A Street in London W11

Six stops on the Hammersmith and City from Euston Square to Westbourne Park, up the stairs, along the bridge over the lines that run east to Paddington and west to Wales, Change at Didcot for Oxford, Change at Swindon for Gloucester and Cheltenham Spa. Turn right out of the yellow-brown station past the Extra! Extra! and the Metropolitan with its doors open to the smoky hole of sodden carpet, clink of glasses, shouts and murmurs. Right off the Great Western – the grind of the buses, the choke of diesel and the men on mopeds, doing the knowledge, weaving through the rush hour traffic with their clipboards tied to the handlebars – and into Tavistock Crescent.

Past the high wall of the nunnery a tall terrace of sooty yellow brick curves west and behind it the Westway with its eternal under-construction jackhammer pounding and roar of lorries and concrete mixers, Drifts of white and ochre cement dust. An overhead motorway on giant stilts is just there – behind the terrace, almost finished now.

The curve of houses, white-fronted with the stucco peeling off in slabs. No front garden just area steps and sometimes railings. Some vacant already, like rotting teeth in a bad mouth, shells boarded up against intruders. For this street is condemned, unfit, scheduled for demolition, slated for clearance, and its people removed. To be a rubble heap of floorboards, plaster and brick. An eyesore. Then gone. But now, the lights are coming on and curtains are drawn against the dull light of the street lamp. A glow of television. There’s a stereo cranked up. And someone is frying bacon. The sounds and smells of late afternoon for it is mild and windows and doors are open. 

Like a tide line in a city harbor, the world has drifted here. By necessity and choice. The frugal and the feckless. Whole families in single rooms staying respectable against the odds of rack-rents and unscrupulous landlords. The house proud waiting for new homes, keeping the basement area swept, net curtains, and here a box of sooty red geraniums on the step. Immigrants from the islands working the factory night shifts and London Transport and hats for church on Sundays. Saving money to buy house.

Irish navvies sharing rooms and working double shifts digging the Victoria Line. Good pay for hard work. Ninety pounds a week some said And every week money sent home and trousers tied up with string. Eddie, sentimental and homesick “I would cut off my right arm for you. I swear to Jaysus I would.” Dark beer and, on payday, whiskey with a barley wine chaser until the fight spills out of the pub on the corner and falling over into the street. “Tis alright, miss. We’re cousins. The eejit”

A refuge for those with nowhere else and a destination for the passing through transients of the end of an era. Derelicts, dealers, do-gooders, drop-outs and drifters; students and squatters, hustlers and hippies – the strung out, hanging out, washed-up residue of somewhere else. On the game, on the make, on something. Long-haired would-be mystics, and musicians trying to stay stoned. Mantras and macrobiotics.

The smell of evening cooking and leaves for, yes, there are trees in tight yards behind the houses. It is early October and the leaves drift with the fag packets and scraps of newspaper into the unswept gutters. 

All You Need is Dynamite

The air’s an autumn damp of old houses where the roof has caved and floorboards rotted. For this is North Kensington, Westbourne Grove – just up the road from the bric-à-brac and brown rice bustle of the fruit-and-veg end of the Portobello Road.

The poor and the destitute rubbing shoulders with the down-and-drop-out-by-choice psychedelic underground anarchy and activism of grunge and graffiti. Fight the fuzz. Deviants and druggies, the desired and the undesirable. Pill poppers, acid droppers, and dope smokers. Dennis has a prescription for anxiety and tickets for Pink Floyd. Dip your cigarette green in his cannabis tincture, burn off the alcohol, roll it in a Rizla and flaunt it. Paul – gaunt and strung-out – dead from an overdose in the top room. 

But that was summer.

And here, just before the corner with St Luke’s is number 34 – the stucco peeling the grandeur of the pillars and the stone steps crumbling. Across from the footbridge over the railway to Acklam Road. Across from the pub where Jane (Lesley Caron) told Terry (Mark Eden) that she is pregnant. (The L-Shaped Room 1962). Where Withnail and I (1987 set in1969) ordered “Two large gins. Two pints of cider. Ice in the cider” and cooked up the trip to the country.

It’s 1969 and long-term residents just now rehoused to a new maisonette nearby with no rising damp and crumbling ceilings. This is the house of the found and the lost. The house of Carnival. A house of stories and secrets. The house of the seven fables. 

But I am home and I have lessons to prepare. 

Withnail calls his Uncle Monty. And then they need to run for it.

The featured image is a detail of a photo that shows heavyweight boxing champion Muhammed Ali standing on the steps of 34 Tavistock Crescent on 15th May 1966. This was during his visit to the London Free School children’s playgroup at the home of Rhaune Laslett, an address known later known as the Neighbourhood Service. Ali was in London for his upcoming title defence against British champion Henry Cooper. (Photo by R. McPhedran/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)