Golden Lane: March 2018

Time for change...

This time last year local elections had put in place a fresh group of councillors, and a spirit of change was running wild. This year, Spring again brings a feeling of renewal and optimism. The Golden Baggers are planning a memorial to one of our members, Fay Caton, who sadly passed last year. A commemorative bird bath has been ordered (Fay was always feeding our feathered friends). The estate’s refurbished community centre is due to open at the end of the month, and our revamped website (goldenlaneestate.org) is working its magic on residents by putting quality communication at its core.

The use of the community centre is a bone of contention. The City Corporation sees it as one of its assets and wants to take charge, first by installing the estate management team. Residents see it as community capital for the benefit of everyone and want to be actively involved in its running. It could all end in tears. There is the slim possibility that a peacekeeping force might be found. The City of London Community Education Centre (COLCEC) is to move from its current location on Golden Lane and into the new community centre in the middle of the estate. This is to make way for the controversial COLPAI school/housing development, but it is nevertheless a new start for an adult-education and after-school facility many residents admire and support. COLCEC is the middle ground on which the Corporation and residents can meet to thrash out a unity deal that everyone can live with.

Assembly point… 

Our London Assembly Member, Unmesh Desai, has been spotted hereabouts recently, which is good news. He is a busy man. The patch of London he represents stretches from here in the City right out east and north through Tower Hamlets and Newham as far as Barking & Dagenham. It’s a huge area. I follow his activities on social media and have become a fan the London Assembly’s ‘Talk London’ forum on the web. This is where you can rant about a whole range of subjects. One item recently canvased views on ‘London’s Night-Time Economy’ and the drive “towards a 24-hour London that works for residents, visitors, businesses and night-time workers”. This is especially relevant as the City’s Culture Mile project develops, bringing with it West-End levels of busyness.

It’s no choke...

Part of the City Corporation's clean air strategy asks residents and workers to look out for motorists who sit in their parked cars with the engines running. We are advised to tell them to turn off, but as a one neighbour discovered recently, that’s easier said than done. When she tried it, she escaped with vile insults and determined never to try something so stupid again.

GP or not GP, that is the question…

You don’t need TV pictures of hospital corridors full of trolleys bearing sick patients to know the health service is in crisis. At our local GP surgery, the Neaman Clinic in Half Moon Court, I recently found a woman queueing outside at 7.45am to make an appointment. She had come prepared, with a good book and a flask of coffee. Some residents don’t even make to the surgery door. In the estate’s gym, Fusion, one senior resident, a regular, tells me she is often short of breath. When I advise her to see her doctor, she replies: “You don’t want to bother them, they’re so busy these days”.

Bella vita…

It took me a long time to fall in love with Italy. Then a holiday in Sicily, followed by a city break in Venice, got me hooked. Now our neighbourhood has its own slice of Italy. Of course we have the Italia Conti school of performing arts, and in nearby Clerkenwell there’s St Peter’s church, which regularly hosts glamorous Italian weddings. Next door to St Peter’s is the food shop Terroni, which, with nearby Gazzano on Farringdon Road, fill the air with the unmistakable smell of Naples. More locally we have Baracca in Cherry Tree Walk, a family-run restaurant that never fails to deliver top food with a warm heart. And the latest additions to the Italian connection are the fast-food rice-ball specialist Arancini Brothers and, two doors down on Old Street, L’Artigiano, an upmarket fresh pasta deli-restaurant. There are many more  – Vecchio Parioli (restaurant), Carnevale (top-class vegetarian restaurant), Passione and Piccolo (cafés). Some of our residents feel so at home in these places they speak in Italian. Which reminds me, I borrowed a copy of Garibaldi & Gelato, a Heritage Lottery-funded recipe book, from Sofia at Central Street Cookery three years ago and forgot to return it. Oops.

Billy Mann has lived in Basterfield House on the Golden Lane Estate for more than 20 years. He is membership secretary of the Golden Baggers allotment group and a City of London Community Builder. He writes a blog about neighbourhood happenings at basterfieldbilly.blogspot.com

A version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, issue 069.

Golden Lane Gazette: February 2018

Protection racket...

