My uncle worked on his uncle's stall in Shepherds Bush market in the mid-70s, he was 20 - this period is the highlight of his life. He often talks about the vibrant and colourful characters - other stall holders, customers, window shoppers, policemen. The soundtrack was always Bob Marley and the Wailers.
I love this city of ours. I live a few neighbourhoods over in NW6 which is probably about an hour’s walk away. I seriously contemplated Goldhawk Rd when I was first moving to London quite a long time ago because at the time it was very cheap and there were loads of skuzzy digs available. I ended up in Kennington, then Vauxhall, then Southwark before Kilburn. I have mixed feelings about gentrification. I’ve seen areas of the city smarten up beyond recognition. In Southwark near Waterloo, the Cut and Blackfriars Rd this meant that instead of loads of interesting corner shops with lots of different types of food available I was stuck shopping in a million identical Tesco metros and Sainsbury’s locals which have very poor identical selections at inexplicably high prices - it’s shit for the people that only have these locally. But… it was definitely cleaner with nicer restaurants and probably less likely to be mugged walking home - although who knows. I miss the skuzz and the existence of ordinary people and ordinary neighbourhood stuff like hardware shops and dry cleaners and launderettes. Kilburn is another neighbourhood that we all joke is stubbornly resistant to gentrification- with fancier Maida Vale, Little Venice, West Hampstead and Queen’s Park on all sides. We joke that according to estate agents the High Road does not exist because they’ll say you’re in one of those other places. I wish it was less rubbish strewn - literal piles of rubbish in the street everywhere - I could do without the junkies continually trying to kick in the bike store doors in - but the neighbourhood has plenty of charm - and kebabs of every conceivable kind.
Great memories of working in a tax office in Shepherds Bush 1976. The market was brilliant. I’d moved to london from Newcastle with a friend I remember a stall holder used to call us the The Liver Birds, wrong , they were from Liverpool , I suppose all northern accents sounded the same to him. We passed Noel Edmonds in the street one day , we went red and giggled . It was the beginning of punk and the most magical carefree time
The house where I currently reside stands at the head of a T-Junction. I can look out of the window in the hallway, down the the length of the short road opposite. At the far end, an open-sided, house-shaped, Victorian shelter, made from heavy timber, painted dark blue, with cream-coloured panelling, stakes out a cross-section of the estuary. If I take-in the same view from the first floor of the house, I can theoretically see the Thames estuary flowing behind the shelter, though it is often the same colour as the sky, or is erased from my view by the sun glare. The beach is hidden away behind the low grey stub of the embankment wall.
Unusually, the road is made from faded, pale-red asphalt. All the other roads surrounding it are layered with black tarmac. Why this one is different I could not say. At the junction, where it meets with the Esplanade, there are six or seven man-hole size patches in the surface where repairs have been made. The flagstone pavement is lined with sycamore and cherry trees. At certain times of day, when I look out from the upper floor of my house, their shadows form bands that stripe the road.
Every so often, a combination of a high tide and a strong wind gusting in from the South, will blow a gale of gritty sand particles up the road. They will settle in the thin grass verges along the pavement. I once saw a man attempting to remove the sand from the grass with a vacuum cleaner – the long insulated cable trailing through a gap in the frosted glass door of his porch.
Many years ago, the Thames came over the sea wall. It flowed up the street towards our house, before miraculously parting to flood the properties on either side, leaving us marooned on an island. The back garden of one of our neighbours resembled an ornamental pond. He came round to borrow a heavy chisel, which he used to make a hole in the wall to let the water out.
The road where I live was built on the border of farmland. There was a brickworks nearby and some kind of rail system that I assume must have been used to transport materials. The road is very long and is shaped rather like a shepherds crook. It has three different names. It begins, a mile and a half east of where I live, as a 'road' before arbitrarily reinventing itself as an 'avenue' and thereafter as a 'drive'. I assume that it was originally three separate roads that were fused together as the area gradually urbanised.
