Ouch, that really hurt!

The Roof of the Sir Ralph Perring Centre on the Golden Lane Estate is a potential death trap for delinquent male teenagers, who prowl its dizzy heights in testosteronic competition and juvenile joshing with one another. I spotted one unlucky specimen today attempting a tricky climbdown, only to twist over on his ankle during the final drop. He staggered painfully to his feet and was ushered away supported by two friends, who both looked like they were enjoying his pain. I smiled a smile bordering on laughter, and felt slightly ashamed.

Golden Lane: September 2018

Summer slowed to a crawl this year on Golden Lane. The excitement of the World Cup and Wimbledon faded quickly and, once the hot weather arrived, a snail’s pace took over. The concrete repairs across the estate left behind a film of fine dust, so suffocation looked like a distinct possibility. But still nobody seemed that bothered. Even the ever-present bitching about the City Corporation and its serial crimes against happiness fell into a lull.

Then the weather changed, the exam results rolled in and the children began to steel themselves for a new school year. It was time to wake up and get moving. Now the new football season is back in full swing, 2018 has found its legs again. In Summer, our tennis courts are plagued by would-be Wimbledonians. But already the netball teams have moved into that space with their fierce tactical shouting and piercing whistles. I can feel hackles raising in Cullum Welch and Crescent House already, as those are the blocks within earshot. Angry postings to message boards are in the pipeline.

Sport is important for some residents, not so much for others. There’s a local tribal loyalty to Arsenal, which is a drawback (I support Liverpool), but even so it is fascinating to see attitudes to sport in competition: to spectate or to participate? For fitness or for fun, health or happiness, whose side are you on? In the corner of our estate at the junction of Baltic Street and Goswell Road is the People’s Choice cafe. Nowadays it is a sanctuary for stressed office workers and anyone just passing, but some years ago, I’m told, it was a resting place for off-duty training staff from Arsenal FC, who would be joined occasionally by squad players for impromptu team talks and mugs of stewed tea. I like these kinds of stories.

Yes, times have changed. Sport is now a serious business; spreadsheets, analytics, psychotherapy and a new pair of Adidas Predators are today's essentials. We have a number of betting shops locally, but I am yet to convince anyone that a flutter on the horses is as good as a frantic half-hour session on a rowing machine.

I’m not a slob, but I fell out with our estate's gym, Golden Lane Sport and Fitness (GLSF), for a number of reasons, the most serious being a failure to promptly repair busted machines. They also got rid of the punchbag, which really got my goat.

But all that has changed recently and new machines have just been installed as part of what is punted as an £80,000 refit. Residents harbour the suspicion that any investment in GLSF, which is run by the Fusion chain, is for City workers rather than residents – and that rankles.

GLSF does at least support health initiatives such as Exercise on Referral in partnership with GP surgeries. It also connects parents and children to Fit for Sport, which runs activities during school holidays, though these are charged at a market rate and are beyond the means of many. A discount rate is offered to over-50s in GLSF’s Young at Heart membership. And City of London Time Credits can be swapped for gym and swimming sessions.

I advise residents to use GLSF whenever they can. There is a huge variety and diversity of sports available, not only a gym staffed by skilled and friendly trainers, a swimming pool, a badminton court, two tennis courts and a multitude of classes in the ‘glass box’ studio. As I’ve stated already, the tennis courts double as netball pitches, the badminton court is also used in down-times for table tennis, the swimming pool has a hoist and occasionally runs assisted swimming sessions for the disabled, There's even the chance to learn the basics of scuba diving. The studio covers everything from the gentle (yoga, pilates, aerobics) to the more energetic reaches of individual sport (kickboxing, bodycombat, bootcamp fitness). If the cost is likely to be prohibitive, I point residents to City LivingWise for advice on free or low-cost exercising for good health. For the big team sports (football, cricket, rugby), there are few opportunities here in the City.

Aside from all this, the urge to be active will always find its own form of expression. Next to the Basterfield Rotunda tree garden here on the estate is a designated soft-surface ball-games space where football-fanatic boys (and girls, more commonly these days) practise keepy-uppies and precision spot kicks long after their parents told them to stop. In Cuthbert-Harrowing House we have a (reluctant) young basketball ace. Embarrassingly, his mother carries around on her iPhone a video of him effortlessly planting balls through the hoop from 20 metres. The scene plays on, over and over, until you start to suspect it’s all a stunt, some sort of trick photography. You are wrong. It’s for real. Her son is just monotonously good at basketball. He plays for pleasure, and that's what makes him a winner.

