Column: January 2019

It’s not unknown for disasters to strike towards the end of the year. Last year it was the December 23 eruption of the Anak Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia, which caused a deadly tsunami to sweep the coasts of Java and Sumatra. At the same time Mount Etna in Sicily was rattling the city of Catania and pumping out clouds of angry volcanic ash, threatening residents and holidaymakers alike.

Here on the estate, the demolition of the former Richard Cloudesley School came to a halt when a JCB accidentally fractured a gas pipe. Not an earthquake exactly, but tremors were felt just before it happened. All of the residents of nearby Basterfield House were evacuated to the local school. Medics arrived and investigations began as to how so many people came so close to disaster. Some days later, residents picked off their doormat a letter from someone in the City Corporation housing department offering a flimsy apology and a plea to not jump to conclusions about the cause of the incident. That particular horse had already bolted. Residents rightly believed they'd had a lucky escape so were stunned when work continued on the site soon afterwards with no guarantees of future safety or any indication that lessons had been learned.

The estate is currently in a vice-like grip of building work over which residents have had little say. It’s been dubbed ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. The Richard Cloudesley site is to become a monster residential tower block taller than Greater Arthur House, to be shared equally by City of London and Islington tenants, plus a primary school. One hundred metres down Golden Lane is the site of the former Bernard Morgan House, where another gigantic block, The Denizen, is under construction, this one offering suites of luxury apartments to rich overseas clients as an investment opportunity.

Nobody expects to see any of these new residents in the Two Brewers, Cliffords the barbers or shopping for lunch in Whitecross Street Market. They are expected to be invisible, which puts them alongside the estate’s resident heron. I wrote about this elusive bird some months ago, describing it as lurking hungrily around our revamped fish pond.

I’ve since learned that this was fake news, because the heron was in fact a fake heron, its skinny legs cemented into a concrete block. It eventually found a home, fittingly, in the shallow waters of the pond, but not for long because, as well as being gripped by development work, the estate is now enthralled by the 'Mystery of the Missing Heron'. Someone’s nicked it. There is said to be incriminating CCTV footage, but no one is quite sure where the camera's rewind button is, so the mystery remains an enigma wrapped up in a riddle.

All of this brings a lighter note to what are heavy times. The TOWIE rendition of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Barbican set the tone, and the Christmas Day funtime family tea party in the Golden Lane Community Centre added to the seasonal goodwill. It was a great success for yet another resident-led event, though I was quietly staggered by the number of very clever people who were unable to work out how to play bingo. They weren't much better when the quiz asked them to name the shop on Goswell Road next door to City Hardware.

The free raffle was a hit. I won six freshly-laid eggs from the chickens they keep at St Luke's Community Centre on Central Street. After that, not winning the luxury hamper was a disappointment I could live with.

I'm filing this column from Tenerife. The island doesn’t have many similarities to London (it is 23C), but there are a few. There is a north-south divide, the north being temperate, the south being hot and arid. Bang in the centre is an active volcano, Mount Teide, with its fabulous craggy lava-landscape that looks very like an artist's impression of the surface of Mars.

Tenerife has its fair share of controversial building projects, too. Close to where we stay in the quiet end of Los Cristianos (the south) is an apartment block some claim illegally breaches planning regulations; 200m away is a newly built parade of what were meant to be luxury shops. They stood empty for two years, then they were occupied by a ragtag group of counterculturals. Today the hippy colony is still hanging in there and the buildings look like they’ve found a niche in the local life of Los Cris. I'm sure these new residents are a headache for local planners and business people seeking a nice profit, but with luck their example will make the local power-brokers think a bit harder in future.

Billy Mann lives in Basterfield House on the Golden Lane Estate. He is a teaching assistant, a City of London Community Builder and blogs at scrapbookbilly.blogspot.com. Write to him at goldenlanegazette@gmail.com

An edited version of this column appeared in the newspaper City Matters, issue 089

Diary: December 2018

2 December 2018, Pangbourne
Sodden newspaper on metal bench at Platform 2 of Pangbourne railway station.

2 December 2018, London
Got these roughs from Hackney artist Coline L’Archiver. We did a jazz/art workshop at Headway last week with the aim of producing artwork that might appear on T-shirts for a jazz event. Mine is the crappy Letraset thing, a case of do it faster, make it better.

