You were the future once.

Full-on post zombie apocalypse

complete with rotting ephemera:

When/if it becomes a living shop again I hope they don't throw away the sign. 

Bobby Joe opened a store not long ago

Independent shops make life more interesting. If I walk past a Tesco or a Costa either I don't notice it or my mind is sent down predictable ruts (tax/cloned high streets/gentrification) round and round and round until even I'm bored and I like tax policy.

'Bobby Joe's Music Music Music' on the other hand fueled an afternoon's puzzling and had me humming 'Peggy Sue got married'. 

It opened last week on the corner of Tollington Way and Hornsey Road, on the same stretch of road as Ajani's, the Petter Pharmacy, the Organic Stall and Atlas World of Birds. 

The only disappointing thing about the shop is that Bobby-Joe turns out not to be a grey-bearded rocker from Montgomery Alabama. He's a young man who spent ten years working in his dad's music shop (Johnson and Jones, which has been on Dalston Lane for forty-five years) before deciding to set up on his own. His brother's called Steve. I assume their parents took turns choosing names. 

Anyway, with Steve's help, he worked out that there are a lot of people round here who play and a lot of gigs going on and no-one repairing instruments or selling things like guitar strings or indeed guitars.  Or ukeleles.

Or drums. 

They're ace and they know what they're on about so here's hoping it works out for them.

Steve on the left, Bobby-Joe on the right. 

So far it seems to be going well. They've had more customers than they thought they'd have, so much so that they're behind on setting up a website/facebook page/twitter account and on replacing the shutter with something less ugly that lets people see the merchandise because they've been busy doing repairs.  

They're also not sure what to do about opening hours - there's very little trade in the mornings and then a rush of people after 5:30 and it's tricky to balance that with any kind of family life or personal life. I was trying to persuade them not to open until lunchtime and to close at seven but, understandably, they were doubtful. 

The Organic Stall and the new demographic

This is Kay. He's opened a deli where Hornsey Road meets Tollington Way, i.e. across the road from Tesco's and down a bit. 

Kay, smiling

The shop (called Organic Stall) is a delight. There are tables by the window where you can have a coffee and watch the world or at least the subset of it that hangs out on the Hornsey Road go by. There are wooden crates of fruit and veg stacked up in the middle of the floor (I can recommend the apples) and the shelves are full of what mumsnet would call 'naice' things: posh apple and carrot juice, fancy chocolate, upmarket tea, good tomato sauce, healthy baby food and so on. 

I can also recommend the brownies.

In other words, it sells the kind of stuff that you had to schlep down to Waitrose on the Holloway Road for, and that's only worth doing during a zombie invasion.

Kay's looking for feedback on what to stock, so go tell him if you want to be able to buy spelt flour or ginger jam locally. 

I really want this place to do well because the Hornsey Road needs some luck, but also because its success would prove a theory of mine right. 

The theory is that when high streets struggle it is often (or at least sometimes) because the shops are too downmarket.

You'd never guess it from the shuttered shops, or from the scruffy takeaways and newsagents, but there is money near here. Within a half-mile radius there are two bed flats on sale for over £500k and a house to rent at £925 a week. There is also a hell of a lot of poverty and gentrification is a mixed blessing, but it's been frustrating to see shops struggle because they aren't pitched to attract the new demographic. I don't know why this happens (perhaps because posh people don't tend to open shops?) but it is bloody annoying.

More on this theme in the aspirational Luton blog 

In which I have doubts

Update: I've since heard from Kay-of-the-organic-stall that it's a conversion into offices and all legit. Excellent news and I must learn to be less suspicious.

The ground floor of number 281 (on the corner of Tollington Way and Hornsey Road - next to Tesco's) has been empty for years.

 A Beloved Reader noticed that you can see building work through the gaps in the whitewash:

Lots of building work:

A planning application to convert the shop into flats was refused in 2010 for for 'providing a poor standard of residential amenity': local authority speak for being unfit to live in. I can't find a more recent, relevant, planning application.

