Chronicles of a Newly Published Author

 Petticoat lane in east London and an immigrant's memory-building

Photo by Deborah Jaffe

“Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.” Zadie Smith, “Intimations”

More than being overheard, we writers hope that our readers will eavesdrop on our conversations. Even when there’s no other interlocutor but our reflection on the mirror. We don’t want to be read by accident, but with intention. So, yes, please, come closer and place that glass on the wall.

Memory-building works in different ways. Years after I visited Spitalfields Market and Petticoat Lane, I ended up cycling down the latter in my first shift for the Felix Project as a volunteer. By them I’d been in London for twenty-one years.

For almost a decade I was a volunteers’ manager, amongst other roles. First, at Enfield Arts Partnership, in Edmonton, and after that, at the Field Federation of Churchfield and Houndsfield Primary Schools, also in Edmonton. Along the way, I learnt the value of volunteers’ selfless contribution to society. Long before Eton-educated, twenty-five-grand-shed-owner David Cameron’s ill-conceived, opportunistic “big society” idea, I had already seen evidence of communities coming together for no other interest than to improve the lives of the many.

Eventually it was my turn to become a volunteer. It all started in 2012 with a local group, Bountagu (a portmanteau of Bounces Road and Montagu Road in Edmonton, Enfield), a Big Local-funded project that sought to tackle various pressing issues. It, then, continued behind the mike at East London Radio, co-presenting different shows and leading one, “The Marathon Man”. Since 2018 I have been volunteering for the aforementioned Felix Project, hoisting a heavy, Deliveroo-style bag onto my back and cycling from café to café, restaurant to restaurant, or supermarket to supermarket, collecting unwanted food in good condition in order to re-direct it to where it’s needed most.

That’s how Petticoat Lane (or “The Lane”, as it’s known by locals) and I reconnected. The market on Wentworth Street runs six days a week and the one on Middlesex Street (word has it that the street changed its name from Petticoat Lane to Middlesex Street in the 1800s to spare the blushes of virtuous Victorians who couldn’t deal with the thought of underwear) operates only on Sundays. In regards to the latter, it is said that one of the reasons for its presence is the influence of the Jewish community. Since Saturday is their Sabbath, it makes sense for them to shop on a Sunday.

That’s how we build our memories. That’s how we take pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. That’s how one day we catch ourselves talking to ourselves.

And you reader, yes, you, you are more than welcome to place that glass on the wall and eavesdrop on our conversation.

Around London's Magnificent Seven

Brompton Cemetery and Kensal Green: flipsides of a royal coin

The irony of it. I’d already been to Brompton Cemetery, but never inside Brompton Cemetery.

London works in mysterious ways. How many times have I cycled or walked on Fulham Road? Usually on my way to or from Stamford Bridge (never to a game, though. Can’t afford the ticket prices. But I’ve been to a couple of events there and, of course, to the shop).

What I’d never realised was that one of London’s Magnificent Seven was right next door to the Bridge. Many years ago, I stopped at the entrance to the cemetery on the Fulham Road side to fix something on my bicycle (you can also access the graveyard from Old Brompton Road).

What first catches the visitor’s eye is the layout. A road called Central Avenue threads its way southwards straight past regularly spaced colonnades and the Great Circle until it reaches the chapel.

The affluence of the neighbourhood Brompton Cemetery sits in is reflected in the many notable people buried here. From women’s suffrage movement leading activist Emmeline Pankhurst, to the “Lady Gaga” of the 1920s, Marchesa Luisa Casati, you’ll find plenty of several famous residents here.

Brompton Cemetery is also an architect’s dream of a place. Or that of a student of architecture. Or even an art student’s. Today I spot a couple of people sketching the columns in the Great Circle.

The café is a welcome stop. I’m in need of a sugar boost. What with this September day being hotter than your average August one. A warm, but much-needed breeze caresses my face as I rest my bones for a few minutes before saddling up and carrying on to my next stop: Kensal Green.

I come out directly onto Kempsford Gardens, turn left onto Warwick Road and ride all the way up, Ladbroke Grove-bound.

As a city, London has a peculiarity that I feel puts it in a category of its own. However, my lack of world-travelling experience stops me from making conclusive, conversation-ending comments. For instance, I’m unable to make comparisons with any other major metropolis, where perhaps, a similar situation plays out.

In the British capital it’s not uncommon to find social housing estates (or council estates) within spitting distance of well-off areas. I lived in Edmonton, Enfield, north London, for many years. The area had (still has) a reputation for being rough. Yet, it was within walking distance of Winchmore Hill and Bush Hill Park, two neighbourhoods that could comfortably be labelled as middle-class.

The Royal Borough of South Kensington and Chelsea is different. There is a stark contrast between the moneyed southern part (mostly hundred-thousand-pound houses and million-quid mansions) and its multicultural, migrant-heavy northern counterpart. A bicycle journey between two of London’s Magnificent Seven, Brompton Cemetery and Kensal Green, is evidence of this.

