GRAVITY'S SUBURB

      I’ve been working on, and have very nearly finished, a book about Suburbia.  Before and between lockdowns I made a few expeditions, you might call them field trips, to various suburbs in England.  Most of this material will find its way into the book, but inevitably some of it ended up on the editing room floor.  Not being a man to waste effort or words, I thought I’d use a bit of it here, in much edited form.  

Here’s a description of a visit I made with my occasional drifting pal Jonathan Taylor to Staveley Road, Chiswick, London, W4, 

 

         Now read on:

 

Staveley Road is part of the Chiswick Park Estate, built in the late 1920s and early 1930s.  It’s a prime example of a well-to-do suburban street, as are many of the other streets nearby.  There are small front gardens, some of them surprisingly exuberant, some showing tropical influence, lots of yuccas and palm trees.  

 

And we saw this one neatly decked out with hardboard. I imagine it didn’t stay like that, but I’m not sure what they were up to.

 

         What sets Staveley Road apart is that it’s where the first German V-2 flying bomb, both a rocket, and a ballistic missile, landed and exploded at about a quarter to seven on September 8th 1944.  Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow has the time as 6.43.16 Double British Summer Time, which sounds wonderfully precise, though it may just be the precision of fiction.  We know for certain that three people were killed instantly: Rosemary Clarke, Sapper Bernard Browning, and Ada Harrison, whose husband William survived the immediate blast but subsequently died of his injures.

Other bits of information are harder to come by.   You can find sources that tell you 19 people were injured, others say it was 11 or 22.  Some sources will tell you that 6 houses, or 11 or 18, were completely destroyed and another 6 or 15 or 27 were severely damaged, in some cases so badly that they had to be demolished. The government of the day has at least some responsibility for the lack of clarity, done in the name of keeping up wartime morale. The official story was that a gas main had exploded, though of course the locals knew better.  Churchill didn’t even publically acknowledge the existence of the V-2 until he mentioned it in Parliament, in early November.

The truth is, I knew next to nothing about the V-2 before I read Gravity’s Rainbow, a book that has lived with me for a long time now, and I’ve since seen V-2s close up in a museum at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.  

 

         I knew there was a monument in Staveley Road, marking that first V-2 attack, but I’d been careful not to over-research it. I didn’t want my field trip simply to confirm what I’d already found and seen online.  Given that we were in deepest suburbia, I wasn’t expecting anything very Rococo or avant-garde but I was expecting a little more than I found. The monument looks like this:

 

A modest piece then, made more modest still by its siting on a tiny patch of ground in front of a chainlink fence that an electricity substation, with two mysterious mechanical lumps sitting on it.  The whole thing originally belongs to Scottish and Southern Electricity, and they donated the tiny patch of land where the memorial stands.

 

 It seemed a bit too modest, but what would I have preferred?  A scale model of a V-2?  A full size replica?  No, I can see the locals wouldn’t want anything like that in a suburban street.  But what about something by Tracey Emin?  Or perhaps more likely Jake and Dinos Chapman? They could surely have come up something suitable, or at least something that suited me: again the folks of Staveley Road might have thought otherwise.

 

However, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that perhaps the street itself and its continuing existence is a kind of memorial. Clearly it doesn’t look exactly the same as it did in 1944, much less the way it did in 1931, but it can’t be so verydifferent.  As so often in the suburbs, it was instructive to look at the older houses and observe how no two of them currently look exactly alike.  It’s the usual variations you find in any suburb; new porches, differing paint jobs, the additions of garages, extensions, loft conversions, but here it seems more significant.  You’d have a hard time telling which houses date from the original development, and which ones were built or rebuilt after the war as replacements for those bombed and demolished.  

 

         This living memorial of brick and mortar, wood and tile and glass, reveals an endurance, a consistency and stability, a continuation of daily domestic life that persists however much, and however harshly, it has to confront change, decay and destruction.  Of course if you were building a suburb today it wouldn’t look like this, this street is not timeless, it’s very definitely of its time, but it doesn’t seem particularly old-fashioned or quaint or retro.  Here are elements of suburban life that have in some sense remained constant for the best part of a century.  

