Lambeth Walk 2005
.
I live a short stroll away from the famous Lambeth Walk.
.
The Lambeth Walk is famous because it featured in a catchy music hall song of the same name before the Second World War. During the War the song was made even more famous by a British propaganda film showing clips of Hitler and Goering jerking backwards and forwards in time to the music. A photograph of East End kids playing in the street, 'doing the Lambeth Walk', later became an iconic image and enhanced the street's fame.
.
The Lambeth Walk was home to a busy market and located at the heart of a warren of narrow streets and Victorian working class terraced houses. Old pictures of the area look, to contemporary eyes, quaint and charming. However, after the war, the entire district was considered to be a Victoria slum eyesore by rich people who didn’t live there. These rich people arranged for an entire swathe of South London, including the Lambeth Walk, to be demolished and replaced with nice shiny modern high rise developments.
.
To describe the resulting landscape as a desolate urban sh*t hole would be an insult to self-respecting desolate urban sh*t holes everywhere. Actually, even though the modern Lambeth Walk is bleak, scary and sad, it is considerably less bleak, scary and sad than nearby Lambeth High Street. You really have to see it to understand. Presumably Lambeth High Street was once the commercial centre of Lambeth and lined with thriving shops, market stalls and such. Now there is nothing along it at all. Nothing.
.
The area probably touched bottom in the mid 1990's and the first signs of creeping yuppification are evident. The Lambeth Walk is extremely well-situated and a stone's throw from Westminster. The first new luxury flats sprouted up a few years ago. Give it another ten years or so, after the existing population has died from old-age, alcoholism, heroin overdoses and stab wounds and the area will be fully redeveloped. The same kind of people who butchered the district in the 50s, 60s and 70s will reconstruct some kind of kitsch homage to the myth and quietly forget about that embarassing interlude between 1945 and 1995. You won’t recognise the place. In the meantime it's dodgy. Very, very dodgy.
.
I live a short stroll away from the famous Lambeth Walk.
.
The Lambeth Walk is famous because it featured in a catchy music hall song of the same name before the Second World War. During the War the song was made even more famous by a British propaganda film showing clips of Hitler and Goering jerking backwards and forwards in time to the music. A photograph of East End kids playing in the street, 'doing the Lambeth Walk', later became an iconic image and enhanced the street's fame.
.
The Lambeth Walk was home to a busy market and located at the heart of a warren of narrow streets and Victorian working class terraced houses. Old pictures of the area look, to contemporary eyes, quaint and charming. However, after the war, the entire district was considered to be a Victoria slum eyesore by rich people who didn’t live there. These rich people arranged for an entire swathe of South London, including the Lambeth Walk, to be demolished and replaced with nice shiny modern high rise developments.
.
To describe the resulting landscape as a desolate urban sh*t hole would be an insult to self-respecting desolate urban sh*t holes everywhere. Actually, even though the modern Lambeth Walk is bleak, scary and sad, it is considerably less bleak, scary and sad than nearby Lambeth High Street. You really have to see it to understand. Presumably Lambeth High Street was once the commercial centre of Lambeth and lined with thriving shops, market stalls and such. Now there is nothing along it at all. Nothing.
.
The area probably touched bottom in the mid 1990's and the first signs of creeping yuppification are evident. The Lambeth Walk is extremely well-situated and a stone's throw from Westminster. The first new luxury flats sprouted up a few years ago. Give it another ten years or so, after the existing population has died from old-age, alcoholism, heroin overdoses and stab wounds and the area will be fully redeveloped. The same kind of people who butchered the district in the 50s, 60s and 70s will reconstruct some kind of kitsch homage to the myth and quietly forget about that embarassing interlude between 1945 and 1995. You won’t recognise the place. In the meantime it's dodgy. Very, very dodgy.
.
.
Occasionally you can spot bemused American tourists who have been lured to the area by visions of chirpy cockney kids doing chirpy cockney kid dances, Dick Van Dyke Style on the streets of Lambeth. Last year, I noticed a middle-aged American couple walking hesitantly around the Walk on an abortive Cockney Chimney Sweep hunt, festooned with fabulously expensive Leica rangefinder cameras and lenses. I couldn’t help thinking that if the locals realised how much all that equipment was worth, those muppets would never leave SE11 alive.