As soon as you turn left from Holland Park Avenue onto Ladbroke Grove, the scenery changes. What were tree-lined streets before becomes a compact mass of people walking up and down the busy roads. It doesn’t help that this next stage of my tour coincides with school pick-up time. Throngs of children and their parents/carers mill about. Either waiting for lights to change or for buses to arrive.

Ladbroke Grove’s tarmacked surface carries a painful reminder for me. It was on this road that I pushed my bicycle down to the site of Grenfell, where a fire had broken out on Wednesday 14^th June, 2017, in the early hours of the morning. A few days after, Saturday 17^th June, I pedalled down the Regent’s Canal towards Notting Hill. I wanted to help out. I wanted to show the survivors that they mattered, that this part of London mattered. That they were in our thoughts and hearts. That like many of them, many of those who died, this immigrant could have faced a similar fate (I, too, used to live in a high-rise).

Pedalling up Ladbroke Grove today, I recall a few lines from a poem written by the Vicar of St Clement Church, Alan Everett, for the victims of the fire:

Forced to watch
Lights at the windows
Torches
Of those who were still alive
For the time being
Signalling
Desperate faint hope
Until floor by floor
The darkness snuffed them out.

The oldest of London’s Magnificent Seven, Kensal Green is also the city’s oldest commercial cemetery. For birdwatchers, the graveyard is heaven on earth. It was declared a conservation area in 1984 and boasts rare flora and fauna.

With seventy-two acres covering the area between the Grand Union Canal and Harrow Road, this is a place worth more than a visit. I’ve already been twice and it’s likely I’ll come again.

153 monuments are included in the National Heritage List for England at Grade II* or Grade I. No wonder Kensal Green has a lot to shout about. Some of those buried here include novelist Anthony Trollope, Lord Byron’s wife and the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

With only an hour to spare, I get back on my bicycle and head for my final destination: Highgate Cemetery. Sadly, I get there at quarter to five and last admission is at half four.

Of London’s Magnificent Seven, Highgate is the only I’ve never visited. There are two sides (although if you’re only interested in paying your respects to Karl Marx’s grave, it’s the East Cemetery you need to go to). There’s an entrance charge, which is eight pounds fifty if you only want to visit the East Cemetery and a tenner if you want to include the architecture-rich west side, too.

I get back on my two-wheeler and make my way back to Abney Park, where this tour started. Hard to believe that the sun is still shining brightly and that the hoodie I brought with me (you can never be too sure when it comes to the highly unpredictable London weather) stayed in my pannier. As I cycle down Stoke Newington Church Street, I’m already thinking of my next adventure. By bicycle, of course.

Around London's Magnificent Seven

 West Norwood: a Gothic cemetery with a touch of the millionaire about it

Halfway through what is an exceptionally warm September day, it occurs to me that my attraction for cemetery parks is as much about their history as it is about my disappointment with London’s modern architecture.

As I cycle away from Nunhead Cemetery on Linden Grove, I think of Rowan Moore, The Observer’s architecture critic, and his opinion on many of the capital’s latest vertical additions. One of his more recent pieces dealt with 22 Bishopsgate, a monster of a building at 278 metres high, located a stone’s throw from Liverpool Street.

Moore asks two questions: the first one being, is there such a thing as too big when it comes to such buildings? And the second one is, is so much space needed at a time when remote working and the altered habits of the pandemic might conceivably reduce the demand for conventional office space?

I’m not interested in the second question. It is the first one that has troubled me for almost as long as I’ve been in Britain. 22 Bishopsgate comes only second to the 310-metre Shard in the race to be the tallest building in the UK. Throw in the Gherkin, the Grater and Nine Elms Vauxhall (in reality, the complex sits between Battersea and Vauxhall) and for the last fifteen, sixteen years, we have been looking up most of the time in central London.

The effect of this new trend is that the traditional, low-rise design I came to love so much when I first relocated here is finding less and less urban space. Most architects want to build up, not across. Or, if they build across, they still want to go up. Perhaps, that’s why I feel attracted not only to London’s Magnificent Seven, but also to its parks, green areas and (low rise) estates.

Another reason why I dislike the Shard, the Gherkin et al, is that they all smack of money. This is the new London of overseas investors, dark, fancy, empty flats at night (a lot of property is bought but not occupied) and poor doors (the segregation of inner-city upmarket apartment blocks). No, thank you very much, but that’s not for me. I’d rather hang out in the rundown area in and around Bethnal Green than bloody One Commercial Street.

The world’s first Gothic-style graveyard, specific-designed West Norwood sits on a hill. After a pleasant ride down Dulwich Common (great road infrastructure), I pull up just outside this “Millionaires’ Cemetery”. The reason for the moniker is the number of high-quality mausolea and memorials.

