Golden Lane Gazette: October 2017

Don’t worry, be happy

Now that our community centre has closed temporarily for refurbishment, meeting places for residents are scarce. This makes us more than ever indebted to Sir Ralph Perring. 

Sir Ralph was Lord Mayor when our estate was completed in 1962 with the addition of Crescent House. He was a master of both the Worshipful Company of Tin Plate Workers and the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers.

His memory lives on in the Ralph Perring Centre, a former nursery next to the Golden Baggers allotment and children’s playground. The centre is home to the Ralph Perring Club for senior residents and former City workers. The club has been meeting for social activities since the mid-1960s. 

The building has also now been pressed into service as a makeshift civic centre for City and residents’ events. In June it was a community cafe for Open Garden Squares Weekend, and right now it is hosting a Corporation-backed Action for Happiness programme of eight weekly sessions exploring “What Matters”, the Dalai Lama way to a stress-free existence.

Community cafe

At the first session we started with a Mindful Minute, which is always useful, if only to stop the noisy nattering. Then we were asked to think about Happiness and what it really means. Next came a YouTube TED talk by Richard Layard, professor of Wellbeing at the London School of Economics. This got us chatting in small groups about issues such as Trust, Contentment and childhood experiences, good and bad. If all this sounds a bit wet and hipsterish, it is. But at a time when mental-health problems have hit epidemic proportions, anything’s worth a try. It was, at least, a positive experience that each member of the group could take forward and build on.

Grout season

In April 2015, the wall tiles on Stanley Cohen House on Golden Lane began to fall off. Scaffolding was erected and all the outward appearances of a repair job started… then stopped. The building is Grade II listed, so no repair is straightforward. English Heritage has to tick its boxes, and wall tiles from B&Q are not on their list of approved materials. While decisions were being made about where best to buy the replacement tiles, what looked like black plastic bin bags were nailed to the walls as a “safety precaution”. So, for around two years Stanley Cohen House has looked like a distressed polytunnel. Only now have new tiles been sourced from Spain and scaffolding is once again in place. This is cause for great celebration and, fingers crossed, very soon the bin bags will be but a bad memory.

Human writes act

Getting a couple of Banksies in the neighbourhood was cool enough, and now the Fann Street side of Bowater House has been turned into an art installation, ‘Spectres of Modernism’, by “Turner Prize winners” protesting the Taylor Wimpey development of Bernard Morgan House opposite into ghost homes for rich overseas clients. But there is something unsatisfactory about this feted project. It looks too studied, and the slogans all seem to try very hard to be clever. The banners are also neat and tidy, so unlike most of the Bowater residents I know. 

All guns blazing

It is a running half-joke that on any working day there are more vegetarians in the City than residents (my bad-maths calculation puts the vegetarian/resident ratio at around 5:2). The numbers game gets even more exciting when you try to find a resident who is also a vegetarian. Reader, I married her, and most Sundays we repeat the same fruitless mission to find a pub that serves a decent veggie roast dinner. Thankfully, the Artillery Arms in Bunhill Row is blazing the trail with a well-pitched menu that includes a meat-free Sunday slap-up. Add a good range of Fuller’s and guest beers and you have the recipe for a proper lazy day.

We all want to change the world 

This year's centenary shenanigans for the Russian Revolution have not exactly gone off with a bang here on the estate, but 2017 is not over yet. On 22 October, the Great Chamber at The Charterhouse will deliver a piano/cello/viola concert featuring the post-revolutionary work of Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich and Prokofiev alongside crazy experimental jazz by Nikolai Kapustin. If that doesn’t spark any riots in your soul, pour yourself a large vodka and settle into a chapter of Onion Domes On Golden Lane, a ripping memoir-blog by one of my Basterfield House neighbours that both comments on contemporary Russian life and recalls evocatively the highs and lows of a young British woman working in the Moscow theatre of the 1990s (clementinececil.blogspot.com).

A joke from our estate office

“A friend of mine invented the cold-air balloon... but it never really took off.”

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, issue number 52

Theatre: Old St/New St

St Luke's Men’s Shed is not often found at arty cultural events, but an early peek at the Old St/New St theatrical project brought us one grey Sunday afternoon to one of the stately rooms inside Shoreditch Town Hall.

