.

The first time I try it I forget – if I ever knew – that the number 1 goes down Galleywall Road and I get off two stops early and walk through the dark streets to Ilderton Road (a place I first heard of on a record sleeve back in about 1976 – my copy of Dillinger’s “Cocaine” proudly claimed to have been released by “New Cross Records, Ilderton Road” – I have no idea why I should remember that after over thirty years).

When the business of the evening (a football match at Millwall) is over I set off home. Its even darker walking along the Surrey Canal Road – a sort of Bermondsey Bypass along the route of the old canal that used to connect Peckham to the Surrey Docks, filled in in the 1970s and now one of London’s darkest, dingiest streets, lined on both sides by warehouses, scrapyards and a very few small factories, as well as three huge shiny buildings – the Millwall ground, Deptford combine heat and power plant and a very large shed that seems to be something to do with the new East London Line extension

The road parts company from the old canal route at Folkstone Gardens in what might be the most unpleasant junction I know in London for a cyclist or pedestrian – a sharp S-curve passing under two lowish railway bridges that cars and lorries can approach from five separate directions, with no traffic lights and blind-spots everywhere,

Along the slightly more gentrified residential streets of Deptford Park (only slightly – though if it was anywhere else in London a lovely little park like this overlooked by bay-windowed Edwardian terraces would be as posh as a posh place) and up to Evelyn Street to get a bus home.

And decide to turn right (towards Lewisham) rather than left (towards the nearest busstop) and walk down to the next stpo[, over the old Canal Bridge which is the nearest thing to a hill between Tower Bridge and New Cross.

But the next stop is shut, because of some road works. Really weird ones that seem to consist entirely of traffic cones that divert three lanes into one for no obvious reason. So carry on down past St Luke’s Church and all the way to the stop by the John Evelyn pub, by which time I’ve walked over half way home and had I gone down to Old Kent Road I’d have probably been home by now.

The stop has one of those little red displays that pretends to tell you when the next bus is coming the way that train indicators work at a station. This one says that there will be a 188 along in a few minutes, and 199 a little later, but doesn’t mention the 47, the bus I want. It does have times for the N1 and N47. As its only just after 10pm and these night buses start after midnight I assume that has to be a typo. Maybe the N47 will turn out to be a 47 really,

The 188 comes on time, the 199 comes on time, then another 188 and I count down the minutes to the supposed N47 – 8, 6, 4, 2… then it disappears from the list. Nothing comes of course. Nor does the N1 materialise Another 199 comes, and another N47 is promised, and finally a 47 is flagged up at 19 minutes in the future. I’m not much further walk than that from home. But I wait – there is no N47 of course and wait – and the bus is postponed, the last 12 minutes take nearly half an hour. But one does come in the end, about 10.50, three quarters of an hour after I got to the stop. It is surprisingly uncrowded.

I get off at Brookmill Road perhaps the most gloomy street of the whole journey after Galleywall Road, barely lit, with 1950s and 60s brick light-industrial sheds on one side of the street and 1990s legoland metal ones on the other.

Mostly now Nigerian churches for some reason. Its only round the corner from home but it can feel scary at night, overlooked by no-one except the very end of platform 1 of Lewisham station, on the other side of the abandoned and ruinous Traveller’s site.

Round the corner into Jerrard Street, onto the main road, and the pub is still just open and I have a pint and one of the sandwiches the darts team didn’t eat.

Trainers in trees

After reading about the presumably American fashion for throwing trainers into trees (on the Ship of Fools here – though being a presumably American fashion it is there called “Sneakers on wires”) I’ve actually seen some. Not very far from me in fact, by an estate just off Rotherhithe New Road, near Southwark Park, between Surrey Docks and the Millwall ground.

Right by the street so easily visible from the bus. Must have passed the place dozens of times this year but mostly in the dark, which is my excuse for not noticing.

Didn’t have my camera on me though. Maybe next time.

South-East Suburban Circular

One of the crazy things about asthma is that its often better being upright and out of doors. So when I managed to get to church on Sunday morning after four days more or less confined to my smelly little bedroom in my smelly little flat I felt a lot better for it. So I thought I’d spend the afternoon outside. But I’m too knackered to walk far, and not into sitting on park benches, so time to try another bus trip.

Bought a one-day travelcard in one of the local shops and got on the first bus that came down Loampit Vale – a 321. Crazy route, Sainsbury’s to Tesco’s, part of the current fashion for breaking up the Great Old Busroutes into inner and outer suburban sections. It starts near New Cross then down to Lewisham and transects what I think of as the layer of classic suburbia, straight up Lee High Road and then Eltham Road, Eltham Hill, Eltham High Street, before turning right on Footscray Road and down to Sidcup, where I walked down towards the station and got on a 229 through Bexley and Bexleyheath towards Thamesmead.

There aren’t many people on the street in these outer reaches of South-East London. You see some of them through their windows – some teenage girls chatting round a table, some men on stepladders Doing It Themselves.

Its suburbia, but its quite dense suburbia, and its not neat suburbia. There is something makeshift and ramshackle about it. Lots of little gaps. Pebbledash in some of the more downmarket parts. Odd bits of 1970s brutalism embeded among the older buildings. Small shops with cliched names – at least three “Buds of May”, a restaurant with the unfortunate name “Sophie’s Choice”, a shop called “Doors of Distinction” which sounds like the location of a spoof sitcom.

Glimpses of small, empty, muddy, sports grounds at the ends of side streets, Hills to the north and south, and over the hills and far away to the east, the lights of Dartford Bridge and the industrial North Kent Marshes

Why does Old Bexley call itself a “village” on the signs, when it was clearly a small town before London ate it, and not a village at all?

Things begin to change on the dual carriageway from Bexley towards Bexleyheath. Things are more open, more 1970s, more concreted. Bexleyheath announces itself with a big new Legoland-style Marriot hotel on top of a hill. There’s a lot of te feel of Legoland about the achitecture of Bexleyheath shoppng centre. It looks as if they knocked it down and rebuilt it sometime in the 70s or 80s, and there are streets of huge shops. But there is no back to it – its like a sort of concentric Blackpool – the town-centre buildings back straight on to rows of 1920s and 1930s terraced houses, there is no urban depth to it – not even the sort of urban depth you get in Eltham or Sidcup with their pubs (come of which even have customers), their disused crumbling pre-war cinemas, Edwardian public buildings, and interjections of civic brutalism.