To have your say on the Mayor's city-wide strategy for sport, visit the Assembly's Talk London website. Billy Mann has lived on the Golden Lane Estate for 24 years. He is a City of London Community Builder and blogs about neighbourhood happenings at basterfieldbilly.blogspot.com.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, issue number 081.

Incident: Whitecross Street

A news report might read something like this:

Immigration officers swooped on a Mediterranean restaurant in Whitecross Street EC1 on the evening of 1 September in what looked to customers like a coordinated 'sting' operation.

We were sitting at an outside table enjoying what we grandly call an apéritif (a quick drink before we head home for an M&S curry) at Iskelé when a posse of around six chunky officers in black uniforms stomped noisily through the front door in single file while others stationed themselves in pairs at strategic points outside of the restaurant.

From my seat I could see one of the officers inside checking a bundle of papers, which I guessed to be the employment documentation for the people working there. The checking and talking continued for some time. None of the customers seemed bothered by what we felt was an air of menace and aggression. At one point, officers hurried out of the front of the restaurant and scuttled to the rear. They had, I assume, twigged that anyone trying to abscond from the premises would head that way. In fact, anyone trying to abscond would have given them the slip long ago such was the dim-wittedness of those in charge.

The Iskelé is a Mediterranean mezze/grill outfit serving locals and visitors to the nearby Barbican Centre. It gets 4.5 stars on Tripadvisor and is well used by the area's residents, who enjoy its friendly family style and polite service. Its kebabs and tagines are glorious, but top prize goes to its "chilli sauce", which is actually a chilli salsa of chopped chillies, onion, tomato and no doubt some other secret ingredient that makes it an essential item on any food order. We ask for it regardless of what we are eating.

We once enjoyed a long conversation with The Isekelé's owner — or at least he said he was the owner. We talked about the fantastic coloured lamps they have hanging from the ceiling. He said he got them through family and friends in Egypt. He promised to get us one, but we never saw him again.

He also talked about the area at the junction of Whitecross Street and Banner Street ,where he has business interests in a dry cleaners, and Italian restaurant, Cozzo, and a cafe, the Market Restaurant, opposite The Iskelé. Next door to the Market Restaurant cafe was an ailing tailors, which specialised in alterations and custom-made clothes. The business closed recently and The Iskelé group of businesses now use the shop as a storage space.

What prompted the immigration raid, I can only guess, though I suspect that this type of operation is likely to be common in areas of London such as Edgware Road and Brick Lane. Some see them as a direct result of Home Office policy in the past under Theresa May (now Prime Minister), which embedded a "hostile approach" to outsiders. I guess also that the trend is likely to continue up to and after Brexit. This evening, even as customers, we somehow felt bullied.

Golden Lane: August 2018

The party for the opening of our newly titivated community centre went off in great style, the best moment for me being a sublime performance from the young ukulele-singer Elpida Karali, who delivered her songs straight from the heart.

There was a minor panic when the queue for the paella lunch stretched too far to silence chatter on the health hazards of heating up rice in a microwave, but overall the day was a success.

One of the hot topics for discussion was the estate’s lack of any memorial space for residents sadly departed. Estate veteran Joan Flannery of Great Arthur House has lobbied on this matter for some time, and with the recent funeral of one of Golden Lane’s best-loved residents, Doris McGovern of Stanley Cohen House, the subject has become urgent.

Some of the estate's very first residents from back in the late 1950s and early 1960s are still very much alive and active in the neighbourhood. But some are sadly no longer with us and it is only right and proper that their lives and times are remembered.

A fitting memorial for our departed residents should be respectful but not too funereally bleak. ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’, the WWI commemorative installation that graced the Tower of London back in 2014 used hundreds of thousands of ceramic poppies to create a glorious waterfall and huge lake of red and green. Its beauty struck a chord. It was dignified and elegant. It triggered all the right feelings.

The two key memorial spaces we have locally are Bunhill Fields (where you can hang your head in front of ancient tombs dedicated to famous names such as John Bunyan and William Blake) and a wall of ceramic tiles at Postman's Park near the Museum of London roundabout, which commemorates those who sacrificed their own lives in acts of bravery to save others.

Of the two styles of memorial, Postman’s Park is the kind of touchstone that seems more fitting for our estate. In nearby St Luke's community centre on Central Street, they recently introduced a copper-wire ‘Memory Tree’ for members who have passed, and for one recently departed member, Jeanie, an engraved brass plate was attached to the streetside bench on which she sat daily devouring packet after packet of cigarettes.

St Bride's church in Fleet Street is famous for its memorials to journalists and has commemorative nameplates on its pews for reporters, photographers and others who made a difference in the “rough trade” of the newspaper industry.