Old St/New St is a performance by a group of local teenagers who, using transcripts of interviews from residents around Islington and the City (including St Luke’s O55 members), tell stories about how our neighbourhood has changed over the years: The one-time council flats bought on the ‘Right to Buy’ of the 1980s now worth £730,000; the devastation of the Blitz in 1941 when German war bombing turned the whole area into an inferno.

The young actors obviously like the idea of impersonating local characters because their mimicry was so accurate I wanted to step in and add my own pennyworth. Touchy issues such as immigration and Brexit were all brought to life by 15-year-olds speaking the words of 70-year-olds. Their quirky mannerisms also spiced the performance, bringing a real sense of comic fun.

As a way of coaching young actors, using the oral histories of real people, is a brave and innovative idea that deserves to go a long way. So it’s hats off to the young professional actresses Rachael Spence and Lisa Hammond for bringing this fantastic show together with such style and vision. Let’s hope there are many more in the future.

For more information, please email rachaelspence@hotmail.com

Golden Lane Gazette: September 2017

Things that go bump...

‘Bumping’ sounds like a nightclub dance craze from the 1970s. In fact, it is a theory of social cohesion. The citizens of small, tightly-packed communities get on far better if they bump into one another regularly. And the places they do this are held by social scientists and community-engagement experts to be sacred, fertile grounds for a better society.

Golden Laners have their chosen spots. Fusion gym, Waitrose and Fortune Street Park are all well established 'bumping’ places. Lesser known ones are the undercover pavement on Golden Lane alongside Stanley Cohen House and, my favourite, the short tunnel of trees behind the Cripplegate Council noticeboard at the back of the Shakespeare pub.

But bumping also happens outside the confines of our bright and colourful concrete paradise. Often I will see neighbours at the open meetings organised by Healthwatch City of London. These are round-table talking shops at which City residents, workers and service users chew the fat with healthcare professionals in an effort to shape future policy. Issues such as medication passports, community pharmacy, dementia and social care come under intense scrutiny. These talks are important because the City of London shares some health and social services provision with neighbouring boroughs, notably Hackney, so policy needs to embrace a wide range of needs.

The Healthwatch gatherings take place in various locations, but often at the Dutch Centre in Austin Friars, EC2. They are always a great success, and I think I know why: the free buffet lunches they serve to fuel the conversation are mouthwateringly good, so good that I have even spotted some of my Golden Lane neighbours stuffing their faces with free food at lunchtime then disappearing quietly before the serious topical talking starts. This is obviously unethical and I never hesitate to remind them of their poor conduct. And in my experience, all the best ideas come with a full stomach, so ‘Let’s do lunch with Healthwatch’ could be the start of a new trend. It’s good to talk...and eat.

‘Recovery After Heart Surgery’, an examination of patient experiences and priorities, is at St Bartholomew’s Hospital on 5 October.

Healthwatch City of London’s fourth Annual Conference is at the Dutch Centre, 7 Austin Friars on 20 October.

A crystal-ball moment

I predicted in last month’s Golden Lane Gazette that objections to the development proposed for the former Richard Cloudesley site would start rolling in. I wasn’t wrong, and even more piled in on deadline day last week. I also mentioned that a “clever resident from Bayer House” had circulated his own alternative to the existing Hawkins\Brown blueprint. This is the ‘Fred Plan’, a scheme more compatible with the estate’s existing architecture, and its author, Fred Scott, is so clever that to advance his rival idea he has created an artistic photo-composition of what looks like an awayday of 1950s British intellectuals loitering ghostlike over a model of Fred’s insurgent 21st-century Golden Lane redesign. They look to be contemplating, with deadly seriousness, a time in the future when our prize-winning estate will be enlarged in a way sympathetic to the original post-war vision of its architects, Chamberlin, Powell & Bon. In the light of how the Richard Cloudesley project has been managed so far, in which residents’ views have been barely registered, let alone considered, it is tempting to remark “pigs might fly”, but stranger things have happened.

