The Secret Life of Streets (BBC Two)

[Pegleg]

Still have to catch up with Caledonian Road!! There was, BBC4, one of their London Film things, this Monday, about the East End. I thought it was very interesting but, did anyone catch the name of the photographer involved? I wondered if he was the Spitalfields blogger that I posted before?

The photographer in the East End was Donald McCullin, the give away was when he spoke of photographing "social wars" as well as the bullet kind.

[Serial_Apologist]

Have to say - as always in this series - I didn't think much for the bourgeois types we met who have taken over the posh end of this street.

The Sloane type guy whose family he told us set up Barclays bank, now disillusioned with the lifestyle his earnings had allowed him to fork out 3 and a half million on his house, who by the end of the film had "retired", presumably in his forties, to his family estate, (not his estate, you understand, it's all in trust, as he shamefacedly put it, etc etc etc.

Once more it was the working class folk, most of whom had moved out or been effectively evicted, and, in once case, "bettered themselves" to the point of living in a portacabin in the depths of the Devon countryside, who emerged as the heroes of the story.

Watched in conjunction with today's news about Barclay's involvements in dodgy dealings must surely give more to the lie about education, class and wealth being the ideal wherewithals for the qualities manifested by those who have for so long been seen as befitting running the show?

Nice of them to do up those lovely early Victorian houses...

[Anna]

Watched in conjunction with today's news about Barclay's involvements in dodgy dealings

Indeed S_A and when he said 'where do you think the taxpayers' money went? It went to buy bankers houses' there was a very sharp intake of breath here!! The transmission of that programme could not have been more perfectly timed with the Barclays news of fiddles!

[Serial_Apologist]

Indeed S_A and when he said 'where do you think the taxpayers' money went? It went to buy bankers houses' there was a very sharp intake of breath here!! The transmission of that programme could not have been more perfectly timed with the Barclays news of fiddles!

As one who had the misfortune to be sent to the kind of educational establishent that man undoubtedly went to - thereafter virtually marginalised by family and friends for not living up to it - I always identified with explicit message delivered in all its violence at the end of Lindsay Anderson's film "If". It never surprised me that the college depicted (Anderson's) regretted their portrayal, only the the spirit of '68 was so easily wiped out by the aspirationalism that followed. Parasites, then and now, the lot of them.

[Anna]

As one who had the misfortune to be sent to the kind of educational establishent that man undoubtedly went to - thereafter virtually marginalised by family and friends for not living up to it

I'm sure you've overcome such a poor start in life! Actually, that Barclays banker somehow made my blood run cold. Really interested to know when they've caught up what vinteuil and Cali think about the Portland Road programme, seeing as they know it so well. I've also caught up with the Caledonian Rd episode. Edit: and forget to say, if it were not for that well connected Randel Keynes and him having the ear of a couple of Peers would that working class pressure group have triumphed? I think not. He was very good, he said something along the lines of: from his priveleged position he always thought your home was your castle but he never realised it didn't apply to the poor.

Going slightly offtopic and back to finding property in London where turn of the century family lived, I find them in The Peabody Estate, Blackfriars, it still exists and it seems the Peabody Trust are not allowed to sell any of the flats. However, I found a one bedroomed flat there to let at £1,200 pm + £1,000 pa council tax. Hardly an affordable rent for the working poor of Southwark is it? Thinking of single person on minimum wage, or is the Peabody no longer philanthropic?

[Serial_Apologist]

I'm sure you've overcome such a poor start in life! Actually, that Barclays banker somehow made my blood run cold. Really interested to know when they've caught up what vinteuil and Cali think about the Portland Road programme, seeing as they know it so well. I've also caught up with the Caledonian Rd episode. Edit: and forget to say, if it were not for that well connected Randel Keynes and him having the ear of a couple of Peers would that working class pressure group have triumphed? I think not. He was very good, he said something along the lines of: from his priveleged position he always thought your home was your castle but he never realised it didn't apply to the poor.

Going slightly offtopic and back to finding property in London where turn of the century family lived, I find them in The Peabody Estate, Blackfriars, it still exists and it seems the Peabody Trust are not allowed to sell any of the flats. However, I found a one bedroomed flat there to let at £1,200 pm + £1,000 pa council tax. Hardly an affordable rent for the working poor of Southwark is it? Thinking of single person on minimum wage, or is the Peabody no longer philanthropic?