At first sight the formerly known South Metropolitan Cemetery has more in common with Nunhead than with both Tower Hamlets and Abney. Its paths are tidy, its landscaping manicured and its architectural gems clearly signposted. I wonder what autumn here will look like. It must be a festival of colour with so many trees (oak and lime amongst others) providing much-welcomed shade right now. Grade II-listed West Norwood boasts great biodiversity as well. Bats, woodpeckers and tawny owls have found a home here. In addition, a £4.6m awarded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund in 2019 will help restore historic monuments and secure the graveyard’s future for years to come.

Amongst the people buried here, some names are familiar: Baron Julias de Reuter, who went on to found the well-renowned Reuters agency and Sir Henry Tate, founder of the Tate Gallery.

With the sun just past its zenith, I saddle up again and head for the river, this time to cross it back northwards. The next stage of my bicycle journey will take me to two cemeteries in the same borough. Yet, the areas they sit in couldn’t be more different. This is the London many tourists don’t know about. The one where a door can lead the visitor through a hotel-style lobby, whilst another one will take them to a social housing development.

Around London’s Magnificent Seven

Nunhead: from hamlet to architectural gem

The first few days of the ninth month of the year are meant to usher in change. This change is of a slow nature and transition, though. It’s as if summer has trouble vacating its room and autumn is too lazy to move in. The unexpected weather situation plays out in people’s choice of clothes. Instead of long-sleeved tops and hoodies, we have vests, cropped tops and the odd bare-chested, beer-bellied bloke on display on the Regents Canal towpath.

I decide to take the longer route to Nunhead Cemetery; down the canal, Limehouse Basin-bound, instead of the faster and more direct one down Whitechapel and Mansell Street. I’m in no hurry and could do with a break from motorised traffic.

It’s logical that as a cyclist my eyes are fixed either on what’s ahead of me or on the ground. Factor in regular shoulder checks behind me and what this means in reality is that I miss a hell of a lot of what goes on above.

The end of summer signals migration for many birds. Whilst I’m still none the wiser when it comes to our winged friends (this was my homework from the first lockdown and I never got around to completing it), I’m aware that swallows are about to head south once more.

Still riding as carefully as I can, I scan the skies above me every now and then. There are no signs of swallows, or swifts (I often confuse the two). A V-shaped skein of geese passes me overheard, its quasi-military flypast formation a beauty to behold.

What I do notice is the long, white trail of a plane on the cloudless sky. A rare sight just a year ago, these other birds (of a metallic winged nature) are making a quick return to our airspace.

Over the walls of a school on the banks of the Regents Canal, I hear laughter. It’s the sort of laughter that makes me nostalgic for those eleven plus years I worked in primary schools. There’s no sweeter sound to make my heart sing than that of children playing during morning break or at lunchtime, making up their own games, giving a makeover to others or bringing back old ones.

I leave the off-road path and join the westbound traffic on the A1203. Again, I’m surprised by the amount of vehicles on the road. It’s not even noon yet, however it’s a horns-beeping and free-fumes-for-all motor festival here in east London.

Cycling over Tower Bridge and heading south of the river, I wonder (not for the first time) how Londoners feel about the Thames. I was born by the water. The sea was a few minutes away from my flat in Havana. And polluted though the water is, we love sitting by it, on the Malecón (seawall), declaring our love to it. Away from it, almost every single habanero I know feels nostalgic for the sea. But a river is not the sea. The vastness of the latter is limited by the banks of the former. At the same time, this city’s history is closely linked to water. The first settlements were based near the Thames. The current site of the City of London is the original Londonium, named so by the invading Romans who made their way along the river.

We must also take into account the sheer size of London. Would someone living in the sticks (say, Barnet or Bromley) feel the same way about the Thames as someone living in Greenwich or Westminster? Propinquity tightens bonds, in my opinion. A closeness that Wilfred Owen’s ghost feels himself in the poem “Shadwell Stair”, as he moves “along the wharves by the water-house/and through the cavernous slaughter-house”.

Built in 1840, like Abney and Brompton cemeteries, Nunhead was a small village surrounded by market gardens and open fields. Unlike five of the other “magnificent seven” (Highgate Cemetery sits on a hill), Nunhead rises to two hundred feet above sea level at its highest point. On a clear day, in the distance you can see the City of London and its (ugly, in my opinion) all-domineering, towering high-rises, St Paul’s Cathedral and even Alexandra Palace.

The silver lining for the graveyard, especially for its trees and wildlife, came in the 1960s and 70s. Unable to earn any revenue from the grounds, the United Cemetery Company left it to its own devices. Nature took over and the cemetery changed from lawn cemetery to meadow and woodland. Bird species include green woodpeckers, tawny owls and ring-necked parakeets. Amongst the trees, specimens include the horse chestnut, the gingko and the oak.

