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

Column: December 2018

The stories we tell about our own lives are the most important ones. The centenary of the end of the First World War served up a feast of stories and voices recently, the best coming from the ordinary people who lived through it. The Imperial War Museum's Voices of the First World War collection gave us a rare chance to hear at last from those who said nothing for so long after the 1914-1918 conflict. And in Peter Jackson's film They Shall Not Grow Old, an army of lip-readers toiled endlessly through silent film footage to work out what the battling young Tommies in the trenches were saying to one another.

Here on Golden Lane a small number of residents (myself included) have made a start on our own mission to remember, by gathering the stories of residents, in their own words, in their photographs and in the curiosities they have collected over the years. Altogether these often small and seemingly uninteresting things tell us a bigger story.

Over at the Barbican estate they are doing likewise. A new archive project just starting in conjunction with the Guildhall School, Laying the Foundations, aims to capture the history of the neighbourhood and its people. Golden Lane has been invited to join, too, so together we should be able to put post-war home life centre stage.

It’s a fair guess that the dusty corners of places like the Guildhall and the Bishopsgate Institute are already well stocked with the testimonies of former Lord Mayors, beadles, sheriffs and all the rest of the City’s ceremonial grandees. So it will be a pleasure be able to read and hear the memories of the residents, the office workers, the shopkeepers, the taxi drivers and the police officers.

This is where Laying the Foundations promises to fill the gap, by putting real people at its core. Barbican residents have already got off to a flying start in this ambitious plan. I’m told they have a secret stash of original (1965-76) fixtures and fittings from kitchens and bathrooms.

So Golden Lane has a bit of catching up to do. We already have in our collection a lot of vintage photos and architectural documents. And one or two senior residents have allowed us to copy items from their own personal stock, which contain such gems as old copies of the Golden Lane Journal and Club News from the late 1950s. Pictures from 1977 show serious-looking children in daft costumes doing their best to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Letters from locals describing the ground zero they saw when they emerged from air-raid shelters after the war bombing in 1940 put into context the citywide rebuilding of London that our estate was part of.

More of these stories will follow, but I especially must guard against my love of tall tales, because they will almost certainly rub up against the archivists’ rigorous codes of practice. Here’s hoping that the sensible people at Laying the Foundations and their partners at the London Metropolitan Archives can steer us in the right direction.

A good test for our seriousness is an unpublished memoir we’ve recently got our hands on, by Pat Moriarty, who lived on nearby Whitecross Street from the late 1950s. Pat made, and remains, friends with many of Golden Lane’s residents and her memories of the neighbourhood are vivid and tell a lot about life in the early days of the estate. In one section Pat describes the social progress of graduating from washouses and outdoor toilets to the fitted home comforts we now take for granted. The arrival of a launderette locally is greeted with rapture: “Then came a ray of sunshine in the greyness of this end of the street – the Sunlight Laundry, with its magnificent rising sun in blue and yellow covering the whole window.”

Good stories are irresistible, and the truth is often dull, but this is the kind of first-person account that gives community history a good name. It is an example worth following. Yes, I am still confident that one day I will crack the mystery of the Basterfield House resident who once slept with David Bowie. And I am itching to talk to the 90-year-old Great Arthur House resident who has a minor obsession with knickers. These stories fuel our imagination and feed our hunger for entertainment, but behind them stand more serious stories about lives lived locally.

Not that the 90-year-old can tell us very much at the moment, because recently she accidentally threw away her false teeth. Gum's the word.

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.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, edition 087