I've survived on generally being risk-averse, Anna!

Blackfriars being in the City probably has something to do with C/Tax being so high, Anna. I don't have any figures at hand for rental charges in this part of S London (6 miles from Blackfriars); I'd need to check. As sole occupant I pay Southwark £914 for a Band D flat.

Edit: Hmmm - it varies widely...

http://www.find-a-property.com/to-rent/london-se19.south-east-london/properties

(To-buy prices linked from this)

[Anna]

I've survived on generally being risk-averse, Anna!

Blackfriars being in the City probably has something to do with C/Tax being so high, Anna. I don't have any figures at hand for rental charges in this part of S London (6 miles from Blackfriars); I'd need to check. As sole occupant I pay Southwark £914 for a Band D flat

And I'm sure you're lovely!
OK, I rounded up the C/Tax for that Peabody, it's £948, Band B. Does this link to it work? It's the same website as you posted.

http://www.findaproperty.com/to-rent/property-11950592

£1,200pm still seems helluva lot if you're poor and single. On the census 1911 my Peabody family (he was lithographic engraver, living with wife no occupation plus their daughter Kate aged 25 who is listed as - Professional Dancer, Theatrical Ooh, I say!) and they had 3 rooms which included kitchen. I wonder how much that would rent out for now and I wonder what happened to Kate? Can't wait for the 1921 census to come on line so I can continue tracking.

[Serial_Apologist]

And I'm sure you're lovely!
OK, I rounded up the C/Tax for that Peabody, it's £948, Band B. Does this link to it work? It's the same website as you posted.

http://www.findaproperty.com/to-rent/property-11950592

£1,200pm still seems helluva lot if you're poor and single. On the census 1911 my Peabody family (he was lithographic engraver, living with wife no occupation plus their daughter Kate aged 25 who is listed as - Professional Dancer, Theatrical Ooh, I say!) and they had 3 rooms which included kitchen. I wonder how much that would rent out for now and I wonder what happened to Kate? Can't wait for the 1921 census to come on line so I can continue tracking.

Blimey that's expensive, Anna!

I have the luxury of cycling past that block whenever I partake of jazz north of that part of the river.

[Anna]

Blimey that's expensive, Anna!
I have the luxury of cycling past that block whenever I partake of jazz north of that part of the river.

Exactly S_A and I found that under the terms of the Peabody Trust the flats cannot be sold. Further digging reveals the Trust are outsourcing rentals to agents and not continuing George Peabody's original plan, for affordable housing for the deserving poor but respectable, working class. George Peabody was a banker with a heart, it seems his Trustees don't continue with his dream and are intent on making a profit by only renting to, dare I say it, a load of merchant bankers. It also seems, the original working class tenants are being/have been turfed out (I need to look into this) and once again, gentrification is taking place. As in the Caledonian Rd and other episodes, the working class are invisible.

This series has made me think about Class as I've never done so before.

[Pegleg]

I've also caught up with the Caledonian Rd episode. Edit: and forget to say, if it were not for that well connected Randel Keynes and him having the ear of a couple of Peers would that working class pressure group have triumphed? I think not. He was very good, he said something along the lines of: from his priveleged position he always thought your home was your castle but he never realised it didn't apply to the poor.

Randel Keynes, related to both Darwin and John Maynard IIRC. My thoughts exactly, and somewhat punctured the "small peolpe v. the big railway" theme of the prgramme makers, but when did a programme maker let a little detail like that get in the way of a good story. A friend still has relations living in the Peabody buildings in Druy Lane, but I've no idea of the rents. http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1028520 A study of the "five per cent philanthropist" and other Model Dwellings companies would make for some good social history programmes.

I've yet to see the Portland Road episode, but it sounds like a load of bankers have taken over the place. Very nasty.