I remember the first time that I walked along it, thinking there was something strange about it. It was after my grandfather had purchased a house on the drive section. We lived about two miles away, having moved across town the previous year. At the beginning of the bend that always catches drivers out when the conditions are icy, there used to be property with a front garden that was open to the pavement - no boundary wall. Along the side of the building there was a geodesic greenhouse. A cardboard sign, propped up against a shallow cardboard box, read 'Cues 50p'. I asked my father what it meant. He told me that it was probably referring to cucumbers. The house, along with the greenhouse, are gone now. The plot is occupied by a mc-mansion with a double-wide front door painted in Wedgwood colours.
My grandparent's house had been built by the man who sold it to them. When we came to sell it, decades later, we discovered that he hadn't bothered to obtain planning permission. It was an eccentric building with a very large, oddly-shaped flat roof and abundant plate-glass windows that made the place sweltering in the summer. I lived there for a while when I was taking care of my grandmother. I grew enormous carnivorous plants who enjoyed the abundant light.
The garden of the house connected to the golf course behind it. Even though there was no right of way, people would cut through and disingenuously feign ignorance when challenged. One time, a gang of about twenty youths marched through the garden and surrounded a golfer on one of the greens. I stood teetering on the balcony rail, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, long hair trailing down my back, probably some kind kind of beard, and bellowed at them to leave the man alone. They departed the same way they had come while I glowered down upon them.
By the time my Grandmother died, the house had fallen into disrepair. The flat roof leaked. Water streaked down the flat walls, dampening the crazy paving of the faux chimney in the living room, transforming an area of the brown shag-pile into a swamp. The lining had come away from the sides of the outdoor swimming pool. The water had got behind it and pushed up from underneath forming a sunken field of giant blisters. A mallard once took her duckings for a swim then went berserk when she realised that they couldn't get out, on account of the discrepancy between the water level and the overhanging flagstones. I rescued them one by one with the pool net. When they were all safe, she led them straight back in, while I ran around the edge with the net yelling that she was a bad mother. The house still exists, but has been renovated to a point where it is unrecognisable.
A couple of days ago I was padding across the hall of the house where I have lived on and off for many years. I stopped to gather the post from where it had come to settle on the red tiles in the porch. As I was sorting through the letters, I happened to glance through the window, down the length of the faded pale-red asphalt, towards the shelter at the distant end. It occurred to me that, when I eventually leave here, probably for a flat a couple of miles west of here, there will be no reason to return to this part of town any more. It will be one of those places that continues to exist, but that for me will assume the dimensions of an intangible memory.
Thanks for this snapshot of your hood - it gave me such joy (if in a homesick kind of way 😊)
Recent working experiences have bought me in touch with a young man who now lives in the neighborhood of Chicago in which I once resided. As we work, we talk about his experiences of it and I find myself seeing that part of the city once again through his eyes. I wonder if he, like me, will have similar conversations a decade or two from now. In my day it was grungy, full of record stores, independent coffee shops, and boutique clothing emporia with the odd nightclub thrown in for good measure. There were invariably a group of giddy trans women at my local bus stop whose conversations reminded me of my teenage years. It was just my kinda place.
These days it has been largely sanitized by the landing of a giant Target store right in its heart and it looks very much as if the quirky life blood of this area is beginning to run dry. There is an unwritten maxim here that if artists colonize an area and give it a vibrancy that the developers are sure to follow, and thus destroy what bought people there in the first place.
I suspect that this has been true all over the world since the beginning of time, but I find myself wondering if there is a way of creating more egalitarian spaces, which protect the very thing which gives any neighborhood its unique flavor. In the meantime, thanks for sharing your slice of London!
Wonderful. You are back ,Hanif, the book , yours and Carlo's ,about done and dusted and now I expect. Now you are watching out for the next one, observing, digesting and listening to the conversations of passers by and other customers, exchanging the odd word with a new customer or enjoying the company of an old friend...the life of a writer without hands. You remain the man, the writer, you always were and still are. All the best, enjoy your outings. Life looks good. Lis xx
Great evocation of a strange but fascinating part of London. Familiar and yet alien - I remember it from the days I worked at the BBC at Kensington House, now an hotel. And of course happy days with you when we lived in the same street as you.,Love as ever.
I grew up there from 77-2001 ish, when I left home. So when I left, of was still the grubby old, rough and ready Bush that all of us who lived there knew and loved. The way you love an old and frayed jacket, that might be old, smelly and full of holes, but fits you like a glove, and you know where you are with it. I don’t know the new Bush, and it freaks me out a bit.