Flats fetch more money than shops in North London and that BBC programme about the Caledonian Road showed that this can lead to dodginess.

The Beloved Reader has informed the council as well as me. 

On the other hand, it could all be legit. Anyone know anything?

Clever Mike's hidden bikes

I can never decide if the best thing about cycling is gliding round corners without using your hands or how bikes look. Even humdrum ones are cute (my heart broke last year when some git stole the mountain bike I'd had since my 15th birthday) but some are like Tom Ford's mid nineties Grecian dresses or Celine since Phoebe Philo took over in that they are lovely enough to make you glad you're alive.

Those bicycles even look good stripped down to their candy-coloured frames:

but they look better when they're sleek and complete:

All this shininess is hidden at number 465 under the Danor sign. Go through the right hand door and left at the piano (which is another story)

and you reach Clever Mike* the new bicycle maintenance business/shop

that is this man's brainchild.

Not Mike 

Here's hoping he thrives in the Hornsey Road microclimate. Anyone patient enough to let me meander around with the pram asking daft questions deserves to do well. More importantly, it shines through that he loves his job and is good at it. 

Talking of being good at something, there are far better pictures on the Clever Mike facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CleverMikeMaintenance.

E: info@clevermike.co.uk
T: +44-(0)7845-304865
Opening Hours
Monday - Friday 8.30 - 17.00

*Rhyming slang for bike. No, I hadn't worked it out either.

Blushing unseen and all that.

I've been past the Savewell Supermarket (corner of Tollington Park, opposite Tesco's) dozens of times since Inkie painted his Mucha-like swirls and they've been on view about twice.

I'd understand if keeping the shutters up meant you could see the stock,  but you can't because the shop's windows are blocked by white panels.

I'd understand if the owners were mad because their property had been defaced, but here the landlord has graffiti artists friends and invited them to paint the shutters.

Meh. Goodness knows there's enough drab shutters on show nearby.

Anyway, there are two more paintings on the Hornsey Road side. One is a black swirly one that I've  never been able to see in full. The other is a bright cubist piece and here it was last week:

March 2013: from a distance

March 2013: closer in

This one is by Hunto. There's less about him on t'internet than there was about Inkie, but you can read a review of his 2009 show at the Rag Factory here and a preview here.

March 2013: close-up with gaping mouth

He was born in Brindisi in 1982 and reminds me for reasons I can't articulate of Repubblica's  cartoonist Altan, who's been drawing Italians resigned to lives of quiet desperation for decades.  Here's his reaction to the latest election:

No?

Okay then.

Inkie lighting up the streets

The independent supermarkets opposite the new Tesco's have looked forlorn since it opened. Then this happened:

 It turns out that the Savewell Supermarket landlord is friends with Inkie.

Here's Artbelow on Inkie:

'This artist is one of the most notorious graffiti writers in UK history to emerge out of the 80's Bristol scene. Painting alongside 3D and Banksy, coming 2nd in the 1989 World Street Art Championships, the Kingpin was arrested as the head of 72 other writers in the UK's largest ever Graffiti bust, Operation Anderson.

Inkie has since worked as head of design for SEGA, Xbox, and currently resides in Jade Jagger's west London studio. As in-house artist and designer for prints, illustrations, clothing and with his trademark beauty on large-scale pieces, the globally respected artist, whose diverse inspirations collect Mayan architecture, William Morris, Alfons Mucha and Islamic geometry, has exhibited worldwide, been denounced by The Daily Mail and simultaneously lauded by The Times, his art published in the books Banky's Bristol, Children of the Can, Graffiti World and magazines Graphotism and Dazed & Confused.'

There's more in Time Out, the Telegraph and BBC Bristol.

Here is a picture of Inkie with Kanye at Jade Jagger's house. That is not a sentence I expected to write for this blog.

Pic by bigbadbanshee, thanks to the Stevio...LA LA Lovin' It blog.

Proof of the Mucha influence:

Inkie
 

See? You should go and take a look. C'mon, what else have you got planned for tomorrow? 

