London belonged to them

I found Norman Collins' London Belongs to Me thanks to the wonderful Big Green Bookshop and bought it for its opening sentence: 'There may be other cities that are older. But not many. And there may be one across the Atlantic that is larger.' But not much.'  Collins wrote the book towards the end of the second world war and put a magnificent, partisan love into that line.

I also hoped that in its 700 pages there'd be a mention of the Hornsey Road. I spent four years looking for references to the Mongols with lower odds than that. Did you know that Ghenghis Khan turns up in the Canterbury tales?

Anyway, on page 415 Mr Squales goes 'off to a professional engagement. Right over to Finsbury Park [...] where the North London Spiritualist Club held their meetings'.

Mizhenka photograph

Mr Squales is a conman, who has taken up spiritualism having failed at phrenology, palmistry and astrology. At Finsbury Park he takes on the persona of the Red Indian [sic] 'Mocking Bear', 'gruff, throaty and pregnant with vision' and declares that Hitler will die in 1940.

'Twenty minutes later Mr Squales with a two guinea cheque in his pocket was stepping out in the direction of the Seven Sisters Road.'

The Faces of St. Mark's

St. Mark's, on Moray Road just off the Hornsey Road, is full of faces.

Ruskin praised such details in medieval churches as 'signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure'.

St. Mark's is a very Ruskin-y church. 

Ruskin also believed that wrought iron was a sign of madness, so make of that what you will.

Either way, it works here. The church is rustic and welcoming, and the faces balance that out by looking stern and aloof. 

North London Spiritualist church, AKA Electric Music.

This is the North London Spiritualist Church:

Mizhenka photograph, taken with cat camera. 

This is 'North London Spiritualist Church' the 2000 album by Electric Music AKA:

The NME called it one of the 'peripheral, unorthodox musical pleasures of Y2K' and the Scottish Herald said it was one 'of the year's most understated but rewarding albums'.

I am as tongue-tied and uncomfortable talking about music as I am happy talking about books and pictures, but I am listening to it on Spotify as I write this post and it is good. It's on iTunes too.

It was also unlucky, caught by the Hornsey Road singularity where nothing goes as planned.

Electric Music had signed to the Beastie Boys' Grand Royal label. It went bust.

Then Karl Bartos of Kraftwerk, whose side project was called 'Electric Music' made them change their name. Have to say, 'Electric Music AKA' is a better answer to that problem than 'London Suede' was.

Then they were thrown out of their North London studio Scabby Rd. This is how they told the story to the Herald:

'It was effectively an old shed with lots of power points up an alley, and during the whole time we were there we never paid for electricity, it had been set up in the past to run off one of the meters upstairs, and I guess they used a lot of electricity and had never noticed. We, of course, were completely skint, and dreading someone finding out, but one day we came back and the guy upstairs had installed one of these sensor lights that go off when someone breaks the beam. ''Unfortunately, he must have used one of our fuses, because when we went into the studio, none of the lights worked any more. The actual studio gear did, so recording continued for a while by candlelight, before we had to give the studio up because we ran out of money.'

They're called Boo Hooray now and in 2010 released 'Haunted'. I wonder if they're still local?

Merry Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa, Holidays, and Happy New Year

I'm going to a land beyond North London* and The Hornsey Road is going on a break until the New Year.

If you're around for New Year's Eve you could go to the stompin' and swingin' dinner dance at Ajani's, or to the prayer party at St. Mark's.

They're both in the new scrolling calendar on the top right hand side of the homepage, which also includes a breastfeeding drop-in and a rock and roll bingo night.

If you want to advertise an event on or around the Hornsey Road then tell me in comments and I'll add it to the calendar unless it's illegal or I take against it.

Thank you all for reading,

DellaMirandola

* I've now got this going round my head. It's the opposite of seasonal but it's also a magnificent song to sing while cycling.

Masjid -e-Yusuf mosque

According to  muslimsinbritain this mosque has a Deobandi theme, a capacity of 200, does not admit women and looks like this inside: 

From the outside it still looks like a pub even though the new name has been painted across where it used to say 'Hanley Arms'.    

    

It's grade II listed, and so the old wrought-iron signs survive, as does some very pretty moulding. 

   

The Hanley Arms was built around 1850. In 1881 it was home to John Diggins, his wife Mary and their children Mary, Clara and Florence. I wonder if they liked the wrought-iron, or fretted that it was looking dated.

The transformation reminds me of a lot of things: of Simon Armitage's line about churches in Yorkshire becoming carpet warehouses, of the ghost signs you see all over London, of Odradek, and of how buildings outlive us.

If you use the mosque, please tell me what it's like. I'm curious.

Where: 440 Hornsey Road
When: ?

How a Methodist Chapel became Holloway Police Station.

This was the Methodists' Hornsey Road Chapel, built in 1858. It replaced their smaller Chapel built in 1821, which in turn replaced the meeting house on the Hornsey Road the Methodists had been using 1811.


According to their Islington and Camden mission 'while middle-class Wesleyans were moving into the new suburbs, conditions in the area around the original Hornsey Road Chapel were declining. In an attempt to address growing poverty in the neighbourhood, missions were established in Andover Road and Hampden Road. Hornsey Road Chapel was finally closed in 1940, and demolished in 1960 to make way for a police station.'

That means, I think, that it's now Holloway Police Station and looks like this: