Tag Archives: South London

Kate Bush’s guide to South East London

Posted on January 20, 2020 | 2 comments

I have written the cover story for the current issue of Uncut about Welling’s greatest daughter, Kate Bush.

The piece looks at Bush’s formative years from her first musical compositions to the release of her debut single, “Wuthering Heights”, which must be one of the most surprising and memorable debut songs ever released.

KB

Much of this story takes place around south-east London, where Kate Bush was raised. She grew up in a rambling old farmhouse in Welling that many interviewees think influenced her idiosyncratic outlook.

“The house when it was built would have been in the countryside,” Joe Boyd told me. “By the time Kate was growing up it was suburbia, but right on the edge with fields out the back. There are barns and stables and horses. It does feel as if her upbringing gave her one foot in both new and old, and I know she really valued that place and what it gave her. It’s one of those old London houses that have somehow never been demolished, where you can squint and imagine the past.” Boyd likened it to an old Georgian mansion that survives in Notting Hill, somehow having avoided redevelopment and now a portal to another history. I told him it sounded like Brixton Windmill, and Boyd told me of a spell he spent in Brixton prison in the 1960s, on remand for possession. The windmill, he said, became his beacon of hope.

When Bush left home, she continued to stay close to her family living in the top floor of a Victorian house in Brockley – her two older brothers occupied the two flats below. It was in SE London that she first rehearsed and performed with the (still performing) KT Bush Band, touring the London pub scene. Here she is performing “Come Together”, one of the few recordings that survive from this period.

Anyway, here are some of the key locations from this part of Bush’s life. For more, you’ll have to buy the magazine.

KATE BUSH GUIDE TO SOUTH-EAST LONDON

East Wickham Farm, Wickham Road, Welling

The Bush family homestead, parts of which are more than 400 years old. The farmhouse remains in family ownership today.

 

St Joseph’s Convent Grammar School, Woolwich Road, Abbey Wood

Bush’s school, which she attended until 1976 getting 10 O Levels. She wrote poems for the school magazine, including “The Crucifixion”, “Blind Joe Death” and “Epitaph For A Rodent”.

 

44 Wickham Road, Brockley

The Bush family bought this house and installed the three Bush siblings in flats on each floor. It was where Bush would perfect the songs that appeared on The Kick Inside.

 

Greenwich Swimming Baths, Trafalgar Road

In a room next to the boiler room, the KT Bush Band held their first rehearsal ahead of their short life touring London pubs, clubs and hotels.

 

Rose Of Lee, 162 Lee High Road, Lewisham

Scene of the debut KT Bush Band show in March 1977 in front of an audience of around 30. Crowds would grow over the next few weeks as the band returned.

 

South East London Entertainment, Rushey Green

Musical equipment shop where the KT Bush Band bought PA equipment with money provided by EMI. They also bought mics from Fender Soundhouse in Soho.

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Posted in Journalism, London, Music, Uncategorized

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Ghost street

Posted on December 18, 2014 | 4 comments

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I walk past this corner at least twice every day but only recently noticed the ghost sign painted above the newer enamel one. I assume it was previously covered up, otherwise I’m sure I’d have spotted it at some point in the past five years. Perhaps the jutting pipe points to recent usage.

Much as I like a painted street sign, this one is particularly interesting as it dates back to a time when the street – a short stub of road – had a different name entirely. According to Steve Chambers, who knows about such things, this was one of three name changes in the area – including the eradication of the similar Hamilton Terrace on Shakespeare Road – brought about to tidy up postal addresses.

The ghost sign for the ghost street sits opposite a ghost pub. Hamilton Supermarket occupies the site of the Hamilton Arms, a cosy corner pub opened in 1878 that was captured magnificently in these old photos. It closed in 2004.

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hamilton supermarket

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Posted in Architecture, History, London, Pubs, Street furniture

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Muhammad Ali in Tulse Hill, 1974

Posted on January 17, 2012 | 1 comment

In 1974, this picture was taken of Muhammad Ali at Tulse Hill Comprehensive, sparring with a schoolboy.

But how did the world heavyweight champion – and one of the most famous men in the world – end up in a South London state school shortly after the Rumble In The Jungle with George Foreman in Zaire?

Well, he was invited by civil rights campaigner Paul Stephenson, who was on the school’s board of governors and thought it would be a good idea to ambush Ali in the lobby of the Hyde Park Hilton and suggest he come to the school assembly.