The ‘munching’ has finished and Bernard Morgan House has gone. It hasn’t been a painless journey for those closest to the clanking machinery, the noise, the dust and the endless queues of dumper-trucks. There have been some touching memorial tributes at the site of the former police section house - flowers taped to lamp posts - but the best of them appeared on social media from the Save Golden Lane protest group, who displayed the single image of one of the building's classy decorative tiles that were dispatched during demolition. 

At the start of the project there was a half-hearted pledge to save the tiles for recycling, but as time went on this looked less and less likely. They are now presumed to have been trashed along with all the other rubble.

Yes, the passing of Bernard Morgan House has left a nasty taste, but it might not be entirely in vain. The site hoardings that picture its proposed replacement, The Denizen, show luxury apartments designed to look like a bad-taste version of the baddy’s lair in a Bond movie. The images have garnered residents in opposition and a plan is afoot to discourage any similar developments by making the estate a conservation area. We are joined in this by residents from the Barbican, and the City Corporation has now provisionally awarded the two estates ‘Conservation Area’ status. Hopefully this will usher in a fresh approach to the preservation of the built environment and a sense of duty towards its maintenance and care. Hopefully...

There’s already a hitch. A small area between the neighbouring estates did not pass the Corporation’s conservation test and has been excluded from any special protection. This zone includes the Jewin Welsh Church in Fann Street and the handsome red-brick block on Golden Lane formerly occupied by the Cripplegate Institute but now home to global financial behemoth UBS. The zone also covers the Barbican Wildlife Garden, a magical place and good friend and partner to our own Golden Baggers food-growing project.

If you’re swotty enough to study the reasons for the exclusion of this contentious area (lots of coffee required), you can agree that, strictly speaking, it might not tick all the boxes. What is certain is that the City Corporation’s decision is a miserly one. The zone is part of the neighbourhood’s history. A Welsh church and a wildlife garden are the kind of things that make a community special. So, in a rare show of unity, Golden Lane and Barbican residents have formed a dream team to lobby for the inclusion of this disputed territory in the Conservation plan.

Golden Girl, Joan

Many of us were happy to join veteran resident Joan Flannery recently in the Ralph Perring Centre to celebrate her 90th birthday. Joan has lived on Golden Lane for 48 years, most recently in Great Arthur House, and is known for her quick wit and gentle sarcasm. She grew up in my hometown Liverpool and sometimes slips into a classic Scouse accent. With family and friends serving tea and cake, the room rang out with bawdy laughter and good cheer. Joan even took time to pass on a top tip for seniors: keep a list of your medication and healthcare details in the fridge door, because that’s where emergency-service workers look first.

A happy accident...

I don't often get emails that were meant for someone else, but it was nevertheless refreshing to get one from Mary Durcan, one of our nine elected members on Common Council. It told us what she has been up to recently on behalf of the City Corporation ward of Cripplegate. She began by stating, ominously, that water has been a theme of her activities, starting late last year with an 8.30am shift on the Lord Mayor's flotilla (in the rain). Other aquatic engagements included a thrilling visit to the Thames Fishery Research Experiment in Tilbury (more rain), where she saw some big fish. Emerging from the moody waters of the Thames estuary, Mary then went to a “stunning” Grade I listed cemetery at Manor Park, where City residents can get cut-price burials (note to self: get on the waiting list). It all made being a councillor sound quite exciting.

Old shop, new start...

Good charity shops are thin on the ground around here, so it’s nice to see our local, Widows & Widowers on Whitecross Street, newly made over and transformed from a no-go Chaos Corner full of tat into a streamlined, go-with-the-flow shopping experience. Pink linen shirt, £5, thank you very much.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, issue 067 In February 2018.

Golden Lane Gazette: January 2018

The new baby boomers…

Right up there on my Christmas reading list alongside the new Donna Leon Brunetti saga was a City Corporation report on social wellbeing within the Square Mile.

Three things jumped out. The first is that being lonely is not the same as being alone. The second is that loneliness can be as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The third? That one of the groups worst hit by loneliness and isolation is young parents.

I expected to see older people, people from different ethnic backgrounds and the disabled (physically and mentally) on a list of those who feel excluded. I might even have added teenagers, LGBT or homeless people to the tally. But young parents was a surprise.