Thank you for these reminiscences of my old hood, it’s like a cosy, comfort blanket of a read!
The Bush Theatre is gone?! Noooo! I moved out of the Bush a couple of years before the spaceship from the future landed, and out of the country a few years later. It sounds as though I wouldn't recognise the place anymore. Thank you for the glorious memories.
I just went round one of those sign in verification forgot your password merrygorounds here’s a link no it’s expired. Anyhow I’m back for what that’s worth. All I can usefully say is Hanif whether by accident no not this one or design got his life in order early on - his places his network his writing and all of that seems to have culminated right here - if it was all leading to this I’m happy you enjoyed a good ride - you brought that life here for us - I could sit in that pub that cafe now and think about the history. Now where I am (nowhere village) is so not diverse or multicultural it’s going to be a Tory outpost until the environment finally gets its own back and swamps the village in long grass overgrown hedges trees thot spread out and weigh their branches on roofs and then the birds - it was lovely to finally get back on here for free too - when my finances look up I will contribute and who knows where my life might end up but yours is ok in Shepherds Bush. Big love Hanif - Maddi - North Yorkshire for now. Xx
Thanks for this beautiful piece of writing, Hanif. It really captures the specialness of Shepherd’s Bush. As a mixed race teenager living in North Kent, My Beautiful Laundrette was an inspiration to me. It made me realize I wasn’t a misfit. I just had to make a life and find a place to fit in. That place was and still is Shepherd’s Bush.
I know many people fear it. But W12’s a great place to live for people with complicated identities. W12 has also saved my marriage on a number of occasions as it’s one of the few places in the UK where my Sudanese husband feels comfortable.
"Indolence is indispensable," "The city is a river" Two phrases that will stay with me. Thanks, Hanif.
Mmm thank you for highlighting these phrases…
My uncle worked on his uncle's stall in Shepherds Bush market in the mid-70s, he was 20 - this period is the highlight of his life. He often talks about the vibrant and colourful characters - other stall holders, customers, window shoppers, policemen. The soundtrack was always Bob Marley and the Wailers.
I love this city of ours. I live a few neighbourhoods over in NW6 which is probably about an hour’s walk away. I seriously contemplated Goldhawk Rd when I was first moving to London quite a long time ago because at the time it was very cheap and there were loads of skuzzy digs available. I ended up in Kennington, then Vauxhall, then Southwark before Kilburn. I have mixed feelings about gentrification. I’ve seen areas of the city smarten up beyond recognition. In Southwark near Waterloo, the Cut and Blackfriars Rd this meant that instead of loads of interesting corner shops with lots of different types of food available I was stuck shopping in a million identical Tesco metros and Sainsbury’s locals which have very poor identical selections at inexplicably high prices - it’s shit for the people that only have these locally. But… it was definitely cleaner with nicer restaurants and probably less likely to be mugged walking home - although who knows. I miss the skuzz and the existence of ordinary people and ordinary neighbourhood stuff like hardware shops and dry cleaners and launderettes. Kilburn is another neighbourhood that we all joke is stubbornly resistant to gentrification- with fancier Maida Vale, Little Venice, West Hampstead and Queen’s Park on all sides. We joke that according to estate agents the High Road does not exist because they’ll say you’re in one of those other places. I wish it was less rubbish strewn - literal piles of rubbish in the street everywhere - I could do without the junkies continually trying to kick in the bike store doors in - but the neighbourhood has plenty of charm - and kebabs of every conceivable kind.
Great memories of working in a tax office in Shepherds Bush 1976. The market was brilliant. I’d moved to london from Newcastle with a friend I remember a stall holder used to call us the The Liver Birds, wrong , they were from Liverpool , I suppose all northern accents sounded the same to him. We passed Noel Edmonds in the street one day , we went red and giggled . It was the beginning of punk and the most magical carefree time
Your memories give a smile to my face early this morning😉
Good to hear your voice again …
The house where I currently reside stands at the head of a T-Junction. I can look out of the window in the hallway, down the the length of the short road opposite. At the far end, an open-sided, house-shaped, Victorian shelter, made from heavy timber, painted dark blue, with cream-coloured panelling, stakes out a cross-section of the estuary. If I take-in the same view from the first floor of the house, I can theoretically see the Thames estuary flowing behind the shelter, though it is often the same colour as the sky, or is erased from my view by the sun glare. The beach is hidden away behind the low grey stub of the embankment wall.
Unusually, the road is made from faded, pale-red asphalt. All the other roads surrounding it are layered with black tarmac. Why this one is different I could not say. At the junction, where it meets with the Esplanade, there are six or seven man-hole size patches in the surface where repairs have been made. The flagstone pavement is lined with sycamore and cherry trees. At certain times of day, when I look out from the upper floor of my house, their shadows form bands that stripe the road.
Every so often, a combination of a high tide and a strong wind gusting in from the South, will blow a gale of gritty sand particles up the road. They will settle in the thin grass verges along the pavement. I once saw a man attempting to remove the sand from the grass with a vacuum cleaner – the long insulated cable trailing through a gap in the frosted glass door of his porch.
Many years ago, the Thames came over the sea wall. It flowed up the street towards our house, before miraculously parting to flood the properties on either side, leaving us marooned on an island. The back garden of one of our neighbours resembled an ornamental pond. He came round to borrow a heavy chisel, which he used to make a hole in the wall to let the water out.
The road where I live was built on the border of farmland. There was a brickworks nearby and some kind of rail system that I assume must have been used to transport materials. The road is very long and is shaped rather like a shepherds crook. It has three different names. It begins, a mile and a half east of where I live, as a 'road' before arbitrarily reinventing itself as an 'avenue' and thereafter as a 'drive'. I assume that it was originally three separate roads that were fused together as the area gradually urbanised.
I remember the first time that I walked along it, thinking there was something strange about it. It was after my grandfather had purchased a house on the drive section. We lived about two miles away, having moved across town the previous year. At the beginning of the bend that always catches drivers out when the conditions are icy, there used to be property with a front garden that was open to the pavement - no boundary wall. Along the side of the building there was a geodesic greenhouse. A cardboard sign, propped up against a shallow cardboard box, read 'Cues 50p'. I asked my father what it meant. He told me that it was probably referring to cucumbers. The house, along with the greenhouse, are gone now. The plot is occupied by a mc-mansion with a double-wide front door painted in Wedgwood colours.
My grandparent's house had been built by the man who sold it to them. When we came to sell it, decades later, we discovered that he hadn't bothered to obtain planning permission. It was an eccentric building with a very large, oddly-shaped flat roof and abundant plate-glass windows that made the place sweltering in the summer. I lived there for a while when I was taking care of my grandmother. I grew enormous carnivorous plants who enjoyed the abundant light.
The garden of the house connected to the golf course behind it. Even though there was no right of way, people would cut through and disingenuously feign ignorance when challenged. One time, a gang of about twenty youths marched through the garden and surrounded a golfer on one of the greens. I stood teetering on the balcony rail, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, long hair trailing down my back, probably some kind kind of beard, and bellowed at them to leave the man alone. They departed the same way they had come while I glowered down upon them.
By the time my Grandmother died, the house had fallen into disrepair. The flat roof leaked. Water streaked down the flat walls, dampening the crazy paving of the faux chimney in the living room, transforming an area of the brown shag-pile into a swamp. The lining had come away from the sides of the outdoor swimming pool. The water had got behind it and pushed up from underneath forming a sunken field of giant blisters. A mallard once took her duckings for a swim then went berserk when she realised that they couldn't get out, on account of the discrepancy between the water level and the overhanging flagstones. I rescued them one by one with the pool net. When they were all safe, she led them straight back in, while I ran around the edge with the net yelling that she was a bad mother. The house still exists, but has been renovated to a point where it is unrecognisable.
A couple of days ago I was padding across the hall of the house where I have lived on and off for many years. I stopped to gather the post from where it had come to settle on the red tiles in the porch. As I was sorting through the letters, I happened to glance through the window, down the length of the faded pale-red asphalt, towards the shelter at the distant end. It occurred to me that, when I eventually leave here, probably for a flat a couple of miles west of here, there will be no reason to return to this part of town any more. It will be one of those places that continues to exist, but that for me will assume the dimensions of an intangible memory.
Beautiful descriptions all the way through. And duck story too!
