 The Baron Seven: l to r Andrew Whitehead, Ken Worpole, Muriel Walker, Sean Longden, Susie Thomas, Nadia Valman, Anthony Cartwright. Photos courtesy of Larraine Worpole The wonderful Old Church on Stoke Newington Church Street was the venue over the weekend for a book launch - part of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival. The volume is about a son of Stoke Newington, the novelist Alexander Baron, best known for his D-Day novel From the City, From the Plough and his cult classic of post-war Hackney, The Lowlife. Six Baron enthusiasts have come together in So We Live: the novels of Alexander Baron to examine aspects of his life and writing. We were joined by Muriel Walker, who is 92 and worked alongside Baron in the late 1940s on the journal 'New Theatre'. She read from a letter Baron had sent her in 1949 when she was in Italy - where Baron had served during the war.  Ross Bradshaw of the publishers Five Leaves with Nadia Valman. Photo: Larraine Worpole The launch was a great success with a hundred or so people packing the church pews. And lots of books were sold.
So We Live is published by Five Leaves - and they have also just published four of Baron's novels, three of them republications and in one case, The War Baby, the first publication of a powerful novel set amid the International Brigades fighting Franco during the Spanish Civil War.
There's more about Alexander Baron here - and we have also posted online a 'walk round Baron's manor', complete with map, which will guide you round Stoke Newington and Dalston in the footsteps of the author.
Do give it a try!
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 Just off Stoke Newington Road in North London, there's a wonderfully evocative entrance arch to a block of social housing: Coronation Avenue. It's on Victorian Road, though the coronation it marked is that of Queen Victoria's son and successor, Edward VII. Coronation Avenue and the adjoining Imperial Avenue were built by the 4% Industrial Dwellings Company and opened in 1903. It has almost 300 flats, most one-bed and bedsit, and is still run by the Industrial Dwellings Society.  This was the site of one of the most profound civilian tragedies to beset London during the Second World War - a loss of life on a scale akin to that of the terrible Bethnal Green tube disaster of 1943. On 13th October 1940, during the German aerial Blitz of London, a high explosive bomb landed on Coronation Avenue. The writer Alexander Baron alluded to the event in his locally set novel With Hope, Farewell: 'The parish church had been burned down and several neighbouring streets demolished. A mile away, along the Stoke Newington Road, a parachute-mine had caused an entire block of flats to collapse into the communal shelter underneath, killing hundreds of people.' That was why the number of casualties was so exceptionally high. The bomb managed to penetrate into a shelter beneath the building where many of the residents had sought refuge during the night-time air raid. The BBC has posted the testimony of a youngster who survived the bomb explosion: "Coronation Avenue buildings consists of a terrace of about 15 shops with five storeys of flats above. The shelter was beneath three of the shops. The back exit was in the yard between Coronation Avenue and another block of buildings, called Imperial Avenue. We went over the road to the shelter whenever there was a raid, and when the 'all clear' sounded in the morning, we would go back over the road, half asleep and very cold, and try to go back to sleep in a very cold bed. "The shelter consisted of three rooms. The front entrance was in the first room, the rear entrance was in the third room, which had bunk beds along one wall. The rooms were jam packed with people, sitting on narrow slatted benches. I would sit on a bench and fall asleep, and wake every now and then, and would find myself snuggled up to my mother and sister. My father had the use of one of the bunk beds, because the men were given priority, as they had to go to work "On 13 October 1940, the shelter received a direct hit. We had settled down as usual, when there was a dull thud, a sound of falling masonry, and total darkness. "Somebody lit a torch - the entrance to the next room was completely full of rubble, as if it had been stacked by hand. Very little rubble had come into our room. Suddenly I felt my feet getting very cold, and I realised that water was covering my shoes. We were at the end of the room farthest from the exit. I noticed my father trying to wake the man in the bunk above him, but without success - a reinforcing steel beam in the ceiling had fallen down and was lying on him. "The water was rising, and I started to make my way to the far end, where the emergency exit was situated. Everybody seemed very calm - with no shouting or screaming. By the time I got to the far end, the water was almost up to my waist, and there was a small crowd clambering up a steel ladder in a very orderly manner. Being a little more athletic than some of them, and very scared, I clambered up the back of the ladder to the top, swung over, and came out into the open." In Abney Park cemetery nearby, the Borough of Stoke Newington - the area was then a borough in its own right, becoming part of the London Borough of Hackney in 1965 - built a memorial to those who died at Corporation Avenue and in other wartime enemy bombing raids. It lists - by my count - 88 people who died that night in Coronation Avenue: 
It's a mute testament to the impact of war on civilians and communities. Altogether 17,500 Londoners were killed in Second World War bombing raids. I'd like to say that this memorial is well maintained - but at least some people visit, reflect and remember. Lest we forget!  At Stoke Newington's Abney Park cemetery at the weekend, I chanced across this remarkable grave - of a London police constable killed in the line of duty. The centrepiece of the memorial is a representation of the slain police constable's helmet and uniform - a very moving touch.  The inscription hints at quite a story but doesn't spell it out. So let me fill in the gaps ... P.C. William Frederick Tyler died in what was known at the time as the Tottenham "outrage", a notorious incident which shocked Londoners and created a backwash of ill-feeling against Jewish political refugees who were responsible for the violence.
