Down The Blue: The Cafe Situation

Grosvenor Estates have bought the Peek and Frean Biscuit Factory site.  Peek and Frean used to be a major employer in Bermondsey but closed in 1989.  The company brought the world the Twiglet and the beloved, delicious Garibaldi squashed fly biscuit.  Now the old factory is home to small businesses; graphic artists, designers, studios.  Grosvenor Estates famously developed Belgravia and Mayfair and are now looking at the potential of The Blue, the area around Blue Anchor Lane, linked to Borough by Southwark Park Road.  Grosvenor Estates are doing their homework on what the area needs to become another trendy London location and sent round a questionnaire asking what residents think would improve the area.  One of the suggestions was more cafes.

This sent me out to look at the cafes already here. I already knew and love Mr. Cappuchinos on Jamaica Road. There you can get a newspaper, an enormous range of hot and cold sandwiches and panninis, the usual range of coffees though they have not yet upgraded to a barista to serve them, and can sit either inside or out on the extraordinarily wide pavement.

In the Biscuit Factory itself there is a good old-fashioned cafe with good solid  hot meals served mostly to the workers in the Biscuit Factory and  the workmen currently crawling all over the Four Squares Estate.

The other side of the railway arches, in what is properly The Blue, the first cafe is the Curry Den, probably named for the famous Milwall Football Team, recently relegated, who's home is The Den, just up the road. Here you can try their famous Piri Piri grilled chicken. They are very nice people and once specially made samosas for me when I popped in.

 Then there is Lou Farrow's Snack Bar and Take Away; Traditional Pie and Mash.  Here they serve meat pies, eel and 'liquor' a mysterious green soup which turns our to be made with parsley.   It is a real, traditional eel pie and mash cafe, and they are rare these days.

Going on down Southwark Park Road are Pete's Bakery, which sells cakes and serves coffee, the Pop In Cafe, oh the other side of the road, and a Wimpy bar.  I haven't seen a Wimpy bar since the 60s.  So I looked it up on Wikipedia and found, to my astonishment, that Wimpy is South African.  Maybe that is why they suddenly vanished from British streets.  The first UK Wimpy was opened in Lyons Corner House, Coventry Road, London in 1954.  This one is at 251A Southwark Park Road.  Checking on the internet the one on Southwark Park Road looks to be the very last one left serving.

Next comes the Market Square where I get my jellied eels and news of Millwall football club from the fishmonger.  Here there is the Lucya Cafe which serves a traditional menu to the locals.  

There is also the Star Express, serving huge breakfasts, a huge range of burgers and sandwiches, Turkish meat balls and liver and onions. and finally there is Duns Delicatessen which serves that other well known London delicacy, salt beef sandwiches along with a splendid all day breakfast including kippers, haddock, black or white pudding and porridge as well as toasted ciabattas and panninis.  All seem well-loved by locals Although it is wonderful to have the huge range of coffees and delicious food served in more fashionable locations round London there is still a place in my heart for these traditional cafes.

Four Squares Estate: Guerilla gardening

Below my flat are two large brick raised beds for flowers.  They have a couple of sad, diseased looking rose bushes in them and a lot of weeds.  It did not take me long to get the itch to rescue them.  But where to find flowers in Bermondsey?  In Birmingham there are plant shops on just about every street plus a garden centre just behind where I live  .London is a vast urban desert with no plants.  I try Tesco, Canada Water, Jamaica Road.  Wherever I go in London I look for shops selling cheap plants.  Or any plants, with roots.  Or bulbs.    The only place I see plants in profusion is Chelsea Flower Show and they are not for sale.
  
Only in The Blue, at the small, struggling local market, can I find plug plants, sold from a barrow.  They are amazed when I buy up, at a very good price, all the plug geraniums I can carry in two large plastic bags.
I plant them out and go back for more.
Then I collect all the seed from my garden and throw it all over the beds.
Result, a fine crop of opium poppies, a few foxgloves, nasturtiums and a lot of cheerful mixed geraniums.

In the autumn I have the job of removing all the dead plants.  I plant tulip and narcissi bulbs and, in February,  I bring some snowdrops.  They all come up.

This year the Four Squares Estate renovations are all happening.  The council blocks are all covered in scaffolding and green netting.  I thought it would be dark under all the nets but it is really not too bad, and it is very exciting to see wonderful shiny new UPVC windows going in.  Suddenly the run down Four Squares is looking almost respectable.

Because of the building work I did nothing to the guerilla garden this spring.  But nature did its work for me.  A fine crop of foxgloves has taken over.














e-mail: childhoodblog@gmail.com

Gormley at White Cube

Doing my civic duty I picked up a newspaper from the pavement.  It was the  Evening Standard, full of interesting stuff including Antony Gormley's new show, Model, at White Cube.  My local White Cube in Bermondsey, which would fit in well with my plan to explore Bermondsey Street.