 

         Jonathan was the ideal companion for this walk because he used to live in the neighbourhood.  He was able to direct us to this fabulous ice house in Grove Park, originally on the land belonging to Sutton Court Manor:

 

And afterwards we walked on to Chiswick Park and Gardens.  If you want obelisks, and we did, then this isn’t a bad place to look.  There’s this one:

 

and this one

 

         And as we wandered away from the scene of our drift we came to a quite amazing garden, complete with obelisk.  It is not exactly what the ancient Egyptians would have recognized as an obelisk, but as a piece of garden decoration it was outstanding.

 

WALKING DANKLY

Walking in the rain is a funny business - sometimes literal, sometimes metaphoric, sometimes imbued with pathetic fallacy, and definitely, apparently, a thing to write songs about.

The one I think of first is ‘Just Walkin in the Rain’ the one made famous by Johnny Ray, written by Johnny Bragg and Robert Riley while they were in Tennessee State Prison. Bragg supposedly said, "Here we are just walking in the rain, and wondering what the girls are doing." Riley thought there was a song in it, and he was right.

Just walking in the rain
Getting soaking wet
Torturing my heart by trying to forget.

Then the Ronettes, ‘Walking in the Rain,’ later covered by Jay and the Americans and indeed the Walker Brothers.

Though sometimes we'll fight, I won't really care
And I'll know it's gonna be alright 'cause we've got so much we share 

Like walking in the rain (like walking in the rain) 

The song is attributed to Barry Mann, Cynthia Weli and Phil Spector.  I don’t imagine Phil ever did very muchwalking in the rain, what with the wig and all, but like Briggs and Riley, as he currently sits or walks in jail, there must surely be moments when he wonders what the girls are doing, though I’m not sure which girls.

And of course, ‘The Sky is Crying’ – many, many versions  - but originally by Elmore James

The sky is crying,
Can you see the tears roll down the street. 

Well, yes, sometimes you can, and t’other day I did. For no very good reason, except my ongoing fascination with suburbia, I went off for a walk in Highams Park, in north east London, and to be honest a large part of the attraction was that I knew I’d have the pleasure of walking down Hollywood Way.

As you see, it was sunny when I started out – and of course there was plenty in the area to look at.

gnomes (well, one gnome)

topiary and yuccas

fine bungalows 

an equally fine concrete shed

streamlined bay windows, which are always a favorite of mine

But as you also see in that last picture, I hadn’t done much drifting before the rain came down (see ‘The Day The Rains Came’ made famous by the somewhat less famous Jane Morgan  ‘The day that the rains came down/ Mother Earth smiled again.’ Well yes and no.

From time to time it would pelt down and I’d run under a tree – no pennies from heaven there - then it would stop for a bit and I’d walk on and it’d pelt down again. If I’d had a specific destination in place I’d have continued but since I was just wandering it wasn’t long before I’d had enough.  My point of return was De La Warr Court.

Now obviously when you see the name De La Warr you think of the De La Warr Pavlion in  very vaguely resembles. 

The pavilion was named after Herbrand Edward Dundonald Brassey Sackville, 9th Earl De La Warr, and the first hereditary peer to join the Labour Party.  If he has any connection with Highams Park, I’ve not been able to discover it.

Incidentally, Hollywood Way has one small point of interest, it was the childhood home of jazz man John Dankworth. There’s a plaque to that effect.

In the course of a long career he recorded plenty of songs about rain, including, many of them with Cleo Lane from ‘Come Rain or Come Shine,’ to ‘Singing in the Rain.’  Rather fewer songs about walking.  And I do hope this was his car, not just a prop for the album cover:

ALL OVER IN DOVERCOURT

Back in the day, and it was a long day, I had an idea for a sort of travel book to be titled The Seaside in Winter.  The pitch was that I’d buy a camper van, a Volkswagen no doubt, and in the course of a long winter I’d travel around the coast of mainline Britain.  By day I’d walk and look and feel the wind and rain and icy chill, and in the evening I’d return to the camper, park up, and spend the evening writing up my notes from the day, which would involve reflecting on and savouring the bleak melancholy of deserted seaside spaces.  

