The writing on the wall – old school graffiti in Kensington and Chelsea

This picture is one of my favourites from Roger Perry and George Melly’s 1976 book on London graffiti the title of which I have borrowed for this post.

The picture dates from a time before graffiti was a branch of the visual arts. The explosion of spray painting which saw elaborate tagging on every accessible wall and which would give us street murals and fantastic decorations on empty buildings had not yet happened. Graffiti was still a clandestine activity. And some people just left messages. Political messages, campaigning messages and even personal messages like this one:

You can’t help wondering even now when it probably no longer matters whether the writer’s love for Linda was unrequited.

Some graffiti then as now was purely political.

The phrase “rent revolt” epitomises community activism in many parts of London in the 70s. North Kensington, the home of Rachman and others was particularly radical.

This is Cambridge Gardens in the period when the Westway was being constructed. “May Day is worker’s day” reads the message followed by “The rest is whose?” It’s almost like an exam question. Discuss. The best of this kind of graffiti raises questions, some of them political some of them philosophical, some enigmatic. Like this one, also from Cambridge Gardens:

It’s a kind of social critique. One of the famous pieces of graffiti which you can see over several pages in the Melly book was located on either side of the tube line between Westbourne Park and Ladbroke Grove where it could be read by passengers. The epic message described the repetitive life of the commuter “same thing day after day”, “work-train-sleep” and concluded with the warning “one in ten go mad, one in five cracks up”.

Graffiti attempts to enter the reader’s head like a tune you can’t stop humming. After the politics and the warnings about the dangers of modern life you can also turn to the consolations of literature with this quotation:

William Blake was a particular favourite of the graffiti artists. This one  in Powis Square “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” was not uncommon. I can also remember seeing another at the entrance to Euston Square station: “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”. It could also be seen in Basing Street W11. We now have a phrase for the way these messages spread: going viral. Here is a more recent example in Ladbroke Grove:

This one was seen all over London in the 90s. Iain Sinclair refers to it in Lights out for the Territory (page 199 if you want to see for yourself) and wonders if it has some kind of alchemical significance. It’s a little like Christian Rosencrantz, a name from esoteric history. Here it is again in a truncated form on Scrubs Lane (perhaps there was only room for the name?)

No-one seems to be sure what it actually means. There are suggestions it was publicity for a band, but it’s also said that the band came after the messages. It’s also reminiscent of another repeated message from the 70s: “George Davis is innocent”. Does anyone remember that one? If you don’t the quick version is that George Davis was a man who was wrongly convicted of robbery and subsequently freed, although he later served prison sentences for two other robberies. Those convictions were not disputed in graffiti.

Londoners have been expressing themselves in graffiti for centuries. The massages serve every kind of purpose but the best ones are the one which make you stop for a moment and think “what?” Why on earth would someone take the time and trouble to write that? Here is my personal Kensington and Chelsea favourite and this one comes from Chelsea on a wall in the soon to be demolished and intriguingly named Raasay Street. Perhaps it’s the size of the letters and their insistent tone but I find it vaguely threatening.

Perhaps it was left by a demented grocer.

If you have any favourites you’d like to share send them to me and I’ll do a follow-up post one of these days. I scoured the photo survey for images of graffiti. Some examples were frustratingly truncated. Some legendary examples such as the slogan Vietgrove were not there when our photographer passed by.

Thanks to Sue Snyder for the Christian Goldman photos. The Writing on the Wall is now unfortunately out of print but well worth it if you can  find a copy.

Building the Bridge – Chelsea 1936

This is Chelsea Bridge, the first Chelsea Bridge. It was opened with some celebration in 1858. It looks a little like its younger cousin the still surviving but beleaguered bridge at Hammersmith, opened in 1887. Unlike Hammersmith less than a hundred years passed before a new Chelsea bridge was needed to cope with the demands of traffic both across and under the bridge.

The old bridge was demolished in 1935. It’s always easier to demolish than construct, even with bridges. By March 1936 the work had begun.

The steel frame on the south channel.

April. A misty morning. The first float of the steelwork. Later that day the tug boats get the steelwork to the north channel.

Inside the north abutment:

You can see water below but the workers are now inside the bridge.

Looking south here is the emerging bridge as a tangle of steel, wood and concrete with a self-explanatory notice.

In the distance, the trees of Battersea Park on the right and the faint outline of a gasometer on the left. If you know what you’re doing you can already cross.

Inside the structure again, lamps shining the length of the new bridge.

Months have passed and a new year has begun. Looking south again.

The shape of the new bridge emerges from the superstructure. Workers are visible across the length of the bridge.

A closer view looking north.

Wet concrete is smoothed out. In the distance the Lister Institute.

You can see the first part of Battersea Power Station, the A station, generating electricity since 1933. The other half was not built until after the war.

The bridge is almost complete. The surface awaits the cars, trucks, buses and feet.

Now it’s done. The supports are all gone and the bridge looks like it has always been there. The river flows past the clean lines of the piers. The old bridge is now just a memory preserved in a few photographs.

These photographs come out of an album which sat in the offices of the builders as a record of a job well done. Until one day the office was cleared. Somebody had the sense to take it home. Eventually it appeared on eBay, where most things end up these days.  Which is where I came in. And now we can all see how steel and concrete and the hard work of many men made the bridge.