But there are more people around. Its getting dark, and all of a sudden the bus is full. I suppose it must be people who have been shopping and are going back to Erith or Thamesmead. The bus runs through Barnehurst to Erith and then back west again to Belvedere (more or less along a route
I walked a couple of years ago) Even Erith is getting posh private flats these days.

The view is occasionally spectacular – the towers of red lights down the Thames by Dartford, the lights of the City in the other direction, the multistory blocks of Plumstead and Thamesmead and most of all the industry by the Thames and in Belvedere. In the day it might not look so good, but at night it is a landscape of lights.

Thamesmead itself is magnificent in a way. But it looks utterly uninhabitable. Dark, threatening, inorganic, with no obvious plan or logic to the layout. Places that just grow have reasons for being the way they are. Thamesmead is laid out by obsolete whim. The bus goes round and round through probably similar sections – probaby because I can’t quite see them. Other planned suburbs (& Thamesmead is nothing if not a planned suburb), other planned suburbs are being gradually humanised as they grow older. They becaome natural, they accquire an artificial backstory. Trees grow, streets are altered, new walkways broken through, buildings are infilled, retrofitted, reused. But Thamesmead is so structured, so constrained, so racked by its curvy grid of near-motorway roads that it has no way of linking itself across them. Most of the little neighbourhoods turn their backs on the streets, and hence each other, often set back twenty or more metres from the road, on a different level, screened by fences and lines of scrubby trees and municipal planting. This is a place built for cars, not people.

But weirdly, even though its dark and getting cold, and there is nothing to so, nothing open in the gloom., there are more people around on the streets and in the buses than there were in the posher suburbs further south. Mostly black and Asian. A lot of them look as if they are on their way to or from church. Its built for cars but a lot of the people who live there can’t afford them.

And a 177 back to New Cross, through Abbey Wood and Plumstead and Woolwich and Charlton and Greenwich and Deptford, and finally back to church for the evening service on another 321. Or maybe it was even the same one.

I’ve got chalk on my boots.

Its the season for fire and remembering so on Thursday I went down to Brighton with the idea of taking a bus to Woodingdean, where I lived when I was a child, and then walking over the Downs to Lewes to see the Bonfire celebrations.

The plan was all but scuppered by public transport. These things are so much harder when you get out of London (so at my age maybe can never leave London – how could I live anywhere else where there is no proper transport? I’d be trapped in a house unless I lived near a mainline railway station) It took about an hour and twenty minutes to get from my front door to Brighton Station. A bus and two trains. Then it took over two hours to get from the centre of Brighton to the top end of Woodingdean. There is only one bus from the station to Woodingdean, its called the 52, and it comes along hourly. I had to wait 35 minutes for it – or would have if it hadn’t been over a quarter of an hour late. (Maybe I could have gone down to St Peter’s and got another bus there but there was no sign or information at the station telling me that.) And the bus was full of schoolkids going home – who gets let out od school before half past three?

And the bus went all round the houses – up to Dyke Road through sidestreets, down the the Steine, along St James’s Street, and through Kemp Town streets that I have leafleted every house in, past the Royal Sussex Hospital (the last time I went in there it was to see my Dad die, about 19 years ago) uselessly in and out of the Marina (ten minutes without once stopping to let anyone of or off), up past St Dunstan’s and through Ovingdean, all round the back of Woodingdean almost to the top so I was about to get off – then it turned left, went down to Warren Road and then turned right back up Falmer Road – by the time I got up there it was after five and getting dark. So it took longer to go by bus from the centre of Brighton to Woodingdean than it did to get to Brighton from Lewisham, or to walk from Woodingdean to Lewes.

So no time to have a look at any of the places remembered from childhood, and I make my way straight onto the hill, fail to find the path I am sure was there once that leads up to the radio mast at the top, and I don’t want to go down into what I still think of as just “The Valley”, where we used to play when I was a kid. The map calls it “Newmarket Bottom” and “Balsdean Bottom” and part of it is now a nature reserve called “Castle Hill” – none of those words we ever used when we lived there (thugh we did know of Balsdean Farm – I went badger watching there once) So I walk back down to Falmer Road and start again there.

The old road from Brighton to Lewes – called Juggs Lane locally for reasons supposedly to do with fish, a name we did use – starts at Warren Road on the Race Hill above Bevendean, opposite the second bend in the race course, and continues as a muddy track behind the older part of Woodingdean, the plotland bungalows from between the wars in streets like Seaview Road and Downsview Road (I thought those names stupid – they are streets, not roads, and where can’t you see the sea and the Downs from?) Then across Falmer Road and up across barley fields behind Woodingdean, incongruously though patchily tarmaced for the first few hundred metres (I guess it was from the War when presumably the radio masts at the top of the hill and further down on the path to the Valley were radar stations or forward observation post or maybe even anti-aircraft batteries) then just a chalk path along Kingston Ridge.

Navigating on the Downs after dark isn’t as hard as it sounds. There is enough light to see the shape of the hills against the sky, and chalk paths almost shine, so its not that hard to find your way. And, at least on the Brighton side, I’ve known these hills since I was a kid. I used to play up here when I was six years old.

Finding the way is not as hard as not falling over. When you get to the top of the hill you can see the lights of Brighton behind you and Lewes before you and a little later you see Kingston much nearer nestling in the side of its Down. A little Tolkieny moment, seeing Kingston from above, by the pale lights from house windows – no streetlights or moving cars or shop windows. Its not much more than a mile from tarmac to tarmac in a straight line and even in the dark you can walk it in an hour.

It would be less than an hour if it wasn’t for the last couple of hundred metres. The path comes down steeply from Kingston Ridge to the village through a deep cut lane. In places the sides of the cutting are taller than I can reach – how many centuries of walkers does it take to wear the ground down ten feet?