The church is worth a visit regardless of this, but recently I was able to attend a memorial service for a former colleague, Peter Preston, the great editor of the Guardian. Back in the mists of time, he gave me a job and was a guiding spirit for many years afterwards. What might have been a sombre occasion was enlivened by a speech from Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail, who, as Voldemort to Peter’s Dumbledore, gave a generous tribute.

And there was fun, too. During the ceremony Peter’s two sons, Ben and Rupert, performed a magic trick with a carrot doubling up as a human finger being “chopped off”. Then the choir sang the Johnny Cash song 'Ring of Fire’. Bet that was a first.

So a memorial space on the estate needs to strike the right note. I was heartened to be shown a memorial of a different kind recently. Bayer House resident and architecture guru Fred Scott has come up with a blueprint for memorial bridge based on the fuselage and wingspan of a World War II plane.

Fred imagines his creation, 'Air Raid Memorial Bridge', across the Barbican lake. It's design gives artistic form to the history of the Barbican and Golden Lane as modern solutions to the devastation the area suffered during the Blitz of 1940-41 and is a nod also to the many commemorative flypasts at which Golden Lane and Barbican residents get a grandstand view, the most recent being the celebration for 100 years of the RAF.

The discovery not long ago of an unexploded bomb during the demolition of Bernard Morgan House was also a reminder of where the roots of our homes lie - in the death and destruction of a war that ripped Europe apart.

The postwar renewal in Britain, to put things back together again, is where the stories of the Golden Lane Estate and the Barbican begin. Golden Lane was an attempt to draw displaced talent back into the heart of London. It originally offered homes to young doctors and nurses at Barts Hospital.

We should never downplay that heritage and we should give proper remembrance to the citizens who played such a large part in forging it. It is a legacy that is too often forgotten by City decision-makers, and residents feel insulted by that.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, issue number 079.

Golden Lane: July 2018

I stand accused of timidity. At a social event on the estate last month, one resident said what she thought of this column: “You sit on the fence, you’re too diplomatic”. I offered a puny response, saying my intention is to write about the richness of life here on Golden Lane and what a great place it is to live, etc, blah blah. None of it sounded very convincing.

What she wanted to say, I suspect, is that I don’t stick the boot in on the City Corporation: its poor record on repairs, its culture of non-communication, its institutional blindness to residents’ needs over business interests, that sort of thing. It might be true, but there’s another reason I don’t take potshots at the council. The Golden Lane Estate is in the City of London residential ward of Cripplegate and it has nine, yes NINE, elected members on common council. Many of them rarely set foot on the estate. Only one is seen regularly and works tirelessly for our residents. Two of them I have only ever seen once, at an election hustings, asking for votes. Add to those nine our member on the London Assembly, Unmesh Desai, and our MP in Westminster, Mark Field, and here is a football team of people tasked to deal with voters’ issues. These are the people who should be kicking the council. 

A case in point is the concrete repairs rolling out across the estate. Expert residents (we have a lot) have let fly a barrage of angry emails detailing the works’ shortcomings with regard to listed building guidelines, heritage repair methods and paint colour-matching. The argument is unlikely to end soon and, meanwhile, scaffolding has gone up at Crescent House for decoration and window replacement work. It’s long overdue and residents have often moaned that their heating bills are sky high, all because routine maintenance and improvements dropped down the City Corporation list of priorities. 

I’m glad to see Crescent House being spruced up. I have an irrational fondness for it, even at its scruffiest. Its glorious iconic sweep along Goswell Road is the public face of our estate. I imagine it as a hotbed of radical non-conformism. It’s residents are not afraid to speak their minds and Crescent House is the only block in which I have seen people dancing naked in their window, in full view of the tennis players outside. 

So if do I sit on the fence it is because it’s a good place to watch what’s going on. The event described  above was a sun-kissed two days of activities for Open Garden Squares Weekend. The finale was a performance on Hatfield House lawn by the London Metropolitan Brass Band (with Golden Laner Tom Martin on tuba) and I sat on the fence (concrete) watching residents and visitors revelling in the sheer pleasure of Summer in the City. I also learned that a Basterfield House resident once refused the offer of a dance from Bruce Springsteen.

Open Gardens marked the start of party season. Wimbledon is underway, the World Cup is reaching a climax and today is 4 July, US Independence Day. If you dash, you might just catch hordes of crazy Americans overdosing on mustard at a hotdog-eating competition at the Blues Kitchen in Curtain Road. 

