Team Cinzano

The Great Kent Ride is organised by Bike-Events it is aimed at a mix of novices and ambitious amateurs. Going for a few years now, The ride is a charity event in aid of The Canterbury Oast Trust who care for and provide rehabilitation for those with severe disabilities.  So the entry fee felt like sixteen quid well spent.

From a cycling point of view, It offered something different to the more competitive sportive and was an opportunity to stretch the legs without young whippersnappers speeding past your right shoulder like an express train, as they pedalled their way into a professional contract.

No, this looked a much more sedate affair; the long route of 60 miles was virtually all flat and promised country lanes sunshine and lashings of ginger beer. One of our group was even prepared to do the route on a single speed such was our Metropolitan roadie confidence. In the end he wisely dropped out, sixty miles in the wind with no gears wouldn’t have been much fun.

Thus the three musketeers were now a double act. Myself and best man Andy met at St Pancras in our black Team Cinzano jerseys, ready to combat a coastal chill. We were to get the fast train to Ashford International that’s the same place as Ashford, Kent by the way.  The presence of around ten other cyclists mostly on road machines allayed fears that this would be a mountain bike only event. It was also nice to see a variety of ages making the trip south.

We alighted at the aforementioned station to the world all keyed up and ready to go. Unfortunately we needed to negotiate the lift first, so in we all piled, cycles upright. Next to me one  keyed up mountain biker was clearly in the zone. Pumping techno pish-pished from his earphones as he stared resolutely ahead through mirrored shades. He looked like he had arrived straight from a Eurosport promo or isotonic drinks ad. He was living strong, about to Do it, not accepting second best, focussed on winning, in a lift.

Pumping techno pish-pished from his earphones as he stared resolutely ahead through mirrored shades.

We arrived at ground level and techno-cyclist was off, locked in the zone he raced up the road, an early breakaway and we hadn’t even reached the starting line. The rest of us were still debating which way to go, dawdling in the middle of the road much to the annoyance of one minicab driver bleary eyed and overtired from a night ferrying refreshed revellers to and from Ashford’s premier nightspots.  He shouted some fruity Kentish phrases at our group as we worked out the way to the start. Another more helpful cabby, presumably starting his shift, pointed us on our way, meanwhile techno cyclist had come back to the fold after getting lost on the first roundabout. However once informed of the route he was off again burning cals, pumping e’s, eating up K’s, being an arse.

After signing in and putting on our obligatory numbers, Team Cinzano awaited their turn. There were three routes, a five miler which had attracted many families and a thirty miler for the slightly adventurous and the 100k challenge for the over confident such as ourselves.

Despite the drizzle there was a good turn of all shapes, sizes and abilities. The mood was good, none too serious but organised. At the start the Cinzano boys were complemented on their attire by the jovial MC before embarking on what promised to be a good workout. Dunwich veterans, we were confident we could do the course in just over three hours without too much strain.  Sure conditions weren’t perfect but what’s a little wind and rain to a couple of good old boys.

The mood was good, none too serious but organised.

The first part of the route took us through the Ashford edgelands, canal tow-paths, glassy cycle lanes and pots holed overpasses, but we were quickly directed to the country roads that would take us southwards towards the coast.  The variety of cycling styles and abilities meant that it was best to go cautiously and politely and wait one’s turn. The terrain was flat and the mood jolly as we snaked through the Romney Marshes. Traffic was at a minimum but the headwind meant that progress was steady and the muscles weary earlier than expected. The route was well signposted with stewards at regular intervals. We eschewed the refreshment stops in favour of our own supply of cycling space food, a random selection of gels and banana thingies that leave you flatulent for days. Surely they can come up with something tastier than this crap. Where’s the cycling equivalent of Kendal mint cake?

This was the no-mans land of the South Coast.

As we neared the coast, the wind got stronger; we arrived outside New Romney in good time, an hour I think.  We turned right to go along the seafront and from here things got tougher. The crosswinds made it impossible to find a comfortable gear change. It was one rev forward two revs back, or so it seemed. We grinded passed one Sky sports pub after another, ducking low in a vain attempt to combat the breeze. We overtook a few game cyclists, all sticking to their task. They had no choice, this was the no-mans land of the South Coast.