Culture vultures

The reinvention of the City as a cauldron of creativity under the title Culture Mile might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Getting the heritage architecture of Golden Lane and the Barbican to be included in this hot new idea might be a fantasy too far, but at a recent party to mark the closure of our community centre for refurbishment, I learned about Joe Mitchell. Back in the 1960s, Joe was the “Cameron Mackintosh of Cripplegate”, rallying residents of all ages to perform on the Golden Lane Community Centre stage in his famous 'Follies’. Some of Joe's protégés even went on to attend the Italia Conti Academy of Theatrical Arts. Italia Conti has been an incubator of top talent for many years, so don’t be surprised if the next Doctor Who hailed first from the Golden Lane Estate.

Behind the scenes

And if your life is not already dramatic enough, take time to check out the absorbing ‘Life on the London Stage’ exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) around the corner in Clerkenwell.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, edition number 048 in September 2017

Golden Lane Gazette: August2017

The beginning of the end

The spirit of  Brexit is haunting Bernard Morgan House. The demolition of the old building and the building of a new one has started. The question is whether the journey will be hard or soft.

The contractors want nearby residents to believe it will be a painless transition from old to new, so they are holding a series of monthly liaison meetings in our community hall.

At the first one I arrived five minutes late, missed the introductions and tried to work out quickly who everyone was. I could spot residents and a smattering of councillors, but I was not familiar with the London Demolition crew or builder Taylor Wimpey’s agents. I figured jointly they were the 10 slightly glistening, freshly laundered people who did most of the talking, albeit in a hesitant tone of voice, as if they half expected a mass killing to break out any minute.

The exchange started badly with a bantamweight tussle sparked by councillor William Pimlott asking whether the purpose of this “liaison” meeting was to “discuss” or to “agree” the roadmap for the controversial project's public engagement. That fizzled out quickly and soon we were hearing about the groundbreaking methods intended to be used in the demolition of Bernard Morgan House.

The process is called “Munching”. Briefly, it is this: a state-of-the-art machine bites chunks off the top of an already hollowed-out Bernard Morgan House and spits the rubble into the vacant interior cavity. It is claimed that this method of destruction reduces noise and vibration, and any stray clouds of nasty concrete dust will be “mitigated” by a water cannon, which squirts out a clingy moisturising spritz.

Munching, which makes demolition sound like a sweet-shop treat, wasn’t the only trick of language our hosts used. They also repeatedly pledged to “try not to…” They will try not to work on Saturdays; they will try not to start electrical fires; they will try not to injure any passing children from the neighbouring school. They will try not to destroy forever the retro-heritage tiles that were one of the original building’s outstanding design features.

The wrecking crew answered questions from a dictionary of platitudes, but it all unravelled slightly towards the end of the meeting when a Bowater House resident made a sincere last-ditch plea for common sense: why was a perfectly useful, not to say historically important building being smashed to smithereens? Wasn’t there a better way of doing things? The wrecking crew all looked at their shoes and changed the subject quickly.

If the intention of this gathering was to reassure, it failed. Claims of poor site management and corner-cutting got the feeble response of “we’ll look into that” and residents walked home feeling the road ahead was a rocky one.

Wedding announcement

The storm clouds have yet to break over at the Richard Cloudesley site on the north side of the estate, but it is only a matter of time. Expect a slew of objections to the current planning application submitted jointly by the City of London and Islington Council. In anticipation of argy-bargy to come, one clever resident from Bayer House, a grandee of modernist architecture, posted on the estate’s website an alternative design to the one currently proposed by the appointed Hawkins\Brown team. The ‘Fred Plan’ meets the stated specifications and complements the existing design of the estate in a more measured way. And it envisions the planned residential tower block as a companion building to Great Arthur House, with the added bonus of a cocktail bar on the roof. Needless to say, this triggered a flurry of excitement online to name the ‘new’ partner tower, assuming it were ever to be built. ‘Merlin’ and ‘Guinevere’ were early contenders, but top marks goes to a marriage of the paired skyscrapers as ‘Arthur & Martha’.

Party time, excellent...

Our community centre is closing for refurbishment on Saturday September 2. It’s an excuse for an end-of-an-era knees-up and we have fantastic day of events planned, including silent discos for all ages, films and pictures from the estate’s past, top nosh, bags of banter and lots of cake and biscuits. Everyone is welcome, and if you have any skills you’d like to bring to the party (home baking, face painting, magic tricks), email goldenlanegazette@gmail.com. City of London time credits will go to the best offers.

