Last night at midnight, Sunday 13th October, Time was called for the final time at The George, Wanstead, as a Wetherspoons pub. There was a sense of occasion from the time we arrived at 10pm. It was packed and stayed that way til midnight when drinks were no longer served. The George Orwell portrait went missing at some point. I wondered what would happen to the maps and paintings of Wanstead Park with the local history information. I ended many a Wanstead Park stroll in the George. And although the pub will re-open under new ownership it will be as part of a more upmarket chain which will price out many of the regulars who had a second home at The George, particularly the older people who could sit there for a few hours with unlimited tea refills for a pound, or enjoy a cheap meal. Wetherspoons get a lot of stick (mainly for their owner’s support for Brexit) but their pubs provide a valuable community resource which will be sorely missed in Wanstead. It felt like a true end of an era. And good luck getting a pint at midnight on a Sunday in Wanstead now.
The Black Path is published by Three Imposters as part of the London Adventures series.
The shades of long-dead writers in the London streets, random meetings, quests and journeys striking lines across the city, the past seeping through the pavements, the unexpected erupting through the fabric of everyday life, glimpses of the fantastic in the ordinary: London Adventures can be any or all of these. John Rogers’ contribution to the series is a psychogeographical ramble along the Black Path, an old drovers and porters road from Walthamstow to the markets in the City, featuring pie and mash shops and pubs, Francesca’s Cafe and the Battle of Broadway Market, the London bodysnatchers, the violent origins of Haggerston Park and much, much more from the colourful history of an ancient route. Previous writers in the series include Iain Sinclair and Xiaolu Guo. Limited numbered edition of 250 copies. Price £10.00 Published by Three Impostors
London Adventures launch London Welsh Centre 29th March 2023
In February 1957 (On the Road was published in September 1957) Jack Kerouac boarded a ship from Brooklyn to Tangier in Morocco. He traveled back to the U.S via France and England. An account of this trip was published in Lonesome Traveler. Below is his record of his few days in London waiting to catch the boat train to Southampton.
“Outskirts of the city in late afternoon like the old dream of sun rays through afternoon trees. – Out at Victoria Station, where some of the students were met by limousines. – Pack on back, excited, I started walking in the gathering dusk down Buck-ingham Palace Road seeing for the first time long deserted streets. (Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.) – Past the Palace, down the Mall through St James’s Park, to the Strand, traffic and fumes and shabby English crowds going out to movies, Trafalgar Square, on to Fleet Street where there was less traffic and dimmer pubs and sad side alleys, almost clear to St Paul’s Cathedral where it got too Johnsonianly sad. – So I turned back, tired, and went into the King Lud pub for a sixpenny Welsh rarebit and a stout.
Site of the King Lud pub on Ludgate Circus
I called my London agent on the phone, telling him my plight. ‘My dear fellow it’s awfully unfortunate I wasnt in this afternoon. We were visiting mother in Yorkshire. Would a fiver help you?* ‘Yes!’ So I took a bus to his smart flat at Buckingham Gate (I had walked right past it after getting off the train) and went up to meet the dignified old couple. – He with goatee and fireplace and Scotch to offer me, telling me about his one-hundred-year-old mother reading all of Trevelyan’s English Social History. – Homburg, gloves, umbrella, all on the table, attesting to his way of living, and myself feeling like an American hero in an old movie. — Far cry from the little kid under a river bridge dreaming of England. – They fed me sandwiches, gave me money, and then I walked around London savoring the fog in Chelsea, the bobbies wandering in the milky mist, thinking, Who will strangle the bobby in the fog?’ The dim lights, the English soldier strolling with one arm around his girl and with the other hand eating fish and chips, the honk of cabs and buses, Piccadilly at midnight and a bunch of Teddy Boys asking me if I knew Gerry Mulligan.
Finally I got a fifteen-bob room in the Mapleton Hotel (in the attic) and had a long divine sleep with the window open, in the morning the carillons blowing all of an hour round eleven and the maid bringing in a tray of toast, butter, marmalade, hot milk and a pot of coffee as I lay there amazed. And on Good Friday afternoon a heavenly performance of the St Matthew Passion by the St Paul’s choir, with full orchestra and a special service choir. – I cried most of the time and saw a vision of an angel in my mother’s kitchen and longed to go home to sweet America again. – And realized that it didnt matter that we sin, that my father died only of impatience, that all my own petty gripes didnt matter either. – Holy Bach spoke to me and in front of me was a magnificent marble basrelief showing Christ and three Roman soldiers listening: ‘And he spake unto them do violence to no man, nor accuse any falsely, and be content with thy wages. Outside as I walked in the dusk around Christopher Wren’s great masterpiece and saw the gloomy overgrown ruins of Hitler’s blitz around the cathedral, I saw my own mission. In the British Museum I looked up my family in Rivista Araldica, IV, Page 240, Lebris de Keroack. Canada, originally from Brittany. Blue on a stripe of gold with three silver nails. Motto: Love, work and suffer.’ I could have known. At the last moment I discovered the Old Vic while waiting for my boat train to Southampton. – The performance was Antony and Cleopatra. – It was a marvelously smooth and beautiful performance, Cleopatra’s words and sobbings more beautiful than music, Enobarbus noble and strong, Lepidus wry and funny at the druken rout on Pompey’s boat, Pompey warlike and harsh, Antony virile, Caesar sinister, and though the cultured voices criticized the Cleopatra in the lobby at intermission, I knew that I had seen Shakespeare as it should be played. On the train en route to Southampton, brain trees growing out of Shakespeare’s fields, and the dreaming meadows full of lamb dots.”