We eventually reached a bend before Rye and stopped for a quick breather. The worst we hoped was over. Already we could feel the wind on our back as we passed by Dungeness and through the centre of Lydd.  The sun peeked out and we took it easy through the marshy peninsula.  Outside Lydd we gladly gave our back wheels to a couple of other roadies for a few kilometres, but the fatal pop of a tyre as we went over a rail crossing meant that we were soon two again. The field had definitely thinned out now, so much so that we thought we had taken a wrong turning but the green signposts and friendly stewards reassured us that there was less than twenty miles to go.

The worst we hoped was over.

At Chapel Down, home to a highly recommendable sparkling wine, we hit our first hill. Not a bad one but enough to tire the legs for sure. The lanes had given way to standard roads with sapping tarmac. From here on in it was hard work. The exertions on the coast had taken it out of our legs and we were back in grinding mode. Conversation ceased as we took turns to get down the road. Refreshments stops flew by stopping would be a disaster. The two routes now joined, the 30 milers looked a lot fresher for sure.

All we two wanted to do was get to Ashford.  The miles ticked down but the mind got lazy, a dangerous state. A misplaced gear change led to a chain off. I re-mounted and pushed on with five miles to go, the end was in sight and soon we were back in the Ashford environs, down the canal and home.

At the finish line just less than four hours after we set off, we gratefully received our flapjacks. Much better than any space food and took in the familial atmosphere. We were more fatigued than we thought we would be, but glad for it. Back for more next year? I reckon so.

                                                                        A Collins

Artist Paul Harfleet was inspired to start The Pansy Project six years ago after experiencing three separate instances of homophobia in one day in Manchester. Although only verbal attacks, Paul felt the crimes should be marked in some way.

“I was thinking about the locations and how they would always trigger the memory of that incident,’ says Paul who was studying for an MA in Fine Art at the time. “I thought a plant might be a nice way to mark it and a pansy was obvious, because it had that connotation of gayness.” It also fitted in with Paul’s own artwork at the time, much of which was concerned with place and identity.

Paul continued to plant the pansies around Manchester, in places where he had heard of homophobic abuses or attacks. He took photographs of he started to photograph them and place them on his website. He gave them provocative titles relating to the abuse, such as “I think he’s a queer, let’s kill him” in St Ann’s Street in Manchester or  “Fucking Faggots” in Belfast.

"Lets Kill the Batty-Man" Camden Lock.

“I wanted the pansies to be invisible, like the abuse,” Paul explains  “I was interested in roadside memorials and how they change peoples perceptions of a place. As soon as you see that, you think what has happened?”

Since those initial plantings Paul has positioned approximately 10,0000 pansies in different contexts all over the world. The tiny pansies are planted in innocuous places, because this is often where the crimes take place. In the photographs however the pansies are shot in such a way as to dominate the foreground.

Paul is very careful about where he plants and tries to be as respectful to the victim’s families as possible. He spoke at a memorial for Ian Baynham who was tragically killed in Trafalgar Square two years ago. Paul however, decided against any guerrilla activity of his own, especially whilst the case was been heard. He has however been in touch with Ian’s sister and together they would like, at some stage, to make a symbolic planting, perhaps even on the fourth plinth. “It’s a big idea and would need lots of arranging but for the time being I’m giving it some distance.”

Paul did plant a pansy in commemoration of 18-year-old Michael Causer who was murdered in Liverpool in 2008. He met with Michael’s mother Marie in April 2009 and together they planted a flower on the spot where Michaels body had been dumped by his three assailants. He continues to stay in touch with the family, aware that his planting comes with a certain responsibility to those affected by such traumatic events. On his blog, Paul describes the vulnerability of the Pansy he has planted amongst the urban flowerbeds. “Pansies generally don’t last long though they are self-seeding and are surprisingly hardy which is quite interesting.”

For Michael Causer, Liverpool

In 2007 Paul took part in a debate with Metropolitan Police officers as part of The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. For that event Paul also planted 3,000 pansies along the Southbank to commemorate David Morley ironically a survivor of The Admiral Duncan bombing in 1999. He was killed on Hungerford Bridge in 2004 by a gang of local youths.

Paul still believes that the media doesn’t really pay enough attention to these types of attacks. He describes how Michael Causer’s family could not believe the lack of attention their son’s murder received. “Generally in the media it’s OK to be gay and there is this feeling that the battle has already been won,” says Paul, “The reality is that people are still being killed.”

