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John Vane’s London Stories: Comic turns in Camden Town

Jokes about dating, ethnicity and meditation and one routine that went too far
John Vane

An autumn night in Camden Town, where, long ago, Kilburn and The High Roads played Dingwalls and a famous pet shop sold enormous snakes. The market was full of bongs back then. Maybe it still is. They say the place has lost its soul. Well, name a time when they weren’t. Come on. Camden’s fringe festival gets compared with Edinburgh’s. The place heaves with pubs and clubs. And everywhere you look, people are standing up and making you laugh.

There was a crowd of 50-odd in the little bar, keen young cosmopolitans preoccupied – if the material set before them was any guide – with dating and ethnic identity. The compere, a smiley black American, teased the mostly white audience with news that this was the “blackest comedy night in north London” (or somesuch), and relaxed us between acts with mellow lines about baby fathers and eating dogs.

We laughed: maybe at him, maybe at ourselves, maybe at him laughing at us, maybe – and maybe mirthlessly – at how stuck we all seem to be with certain ways of seeing and being. Performers got five minutes each. I, in the front row of the ranks of folding chairs, got my line prepared for when one of them asked me what I do for a living (“I review comedians for the Telegraph.”).

Women told jokes about being East Asian, being single, being insulted by children, being single, being worried about their weight and being single. Men told jokes about being Indian and being single, their jumpers and being single, being short and being single. Everyone said “shit” frequently. One woman ventured into clown country, donning a sheep novelty hat and, by inflating an exercise ball using a pump squeezed between her knees, fashioned a symbolic representation of a ewe being penetrated by a ram.

The next comic turn was a guy who got off to a good follow-that start (“I hate it when people steal my material”), then instantly crashed and burned by going into a routine about Gaza and Jews. The stoney silence prompted him to improvise in a manner he had not anticipated (“Uh, oh, I thought it would land well with this audience…”).

Did someone deep once observe that you can get away with making a joke about a tragedy as long as you take the tragedy seriously? Perhaps he would have obeyed that rule, but he had overstepped the limits of edginess so quickly that we would never know. The sheep woman, sitting next to me, suggested he might need to wait 50 years before such material could be acceptable.

The evening’s only other discordant moment was when a couple of young women, tiresomely drunk, gatecrashed and tried a bit of heckling. Our compere suavely suggested that their parents might be called. They were quickly gone.

That tiny incident threw into relief the generosity of those who’d paid their money. What used to be called “alternative comedy”, back in the days of pet shop pythons and pub rock, was inseparable from pisshead counter-performances from the floor. But this audience was rather sweet. My eye was caught by two lads from Ireland, who looked as if they’d broken out of seminary. I felt a fleeting urge to get up at the end and tell everyone I hoped their rents would soon come down and to call me if they got frightened travelling home.

To end, my evening’s favourite lines :

“Hi. I’m Frank. I travelled here this evening on the Tube. You can imagine what it was like – busy, overcrowded, people under pressure, hard to relax. I found a seat and decided it would be more mindful if I meditated. So I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. It was amazing. So powerful. I was able to completely block out a pregnant woman standing next to me who needed to sit down.”

Thank you, Camden, and good night.

John Vane is a pen name used by Dave Hill, editor and publisher of On London. Buy his London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here, here or here. Subscribe to his Substack too.

Categories: Culture, John Vane's London Stories
Tags: Camden Town, Dingwalls, theatre

Lewis Baston: Labour’s ‘Super Thursday’ by-election holds can’t disguise a slide

The party retained all five London council seats contested in the latest by-elections, but less convincingly than it would have liked
Lewis Baston

Thursday 28 November saw a Super Thursday of London borough by-elections. There were five vacancies in four wards in three boroughs. Two of the contests arose from councillors being elected MPs in July’s general election, and one party – Labour – was defending all the seats.

A lot of the activity concerned Barking & Dagenham. It hosted three of the votes, one of which came about for the same reason Enfield held a by-election on the same day. The need for new member to represent Northbury ward was caused by the resignation of Darren Rodwell, who had been Barking & Dagenham’s leader for ten years until he stood down in September.

Rodwell had been selected as Labour’s candidate for the Barking parliamentary seat, but withdrew after an allegation of misconduct was made against him. He was later cleared, but it was too late for his parliamentary aspirations. A replacement candidate had already been chosen – Nesil Caliskan, the then leader of Enfield.

It was her elevation to the Commons that left a seat to fill in Enfield. Rodwell, not surprisingly, was sad and angry about these events, blaming “a deliberate attempt to besmirch my name and reputation ahead of the close of nominations”. He decided he was better off out of politics.

The other two Barking & Dagenham by-elections were both in Village ward. One was caused by Margaret Mullane being elected MP for Dagenham & Rainham, the other by the death of Lee Waker, who had been a Village councillor since 2002.

Northbury and Village are at opposite ends of the borough. Northbury is in its north west, covering Barking station and the residential areas to its east and west. It is a highly diverse ward – 39 per cent Asian, 29 per cent white and 23 per cent black. The housing is mainly rented, 40 per cent from private landlords and 29 per cent in the social sector, with only 11 per cent owning their flats or houses outright. Slightly more than the borough average have degrees and significantly more commute to work by Tube.

The ward closely fits the pattern of high-density development around lower-cost commuter hubs in outer London (it is successor to the previous Abbey ward, which was split up in 2022 because of population growth). Its demographic mix makes it fertile ground for Labour and potentially for parties to Labour’s left. It was 69 per cent Labour in the 2022 borough elections, but that sort of share usually sustains a dent in a lower-turnout by-election.