I now want: 

A) Kanye to go to Ajani's.
B) Inkie and friends to take over the horrid shutters at With Love and Ajani's and Atlas and the Chemitex Pharmacy and hell the whole damn road. 

I'll settle for B. That would make me happier than seeing this Sydenham or this Leyton initiative being replicated on the Hornsey Road. And the world exists to make me happy for I am the centre of all things. 

I'm going to lie down now.

Everest Spice

So I was cycling home with a friend the other day and we had one of those disjointed conversations where you catch five words before the traffic lights change. Anyway he recommended Everest Spice.

'Really?' I said 'This place?'

Photograph from here. 

'Really' he said.

'Mmph' I said. 

But I tried it and he was right. You should try them too if you haven't already, in which case I suppose you're shaking your head at my slowness of uptake.

Photographing food is difficult

If I had more data I'd theorize that there's an inverse relationship between how rundown takeaways look and how good they are. Someone should do a study. There should be graphs. 

Really difficult

Where? 53 Hornsey Road
When? Monday to Sunday 17:00-23:00
Tel: 020 7609 7487
Website: http://www.everestspicetakeaway.co.uk/

Self-referential Hornsey Road.

The Hua Run chinese supermarket on the Hornsey Road/Seven Sisters corner

I wrote about it here.

sells this (not bad btw) chilli oil,

Sorry picture is blurred.

which is made by Tak Kee Trading in the bright bright bright building at 222 Hornsey Road (opposite the Eaglet)

Tak Kee Trading

making this is a Hornsey Road blog about buying something made on the Hornsey Road from a shop on the Hornsey Road.

It's like a North London ouroboros. This pleases me because it means I can use the word 'ouroboros', which I learnt last week. I like new words. #stillintouchwithinnernineyearoldgeek

Ouroboros drawn by Theodoros Pelecanos in 1478. Wiki commons

Ghost story

Empty shops should hide behind shutters; there's something indecent about the ones that don't. They're flaunting failure, letting the side down like an uncut lawn, whispering memento mori to their neighbours.

This one on the corner of Hornsey Road and Tollington Way is acting out a ghost story (I think I mostly like ghost stories because they're about places).

It's been shut for at least two years, and this is the only sign of its owner:

Would bills really make it look worse?

No-one ever goes in but things change inside. A can of coke appears on a table then disappears. The lights turn on and, overnight, are turned off again. If this were Buffy there'd be a demon inside feeding off blight and scheming to open the hellmouth.

I miss Buffy. Many things would be explained if the Hornsey Road were on a hellmouth.

Seven things I found out about the new bookshop and one I didn't

1) This is what it looks like inside :

 

2) All the books are £1 or ten for £9. 

3) This isn't an opening gambit, it's the long term plan. 

4) Despite this, the books aren't at all bad. I think the idea is to sell things that were published a couple of years ago. It's like the TK Maxx of children's bookshops. Except that unlike TK Maxx it doesn't scare me into running off to a monastery.

4) One of the books is called 'Norbert and the Disappearing Eggs'. Here it is: 

5) It has a happy ending

6) It also has cute watercolours:

 7) The owner is a cheeful young man called Connor


I forgot to ask about opening hours. Sorry.

(Updated to say that thanks to Mizhenka we now know it's open 9 to 5-30.)

We're getting a bookshop. Squeee.

This is the shop next to Hamlet. It was empty for a very long time.

Then Conny-who-reads-this-blog noticed something happening:

If you are curious enough to look through the gap at the foot of the blinds you'll see a children's bookshop taking shape. This is wonderful news. 

Bookshops are thriving in France but they sure as hell aren't here and children's literature has Alice, the Velveteen Rabbit, the Thirteen Clocks, the Wonderful O, Minnow on the Say, the Chimneys of Greene Knowe, 101 Dalmatians, Five Children and It, the Railway Children, the Wouldbegoods, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Pinocchio, Tom Sawyer, Tom's Midnight Garden, the Wolves of Willoughby Chase, the Hobbit, King Solomon's Mines, the Jungle Book, Kim, Stalky & Co, Charlotte's Web, Anne of Green Gables, the Wind in the Willows, the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, the House at Pooh Corner, Shimbleshanks, the Night Train as well as a whole load of stuff for toddlers that I can't remember but am assured is good and whatever it is that kids read these days. I hope they still read Alice.