There is a knack to walking on bare chalk that I picked up as a child but would probably be more difficult to people not used to it. There are also knacks to walking on grassy steep downland (stepping from hummock to hummock) and other ones for shingle and the wave-cut platform

Chalk paths form ruts and ridges easily. The tops and sides of the ridges are often at quite odd angles making it easy to turn your foot over walking on them. The bottom of the ruts can be full of exposed flint – which grips your boots well – but can also be very wet. Bare wet chalk is slipperly, slidy and claggy. The path is steep, maybe one in six or steeper. I walk slowly and carefully, almost falling over three or four times. At one point trying to hold on to some vegetation to steady myself I put my hand in what felt like a gorse bush. Maybe it was only a large burdock, it was too dark to see.

Its easy to see the path, its chalk. It all but glows in the dark. You can even see it by starlight. What you can’t see is what the dark patches are. In the dark a patch of grass, a heap of horseshit, and an eight-inch deep hole you could break your ankle in all look just the same against the chalk. And there are plenty of all of them on this part of Juggs Lane.

And then into Kingston (or rather the Kingston Ridge estate uphill from it) feet and ankles complaining (though it was my back that felt it the next morning) and suddenly the navigation problems start. Kingston is not the sort of place that has streetlights. Or even roadsigns. Its not designed to be easy for strangers to find their way about in. It is also just off the edge of my map of Lewes, but not shown in detail in my OS map of the Downs. It ought to be possible to find the other end of Juggs Lane (”Juggs Street” on the map) and so to Southover that way – but in the dark, I miss it. And find myself in a deep cut road with flint walls and many cars and still no street light. Which is one of two or three such roads in the area and I’m not sure which.

So, on principle, I carry on downhill, hoping to find the pub. And I do. I have half a memory, probably false, of the Juggs Arms (its all “Jugg” round here) being called something else and small and rural and frequented by farmers and retired colonels. Well, now its been extended and its got a restaurant and a car park and a large covered area and the customers seem like the sort of people who live in Lewes (if that makes sense) But the beer is good (Shepherd Neame – some sort of very hoppy ordinary bitter rebranded as Kingston Ale, and also Spitfire kept well) and the bar is warm and I have a couple of pints before setting off for Bonfire.

Its a lockout – clefs sans portières

The Master’s annual speech to the college staff yesterday wherein the Master (that is his real job title) tells us that Oh good there are to be no staff cuts. But a 38% increase in student numbers.

So we hang around and eat the peanuts and olives and sip the “free” cheap white wine they always have at academic dos (there was red too but it wasn’t that nice) and (would you believe it?) talked about football.

5pm is dangerously early for such behaviour. It leads to the smoking of cigarettes and the visiting of college bars. Which is good as far as it goes but inevitably leads to the pub.

And last night that lead to arriving home after 1am to find that the door was locked against me. My key doesn’t work. Try again. Push door, pull door. House is empty (or so I thought) but I tried banging on door to attract attention – and did get some from next door but two. Go and sit on someone else’s wall. Try key again. Think about breaking in. Utter imprecatory prayers. It starts to rain. Sit on wall and smoke last fag. Try again. Yale key broke in lock leaving the shaft in there and me with twisted broken bit.

So I smashed the window in the door with a wheely bin. And could reach in and operate the little nub on the lock that allows the handle to turn to open it, and also to unhitch the chain that someone has set against me.

We live in downstairs flat. Someone has moved in upstairs without telling us. I didn’t know anyone was there. I didn’t even know they existed until after I got in and heard movement upstairs. I went up to talk to them. They look like small gay Brazilians. (Which knowing my luck with this shitty flat probably means they are in fact well-connected Corsican terrorists firmly committed to vendetta) I think I frightened them. Upsetting. They said that they had been told that the building was empty.

And now I can’t leave the house because I need to be here to let Abigail in when she comes back from visiting friends and I want to explain to here what happened and no we haven’t been burgled. And because she was feeling fragile yesterday because she was late to university because she found a run-over cat in the street and called the cats rescue people and waited till they came. And I am missing a day from work. Maybe two.

And I want – without much faith that it will happen – whoever is letting out the upstair flat to fix the door and pay for it themselves. Not the people living there, they are probably the victims of this. And I want them to put in a new lock and give me copies of the new keys. I want them to pay for it because it is their fault. Though my feelings are strengthened by remembering the something like six thousand pounds I had to pay a couple of years ago to get the shared drains fixed with no contribution from them at all even though they probably caused the damage and certainly needed the repairs.

And I want them to clear up the mess from upstairs that they took out into the front and dumped in a pile against the side of the house – including broken furniture and a whole old carpet. And in my real fantasies I’d like them to pay for the severe damage to our ceiling caused by water from above on many, many occasions. But the truth is I don’t even know who they are and if I did am I going to sue them?

Overheard in a gents toilet at a University:

Two ancient history students chatting

“What’s next week?”

“Bloody Irish archaeology!”

“What’s wrong with it? It sounds good?”

“Too much domestic stuff. I only signed on for this course because I want to do the warfare. I want to get to the barbarians. Franks and Goths and stuff. None of all this nonsense about trade! That’s so boring!”

“Military defences of the Empire soon.”

“Plenty of blood and guts in that!”

Pepper Soup in Peckham

To Peckham, to party in a church hall after an ordination

The newly ordained person is Nigerian, and most of the congregation at St Mary’s church seem to be African, so the food was basically West African. As it would be in our church, and I’d guess most CofE churches in inner South London. And as we often find a reason to eat at church I’ve come to associate Sunday lunch with jollof rice as much as with roast potatoes.

Someone once said that the only places in US society where it was normal to see black women in authority over white men were the Army and McDonald’s. I doubt if that is true of the British army, or many British takeaways. But it might be the case in the Church of England in South London pretty soon. Half the people our diocese ordains are women – our church is on its second woman vicar already and and four or five women from the congregation have gone to be ordained in the last ten years or so, but no men – and an increasing proportion of them are Africans.

No moi-moi this time but various kinds of fried chicken and pots with different sorts of meat and sme beany things abd potatoes and bread and of course lots of spicy jollof rice.