.
Having said that, even though the last cheeky street urchin danced his last jig on the Lambeth Walk sixty years ago, it's long been an ambition of mine to take a high-impact photograph of the Lambeth Walk as it looks today. My plan being to contrast it with a classic photo of the street in its heyday in the 1930s.
.
The thing is, I've never had the guts to get a camera out and line a shot up.
.
But today I felt up to the task. I was strolling along the Walk, the sun was out, it was 9.30 on a Sunday morning and I had my camera in my bag. 'Why not give it a go', I thought? 'The psychos are in bed and most of the shops aren’t open. I won’t be accosted by demented shopkeepers and customers who think I'm spying for the DSS, Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise, Local Council or Home Office'.
.
So there I was, trying to find an aesthetically pleasing composition that included the Colombian Refugee Association office and West African mini mart. As I was setting my camera up, a crackhead who was walking along the street approached me.
.
London, particularly South London now leads the World on a crackhead per capita basis. Most of them are so similar in behaviour and appearance, there just has to be a factory producing them somewhere; twentysomething, undernourished white guys with strained, reedy voices. They stink of piss and are wankers. My brother was telling me earlier on today about how some local kids in Arnos Grove, near where he lives, found a pair of crackheads jacking-up in a car they had broken into. The kids set fire to the car with the junkies still in it as a social service. Whilst not condoning the action I can understand the sentiment.
.
Anyway, as an example of the kind of cheerful cockney banter you can expect on along the Lambeth Walk in the 21st century, here's the conversation I had today in full:
.
Crackhead: Excuse me sir. Do you have 60p to spare?
Me: No
Crackhead: C*nt!
Me: Just as well I didn’t give you any money then isn't it
Crackhead (affecting an upper class voice): wha! wha! wha! wha!
Me: Are you making out I'm posh you c*nt?
Crackhead: Yeah you, you posh c*nt!
Me: I can smell only one c*nt here and that's you
Crackhead: C*nt!
Me: You're not from round here are you? I haven’t smelled you before. C*nt!
Crackhead: What you going to do about it?
Me: Well I ain't touching you for sure. I might catch something
Occasionally you can spot bemused American tourists who have been lured to the area by visions of chirpy cockney kids doing chirpy cockney kid dances, Dick Van Dyke Style on the streets of Lambeth. Last year, I noticed a middle-aged American couple walking hesitantly around the Walk on an abortive Cockney Chimney Sweep hunt, festooned with fabulously expensive Leica rangefinder cameras and lenses. I couldn’t help thinking that if the locals realised how much all that equipment was worth, those muppets would never leave SE11 alive.
.
Having said that, even though the last cheeky street urchin danced his last jig on the Lambeth Walk sixty years ago, it's long been an ambition of mine to take a high-impact photograph of the Lambeth Walk as it looks today. My plan being to contrast it with a classic photo of the street in its heyday in the 1930s.
.
The thing is, I've never had the guts to get a camera out and line a shot up.
.
But today I felt up to the task. I was strolling along the Walk, the sun was out, it was 9.30 on a Sunday morning and I had my camera in my bag. 'Why not give it a go', I thought? 'The psychos are in bed and most of the shops aren’t open. I won’t be accosted by demented shopkeepers and customers who think I'm spying for the DSS, Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise, Local Council or Home Office'.
.
So there I was, trying to find an aesthetically pleasing composition that included the Colombian Refugee Association office and West African mini mart. As I was setting my camera up, a crackhead who was walking along the street approached me.
.
London, particularly South London now leads the World on a crackhead per capita basis. Most of them are so similar in behaviour and appearance, there just has to be a factory producing them somewhere; twentysomething, undernourished white guys with strained, reedy voices. They stink of piss and are wankers. My brother was telling me earlier on today about how some local kids in Arnos Grove, near where he lives, found a pair of crackheads jacking-up in a car they had broken into. The kids set fire to the car with the junkies still in it as a social service. Whilst not condoning the action I can understand the sentiment.
