Welcome to Tooting

I’ve been off work this past weekandahalf, and I’ll be honest, it’s getting a little dull being stuck at home all the time. I never thought I’d miss being in an office.

On the other hand, it’s given me an opportunity to experience my local area during the day. To see the neighbourhood in a new light. It’s like one of those movies where everyone learns a very important lesson and in the space of a week becomes a whole new person. Except this time it’s set in Tooting.

Not much gets set in Tooting. The only thing that springs immediately to mind is Citizen Smith. Don’t get me wrong, in many ways it’s a pretty cool place, particularly once you get up towards Tooting Bec, but in many ways it’s also… not. At least, not on a weekday.

For instance, one thing you notice is a certain type of triumvirate. Two members of the triumvirate will be male humans, very fat, clipper haircuts all over, swigging from cans of lager even though it’s ten in the goddamn morning, and the third will be a ratty dog. So common is this combination that I’m starting to think maybe we should think of all three as part of a single colonial organism, like the Portuguese Man O’ War. Seriously, you see them everywhere. I’ve even had one or two of them attempt to half-arsedly start a fight with me, even though the merest attempt at physical exertion by any of them would result in a massive heart attack. You know that feeling you get when every snobbish thought you’ve ever had suddenly feels justified? Yeah.

I’ve also been trying to get in shape a bit. There’s been a lot of beer recently, and I was starting to feel guilty. Fortunately, on the intriguingly-named Figges Marsh, they’ve installed one of those new outdoor gyms. This is great if you’re me – I can’t be arsed with joining a gym. The concept apparently originates in China, and it’s one of those things the government likes because it helps to Improve the Health of the Nation. God knows it’s not just me who needs that. I mean, can you imagine? 2012 comes along and we’re all, “Oh hey man, I know I live just around the corner, but I’m going to take the bus.” What will the other countries think of us then?

Where was I? Yes, outdoor gyms. The one on Figges Marsh seems to be pretty popular. Every time I’ve been there, there have always been plenty of other users. I also found it pretty easy to use. It turns out my upper body strength lags significantly behind my lower body strength, which is lame. Must be all that running from the police.

It also turns out that the bank gets very busy, but that’s not interesting. Although seriously, what was with the guy behind me who felt the need to sigh and tut every thirty seconds? I know bank queues are boring. This is not a new thing.

As for tomorrow? Well, who knows, my friends. Who knows.

The Infernal Tower

There have been some interesting proposals for London buildings over the years, from the Pyramid of Death to the scheme to rebuild the Crystal Palace so that it stood on its end. Perhaps the most significant landmark-that-never-was was the Wembley Tower.

It all started with the old Metropolitan Railway. Being a commercial enterprise, the directors of this company were naturally keen to make as much money as humanly possible. In the 1880s, though, they were already making quite a lot of money. What is a railway tycoon to do under such circumstances? If you were Edward Watkin, Chairman of the company, you simply create more traffic by making London bigger.

The idea was simple. Buy land out in the sticks where it’s cheap, miles away from London. Build a railway to it, build some houses on it and bam! You got yourself a suburb, mister. Sell the houses, there’s a goldmine for ya. You’d be amazed how much of London basically didn’t exist until people did this. Put it this way – until the 1860s, Kensington was considered to be a rural village.

Watkin was a man who liked to think big. For instance, his ultimate plan for the Metropolitan was to run trains up to Manchester and down to Paris (I forget how that one turned out). When he looked upon the route of his railway, he decided that what his grand plan needed was a selling point. Some sort of focus that would draw people to the area (and, let’s not forget, drive up the land values).

In 1889, the latest wonder of the world was the Eiffel Tower. Watkin came to the conclusion that what we needed in London was something similarly troubling to Freud, only more so. Possible sites included High Street Kensington and Gloucester Road, but eventually it was decided to purchase a 280-acre site at Wembley and develop that. Former Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone asked questions in Parliament on behalf of Watkin and was told by the committee that “although the atmosphere of London may not be so favourable to extensive views as Paris, the view would be incomparably superior.” Suck-ups.

Having been given the go-ahead, the Metropolitan Tower Committee was formed in 1890 to decide on the form this tower would take. Many exciting designs were proposed. I think my favourite was one based on the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I’m no structural engineer, but I can’t help wondering how wise it would have been to build something like the Leaning Tower, only much taller. I also like the one about the “colony of aerial vegetarians.” Gustave Eiffel himself was even approached and did initially show some interest, only to decline later on patriotic grounds (he probably heard that dis about the views in Paris).

As it happened, the final design was very similar to the Eiffel Tower, only 320 metres taller. Work started in 189e and in 1896 the park around the tower’s base was opened to the public. The tower had only reached its first stage, but hopes were high even if the structure wasn’t.

Yet already problems were being encountered – the year before, the new Chairman of the Metropolitan, John Bell, had already been convinced the whole thing was a white elephant. It turned out that the foundations couldn’t quite support all that weight on just four legs (the original design called for eight). The biggest issue of all, though, was money. It turned out that not everyone was as enthusiastic as the Parliamentary committee, and very few were willing to invest. The park itself was not the major tourist attraction Watkin had hoped for, and work ground to a halt.

