Flitcroft Street is the short street at the east end of Denmark Street. You might know it from its most famous building – the one with the huge door (theatre backdrops were painted here – hence the big door to get them out on to the street).
Flitcroft Street used to be known as Little Denmark Street. Readers of my book, Denmark Street: London’s Street Of Sound, might recall it was the location of Billie’s, a legendary London gay club populated by musicians in the 1930s that was the subject of a homophobic police raid.
Flitcroft Street is now home to Meanwhile, a gallery run by the Farsight Collective. Walk down Denmark Street, turn right and it’s right there. The Farsight Collective have huge plans for this site. The gallery will be on the ground floor. A couple of floors below, almost directly below Regent Sounds at No 4, that will be a cabaret bar – modeled partly on Billie’s. In the floor between there is space for a live music venue that will hold around 300 people. The Farsight Collective have considerable experience running both clubs and galleries in London so they know their stuff.
This is, in my view, the most exciting thing to happen in the West End for decades. It has the potential of confirming Denmark Street as an essential location for live music, particularly if it encourages the Lower Third (once the 12 Bar) and Here to up their game. Other new arrivals for the street – as yet unconfirmed – will add to this experience by filling in other gaps that are currently lacking in the street’s offering.
Meanwhile is open weekdays 12-6pm. It is currently hosting an exhibition that celebrates the musical history of Denmark Street and Soho. This includes photographs of great London nightspots from the past, covering everything from jazz to Trash. There’s a video timeline showing London clubs from 1900 to today – apparently there were more nightspots open in Soho during the Blitz than there are today – and some drawings of famous Denmark Street locations including Lawrence Wright House at No 19, Bowie and Bolan at La Gioconda and The Sex Pistols outside their outhouse at No 6.
There is also a short history of every building on Denmark Street using text taken from Denmark Street: London’s Street of Sound.
Other displays discuss the plans for the location and how you can support their license application.
No 4 Denmark Street could be the most important single address on Tin Pan Alley. It’s housed Regent Sound, the studio where the Rolling Stones recorded their debut album, the Helter Skelter bookshop that specialised in books about music, and is now home to Regent Sounds, London’s best guitar shop. Other residents include Johnny Dankworth and Essex Music, publishers of the Rolling Stones among others. There might even be a connection to the Krays.
I will be giving a talk about the general history of Denmark Street amid the Fenders at No 4 on Friday December 15 at 7.30pm, and then signing copies of the second edition of Denmark Street: London’s Street Sound. Crispin Weir, who owns Regent Sounds, will be talking about the history of No 4 in particular, having done extensive research into the building over the years. It should be a great event for anybody who loves music, books, history and guitars. Hope to see you there.
Denmark Street talk – at No 4 Denmark Street, WC1, on Dec 15, 7.30pm.
I have three events coming up in the next four weeks.
On Monday October 23, I will be talking to counterculture guru Carl Williams about the LSD Library. This is a free event organised by TANK magazine at their base on Great Portland Street but tickets must be booked. The LSD Library was the incredible collection put together by Julio Santo Domingo that contained thousands of books and items related to drugs, sex, magic, alternative politics and rock n roll. It is the subject of my book, Altered States.
On Thursday November 23, I will be at the Horse Hospital to talk about music in London for the London Salon. I will talk about some of London’s lost venues, focusing on those around Soho and Covent Garden within walking distance of Denmark Street.
On Thursday November 30, I will be at Battersea Bookshop at Battersea Power Station to talk about Denmark Street. Tickets aren’t available for that yet, but should be soon.
Here’s an interview I did with Matt Brown at Londonist that I think gives a good overview of the topics covered in the book. If you’ve bought, read and enjoyed the book, please do consider leaving a review on Amazon as it makes a big difference.
My new book, Denmark Street: London’s Street Of Sound, is now available for pre-order with publisher Paradise Road – link here. It will be available from the week of September 11.