I can still see how it might have worked but I never turned it into a proposal, because I also thought it might be recipe for doom.  ‘Promising melancholic young writer found dead by his own hand in VW Camper.’  That might have boosted sales a little, but it wasn’t enough.  Yet that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped enjoying the seaside in winter.

And so at the weekend I went to Dovercourt: north east Essex coast, next to Harwich, and the casual flâneur might be hard pressed to say where one town ended and the other one started.

Dovercourt is where Hi Di Hi was filmed, in Warner’s Holiday Camp, renamed Maplins for the show.  I wasn’t a regular viewer, but I don’t remember many scenes being shot outdoors, though evidently some were.

Dovercourt in late November had many of the things I thought would be components of my long lost book, even though I’m well aware that late November isn’t truly winter. There was the empty seaside shelter – with pro-Jesus and anti-Satan graffiti.

They’ve got two  19^th century steampunk(ish) lighthouses (no longer in use):

There was crazy golf – I would have played if the kiosk had been open:

And you know I love signs, not least this one, 

I think, and again I may be wrong, it’s warning you that you could be attacked by a blob of black ectoplasm rising from the beach and attacking you in the trouser region.  In general I think life requires a few risks, but I’m all in favour of being warned against that particular danger.

As well as being proper seaside, with groins, lighthouses and (rather small) stretches of beach, Dovercourt also has some serious suburbia, which of course I’m deeply attracted to.

Note how the two bungalows above are apparently mirror images of each other, but they have a different kind of pvc front door and a different kind of lamp adjacent to it.  That’ll make a house stand out from all the others, not that everybody in suburbia wants their house to stand out.

Anchors are another option:

So is a horse:

HANGING ON THE HILL

I went on an exploratory drift with my flâneuse pal, and walking tour guide Jen Pedlar (she guides for Footprints of London).  The expedition was all hers but I liked that, since it meant I was able to tag along without any sense of responsibility.  The walk promised the tunnels of Hanger Lane, various kinds of northwest London suburb and a good old cemetery. You can’t ask for more, can you?

We met at Hanger Lane tube station which is a remarkable thing above ground, like a very low budget flying saucer stranded in the middle of a gyratory system:

And below ground were the tunnels that looked like this.  

You could perhaps argue that these tunnels were actually a very complicated subway system, but one man’s subway is another woman’s tunnel. The various exits were colour-coded with tiles that had seen better days.

The tunnels seemed cheerful enough in the middle of the day - I mean not all THAT cheerful but I think they’d have seemed a lot less benign at one in the morning.

People like to say that London is a collection of villages, but we know it’s mostly a collection of suburbs, some much more appealing than others.  The first we came to on our walk was Haymills which was astounding, and in places astoundingly posh, a mix of architectural styles: mid-century modern, streamlined moderne, seaside moderne, and the just downright very fancy; a kind of super suburb. 

It was laid out around a series of concentric semi circles

much like the council estate in Sheffield where I grew up

but there the resemblance ended.

Then we wandered into the Hanger Hill Garden Estate, 

It’s a conservation area, and is by no means not posh, but compared to the other place it seemed modest, well comparatively modest.

I'm also pretty sure that it has the highest concentration of half-timbered buildings I’ve  ever seen.  

If local evidence is to be believed these houses, and some of them are converted into flats, are very popular with Japanese buyers and renters – by which I mean that an estate agency named Japan Services appears to be doing some very good business in the area.

And of course we saw all the things there that make suburban walking worthwhile.  A stray cat:

a Volkswagen Beetle: 

pampas grass: 

an inscrutable arrow carved into the pavement:

And when we got to the Acton cemetery we went to see the grave of George Lee Temple, the first man to fly a plane upside down (Who knew? – Well, Jen did.)  And while we were there, I was able to indulge my taste for obelisks.

That all adds up to a pretty good day’s drift.  

And you know, all the time I was walking through the Hanger Hill Garden Estate, I kept thinking about Osbert Lancaster’s illustration of Stockbroker Tudor.

To be fair to Lancaster and indeed to the Hanger Hill Garden Estate, the illustration doesn’t show a half-timbered house, it shows a fully timbered house.  The thatched garage is especially fine.