As the robbers/revolutionaries fled, they opened fire on the increasing numbers in their pursuit. A ten-year-old boy, Ralph Joscelyne, was shot and killed. At Tottenham marshes, PC Tyler was able to take a shortcut and get in front of the robbers - they shot him dead. At one point, the two Latvians commandeered a tram as they sought to get away from their pursuers. One of them, realising that he was trapped, shot himself; the other managed to barricade himself in a room in a cottage in Walsthamstow where he was shot dead. The chase lasted two hours and covered six miles ... it's estimated that the two robbers fired 400 rounds of ammunition at their pursuers ... and at the end, four people were dead. You can see why this was called the Tottenham outrage.
The events in Tottenham and Walthamstow bear a striking similarity to the still more notorious Siege of Sidney Street in the East End two years later, when Winston Churchill accompanied a detachment of Scots Guards to flush out another gang of revolutionary Jewish robbers. The grave and memorial for PC Tyler was paid for by the Metropolitan Police - it's now Grade II listed. Ralph Joscelyne, I discover, is buried nearby in Abney Park cemetery - next time I go I'll tried to find his gravestone.
 So, you don't know where Haggerston is? Neither did I! But it has a station - on the Highbury and Islington to West Croydon route, if you are wondering - so what better place as a starting point for some New Year psycho-geography. It's in Hackney - sandwiched between Hoxton and Dalston. E8 is the postal area. Haggerston station was rebuilt and reopened six years ago, and in the bright winter sun looks rather fetching - as does the adjoining Stonebridge Gardens.
The whole point of these rambles it to discover the unexpected - and just three minutes stroll from the station is the delightful Albion Square, with a wonderful, almost tropical-looking, garden.  Adjoining the square, on Albion Drive, is the home of Iain Sinclair - psychogeographer extraordinary and author of Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire. And plumb in the middle of the gardens, deservedly listed as a local landmark, is a splendid granite drinking fountain
Venturing on, the real surprise of the ramble came - as so often - on a back street. This 'Gothic Revival spectacle', in Sinclair's judgement, was built as the Hamburg Lutheran Church, its foundation stone laid by the Duke of Cambridge in 1875. Apparently, its minister in the late 1930s was a Hitler sympathiser, and on the outbreak of war he headed back sharpish to Germany. The building is now used by a Pentecostal group, the Faith Tabernacle Church of God.  Still more delightful is the array of adjoining buildings, tucked away from view - these are, or were, the German Hospital.  The hospital was established nearby in the 1840s. These buildings date from 1864. Although intended for local Germans of all religions, the hospital also provided care for anyone who needed it. By the 1930s, the hospital had almost two-hundred beds. But in 1940 the German staff were arrested and interned on the Isle of Man as enemy aliens. It became part of the NHS as a general hospital in 1948 later became a specialist psychiatric and psycho-geriatric hospital and eventually closed in 1987. The older, listed buildings now provide affordable housing.    The hospital into which this one was subsumed offered the only modern architecture of note (Haggerston Station apart) encountered in E8. Here's part of Homerton University Hospital - a splash of bue among the rose red:  On Shacklewell Lane, there were two memorable moments - a wonderful old dairy frontage ... and an old public wash house now done up as flats. 
 I had this vague sense as I promenaded along Shacklewell Lane that I was heading out, out, out - that Newham could well be next stop. Then I hit Stoke Newington Road. So I was about as wrong as could be. But taking to some of the back streets of good old Stokey, I still found some new places to ponder over. On Walford Road, just two or three minutes from the main road, is a back street synagogue - and independent orthodox synagogue, according to its website, which dates back to the inter-war years, initially serving I imagine those Jews who moved out of the East End for a more comfortable life. Architecturally, it's distinctly drab - but nice that it survives, and as a place of worship too.  Zig-zagging to the south side of Abney Park, I chanced across Aden Terrace, which follows what was once the course of the New River, the ancient waterway which once provided drinking water to the capital. And delightfully, where the river once ran there are now allotments. How could I have never spotted this before?