And so it proved. Labour’s Val Masson retained the seat with ease, but the party’s share dipped to 58 per cent (561 votes). Simon Anthony for the Greens came second with 17 per cent (161 votes), just as the Greens had done in 2022. Contesting the ward for the first time, Reform UK came third (101 votes, 10.4 per cent, for their candidate Ryan Edwards), pushing Conservative Angelica Olawepo into fourth by a single vote. Liberal Democrat Olumide Adeyefa brought up the rear. The swing to the Tories was 2.4 per cent, which is at the lower end of the recent spectrum.

***

Village ward is in the east of the borough, in the part of Dagenham that lies between the Dagenham Heathway and Dagenham East District Line stations and to their south. Dagenham is for the most part inter-war planned public sector suburbia, and so is a large section of Village ward: 38 per cent of households are social rented. But there are some post-war estates and also the old village of Dagenham (hence the ward name) with its green and its parish church.

The church is old, but was remodelled in the 19th Century. Inside, there is a memorial brass to Thomas Urswick (1415-79), Chief Baron of the Exchequer and one of four MPs at the time for London. Village ward’s population is just over 50 per cent white, a high proportion for the borough. People there tend to drive to work. Although it has been a Labour ward – as have all Barking & Dagenham wards in every election since 2010 – there is potential competition from the right.

All four of the main London parties ran two candidates in the two-seat Village race, with the Conservative pair prefixing the word “Local” to their party name. Neither the Greens nor the Lib Dems made much impression and in the absence of a Reform candidate, who might have polled respectably, the battle was between Labour and the Tories.

Labour’s team (pictured) of Julia Williams (776 votes) and Ajanta Deb-Roy (774 votes) prevailed over their main challengers Ben Suter (580 votes) and Graham Gosling (571 votes).

The Village result, unlike Northbury’s, showed a very impressive swing to the Conservatives – 21.5 per cent since the borough elections in May 2022. But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that the Tories are on course to sweep to victory in Barking & Dagenham in the near future, or in London more generally.

The Conservative vote here varies substantially depending on the type of election. It comes out for mayoral elections – Shaun Bailey carried Village for the Tories in 2021 – and sometimes for general elections, but not in full borough elections.

That is because the local Tory machine is stretched too thin. Labour, conversely, has a well-oiled and successful campaign infrastructure for full Barking & Dagenham borough elections, but sometimes struggles in by-elections.

This explains why the Tories have managed respectable swings in Barking & Dagenham before, such as one of 13 per cent in Mayesbrook in September 2023, when the party was not picking up in general popularity. They have also done better in the recent past than they did on Thursday, when Conservative London Assembly member Andrew Boff achieved a 25 per cent swing in Thames ward in May 2021.

***

Enfield’s Jubilee is ward, which Nesil Caliskan vacated, is the northernmost of the block of five Enfield wards making up Edmonton.

The population of the ward is highly diverse. White British account for 20 per cent, around 27 per cent are black – with many distinct communities grouped under that label – and 13 per cent are Turkish or Turkish Cypriot. The ward is 28 per cent Muslim – again, from communities of widely varied origins – and 42 per cent Christian.

It is a predominantly working-class ward, with deprivation levels above the national average. Its name comes from Jubilee Park, which is in the west of the ward. Jubilee also contains the Lee Valley Athletics Centre in the east. It has been a Labour ward with a substantial majority in recent borough elections, although the Conservatives won a share of representation here in 2002 and 2006.

Six candidates took part in the by-election, with those of the five largest parties joined by Khalid Sadur, a left-wing Independent who had the Jeremy Corbyn seal of approval. Labour’s Ian Barnes was a familiar figure, having previously served as the council’s deputy before standing down from Winchmore Hill ward in 2022.

The Conservatives’ Masud Uddin made fly-tipping and the state of roads and pavements in the Labour-controlled borough the main focus of his campaign. The Greens and Lib Dems criticised Labour over housing. But Labour held Jubilee, and Barnes was returned to the council with 853 votes (39 per cent). Uddin provided the main competition with 691 votes (32 per cent). Sadur finished third (208 votes, 10 per cent). Turnout was 21 per cent.

It was not a particularly impressive Labour victory – compared to May 2022 their share of the vote was down 14 points and the Conservatives were up by nine, amounting to a swing from Labour to Tory of 11.3 per cent. If Enfield Tories can replicate that performance on a larger scale in the May 2026 full borough elections they will have cause for celebration – it would be enough for them to win a majority.

***

The only by-election held on Thursday that had no Barking & Dagenham connection took place in Islington. Having been chosen by Sadiq Khan to be his new Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, council leader Kaya Comer-Schwartz stepped down from her Islington municipal roles, including as councillor for Junction ward.

Junction is the north-western ward of Islington, centred on Archway Northern line station. In estate agent parlance it is “Highgate borders”, adjoining both the Highgate ward of Camden and the Haringey one of the same name, and covering the lower slopes of Highgate Hill around the Whittington Hospital. The ward name refers in general terms to the road junction at Archway, but more specifically to Junction Road, which heads south from there to Tufnell Park.

Junction ward is part of the Islington North constituency, which Jeremy Corbyn won as an Independent in the general election, having represented it for Labour since June 1983. Corbyn’s suspension, deselection and independent run have caused ructions in the local Labour Party. These have been reflected in the council chamber, where four ex-Labour Independents now sit in a joint group with the three Greens to provide the official opposition to the Labour administration.

