No Way Street

Caldew Street in Camberwell, South London is a fragment now. Just a truncated bit of road, only and all thirty foot of it. This Caldew St limitation has now been boundaried by a metal barrier and the homeowner nearby has put up CCTV to watch you day in and day out. Just a little bit of road that back in the day was a way through the area of houses and canal and light industries, Caldew allowed its own sacrifice, against its will no doubt, to let Burgess Park be. Over the passage of time mostly everything was knocked down here to create the wonderful Burgess Park and this is a wonderful story but not today’s tale. Caldew then, just another fragment then of land and a fragment now of the property relations at play as the middle class has its revenge on this Monster City. Many ordered takes of public land bled now to private. Many taken paths occluded by the re-imposition of the arcane fables of laws, rights, liberties and taking the piss out of us.

Behind the barrier though the fragment comes to actual life as there is now a luscious verdant carpet of natural moss, springy and dreamy. Fresh as life itself in its moments of being lived. What a wonder. What could you do here? Surely lay down and dream, be against property. Let your fingers tease the wet moss as you wonder what can be found again against this regime of re-regulated free space as you start to wander off and fall asleep here. Ignoble blob of something other than made up, entitled, imposing smug subjectivities increasingly allowed free play in this City. We get stripped increasingly of our own pretty but practical illusions but also our material being, alive and living, not making demands on others, nor reinforcing labour roles because we know waged labour is a stage play for us we neither wrote nor find credible. We not having long lineages of privilege and inheritances. We not prim and proper but mongrel and we can dream here on chaotic moss and expand once more. Be sumptuous on a sexy, green shagpile of sinful verdant Earth covering. 

Myself, local and wandering, I like to write pamphlets about all this kind of thing. Over time, there are many. Each contains such fragments of local histories but done weird, a bit off, tilted, deliberately skewed to try and bring to the present moment how we may still live. So, a somewhat furtive pamphleteer I hope that has also been active, some would say ‘organising’ locally, for the many years. Text and words and fantasies mix with attempts to make a political reality by working with people against all the bastards. With and beyond these histories we can try and say something of the now – and, here in Southwark, in Addington Sq where Caldew St spurs off from, there’s the example of the revenge of the bourgeoisie as it were. Much written on gentrification correctly puts global capital, national and local government as the cause (yes of course) but what’s what’s going on at street level? All that re ordering of your familiar easy time and space and how does it make you feel? What do you know or what do you remember? What follows is messy because both memory and the present day are messy. Here lies from this point on some fragments of truth that I’ve made into quotes and some lies and some drama and, hopefully, some wry fucking shit for you to get your hands dirty with.

Bear Markets

If we were looking at history for the way through, where is it? We think it exists in different modes in different periods, coming and going, strong then weak, never disappearing, just evil physics, pulls exerting pushes as time bends on itself and gravity shakes itself to pieces here. By the 70s Addington Square was classic dilapidation. We know from many photos that the posh Georgian square turned shit post-war square turned posh square once more, is the tale here. Uppers and downers shown in pictures of commercial premises and businesses and broken down cars around the streets of the busted up central public park. Ruination now abolished and the asking price for houses there are astronomical. Heaven’s money needed. Even the railings around the central park are Grade 2 listed. So there are periods like now where we are disappeared but periods also come and go where we ruled. 

There are many and oft repeated tales of South London’s criminal doings. We kept it at a distance because there is only so much lore and myth and actual actuality that we want to cover and because, mostly, such working class crime, emancipatory at some small level for some is just more misery for others. Sticking it to The Man can be romantic as much as it can be preying on others in a similar level on the pecking terrain. Yet, here we are. A photograph from 1956 of 33 Addington Square shows us a work-a-day business: Peckford Scrap Metals - ‘Highest Market Prices for All Grades of Non-Ferrous Metals’. Also in the markets for ‘Waste Paper - Rags - Metals Etc’. Good to know that ‘We Are Noted For A Square Deal / Tel ROD 6784’. Two boards also show ‘Today’s Prices’. Outside some Addington gaff there is also a fairly new Bedford S Truck, a real 7 ton monster pretty new then to the lugging things around Industry with a hand painted text that says ‘Metal Rags Waste Paper Merchants’. Yet in the scheme of things that aren’t there, we see in the photograph a whole walled yard around a two storey lock-up building. A kind of cross between a mini-warehouse for storage and a commercial unit of some kind. In the upper windows bundles of stuff are making it seem like the small building is fit to burst and spew waste into the street and gardens, bundles of waste cardboard piled up behind the PECKFORD sign. The lock-up was an early part of the Richardson family’s empire. Famous or infamous as the ‘Torture Gang’, the family was a wider network of what the coppers, bent as they were, would call ‘villains’. The violence is less great but our interest here is limited to the articulations of how you were working class then and how you could get by. Stories are good. The tales are funny even as we eschew any rose-tinted spectacles. 