There is surely no other street in London that can pack so much history into such a small area. There are numerous significant buildings in London – the British Library say, or Abbey Road – but there’s nowhere quite like Denmark Street, which connects musicians such as The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Lionel Bart, Joe Meek, Gracie Fields, The Kinks, The Sex Pistols, Pink Floyd, Bananarama, Elton John, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, David Bowie and Jeff Buckley in so many different ways.
Some recorded here, some performed, some lived, some worked in office jobs, some scavenged for session work, some bought or sold instruments – and many were ripped off by the managers and booking agents that occupied the offices of Denmark Street before they were told into shops that sold guitars.
I trace the story of this street from the moment the first music publisher arrived on Denmark Street before the First World War, and follow the way it has changed and developed alongside the needs of the music industry itself, right up to the present day. The text is enlivened by Rob Telford’s amazing photographs.
Last week I was able to visit the reopened Hunterian Museum at the Royal College Of Surgeons on Lincoln’s Inn Field. This is an anatomical, pathology and natural history collection originally started by 18th-century Scottish surgeon John Hunter, who acquired thousands of specimens – human and animal – in his desire to understand the natural world. Here is one of my favourites, a cute little foetus of a sloth.
A sloth foetus
I wrote about the collection and Hunter’s motivations for Apollo and you can read that article here.
It’s easy to cast the Hunterian as a sort of sophisticated freak show – a place where you can see diseased organs, strange animals, skeletons and a large number of dead babies. And to a certain extent – or at least to modern eyes – that is exactly what it is. But it’s important to understand the collection in the context of the time, before X-rays, aspirins, anaesthetic and all the other miracles of modern medicine that we take entirely for granted.
Hunter collected because he wanted to understand and he wanted to understand because he wanted to improve. His curiosity and motivation (and his approach to ethics) is very similar to that of John Soane, whose own vast jumble of artistic and architectural wonders can be viewed on the other side of Lincoln’s Inn Field.
Take just a moment to think about that. Here are the two cultures – art and science – in the form of two collections amassed by obsessed and committed individuals, facing each other across a large garden square in a pair of incredible free museums, either of which would be the envy of most national or city collections. London is by no means perfect, but – much like the scientific improvements that Hunter’s inquisitive mind helped propagate – such marvels should never be overlooked or underestimated.
I have a piece about 90s Riot Grrrl band Huggy Bear in the latest Uncut to mark the 30th anniversary of their single, “Her Jazz”. Here’s Huggy Bear performing the song on The Word. Apparently you can see three members of their labelmates Cornershop in the crowd. It’s a thrilling performance and I remember watching it at the time, impressed and slightly scared.
Although I was not a huge Huggy Bear fan – frankly, they intimidated me – I couldn’t miss the fact that in the music press, Huggy Bear got a tough time in a manner that seemed completely out-of-proportion to their actual size. NME and Melody Maker were known for their snark, but the usual targets were the self-important big stars – Bono, Sting, Morrissey – or the current flavour-of-the-month, such as Suede or Manic Street Preachers (a band that have some interesting similarities with Huggy Bear). But for the latter, the nastiness was usually balanced by regular cover features, positive reviews, news pieces and a general boosting of the latest indie hero.
With Huggy Bear – a small band on an indie label whose fan base barely filled a couple of pubs in north London – it seemed like it was all snark. The vitriol was relentless; Huggy Bear were the eternal punchline.
Talking to the band – mostly via email as even after 30 years they were still reluctant to trust a journalist so wanted to retain control of their words – it was clear they’d had experience this as, in one member’s word, “spiteful bullying”. And it wasn’t just the press. Other bands refused to sign to the same label as them, or created such hostility they couldn’t drink in the usual indie haunts in Camden. Some of their peers even went to gigs just to heckle. It was vicious.