Though significant, this pales in comparison with an earlier phase of Islington infighting in 1981-82, when a majority of the council defected to the newly-formed Social Democratic Party. And the alliance between the Independents and the Greens, newly-concluded, was not reflected in the form of an electoral pact for the by-election, in which an Independent and a Green stood separately.

Labour was defending a large majority, having taken 62 per cent of the vote in 2022. No party had emerged as strong competition since the Lib Dems last won seats in the ward in 2002 and 2006. Their candidate was James Potts, a public affairs consultant. The most effective opposition came from Jackson Caines, an Independent enjoying the support of Corbyn. Caines is a housing campaigner and a community organiser for Harrow Law Centre. Not surprisingly, he put housing at the centre of his campaign. The Greens’ Devon Osborne, who had stood in Tufnell Park in 2022, made similar arguments.

The result  was another Labour hold with another substantial drop in the party’s share of the vote. Potts polled 785 votes (40 per cent) to 550 votes (28 per cent) for Caines. Osborne for the Greens was third with 219 votes – at 11 per cent, her vote share was half what the Greens had won in 2022, a sign that Caines had attracted most of the left-of-Labour vote. None of the other candidates – Conservative, Lib Dem, another Independent and one from the Socialist Party of Great Britain – scored better than 10 per cent. Turnout was 21 per cent.

***

Although Labour held all the seats in London’s Super Thursday, the party’s performance was not very super if measured against the 2022 borough elections.

Excuses might be offered for most of the results. As we have seen, the big swing in Village in Barking & Dagenham is not unprecedented and probably not replicable in a bigger contest. The result in Northbury ward was not too bad. The Corbynite challenge in Islington’s Junction was vigorous, but less formidable than Corbyn himself had been July. Enfield council has been much-criticised.

Furthermore, Labour is starting from such a high baseline of support in May 2022 that it can afford to lose a lot of votes and still hold seats and councils. But for all that, a broad pattern of decline in support for Labour is unmistakable.

Support OnLondon.co.uk and its freelancers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money that other people don’t. Details HERE. Follow Lewis Baston on Bluesky.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Barking & Dagenham Council, Enfield Council, Islington Council

Next stage approaches for Hackney Wick’s Yard theatre

Tucked away in a corner of east London right next to the Olympic Park, it has grown with the part of the capital it serves
Dave Hill

To get to the Yard theatre, emerge from Hackney Wick station on what we now call the Mildmay line, scratch your head, look right, venture forth and then turn left between scruffy uprights into what looks like – and is – an ex-industrial site, Queen’s Yard, running up to the Lee Navigation Canal.

So far, so eerie or so promising, according to taste. Whichever, you soon enter an agglomeration of restaurants and bars with an ongoing meanwhile feel and, if you swing immediately right then right again, the former warehouse that has been the home of the theatre since its creation in 2011.

I was there on Tuesday night to see The Flea, a play written by James Fritz and directed by Yard founder Jay Miller. It dramatises the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889, when Fitzrovia hosted a house of assignation where aristocratic gay men encountered boy bits of rough. Nob patrons were rumoured to include Prince Albert Victor, grandson of Queen Victoria.

It was my second night out with The Flea, having attended its first run last autumn. Richard Brown reviewed it for On London at that time. He liked it. So did I. It is witty, insightful, sad, sparklingly performed and cleverly staged. Sartorially, it brought to mind that distant time when Derek Jarman made Jubilee and punk rock morphed into Antmusic. Move fast if you want to catch it at the Yard – its second run finishes on Saturday.

That ending nears as the Yard approaches a new chapter in its history. Earlier this year, the theatre secured a £700,000 Arts Council England (ACE) grant to refurbish and expand. Planning consent for the project had already been received and more news is expected soon.

The Yard’s story is one of commitment, creativity and endeavour. It is also a strand of the legacy of London 2012. The theatre was put together by volunteers, with some materials salvaged from the future Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park’s regeneration works and £10,000 from ACE. It was a temporary conversion that has lasted, underpinned by a 30-year lease. Its board of trustees is chaired by Simon Tate, founder of real estate firm Wetherby. Fellow members include Southbank Centre chief executive Elaine Bedell and Trust for London chief executive Manny Hothi.

The London Legacy Development Corporation, the mayoral body responsible for the evolution of the park and its environs – and the planning authority that consented the Yard’s upgrade scheme – has been among its backers, along with various trusts and the boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets, within whose territory it lies. Another connection is that the Yard ran the short-term Hub 67 community centre, also in Hackney Wick, for the LLDC (it closed in 2022 to make way for redevelopment).

The LLDC will begin its own transformation from Sunday, when planning powers are formally handed back to the four boroughs who ceded them and as it continues its transition into a new kind of organisation for the next Games legacy phase. The theatre’s process of change will encompass a more capacious, sustainable and accessible building, a new café-bar and space for young artists, designed by architects Takero Shimazaki. From improvised pop-up to established institution, the Yard has grown like the part of the capital it serves.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support the website and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things that other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. Photo: Outside the theatre from its Facebook page, 2017.

Categories: Culture
Tags: Hackney Wick, Olympic Park, theatre

Dave Hill: Don’t grow tired of caring about London’s housing emergency

In a talk for The London Society, Housing Ombudsman Richard Blakeway has warned of the danger of tolerating the intolerable
Dave Hill

In theory, Britain’s Housing Ombudsman is not one of London’s emergency services: the office’s primary role is to resolve disputes between social housing tenants and their landlords. In practice, there is a flashing blue light quality to its work. Ask Richard Blakeway, the Housing Ombudsman himself. “The housing emergency is starting to make us feel like an emergency service,” he said at a London Society event last week. “Every 30 seconds someone calls us for help.”

