My London is suburban, and none the worse for that

There used to be three Londons. The London of work, the tourists’ London, and the London of life. I was brought up in the last of these.

I swear to god I heard the earth inhale

Moments before it spat its rain down on me

I swear to god in this light and on this evening

London’s become the most beautiful thing I’ve seen.

Across the road from the Houses of Parliament there’s a very old, slightly unprepossessing building called the Jewel Tower. This was part of the old medieval Palace of Westminster and was once the ‘King’s Privy Wardrobe’ holding all his good stuff (hence, I assume, its modern name). One of my earliest memories of Westminster involves the Jewel Tower, not because of this history and heritage but because, when I was a small boy, the tower’s moat was filled with water and, in that water were marvelous multicoloured fish. I don’t remember the reason for us being in London on that day, just the rainbow trout.

I’m a Londoner of sorts. I was born at 174 Beckenham Road, Beckenham, Kent which, back in 1961 was still part of Kent so, technically, I am a Kentish Man despite becoming a Londoner a couple of years later when Beckenham became part of the London Borough of Bromley. As I said, I’m a Londoner albeit a suburban Londoner. And, despite living a bus or train ride from the wonders of central London, going to London was a big deal for us kids. As a result, I have an odd and eclectic collection of memories about the great city that probably make little sense to anyone who wasn’t brought up in a car-free family in a South London suburb. If we managed a trip to town once a year that was about the sum of it. But it did mean we went to the museums at South Kensington, queued (but didn’t get in) to see the Tutenkhamun exhibition in 1972, had lemonade and a teacake at the top of the Post Office Tower, and ate fish and chips in the cafe at London Zoo.

I recently wrote about being English (and what Englishness means) and historian Tom Holland pulled me up for dismissing London as a ‘nice place to visit’:

“I enjoyed it, but London too - where Edward the Confessor’s bones lie, from where Chaucer’s pilgrims set out, where Hamlet was first staged, where Milton was born, where Dr Johnson petted Hodge, where Scrooge was redeemed, where Sherlock Holmes lived - is very much England too!”

So in the same way as I discussed England, I began to think about what makes a Londoner especially for one like me who has spent more than half his life living somewhere else. I retain a few vestiges of London such as supporting West Ham and a grating South London accent. Plus of course, a set of memories that are part of what shaped my character, world view and love of the places of England.

Suburban London of the 1960s and 1970s was a very different place. In 2009 I wrote a short blog post entitled “Can I be ten again, Sir?” that helps picture what that world was like:

“We climbed over the fence to play football in the school grounds (it is only a rumour that we climbed on the roof) & could cross the fields to Elmers End Cricket Club and watch them play – and so long as I was back for tea no-one bothered

With Jeremy Lesuik I got the bus and tube to go to football – Highbury, Stamford Bridge, Upton Park – on our own and paid for from our pocket money. And in the Summer a trip to The Oval or Lords for cricket

Mr Sparks took us to the old golf course to play cricket – on occasion up to twenty or so playing an impromptu game. In bad weather he took us swimming. We walked the two miles there and back to South Norwood pool”

For most Londoners of my generation the grand places of the big city were, at best, the subject of occasional visits, birthday treats and, in the vague recesses of our minds, where our dads worked. But, despite this, we were never tourists, London was our town. All of it.

The best bits, however, weren’t in Westminster, Kensington or The City. The best bits were where we lived, where our schools were and where we managed the adventures of a child’s life. My relationship with London, cricket and football aside, circles round places like Upper Norwood, Brixton, Forest Hill with the amazing musical instruments at the Horniman Museum, and South Norwood, Elmers End, Beckenham and Penge, where Mum delivered meals on wheels to Mr Squirrell, Dr Arnott and lots of lovely ladies called names like Sissie and Queenie who’d been in service at one or other big house on Sydenham Hill. We’d meet people in the Watermen & Lightermen’s Alms Houses who had actually been watermen on the Thames and then speed off to visit Mr Chapman who kept bees and, in the end, died from a bee sting in his 80s.

For most of this time we lived in the borderlands between Croydon and Beckenham from where we could walk across the sewage farm (now the South Norwood Country Park) and through the bunny hole to visit Grandma in Penge. The sewage farm was a mysterious place of concrete lined pools and dire warnings to keep out of the water but we loved it. Perhaps rebranding it as a country park destroys its marvels a little but I’m sure it still contains adventures for the right sort of ten-year old. Penge was also where the doctor lived, an old Czech man who wrote with his fountain pen held between his second and third fingers. And across the road, Betts Park with the last vestiges of the Croydon Canal.

Suburban South London is just as much London as Hyde Park, Harrods and Oxford Street and the people who grew up there, even if they didn’t spend much time gawping at the wonders up town, are definitely Londoners with all the arrogance that coming from England’s capital - damn it, the Empire’s Capital - gives a man. Our dads were doing great work running everything because, if you live in London, that’s obviously what dads do.

Today, I read too often, London is not what it was. Some, often gratingly unpleasant people, say things like ’London has fallen’ because they don’t much like the skin colour of recent arrivals in the city. Others rightly bemoan the dirty streets, crime and tell us how impersonal the whole town has become. And the rents and house prices. My dad bought the house in Shirley for a few thousand pounds and the bigger house on the edge of Penge for a few thousand pounds more. Today those same houses would cost you half a million and a couple of million respectively. If anything is wrong with London, it isn’t immigration or even crime, it is that nobody can afford to settle there, raise a family and rebuild the sort of communities we had in the city’s suburbs back in the 60s.

There used to be three Londons. The London of work, the tourists’ London, and the London of life. I was brought up in the last of these. Going to the Jewel Tower that day in the 1960s was a glimpse of the tourists’ view. And the suited men discussing politics in our front room showed me the first London. For most Londoners, the city isn’t about work though, it’s about the things you cram into the times you’re not working. And for most of us this wasn’t done in the bars and restaurants of the West End let alone the tourist attractions, but in altogether plain places often sneered at by the great and good, London’s suburbs. It may not be so true in today’s expensive, precarious city but my generation of Londoners are, near all of us, suburban boys and girls. And none the worse for that.

The sons of the suburbs were carefully bred

And quite unaccustomed to strife;

The lessons they learned in the books they had read

Had taught them the value of life.