peeling layers of london

Out among our towns, at the better end of the English humdrum high street - Starbucks, Costa Coffee, Tesco Metro, Sainsbury's Local, Pizza Express, Zizzi, Carluccio's, Crabtree & Evelyn, The Body Shop, Jack Wills, Fat Face, French Connection.


Out in the provinces, at the shittier end of the tedious English high street - Poundland, 99p Stores, pay-day loans parlours and boarded up travel agents' shops.


The blanding and the homogenisation of our towns is nearly complete. Perhaps a more sustained period of a bad economy will smear the gloss from the fascias of some more chain stores and dining experiences. Perhaps an extension of the tough times will see a multiplying of the outlets catering to the skint and the desperate. This could add character of a sort.


But one lovely aspect of our capital is that away from its most prosperous suburbs, the character of its streets continues to be a hodgepodge of ill-matched and flaking paintjobs and a jumble of eccentric enterprises, thriving, dying and dead. The grandiose dreams of earlier eras are not quite forgotten, their echoes felt by anyone who glances up at what's left of some magnificent but long-abandoned structure. Away from places where prissy crews of NIMBY residents worry the local politicos into maintaining dull standards, the nomadically shifting populations drifting through much of London never find the time to become boringly obsessed with the look and feel of their surroundings. Safe streets and good times are wanted. What goes where and what colour is has to be? Meaningless.


Take this bright morning stroll along just one of London's arteries, Essex Road N1...


Behold the Egyptian stylings of what was once the Carlton cinema, crafted lovingly in the 1930s by a noted architect of the genre, one George Coles. It's been a while since the last punter was guided to a seat by a uniformed usher; ages since the Pearl & Dean theme thundered in the darkness. Bingo was played in George's ornate palace in the years that followed the final picture show. But even the last cry of "two fat ladies" is a distant memory now...

Further along Essex Road, on an outside wall of a pharmacy, we find a work by Banksy, which appeared in March 2008 and which had been defaced two years later as part of a feud between the street artist and graffiti bigwig King Robbo, despite the efforts of the pharmacist to protect the original piece...

Continuing down towards the Angel and Upper Street, we can look up and see evidence of the commerce of a bygone era. Doubtless, the painters of London's old shop signs and advertisements thought in terms of the touted names having resonance for countless years. But who remembers the full name of this "night cure" for catarrh and pains in the head? With no advertising standards authority to deter them from doing so, the makers of the product claimed boldly that it could prevent influenza. When was this painted? When was the last bottle of this quackish stuff glugged back by some hopefully credulous Londoner?

Schlepping south and flashing back towards the present day, we see that one shopkeeper has taken a particular approach to discouraging the taggers and graffiti artists from customising his storefront in unwelcome ways. This is done by commissioning a graffiti piece of his own... 

Peeling layers of jumbled London. You can stick your gentrification where the sun never shines...