Great here is how the Richardsons had an idea of how to increase local sales at the lock up. Knowing Dolly Legs, who was down Orpington way keeping a small menagerie with an African buffalo, two brown bears, ponies, ferrets and other mammals, Charlie Richardson had the idea to set up a small zoo and grotto there for great publicity. Paying out for a loan of the bear, the buffalo and some ferrets to attract kids and mums, and “help persuade them to do their Christmas shopping upstairs” amongst the lifted goods – radios, kitchen and household appliances and so on. Sounded sound really except as Eddie Richardson tells it “well, you can imagine the chaos. The kids knew no fear and would stick their hands into the cages, and then scream when the bear sucked their fingers. The mums would be shrieking in terror, the kids would be going back for more, fighting to get near to the cages, chucking things at the animals. It worked in terms of selling stuff, because the mothers would be so relieved their kids still had all their fingers that they’d drag them upstairs and buy things”. It’s bonkers and it’s chaos and we can’t hear it anymore at Addington Sq. A raw recording of this moment, shrieks and calls and swearing and seering bargains would implode the entire Radio 4 institution at a rate of knots if ever played. But it was long gone even before gentrification although that social cleansing from on high has had a more recent effect of producing first a silence then a new chatter. The play of language and gestures and tricks of the word and the greetings are what we now miss from those sounds and slangs once drifting in the air to your ears. To be sure no-one ever made much lived poetry out of people ordering a latte and a pain au chocolate but you could get high on the same poetry of the expressions heard locally. Some of our own firm Jones family favourites remain ‘shit and corruption!’ or ‘it’s all over the place like fish guts’ or the enigmatic ‘There’s a difference between scratching your arse and tearing it to pieces’ that comes out on top of our own working class family poetry. It’s always a language we own for ourselves.

Fragment of Feeling: Your Letter Box

The posh Square is fancy now though, done up like this: 

“Today Addington Square is that cutesy, folksy enclave of conservation rich Grade II listed Georgian and Regency houses set around a public open park. It’s all heroic vertical frontage with recessed and restrained decoration if you’re lucky. A lot of stuff going on at window level, door level, steps ascending to higher planes and plenty railings, some now Listed by English Heritage. Dizzying choice of semi-circular fanlights above front doors delight us but also so light can eke its way into your corridor to illuminate all of your letters and materials laying on your inner sanctum’s pristine door mat. Here’s mortgage demands and interest rate notifications from your bank, curious poison pen letters probably those at No.45, an old Pools win notification from 1981 for someone entirely different from you has just turned up, your Uncle Mortimer writes a letter from Chamonix, your sister’s having a hard time again with Sebastian and here’s another flyer for Pizza at half price, scrappy A5 leaflet came through too for a local window cleaner seeks windows to clean for cash, another Council magazine advising on social services you’ll never need, a local heritage group’s newsletter Edited by Charles Fizarkly-AdobeClassic, dogshit put through your letterbox again, some stuff outlined in a postcard to you from an acquaintance about the problems in the French village where your second home is, your keys being put back through the letter box AirBnB folks left this morning no complaints lovely local host went out of their way fresh heated croissants when they arrived, your Restraining Order updated for another five years, that Ten of Clubs that a neighbour has found in the grass and reunited you with from when you all played cards out on the picnic table glasses of Prosecco, M&S cheeses selection, your Council planning permission letter for your intended porch addition has been approved finally after the changes your architect made, a ‘We Called’ delivery postcard that means you’ll never ever get that parcel now, your rare book bought online so easy and now it’s gone to ‘the Depot’ and no-one knows where the package is, just how it is, there is no ‘Depot’. All on your doormat, your life’s correspondence all corresponding”.