Not all of those calls are from Londoners. But Blakeway told the gathering at the Clerkenwell office of architects BDP that 47 per cent of his team’s casework comes from the capital. That is striking, yet no surprise. Councils and housing associations own about 800,000 homes for low-cost rent in London. All of those providers have to sign up with the Ombudsman, and with some private landlords also doing so voluntarily, one Londoner in four or five is entitled to seek the organisation’s assistance.

Demand is a daily deluge. That, too, is to be expected, given the daunting stats. Drawing on research from cross-party local authority group London Councils, Blakeway reminded his audience that on average every classroom in the capital contains a child living in temporary accommodation. At the other end of the age range, he pointed to an increase in the number of over-55s housed by the private rented sector, which has been growing in recent years as the number of mortgage-holders has declined. “At some point, they will retire,” Blakeway said. “How will they afford their housing costs?”

To these numbers can be added the more than 323,000 London households on waiting lists for social housing – twice the population of Cambridge. In inner London, where lists are longest, the average waiting time for a one-bedroom property is well over three years. City Hall’s latest evidence base says there was a small increase in the total amount of social housing in London between 2022 and 2023, but that was nowhere near enough to keep pace with demand, and supply has lately ground to a near-halt.

The same data source says at least 6.6 per cent of all London’s homes are overcrowded. A government estimate in 2020 found that over 400,000 London homes fall short of the national Decent Homes Standard. The other week, I spent two hours with tenants of two-year-old housing association block in Purley. I headed home with my head ringing with their stories of doors that won’t close, a lift that doesn’t work and rats scratching in cavities behind their walls.

I could go on. And on. And on. And the awful thing is, you might get bored. So might I. After all, voices have been raised about London’s housing crisis for much of this century. As Blakeway said, the term embraces a number of different crises covering quality, availability and affordability across every tenure in different ways. With the big picture getting darker and borough budgets buckling under the financial strain, the word “emergency” has been recruited to bring home just how alarming these crises are. But how much impact does that have when even some of those with the most direct responsibility for putting things right display symptoms of commitment fatigue?

“I worry that the numbers are so huge or so often repeated that people may become desensitised,” Blakeway said. He expressed concern, echoing the findings of recent Ombudsman investigations, that the pressures housing associations have come under, due to new post-Grenfell safety standards, ongoing grant reductions, the disruptive effects of mergers and the combination of market conditions that has hit home-building across the board, have seen what he called “a creeping normalisation of responses, a sort of tolerance of things that aren’t tolerable”.

To illustrate the scale of the task to be addressed, he spoke about the landmark Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, published in 1885. We would be struck if we read it, Blakeway said, by the similarities between the issues the commissioners addressed by then and those clamouring for attention today, not least the link between housing conditions and public health. An Act of Parliament about the issue was assented in the same year and another five years later, the latter giving new powers to the London County Council.

Descriptions of London’s housing conditions in George Orwell’s Keep The Aspidistra Flying, published in 1936, advise us that these initiatives did not instantly make everything right. They did, though, represent a coherent effort to cure an often unspeakable social ailment of the Victorian age, one that debilitated much of the capital city and left hundreds of thousand of Londoners trapped in grim conditions that ruined and cut short lives. Today’s London may not be synonymous with dire hovels and hellish rookeries. But it is in danger of moving back in that direction. The very thought can prompt you to avert your gaze. It is an impulse to fiercely resist.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support the website and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things that other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. Photo: Early London social housing near Westminster Abbey. 

Categories: Comment
Tags: council housing, housing associations, Richard Blakeway, The London Society

Julie Hamill’s London: Writing where nobody knows your name

The cafés and malls of the capital's north west can be surprisingly conducive to creating fiction
Julie Hamill

I can’t write at home. I know lots of writers can and do, but I’m not one of them. The slightest floorboard creak, dog wants out, noise from the radio, door bang, cough, sneeze or beep-beep-beep of a reversing lorry and it’s over, laptop shut. The distant echo of a crisp crunch from downstairs and I’m Jack Torrance in search of a hatchet.

I write in the café chains of my north west London neighbourhood. The low hum of chatter and spoons in tea cups, coffee machines and sandwiches being ordered is fine. In fact, it’s good, comforting, productive. I can get more written in two hours in that environment than ten hours of my don’t-breathe-wrong-or-die policy at home. I don’t know the café-goers. I am not required to engage.

Willesden is a ten minute walk from where I live, and a ten minute walk in any direction in London can put you into know-no-man’s land which, for me, is absolutely brilliant. No sign of neighbours or friends, you can be somewhere that’s the direct opposite of Cheers, where nobody knows your name and they’re not at all fussed that you came.

That’s not to say Londoners are ignorant or unfriendly – that’s a myth – Londoners are very friendly (in fact, as I write this, the nice woman at a table beside mine just cleared the surface and it wasn’t even her used cup). It’s just a big city full of busy people who for the most part are polite, but like to keep themselves to themselves. And thus, London is a good place to be a writer (as long as you don’t share a table).

Generally speaking, I rotate between a few different cafes in and around NW2. Once inside and in the queue for the tea or coffee I begin to scan to see where I’ll sit, as I suffer from momentary self-imposed correct-seat OCD panic, whereby if I can’t get the seat I need, I won’t be able to get anything done. This seat search can involve a few false start moves (not unlike Mike Reid’s Runaround) until I get somewhere with nothing behind me, no one looking over my shoulder.