What was everybody’s problem? It wasn’t Huggy Bear’s music, it was their politics – and more to the point – the sheer conviction with which they held their views. Huggy Bear believed in the underground community of fanzine culture and DIY gigs, and they believed in – and passionately espoused – gender and sexual equality. They were fierce feminists and that scared the boys. It still does. To care so much was unforgivable in the early 90s, as the affected ennui of Generation X was about to give way to the destructive irony of Britpop and Loaded – an irony, of course, that heavily favoured the views of white men.
After that performance on The Word, there was an interview with a pair of identical twins who modelled for Playboy and proudly declared they were “bimbos”. Huggy Bear and their friends in the crowd heckled, while guest Henry Rollins and presenter Terry Christian smirked awkwardly. Terry Christian is a good guy with sound views but he couldn’t handle being upstaged – on The Word for chrisake, which was explicitly created to manufacture controversy – and had them all thrown out. That earned Huggy Bear an appearance on the cover of Melody Maker. It was not The Word‘s finest hour.
Back then, Huggy Bear were sneered at for being “right on” and “politically correct”, even in the ostensibly left-leaning NME, which regularly carried a column by comedian Simon Munnery based on his Alan Parker, Urban Warrior character, which targeted this tiny but easy-to-mock demographic. Ironically, this terrible column was far more humourless than Huggy Bear themselves, whose songs brim with wit as well as fire and compassion.
These days, that terrible lazy “W” word would be deployed to diminish their opinions.
It must be annoying for them to know that Huggy Bear were right. About pretty much everything.
This was originally published by the Canal & River Trust’s Waterfront newsletter in 2016.
It was while working on Time Out’s annual pub guide in around 2000 that I heard the tale of the Camden castles. A reviewer claimed that there were once four Camden pubs with castle in their name – the Edinboro, Windsor, Dublin and Pembroke – and these had originally been built for navvies digging Regent’s Canal. The gist was that each national group – Scots, English, Irish, Welsh – was assigned a pub to keep them happy, or more precisely to stop them from scrapping with one another. It’s now found all over the internet, with variations. Sometimes, the Caernarvon Castle is included, and often they are said to have been built for the later railway navvies.
Original illustration by Leonie Bos via Paul Pensom.
It’s a great yarn, but if it seems too good to be true, it’s because it is. The theory is carefully taken apart in the November 2014 newsletter of the Camden History Society by David Hayes who points out that the pubs weren’t built at the same time but “gradually appeared over a period of 130 years”. The Dublin Castle on Parkway, now a music venue, is the oldest. It featured in rates books in 1821 and may just have been frequented by Irish navvies, as the canal was completed in 1820. But next was the Edinboro Castle on Mornington Terrace, which opened in 1839, two years after the railway line to Euston. Not only did this open too late, it had facilities – a tea garden and library – aimed at an upmarket clientele. The Pembroke Castle in Primrose Hill opened in the late 1860s and was probably named after its address – 1 Pembroke Terrace – while the Windsor Castle on Parkway was an off licence until 1953, when it reopened as a pub. It’s now a restaurant. As for the Caernarvon, this originally opened as the Pickford Arms – named after a nearby depot – changing its name in around 1870, possibly to join the trend, as Camden pubs became synonymous with castles.
Where then did this rumour came from? To seek an answer, I turned to In Camden Town by David Thomson. This is a diary covering a year in Camden in 1980, combining social history and personal reminiscences. Thomson spends much of his time idling with locals in Camden pubs – the Windsor, Edinboro and Dublin Castle all feature – and he also writes about the building of the canals. However, he never brings the two together, either to spread or dispel the rumour, by saying his favourite pubs were built for navvies. That suggests the story had not yet been formulated.
Of the canal navvies, he writes that “it is difficult to find out much about the… homeless thousands of men who carved the channel out by hand”, noting later that “public inquiries… showed their food, shelter and conditions of work were as wretched as those of the railway navvies later.” This was a dangerous and exhausting life. One accident near Camden in August 1813 saw a cutting collapse, burying a dozen men, several of whom died. “A navvy’s life was less valuable than a slave’s”, says Thomson, who says navvies were “like an invading army but without discipline, tents, billeting officer or commissariat.” Many were Irish and spoke no English. “‘They use only their Gaelic tongue,’ wrote one engineer. ‘And it’s by sign we direct them and thus they have little traffic with the English and keep them apart.’”