[Serial_Apologist]

Exactly S_A and I found that under the terms of the Peabody Trust the flats cannot be sold. Further digging reveals the Trust are outsourcing rentals to agents and not continuing George Peabody's original plan, for affordable housing for the deserving poor but respectable, working class. George Peabody was a banker with a heart, it seems his Trustees don't continue with his dream and are intent on making a profit by only renting to, dare I say it, a load of merchant bankers. It also seems, the original working class tenants are being/have been turfed out (I need to look into this) and once again, gentrification is taking place. As in the Caledonian Rd and other episodes, the working class are invisible.

This series has made me think about Class as I've never done so before.

Class has never really gone away, Anna - in this country or anywhere else, including the States. (We could discuss whether the Soviet Union and other imv misnamed "socialist states" were classless). What happened was, I think, that from the wake of the "we're all in this together" Second World War came the notion of class collaboration, helped by Keynsian methods of economic demand-management. These died out in the mid-70s as it became clear that the organised working class needed its thinly-won rights to maintaining free collective bargaining by old methods of protectionism and industrial action straitjacketed, if a flight of capital (monetary and physical) was to be averted. Hence the corporatism of In Place of Strife (referred to elsewhere); and hence, when that failed in the Winter of Discontent, removal of the velvet gloves for a full return to survival of the fittest in evermore globalised circumstances.

In my memory the biggest signal of the kind of triumphalism still then to meet its coronation with the fall of the Berlin Wall was an announcement in the Daily Mail, a few months into the Thatcher administration, that a certain stratum of society were now once again spending enormous amounts of money on hosting dinner parties, guests proudly lashing out £2,000 on a frock that would only be worn once, and the re-burgeoning market for Rolls-Royces and Bentleys.

Portland Road reminded me of what had happened to Clifton, a posh district of Bristol comparable in many ways with Notting Hill, which had been bedsitter land when I moved there in 1968. When I returned there in the early '80s, the Regency and early Victorian terraces had reverted to single, couple or family occupation, and most of them done up, curtains left open to display lavish interiors at night. Although one or two squats still remained the bohemian atmosphere had gone from the pubs, which had become yuppified.

Brighton has gone gay chic - outside a few pockets of London, maybe Hastings represents a last, now crumbling bastion of alternative inner-city lifestylism from that era.

[Pegleg]

Class has never really gone away, Anna .

From Lords of the Manor versus serfs to Lords of the Universe versus the rest, plus ca change.

I did think I was working class, but I've always worn underpants. So what does that make me? The Portland Road episode was both absorbing and alarming to watch, a property version of that classic Frost Report sketch with Cleese and the two Ronnies, with the little man ending up with a pain in the neck.

The programme told us that the Portland Road was built in 1850s on a strip of waste land dividing an affluent Ladbroke Estate from the effluent Norland Estate with its piggeries and potteries. They totally failed to mention that all of of this had been built on the site of the old Hippodrome race course, which has its own very colourful history, and that Portland Road ran along the line of the steeplechase straight. Hence missing the obvious allusion to the “rat race” that followed, and the altogether different rats of the Rachman kind.

Histories of the area would suggest that the area run into problems almost as soon as it was built and it was a notorious in the 1850s as it was to become in the 1950s. You could argue that the proposition that the Portland Road was ever just one long street is quite false, but rather it was three streets that ran into one another.

Stanford maps as late as 1897 clearly show Portland Road to the South, Montpelier Terrace in the Middle, and then the Portland Road North. As the Charles Booth maps showed these section had always housed populations of quite distinct character. Not that this detracts from less fortunate being pushed out on the arrival of 1960s “settlers” ( a quaint expression) and later the uber-rich, nor the dire state that some of the housing had fallen into by the 1950s which gave rise to Winterbourne and Nottingwood House. But it never was one village.

One thing that is beginning to irritate me about the makers of this series is their manipulative use images, sometimes generic other times specific and often anachronistic. In this week's episode we had film of builders when the narration spoke of the 1850's manic development, archive file from the Kensington Housing Trust which may or may not have been of Portland Road, black and white film made to look old when clearly is was not as burglar alarms were visible, old street film when the narration was about George's part of the street which matches nothing in that part of Portland Road, pointless generic film of gypsies, and film of Winterbourne House as it is now made to look old and grainy. Even when we caught a glimpse of the real thing in the film “Turn the Key Slowly” it was so short that were given a studio sequence with Thora Hird at the door. Why bother with all this when there was an abundance of oral history to tap?