The Exhibitionists

Golden Lane Estate resident and City Matters columnist Billy Mann with fellow artists Yoki (left) and Tirzah at the opening of ‘Making Faces’, an exhibition of work by survivors of brain injury from Headway East London, at the Southbank Centre until August 23.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, edition 45, p14

Diary: Old Street bus stop

At the bus stop on Old Street, a begging woman approached, having already been spurned by another waiting passenger. The begging woman looked at me pleadingly and told me she was hungry. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a £1 coin and handed it to her. She thanked me then added: “A sandwich costs £2.50.”

Golden Lane Gazette: July 2017

A breath of fresh air

The Corporation’s determination to combat bad air quality and help us breathe more easily has been hard to avoid, with electric cars here and pop-up gardens there. One weekend we were given lessons in bike repair and free maps showing the cleanest route from A to B. At Barbican station, they stuck plastic arrows on the pavement, indicating “cleaner air this way”. Then I read a Corporation factoid stating that the air inside a car in busy traffic is dirtier than it is outside on the street for pedestrians and cyclists. I nearly choked.

Golden Lane residents don’t need this kind of horror story to tell them the air we breathe in the City is poor. Sit in Sourced Market on Goswell Road and look across to the iconic sweep of Crescent House and it is pretty obvious that it really could do with a good wash.

Thankfully, the architects of both the Golden Lane Estate and the Barbican - Chamberlin, Powell & Bon - imagined a future where car was king and carbon dioxide the enemy, and took steps to separate people from pollution. The core of the Golden Lane estate is a green haven of lawns and trees, while the Barbican highwalks, as irritating to navigate as they can be, raise pedestrians above and away from CO2 black-spots.

The success of the architects’ vision, and the chance to breathe cleaner air on the south side of the estate especially, is seen in the in the four healthy London Plane trees - originals from the 1970s, I’m told - standing across Fann Street in the Barbican Wildlife Garden.

The London Plane is a miracle of botany. It is an accidental hybrid of Oriental and American planes. They are relatives of the Sycamore and most of the world’s great cities have their own variant, and for two good reasons.

First, it readily consumes nasty particulate pollution into its dappled camouflage-like bark, which then flakes, and renews itself with ease, trashing the toxins.

Second, those big, lobed leaves and short root system work together to suck up and pump out vast amounts of valuable oxygen and water into the atmosphere. No surprise, then, that the Plane is known as ‘London’s Lungs’. I stare at those Fann Street beauties often and give thanks.

Fiddler on the hoof
Open Garden Squares Weekend is always good fun at the Golden Baggers allotments. Baggers bake good cakes and this year more than 400 green-fingered types arrived to ask questions about our varied crops. They like the Baggers because our growing space is a secret idyll, because we have a community café staffed by volunteer residents and, importantly, a toilet. To add spice this year, we invited poet-gardener St John Stephen (@HangingBabylon). He mingled with visitors, offering sizzling stanzas from greatest hits such as Sylvie, Red Pelargoniums and VIII. Sadly, he was not able to perform the poem about the joys of sniffing bushes, because that one is part of his ‘Spring’ cycle, and we were already well into Summer. But there was plenty from his Shrub Fiddler’s Pocket Book to make an already hot weekend even hotter.

It’s a snip

Getting a haircut around here is always a dilemma. Should I stay loyal to Golden Lane and go  to Cliffords, or break for the Islington border and visit Best Gents in Banner Street, off Whitecross Street? Best Gents does the full grooming experience (ear singeing, hot towel, eyebrow trim, nose hair, cranial massage), but Cliffords, with their pot noodles, chipped coffee mugs and bulk-bought tea bags ‘hidden’ in the corner shelf in full view all Golden Lane residents, has the kind of no-nonsense feel I find comforting.

All together now

It was a new experience: a joint reckoning for Barbican and Golden Lane residents of our freshly elected Common Council after 100 days in the job. It started well, with Cripplegate Alderman, David Graves, urging residents to get more involved and hinting at his desire for a more inclusive type of regular meeting.

