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

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