The City Corporation has an interest in tackling loneliness, even if it’s only as part of a wider remit on facing up to modern social ills. And on Golden Lane it has been working behind the scenes to train volunteer residents in the art of Community Building.

'Builders’ are people who stop to chat and generally act like good neighbours. Sometimes they also act as 'Community Connectors’, offering handy local tips and plugging people into information and services.

And if the recommendations of my Christmas reading are carried out, they will soon be joined by ‘Maternity Champions’.

The City’s business relies heavily on the daily arrival from outside the Square Mile of many thousands of young professionals. Add to this its young resident population and the sum is a human dynamo that cannot be ignored.

Many of the workers might have been uprooted from secure and supportive family networks elsewhere. Many of the young residents will be so drained by the sheer hard work of bringing up baby that they simply drop out of community activities.

No wonder the Corporation puts the social wellbeing of these people at the centre of its action plan. They are the present and the future of its success.

Time, ladies and gentlemen, please…

Like our Common Councilmen, Community Builders and Maternity Champions don't get paid. What they get instead is City of London Time Credits.

This is a scheme in which you offer one hour of your time doing something for the community (pulling weeds from paving cracks, for example). For this you get a crisp piece of paper that looks like a foreign banknote. You can spend it not on cups of tea in the local café, or milk and bread at the supermarket, but on fun things like going to the cinema, riding the Thames Clipper or watching Millwall FC.

Earn and spend

One Time Credit equals one hour of fun. I recently spent two of mine on a visit to the superb Courtauld art gallery at Somerset House to see the exhibition ‘Soutine's Portraits’ (finishes 21 January), which revealed the artist's great skill in painting pinched faces with unnaturally long noses.

Pay, the way to go...

A proper wage for Common Councillors (City Matters, issue 062) is a cause worth supporting. Only when our elected members are given professional status can voters expect a professional service, fully transparent and compliant with progressive democratic principles.

Tree cheers (not)...

The estate became a laughing stock over the festive holiday as passers-by scoffed at its pathetic Christmas tree. Not only was this the scraggiest of specimens, what is presumed to be an overdose of austerity at the City Corporation saw it left stark naked, with no lights or decoration over the entire holiday. It wasn’t even planted properly in its traditional place at the centre of the stone rotunda at the end of Basterfield lawn, so the first gust of winter wind left it tilted drunkenly to one side as if trying to stagger home from a not-very-good party. Residents took to social media to note their displeasure, but would nevertheless like to apologise to anyone forced to feast their eyes on such an embarrassment.

The naked truth

Yr rnt iz du...

A new texting service that allows residents to check stuff like rents and repairs will be introduced at a workshop in the Ralph Perring Centre on 30 January (5-7pm). This sounds like a good idea, with plenty of scope for future development. Text messaging is already used successfully for GP and hospital appointments, and at a recent Healthwatch conference there was talk of using it to prompt outpatients to take their medication or to get up and stretch occasionally. The possibilities are endless, so it’s fingers crossed that a Christmas Tree Complaints number will be issued in time for Santa's next arrival.

An edited version of this column appeared in the newspaper City Matters, issue number 063.

Golden Lane Gazette: December 2017

Spoke ‘n’ words

There is a two-wheel paradox on the

estate. All around us are invitations

to get on our bikes. There are two

Santander cycle stations on Golden

Lane, barely 100 metres apart. Other new bike-hire schemes seem

to be popping up regularly. Nearby Old Street sees a daily rat

run of pedal pushers, speeding like

guided missiles to work and back.

They even have their own café,

Look Mum No Hands! And cycling

certainly fits the City Corporation’s

Air Quality Strategy.

Yet here inside the estate, there are

NO CYCLING signs everywhere.

The one on the wall of Hatfield House

is terrifying: “Action may be taken

against anyone ignoring this

request under the 1990 Environmental

Protection Act”.

The threat is backed by action.

Children on bikes are ordered to

dismount, and last month a bunch

of parkour stunt riders, having sneaked

onto the Great Arthur House roof

garden, were promptly marched off

the estate by police.