.
Anyway, as an example of the kind of cheerful cockney banter you can expect on along the Lambeth Walk in the 21st century, here's the conversation I had today in full:
.
Crackhead: Excuse me sir. Do you have 60p to spare?
Me: No
Crackhead: C*nt!
Me: Just as well I didn’t give you any money then isn't it
Crackhead (affecting an upper class voice): wha! wha! wha! wha!
Me: Are you making out I'm posh you c*nt?
Crackhead: Yeah you, you posh c*nt!
Me: I can smell only one c*nt here and that's you
Crackhead: C*nt!
Me: You're not from round here are you? I haven’t smelled you before. C*nt!
Crackhead: What you going to do about it?
Me: Well I ain't touching you for sure. I might catch something
.
Crackhead gestures that he might hit me. I walk towards him. Crackhead starts backing away down the street.
Crackhead gestures that he might hit me. I walk towards him. Crackhead starts backing away down the street.
.
Crackhead: C*nt!
.
Crackhead: C*nt!
.
A minute or two later and further away
.
Crackhead: C*nt!
.
Crackhead: C*nt!
.
A little later still
.
Crackhead: C*nt!
.
So much for taking the picture then.
Crackhead: C*nt!
.
So much for taking the picture then.
.
PS The use of the word c*nt in the above exchange should not be confused with a barman saying 'What do you want then c*nt?' when you walk into a South London pub you've never visited before. In this situation the barman is merely being friendly and politely enquiring as to the nature of the beverage you wish to consume.
.
5 comments:
Stef wanders thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And marks in every face he meets,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles we hear.
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackening Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro’ midnight streets we hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
With apologies to ...
William Blake
London, 1794
OK, someone's started anonymously posting William Blake poems on my blog ...
scared now
I've read Red Dragon
Mind you, Bill was a top lad, so I suppose I shouldn't complain really
Yes, I shall take it positively
Thanks
but no Death's Head moths in the post, please.
No moths here, you correctly judged I was thinking of Blake the social critic, even Blake the Swendenborg perhaps, both efforts took great imagination and courage in his day.
Blake walked the (Lambeth) walk too.
Like spiders ... and etchings, we seem to fear what we don't understand or what we later learn to fear, a la Francis Dolarhyde in The Red Dragon perhaps.
YOUR social criticism is of great interest and very much appreciated today.
Imagine this blog as your copper plate and continue to etch it well.
I shall visit often, sometimes bringing along Mr. Blake, if that's okay with you.
He needs to get out more.
Lambeth Walk? Near where I used to live is the famous pub 'The old Bull and Bush' in Hampstead, and probably as you'd expect it to be from the song. It was lucky, then, that they didn't decide to make the song about the Hare and Hounds directly next door, or Jack Straw's (no relation) castle just down the road, as they've been either demolished or turned into yuppy flats in the last few years. And guess what, of the three of them the Bull and Bush is easily the worst, in fact I never even went in there till there was nowhere else left on the Heath besides the overcrowded and pretentious Spaniards on the adjacent road leading to Highgate. The trouble with history is it's not always the best bits that are kept, as we've got far more of our share of genuine Victorian slums all over Britain, but really nice buildings such as family homes all over North-West London are being demolished annually to be replaced by soviet-style blocks of flats. We are seeing a creeping shift of London into a combination of the third world and soviet Russia, and since Ken's been in charge the shift now seems to be more galloping than creeping. And all we can do is moan about it on blogs... hey ho!
Anonymous - thanks for the positive thoughts. I shall inevitably fail to live up to them. I'm good at that
David - preservation of history is indeed a peculiar thing. I actually get a stronger sense of history in small towns in the US rather than here at home in the UK. I've visited some places in the Deep South where time seems to have stood still since 1860, whereas here in Blighty we've been ripping stuff down willy nilly since the 1950s. It's all down to a curious misplaced sense of needing to strive for the 'modern'. And there's nothing that dates quite so quickly as the self-consciously modern
Post a Comment