They predate the booms and slumps of property.
Blackstock Road has not yet, as I write, become gentrified, and may never become so. It was peaceful then, when we were young. Shabby, but peaceful. There were little shops, selling small cheap household objects, bric-à-brac, groceries, vegetables, stationery. Locksmiths, hairdressers, launderettes, upholsterers, bookmakers. A lot of people taking in one another’s washing. It is much the same today, although most of the shop-owners now come from different ethnic groups. There are fewer of the old white North Londoners. They are dying off, moving out. It remains on the whole a peaceful neighbourhood, though there have been eruptions of violence and suspicion, and one spectacular police raid by hundreds of uniformed officers that revealed, I believe, a tiny cache of ricin.
Even a tiny cache wasn’t very pleasant, some of us old survivors thought, although we made light of it, laughed about it. It’s not nice to have neighbours who are trying to kill you, even if they are not trying very hard. We tried to be tolerant, but it wasn’t very nice.
There was a time, not so long ago, when hatred was preached by a man with a hook for a hand from the redbrick mosque of Finsbury Park, the mosque that Prince Charles, Prince of Many Faiths, opened with such conciliatory optimism in 1994. It’s quieter now. It’s not a very big mosque, not one of those extravagant imposing new mosques with great golden domes, and its minaret is made of cement and pebble-dash. It is well guarded by spiked walls and CCTV Suburban net curtains drape its windows, with their green-painted frames. It doesn’t look much of a threat. As a mosque, it is a far cry from the glories of Isfahan and Samarkand and Cairo, and I’m not sure who is watching what on that CCTV
You can’t tell what will happen to a neighbourhood. Jess studies its evolution with an expert eye. Her eye is better than mine, but we discuss its progress. I’ve learnt new ways of looking from Jess. She continues to find ways of employing her sociological and anthropological expertise.
Finsbury Park tube station hasn’t seen much improvement. At our age, most of us tend to avoid it at night. It presents a small challenge. Too many drug-dealers. They’ve moved up the line towards us from King’s Cross.
I visited a great and famous mosque in Cairo once. I forget its name. It was unutterably grand and sacred, lofty and empty, austere and sombre. It reared up from the deep ravine of the sloping street like a cliff face. I wandered round its solitude in silence and in awe.
The Finsbury Park mosque is small, domestic, suburban. Rather English, really.
Jess’s thesis on contrasting perceptions of witchcraft and disability in pre-i mperial and post-i mperial Africa was disputed, and she was rightly accused by some of having bitten off more than she could chew. She was also accused from a diametrically opposite angle by one of her assessors of having failed to include any mention of the superstitions surrounding the birth of twins in West Africa, and the heroic work of Scottish missionary Mary Slessor in rescuing some of these twin babes from being exposed at birth in the bush. (Jess had not mentioned Mary Slessor and the twins because she had never heard of them. Her knowledge, although arcane, was very patchy. But she was still very young. The assessor had himself specialised in Mary Slessor and twin studies, and if Jess had known that she might have been more diplomatic in her selection of material.)
Theses were not nearly as rigorously overseen in those days as they are now, and the maverick globe-trotting conference-attending field-work-dabbling Guy Brighouse had been somewhat nonchalant about his duties towards her. You could get away with almost anything. You didn’t have to tick so many boxes.
But her efforts, although criticised, were also moderately applauded, and she became Dr Jessica Speight. Her father, plain Mr Speight
Blackstock Road has not yet, as I write, become gentrified, and may never become so. It was peaceful then, when we were young. Shabby, but peaceful. There were little shops, selling small cheap household objects, bric-à-brac, groceries, vegetables, stationery. Locksmiths, hairdressers, launderettes, upholsterers, bookmakers. A lot of people taking in one another’s washing. It is much the same today, although most of the shop-owners now come from different ethnic groups. There are fewer of the old white North Londoners. They are dying off, moving out. It remains on the whole a peaceful neighbourhood, though there have been eruptions of violence and suspicion, and one spectacular police raid by hundreds of uniformed officers that revealed, I believe, a tiny cache of ricin.
Even a tiny cache wasn’t very pleasant, some of us old survivors thought, although we made light of it, laughed about it. It’s not nice to have neighbours who are trying to kill you, even if they are not trying very hard. We tried to be tolerant, but it wasn’t very nice.
There was a time, not so long ago, when hatred was preached by a man with a hook for a hand from the redbrick mosque of Finsbury Park, the mosque that Prince Charles, Prince of Many Faiths, opened with such conciliatory optimism in 1994. It’s quieter now. It’s not a very big mosque, not one of those extravagant imposing new mosques with great golden domes, and its minaret is made of cement and pebble-dash. It is well guarded by spiked walls and CCTV Suburban net curtains drape its windows, with their green-painted frames. It doesn’t look much of a threat. As a mosque, it is a far cry from the glories of Isfahan and Samarkand and Cairo, and I’m not sure who is watching what on that CCTV
You can’t tell what will happen to a neighbourhood. Jess studies its evolution with an expert eye. Her eye is better than mine, but we discuss its progress. I’ve learnt new ways of looking from Jess. She continues to find ways of employing her sociological and anthropological expertise.
Finsbury Park tube station hasn’t seen much improvement. At our age, most of us tend to avoid it at night. It presents a small challenge. Too many drug-dealers. They’ve moved up the line towards us from King’s Cross.
I visited a great and famous mosque in Cairo once. I forget its name. It was unutterably grand and sacred, lofty and empty, austere and sombre. It reared up from the deep ravine of the sloping street like a cliff face. I wandered round its solitude in silence and in awe.
The Finsbury Park mosque is small, domestic, suburban. Rather English, really.
Jess’s thesis on contrasting perceptions of witchcraft and disability in pre-i mperial and post-i mperial Africa was disputed, and she was rightly accused by some of having bitten off more than she could chew. She was also accused from a diametrically opposite angle by one of her assessors of having failed to include any mention of the superstitions surrounding the birth of twins in West Africa, and the heroic work of Scottish missionary Mary Slessor in rescuing some of these twin babes from being exposed at birth in the bush. (Jess had not mentioned Mary Slessor and the twins because she had never heard of them. Her knowledge, although arcane, was very patchy. But she was still very young. The assessor had himself specialised in Mary Slessor and twin studies, and if Jess had known that she might have been more diplomatic in her selection of material.)
Theses were not nearly as rigorously overseen in those days as they are now, and the maverick globe-trotting conference-attending field-work-dabbling Guy Brighouse had been somewhat nonchalant about his duties towards her. You could get away with almost anything. You didn’t have to tick so many boxes.
But her efforts, although criticised, were also moderately applauded, and she became Dr Jessica Speight. Her father, plain Mr Speight
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