Don’t worry, be happy
Now that our community centre has closed temporarily for refurbishment, meeting places for residents are scarce. This makes us more than ever indebted to Sir Ralph Perring.
Sir Ralph was Lord Mayor when our estate was completed in 1962 with the addition of Crescent House. He was a master of both the Worshipful Company of Tin Plate Workers and the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers.
His memory lives on in the Ralph Perring Centre, a former nursery next to the Golden Baggers allotment and children’s playground. The centre is home to the Ralph Perring Club for senior residents and former City workers. The club has been meeting for social activities since the mid-1960s.
The building has also now been pressed into service as a makeshift civic centre for City and residents’ events. In June it was a community cafe for Open Garden Squares Weekend, and right now it is hosting a Corporation-backed Action for Happiness programme of eight weekly sessions exploring “What Matters”, the Dalai Lama way to a stress-free existence.
Community cafe
At the first session we started with a Mindful Minute, which is always useful, if only to stop the noisy nattering. Then we were asked to think about Happiness and what it really means. Next came a YouTube TED talk by Richard Layard, professor of Wellbeing at the London School of Economics. This got us chatting in small groups about issues such as Trust, Contentment and childhood experiences, good and bad. If all this sounds a bit wet and hipsterish, it is. But at a time when mental-health problems have hit epidemic proportions, anything’s worth a try. It was, at least, a positive experience that each member of the group could take forward and build on.
Grout season
In April 2015, the wall tiles on Stanley Cohen House on Golden Lane began to fall off. Scaffolding was erected and all the outward appearances of a repair job started… then stopped. The building is Grade II listed, so no repair is straightforward. English Heritage has to tick its boxes, and wall tiles from B&Q are not on their list of approved materials. While decisions were being made about where best to buy the replacement tiles, what looked like black plastic bin bags were nailed to the walls as a “safety precaution”. So, for around two years Stanley Cohen House has looked like a distressed polytunnel. Only now have new tiles been sourced from Spain and scaffolding is once again in place. This is cause for great celebration and, fingers crossed, very soon the bin bags will be but a bad memory.
Human writes act
Getting a couple of Banksies in the neighbourhood was cool enough, and now the Fann Street side of Bowater House has been turned into an art installation, ‘Spectres of Modernism’, by “Turner Prize winners” protesting the Taylor Wimpey development of Bernard Morgan House opposite into ghost homes for rich overseas clients. But there is something unsatisfactory about this feted project. It looks too studied, and the slogans all seem to try very hard to be clever. The banners are also neat and tidy, so unlike most of the Bowater residents I know.
All guns blazing
It is a running half-joke that on any working day there are more vegetarians in the City than residents (my bad-maths calculation puts the vegetarian/resident ratio at around 5:2). The numbers game gets even more exciting when you try to find a resident who is also a vegetarian. Reader, I married her, and most Sundays we repeat the same fruitless mission to find a pub that serves a decent veggie roast dinner. Thankfully, the Artillery Arms in Bunhill Row is blazing the trail with a well-pitched menu that includes a meat-free Sunday slap-up. Add a good range of Fuller’s and guest beers and you have the recipe for a proper lazy day.
We all want to change the world
This year's centenary shenanigans for the Russian Revolution have not exactly gone off with a bang here on the estate, but 2017 is not over yet. On 22 October, the Great Chamber at The Charterhouse will deliver a piano/cello/viola concert featuring the post-revolutionary work of Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich and Prokofiev alongside crazy experimental jazz by Nikolai Kapustin. If that doesn’t spark any riots in your soul, pour yourself a large vodka and settle into a chapter of Onion Domes On Golden Lane, a ripping memoir-blog by one of my Basterfield House neighbours that both comments on contemporary Russian life and recalls evocatively the highs and lows of a young British woman working in the Moscow theatre of the 1990s (clementinececil.blogspot.com).
A joke from our estate office
“A friend of mine invented the cold-air balloon... but it never really took off.”