Fragment of Feeling: Your Kitchen Table

Brenna Bhandar in her excellent ‘The Colonial Lives of Property’ from 2018 writes that ‘Property constitutes a central part of the narrative foundation in a way that is so ubiquitous, it is akin to the furniture in the drawing room of a manor house, shoring up and naturalizing possession and occupation’. Love this precise image and this feeling I get from it because you can imagine much from seeing the large wooden tables in the basement kitchens of many of these 4-storey townhouses in Addington Sq. We look down and we peer into the kitchen: 

“This is the central node of the domestic dynasty of homeownership, its very womb of being. Pass by on a brisk walk and you see down there, into there, into the lair, entering the labyrinth of most common of the uncommons, the large wooden kitchen table, the site of feeding, of gathering round, family oasis, mirage of meaningfulness, of a laptop open to pay the bills online, morning cup of tea, afternoon cup of coffee, evening wine maybe, the table creaks under books, fruit in a fucking porcelain bowl, selected ironware hung up, two elbows resting on the distressed wood, weighed down, sighs, smiles, quick surreptitious hiding of the text message you were sending to your affair, the kitchen table big enough for a middle class orgy or horn pipe dance or Trooping of The Colour or Swan Lake or The Magic Flute or Wimbledon Final or The Battle of Trafalgar, see all the folk horror masks worn for fun, your Father with his Stag’s head mask and scythe, bourgeois occulture and their secret rituals for wealth, the head of the table seat, designer dining room chairs at £500 a pop, the big deboning knife still bloody, someone’s leather handbag, since they demolished the local estate you’ve been seeing cockroaches here and there in the kitchen that had never happened before, you decided an Aga was a hassle but the oven you have is too small, Christmas turkey, seasonal meats and organic vegetables, quail’s eggs, oysters, Duck and fizz, your Father Christmas decoration is brown and green and never red, the Martial energy of The Tower of Destruction tarot card a close friend from Uni back in the day has pulled in the Present position in a six card spread on the table and they look worried as do you with those pictured bodies hurled out of their curated abode and the home’s crown burst asunder by a lightning strike, a niece is weeping under the stairs no idea what’s going on, ‘don’t put your plumbing tools on there, please!’, dinner parties, reunions, family occasions big shopping in the car, come round for supper, frisson and frisky illicit enjoyable fingering of your significant other on the table next to a bottle of Belberry Posh Ketchup as the kids play upstairs lost and found in the John Lewis playhouse for bedrooms, a Creuset with white beans soaking on it covered by a tea towel that says The Vagina Museum on it. The inner life of private property starring your large dining table through a long historical lineage of your family of old importers of wool, players on the emerging global markers, merchants of commodities, makers of nations, shiny object purveyors, shop keepers, human traders, organic accountants, cottage industry destroyers and always good people, good partners, good family people, with many ‘private virtues’. Brenna Bhandar gets this. She writes how property relations solidify all of those on the outside – the marginal, the colonised, the oppressed, the dead and the half alives in poverty whilst the laws of property – written and lived – bolster the cultures, the economy, the hierarchy of ‘rational economic subjects’, those decision makers whether that be in offices, courts, universities or merely sitting having a coffee in a local park close to their home. ‘Property is nothing but the basis of expectation’ say olde English philosopher dude Jeremy Bentham whereby the wealthy ‘draw such and such advantage from the thing possessed’. Sitting too around the large family dining table in the basement, a wooden ornament of ownership, and what is expected is what will come to be. All the correct transactions are carried out here at this table, this accounting platform, this ship’s wheel, this airport, this institution, this sight of seduction and this scene of the crime. This is where the war plans are made”.

Fragment of Feeling: at the Clubhouse

So how does it feel today? That’s the drift here. How does it feel to you this reassertion of property relations? Privatisation, demographic change, cultural inflation and the Clubhouse Cafe now arrived where I drive myself nuts by ear wigging and wince from the clangs and bangs of middle class chirping. Formerly Nescafe and Custard Creams and now all coffee blends and cutesy named toasties, free dog biscuits and many nonsenses overheard that you’ll have to read out loud in your best ventriloquist act of what you imagine it sounds like from this verbatim clump of reports: 