The school holidays begin soon, the local children can smell freedom, and on 15 July the Whitecross Street Party (WSXP) guarantees endless fun. Resident involvement in this year’s event has been a top priority and activities will centre on a number of “Rooms”, each coordinated by local groups – art, music, children, performance, pottery and virtual reality are among the themes.

The day before, 14 July, is more important though, because after an absurdly long delay, the newly refurbished Golden Lane Community Centre opens, with a whizz-bang party promised. The overlords at the City Corporation are very excited, but I am not so confident. At a recent meeting to discuss ideas for activities on the day, I gave a pompous lecture on 14 July being Bastille Day, a celebration signalling, in 1789, the start of the French Revolution. London will be throbbing with Gallic euphoria, I said. Paul in Liverpool Street are said to be dishing out free glasses of fizz and macaroons. To stand any chance of measuring up, I argued hysterically, the Golden Lane party, should include two things: a Wellie Wang on Basterfield lawn and a second outdoor game, in which children decapitate life-size effigies of their parents.

The assembled group looked at me in disbelief then broke into nervous laughter. You see, reader, that's the problem with these straight-laced council people. They can’t even spot a winning idea when it jumps up and bites them. 

Billy Mann has lived in Basterfield House on the Golden Lane Estate for 24 years. He is a City of London Community Builder and blogs about neighbourhood happenings at basterfieldbilly.blogspot.com. Write to him at goldenlanegazette@gmail.com.

An edited version of this column appeared in Edition 077 of City Matters newspaper.

Portman Pharmacy: New depths of bad manners

Being on regular medication can be quite daunting, and not just for the patient. Ahead of a recent holiday to Spain, I visited the Portman Pharmacy in Cherry Tree Walk to request a regular repeat prescription. The idea is that the pharmacy contacts your GP surgery and, hey presto, two days later, your life-saving medication is ready for collection. 

Twice in a row now, this seemingly simple and streamlined process has crashed. In the most recent case, having made my request to the pharmacy on a Friday and told the medication would be back for collection the following Wednesday, it wasn't there. What's more, the chief pharmacist mined new depths of bad manners and arrogance to tell me, first, that the GP surgery was to blame, and then that it was MY fault because my “expectations are too high". 

Despite having mobility problems caused by a stroke, I then made the journey to my GP surgery, the Neaman Clinic, was treated with great courtesy, collected the prescription and got my medication from another pharmacy. Endov Portman Pharmacy, hello Boots New Change.

St Luke's: Dementia workshop

Peggy Ennis has two interesting ways to describe dementia to those who know little about it. In the first she likens the inner wiring of the right side of the human brain to a set of fairy lights that are not performing at their peak. Some of the bulbs are dim, some are flickering. Others have packed up altogether. It all means we are no longer quite as bright or as flashy as we used to be.

In the second description Peggy uses the metaphor of the bookcase. Imagine, she says, a bookcase made of plywood. Each of its shelves are full of books; each of the shelves represents 10 years of your life; all of the books on each shelf are your memories of that decade. On the bottom shelf are your earliest memories, on the top are your most recent. Push the shelf slightly and it will sway; push it harder and the books on the top shelf will begin to fall off. More pushing and the books on the other shelves will do likewise, but the books on the bottom shelf (your long-term memories) will only fall off after an almighty shove. As you try desperately to put the falling books back on their shelves, many of them will get mixed up. In other words, you become confused. This is what dementia is like.

Now imagine a bookcase made from solid oak. The books on the top shelves might fall, but the stability of the unit will hold many of them in place, allowing the displaced books to be re-stacked on the shelves with some sense of order. This, Peggy says, illustrates the importance of “brain fitness”. Keep your brain exercised and nourished and the effects of dementia can be eased. She has a slogan for this exercise: “a healthy heart means a healthy head”. In other words, regular exercise keeps your mind in tip-top condition.

In the dementia awareness training Peggy delivered to a small group at St Luke’s Community Centre, she then spoke about the left side of the brain and the importance of the emotions. Quite often, she said, we will forget what people told us, what their names were, where we met them and what time they arrived. But we will remember how they made us feel, so using our emotional recollections rather than our factual ones is a good way to compensate once dementia and/or memory difficulties set in. Happy, sad, angry, disgusted, frightened or shocked: these are the experiences we can use to put those books back on the right shelf.

Peggy told us how people with dementia can appear a bit confused, bonkers even. To someone with dementia a polished vinyl floor might look like water; a black rubber slip-mat outside a supermarket door might look like a hole in the ground. This took me straight to a film idea, ‘Dementia Tour Of London’, a kind of funny/serious travelogue in which offspring and parent with early onset wander the capital’s streets seeing everything from a demented point of view.