Carrying Southwark Council booklet The Story of Bermondsey, I walked down Jamaica Road, pioneering a new route to Bermondsey Street.  Down Tanner Street, in the bit the bus can't penetrate,  I found a massive warehouse full of antique furniture, very nice.  On to Tower Bridge Road and the squat little church of St. Mary Magdalen with its astonishingly low steeple, hardly a steeple at all.  But the church is the oldest building in Bermondsey, built in 1291 right next to Bermondsey Abbey.  The Abbey stood roughly between Grange Walk, where there are still remains of the Gatehouse, and Bermondsey Square where the Friday antiquyes market is held.  The small building by the church was the parish watch house, where any local malefactors were detained by the night watchmen.

 
 


Bermondsey Street runs across Tower Bridge Road here.  It is probably the oldest street in Bermondsey, narrow with warehouses on either side and cobbled alleys leading into old yards. It is the place I fell in love with on my very first visit to Bermondsey, walking across Tower Bridge to Zandra Rhodes Museum of Fashion and Textile.



The gleaming modernity of White Cube stands back behind a courtyard.  In the Model Room Antony Gormley was talking about his maquets, fascinating essays in translating the human form into cubes and playing around with extending them.  Perspex and wire models and drawings show the internal working structures.  In the white rooms the nearly black metal models are austere and beautiful; standing, lying, crouching.  Finally, stretching the length of one room, lies an interactive cubed form, an exploration of inner and outer space.  Enter the tunnel at the toe, adjusting to the dark, and feeling cautiously, a hand out and up to feel the wall and ceiling.  Explore the marks on the surface.  Crawl through the dark, dark tunnel towards faint light.  See the square of light ceiling where the roof opens up, fortuitously incorporating the square light fittings of the gallery.  Sitting on a shelf and looking around I saw shades of grey squares superimposed one on another, with one triangle of light.  Then there was a very, very dark space, pitch velvet black but with a faint reflective gleam from some far wall.  Walking slowly forward, hand outstretched and raised, I suddenly hit a barrier, the reflection was deceptive.  This is the head.  Then back to where I found a shelf and a space darker than the dark around and crawled to the back.  I observed invisibly and sat and listened to the boom, boom of people's feet on the metal, drummed with my hand and someone drummed back. 
I wondered when I saw the perspex maquets why Gormley made the final model opaque but now I understood.  Transparent would be another story.

whitecube.com/

 

Buying in Bermondsey

I had never been to Bermondsey in my life until Jim took me to the Zandra Rhodes Fashion and Textile Museum.  We walked across Tower Bridge, another first for Brummy me, and into old streets of Georgian houses, warehouses, a but tatty, but definitely exciting. Pink and blue painted doors and window frames.  Enticing little cafes.  The museum was showing bras and corsets, how often do you get the chance to look at Victorian intimates?  

Then he took me to his friend's house near Grange Road.  A Georgian house with Elizabethan cellars.  Magic.  I really liked this area.

Plotting my partial move from Bournville to London, I researched cheap London property on the web.  Never defeated by people telling me I couldn't afford London, I started at the bottom.  The bottom, the absolute bottom, is interesting; garages, lock-ups, shops, cafes.  I speculated on sleeping rough in a garage but was defeated by the toilet problem.

I mapped the cheap properties I found across London on that wonderful invention Google Maps and got on a train with just one viewing in my diary and a lot of addresses.  That one viewing was a could-not-pass up.  On the map it was ten minutes from the river Thames.  Getting to Bermondsey tube station a good hour early for my appointment I went straight down to the river, at Cherry Gardens pier.  Once there were cherry orchards, and Pepys and his wife used to be rowed across the river to picnic there.  I looked down the river and there were walls of warehouses, across the river I could recognise Wapping and up river, well, upriver the view was Tower Bridge.  I  walked along the river and found a park.  It was a bit scary, as always, being in a strange place, possibly hostile, possibly dangerous, but the people seemed OK.  I skirted the park, not knowing whether it was a muggers' paradise, and crossed Jamaica Road.

The estate agent picked me up and we drove into a hinterland of council properties, to a great barracks like block of flats, with broken, boarded up garages, looking ripe for demolition.  But there were plane trees all along the street and the people didn't look bad.  The entrance stairs were rough and covered in graffitti, but the lift worked.  When we got to the top floor I looked out, right across London, to the sun glinting on the Gherkin building across the river. And I fell in love, fell in love with Bermondsey.

I spent the rest of the day on London buses following my trail of cheapish property through Deptford and out to  Woolwich and Thamesmead.  I loved the river but it was too far.  The train from Birmingham takes 1.30 hours to central London, and this was a benchmark for travel times.  I came back to Birmingham and put in an offer.

The long and the short of it is that my offer was not succesful.  A bidding war and several other viewings later I took possession of another flat.  By they I was a bit wiser on the question of security and this was in another barracks but one which had already had excellent security put into place by Southwark Council. As I viewed it the estate agent apologised for the lack of that spectacular river view.  Over her shoulder I could see the Shard and St. Pauls. I felt that was good enough.

Like a fortress

The Shard

e-mail: childhoodblog@gmail.com