This walk takes into a magical realm just off the hustle and bustle of Upper Street Islington as we take a walking tour around the streets of Canonbury. Ed Glinert described Canonbury as ‘The best preserved and most picturesque suburb in inner London’ (The London Compendium). In The London Nobody Knows, Geoffrey Fletcher wrote that to walk from Upper Street to Canonbury Square is to ‘move into an entirely different world’.
Here are some of the points of interest on the walk: Highbury Corner Upper Street Compton Terrace Union Chapel Compton Terrace Gardens Hope & Anchor Canonbury Lane Compton Avenue & Compton Arms Canonbury Square Estorick Collection 27b Canonbury Square – George Orwell 17a Canonbury Square – Evelyn Waugh Canonbury Tower Canonbury Place The Canonbury Tavern Willowbridge Road New River Path Marquess Estate Caldy Walk The Marquess Pub Essex Road – Station, Carlton Cinema, South Library, The Old Queens Head, The Winchester Cross Street Dagmar Passage, Dagmar Terrace – Little Angel Theatre St. Marys Church Kings Head Theatre St Marys Path Colebrooke Row – Charles Lamb Duncan Terrace – Douglas Adams Regents Canal – Islington Tunnel Noel Road – Joe Orton
Canonbury Tower
Further Reading: Canonbury Tower and Canonbury House Books: The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series by Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams, Prick Up Your Ears by John Lahr, The Orton Diaries ed. John Lahr, Orton the Complete Plays by Joe Orton
My previous experience of Paddington was simply as a place of transit, passing through to catch the westbound train to Devon. But I knew there was more to this historic area than Brunel’s steam age dreams and a cute Peruvian bear with a thing for marmalade sandwiches. Turning to my bookshelf I was surprised to find a chapter on Paddington in Discovering London Villages by John Wittich (pub 1976). The book contains chapters on the more traditional London villages: Hampstead, Chelsea, Highgate, Greenwich etc. Places people associate with the saying that London is a city of villages. But I’d never heard Paddington mentioned in the same way. How wrong I was. Or it could be that John Wittich lived in St. Michael’s Street, Paddington, as I discovered via the YouTube comments on the video.
St Mary’s ChurchyardSt Mary’s ChurchyardPaddington Green
Another unlikely source of commentary came from Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows (pub 1962), also a former Paddington resident. I always associate Fletcher with Islington, Clerkenwell and Camden and those streets around the Inns of Court. However Fletcher was enthusiastic about the charms of Paddington writing that, “I claim to write on it with authority, since I tramped nearly every inch of it when I lived in Gloucester Place and that reminds me of a characteristic London feature, the quick transition from a well-off to a seedy area at the drop of a hat. A single street becomes a sort of Mason-Dixon line of demarcation. You could spend a lifetime nosing round Paddington, and still make discoveries.”
Porchester Place
Fletcher paints a vivid scene, as well as one of his characteristic illustrations, of neighbourhood life around Star Street, Paddington. And despite the book being published in 1962, you can still feel the vibe that he described over sixty years ago. The plant pots are still on the windowsills as well. It was Fletcher who guided me from St. Mary’s Churchyard and Paddington Green with its Cold War concrete Civil Defence Report and Control Centre to Church Street Market on the other side of Edgware Road where he once picked up an early Turner drawing for a fiver. An antiques market lined the street. You could browse the scattered buffet of furniture, rugs, artworks, and bric-a-brac at leisure free from the crush of Portobello Market. It’s a real gem. Although I didn’t find any bargain art treasures like Fletcher claims to have done.
Connaught Square
I crossed over Edgware Road, back following John Wittich’s Paddington trail, particularly interested in the burial ground where Laurence Sterne had been buried, dug up by grave robbers, then re-buried. Wittich didn’t name the graveyard but someone posted the information about St George’s Fields in the comments, now a ziggurat style housing block but retaining some of the burial grounds and portions of the high double walls placed there to prevent resurrectionists lobbing corpses over.
The walk had to end at the site of the Tyburn Tree after a visit to the Tyburn Shrine – an analogue of Paris’ Mount of Martyrs (Montmartre) at the Hill of Martyrs (Tyburn). Although a tree may well have been the original site of execution, the Tyburn Tree was a terrifying gallows that could hang twenty-four people at a time. A truly grim marker in the London landscape.
Saturday night at Nottingham Station. The heavens opened and the rain lashed down. The over-excited Hen Night parties singing Abba anthems piled onto regional services to other cities.
On the way to the station we passed over the Nottingham Canal illuminated by a light installation.