Most of my novels, columns, interviews and other work have been written at Costa, Gail’s, The Library at Willesden Green and, outside of NW2, Westfield Shepherd’s Bush, Brent Cross shopping centre and a little at King’s Cross. Each have their benefits, particularly for writing fiction.

1. The Library at Willesden Green

I usually take a flask and a sandwich with me. My subconscious must think of it as some kind of picnic camp site, which it sort of is, as every single type of person you can imagine goes in there from every walk of life to camp out for a couple of hours. The library has good facilities, including nice rooms that hold author events. A few years back I was privileged to do one to a packed audience of four. Two were friends, one was an acquaintance. I asked the other one how she heard about the event (which had been written about in Brent and Kilburn Times) and she replied: “I just came in out of the rain.”

In this large building there are many places to sit and work, so I try to find a table that doesn’t have those wooden benches that punish one’s behind like a church pew. Solo chairs can be difficult to come by, especially if there’s a scheduled group going on. Timing is crucial to avoid the scurry of bobble-hatted primary school children on a visit. Upon reaching the arc of my most recent book, June, the beginning of the end was formed in the library as dusk was falling around the building. This was perfect, as main character Frank had just been sent upstairs to a bedroom to confirm if his dead wife’s spirit was lurking in the corner.

2.Gail’s, Willesden High Road

Gail’s has a good hum, and can be great for detail, such as the elderly man I can see right now who has too many clothes for the weather. He’s removed his hat, scarf, gloves and they’re all on the table, and now he’s working on his coat and cardie, which are coming off together at the sleeves. I wrote an elderly character named Mabel Hughes in Gail’s (who hates her neighbour, Tommy Fletcher) and I’ve just stolen a full description from a man sitting in front of me, who is well-dressed in a suit, but has a hole in his sock at the heel, peeking above his hard leather shoe, which is leaving a red mark.

The green tea in a pot in Gail’s is good, but you have to remove the leaves quite quickly or it gets stewed and horrible. Gail’s is also not the cheapest, but they do leave you alone and there’s always a few other tap-tappers flying solo.

3.  Costa, Willesden High Road (formerly The Spotted Dog pub)

Every time I enter my favourite place to write, The Costa Dog as I call it, I stress, hoping that the table in the semi-hidden private corner is available. Occasionally, people are playing chess in that spot, but the second I see it’s free I get quite excited because I know I’m in for a good couple of hours in the other universe where all my characters live. It’s a great feeling to wonder where they’ll go and what they’ll do that day while I sit at that little table.

Tea is the cheapest in Costa and I can sit for hours and nobody will bother me to leave. In my novel Jackie there’s a storyline where the title character goes to visit to her mother’s grave and a white feather lands on top of her headstone.  That whole chapter was written in the quietness of The Costa Dog, at the chess table.

4.  Westfield Food Court 

The saddest chapter in June was written in the middle of the food court at Westfield. Tears poured down my face at a table beside the Indi-go, and nobody noticed or said anything. The story was unravelling in the most beautiful way between Clarence and his Granny and my fingers couldn’t keep up with the flow. After reaching the last sentence I treated myself to an excellent Masala dosa, as I knew what I had written was so powerful it had overtaken me in the best way possible.

The downside of Westfield is I have to take the Tube there, and that eats into writing time. It’s also really enormous and takes ages to walk around, but the chapter I wrote there remains the best thing I’ve ever written.

5. Leon, Brent Cross

Sitting upstairs on the balcony while Brent Cross buzzes around me is where I get the pages flying. Sometimes I just have a tea but the Leon Love Burger is probably the best vegan burger I’ve ever had, so I like to go in hungry. Parking at Brent Cross is free, but you really need a car to visit, or it’s two buses from NW10.

I flew into the new book I’m currently writing after a Love Burger in Leon, and I instantly knew what the first four chapters were going to look like. It all came out like a possessed exchange between me and the laptop. I sat for four hours at the corner table while all the people I didn’t see came and ate and went, enjoying something with a side of waffle fries. I can’t tell you the title of my next book yet, it’s in development. In the meantime, try the Love Burger.

6. Brent Cross Cafeteria

You can’t really just order a drink in here, it’s the only place where it’s gotta be food too. The bread, however, is incredible, so I go for the avocado and chickpea sandwich and green tea (comes in a lovely glass pot). This is a less productive place to write, but I do like the food, which always arrives quite quickly. I think this is because they see me coming and speed it all up so I’ll finish and leave sooner. I get the stare if I stay too long, and the “Anything else?” shove towards the bill, but 500 words can be worth it for the bread alone.

*

I’ve been less successful with places outside of my NW10 and NW2 ‘hood, one of which is the British Library. It always comes top of lists of “places to write in London”, but I violently disagree. The place is swarming with students, and they’re all far too nice. When a seat becomes available at a table of four, I sit down to share knowing this is not good for me. When any kind of chat gets going I’m a chronic over-talker, and end up meeting people and getting into conversations about being a writer, which is ironic as I leave having not written a word.

I used to be so good at writing on any train leaving from Euston, usually going to Manchester or Glasgow. A lot of my first novel, Frank, was developed and written on trains between 2012 and 2017, the latter being the year it was published. Maybe that’s because Frank himself worked on the railways before he retired. I wonder if I that his profession because I was on a train when I wrote his story, but if I think too much about that I end up chicken and egging the issue.