Of the railway navvies, Thomson writes. “Navvies were reckless in their leisure. They came and went to the next job in hordes, shared hardships and pleasures peculiar to their homeless life, helped each other in adversity, had a strong sense of justice, were loyal to the gang and to fair employers, and fiercely violent against those who cheated them of food or pay.” The navvies had their own traditions, including “broomstick weddings” – a marriage ceremony described thus in 1846: “It consists of the couple jumping over a broomstick in the presence of a room full of men, met to drink upon the occasion, and the couple were put to bed at once in the same room.”
Navvies were perceived to be heavy drinkers and sporadically violent. At a ceremony in Camden’s Cumberland Basin in 1816 to mark the opening of one section of Regent’s Canal, the navvies “were presented with several hogsheads of beer. Plenty of quarts and pint pots were provided, but not finding these large enough, many held out hats for a full up and drank copious draughts from those.” There were occasional fights – most notably between canal workers in Sampford Peverell in 1811 and Barrow-Upon-Soar in 1794 – as there was among railway workers in Camden in 1846 when a riot broke out between English and Irish labourers at the Round House that lasted several hours and left many injured.
A trip to the Canal Museum in King’s Cross brought more information from The Canal Builders by Anthony Burton. The canal navigators were, he writes, “strangers of uncertain origin” who carved canals the length and breadth of the country using spade and barrow, experience and muscle. Again, he notes how little trace they left on the printed record, as they became “such an accepted part of the landscape that writers and travellers rarely felt it worthy of mention”.
Originally made up of part-time agricultural workers from the English and Welsh farms, by 1795 there were an estimated 50,000 navvies working on the canals, “a mixture of English workers… and a specialised work force from Scotland and Ireland, specifically to work on the canals.” The Irish and Scots were extremely poor and these “roving bands of migrant workers” were much feared, described as “banditti… the terror of the surrounding country” in 1839.
And what of their living conditions? These sound uncannily like that of migrant workers today. Burton says some were encouraged to lodge in the towns in which they worked to defuse some of the fear and friction caused by so many unfamiliar men living close together but most lived in jerry-built temporary accommodation, travelling encampments of 600 or more, with navvies living in “a turf hovel” and subsiding on “dull plain food”. Some canal owners discussed improving conditions, raising places for workers to eat and drink, but only in the form of tents or booths. Many were paid in tokens that could only be redeemed at certain stores, invariably those owned by the canal owners. Would four brick pubs have been constructed for such poorly treated, poorly regarded men who never settled in a single place for long? Not a chance.
Camden’s Pirate Castle youth club – also not a real castle
A photograph in Michael Ware’s A Canalside Camera shows a group of navvies, dressed in rags, surly and exhausted. The navvies had a terrible reputation, but Burton is sympathetic. “Take thousands of poor, uneducated men, remove them from home and family, send them out to sweat away at hard, dirty and dangerous work, and you cannot be surprised if the end result is a gang of men who frequently find their repose in outbursts of drunkenness and fighting.”
Here it is apparent how – if not when – the story of the Camden castles was formed. Canal navvies would have been prominent in Camden during the first half of the 19th century. They were often drawn from the poorest Irish and Scottish labourers, bolstered by English and Welsh workers. Attempts were made to keep the disparate national groups apart as they were known to fight with each other and the public. They were also famed for consuming heaps of ale, traditions later continued manfully by the railway navvies, who enjoyed a terrific tear up in the centre of Camden in 1846. And so, from these disparate truths, a cohesive myth was born, spun by some enterprising soul with a rich imagination, possibly even a lubricated barfly, enjoying the continuing hospitality of one of Camden’s many, but entirely coincidental, castles.