The obsession with gang-based knife crime can, Paul believes, overshadow homophobic attacks, which are part of a more disturbing trend of hate crime generally. The most worrying aspect Paul believes is the fact that these crimes are in the main, being carried out by young people, suggesting that homophobic abuse has become accepted in the playground rather than eradicated.

In late 2010, Paul travelled to Istanbul, researching his experiences as part of Liverpool’s Homotopia Festival. Whilst there, he received anecdotal evidence about homophobic attacks in a country where one Government minister recently stated that homosexuality is some kind of biological disorder.  Paul planted pansies within the grounds of the British Consulate and also in Taskim Square, despite the attention of on-looking Policemen.

Hanged, Paul Harfleet,

Turkey’s neighbour Iran was also the subject of an installation entitled ‘Hanged’ Paul created in Iceland in 2008. The exhibition was in an art space called Egilsstaðir or ‘slaughterhouse’  in east Iceland as part of the Reykjavik Arts Festival. Alongside meat hooks Paul mounted a drawing of  two teenagers, Mahmoud Asqari and Ayad Marhouni who were publicly hanged in ‘Justice Square’, Mashhad, in Iran in July 2005 for engaging in homosexual behaviour.  The stark images contrasted with Paul’s trademark pansies planted at the entrance to the building.

Considering the challenging nature of much of Paul’s work it was perhaps surprising to see him enter the 2010 RHS Flower Show at Hampton Court with his brother Tom, a respected garden designer in his own right. Over four thousand pansies under-planted a ruptured concrete sculpture, which symbolised the disruptive nature of homophobic hate crime. It was a perfect mix of skilful, colourful planting and strong theme and won the pair not only a Gold Medal but also the prestigious Best Concept Garden Award.

Following on from that success The Pansy Project has received a lot of attention though it is still very much a one-man mission. “People assume The Pansy Project is an organisation,” says Paul “I get e-mails from people wanting to speak to my marketing department he laughs “I have to explain sorry it’s just me.”

Facebook and Twitter have played a major part in spreading awareness as well as being integral to the project.

“As soon as Facebook happened people could comment and so that has become a really important element.”

It is also a platform for people to share anecdotes, which Paul can then follow up at a later date, as was the case with one US blogger, who recalled the murder of a friend over a decade ago. After getting in touch with the writer, Paul planted a pansy on the spot where the crime took place in New York.

Paul Harfleet

Paul’s various projects make him hard to define, he is an installation artist, guerrilla gardener, blogger, photographer, therapist even. However he is happy with that ambiguity, “Its nice to be somewhere in between” he says, “fundamentally though I am an artist and the photographs are a part of that artwork.”

Despite being so articulate on his subject matter Paul does not wish to be seen as an agitator, “its very easy to get on your soapbox and I think that puts people off, I see myself more as an accidental activist.” The neatness of the idea has attracted attention from Gay activist groups some of whom wanted to use the pansy as a symbol. However Paul was keen to stay true to the original concept, believing the planting works best in the street reclaiming the abuse, drawing attention to its ignorance. “The Pansy Project is a metaphor for how people interact generally on the streets, its meant to open up discussion not close it down.”

London Fields New Signboard

If you listen very hard, a late-revelling birdsong can just be heard, up in the lock-jaw, dogtooth-ripped, ancient plane trees along London Fields’ crow roads, blown  on the wind, caught in the whining throttleback sound of incoming friendly fire, high over the semi-detached new City’s sugar silos and spinning U-bend of a soap operatic skyscape. Cue drum intro.

The crash and burn merchants’ warning lights are blinking, a multi-billion, bonus-backed lumen sear through the thin air of a befogged  pyramid. Fiat Lux. A Zappa soundtrack plays in the cyclist’s nano-earbuds, through a city of tiny lights, diodes mapping out the index of crisis loan cranes, perched on the half-built slabs and lift towers of yet another new frontiersville. Giant shards casting their shadows across the pale limelight of Norton Folgate, taking liberties with Hackney’s onetime metropolitan board of works, an unplanned, lawless republic, the Southern Axis of Madness.  Meanwhile out on the western front,  swarming out of ‘de beever’, laying waste over the King’s Land, a despoiling chevauchée fans out across the Queen’s Bridge in perfect formation. Here come the lads’ army of the British Military Cycling Fitness Corps headed for their Night Games. Ce n’est pas le peloton, c’est la guerre. The Ting Ting[i] Macoutes are here too, with their babes-in-arms, child-soldiers of the cyclobellum, strapped up-front as human shields.