“Basically I’ve put aside another….Oh! That’s so interesting….No, I work, er, I work from….I used to work at…Oh baked potato yum yum and latte too….I normally go by bike…Rice milk? Excuse me, is this normal milk?….I’m enjoying it immensely…..Are you doing your bit?….No! Don’t worry about it…That oat cappuccino is mine…Supper tonight…The oatmilk situation….A-maz-zing!….Love that! Yes, love tha-t!….No, not a relentless day but…no, relentless is not a word I think i’d use but…persistent, let’s say…but it’s just so glorious when it’s a sunny….Oh My God, I knowwwwwww…..amazing…You are soooooo nastyyyyy….Coffee first?…That is actually a better coffee…Shall we? Croissants are ugly…My Patagonian jacket is…but also really sweet and cute…like yeah…absolutely…back from Czech…they steal sausages off the barbecue because they think they are snakes, Noah…Yeah, oh! back in on Monday, yeah. I…..I, well, no, they said, the Director said I was. well, it’s the place, I reckon… well, i think being…I’m sure…oh really…I’m not sure…I don’t know. They wanted to see what the staff… I’ve been using Ebay, I’m quite old school but also like…yeah….one is quite at home there…No, I work in Canary Wharf there….I guess my thing is being un-painful…..She has a tendency to…Do you have a corkscrew here? Oh you don’t serve wine. You don’t have one? No corkscrew?…The most important thing is that it is a really big publisher…Old house with old electrics…But we have found an old gas oven, six hundred pounds…Rodney…Rodney (louder)…Rodney (even louder), I may have the vegan sausage roll…Got all the original features on that one wall…A new tiled area is almost done, slightly off-white tiles, sort of…My property is…”

Fragment of Feeling: Bourgeois Property Relations

So let’s be solid here and say what this aim we have maintained at the bourgeoisie as a class for itself. Within those class relations: 

“How many times our ideas stolen, our love turned into an object, our entire background and history removed in a single spoken sentence and we erased? How many over-articulate Marxists who’ve never organised with a single working class person? How many meetings can you sit in where they talk about ‘the class’ and what ‘the class’ should do as they have all the answers from many books and their critiques? How many times are we just a source of inspiration, entirely a transactional one way street though? How many socially engaged practices or artistic researches about us, well-funded and the endless round of studies of what we did and what we have always sought to do but all of absolutely no use to any of our struggles? How much comes their way and how little comes our way? Or how many times our spending money has been seen as equal but never, as we do, do they need to constantly tot up in your head how much you are spending against how much is coming in. How in the desire to share, buy a round, pick up a restaurant bill, the calculations are agony for us but we do it anyhow? Have you ever just been a bit excited to be learning stuff from educated people only to be wholly disappointed that they never needed really what they learnt as they would always be ok in the scheme of things but you now knowing some of the stuff they knew hasn’t left you any better off, just now cast aside as you’re too much in on their racket? How much symbolic violence can you take directed straight at you, in public, from middle class defensiveness when you say something tiny and critical and they feel like you’re the aggressive one? How many legalistic claims we’ve seen foisted on working class ex-lovers? How many inheritances and all those inside jobs? How many years of learning did it take you to be comfortable in spaces you were never in growing up? How much cultural capital is wielded in off the cuff conversations where you realise that yourself, well you grew up and your parents never knew any artists, writers, reviewers, professors, film makers, producers, critics? How many times you just wanted to leave a party or a gathering or an art opening or a political meeting because it was insufferable? Yet how much time you have spent learning about stuff that meant you were now around that other world of being and doing and how did that make you feel, that insight that your class formation could never be explained and understood by anyone other than working class people? Why, because the culture you grew up in, the one you have left and look back at, all puzzled at who you are now, is what it was and you also don’t want to have to authenticate yourself anymore to anyone about that upbringing out of force of habit, anger, shyness, deference, class hatred or whatever. How much time do you have to hear our 50+ years of anecdotes of these things we describe? How many times will we have to point this out and for who and for why?”