This kind of gentrification I can take.

My overlooked launderette.

Sometimes I act like I'm blind. I walked past the launderette at 450 Hornsey Road dozens of times before I could see how good a melancholy film set it would make.

The story would be about people falling behind with the rent and in or out of love, the cast would dress in 1950s pastels to match the washing machines or wear dark red saris like the lady who runs the place or go about in converse, hoodies, and a hungover haze. 

It might have a happy ending (I'd like it to, I think) but it couldn't be a hero-wins-the-lottery-and-gets-the-girl type of happy ending. There'd have to be a sense that the happiness was a fragile thing, its feathers in danger from loose nails or an overloaded machine.

 

Oh my fruiterer and my greengrocer, long ago, long ago.

Once upon a time Blackall's the greengrocer was next door to W. Plumb the butcher.  

Image thanks to Sludgegulper on Flickr.

London switched over from the 01 telephone numbers in 1990 and the sign says 'established over 100 years'. Blackall's must have opened in 1890 at the latest.

This is what the shop looks like now. It is not an improvement. I wonder if the old sign survives underneath?

Census, or how the Hornsey Road nearly drowned.

Hornsey Road circa 2008

It was raining and I didn't want to look like a lost trainspotter clutching a notebook while the drizzle soaked through my clothes and rivulets of rain made their way under my collar, into my shoes and down my sleeves so I used Street View data (roughly three years out of date and with gaps where I couldn't see the shop fronts) to build this chart.

Three years ago was the depths of the recession before the one we're in now and the street was dying. Out of 210 shop fronts 52 were either empty or had been empty for so long that they'd be turned into flats while another 5 were bookmakers and most of the rest looked tired. It's funny, in the not funny at all sense of funny, that RBS not doing due diligence before buying ABN AMRO bankrupted little shops in North London.

I remember walking along the Hornsey Road for the first time about then and thinking 'bloody hell this is grim as fuck, I wouldn't want to live here'. My inner monologue swears too much, but it/I had a point and we hadn't even noticed the fake university, the two brothels masquerading as saunas and that some members' only clubs were really drug dens.

Things are, I think, slightly better now. The Hornsey Road will never be a conventional cloned high street but it is perhaps edging its way into becoming something interesting. You can rent a 711 sq ft (66 sq m) shop for £155 a week (or less - they've been on the market a while) while a flat that looks to be about the same size and is in the same area rents for £290 a week. My dream of a second hand bookshop or record shop moving in just might come true. That or we'll get another bookies.

Picture Framing Therapy

I carted postcards, prints, photocopies, pages torn from magazines and exhibition posters from rented flat to rented flat for years thinking that as soon as I knew I wouldn't have to move for a while I'd put them up. Then we bought here and lived for two years with bare walls. For all my ambitions I didn't know what I wanted or how to get there or who to ask for help and the longer I waited the harder it seemed to choose anything.

The blog was my salvation.Well, when I say salvation I mean kick up the arse to stop me dithering because I found Art and Soul in the Belgravia Workshops and went there.

Zoological drawings, bought in Lille, framed off Hornsey Road

It was heaven. They should market picture framing as therapy.  The workshop is a set of interconnected rooms, painted white, full of the flotsam and jetsam of tools and bits of wood, with a big round window looking onto the courtyard and TMS playing. I'd move in if they'd let me. 

Smyrna/Izmir sea-scene, as per above.

I spent so much time choosing between different mounts, frames and glass types that my dad (who was visiting that day and had kindly come along) decanted himself next door to Libertea for tea and cake. And the pictures look beautiful, far better than in my photographs.

Map here: 

Contact details here:

telephone: 020 7263 0421
mobile: 0771 569 7345
email: bec.b@mac.com