 The course of the New River crosses Green Lanes on its way south and then once ran in the middle of Petherton Road, now grassed over and a long green snake of a dog walk. And on the one-time shopfronts facing the road, one last surprise -   A fashionable restaurant has made a virtue of being located in a former garage - to the extent of keeping the old, fading signboard, complete with the three letter area code.
This is CAN for Canonbury. CAN do!  A rare privilege this week, to see inside the Mildmay Club on Newington Green. A big barn of a building which has seen better days, but seems to be slowly, slowly bouncing back from the prospect of oblivion.
The Mildmay and a raft of other local radical clubs were in the second tier. Hardly any are still going. This club has had a chequered history, and only moved into its current home after the heyday of late-Victorian radicalism, but it's still hanging in there. Just. And there was something both sad and wondrous about looking round this time-locked sarcophagus of a club - thinking back to what it once was, and ahead to what it could become.
Hackney's appraisal of the Newington Green (North) conservation area - which focusses on such fine buildings as the nearby Unitarian Chapel established in 1708 - offers a potted history of the club (and I've nicked the photo from there as well):
The renaming of the club was a clear statement that it had abandoned its radical pedigree. But in earlier years, the Radical in the club's title meant just that. A local vicar complained of the club's 'pernicious influence' - radicalism at that time often went hand-in-hand with freethought. And Tommy Jackson, later a leading Communist, recalled with gratitude help from the club when an anti-Boer War street meeting at Highbury Corner came under attack. Barry Burke and Ken Worpole take up the story: The Tories resolved to smash the meeting up: the Radicals took the precaution of mobilising the gymnasium class of the Mildmay Radical Club (Newington Green) to act as ‘stewards’. Quite a pretty battle was in progress when the issue was decided by the local S.D.F., who, when the fight started, were pitched nearby. Abandoning their own meeting, the Socialists, led by their Chairman, a useful middle-weight of local fame, fell upon the Tories and routed them ‘with great slaughter’  Walking round the club, it's cavernous - on every floor. A snooker room, dark, slightly spooky, with a dozen or so tables ... a bar that's bigger than most pubs ... a big hall with stage, festooned as if for a 1960s talent night, which could easily take a couple of hundred ... a smaller hall in itself the size of many working men's clubs ... and at the top of the building, three (now empty) one-bed flats. There are city states, UN member nations indeed, smaller than this!
Once the Mildmay Club had a membership to match. Outside the hall, there's a large varnished wooden board listing the club's wartime casualties (at least, we think that's what it is - the top of the board has been obscured by a rather hamfisted renovation). There are close to four-hundred names. And in the Conservation Area appraisal, there's a couple of grainy old black-and-white photos dating (it says) from about 1905, one of the theatre/hall and the other of the snooker room. Take a look:
It strikes me that, more than a century later, the snooker room may still have the same lino. If not, it's a close lookalike. 
And the snooker hall - they should film Sherlock Holmes in here, and ghost movies, Edwardian thrillers ... it's eery, with a Martian-style greenish light intensified by the lime coloured walls. There are still gas light fittings, adding to the spectral feel and looking sinisterly like secret police torture equipment.
Then the most macabre aspect of the room - the walls are lined with snooker cues in their cases, some locked into position. Dozens and dozens of them. In a snooker hall, where on Thursday night, just two of the tables were in use. Some have names and numbers inscribed in a style resonant of a bygone era. I am fairly sure quite a few must once have been wielded by players now seeking out record breaks in the greater snooker Valhalla in the sky.   And the bar? Well to judge by the meagre attendance last Thursday, if they sell twenty pints on a weekday evening they are doing well. Which makes you wonder whether this sign really is necessary ...  And I mentioned the tentative bounce back in the club's fortunes. Well, it's not going to be sold off for development - details here - and the club committee, whose orders are of course the last word, has had an infusion of new blood. Whether there's new signage to follow, well, I'll let you know.
The UnLondon festival at Stoke Newington old church yesterday was a rip-roaring success. Great, cosy, historic venue, with very well attended talks and readings in the afternoon - including the inspiring Bernard Kops, and Ken Worpole talking about Stoke Newington's own Alexander Baron, author of The Lowlife (and yes, 'London Fictions' was there too).