And pepper soup. Pepper soup is always an adventure. You never know quite how hot its going to be. Sometimes it is hot, sometimes it is hot, sometimes it is hot, and sometimes it is hot. this one was sort of hot. I don’t know how pepper soup is made but if I had to guess from how it tastes I’d say that you start with a whole dead cow, cut it up, bones, guts and all, into chunks about two or three centimetres across and simmer it with bitter leaves and garlic in a large vat of water for a day or two, every now and again throwing in a kilo or so of ground pepper. Today my dollop had a few chunks of tripe and some steak-like bits in it. Previously I’ve had bits of liver or kidney and what looked like an entire vertebra. Its an aperitif or a flavouring rather than a meal and, apparently, a favourite snack with beer. Sort of like Nigerian equivalent of pork scratchings or jellied eels. I like it. And it makes the jollof taste mild.

Great stuff!

Memo to self: if you start the day with a badly upset stomach, pepper soup and red wine do not make the best breakfast. I had to rush back home on the 136 praying that it wouldn’t get stuck in a jam. Would it be good idea to go to the pub for some jellied eels now? Probably not. Maybe I should just crash out and sleep off the huge heap of rice and beans I with the pepper soup had for lunch.

This bus terminates here

The other day a policeman in uniform came up to me at the bus stop at Waterloo station and asked if I could answer some questions for a “survey”.

A few questions about where my journey was from and too that day – nothing that would identify me – then something like “what is your experience of bus travel today?” Weird question. Not sure how to answer. And do I have any complaints about the service?
Well, the buses are too hot. And often overcrowded. But you expect that… Any complaints about the other passengers? Are any of them rowdy? Abusive? Violent? No, not really. Mostly just trying to get to work

I don’t really know but it looks pretty much as if he was trying to get up to his quota of complaints for the month, and was asking me questions from a form intended to report specific incidents.

He also asked me which bus I used. And would only take one answer. (another clue that it was a fake report for a fake incident)

But that got me thinking as like most people who use London buses, I use all sorts of routes.

I reckon this is about true:

• More than once a week: 21 24 29 188 321 436
• Maybe about once a week but probably more than once a month: 47 59 68 91 136 168
• More occasionally than that but not one-offs, still part of my regular pattern of travel: 1 7 9 12 15 17 43 53 54 73 89 108 122 171 172 176 177 185 199 225 284 343 381 484 P4 P12 P13

Which is more regular routes than I would have guessed I think.

And why is the oldest bus route in the world the number 12?

And talking about the 188, how come when the driver is black (maybe 4/5 of the time) the bus takes you to the north side of Russell Square? Which is where most passengers, including me, are going. But when its a white guy in the driving seat he stops on the south side and plays the little “This Bus Terminates Here” message until everyone gets off? And then we all walk across the square – and the bus gets to the north side before us.

The Tower of the Lidless Eye rises anew!

Well over twenty years ago, I walked back from town towards Nunhead through the North-Peckham Walworth triangle with my old mate Dave Turtle. I mean that piece of land surrounded on the west by Walworth Road and Camberwell Green, on the South by Peckham High Street and Queen’s Road, and on the north-east by New Cross Road, Old Kent Road, and New Kent Road.

We walked across the bit of post-industrial desolation that was then just becoming Burgess Park – its quite pretty now but then it was basically a disused canal towpath connecting the abandoned church to the traveller’s site by way of an old school building full of squatters and a car-breaking yard, and looked out at the ramparts of North Peckham to the south and the flats round Albany Street and the Heygate and Amersham Estates to the North.

The first time he saw it, Dave named the place “Barad Dur”.

Here are those ramparts close-to:

Just a silly joke. OR SO WE THOUGHT!!!!!!

Then, I first saw IT a few months ago, rising over the collapsing brutalist mass that surrounds the Elephant and Castle. What was it? It is in this picture taken from North Peckham – follow the link to the larger picture and look at the tower you can see in the distance on the left:

Is that what it looks like?

I had to find out.

For many hot and dreary weeks I quested through the railway cuttings, arches and twittens of South East London to get a better view of this monstrosity.

Finally, from behind a parapet in a dingy and little-used part of Waterloo station, I got a good view:

Follow the link and open the larger the picture, IF YOU DARE. Look at the top of the new building. Is this not clearly the Tower of the Eye, Sauron’s fastness in Barad-Dur, being rebuilt in South London?

Take a closer look:

CAN THERE BE ANY DOUBT?????

At the Elephant, after dark, I was able to approach unseen (I hope) almost to the base of the Evil Tower:

The picture is, I know, vague and distorted. I hardly dare approach the orc-works so close in daylight. (As if the evil within cared for the sun or the moon! Aaaaaah! I am already weary!)

Look at the horrible gaping windows with a ghastly pale gangrenous death-light of putrescense oozing from them:

This morning, in the rain, through distorted old plastic windows of the tunnel in the sky over Waterloo Road, I finally got a good picture. It looks almost beautiful, in its dull, damp, stony way:

BUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT???!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!

Overheard walking down the street.

Two rather chubby cute teenage or early-twenties black girls.

A: I’m going to Sweden next week.

B: Will you bring me back a Viking?

A: Bring one back? Have you seen J? He’s so blonde and cute! The perfect Swede.

B: What, D’s boyfriend? But he’s, like, Gollum!

A: No. She’s given up going out with Gollums.

B: But I thought he was like, her boyfriend boyfriend, like they lived together. Her husband or something.

The whole with a rather odd intonation that is maybe getting more common in London (not that I have any real measured basis for thinking that). Seems mostly restricted to under thirties, to be slightly more common among black than white, and much more common for women and girls than for men and boys.

I think what’d going on is that unstressed final syllables are being given a fuller value, rather than being reduced to a schwa. So to someone who wasn’t brought up to it, like me, it sounds as if the final syllables of some words are being stressed (though probably they aren’t really). So “Sweden” sounded to me as if she was saying “sweeDAN”. And girls calling to each other in the street seem to be saying things like “AngeliCAH!” “DominiCAH!”

As far as I remember I never heard “boyfriend boyfriend” before.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…

…comes stuff I don’t want to repeat on a family-friendly website. Or it does if the kids in question are Millwall fans at the Cold Blow Lane end during a match.

Football is not a big part of my life, as everyone who knows me knows. (*) But people watch football in pubs. And I spend a lot of times in pubs. So I am often around people watching football. And it gives you something to talk about, it is a way of relating to the people around you. And as the people around me tend to be Millwall supporters I thought I would go and take a look.