Nunhead has three Grade II-listed buildings: the two gate lodges and the Anglican Chapel. The latter was destroyed by an arson attack in 1976. Thanks to a Heritage Lottery Fund the building was refurbished and made safe and accessible to the public in 2001. It is nowadays used for theatre and music performances.

As I unlock my bicycle outside Nunhead I hear fluttering overhead. I look up and I think I see a couple of swallows criss-crossing the air. But, then, again, they could also be swifts. You never know. And I’m none the wiser.

Around London’s Magnificent Seven

Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park: not just a burial ground for the East End’s working class.

My early morning cycle ride to Abney Park sets me up for the journey ahead. Carrying on to Mile End, my body welcomes Hackney’s flat terrain. Not too much exertion yet.

At the bottom of Globe Road I turn left onto Mile End Road in order to continue my journey towards Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. I’m now on the previously much-maligned Cycle Superhighway 2. Hard to believe that it was only a few years ago that this long road, running from Aldgate East to Stratford, was nothing more than a blue strip with no dividing line  between motor vehicles and bicycles.

The difference between then and now couldn’t be starker. At present an off-road, segregated lane snakes almost all the way eastwards.

I fall behind a head-down, traffic-charging, heavily tattooed fellow cyclist. “Fellow” might be stretching it a bit. With his brake-free, fixed-wheel track bicycle, he belongs to the sort of tribe for whom purity in cycling is all that matters. A frame, two wheels, pedals, handlebar and seat (D-lock hanging from his rucksack, of course). That’s it. Who needs my seven gears when his own muscular legs can propel him anywhere he wants to go?

His D-lock becomes a blur before I go over the canal. I’m now in Tower Hamlets, home to the largest Bangladeshi community in the UK. Saris are a common sight and I immediately think of Sujata Bhatt’s poem “My Mother’s Way of Wearing a Sari”. I still remember a few lines but I will have to look up the rest when I get home.

These days

in the darkness,

broken up by the moon’s

almost full brightness, before dawn

my mother rises

and in this room without a mirror

in this room where we all sleep together

she turns away from the windows-

her glass bangles pushed up, away

                   from her wrists

so they are motionless on her arms

                                      soundless-

In the darkness she finds her sari

and begins to wrap it around

her waist – her right hand is firm

and fast and moves like a fish

fanning in and out of the waves-

                   blind, mute,

her hand zigzags making pleats

so fast I cannot count them

By the time I enter Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park the sun has inched further up on the cloudless sky. I’m beginning to feel the effect of this early September’s Indian summer.

Unlike other members of the Magnificent Seven (Highgate, Abney and Kensal Green, for instance) THCP is not a celebrity-magnet. In fact, this cemetery almost ceased to exist in the mid-to-late 60s. At the time the Greater London Council (GLC) decided to clear the graveyard in order to make way for a brand new park.

The GLC’s plans hit a wall when many local residents, whose relatives were buried here, voiced their disapproval. The idea was shelved, but not before a section of the grounds was cleared for the intended park.

Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park’s proximity to the Docklands might be an explanation for the number of sailors interred here. Many of them lie in unmarked public graves.

Like Abney Park, THCP has a scruffy look. Paved paths and bush-covered trails share space equally. Personally speaking, I love it. The grounds have an air of wilderness about it. Plants and flowers grow almost undisturbed and species vary between woodland and meadow.

There’s however a sad story behind THCP’s “rough” look. During the Blitz, the Luftwaffe targeted the aforementioned Docklands (the Thames being a centuries-old major trading and shipbuilding area) which resulted in the East End being left in ruins. Many homes were left uninhabitable, shops and local business destroyed and a third of London’s docks wrecked. Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park suffered a similar fate unfortunately.

Trivia moment of the day. I learnt recently that one of the graveyard’s most famous memorials belongs to Joseph Westwood. This man ran a shipbuilding company. Eventually the company became known as Thames Iron Works. Some of the employees put a football team together. With the passing of time, the football team became West Ham United FC. The team’s origins are still referenced in nicknames such as “The Hammers” and “The Irons”.

Reaching-out me would have loved to share this information with my “fellow” track bicycle rider, but I doubt he’d have stopped to listen. It looked as if he had places to rush to, his D-lock hanging from his rucksack as he disappeared in the distance.

One-Minute London Cycle Diaries

London Cycle Diaries is both a cycle-based and cycle-orientated series aimed at "discovering" hidden spots in London from the saddle of my Raleigh.

London Cycle Diaries (The Surrey Canal Path)

London Cycle Diaries is both a cycle-based and cycle-orientated series aimed at "discovering" hidden spots in London from the saddle of my Raleigh.



© 2017

Next Post: “Grenfell Tower”, to be published on Wednesday 21st June at 6pm (GMT)