And in the evening the guys who had organised the free event took to the stage. They are The Unfortunates, named after a B.S. Johnson novel, the one where the pages are sheets in a box and, apart from the first and last, can be read in any order. They play well, really well, sort of skiffle-meets-punk (I may have got that wrong, but that's how it struck me). And there they are above doing their encore, not their own number but Robyn Hitchcock's Trams of Old London - a song I didn't know, but a great choice, and yes those are the lyrics of the chorus on the blackboard. And here they are in full: Trams of old London, Taking my baby into the past in it. Trams of old London blow my mind. Ludgate, Fenchurch, Highgate Hill; Rolling slowly up there still, uh-huh. Waterloo and Clerkenwell, Out to Aldgate East as well, uh-huh. On a clear night you can see Where the rails used to be. Oh, it seems like ancient myth They once ran to Hammersmith. Trams of old London, Taking my baby into the past in it. Trams of old London blow my mind. Through Electric Avenue, Brixton, down in southwest too, uh-huh. Teddington and Kennington, Twickenham and Paddington, uh-huh. In the blitz they never closed Though they blew up half the roads. Oh, it hurts me just to see 'em Going dead in a museum. Ah... Trams of old London, Taking my baby into the past in it. Trams of old London blow my mind. Trams of old London, Taking my baby into the past in it. Trams of old London blow my mind.  Nag's Head, Holloway Road It wasn't intended as a New Year wander. If the No. 4 had been running a regular service, I wouldn't have walked anything like as far. But today - part flaneur, part keep fit resolution - I hiked the whole distance from Dartmouth Park in north London to Dalston Junction. Do come with me! The light was wonderful - a bright winter sun. I'd never seen the Nag's Head looking quite so bright. It hasn't been a pub for the past seven years, and hasn't been the 'Nag's Head' for a great deal longer - but it still appears on bus routes, and gives its name to the neighbourhood.  Holloway Road A little further down Holloway Road I passed a solitary, sad reminder of the wonderful Jones Brothers department store - Waitrose now stands on most of the site. Jones Brothers was much loved across north London. John Lewis stubbornly refused to listen to a lively local campaign demanding that the store be saved. It closed in 1990. Holloway Road has never been the same since it went.  This is Arsenal territory, and in case anyone should forget, there on Holloway Road is a pub named after the club's greatest manager, at least until Arsene Wenger came along. 'The Herbert Chapman'. Earlier Chapman had managed Huddersfield Town (my boyhood team) during their golden spell in the 1920s. He is regarded as one of the greatest team managers, and a great moderniser of the game of football.  The notice in the pub window saying 'Home Fans Only' seems a touch unnecessary. But I suppose any Spurs or Chelsea fans intruding into this Gunners' pub can't say they hadn't been warned. A few yards further down, a left turn, and there it is - the Emirates stadium. The home of a club which knows, and values, its history - as you can tell from the museum, the statues, the billboards.  Arsenal's Emirates Stadium  From there, cutting across Highbury, along Clissold Park, to Stoke Newington. And as perhaps befits the old stamping ground of the Angry Brigade, one of the first things I spot is the skull and crossbones flying high. Can anyone explain why? On the far side of the park, the crenellated old pumping station, now a climbing centre, stands out. I seem to remember that the IRA once hid a cache of weapons in the filter beds which fed the water pumps. The site was long ago cleared and is now a housing estate.  Clissold House, in Clissold Park The park has many delights, the greatest being the colonnaded Clissold House - built in the 1790s for a Quaker merchant and anti-slavery campaigner (this is Hackney after all). A little further along Stoke Newington Church Street is the old church, in part mid-16th century and hugely more elegant than the other St Mary's across the road.  St Mary's old church, Stoke Newington Church Street  I had planned to treat myself to lunch at one of the trendy Church Street cafes, but hundreds of others had the same idea. So I ploughed on to the Victorian valhalla at the eastern end of the street - Abney Park cemetery. It's best known for the grave of William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. But another tomb demands at least as much attention.  The two photos on the left show the last resting place of the Chartist leader and thinker, James Bronterre O'Brien. His remarkable followers, the O'Brienites, were key figures in London radicalism for a full quarter century after their leader's death in 1864. The inscription, spruced up in the 1980s but faithful to the original, reads rather sombrely: 'His life was grand, his death was sad and drear'. On to Stoke Newington High Street - heading south, past the excellent bookshop, and now amid an array of Turkish kebab shops. Above one is the most enticing shadow sign I've seen in a long while. Enough to prompt me to pop into the cafe, and have a chicken with honey and mustard ('no kebabs', I was told, 'haven't had a chance to marinate the meat because of the holidays'!)  Stoke Newington High Street  Stoke Newington Road By the time I had eaten, the light was beginning to fade. I hurried on south, past Alexander Baron's Foulden Road, stopping to admire the strange juxtaposition of places of worship just across the road. A small, homely old Baptist church, probably with a largely Caribbean congregation - overshadowed by the mosque and halal grocery next door, a converted cinema decked out with eye catching blue tiles.  Ridley Road As Stoke Newington shades into Dalston, and Stoke Newington Road becomes Kingsland High Street, African shops, stalls and bookstores become more evident. Ridley Road market, once one of Oswald Mosley's rallying points, is part African, part Caribbean, part Pakistani. I had never seen Punjabi run fish stalls before (traditional Punjabi cuisine is not in the least piscatorial) - but Ridley Road has quite a few.  A fish stall on Dalston's Ridley Road Just a little further south to Dalston Junction, on to Balls Pond Road - and my walk's over. I hop on to a 38 to the Angel, and then take the Northern line back home. Close to three hours of wandering, I reckon. Thanks for your company.