The secret life of postcards

Picture postcards have been with us for more than a hundred years. People have been collecting them as well as sending them from the beginning. Before cameras became a common consumer item they were the only way many people could get a photograph of their street. Professional photographers it seemed roamed the streets of London taking pictures of any street they liked the look of, perhaps hoping to sell postcards to the residents. It’s possible anyway, all I know is that there are a lot of postcards of quite obscure streets taken from the 1890s to just before the First World War, Postcards like this one:

This is the view looking north down Pembridge Road from Notting Hill Gate. Most of these buildings are still there now, only the shops have changed. And the people of course.

Regular readers of the blog will know that I like a good close up. This is what I mean by the secret life of postcards. The photographer was trying to get a good picture of the street. The people in it were incidental for his purposes. But whether intentionally or by chance he captures the passers-by in unguarded moments. The girl waiting impatiently for her mother to finish taking to her friend. Or are they waiting to cross the road?

This is the Earls Court Road fully developed on the east side with a hoarding enclosing a vacant lot or building site on the other side.  There are plenty of people too.

In this case teenage girls hanging out by the shops? Two of them at least with sonewhere definite to go striding out of the picture.

A slightly less crowded scene. These mansion blocks on the western side of Elm Park Gardens have now been partially replaced by modern blocks of flats but the street is still recognizable.

In the close up the woman and her daughter are too blurred to see much detail but you can see her lifting up her skirt to protect it from the dirty surface of the road.

This is an excellent action view of Kensington Park Road looking north from the junction with Elgin Crescent. Look at the barely visible cyclist, the horses in motion and the woman leaning forward to start pushing the pram across the road. The close up adds a little information.

The woman in the foreground has noticed the camera, and maybe the man with the umbrella too. You can just about make out the child sitting up in the pram.

Maybe half a mile away, but possibly a few years apart, in Notting Hill Gate there is another bustling street scene.

You can see the Metropolitan underground station and another bus covered with adverts.

All the figures in this picture are interesting in some way, even the dog, but the two that catch my eye are the bearded man and his younger companion. Are they out for a leisurely stroll or pursuing some business venture?

Moving south here is a picture of the now demolished Kensington Crescent, an unsuccessful development in the Warwick Gardens area. The two children in the photograph are aware of the photographer perhaps even consciously posing for him.

I can’t tell if the expression is curious, resentful, bored or whether they’re just standing still as the photographer asked.

This picture shows numbers 1-14 Kensington Crescent. Normally I avoid fascinating facts but I cannot avoid telling you that Kenneth Grahame, author of the Wind in the Willows lived for five years at number 5, just before the photo was taken.

Finally a personal favourite, one of the first postcards I subjected to the scan and zoom process.

A good crisp view of Kensington Park Road showing St Peter’s Church. Try it on Google Maps street view for comparison. The pattern of the facade is still there exactly.

But naturally what I want to know is what the woman in the middle is doing with her left hand. Is she scratching her nose, and has this idle gesture been captured for posterity?

There are so many postcards full of compelling details and questions that we will probably be here again soon using the time machine to catch more of these details of everyday life.

Author’s message

From next week I’ll be tweeting a preview of the week’s post a couple of days before posting – assuming I know what I’ll be writing about before Wednesday. Follow me at @daveinlocal .

Ready for war – June 1939

It’s Monday 19^th June 1939.

Sir John Anderson and his colleagues have found a vantage point to watch an event of national significance. Down below something out of the ordinary is occurring.

Crowds are gathering to watch and to take  part.

Notices are posted.

A bunch of girls are getting out of school early.

Children of all ages are on their way somewhere.

Now they’re being organised and labelled. But this is not a real evacuation.

They’re being marched off again down the King’s Road. It’s all go.

This was an event for adults as well.

Buses had been hired for the day.

Casualties had been organised for the volunteer members of the emergency services.

It’s all an exercise of course at this stage. These casualties are only pretending.

Regional and national newspapers reported this event in some detail. According to the reports about 7,500 people took part in the biggest Air Raid Precautions test the country had ever seen. Children and adults marched to 125 shelters in the Chelsea area. Virtual shelters that is, chalked off areas to stand in and designated pubs. 400 wardens shepherded the crowds through the streets. 5000 children from 21 schools were taken to underground stations and then taken away again. Sirens were sounded for extra realism. As the streets were cleared “an unnatural silence fell” according to the Times, broken only by a loudspeaker announcement that the bombers were only seven or eight minutes away. A rocket was launched to give witnesses some idea of the noise of bombs falling. “A few idlers” refused to take shelter but at least kept still. Some flyers were distributed calling for real shelters to be built as opposed to the conceptual versions of this event. Buses, cars and taxis parked by the kerb. Some virtual bomb damage was made up for the purposes of the exercise and the casualties were escorted to the first aid post at Chelsea Library (In Manresa Road in those days). My colleagues at the library filled 5 small scrapbooks with cuttings from newspapers ranging from the Evening Standard to the Belfast Telegraph.

The people involved in the exercise are serious but not solemn.  People seem to be enjoying the event.

There’s very little sense of anxiety in these pictures.

From this distance in time I can’t get imagine what it was like for the people of London to be getting ready for a war which would be fought in their own city as well as in Europe. Did they know what was coming? Did they believe that the exercise of June 1939 was a realistic picture of what lay ahead?

The next picture is not of an exercise. It’s about a year later.

The men in the picture are not pretending to search for survivors.

Now go back to the picture of the woman putting up the sign. You’ll see her again wearing a coat and a helmet getting some instructions from a man not unlike Mr Lansdell, (he’s second from the left in the picture below). She might be on the far right of the group of women running. And she’s here on a roof in 1941. Now she’s an ARP warden in the real war.