And this from Errol.


4 December 2018, London
On a 'Best of Ennio Morricone’ album is a fab version of 'Gabriel's Oboe’ from the film The Mission played on flute, guitar and pan-pipes.

6 December 2018, London
Message sent to Hackney artist Coline L'Archiver
“Many many years before I became an artist at the Submit to Love studio at Headway East London, I worked as a writer in the music press. One day, for some reason, I was invited to the retirement party of Jack Hutton, the managing director of the company I worked for. Jack was an old jazzer, so the party was at Ronnie Scott's in Soho. It was a lively event at which Jack made a speech. He told stories from his past as a young reporter, one of which was the occasion on which he interviewed John Coltrane. Jack finished his interview by asking Coltrane if he had any advice. Yes, answered the master, “Have sex and travel”. Only when Jack returned to the office and repeated his gem of a quote to a senior editor did he learn that “Have sex and travel” is a roundabout way of telling someone to “Fuck off!” Jack's unhappy brush with a legend was the inspiration for my typographical piece HAVE SAX AND TRAVEL. It is a small detail in the rich tapestry of jazz, but one that nevertheless always makes me smile.”

20 December 2018, London
At Headway today during Christmas lunch, SD told me a story from when he was a young boy in Birkenhead. While his mother was ill in hospital - dying from cancer as it came to pass - his father employed a woman called Rose as a home help. According to SD, this woman abused her trusted position to run up massive bills and even to pilfer the contents of the young SD’s plastic piggy bank. When his father came to check the contents of the piggy bank and found it empty, he blamed and scolded SD for spending it all on sweets. A smack around the head is what SD got when he protested his innocence. SD said I was the first person he had ever told that story to. Unfortunately, he started the story by describing Rose as his “nanny”, which led instantly to cruel jibes from me about SD’s fellowship with Jacob Rees-Mogg.

21 December 2018, London
Paula, Sean and Sue Howard came round for pizza and a viewing of the film Elf, which coincidentally stars both Lou Grant (Ed Asner) and Professor Proton (Bob Newhart). Sean’s treat as an 8-year-old was to talk to Alexa, and he wasted no time in getting familiar. But unlike the adults we have introduced to her, he did not treat her as a slave. He spoke to her politely, asking questions such as who was the first Roman Emperor and which was the heaviest dinosaur. Alexa was polite back, even to the extent of her response to Sean’s declaration of his love for her. “Wow!” she replied, “That’s very flattering.”

22 December 2018, London
Saw MH from GAH at the bus stop today. She said she had been unwell with a cold and had gone to get her hair cut to cheer herself up, but it didn’t work. She also told me that when her husband T was still alive (he died in 2016), they had given up buying each other Christmas presents because they had everything they wanted. Nevertheless, each year Ted still bought her some Chanel perfume. Since his death she has bought it for herself, but told me she rarely had much use for perfume “these days”.

22 December 2018, London
Merry Wives of Windsor at the Barbican Theatre. Roll together off-the-shelf, writing-to-order Shakespeare humour, Are You Being Served, ‘Allo ‘Allo, The Only Way Is Essex and Carry On Everything and you get the picture. Great Christmas fun. It made me want to re-read all of Shakespeare’s comedies.

23 December 2018, London
In the 'paper' today. Labour leadership under pressure over Brexit.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/23/labour-leadership-is-at-rock-bottom-wont-be-forgiven-for-conniving-in-rightwing-brexit

28 December 2018, London
There is a coffee bar in Farringdon that does not take cash. I remember when it was difficult to pay by card. Retailers were suspicious. Card-reading machines were rare and banks did not repay the money very quickly.

30 December 2018, Los Cristianos, TenerifeColour combinations. Pink and grey has long been a favourite for me. The grey clouds and the pink sunset here at Paloma Beach is mesmerising. Add a pristine sky blue to those colours and the effect is sublime.