 Alexander Baron is back in style! The first evening of this year's Stoke Newington Literary Festival included a wonderful session on the locality's most famous modern writer. Baron was brought up on Foulden Road, and borrowed from his childhood memories in his classic The Lowlife, as well as in With Hope, Farewell, and the most autobiographical of his fiction, The In-Between Time. Yesterday evening more than seventy people crammed in to an evening meeting to celebrate Baron and his books. Not simply his novels of north London, but also his celebrated fiction giving an ordinary soldier's viewpoint of the fighting in Europe during the latter part of the Second World War.  Sean Longden - one of the speakers and a leading historian of the combatants' experience of war - said Baron's novels turned up more regularly than any others on veterans' book shelves. Baron's son, Nick, talked of a shy man, a pessimist, morose at times - but a hugely accomplished TV script writer as well as novelist. There's much more about Baron elsewhere on this site.
One of his war novels - the hugely affecting and compassionate There's No Home, set in Sicily during a lull in the conflict - has just been republished by Sort of Books. There are now five Baron novels back in print - the greatest number, surely, for many decades. And for Baron fans, of whom I am one, a real cause for celebration. If you are an enthusiast for London novels, let me point towards the London Fictions site - where, among others, Baron's Islington novel Rosie Hogarth is discussed. Foulden Road stands where Stoke Newington edges into Dalston. A little anonymous - especially on a wet winter Sunday afternoon. I wanted to walk along it because this was where the novelist Alexander Baron (known to his friends as Alec Bernstein) grew up. It was the place he had in mind when he wrote his most famous work, The Lowlife, an affectionate account of a none-too-successful Jewish gambler living in a boarding house, and caught between the disappearing Jewish East End and the suburban aspirational culture his sister has married into.
The road has not changed much since The Lowlife appeared half-a-century ago. The late Victorian houses are neat and well kept, with occasionally a three- or four-storey house giving a little variety to the skyline. As you approach Amhurst Road, some of the houses are double fronted. They must have bene rather grand when first constructed. At its western end, Foulden Road runs into Stoke Newington Road. From the garage, you can seen some remnants of light industrial buildings - a chimney and a two storey factory. Across the main road, the unassuming Stoke Newington Baptist Church is entirely eclipsed by the Turkish mosque next door, with its eye-catching blue tiles. (There's a wonderful Flickr photo of the building here). As I approach, the mosque appears to be something more modest - the Aziziye halal butchers and restaurant. Surely the most ornate such meat shop in the city. I pop in and buy some garlic sausage. What a marvellous building, I say. Yes, the manager replies - it used to be a cinema, now its a mosque. I look puzzled. There's an entrance at the back, he explains, you can go and have a look if you like. I do. It's a cavernous, serene first floor prayer hall in a building probably built to show the early talkies. Walking past the Baptist Church I notice the door is ajar and so I peek in. The preacher - if that's what he is - is black, and the mike in his hand can hardly be necessary for his congregation, or audience, barely numbers a dozen. Alexander Baron's The Lowlife captures, very humanely, the early waves of Caribbean settlement in this corner of London. The Turkish migrants, now much more numerous here, are more recent. But there is at least a spiritual continuity. The Turkish cafes, clubs and snooker halls are - I'm sure - a setting for much the sort of gambling that The Lowlife's hero, Harryboy Boas practised so unsuccessfully. |
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