The eager young conscripts gather at the gates where a red, white and blue standard is decked with a proud lion, rampantly emblazoned around the lido entrance. “Park Managers” with their infra-red night lights, elastic,sub-knoppfler bandana’s strapped tightly onto buzz-cut heads, deerhunter-like, sound the opening rounds across the camouflaged common of london’s fields these dark winter evenings. A barking salvo from a former, Iron Curtain major domo and an Ashes-fallen Galipollian descendant signals that night manoeuvres have started across this already heavily yomped yummy-mummy designer pram terrain. No silver crosses on this side of town, its strictly 4 x 4 off-roaders to get to the NCT class by the shortest route possible. I digress.  A Catterick Camp is formed on this Hackney cataract, as the deluge gathers momentum,  bike tyre ravines are channelling into the bare earth where  caterpillar tank tracks have already flattened the dead daffodils and stunted saffron municipal lawns. Hastily erected barricades surround the shelled out latrines. Is this a declaration of war? The first skirmishes of Woolfie, Citizen Smith’ s popular front, a new model army crying “freedom for Hackney”? An Italian, anarcho-situationist brigade of Luther Blissetts? No? Then perhaps Mayor Pipe’s brave, advancing olympian Pioneers or the pigtailed, kickboxing jungmaedels of  Cameron Youth?  In the dim parklight it’s much too hard to say.

Push-ups and scrummages, grinding knees and bare flesh,  flushed cheeks pressed down in the quagmire in their designer militia-wear. JUST DO IT. Follow-my-leader tag games,  ring-a-ring-a-roses SAS style – a Czech paratrooper commands – “get down!”. On your knees and pray, make peace with your own personal god, quickly, before you’re up again and dodging tracer fire from the left over bonfire night rockets of an E8 sniper boy on the landings and flats. This is project ‘Boot Camp Britain’, I counted them all in… 60 of them. Twelve quid a head for a 45 minute session of ritualised fitness, direct debits clocking up as the website hit counters spin the numbers. We’ve traded Park Managers for Para’s in the latest craze to sweep our heathlands. Paydirt opportunities for a new private army.  A land made unfit for heroes has found our brave boys a post war job, selling england by the pound, an off-Broadway fringe production, hunting down the obese and TV-bound talent show generation.  The retired troops are in need of some gainful trigger finger distraction, away from the blue helmets and the green zones. Mercenary City boys hit the sodden deck, callow pinstripe traders and Bickerton foldaway webjockeys by day, Arnie’s Army by night – a little bit of S&M wrestling in the mud never hurt anyone and anyway, its all off to the pub afterwards to swap tall tales of battle scars and to play a little black russian roulette with Jägerbombers to chase. They’ll be back…

*

In the morning, carrion crows sup from left over beer cans and feast on feral leftovers, chicken bones, pizza crusts.  Another, week-long dead crow rots, belly up where it died – old age? a gangland killing? Who knows? A binliner spills its guts under the trees, spinal cords, intestines and the backbones of unidentifiable eviscerated animal remains, reek and suppurate, veiled only by the sweet eternal gas leak of our eastern ringmain, recently re-fitted with state of the art high speed anti-terror shut off devices in the event of an all out Olympic war.

Cuspid children dressed in Gove’s New Caesarian Academy purple sweatshirts crawl through the London Fields mud, Action Man pupils elbowing themselves forward, commando style, Slitherin’ with make-believe lite-automatics, forced to play war games by the school’s new barrack room bawlers. Where are you when we need you most ILEA?

No more Educational Maintenance Allowance in da slumz of Hacknee. People get ready. It’s nearly time for another round of agent provocateur induced storming of the Milbank bastille.  Why settle for a sit-down protest or a classroom lockdown when you can hire one of our Heroes to help prepare for power?

Rectify the Anomaly !

The Protagonist Harry-boy Boas like Baron has moved on from his Cable Street childhood and now lives in lodgings near to Amhurst Road where unlike other parts of the City the landlords are have no scruples about accepting West Indian lodgers.