Fire safety was understandably top of the agenda and the whole meeting soon became a single-issue free-for-all. Touching stories and heartfelt concerns mixed uncomfortably with grandstanding bluster, at times it seemed to be spiralling into chaos and mumbo-jumbo. And hearing Corporation placemen talking about 'learning the lessons of Grenfell' left a hollow sound in the ear.

The mood was electric and fragile, but somehow the simple act of sitting together and struggling to find answers made a difference. I went away wanting more.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, edition 41, July 12-18 2017

Golden Lane Gazette: June 2017

Let there be light...

A decision to improve the lighting around the estate is welcome. Crime is not a big issue here, and the poor lighting is more to do with the safety of residents and how secure they feel walking the estate after dark.

At least that was my concern when I raised the matter with our Common Council team at a group meeting more than a year ago. None of them seemed to think there was a lighting problem. I was dismissed as a fantasist.

But now the Corporation has decided to act. A consultation was set up. We sat and listened, moaned about how frighteningly dark it gets between the Shakespeare pub and Great Arthur House. A man from the police, an ‘architectural liaison officer’, told us how 'smart' lighting can be used to 'design out' crime, if we had any. An official from the Corporation's Built Environment department told us how, miraculously, funding had been found to upgrade the lighting and then described the ways our lives might be transformed with sophisticated uplighting and LEDs. There were diagrams to look at. 

I looked down at my notebook. 'Is there a hidden agenda?’ it said on one page. The one that was screaming at me was that the Corporation anticipates increased footfall across the estate once Crossrail opens at Farringdon and the Bernard Morgan and Richard Cloudesley site developments are finished. And they want to make sure everyone knows which way to go. Oh, and Fusion gym wants it made easier for people to find their way to its front door.

The designation of 'private’ and 'common’ areas of the estate is a hot-potato issue and one the Corporation and the Golden Lane Residents Association have been wrestling with for what seems like forever. It is a fraught conversation and one I’m not sure any amount of 'smart' technology can bring to an early conclusion.

Centre of excellence

There are plans to redevelop our community centre, the flat-top building at the back of the yellow giant that is Great Arthur House. It has been a struggle for residents to get a say in the matter, but that has changed and a steering group of locals is now doing some proper steering. There has also been an effort to show that residents can - and will - organise and run successful events that benefit the whole estate: yoga, chess, knitting (see below).

Two in particular impressed me recently. In January a Hatfield House resident pulled some strings somewhere and a brass band took to the stage of the community hall one Saturday afternoon. Children wriggled and giggled around our feet as the band parped out old favourites such as the Floral Dance and The Typewriter, which featured a live typewriter: clickety-clack, ping, and all that. In the interval, the children got to blow a few horns. Top prize overall went to the band’s rendition of David Bowie’s Life on Mars. Some residents were visibly emotional. 

More recently the hall was transformed into a restaurant and we were treated to a three-course meal of Caribbean food as actors from Off The Wall Players performed structured scenes (soup, main, pudding) based on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the 1967 film starring Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier.

Like the film, the performance tackled themes of race, class and gender roles, but its centrepiece, served to our tables by members of the cast, was food. It climaxed in a petty squabble in which an idiot boyfriend gets coleslaw dumped on his head by his date. He staggers, spits out a few swear words, then falls over humiliated and dies. Just desserts, I thought, as we finished our main course.

The community centre will close at the end of the summer for refurbishment, but let’s hope that when it reopens, such sparkling events as these get a fair shout. They more than deserve it.

Animal magic

We’ve had displaced ducks stranded on Basterfield lawn. We have a sparrowhawk who arrives with a bearded handler to put the frighteners on the pigeons. And foxes are regulars. Some years ago we had a three-legged fox which, in spite of being seriously disabled, hopped around eyeballing innocent passers-by.

Now we have another fox. It has been named ‘Mr Fox’, but that is a bit dull, so if you have any better ideas, please let us know.

Wool meet again

Every third Tuesday in the month is Knit & Natter at the community centre. No prior skills or fancy equipment is required, just turn up, cast on and chill out. Hats for the Premature Babies unit at UCLH is the good cause.

An edited version of this column appeared in the London newspaper City Matters, issue 37.