Draconian policies are unfortunate,

because the estate’s design is so

enticing to cyclists. It looks like an

urban playground, and despite

technically being a private estate, its openness is one of its most attractive

features. It is built on a series of

raised platforms, so heavy use

impacts on the underlying structure.

This is why attempts to control the footfall of marching City workers

and delinquent cyclists are not

entirely unreasonable.

A hint at a third-way solution arrived

last year when we got a community

cargo bike. Up to now it has been

used mainly as a fun ride for children

(and parents), but it has recently

come under new management so

maybe now it will be steered towards more suitable activities such as

ferrying shopping, bits of furniture

and bags of waste to and fro.

The success of the cargo bike shows

how strict rules can, with measured

regulation and cooperation, be gently

broken with no great loss to public

order or safety. In time we might

even get a few NO KIDS IN CARGO

BIKE signs, but that would be a

small price to pay to see wheels

spinning freely around the estate.

On the move...

Other forms of transportation have

found a niche locally. There is the

Baltic Street Chapter, a bunch of

motorcycle couriers who hang out

in the no-man’s land between Baltic Street East and Baltic Street

West, eating sandwiches and looking

tough; there is the early-evening

mass occupation of Kennedy’s fish

and chip shop on Whitecross Street

by black-cab drivers. And a yellow

minibus trundles around our streets,

leisurely picking up and dropping off

passengers.

This is the 812 hail-and-ride service

provided, strangely, by Hackney

Community Transport (hackneyct.org).

You wave it down like a taxi. Seniors

and children under 16 go free,

otherwise it’s £1 per journey. The route

takes in Golden Lane, then snakes up to Sainsbury’s at the Angel and

onward to somewhere around

Haggerston. Its friendliness is one

of the service’s best-kept secrets.

Branch out…

The Tree Council’s National Tree

Week passed recently without much

fuss hereabouts, but for die-hard

enthusiasts Golden Lane does have

a few quality tick-list specimens.

At west end of Bowater House there

is a monster Indian Bean Tree. At the other end of Bowater, on Fann Street is

a Canadian Sugar Maple. And in the

beds at Hatfield Lawn there is a

Judas Tree, the national tree of Israel.

Add others (Mexican Cherry, Cedar of

Lebanon), and on the Golden Lane

Estate you can practically travel the world in trees. If you did so, it

would not be without controversy.  

At the west end of Bayer House

stands what official documents say

is a beech tree. But one of my

Basterfield House neighbours is

adamant that it is not a beech but a

poplar. Now an expert has stepped

in to verify that the disputed tree,

planted in 1989, is in fact a beech, Fagus Sylvatica, a “fastigate

form of beech that typically grows to a height of 12 metres”.

Live and learn...

The Gresham College website

(gresham.ac.uk) is the place to go

for a juicy free lecture. There are

plenty on offer, both to attend at a real

college in Holborn and at other City locations, or to watch online. There

was a good one recently about how

Scotland tried to ban Christmas carols

in 1582, but I have become hooked

on two in particular: ‘From Mr Pickwick

to Tiny Tim: Charles Dickens and

Medicine’ and ‘A World Without News?’, by former Guardian editor Alan

Rusbridger. Bliss.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper,
edition number 061.

On Golden Lane: The Survey Panic

It started half way through Blue Planet II, which was annoying. An email arrived from a neighbour saying the printed version of a survey she was conducting for our residents' association had a crucial error. What was the solution, she asked.

The survey only exists because something went wrong. Many years ago our estate, which is populated by a roughly 50/50 mix of local authority tenants and leaseholder/owners, had two associations: one for tenants and one for owners. The decision to weld them together into a residents' association has not been entirely successful. Tenants dismiss leaseholders self-interested nimbys; leaseholders have no confidence in 'terrified' tenants to challenge the local authority with regard to maintenance and repairs. Both sides are probably half right and in an attempt to recalibrate the tenant/leaseholder relationship, the association devised a survey to measure residents' concerns on issues such as cleaning, safety and estate management.

The survey was delivered to all of the estate's 600 flats. The results would steer the future direction of the resident's association in its discussions with those in charge. I will report further once the results are collected and collated into a document that, hopefully, most people can understand.