Boas calls himself a professional gambler and divides his time between the dog track and the clip joints of Soho. Here he spends his money on his favourite hostess Marcia, when he can afford it, and treats himself to slap up Italian meals. Now In his forties, he remains guilty about the pregnant French Girl he abandoned in Paris to join the army. Harry’s post war singular bachelor life style contrasts with his sister, now ensconced in suburban Finchley with her bookmaker husband Gus, who is all too aware of Harry’s hopeless gambling addiction.

Harry does get breaks, but his gambling weaknesses mean that he will always risk one more throw of the dice. However his outlook is changed when new lodgers with a small child, Gregory, move in downstairs. Gregory‘s parents have dreams of respectable suburbia and the mother Evelyn has no time for Harry or her current West Indian neighbours. Harry in turn has little time for her or her meek husband. However the boy sparks guilt about his own past and gradually he becomes a surrogate father to the demanding child.

Harry eventually finds himself brushing with the underworld when he reneges on a bet whilst trying to help Gregory’s father. The West End gangsters turn up on Harry’s patch to teach him a lesson, but Harry knows the Hackney streets too well and is more than a match for them.

Boas is a captivating hero, his life exciting but also led by his personal moral code. A code influenced by Barons own Jewish-Socialist upbringing. He has no problems with his black neighbours and is willing to sacrifice all for a child he has no blood ties with.

Throughout the book Harry professes his love for the area, its noise and mix, the kosher restaurants, and anonymity. In Hackney he can spend days alone reading and feasting before the money runs out and he needs another win. The London he describes is familiar; the excitement of Soho is a short jaunt away while Hackney is cheap and easy. Unlike say, Patrick Hamilton whose characters are often sad victims of the City, Baron’s Harry-boy revels in London life and has the moral fortitude to deal with its ups and downs.

The Lowlife has many crime thriller elements and would have made a great film in the style of Jules Dassin’s Night and The City. (Harry H. Corbett was apparently due to be a cast in the Harry-Boy role but the project fell through.) However it is character and place that is important here rather than plot, Harry is a forgotten character from a forgotten time. He carries with him the pre-war radicalism of the old East End, in a post war period when the sands were shifting and a new aspiration taking hold. Nevertheless he is able to survive on the margins and thus can be seen to be a pioneer of a spirit, which continues today.

King Dido was originally published in 1969 and marks a shift to more historical writing. This particular edition is published along-side Rosie Hogarth, an early Baron novel set in Islington, by New London Editions. The new edition of King Dido is superbly introduced by Hackney architectural writer Ken Worpole. Yet the setting would have been familiar to Baron. Set at the turn of the twentieth Century in the slums of Bethnal Green, it follows the fortunes of Dido, who finds himself running a protection racket in his local street following victory in a violent street bawl. However this is no Godfather style tale of rags to riches. Dido is unsuited to his role and yearns to work as a labourer once more. However family pride and a desire to please his new wife lead to a spiral of crime and violence.

The poverty of the lives lived by Dido and his family is vividly described as is the injustice and corruption, which plagues its inhabitants. The police turn a blind eye to the extortion of Dido and his rivals The Murchison’s. Dido is clever and resourceful but still finds it difficult to rise above his surroundings.

Violence is always close at hand and territory is measured in streets no one else cares about. This suffocation is evoked expertly by Baron. Dido’s territory is small and clearly defined to the area known as Rabbit Marsh slum near what is now Cheshire Street. (Journalist Peter Watts gives an excellent tour of this forgotten area in his London blog.)

Brick Lane is off limits for here the rival Murchison gang roams. Although the distances are small, the maize of slums makes even Old Street seem like another city. We also get a window into the ‘Upstairs-Downstairs’ world of the middle classes, with a botched burglary initiated by the bawdy servants of a large Victoria Park house.

Like Harry in The Lowlife Dido is a complicated protagonist, never entirely winning our sympathy and the author of his own downfall. Dido is more taciturn than Harry, uncommunicative and primitive. Like Harry though he is at the dawn of a new era, but stuck firmly in another. Harry has however enjoyed the benefits of travel and education whereas Dido has nothing but his wits and brute strength. Only sixty-odd years separate the two but East London has changed considerably by the time Harry-boy is laying bets.

