The Secret Life of Streets (BBC Two)

[Serial_Apologist]

A girlfriend lived in Craven Terrace back in '66. The pub betwen the junction with Bayswater Rd and the big hotel holds many happy memories - amazing buffet spread they used to do - and is still one of my favourites.

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?

Well Cal, according to RT it's on tomorrow night on Beeb 2 at 9 pm, unless the Wombles have elbowed the schedules aside in some way - Reverdy Road, Bermondsey.

[Nick Armstrong]

A girlfriend lived in Craven Terrace back in '66. The pub betwen the junction with Bayswater Rd and the big hotel holds many happy memories - amazing buffet spread they used to do - and is still one of my favourites.

Well Cal, according to RT it's on tomorrow night on Beeb 2 at 9 pm, unless the Wombles have elbowed the schedules aside in some way - Reverdy Road, Bermondsey.

Ah! It eluded me in the quick flick through the schedules last night. Thanks!

Do you mean The Mitre on Craven Terrace? http://www.flickr.com/photos/oxfordian/5365478318/

[vinteuil]

I've found the map of the area

... ah, memories! My first job in England - before I took up a proper Career - was teaching in a ghastly crammer in Queen's Gardens [on your map]. The summer of 1976, which sweltered - and me, all enervated by glandular fever, walking to work across a parched baking Kensington Gardens and seriously wondering whether I would make it...

[Anna]

Wednesday's programme, not sure how interesting it will be minus slum clearances and odious merchant bankers from Barclays ....... "The fifth episode features Reverdy Road, Bermondsey, which has endured as an enclave of working-class respectability. When Booth visited in 1900, he was impressed by the houses, gardens, and by the broad and clean streets.

Older residents recall life on the street during the war, when three houses were bombed, and trips to the hop fields of Kent. They also remember the work of a pioneer of public health, Dr Alfred Salter, who lived in the house on the corner of the street"

p.s. Cali, is it wise to post your exact location, you could well be beseiged by stalkers!

[Serial_Apologist]

Do you mean The Mitre on Craven Terrace? http://www.flickr.com/photos/oxfordian/5365478318/

No Cali - the pub on the Bayswater Road between Craven Terrace and Lancaster Terrace: the one with a front courtyard and finials on the roof.

[Nick Armstrong]

Wednesday's programme, not sure how interesting it will be minus slum clearances and odious merchant bankers from Barclays ....... "The fifth episode features Reverdy Road, Bermondsey, which has endured as an enclave of working-class respectability. When Booth visited in 1900, he was impressed by the houses, gardens, and by the broad and clean streets.

Older residents recall life on the street during the war, when three houses were bombed, and trips to the hop fields of Kent. They also remember the work of a pioneer of public health, Dr Alfred Salter, who lived in the house on the corner of the street"

p.s. Cali, is it wise to post your exact location, you could well be beseiged by stalkers!

Hardly exact - a good square kilometre, I reckon!

[Nick Armstrong]

No Cali - the pub on the Bayswater Road between Craven Terrace and Lancaster Terrace: the one with a front courtyard and finials on the roof.

Ah indeed - The Swan. http://www.flickr.com/photos/55935853@N00/3250481865/

[Anna]

Hardly exact - a good square kilometre, I reckon!

Oh, bugler - that mean's I'll have trouble stalking you!

[Serial_Apologist]

Ah indeed - The Swan. http://www.flickr.com/photos/55935853@N00/3250481865/

That's the one! Funny, I must have imagined the finials.

[vinteuil]

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...

"their vast estates out west" - well, Shepherd's Bush doesn't usually get described as such, but if you wish, if you wish...

Interesting that one could feel some fellow feeling for the 'middle class pioneers' of the 1960s who were brave enough to leave Chelsea for the wilds of W11 - they, at least, were keen and happy to put their kids into the local state primary school (very well, yes I know that they swiftly added - "but they went on to Westminster, so that was all right..." ) - whereas there was a complete alienation from the newer stratum of supergentrification of the soulless bankers, who had no contact at all with the rest of the street ("my village is that way [pointing south] - their village is that way [pointing north]... "

I liked the deliberate symmetry of the poor dispossessed man ending up in a caravan in Cornwall - and the uber-rich Barclay scion ending up washing himself in the open air outside his portable shed (yes, I know, on ancestral woodlands held in a personal Trust, but still.... )

[Nick Armstrong]

Oh, bugler - that mean's I'll have trouble stalking you!

[Nick Armstrong]

"their vast estates out west" - well, Shepherd's Bush doesn't usually get described as such, but if you wish, if you wish...

Interesting that one could feel some fellow feeling for the 'middle class pioneers' of the 1960s who were brave enough to leave Chelsea for the wilds of W11 - they, at least, were keen and happy to put their kids into the local state primary school (very well, yes I know that they swiftly added - "but they went on to Westminster, so that was all right..." ) - whereas there was a complete alienation from the newer stratum of supergentrification of the soulless bankers, who had no contact at all with the rest of the street ("my village is that way [pointing south] - their village is that way [pointing north]... "

I liked the deliberate symmetry of the poor dispossessed man ending up in a caravan in Cornwall - and the uber-rich Barclay scion ending up washing himself in the open air outside his portable shed (yes, I know, on ancestral woodlands held in a personal Trust, but still.... )

West even of the Bush, vindepays!!

Totally agree with your paras 2 & 3. The vision of the banker turned backwoodsman (albeit as you say, chez lui) was rather haunting and strange...

[Serial_Apologist]

Oh, bugler - that mean's I'll have trouble stalking you!

It could be difficult spotting you among all the foreign accents around there, Anna!

[Serial_Apologist]

West even of the Bush, vindepays!!

Totally agree with your paras 2 & 3. The vision of the banker turned backwoodsman (albeit as you say, chez lui) was rather haunting and strange...

Assuming he had become disillusioned with being in the super-earnings league and the rat race, at least he had an inheritance to fall back on.

[Anna]

Assuming he had become disillusioned with being in the super-earnings league and the rat race, at least he had an inheritance to fall back on.

I really felt quite sorry for him, sitting in a tin bath in the middle of some woodland trust. He seemed a rather sad merchant banker for all his wealth. I wonder where his wife and children went.