So yesterday I went to the New Den to watch Millwall trash Huddersfield 3-1 (And that last Huddersfield goal ws a fluke. They were outclassed. There were at least three Millwall forwards better than anyone Huddersfield could put on the pitch, and one of them was supposedly playing as a defender. Neil Harris could have been in a different league from Huddersfield. I doubt if Leeds will go quite that smoothly though…)

I have to confess that I would have been nervous about going to the Den. That I almost was nervous. The place has a reputation. And I don’t go to football matches I didn’t really know how to go to football matches. How do you get in? Where do you buy a ticket? Can you just buy a ticket? What do you wear? What do you do when you get there? What if they think I’m from Huddersfield? Does anyone check on which team you really support?

I was late because I had something to do in Lewisham so I took a 47 bus, and there were traffic jams all whe way from the High Street to Evelyn Street so it might have been quicker to walk. Instead of going all the way up to Surrey Docks on the bus I got off at Deptford Park and walked along the Surrey Canal Road, and was heartened to see that I wasn’t the only latecomer, there were a dosen or so others all walking purposefully along the same way.

The stadium is next to one of the few remaining industrial areas in inner London, stuffed into an angle between the mainline railway out of London Bridge towards New Cross Gate and another local line that goes to Peckham via South Bermondsey. Its got four more or less identical stands, one on each side of the pitch, simple plain concrete structures that looks about as cheap and functional as a stadium could be.

Well, its easy to get in, if not cheap. You walk up and buy a ticket. And no-one checks that you are real or not or minds what you are wearing. Its mostly T-shirts, jeans and trainers. There were even a couple of blokes wearing sandals. A few adults but a lot of kids were in team colours. The crowd segregation is (at least for a low-profile game like this one) more or less voluntary. There is nothing other than common sense stopping a stray away fan from buying a ticket for the local end.

and the game had already just started when I bought my ticket, so by the time I found my way to a seat it was nearly ten minutes in. And the first thing that happened was two Millwall goals in about two minutes. Which is probably as bad a start as you can get – like a gambler who wins on their first visit to a casino. Maybe I’ll spend years expecting always to win.

Do the crowd deserve their reputation? Maybe they do. Its mostly male, though there were a few women. And mostly white. There are a few black fans as well – nowhere near as high a proportion as in the area round (which is one of the centres of population for Africans in London) but some. Including some young kids apparently on their own. There were a lot more children than I had thought there might be, though that might have been because of where I was sitting. As it was my first time I decided to sit down at the front, behind the goal – which is where the little kids tend to be, which is why I got to hear what they were saying. It seems the older supporters tend to like being higher up so they get a better view of the whole game.

As the game went on more and more of the children drifted to the front, and many of them were hanging arounds in the space between the seats and the pitch. Which is full of signs telling you to remain in your seat and never stand up and certainly not to go near the pitch. Apparently if you do you will be licked out of the ground and arrested and put on a database and not allowed to watch football again anywhere for ever, sent into internal exile in Scunthorpe, and your maiden aunts will be sold into slavery. Or something like that. It seems that these rules don’t apply to children in practice, and by end of the first half there were about fifty kids with bottles of coke and packets of crisps standing in the space in front of the seats. Some of them could hardly have been more than two years old. I wonder how seriously the club takes the “no standing” rule for children when they emply someone to dress up in a lion costume and wander round the pitch entertaining them?

There was a lot of shouting from our end (I couldn’t hear anything coming back the other way even when Huddersfield scored, but there were only a few hundred of them – and about thirty police guarding them) Millwall songs and chants tend not to be that tricksy or clever, and at the end when it was clear that the game was won it was nothing but the word “Mill” chanted on one note for some minutes, people dropping out to take a breath and others joining in so the chant kept up.

A lot of the shouting was obscene. Once the fans had a reputation for racism, but I heard none of that. But then we had more black players than they did. Unless you count “Your mother’s Welsh!” which doesn’t seem that insulting to me. I suppose “You dirty northern bastard!”, chanted after every foul, or supposed foul, from the other side is sort of regionalist of not racist, but its not said with much conviction. And Brighton fans used to yell it at any team, even Reading, which probably confused them. One player on the ground who looked like he might be injured got “Let him die, he’s only a northerner!” Which probably didn’t affect him much – I think he’s from Luton. But in the second half when they changed ends and the Huddersfield goal was right in the centre of the Millwall fans one or two of them did look a bit put out by the crowd.

Yes, a lot of it was sexist. Commenting on the sex or sexuality of the opposition players seems to be the staple insult. And the most popular four-letter word begins with C, not F. I’m not sure what “You’re a woman and so is your bird!” was meant to mean though.

Sometimes the insults were just confusing. What on earth is “fraggle!” meant to mean? Have I missed something?

And they start them young. The kids at the front were as rude (and mostly as unimaginative) as the adults. I’d be surprised if Daniel Drinkwater was very upset by a kid about five years younger than him shouting “Drink Lucozade!” every time he got near the line. And “Crawl back under the stone you came from!” sounds more odd than scary when the boy yelling it looks about eight at the most.

But the oddest Millwall supporter’s comment of the day was back at the local when West Ham were being beaten by Liverpool on the TV (and presumably on the pitch as well but all I saw was the TV). “What I can’t understand is how when the bloody Luftwaffe were bombing the East End every night they managed to miss Upton Park. Were they bribed?”

And at the ends of the match, most of the Millwall supporters seemed to walk home. There was certainly a long crocodile of people all the way down Ilderton Road to Old Kent Road, with smaller groups walking off at each side-street and estate we passed. Millwall is, I think, genuinely a local team with few if any supporters from more than a mile or two from the ground. I wonder how many other proffessional football teams that is true of?

(*) Saying “football is not a big part of my life” is putting it mildly. In fact I used to hate football. We were made to play it at school, which turned me off it for decades. School sport is in a way a form of child abuse or it is in a boy’s school anyway. It involves a kind of ritual pubic humiliation that you would never see in any academic subject, forcing the weaker or less skillful students to tray again and again and again to do things they are incapable of doing and punishing or mocking them when they fail. It is all too often institutionalised bullying. Part of its function was to separate off a minority of boys and mark them as suitable targets for scorn, which is a powerful way of boosting social solidarity among the majority. Bullying reinforces the social system in a hierarchical institution like a school. I don’t know if the teachers knew that that is what they were doing. I hope they didn’t. But it is what they were doing.