In fact, the tower ended up having a detrimental effect on the Metropolitan Railway. At this time, the Great Central Railway used the Met lines to get into London, a costly move. With the construction of the Tower, the Great Central was able to say (and I’m paraphrasing here y’understand), “Oh hey, that’s cool, with all that extra traffic you’ll be getting from the Tower you won’t be able to run our little trains so we’rebuildingourownlineintoLondonbyenow,” and promptly rushed off to Marylebone.

The Tower also had something of a domino effect on Watkin’s other schemes – it was very clear, as the mostly-incomplete tower rusted away, that Watkin had maybe lost his golden touch, and so investment in his grand scheme to run trains to Paris dried up as well. The ugly monument gained such unflattering nicknames as “the London Stump” and, the name by which it is perhaps best known today, “Watkin’s Folly.”

The enterprise went bust in 1899, in 1901 Watkin himself passed away and in 1902 the whole thing was declared a health and safety hazard and closed down. In 1907 the remains were blown up and sold for scrap. Yet Watkin’s scheme was not entirely in vain – in the 1920s, when the organisers of the British Empire Exhibition were looking for somewhere to build their stadium, they discovered there was a perfectly peachy-keen area of flat ground at Wembley…

… and the rest, they say, is history.

The marriage of heron and hell

I often think the success of a party can be judged by the voyage home. If it was a lame party, the voyage home will be undertaken in a state of sobriety on the Tube. If it was a good party, the voyage home will be undertaken while in a total mess and may well involve a degree of unrelenting horror. Possibly the following morning.

So it was on New Year’s Eve. The party was held in rural Oxfordshire (somewhere called “Bicester” or possibly “Bister”), which for some reason is not served by night buses. Therefore, I had to crash and make my way home the following morning. You get some pretty funny looks when you’re making your way home in a tailcoat, a silver waistcoat and a scarlet top hat, I can tell you.

The train came in at Marylebone, and the quickest route home would have been to simply jump on the Bakerloo line and change at Elephant and Castle, but I felt like a bit of a stroll – I thought I’d walk to Euston, shooting up Baker Street and swinging through Regent’s Park as I went.

This is perhaps not the park at its best.

Regent’s Park is perhaps my favourite of the London parks (though Hyde Park takes some beating). Particularly in the summer, it’s a delightful place to walk when you have nothing particular to do, and it’s easy to get to from Chalk Farm, Camden or the West End. The park was originally land swiped by Henry VIII and used for hunting. In 1818, the Prince Regent (later King George IV) took it over and envisioned it as a rather extravagant town home for himself and his friends, commissioning his friend, the now-legendary architect John Nash, to design the whole shebang. Nash is worthy of an entry in himself, so I won’t go into too much detail beyond saying that he defined the Regency style of architecture more-or-less singlehandedly. His grand plans for the area included a palace and several large villas, but were scaled back into the park we see today. It was, for the time, extremely innovative – the standard concept of the urban park, such as it was then, consisted of rigid, regimented grids. An up-yours to nature. Nash’s concept was the first real attempt to recreate an area of natural beauty within the city, and as such set a trend for urban parkland that would last right up until the present day.

Although the park was open to the public, it was on the basis of an admission fee – well, after you’d spent all that money, you didn’t want just anyone coming in. The fee was abolished in 1835, though the park was still only open two days a week.

Fortunately, we live in more enlightened times (perhaps) and now it’s open to the public all the time. Despite this, on that New Year’s morning there were few people about. The lake was frozen over, which had I known about it at the time might have reminded me of the occasion on 15th January 1867 when the ice on the lake collapsed under the weight of skaters. The Royal Humane Society had stationed icemen nearby, equipped with hooks, ladders and hot baths, but with two hundred in the lake they were utterly overwhelmed. Local boatbuilder William Archer managed to save seven in his boat and Abel Thomas swam out and rescued two (a third attempt being foiled by the intense cold). The master of the Marylebone Workhouse, George Douglas, played a key role in organising the medical care for the victims. Despite these and countless other unacknowledged efforts, forty were killed in the disaster.

Seven years later, the park would bear witness to another disaster, though fortunately with far smaller loss of life.

Following the 1867 disaster, the water level of the lake was reduced somewhat. This might be what made it so very attractive to herons. Herons, specifically grey herons, can be seen all over the place in London, helped in no small part by the number of little rivers, canals, docklands and ponds. They hunt in shallow water, standing motionless, sometimes for hours, before striking. One thing you can’t really say about them, though, is that they’re particularly social birds. It’s quite rare to see more than one at a time. Now, in the above photo, you can see seven. That wasn’t even all of them. There were ridiculous numbers of herons in this place. A little bit freaky, actually. I don’t know if herons are capable of cooperating to, say, bring a human down, but I wasn’t too keen to find out, and left mystified.

I found the answer on my trip to the Greenwich Peninsula a little while ago – it turns out that Regent’s Park is the only breeding colony in London for the grey heron. So all those herons I’ve seen, in Brentford, Merton, Whitton, Hackney, Kingston and so many other places, all came from the same place. Incredible.

No word on whether they can bring a grown man down, though.