across London to my manor in the area of W10 and 11.
I’d like to explain this district where I live, because it’s quite a curiosity, being one of the few that’s got left behind by the Welfare era and the Property-owning whatsit, both of them, and is, in fact, nothing more than a stagnating slum. It’s dying, this bit of London, and that’s the most important thing to remember about what goes on there. To the north of it, there run, in parallel, the Harrow Road I’ve mentioned, which you’d hurry through even if you were in a car, and a canal, called the Grand Union, that nothing floats on except cats and contraceptives, and the main railway track that takes you from London to the swede counties of the West of England. These three escape routes, which are all at different heights and levels, cut across one another at different points, making crazy little islands of slum habitation shut off fromthe world by concrete precipices, and linked by metal bridges. I need hardly mention that on this north side there’s a hospital, a gasworks with enough juice for the whole population of the kingdom to commit suicide, and a very ancient cemetery with the pretty country name of Kensal Green.
On the east side, still in the W10 bit, there’s another railway, and a park with a name only Satan in all his splendour could have thought up, namely Wormwood Scrubs, which has a prison near it, and another hospital, and a sports arena, and the new telly barracks of the BBC, and with a long, lean road called Latimer Road which I particularly want you to remember, because out of this road, like horrible tits dangling from a lean old sow, there hang a whole festoon of what I think must really be the sinisterest highways in our city, well, just listen to their names: Blechynden, Silchester, Walmer, Testerton and Bramley – can’t you just smell them, as you hurry to get through the cats-cradle of these blocks? In this part, the houses are old Victorian lower-middle tumble-down, built I dare say for grocers and bank clerks and horse-omnibus inspectors who’ve died and gone and their descendants evacuated to the outer suburbs, but these houses live on like shells, and there’s only one thing to do with them, absolutely one, which is to pull them down till not a one’s left standing up.
On the south side of this area, down by the W11, things are a little different, but in a way that somehow makes them worse, and that is, owing to a freak offortune, and some smart work by the estate agents too, I shouldn’t be surprised, there are one or two sections that are positively posh: not fashionable , mind you, but quite graded, with their big back gardens and that absolute silence, which in London is the top sign of a respectable location. You walk about in these bits, adjusting your tie and looking down to see if your shoes are shining, when – wham! suddenly you’re back in the slum area again – honest, it’s really startling, like where the river joins on to the shore, two quite different creations of dame nature, cheek by thing.
Over towards the west, the frontiers aren’t quite as definite, and the whole area merges into a drab and shady and semi-respectable part called Bayswater, which I would rather lie in my coffin, please believe me, than spend a night in, were it not for Suze, who’s shacked up there. No! Give me our London Napoli I’ve been describing, with its railway scenery, and crescents that were meant to twist elegantly but now look as if they’re lurching high, and huge houses too tall for their width cut up into twenty flatlets, and front façades that it never pays anyone to paint, and broken milk bottles everywhere scattering the cracked asphalt roads like snow, and cars parked in the streets looking as if they’re stolen or abandoned, and a strange number of male urinals tucked away such as you find nowhere else in London, and red curtains, somehow, in all the windows, and diarrhoea-coloured street lighting –
I’d like to explain this district where I live, because it’s quite a curiosity, being one of the few that’s got left behind by the Welfare era and the Property-owning whatsit, both of them, and is, in fact, nothing more than a stagnating slum. It’s dying, this bit of London, and that’s the most important thing to remember about what goes on there. To the north of it, there run, in parallel, the Harrow Road I’ve mentioned, which you’d hurry through even if you were in a car, and a canal, called the Grand Union, that nothing floats on except cats and contraceptives, and the main railway track that takes you from London to the swede counties of the West of England. These three escape routes, which are all at different heights and levels, cut across one another at different points, making crazy little islands of slum habitation shut off fromthe world by concrete precipices, and linked by metal bridges. I need hardly mention that on this north side there’s a hospital, a gasworks with enough juice for the whole population of the kingdom to commit suicide, and a very ancient cemetery with the pretty country name of Kensal Green.
On the east side, still in the W10 bit, there’s another railway, and a park with a name only Satan in all his splendour could have thought up, namely Wormwood Scrubs, which has a prison near it, and another hospital, and a sports arena, and the new telly barracks of the BBC, and with a long, lean road called Latimer Road which I particularly want you to remember, because out of this road, like horrible tits dangling from a lean old sow, there hang a whole festoon of what I think must really be the sinisterest highways in our city, well, just listen to their names: Blechynden, Silchester, Walmer, Testerton and Bramley – can’t you just smell them, as you hurry to get through the cats-cradle of these blocks? In this part, the houses are old Victorian lower-middle tumble-down, built I dare say for grocers and bank clerks and horse-omnibus inspectors who’ve died and gone and their descendants evacuated to the outer suburbs, but these houses live on like shells, and there’s only one thing to do with them, absolutely one, which is to pull them down till not a one’s left standing up.
On the south side of this area, down by the W11, things are a little different, but in a way that somehow makes them worse, and that is, owing to a freak offortune, and some smart work by the estate agents too, I shouldn’t be surprised, there are one or two sections that are positively posh: not fashionable , mind you, but quite graded, with their big back gardens and that absolute silence, which in London is the top sign of a respectable location. You walk about in these bits, adjusting your tie and looking down to see if your shoes are shining, when – wham! suddenly you’re back in the slum area again – honest, it’s really startling, like where the river joins on to the shore, two quite different creations of dame nature, cheek by thing.
Over towards the west, the frontiers aren’t quite as definite, and the whole area merges into a drab and shady and semi-respectable part called Bayswater, which I would rather lie in my coffin, please believe me, than spend a night in, were it not for Suze, who’s shacked up there. No! Give me our London Napoli I’ve been describing, with its railway scenery, and crescents that were meant to twist elegantly but now look as if they’re lurching high, and huge houses too tall for their width cut up into twenty flatlets, and front façades that it never pays anyone to paint, and broken milk bottles everywhere scattering the cracked asphalt roads like snow, and cars parked in the streets looking as if they’re stolen or abandoned, and a strange number of male urinals tucked away such as you find nowhere else in London, and red curtains, somehow, in all the windows, and diarrhoea-coloured street lighting –
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