But, a lot later, I got over it. Partly through watching World Cup matches with some mates, partly through having a great time in a pub when Millwall got to the FA Cup Final. I suppose that was the day I made my peace with football. Not that football noticed.

Ian Paisley International Airport.

No, there isn’t one. And there probably never will be in this world, though I could imagine an alternative Earth in which there was. Probably in a Ken MacLeod book.

Down to Worthing for my aunt Peggy’s funeral. A quiet affair, less then twenty people there and a few drinks suplied by my cousin back at his Mum’s flat. Some stressful things, and some buried bits of the past, mostly not talked about. It must have been a hard nut for the minister who took the service to crack, and I think he chewed it or even sucked at it more than he cracked it. Lots of unresolved old disputes and rivalries, most of which I have no idea of the source of, and most of which will now never be resolved because most of those involved are now dead.

OK, this isn’t an emo blog, or even a political one. Its about places and a bit about language and random encounters. And I’m not about to plaster rumours about my family history all over the internet.

So I’m wondering about accents again. Where they come from, how fast they change. My Dad’s parents generation all had strong South Tyneside accents when I was a child, even the nine or ten of them who had moved to the south coast forty years before I was born (which is why Jarrow or Hebburn sound like home to me – people speak in the voices of the aunts and cousins who used to babysit me and my brother when we were chldren). Yet that accent itself was probably only about a generation old when they learned it. My generation of our Brighton family mostly speak in a rather typical south-eastern urban accent, (what might now be called “Estuary English”, a term I hate), which sounds to most people a bit like a London accent. And our children are mostly posher than us, tending towards RP (but not quite getting there).

I wonder where and when that urban Brighton accent came in. Did anyone speak it in the 19th century? Or would Brighton people have had Sussex accents? As far as I can remember most people I knew in Brighton of my parent’s generation spoke it when I was a child, and at least some older ones (though it is hard to be sure after all these years). The “Estuary English” scare in the newspapers of about a decade ago seemed completely to miss the mark to me. Prescriptivists attacked urban south-eastern English as if it was some new-fangled slang threatening to overwhelm RP and kill off the real local or rural accents. But from my point of view they were talking about the accent I was brought up with. (I don’t think my Dad said “innit” but we did, and we said it in the 1960s) If anything the trend was the other way – older Brightonians sounded more “cockney” and more working-class than many of the younger ones. (But that is anecdotal and depends on our own class trajectory of course) Real Sussex accents seemed vanishingly rare in Brighton even in the 1960s (though I have overheard people using them at Plumpton races only an afternoon’s walk away)

I think I used to think of accents as diverging like a tree. But now itseems more like the way the sea sorts out the pebbles on Brighton beach. A wave of economic and social change passes over a city or a county or a country generating new accents and dialects in its wash, mixing people and speech together, and when it has passed it leaves them stranded as heaps or ridges of shingle, similar but different to the ones there before, arranged in new combinations whuich might last for hours or days or weeks or years or centuries.

I took the opportunity today to try listen to the voices of P and J, brothers, distant cousins of mine, just about the oldest surviving of the Brighton-born in our family. They have rather different accents from each other. One posher (though nowhere near RP), the other could easily pass for South London or urban north Kent. But I think I can hear the ghost of a Sussex accent in them, a little bit of the voice of their father, a man from rural Sussex. Their mother, who died recently, still sounded more Jarrow than Hebburn or Shields when she was in her eighties. She moved three hundred miles from home, her accent never moved even three miles in sixty years.

She was probably the last living person with any memory of my grandfather who I never met, and as far as I can tell almost no-one liked. I don’t even know what he looked like. Though I think I can guess. I saw a photo today of my uncle Joe (who died many years ago) and he looked astonishingly like my cousin Kevin. Both of them look quite like my Dad and his brother Fran (Kevin’s Dad) and also my own brother. Presumably they all got that look from somewhere, and I guess it must be their common ancestors, our grandfather and grandmother I never met. (Though I don’t look like that – I more resemble Mum apart from eyecolour and waistline and find myself reflected in all sorts of cousins in Scotland)

And afterwards in a car through Lancing and Shoreham to Brighton for a nostalgic drive along the seafront and a walk along the Palace Pier (the only one still more or less standing) taking in some bits of personal and family history on the way. The road goes all along the long lagoon of the River Adur and you can tell which part of the urban coastal strip you are in by the uses made of the lagoon. At the Worthing end it is filled in and made into a lawn. There are some beach huts and park furniture until a few huge vaguely gothicky-Arts-and_Crafts fake-timbered houses with pre-distressed rooflines and hanging tiles announce the begining of Lancing Beach. Norman Shaw come down to the coast and pupped with Arthur Rackham. Then a combination of unimaginitive recent blocks of flats and slighly less huge barn-like houses that seem to be an incongruous mixture of Swiss chalets and clap-boarded fishermen’s cottages. We try and fail to remember which one my aunt Vera kept a guest house in many years ago. The lagoon behind is now the Widewater, brackish and teeming.

Over the mouth of the Adur and past Shoreham Beach, which is marked by the sudden proliferation of houseboats, dingys and old leftovers from the pre-war plotlands, along with some much more imaginative modern blocks. Drive past a few very strange pubs I remember from years ago an lots of smallish 1950s and 1960s warehouses converted into either flats or furniture showrooms. Across the county boundary to East Sussex, which is at this point one of the most egregiously misplaced county boundaries in the country, cutting through both the port and continuously urban western extremities of Brighton, Whatever they say, Shoreham is a suburb of Brighton,

Then all of a sudden what remains of real industry, incongruously separating (for those who don’t know Brighton) horeham from Hove. Yes, there still are small coastal oil tankers, I saw one drawn up by the old Texaco oil terminal, it up by bright lights and with a huge NO SMOKING sign over the front of the superstructure, and ramifying manifolds of red-painted pipework and plumbing over the deck. And the timber yards are still where they were when I was a child, if a little smaller. And there is only one metal chimney on the new power station, not the two old brick ones I remember. We are passing Portslade.