It didn't start well. The survey was delivered and the phrasing of some of the questions was all arse about face. They got the scales wrong. On some questions, it asked you to rate your satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5, but for question 3, for example, 1 meant " extremely satisfied", whereas in question 7, 1 meant "extremely dissatisfied". A second, correct version of the survey had to be hurried out, with different coloured paper to signify that it was the 'real' survey and that all previous surveys were fake. Ho hum.

Golden Lane Gazette: November 2017

Walk the walk…

Every so often residents are invited to an 'estate walkabout’ with a member of the management team. The idea is to point at paving cracks that haven’t been repaired for a very long time. The chronic subsidence of the pavement on Golden Lane alongside Stanley Cohen House is always a good opportunity to point out the chronic failings of the City’s repairs department.

It was on one of these outings recently that my neighbour and Cripplegate Common Councillor Sue Pearson drew our attention to a spooky defect on the steps outside Crescent House. Two perfectly smooth scoops had been etched from the concrete. They looked like a weird sculptural hex. The marks were, she told me, the work of the enthusiastic skateboarders who arrive on the estate from time to time. Their wheels have left us a permanent reminder of their visit. Shortly afterwards, repairs began on the skateboarders’ scoops; the Stanley Cohen paving still awaits its first casualty.

 

Slipping the Mickey

If William Wordsworth had ever lived on Golden Lane, his famous poem might have started:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er Great Arthur House

When all at once I heard a sound

The hungry scratching of a mouse

At first sight, our estate looks neat and well ordered, with clean lines and a simple geometry that leaves nowhere to hide. But inside the individual flats are nooks, crannies and cavities galore - in short, a paradise for mice.

The M-word is not one residents use openly, but once the conversation starts it quickly moves to preferred methods of extermination. Glue pads are frowned upon by those dedicated to a more humane way of killing. It’s an ethical minefield.

The mouse problem surfaces whenever any kind of building work is in progress, such as the current refurbishments of the children’s playground and community centre. The mice scatter and find a comfy corner somewhere in your flat. Then, late at night, you hear the sound of those micro-molars at work…

Wicked leaks...

Each morning I open the curtains to see another rainwater stalactite added to the growing collection that festoons the underside of our building’s flat roof.

Flat roofs are prone to many problems if not diligently maintained and inspected regularly by professionals. The solidified cave-like drips that appear this time each year are a seasonal nuisance.

When I tell a Crescent House neighbour about this, he grins knowingly. He lives on the top floor, and has a clear view of Basterfield House roof. He is so fascinated by what he sees that he has in effect become a ‘roof mapper’. He sits watching the clogging of silt in the drainage channels and monitors the ebb and flow of rainwater and its failure to find a clear runoff route to ground level. He describes all these defects as if they were acts of nature, like an over-enthusiastic landscape geographer studying an ancient river bed. He talks like an environmentalist arguing for a better approach to the conservation and preservation of the natural world. He’s right about almost everything, but the bad news is I’m probably the only one listening.

Teenage rampage...

The Golden Lane Estate lies on the northern edge of the City and sticks up like a throbbing thumb. It is surrounded on three sides by Islington. Some of our best friends are from Hackney and Camden. We live on the edge, and our interests cross boundaries and push at the frontiers of the neighbourhood.

Recently I pushed myself as far as Shoreditch Town Hall to see an exciting intergenerational theatre project. Old St/New St is the brainchild of two young professional actors, Rachael Spence and Lisa Hammond, who have been busy interviewing senior residents of the City/Hackney/south Islington area around Old Street. They have turned their spoken words into a piece of ‘verbatim theatre’, performed by a group of local teenagers.

This is acting by imitation, and the comic potential of teenagers pretending to be pensioners is huge, especially when the pensioners are your neighbours. The eerie familiarity of the voices got stronger as the young actors settled ‘into character’, relishing every moment. The irritating Brexit Bore soon became a figure gripped by a sense of loss. The angry woman who doesn’t like the smell of garlic from the food stalls on Whitecross Street started to look slightly pathetic.

As a way to teach acting, Spence and Hammond have hit on a special approach, and the performances had an authenticity that put real voices centre stage. More, please.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, edition 056

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