Fragment on Cambridge House

As an aside on Addington Sq, once upon a time, from 1889 to 2023, there was a Settlement here. The Victorian Settlement movement was made up of university students, staff and other consultants and experts moving to poor areas for a year or two to do the philanthropic work of betterment amongst the ‘moral corruption, heartbreaking misery, absolute godlessness’ they found in the ‘dark region of poverty, misery, squalor and immorality’. Too much to say on this and so by the late 60s it had been aware of it losing touch with local people and that these same locals were often running their own self-help initiatives based on their own knowledge and experience: 

“What interests here then is how by the 70s, Cambridge House understanding its own failings and seeking to remedy this, in part, pioneered a massive literacy campaign which spread right across the capital and sowed the seeds of 133 education schemes. This started in the 1960s when Cambridge House recruited volunteers to teach young people on probation to read and write. By 1973 the British Association of Settlements including Cambridge House started an important national ‘Right To Read’ campaign to deal with levels of illiteracy in working class neighbourhoods. It seemed like they had found a new way to maintain relevance and support for local people. Tony Parker’s 18 month interview project with folks on a local estate for his book ‘The People of Providence’ published in 1983 as a mainstream paperback has its origins in the 1976 Listening Post project out of Cambridge House. Although the estate is anonymised in the book, we believe it to be the Wyndham & Comber Estate not at all far from Addington Sq just over Camberwell Rd. ‘The People of Providence’ remains in print and can be yours for a few quid online! You can read it yourself because literacy is political and is crucial as “reading the world precedes reading the word, and the subsequent reading of the word cannot dispense with continually reading the world” says Paulo Freire, the radical Brazilian popular educator.

We can hear from a transcript of one of the literacy project sessions that some of the women participants in the session live in Campbell Buildings, Lambeth Council-owned tenements up along Baylis Rd, famous then for being run-down and in ill repair. Mostly the discussions, the women’s own reading of the world, flit from the questioning of what the project work is for, to the more pressing chats about countering rent arrears. Their own solutions are individual and backed up with advice from relatives, the Tenants Association or other local legal centres named as Blackfriars Settlement or Waterloo Action Centre. What returns repeatedly throughout the transcript is both the help available to the women that the educators seek to promote as well as the educators’ own desire for collective action from the women. Many times in the kind of social work that was popular in the 70s to 80s, middle class educators wished the proletarians they worked with would be more revolutionary and so projected a whole heap of their own political fantasies upon them. The mixing up of what could be a desire to help with the skewed University-understood imaginary of a collective class struggle was never that helpful. The stakes are often low for the educators with no immediate consequence if they decide to stop doing this helpful work. The actual stakes of the women in the literacy sessions are the miseries of mould, no hot water, washing the kiddie in a tin tub in the kitchen, Council on your back, debt people on your back, the Social on your back, your ex-husband on your back, possession proceedings begun, re-housing slow as fuck, demolition notices up and the always eternal return of being broke. This takes us back to Settlements and those who might know best even if there is seemingly an abyss between venerable men of Cambridge University in the 1890’s and the community politics turn of the 70s where University educated folks came to working class communities to work in them. Sometimes we are just back at where we started and listening to chit chat about us always. The notion that we have been ‘given a voice’ is a joke”. In 2022 Cambridge House sold their building and moved out of Camberwell. It is now artist’s studios run by a company called Eat Work Art. You can write your own bilious punchline for this.

Picnic Table

Once again, working class agency exists, always has and always will, with or without the help of those who seek to guide it. Back at our Caldew St there are two things the homeowner’s CCTV did not catch. An addition and a subtraction right under the Square’s nose. In September 2020, diverse hands in chalk did add to the concrete wall of the poshed up cafe where a new poster advertising ‘brunch’ a graffiti reading both ‘Brunch is the horizon of bourgeois love’ and, more pointedly, ‘Fuck Brunch’ which with zero irony then used in an Instagram post by the cafe because they are hip as fuck. For some time we used to take our coffee, never Brunch, to the picnic table that was in Addington Square’s central gardens. Loved that picnic table and its wooden wonkyness and visiting squirrels always blagging you for your toasties. Then one night the picnic table disappeared. Just gone! Just a small worn away patch of dirt where it used to be. But what happened? Where did it go? Maybe it had just finally crumbled from the weight of our worries? Actually, no! It ended up on our estate where someone or some two had lifted up the whole heavy ass picnic table, moved it over the railings and taken it for a good ten minute walk to now sit outside the low-rise Elmington Estate block on Caspian St where it resides to this very day, expropriated indeed in its own mysterious wandering way. Your property? It’s ours now! We’ll always be coming for you, win or lose. Here endeth multiple fragments of revenge, theirs and ours once more. Forward to the loved fragment of Caldew St’s mossy dream life of our own having little and being much together and for ourselves.