The Pembroke Castle, Edinboro Castle and Dublin Castle can all be found around Camden Town. The London Canal Museum is at 12-13 New Wharf Road, N1 9RT.
Word reaches me that plans are afoot to start a campaign to erect a statue to London peace campaigner Brian Haw, whose peace camp was a fixture at Parliament Square for many years.
I interviewed Brian in June 2005 for Time Out, by which time his shanty town and placards had been housed opposite the Houses of Parliament for several years. His arrival predated the Iraq invasion of 2003 but grew and grew, drawing much more attention after the conflict started. It’s worth remembering that the current Conservative government’s illiberal approach to protest was very much previewed by the way New Labour reacted to Haw, changing the law multiple times in an authoritarian attempt to erase what they saw as an embarrassing protest. And in some ways, Haw was a trendsetter for the kind of high-visibility permanent protests seen over Brexit, although now the protesters are permanently armed with camera phones to ensure they get that attention-grabbing soundbite for a tweet that might go viral. Haw could be noisy, but was generally more stoic in his approach to protest – sitting opposite Parliament like a human scowl, a permanent blight on the house’s collective conscience.
When I interview Haw in 2005, we ended up talking for two hours. Or rather he talked, while I listened.
His life was extraordinary and seems to have been defined by his strong Christian belief and the unresolved trauma of his father’s experience as a WWII sniper who liberated Belsen and later took his own life.
What I most remember was his utter, almost frightening, determination – there was an almost messianic steel behind the eyes that reminded me in a strange way of the manner in which his nemesis Tony Blair was depicted by cartoonist Steve Bell. I’m sure neither man would like the comparison.
Haw sadly died in 2011 having defied several attempts to remove him – indeed his, peace camp was at one point famously recreated at the Tate by Mark Wallinger, winning the Turner prize.
Is a permanent statue likely to follow? News of the campaign will soon emerge.
In the meantime, here’s my interview with Brian from 2005.
A short and sad post to start 2023, following the death of former Chelsea player Gianluca Vialli. Some of my happiest memories were spent at Stamford Bridge watching Vialli play for and then manage a Chelsea side that surpassed all my childhood dreams. As a kid, the best I ever expected from Chelsea was to reach an FA Cup semi-final – with Vialli they won two FA Cups (one as player, one as manager) as well as the League Cup, Super Cup and, unforgettably in Stockholm, the European Cup Winners Cup. That Chelsea team of Poyet, Petrescu, Leboeuf and Wise was stylish, cavalier, tough and cosmopolitan – qualities utterly epitomised by Vialli himself, who grew up in a castle, dressed like a Bash Street kid, spoke in a hybrid Italian-Cockney accent and looked like he knew his way round a street fight. Vialli was very London, in an Italian sort of way, and for a few years around this time every Italian cafe in London – of which there were many – seemed to have a signed photo of Vialli behind the counter.
Of many great games from this late 1990s period, my favourite was probably this, Vialli’s first as manager. It was the second leg of the League Cup semi-final when that tournament still counted for something. Chelsea had been beaten 2-1 at Highbury. Back then, Arsenal always seemed to beat us and they were a truly formidable side – the George Graham back four, Petit and Viera in midfield, Bergkamp, Anelka and Overmars in attack. We played them off the pitch, winning 3-1, Vialli having calmed the players’ nerves with a glass of champagne before the game. Just watch the footage for a reminder of why late 90s was so thrilling and, frankly, so much better than the samey, sanitised, tactics-heavy, contact-free version we have today. These were exceptional footballers, but they knew how to tackle – well, almost: Veira was sent off. And the atmosphere! Nothing today comes close.
My girlfriend of the time had a notable soft spot for Vialli, a good-looking man who embraced his baldness like Jean-Luc Picard and paired it with a grey v-neck and thick tie.
For a while, I sported a grey v-neck myself in imitation of the great man. I couldn’t play like him, and I still had my hair, but at least I could dress the same way.
I may dig it out the back of the cupboard today, one last time, in memory of the lovely Luca.
The Great Wen 