The best writing off-site I’ve ever treated myself to was a couple of days at the Grand Hotel in Sunderland. It’s old and slightly run down, but affordable and right on the seafront in Seaburn. I was able to write a lot of character dialogue there, including an amusing exchange in June about a jar of Dolmio. I learned of the power of being near the sea and hearing the lap of waves. It brought me total peace to think of nothing else but the story.

There are no waves in London, except the ones that say cheerio. My green tea has stewed. Time to go home.

This column was brought to you from Gail’s, where nobody opened crisps, spoke too loudly or breathed incorrectly.

Julie Hamill writes novels, appears on Times Radio and does lots, lots more. Follow her on Bluesky. Support OnLondon.co.uk and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details HERE.

Categories: Culture
Tags: Brent Cross, British Library, Willesden

Richard Derecki: Lasting intrigue of London’s most notorious suburban spies

Respectable Ruislip, along with a bookshop in the Strand, became a key location for the operations of the Portland spy ring
Richard Derecki

Between 1954 and 1961, operating from an unassuming bungalow at 45 Cranley Drive, Ruislip, Lona and Morris Cohen smuggled out a vast haul of British nuclear secrets to their KGB paymasters.

Operating under the aliases Helen and Peter Kroger, the names taken from a New Zealander couple who had died in a car crash, the US-born Cohens were top Russian spies who in the 1940s had been key members of a network of agents collecting and passing on crucial information from research and development programme the Manhattan Project. This included a complete diagram of the US atomic bomb.

In 1950, their cover blown, the Cohens travelled to Russia and then to Poland, where they were given their new identities, and eventually to London. They opened an antiquarian bookshop on the Strand – great cover for sending parcels across Europe. Working with their handler Konon Molody, a Soviet intelligence officer masquerading as Gordon Lonsdale, a Canadian businessman selling jukeboxes and vending machines, they acted as the conduit for information collected by fellow London-based spies, Harry Houghton and Ethel Gee.

Houghton was a former Royal Navy master-at-arms who, in the 1950s, worked as clerk to the British Naval Attaché in Warsaw. He spied first for the Poles and then the Russians. Greedy for money, Houghton passed on huge amounts of material and was paid bonuses according to its sensitivity. His heavy drinking and troubled relationship with his wife became widespread knowledge at the Embassy and he was transferred back to the UK early. But in 1953 he began work in the Royal Navy’s Underwater Detection Establishment in Portland, Dorset and persuaded his work colleague, Gee, to help him access highly sensitive material on the UK’s nuclear submarine fleet.

Gee and Houghton would regularly travel up to London, taking in a show and a bite to eat, before handing their trove to Molody, who would pass it on to the Cohens in Ruislip. There, the material was photographed and reduced to the size of a micro dot, which went into one of the antiquarian books ready for dispatch abroad. Then, using a radio transmitter with a 23-metre arial, the Cohens would notify the KGB that the book was on its way. This was the arrangement that came to be known as the Portland spy ring.

Houghton’s extravagant spending attracted suspicion, but it wasn’t until 1959, when the Polish intelligence officer Michael Goleniewski defected to the US, that MI5 began surveillance of him and Gee. This led them to Molody and then to the Cohens. At that point began a protracted MI5 stakeout of 45 Cranley Drive, conducted from the side bedroom window of a house in nearby Courtfield Gardens, occupied by Wilfred and Ruth Search and their children Philip and Gay (who would later become a TV presenter and journalist).

The stakeout provides the starting point of the play Pack of Lies by the prolific writer of theatre, TV and film scripts, Hugh Whitemore. The Searches were good friends of the Cohens – the Krogers as they knew them, of course – and found the whole situation difficult. They were told bits of what the Security Service believed was going on, but not all, adding to their initial disbelief.

It is Ruth Search’s growing realisation of the scale of the Cohens duplicity and the strain that having MI5 watchers hidden in her house, together with pretending to the Cohen that everything was tickety-boo, that provides the dramatic drive of the story.

In the play, the Helen Kroger character “splashes the cash”, opening the door for Ruth to a life of gifts, boozy parties and provocative conversation and encouraging her in her desire to be a painter. This was in sharp contrast to the repressive silence of suburbia, the drudgery of repetitive housework, the twitching of net curtains and the fear of what the neighbours might think.” And Ruth, as she was all too aware, was engaged in her own kind of betrayal, being persuaded to put the interests of her country ahead of a deep friendship.

The Cohens-turned-Krogers were arrested at their bungalow in January 1961 and in March were convicted of espionage. They were sentenced to 20 years in jail. Kolody was given  25 years, and Houghton and Gee, 15 each. However, in 1969, the Cohens were released in a prisoner swap with the Soviet Union. Their feats were celebrated in Russia – they were even to appear on a set of postage stamps. Ruth Search, however, struggled to adjust and never got over the strain of weeks spent lying to a neighbour she thought she knew well. A few weeks after the Cohens’ release she died of a heart attack.

***

This story of high-stakes international mystery in suburban London still intrigues. A recent production of Pack of Lies at the Compass Theatre in Ickenham played to sell-out crowds.

It was performed by Proscenium, a theatre company (pictured below) founded in 1924 whose aim is to present classic and contemporary plays to as wide an audience as possible. This includes work by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Bennett and Lorca and more. The amateur group based largely in north-west London puts on three shows a year and has around 30 active members, though its membership is much wider.