Baron himself was born six years later than the setting of King Dido and would have been familiar with tales from the old brutal days. As a writer he was all too aware of how London is a place of constant change, where poor and rich live side by side but continue to operate in different worlds. Like James Ellroy’s Los Angeles, place assumes a heightened importance in Baron’s novels, it is as much part of the drama as the characters it has helped form.

Bingo's Coffin

In readiness for our next ‘Pop-House’ issue 15,

FRITZ CATLIN reminisces about living in Limehouse in the 80′s.

The last time I saw Bingo I was inefficiently chopping up firewood on the front steps.  My hatchet was blunt and took several blows to smash it’s way through the planks I had pilfered from Lucy and Martin’s small waste processing yard. Through the day skips would be tipped out onto an enormous pile of building waste and then a bulldozer loaded the debris into larger trucks to go off to landfill. The constant crashing sounds were tempered by delicate trickling sounds from the glass cullet merchants on the other side of the railway line.  In the evenings we would climb over a 20 foot wall and take what we needed to build or burn.

Turner’s Road was untouched by the creeping gentrification of Limehouse’s housing stock, our side by the railway was half derelict, half short life, mirrored by a gutted windowless terrace awaiting demolition. The houses were three storey with a basement and area in front. Once a man in the street offered to pay me to rip out the cast iron railings from in front of one of the empty houses. “What if some kid falls down the drop?” I said.

Jock, who lived five doors up in a house he had modified with cutouts in the floors to accommodate his massive canvases, had warned us to call the police and the council if any of the local dossers were to move into the empty houses either side of us, but we dismissed his fear of fire as some kind of reactionary intolerance. They needed somewhere to sleep and included, as well as the out and out gone drunks, such characters as Lee Akh, an ex-Gurkah  who spoke an archaic and melodious pidgin. He had been an uptown manservant and now worked for a pittance in a Chinatown kitchen and lived in the basement opposite with no power or water.  Sometimes a dread calling himself Patrick or Michael lived above him and would do martial arts exercises bare chested  on icy mornings framed by the empty space for a sash window.

Lee Akh was always welcome for a cup of tea, but he needed the company more than us, and our efforts to decipher the speed and lilt of his speech were frustrating for all. The dread with varying monikers came over once or twice but was too mash up in his head to be welcome back.

The only time Bingo came in was when we first arrived and there was copper to be had. We let him take whatever redundant wiring was in the place to sell for scrap. Later we would see him around the area dragging along a small cart with a fresh collection of wire. He was only four foot tall, dark skinned, who knows how old and somehow, compared to the other dossers, more together, down but not out. He was gnarly and strong, well weathered but still with humour in his eyes.

The last day I saw him alive, he came up to our steps, picked up a plank of my firewood, smiled at me and tapped it on the ground with one hand. It split instantly lengthways into two pieces thin enough to break between his hands: a zen lesson for me and my sweaty labours.

We were happy enough Bingo was next door in number 25 but the drunks in 29 pissed us off with their ranting and eventually torched the place. I came back from training on a fine Saturday afternoon, smelt fire and walked out into the garden just in time to see a window next door beautifully fracturing from the heat inside. The fire brigade were quick, the house was sealed up by the council and the drunks moved into Bingo’s basement.

Maybe the smoke gathered quicker on the floor above, maybe I owe my life to John being a lighter sleeper than me, but a week later at four a.m.  he was dashing down the stairs “Fritz, wake up man, we’re on fire” .

I leaped down from the bed scrambled into some clothes, thought briefly if it was worth trying to save any of my things but the air was getting too hot and filthy to breathe, the pressure of the fire next door was pushing acrid fumes into the house, they poured through the blown mortar, smoke streaming from gaps above the skirting boards like a club smoke machine.

Coughing outside we saw the flames in 25 had reached the roof. There was a screaming that could have been wood or could have been Bingo. John started trying to kick in the builders board over the front door. I was scared he would succeed and madly enter the fire and pulled him back “Don’t do it John, it’s like the chimney effect, smash that down and you’ll feed the fire with more oxygen and it’ll go up stronger”.  Reluctantly he abandoned his bravery and we watched waiting to see if the fire brigade would reach before it spread to our home and hoping that what we had heard wasn’t human but one of those strange noises you hear from an open fire, like you can also see some strange things in a wood fire on a cold night watching the flames dance for hours.