We continued to chat and he wanted to know how much I’d pay him. I looked him straight in the eye and said: ‘Muhammad, I haven’t got a dollar.’ He responded ‘Not even a dime? You have more nerve than Frazier.’

The full story is here, and it’s a cracker.

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Posted in Brixton, Celebrity, History, London, Photography, Secret London

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Secret London: Toulouse-Lautrec in Catford

Posted on June 7, 2011 | 3 comments

Say what you like about South London, but it clearly has something about it. Why else would a trinity of the world’s greatest 19th-century artists have come here?

You probably know about Vincent Van Gogh’s time in Brixton because of the play from a few years ago. Van Gogh lodged in Hackford Road, Brixton in 1873 and regularly walked from there to Covent Garden where he worked as an art dealer.

This is the only surviving picture he sketched during this period It’s of the Georgian houses on Hackford Road itself.

Van Gogh also lived in Isleworth in 1876, at 160 Twickenham Road, when he later returned to London as a teacher. Hackford Road now has an English Heritage blue plaque for Van Gogh, and there used to be a Van Gogh Cafe on Brixton Road, but it’s closed down.

Camille Pissarro painted around a dozen pictures of Sydenham and Dulwich during his time in South London in 1870. I particularly like this one, of Lordship Lane Station.

As Michael Glover writes in the Independent: ‘The painting shows us a new kind of modernity. Here is London being mightily transformed by the growth of housing and the ever onward thrust of the railways in the second half of the 19th century.’ Pissarro lived at No 77 Westow Hill and then on Palace Road, and married at Croydon Registry Office. He returned to London a number of times. Lordship Lane station was demolished in 1954. A non-English Heritage blue plaque adorns the site of his house on Westow Hill and a restaurant called Pissarro is in Chiswick, but I’m pretty sure that’s named after his son Lucien.

Best of all, though, is the fact that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did time in Catford in 1896. The diminutive brothel-loving soak was a huge fan of cycling and in 1896 was asked by a company called Simpson to work on a poster for their new bike, which used a new type of chain. This, according to Wiki, ‘was composed of linked triangles forming two levels. The inner level was driven by the chainring and the outer drove the rear cog. Instead of teeth, the chainring and cog had grooves into which the rollers of the chain engaged.’

I’m not sure what that means, and probably neither did Lautrec, so he came to the newly built Catford Velodrome to watch the bike in action during special races, set up by Simpson to advertise their product. Lautrec produced a couple of images during his visit. The poster was one of the last he designed before his death in 1901.

The velodrome was knocked down in the 1990s and there is no trace of it left (it’s location was approximately around Sportsbank Road), but there is at least a brasserie in Kennington called Toulouse-Lautrec.

But perhaps Toulouse-Lautrec had more influence on Catford than we may have thought?

Consider this, a famous poster advertising one of Lautrec’s favourite clubs by one of his contemporaries and very much in Lautrec’s style.

And this.

If you do not wish to go all the way to Catford to pay homage, an exhibition of Lautrec’s work goes on display later in June at the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House, where you can also see Pissarro’s lovely picture of Lordship Lane Station.

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Posted in Architecture, Art, Celebrity, Exhibitions, History, London, Secret London

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Secret London: the Russian tank of Bermondsey

Posted on November 23, 2010 | 9 comments

That there is an authentic Russian tank parked in a patch of wasteland on a side street off the Old Kent Road is one of those things that is so brilliant it should be mentioned on the news at least once every day. (I felt much the same way about Gordon Brown’s glass eye.  A Prime Minister with a glass eye! How cool was that! What a wasted opportunity.)

The tank is a T34 Russian tank that was possibly used against the Czechs in the Prague Spring uprising of 1968. It arrived in London in 1995 when it was used for the filming of Richard III. The tank was then purchased by Londoner Russell Gray as a sort of giant and very expensive pun after Southwark refused him planning permission to build houses on the site. Gray instead applied for permission to put a tank on the site. They thought he meant water tank, but he didn’t. The tank’s gun is trained on the council office.

How much truth there is to that story is surely irrelevant. It feels right. And when it comes down to it, all that matters is that there is a bloody great Russian tank on the streets of South London and people don’t seem to realise quite how incredible this actually is.

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Posted in Art, History, London, Secret London, Transport, War

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