Screenshot 2024 11 22 at 15.29.57

Recruiting and keeping actors, particularly young ones, is a big part of the stresses and strains of running the group. It is, after all, quite a commitment, with rehearsals three times a week and a lead-in time of seven or eight weeks to get a play ready for opening night.

Securing a long-term suitable performance space is another big part of the challenge, as On London’s recent piece about the Scrum theatre group highlighted. Izzie Cartwright, Proscenium’s artistic director, has over the years seen a number of groups disappear and venues close in this part of London. Proscenium uses all sorts of methods to promote its work, including social media, mailing lists, WhatsApp groups and even leafleting supermarkets to get people in through the doors.

But there is clearly an appetite for theatre close to home in outer London areas. People save on travelling into the West End, it is excellent value and there is a wide repertoire to choose from. Proscenium carefully balances its choice of plays between what will appeal to its likely audience and what will stretch it as a group. Next up is Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, which will be staged next March. Support your local theatre scene.

Support On London and its writers for £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details HERE. Follow Richard Derecki on X/Twitter.

Categories: Culture
Tags: Ickenham, Ruislip, The Strand

Charles Wright: London’s net zero target is at risk. What should happen next?

Sadiq Khan has acknowledged that much more must be done, which raises questions about what and how
Charles Wright

When the government was told in July by the independent Climate Change Committee (CCC) that it was falling well short of its “net zero by 2050” climate change target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, a similar warning about local targets seemed inevitable.

That came earlier this month, with the CCC telling the London Assembly that Sadiq Khan’s even more ambitious target of achieving net zero in London by 2030 was similarly in doubt. Now Khan himself has accepted that his targets are not just at risk but currently unattainable. “As things stand now, we are not on track to meet them,” he admitted yesterday at this month’s Mayor’s Question Time session.

It was a stark concession from a Mayor who first declared a “climate emergency” back in 2018, brought his original 2050 net zero target forward by 20 years, and has taken a leading role in the C40 network of cities across the world taking forward climate action. Why is City Hall’s target looking unattainable, and what should happen next?

In truth, Khan’s 2030 target always looked like a stretch, relying substantially on action by central government along with encouraging individual Londoners and London businesses to make changes, particularly with heating and transport – swapping boilers for heat pumps and petrol or diesel cars for electric, as well as driving less.

Take “retrofitting”, now a key focus. This means insulating the city’s homes and fitting heat pumps in order to cut the amount of heating they require by 40 per cent. It is essential work, given that around a third of London’s carbon emissions come from its homes, but it’s also expensive.

Around half of the city’s social housing stock alone – council and housing association properties, including Right to Buy homes within blocks – needs to be retrofitted. That’s about 500,000 homes, representing one in seven of all homes in the capital.

Despite Khan promising a “retrofit revolution” in 2021, progress has been sluggish. According to figures from London Councils, the cross-party boroughs’ grouping, just 3,057 social homes were retrofitted in 2022. Meeting the 2030 target would mean increasing the rate of retrofit 15-fold, with a price tag of some £13 billion.

That sort of bill can’t be met by councils and housing associations on their own, and there’s general consensus that national government hasn’t stepped up to the mark. Funding has fallen short and been “stop-start”, according to the local authorities, with councils forced to spend time bidding for cash.

There’s also a shortage of trained people to do the work and a overall fragmented approach, not helped by Rishi Sunak’s administration rolling back deadlines, particularly in the run-up to the general election.

Homeowners too seeking to make their homes more energy efficient have faced a “maze of complex process, confusing regulation and high upfront costs” according to a report last year from the lobby group BusinessLDN. High electricity charges have eaten into cost-effectiveness as well, and there’s also the “hassle” factor. Retrofit can be a big job, and not necessarily seen as a priority without clear government messaging – and a reasonable financial incentive.

Following the change of government, greater Whitehall support is anticipated, including possible multi-year funding settlements for the Mayor and boroughs allocated by need rather than by bidding. This would support what Khan said on Thursday would be a “genuine retrofit revolution”. Energy secretary Ed Miliband has just announced that planning permission requirements which were deterring heat pump installation will be scrapped.

But could City Hall have done more? A report last September from Green Party Assembly member (AM) and now deputy party leader Zack Polanski suggested that although government investment in retrofit remained inadequate, Khan was also dragging his feet, on training and procurement particularly. Recent research for City Hall and London Councils was relatively damning too. It found there was still “no collective strategy” on retrofit across the city “or indeed a means of communicating and gaining consensus”.

Current arrangements, the research said, were resulting in an “unpredictable” pipeline of work, holding back supply chain development, and a “pepper-pot” of uncoordinated projects, with successful pilots generally “under-exploited” and no system for coordinating efforts.

The report’s recommendation that a new “London Office of Retrofit” should be set up, to coordinate and plan retrofit work city-wide, identifying funding, improving the supply chain and speeding up delivery, is now being taken forward by Khan and the boroughs. “All is not lost,” he told AMs yesterday.

Does a missed target matter? Dr James Richardson from Climate Change Committee told the Assembly’s environment committee last week that getting things done was more important, and there’s certainly a range of action underway. But a target too easily set aside risks undermining the credibility of the policy itself, particularly in an area like climate change which is increasingly contested.

Has the climate change agenda become over-technocratic too, even while the need to win support for action is widely acknowledged? Warnings from long-standing Labour AM Leonie Cooper seem pertinent: “I think there is a big issue about the language we use all the time as well, which I find very mysterious,” she said, adding that terms such as “net zero” were “phrases that a lot of people would not ever dream of using” in their ordinary speech. “I think we need to address that,” she concluded.