The exact location of Southwick, Fishersgate, and Aldringon, is a matter for the Wise.

The start of Hove seafront is marked by beach huts and paddling pools on one side (the lagoon filled in yet again) and Edwardian “villas” Regency terraces, whitewashed flat-rooved portholed liner-style “modern” blocks of flats from between the wars, and small blocky 1960s hotels. The very last gasp of the old lagoon, the gap between the shingle and the mud, is occupied by the King Alfred centre, one of the most ugliest buildings in Britain. Swimming pool, bowlng alley and cheap cafes. Shiny and tempting when I was a kid, grey and falling apart now.

You can tell when you cross the border into Brighton. the shops are still open, the cafes full, and people don’t walk in the bike lanes. Though they do fight in the streets. The ruins of the West Pier are beautiful in the sunset, an unlooked-for unwanted glorious sculpture of tangled rust rising from the sea. There are people who want to preserve it as a ruin and I can see their point.

Park up in the darkness below the Promenade and terrace that covers the beginings of the cliffs where the South Downs meet the sea – no bare chalk till Black Rock, one of the greatest enineering triumphs of the early twentieth century, gicing the seafront a sort of three-dimensional feel no-where else quite has.
Then some fish and chips from one of the overpriced cafes near the bottom of East street (very authentic Brighton experience!)

And we drive our Mum back to where she is staying in Hurstpierpoint (”Hurst” the rather rah-rah locals call it), at the extremity of MegaVillage One. The last couple of miles are on the old road, one of those Wealden sunken lanes with a tunnel of trees, that are possibly the oldest human artefacts still in use in the British Isles. The houses by the side of the road are from the 1960s but the roas itself is perhapse three thousand years old or older. Our field boundaries are our history. the lines of the straight Roman roads were expunged centuries ago, but the landscape the people before the Romans knew – more likely the ones before them – is carved into the landscape by successive generations who walked the obvious way and wore their paths deep into the ground.

Got back to London just in time for last orders at the local

Sometimes pubs just work. And sometimes they don’t. Today was pub fail. I could have done with a lively chatty party feel. I could have coped with a quiet drink in the corner thinking to myself. What I found was a pub with only about eight or nine customers in it. A small gaggle of incoherently pissed blokes playing pool loudly – and ordering a minicab and then sending it away again because they’d either changed their minds about where they were going or were too drunk to have made up their minds in the first place – which must have pissed off the driver and certainly pissed off the barmaid because the mpore that happens the more reluctant the minicabs are to come when asked, and reliable cab numbers are a vital resource for a pub in London – the pubs and the minicabs have a symbiotic relationship and can’t afford to annoy each other.

And to one side of me D. and R., after an obviously bad day, sharing a tedious racist rant along “send them all back home” lines with passing digs at just about every ethnic minority they could think of – even the Spanish. Though mostly against black people. And at one point “I’d rather clean toilets than pay a black to clean them for me”. I didn’t feel up to saying “well bloody well do it then”.

And to the other side M., just back from a visit home to Northern Ireland, going on about how everything is more friendly there and how shit the English in general and Londoners in particular are, and how antisocial and unfriendly we are and how everyone treats her badly here and positively gloating about having been present for the thirtieth anniversary of the Warrenpoint ambush (which killed more British soldiers in one action than any war since has) and the murder of Mountbatten at Mullaghmore on the same day. It was grotesque and boring at the same time. If there was ever a moment I could have become an Ulster Unionist, that was it. And at the same time trying to make friendly conversation by asking all sorts of personal questions about my family which I didn’t feel at all like talking about. And she wonders why some people didn’t seem to like her and talk aggressively to her. And I wasn’t really capable of coping politely with that sort of conversation, speajing ill of the dead, so I popped out the back for a fag.

And heard another strange piece of found speech: “I’m leaking like a bitch” – from a drunk man who needed to go to the toilet a lot.

As for the title of this post – well some of Peggy’s family were over from Northern Ireland. Ballymeena and a bit of Portrush I think. I never knew I had a relative by marriage who was at school with Ian Paisley and actually knows him. Lets call her “T”. A strange feeling. Like most British lefties I was brought up with sympathies on the other side. I am told, though I didn’t hear it myself, that at dinner the night before T was complaining about about Belfast City Airport, now renamed George Best Airport (once upon a time it was called Sydenham Airport which sounds odd to an inhabitant of South East London). She hated the name. She said that George Best was an alcoholic, a drunkard, a waster, a violent man, whose liver transplant wasted an organ that might have saved a life, and a bad example of and to the people of Northern Ireland. She didn’t want to be associated with him. Why not, she suggested, name the airport after a decent family man? Someone who represented the best of Ulster life and Ulster values?

Who might that be? someone asked.

Ian Paisley of course.

It is reported that everyone else tried to change the subject after that.

Virgin train announcements

“Any passengers not travelling please make your way tothe platform”

But if they aren’t intending to travel they aren’t passengers! AAAAAARGH!

Overheard on the train:

African man on a mobile phone, in fake American accent:

“Whatever”

“I don’t give a bunch of ham!”

Not sure what his accent was, possibly East African of some sort. When speaking Englih and not doing he American thing he was clearly non-rhotic. But when speaking another language I didn’t recognise he has a sound that sounds very much like a rolled “R” to me. Which I foolishly thought was odd for a bit, but obviously isn’t. Maybe he doesn’t perceive that sound as the same as an English-language post-vocalic “R”. Maybe the version of English he learned simply doesn;t have an “R” there (as mine doesn’t. There is no reason he should associate the written “R” with a consonant – it might just be a peculiarity of English spelling. Its just a clue that the vowel is lengthened. Our “TH” isn’t a T followed by an H, our “NG” is not an N and a G, the “E” in a word like “fate” is not a vowel, its a clue that the “A” is pronounced differently from the one in “fat”.

Two things

The way we speak now, part 184:

Curly, the taxi driver from Lewisham, pronounces “shot at” and “shite” almost identically.

Men have bags:

Someone in Another Place wondered why men can’t have handbags. Well, in London we can. I counted some men I saw on the way home from work last night.