My last gripe is about the use of photos by Roger Mayne who made his name taking pictures in Southam Street. Only one of three photos shown in the programme is catalogue as being taken in Portland Road, this one of Teds is definitely Southam Street: http://www.rogermayne.com/sstreet/sstreet8.html

Of course, Southam Street is another, but no totally unrelated, story. As Johnny Speight would say they pulled down my 'ouse and built a slum. In this case Trellick Tower.

A series of articles about Notting Hill history worth reading: http://www.historytalk.org/nottinghilltimeline.htm

Roger Mayne's Southam Street: http://youtu.be/uYUwljFJWzc

http://www.rogermayne.com/sstreet/southamstreet.html

http://www.vam.ac.uk/contentapi/search/?q=roger+mayne&search-submit=Go

[vinteuil]

The programme told us that the Portland Road was built in 1850s on a strip of waste land dividing an affluent Ladbroke Estate from the effluent Norland Estate with its piggeries and potteries. They totally failed to mention that all of of this had been built on the site of the old Hippodrome race course, which has its own very colourful history, and that Portland Road ran along the line of the steeplechase straight. Hence missing the obvious allusion to the “rat race” that followed, and the altogether different rats of the Rachman kind.

... but the Hippodrome didn't last long - Pevsner has: (of the Ladbroke Estate) - " Building did not take place until the 1840s. It was preceded by the curious episode of the Hippodrome racecourse, which covered an area of c. 125 acres between Holland Park Avenue and the present Westway, the crest of Notting Hill providing an ideal vantage point. Opened in 1837, the course was immediately set with difficulties; its transgression over the footpath north to Notting Barn Farm resulted in protest marches by local tenants, and it was closed in 1841."

EDIT Have just read pegleg's fascinating attachment [history talk - notting hill timeline]. Many thanks for that, Pegleg - really interesting

[Anna]

A very belated thank you to Pegleg for the Roger Mayne photos and some absorbing reading about Notting Hill (an area you obviously know very well as well as Royer Mayne's work) Now the footie has finished I wonder if others have caught up with Portland Road episode yet, I missed yesterday's London on Film about the suburbs, will have to catch up with that, but perhaps all you Londoners have no experience of suburbia? I certainly don't.

[Nick Armstrong]

I wonder if others have caught up with Portland Road episode yet, I missed yesterday's London on Film about the suburbs, will have to catch up with that, but perhaps all you Londoners have no experience of suburbia? I certainly don't.

I have - I watched the Caledonian Rd and Portland Rd progs this weekend, both fascinating. The Cally as an account of the history of a functional artery - the prison, the cattle market, and latterly the railway sagas (I didn't know about that King's Cross scheme for the Eurostar - particularly interesting to see that offshoot of the Darwin-Keynes families scuppering the plans along with economic conditions).... And Portland Road as a slice of social history - what a mix, from the gypsies to the bankers. All the paints for the inside of Chateau Caliban came from Fired Earth which was visible on a number of occasions, just by the paved area half-way up the street, an odd feature whose origins I had always wondered about - where Julies (the wine bar / restaurant) is situated, an occasional hang-out of mine, good place to meet clients from west London and contacts at the Beeb. And the maverick decendant of the Barclays bank dynasty was interesting and alarming in his depiction of the multi-millionaire slaves who bank all day while their wives have their nails attended to in The Cowshed, and of the soulless atmosphere engendered by the anti-social über-rich who never mix and presumably go away for the weekend to their vast estates out west...

I've been stimulated to try and find out more - especially pictorial - history of my own manor, further east... I've found a few historic shots of the streets either end of mine, I'd love to find a photo of my place (built 1858). And I've found the map of the area in Booth's 1889 map, all pretty upmarket back then around chez Caliban (bottom left quarter of the map, just north of Kensington Gardens), all coloured green...



Nosedived I think in the 50s and 60s into red-light notoriety, then up again and transformed during even the time I've lived there (20 years this August) not least due to the Heathrow Express and Paddington Basin regeneration.

Looks like some flower show will now make us wait a couple of weeks for the next programme in the 'Streets' series - I think it's somewhere south of the river again next time?