On climate action, time for a new battle for hearts and minds perhaps?

Watch 21 November 2024’s Mayor’s Question Time in full here.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support it for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Charles Wright on Bluesky. Photo from cover of Zack Polanski report.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: council housing, housing, net zero, retrofitting

Dave Hill: Can a ‘liveable’ London street become a forbidding precinct?

Some residents suspect that bold changes to traffic regulation on Tottenham Court Road have had unintended consequences
Dave Hill

Don’t yell at me. Don’t take offence. I’m just asking some questions in need of carefully-considered answers. My starting point is a fire that took place last Sunday night, halfway along Tottenham Court Road at its junction with Torrington Place. It wasn’t a building fire. It was, in part, a tent fire – the tent of a person with no home. Fitzrovia News reports that encampments of such tents have become a feature of the famous London street. This is, of course, a symptom of a social problem. It has also created one.

A year ago, at the north end of the road, 11 tents used by rough sleepers were removed from outside University College London Hospital (UCLH) premises on Huntley Street. The hospital had asked for this because of public health concerns. Then, over the summer, a public meeting was held at Tottenham Court Road’s American International Church, where local residents expressed disquiet about the newer settlement, the one where Sunday’s fire took place. One wrote to a Camden councillor about its effect on neighbourhood life.

“The ongoing anti-social behaviour exhibited by some of these individuals, including loud disturbances during late hours, public intoxication and threatening use of language, creates an environment of fear and anxiety for those going about their daily business.”

“Constant vigilance” had become normal when walking nearby, the author went on, with bicycle theft, graffiti and other delinquencies rife. The email continued:

“It is essential that Camden. along with the police, takes action to restore safety and peace for all residents an visitors to the neighbourhood. Otherwise, it is only a matter of time before someone is seriously injured.”

Serious injury was avoided on Sunday night, but only just. As well as a tent, a pile of rubbish burned and an electrical display board was damaged by the flames.

How did this whole situation come to pass? Rough sleeping in London has risen as a whole. And it is nothing new in this part of town: I recall seeing a row of tents on Euston Road by Warren Street station early one morning in 2020, on my way to an encounter with Rory Stewart.

And, of course, people who end up living on streets anywhere do so for a variety of reasons, among them housing shortages, mental health traumas, family breakdown, immigration status and addiction. But have particular local policies enabled it to flourish, along with a more general degradation of the street’s social environment?

One argument, guaranteed to start a road rage fight, is that Camden’s bold changes to Tottenham Court Road’s traffic rules have had some unintended consequences. Since March 2021, much of the street has been reserved for buses and bicycles between 8am and 7pm. This change was part of the council’s West End Project, which also saw the road become two-way, along with the parallel Gower Street.

The purpose of the scheme was to do away with a longstanding gyratory system, reduce the use of private motor vehicles, improve air quality and make the area more pleasant for residents and shoppers. The following year, a monitoring report by consultants Aecom said there had indeed been reductions in traffic on Tottenham Court Road and streets to its east, an increase in cycling and fewer fumes.

But have those successes had a downside? There is a view that taking private motor vehicles out of Tottenham Court Road has simply diverted it on to some others. As Fitzrovia News noted at the time of the Aecom report’s appearance, its study area excluded Maple Street, part of a patch to the west of Tottenham Court Road that one local person wryly describes as having become a “high traffic neighbourhood”.

Then there is the emptiness. Arguments for cutting traffic on streets with a retail function, which Tottenham Court Road has long had, typically maintain that reducing the noise and emissions of motor cars results in more people being drawn to their shops and cafés, the pavements bustling with greater life than before.

But what if instead the space starts feeling, at least at times, a bit eerie? A bit deserted? What if its new tranquility makes it more conducive to pitching a tent and fashioning a makeshift home, perhaps joining others already there and attracting more, accumulating detritus and possessions?

Suddenly, you have a pop-up settlement: a community of sorts, with a way of life, appetites and needs. It can constitute a market, one that drug-dealers compete to serve. Some of its members are helpless and harmless. Others engage in panhandling, public nuisance and petty crime. Suddenly, that vision of al fresco vibrancy starts to be compromised by a sadder, bleaker, more uneasy reality.

Once a tent cluster is established, what should be done about it? Camden learned the hard way that sympathy for the plight of rough sleepers can punish those who move them on. A furore followed the council’s involvement in clearing the street outside UCLH, where some had been living for many months. Social media footage spread and heart-rending stories were told. An admission of guilt was extracted. Sadiq Khan declared himself “appalled“.

In May, Camden was again criticised for removing rough sleepers from the doorstep of its own Town Hall. But could it really be expected to do nothing? If not, what was the right way to proceed? The council has reviewed its rough sleeper approach and recommendations have been made, but this problem won’t be easily solved, as Sunday night’s incident showed. It presents difficult dilemmas: do nothing on and around Tottenham Court Road and a “liveable” street ideal starts resembling a forbidding precinct; tolerate and service, and you might almost be founding a shanty town.

There are plenty of opinion about Camden’s policies for streets, often clashing and firmly held. Some believe there is a causal link between the removal of traffic from Tottenham Court Road and the perpetuation, perhaps the acceleration, of a general state of decline. The proposition is contested and difficult to prove. But as City Hall puts its mind to pedestrianising Oxford Street just round the corner, it should not be quickly dismissed.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support the website and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things that other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. Image from London Live.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Camden Council, crime, rough sleeping, Tottenham Court Road