As long as they don’t gentrify what’s inside u, Hanif!,
Thanks for this snapshot of your hood - it gave me such joy (if in a homesick kind of way 😊)
Recent working experiences have bought me in touch with a young man who now lives in the neighborhood of Chicago in which I once resided. As we work, we talk about his experiences of it and I find myself seeing that part of the city once again through his eyes. I wonder if he, like me, will have similar conversations a decade or two from now. In my day it was grungy, full of record stores, independent coffee shops, and boutique clothing emporia with the odd nightclub thrown in for good measure. There were invariably a group of giddy trans women at my local bus stop whose conversations reminded me of my teenage years. It was just my kinda place.
These days it has been largely sanitized by the landing of a giant Target store right in its heart and it looks very much as if the quirky life blood of this area is beginning to run dry. There is an unwritten maxim here that if artists colonize an area and give it a vibrancy that the developers are sure to follow, and thus destroy what bought people there in the first place.
I suspect that this has been true all over the world since the beginning of time, but I find myself wondering if there is a way of creating more egalitarian spaces, which protect the very thing which gives any neighborhood its unique flavor. In the meantime, thanks for sharing your slice of London!
Evocative portrait of a neighborhood and the need to hold court somewhere other than home!
Always a relief to find safe spaces away from home .. opportunities to relax w new energies
Wonderful. You are back ,Hanif, the book , yours and Carlo's ,about done and dusted and now I expect. Now you are watching out for the next one, observing, digesting and listening to the conversations of passers by and other customers, exchanging the odd word with a new customer or enjoying the company of an old friend...the life of a writer without hands. You remain the man, the writer, you always were and still are. All the best, enjoy your outings. Life looks good. Lis xx
Great evocation of a strange but fascinating part of London. Familiar and yet alien - I remember it from the days I worked at the BBC at Kensington House, now an hotel. And of course happy days with you when we lived in the same street as you.,Love as ever.
Good piece. We must head to le petit citron soon!
I thought I read « Citroën »
but le « Petit Citron » 🍋 makes more sense 😄
Ditto
I grew up there from 77-2001 ish, when I left home. So when I left, of was still the grubby old, rough and ready Bush that all of us who lived there knew and loved. The way you love an old and frayed jacket, that might be old, smelly and full of holes, but fits you like a glove, and you know where you are with it. I don’t know the new Bush, and it freaks me out a bit.
Thank you for these reminiscences of my old hood, it’s like a cosy, comfort blanket of a read!
The Bush Theatre is gone?! Noooo! I moved out of the Bush a couple of years before the spaceship from the future landed, and out of the country a few years later. It sounds as though I wouldn't recognise the place anymore. Thank you for the glorious memories.
Never fear. The Bush Theatre is thriving and has moved into the library which has moved onto the edge of the shining white mall of which Hanif writes!
Ah, phew, that's such a relief! Thank you for letting me know! Maybe I will head back for a look around and a night at the theatre again after all. 🙏💕
I just went round one of those sign in verification forgot your password merrygorounds here’s a link no it’s expired. Anyhow I’m back for what that’s worth. All I can usefully say is Hanif whether by accident no not this one or design got his life in order early on - his places his network his writing and all of that seems to have culminated right here - if it was all leading to this I’m happy you enjoyed a good ride - you brought that life here for us - I could sit in that pub that cafe now and think about the history. Now where I am (nowhere village) is so not diverse or multicultural it’s going to be a Tory outpost until the environment finally gets its own back and swamps the village in long grass overgrown hedges trees thot spread out and weigh their branches on roofs and then the birds - it was lovely to finally get back on here for free too - when my finances look up I will contribute and who knows where my life might end up but yours is ok in Shepherds Bush. Big love Hanif - Maddi - North Yorkshire for now. Xx
Thanks for this beautiful piece of writing, Hanif. It really captures the specialness of Shepherd’s Bush. As a mixed race teenager living in North Kent, My Beautiful Laundrette was an inspiration to me. It made me realize I wasn’t a misfit. I just had to make a life and find a place to fit in. That place was and still is Shepherd’s Bush.
I know many people fear it. But W12’s a great place to live for people with complicated identities. W12 has also saved my marriage on a number of occasions as it’s one of the few places in the UK where my Sudanese husband feels comfortable.