CHELSEA MOURNING

Well, my billeting in Chelsea is about to come to an end.

It’s been a good time, and of course I make friends wherever I go, but I never got over the feeling that I wasn’t quite Chelsea material.  Few are.

When I arrived there was a place nearby in Kings Road called the Diva Café – it has now become Bye Bye London. 

I haven’t been in there since the change of name. As you may guess from the sign, it’s an Arabic restaurant, specifically Kuwaiti, and I don’t quite understand what the man on the sign looks so cross about. 

Meanwhile a little way up Kings Road there’s shop called London Bonjour, selling 'eyewear' (kids, that's what we used to call glasses!) and I’ve never been in there either but the name does seem a little more welcoming.

And here are one or two other sights I've seen while wandering around Chelsea.

HOLLYWOOD TO GO

As I bounce around from Airbnb to hotel to people’s spare rooms, I have to consider the possibility that this makes me an e-nomad.  If so, it’s a damn exhausting way of life, although it does mean that you’re regularly arriving in some new place with plenty of options for walking, and “the exploration of a fixed spatial field” (as M. Debord would have it), and also of course for disorientation.  I get gently lost pretty much every day.

And it so happens that I’ve briefly ended up in a flat in Harcourt Terrace SW10, between Fulham Road and Old Brompton Road, an area which might possiblybe thought of as Chelsea, though the nearest Tube station is Earls Court.  Either way it’s a fairly swanky area, but here’s the thing for a man who sometimes styles himself as a Hollywood Walker: if you walk south down Harcourt Terrace, it suddenly becomes – now wait for it - Hollywood Road.

There’s a Hollywood Lodge:

These people are staring into Hollywood Mews, which has a very nice font:

There’s a salon offering Hollywood Hair and Nails:

There is even the Hollywood Arms, a pub that’s been there since 1865:

None of this, naturally, has much in common with the Californian Hollywood: there’s money there, but there’s also muck. Finding signs of patina and decay is a quite a job in this bit of London – but as I pounded the streets I did feel quite cheered when I saw this ghost sign:

It’s a former showroom for Metcalfe and Mundy who, I discover, were the sole Borgward concessionaires for the whole country.  

Borgward were good looking cars but they went out of business in 1961 (though the brand has recently been revived) so this is one very old surviving sign.  Fortunately Metcalfe and Mundy didn’t have to rely only on the Borgward.  They did a pretty nice line in Aston Martins too.