The rest is a blur, the fire brigade saved our house, milled around with the police for hours and danced jigs on their hydraulic platform as it ferried two stark metal coffins up and down from the first floor window next door.  The police photographer’s eyes mirrored bleakly the horrors he saw on the job. We meanwhile were possible but not probable suspects, sneaking back into our home at 9 a.m for a furtive reefer with the police still outside the door.

Everything stank of that burnt home smell: wood, plastics, fabrics and human debris reduced to ashes and an odour that reveals an intimate space destroyed. We didn’t know for sure it was Bingo until later. A sparse local newspaper paragraph mentioned relatives but didn’t explain the need for two coffins.

I stayed away as much as possible to escape the smell, and eventually moved out. John surprised me years later, telling me he had gone to the funeral and that Bingo had family nearby but had ended up in a pauper’s grave.  Now the terrace with it’s rhomboid door-frames is gone, judged too dilapidated for refurbishment just like it’s inhabitants.

If you have any Poplar or Limehouse tales please send ‘em to eelzine@yahoo.co.uk

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Listen here to The Godfather

Essentially enclosed sports areas, they come in a variety shapes and sizes but they generally comprise of a mesh enclosure, floodlights, astro-turf surface and a goal area suitable for football, hockey, basketball or netball.

Hackney Council have installed a number of MUGAs across the borough such as the one I visited on the George Downing estate in Stamford Hill. Here young people of all ages (nearly all boys) play football long into the night, even after the floodlights have gone off. The lads I spoke to were unanimous in their appreciation of the MUGA.

They liked the fact they could bash a ball around without fear of it going on the road, but most of all they welcomed the idea that it was theirs.

As one would-be Rooney so eloquently put it;

“It’s good for the community, if it wasn’t for the astro-turf all these kids would be on the road.”

The MUGAs are seen as a way of keeping youngsters off the street. They also serve as a way of keeping teenagers within their ‘territory; the demarcation lines set out by different gangs.

The proposed new MUGA in London Fields will be positioned so that it lies equidistant between two local gangs. The plans met with much opposition though after three years, the go-ahead was given late last year.

Syd Bolton of the London Fields Preservation Society was chief amongst those who campaigned against the MUGA. He felt that the artificial nature of the area would be a blot on the natural landscape.

“We were concerned that it would be of detrimental quality to the open space and that the freedom of that space would be compromised.”

Not all local residents were against the MUGA. The London Fields User Group (of which Syd is also a member) campaigned for the MUGA arguing that it would give local teenagers somewhere to go and play sport.

Syd accepts defeat graciously but refutes accusations of NIMBYISM:

“It was a laudable initiative but it conflicts with the space we have here.”

As we watch The London Fields cricket team command the crease, he points out to me that there are plenty of green spaces where sport is already played:

“I think peoples ability to participate in sport is very valuable, but it shouldn’t be in an artificial space.”

He admits the final plans are much improved with the addition of foliage and the promise to re-seed the surrounding area.

However, not all MUGAs are in such open spaces. Most are within or next to estates. Noise can be a problem though there are plans to incorporate sound proofing measures in the design and layout of the sites.

Trevor Lafferty is managing director of Lightmain who design MUGAs across the UK. He argues that the quality of the mesh in new MUGAs keeps the noise to a minimum while timed floodlights bring a natural end to proceedings.

He is an advocate of teenagers getting involved in the design process and claiming ownership of MUGAs.

“They have got an area which is focussed on them and there is a sense that they own it, and because they own it, they take care of it.”

Trevor operates in an expanding market. MUGAs are not cheap; a new MUGA in Hackney Downs is expected to cost £1.1million. Hackney Council provided £100,000 match funding, the rest coming through Learning Trust lottery funding.

With seemingly no end to youth and gang violence, authorities are keen to make the investment if it means getting teenagers off the street and onto the pitch. They have police support too, possibly because as Trevor Lafferty urges, “they know where the youngsters are.”

Football clubs are also keen to be partners; Arsenal train kids at schemes in North London and Tottenham Hotspur are involved in a MUGA at the Hackney Wick Youth Club. Coaching is provided and the best young lads are taken for trials. In 2009 one of its promising players Jamal Mason Blair died in a stabbing incident in Hackney.

SoundBites

MUGA users on The George Downing Estate talk about their space.

Trevor Lafferty of Lightmain on why MUGA’s can be beneficial

Syd Bolton of The London Fields Preservation Society