184 had no bags
49 had plastic carrier bags or branded shop bags
363 had proper bags

Result: Most men round here carry bags.

Further result: looking at men is much more boring than looking at women.

Wasn’t that interesting?

Intergenerational rhotaicism clash

Overheard on a bus:

Small boy [worried]: “Mummy, where’s Carl?”

Slightly older sister [patient]: “He’s in the buggy” [pointing at little baby brother]

Mother [humourously]: “Who’s this ‘Carl’ anyway?”

Small boy: “Carl!”

Mother [rhotically]: “He’s called ‘Carl’, not ‘Cal”

Sister: “Carrrrrrrrl”

Small boy: “why didn’t you call him ‘Michael’?”

Black family, I guess possibly the mother had a Bajan accent but I don’t know enough to tell for sure.

The point being that the children have non-rhotic London accents (though clearly a black London accents) and so for them there is no “R” or “L” in the name “Carl”, any more than there is for me. Its all one vowel glide. So he probably hears his mother say something like “KARR-ul” but she hears him say something like “KAAUW”.

That’s not a very satisfactory way of writing that!

Does IPA work on this blog?

What I’d say is perhaps [kaəɫ]
What the mother seemed to be saying to me is more like [kærərl]

I probably didn’t do that right!

Saturday afternoon walk

Blackheath to Greenwich to Deptford – Sometimes Pubs Just Work (2)

My brother came down South of the River on Saturday for the first time in a while (he used to say he never did – when I bumped in to him in Brixton one night he said that it was honourary North London). He cycled to Blackheath, all the way from Holloway more or less) which took a little longer than he thought, especially the hill at the end (*) and we had some wonderful cider at the Princess of Wales. A license to print money that place, on a sunny summer Saturday.

Then down to Greenwich through the Park in the sunshine, and some noodles and more beer at a Vietnamese restaurant, and walk to Deptford and a final pint at the Dog and Bell:

And my brother says “where can I put my bike” and I say “over there on the bike racks”. We are civilised in Deptford these days. And he says “Is it safe” and I tell him it is. After the obligatory scare stories about Milton Court and the Pepys Estate of course. Not as dangerous as people make out. So we have beer and a fag in the back garden of the very very nice pub and I hear a few loud bangs that, if I knew what shots sounded like, might have been shots. And I walk my brother to Evelyn Street and put him on the right road for Rotherhithe, and wonder why such a traffic jam.

And I walk back towards the High Street and there are police everywhere and sirens and scene-of-the-crime types, and the roads taped off and I asked someone what was happening, and yes, it seems as if someone has been shot. So much for my telling everyone how not-dangerous Deptford is.

For some reason one of the blues-and-twos vans had “Metropolitan Police Marine Policing Unit” written on it. The river cops? Why? For a moment it was like being in the second series of The Wire

So back past the Cranbrook (where someone I have never met before bought me another pint) and to the local where there was some kind of party going on and various people there…

And I really ought to lay off booze for the next few days to give my liver a chance to recover.

Only in South East London could there ever be a fake Morley’s:

(*) Mildly irrelevant Pompous Geology Witter – why South London is steeper than North. London is (as NE Fule No) in a the London Basin, which is formed by tertiary [i.e. after-the-dinosaurs] deposits of sand and gravel and mud (much hrdened into clay) in a syncline,. a bowl-shaped fold in the underlying chalk. The Thames didn’t make the Thames Valley – the river flows through a valley that was made by a great fold in the earth running hundreds of miles east from the centre of southern England into Belgium and even Denmark (though the sea came in and washed most of it away during the Pleistocene…)

There are three steps up from the Thames to the sides of the basin. North of the river they come one after the other . First the river terraces, accumulated gunk on the edge of the flat alluvial basing of the post-glacial Thames. In Central London the river is at the northern edge of its little plain, so it buts onto the terraces – the Strand runs along it. Which why Trafalgar Square slopes, why Villiers Street is steep, why the north side of Waterloo Bridge is higher than the south and why Upper Thames Street is Upper and Lower Thames Street is Lower.

Then a mile or two back, the so-called Northern Heights – a line of hills of clay and sand, including Stamford Hill, Alexandra Palace, Muswell Hill, Hampstead, Highgate, Horsenden Hill, Hendon, Harrow and so on (I don’t know why there is such a wave of “H”s in suburban north-west London – it carries on in a big arc round the city to the not-at-all hilly Hillingdon, Hayes, Harlington, Heston, Heathrow and Hounslow.) There can be quite a steep scarp to this in places, you see it best round Archway and Highgate Tube, even though the hills themselves aren’t very high. I suppose its because the muddy clay isn’t very strong and collapsed in places, leaving natural quarry-like sides. (Not that I cam at all sure of that)

Then there is a another big flattish step, even a valley in places, until you get to the dip leading up to the Chilterns outside Greater London which are proper chalk Downs, and the start of the anticline, the other bit of the fold. They aren’t exactly high, not even as high as the South Downs (which are the real Downs of course) but they are proper hills and higher than anything you are likely to find in north London.

South of the river you get the same three steps but they all come at once. The terraces at the southern edge of the Thames floodplain run in a pretty straight line from Camberwell to Greenwich, abut five to ten metres above what used to be the marshes, which is why the old Roman road ran there. Peckham High Street, Queens Road, New Cross Road, and Deptford Broadway still follow the line. You can see it clearly around New Cross, where the roads and paths leading north go steeply down hill – the main roads have been levelled but the side roads and footpaths fall down fast. The original Deep Ford that Deptford is named for is the place that the Ravensbourne flows through these terraces into Deptford Creek.

But unlike north of the river these terraces butt on to the clay hills behind them, so the two steps up become one. And the chalk hills are immediately behind them. So if you go south from central London you rise immediately and almost continually from the Thames to the first of the North Downs. And – also unlike north London – the chalk isn’t very far under the clay. You can pick up chalk off the ground at Woolwich. There were lime pits in Blackheath and Lewisham where chalk was dug out by hand. The railway cuttings at Lewisham exposed chalk at St John’s – if you wanted to stretch a point you could make a rather stingy claim that Hilly Fields Park and St John’s Church were the northernmost gasp of the North Downs.

Two old photos of Deptford Creek, just because I like them: