On being right.

As you'll know if you've asked me for directions I can be all kinds of wrong (ill-advised, misguided, ill-informed, wrong in detail, wrong in general, wrong in principle, wrong in practice) but every now and then I'm right.  For example, I'm right in thinking that the Andover estate's street-level garages are a lousy use of space. They're ugly, make the streets fell less safe, and attract fly-tippers.

So this made me happy:

Wesley Close.

Garages on the left, garages turned ino flats on the right. 

Close-up

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?

I made my excuses and left.

There's a notice pinned to the door of the Aqua Sauna. It gives you until Valentine's day to oppose a renewal of its 'special treatment licence' by writing to the Licensing Team, Public Protection Division, 222 Upper Street, London N1 1XR 'giving in detail the grounds for objection'.

I wonder what they'd do if anyone wrote in to support the application for renewal?

 Anyway, I had this conversation with my friend in Ireland last week:

'How can you tell if a massage parlour isn't really a massage parlour. I mean, apart from going on Punternet?'
'Is it open at night? Are the windows blocked so no-one can see in? Does it radiate seediness?'
'Hmmm. Yes, that would do it.'

We were avoiding arguing about whether Britain has a constitution (long story) and so went on to talk about words.

Here's the thing. The Aqua Sauna's pretence of selling saunas and massages is as transparent as that News of the Screws line I stole for the title of this post, and yet Islington Council's 'community safety update' doesn't say 'we raided a brothel and closed it down', it says 'Aqua Sauna, at 42 Hornsey Road, had no licensed staff on duty [and]  will now face prosecution.'

The Islington Tribune didn't run a 'police close down whorehouse' story; they wrote: 'On Friday, Aqua Sauna in Hornsey Road, Holloway, was found to have no licensed masseuses on duty – although it did have a special treatment licence – and was also temporarily closed.'

The Islington Gazette article says 'Aqua Sauna in Hornsey Road, Holloway, was found to have no licensed masseuses on duty – although it did have a special treatment licence – and was also temporarily closed' and then quotes Cllr Paul Convery:  'We are not turning a blind eye to this any more. This sort of thing should be removed from the neighbourhoods of decent law-abiding people.'

It's as though urologists wrote papers about down below and divorce lawyers accused their clients' spouses of having special friends. It's a funny fit with the Aqua Sauna's brazenness. I get that local papers and councillors would not want to talk about pimps, johns and whores*,  but I don't get why 'brothel' or 'prostitution' are off limits.

Non-brothel blogging will resume shortly.

*Side-note: Those slang words are losing their primary meaning too. I doubt 'ladies is pimps too, go and brush your shoulders off' is actually about prostitution, and I'm pretty sure the President doesn't think so either. 

Past and Present at Number 51

Augustus Egg (not a Wodehouse character - you're thinking of Gussie Fink-Nottle) painted a triptych called 'Past and Present'. In the first scene a woman is caught with her lover's letter, in the second her daughters weep in a garret, in the third she sleeps under a bridge.

This is the Hornsey Road version, played out in and around number 51:

Image from here

Both stories start with a woman taking a risk, although Veronica McGannon doesn't have much else in common with Egg's floozy. This Islington Tribune article describes a grandmother of nine who saw her first Arsenal game aged three and who instead of retiring opened Vee's bistro opposite the Emirates. I like the sound of Vee's Bistro, but the Great Recession closed it before I moved to Islington.

Number 51 lay quiet for months and months and months 'walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily'.* Then homeless people turned the recessed doorways into shelters, and then the doorways were boarded over to stop them. The second scene looks like this:

Number 51, January 2013

The third scene is set about about fifty metres south of Number 51:

Under Hornsey Road bridge, January 2013

I don't know how many people are sleeping in that pile of mattresses and bags under the Hornsey Road bridge, or why they've ended up there or how long they'll stay, or even if they're the same people who were sleeping in the doorway of what used to be Vee's. I could ask them, but I doubt they want to be asked.

I'll leave you with a quote from that 2008 Islington Tribune article: 'in a letter to the council, neighbour Sheila Stewart complained about the possible noise and mess the bistro could attract. She said: “I do not wish for my life to be turned upside down for the sake of a social venue. I am already penalised by living right near the stadium, because I cannot have visitors while a match is on".

*Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, go read it.

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.

Spooksbury Halloween

The Gothic WI meet every second Thursday in the Shaftesbury. Their next meeting is a clothes swap, and this is where I regret giving away only corset I've ever owned*.

Oh well.

Anyway, the Gothic WI are/were (depending on when you read this) hosting two Halloween parties. The children's party ends in about fifteen minutes as I write. There were cobwebby cakes,

pastries shaped like dead men's fingers**,

and a smiley ghost cake.

I bought some apple butter because I couldn't resist mystery confectionery with a corset logo.

The grown-up shindig (hootenanny?) starts/started at 7. I'd go, but I'm not drinking until April 7th and I'd have to be a kinder, more mature and altogether better person go to a party in a pub, not drink and not sulk.

*I threw out my blessed Hussein Chalayan jacket the same day. Why? What was I thinking? Why didn't you stop me?
** Talking of which, have you tried these pathology cakes?  

Secret Garden in the Six Acres.

Came across this the other day. 

'2 January 2012 - 1 January 2015: Sans façon have been selected to create a new, artist-led garden design for the Six Acres Housing Estate in Finsbury Park, Islington.  Working in close collaboration with local residents and the estate’s landscape architects, they will be developing creative interventions for the site to enhance the central plaza of the estate and achieve a functional, successful social space'

Questions: 

A) Who are Sans façon? 

'It began as an investigation between French architect Charles Blanc and British artist Tristan Surtees, and has developed into an ongoing collaboration through an art practice. They undertake diverse projects, both temporary and permanent, predominantly exploring the complex relationship between people and place. They see the role of the artist and art as a catalyst in a process of raising questions and inviting people to look and think differently about a place, hoping to create an opportunity rather than an inanimate object.' 

They do interesting things. I approve of anyone who titles a piece 'Collaboration as a place you don't expect'.

B) Where is the Six Acres' central square? I still don't understand the geography there. 

C) Who's Dickon, who's Mary and who's Colin?

Changing the Six Acres.

I walked round the Six Acres the other day looking at the new buildings going up all over the estate:

A building

They look fine, I think. There's something 1930s about them (like an English take on the Gernsback continuum) and they don't have the cramped feel of a lot of new-builds.

There's a complicated conversation to be had about why we don't build enough houses in the UK and what can be done. I'll leave that be for the moment, though I'd be curious to know what you think about it.  There's a more local conversation about whether these particular buildings work for the Six Acres and again I'd love to hear what you think, especially if you live on the estate.

My (superficial) first impression is that they might make the Six Acres more welcoming.  The estate isn't frightening - the people in it are no better and no worse than the fancy lot in Crouch End and the closest I've come to violence there is when this kitten launched itself on me and insisted on having its head rubbed:

Very fierce.

But I do tend to avoid walking through it, whereas I'll take a detour to walk through the Andover, especially in spring or in autumn when the trees are in flower or turning red-gold.

There's this thing that happens in cities when spaces don't work. It can happen in a business district as much as in a suburb, in a rich area as much as a poor one. It's hard to describe but the coherence goes and it's like reading a book and finding that some pages have fallen out. You look around and you're not sure whether that road ahead is a dead end, whether that square is private. You get the impression that outsiders don't turn up often and perhaps aren't entirely welcome. If you're in a hurry, or (like me) you get lost easily you'll probably turn back and head for somewhere where your feet and your eyes know what to expect and how to read it.

The Six Acres seems like that, perhaps because when they obliterated Campbell Road they wanted to make something as different as possible to Victorian streets.

Tell me if you agree, or not. 

The Ujima court curse

Ujima court lies just north of Hornsey Road. Three stories, stucco and brick stripes, stepped roof, it looks normal but its windows have been gradually being bricked up for months and now the main entrance is boarded up too.

It turns out to be a morality tale.  There were 38 flats and bedsits crammed in there and none were big enough for people to live in them decently. Now the building's being closed down as people leave and something better will go up in its place.

Here's the story told by the council:

'Ujima Court is owned by London and Quadrant (L & Q) Housing Association.
At present it contains 23 flats and 15 shared bedsits - all of which are
undersized and not considered to be suitable living accommodation. Over
the past two years, Islington Council has been working with London and
Quadrant on plans to redevelop this site which will involve the
demolition of the existing building. During this time L & Q have also
been working with residents to find them suitable alternative
accommodation, which is why the building is predominantly empty now. 

L & Q submitted a planning application in 2011 for the following:
Demolition of 23 flats and 15 shared bedsits and associated outbuildings
and redevelopment of the site to provide 28 new flats and maisonettes (1
x 1 bedroom flat, 17 x 2 bedroom flats, 2 x 3 bedroom flats, 8 x 3
bedroom maisonettes) new external works and landscaping, including three
disabled parking bays, cycle parking (28 spaces) and refuse storage. 

All of the 28 new housing units on this site with be for affordable
housing; either Social Rented or Shared Ownership - it is a 100%
affordable housing scheme. '

Meanwhile someone (an ex tenant?) has written this in chalk on the paving stones: 'Oh yeah, whoever trashed all my stuff fuck you sad cunt. Now you're cursed: bad luck; cancer growing, growing, growing.'

The university that wasn't.

The corner of Seven Sisters and Hornsey Road has a bike shop, a Chinese supermarket, and a pub that survived a Zeppelin attack.

It doesn't have a university. It never had a university. It is unlikely ever to have a university. 

The 'American University in London'

It does have a building with a plaque. The plaque, just about visible in the photograph above, says 'American University in London'. 

AUL was never accredited anywhere, and could no more confer degrees than I can (though if anyone's interested in a Hornsey Road MA my fees are reasonable and attendance requirements not onerous). 

Its website is still up. It shows good-looking young people smiling and skates over AUL's premises being a few rooms over a bookies. 

Note the crest with House of Commons-y portcullis

It recruited up to the 2011/12 academic year even though AUL was fined in 2006 for 'misleading prospective students by deceptively representing itself as a university in spite of lacking proper accreditation' and I can find no evidence that they became accredited after. 

The plaque's still there too. 

... by any other name

The police said Josie Daly was 'in the premier league of London madams', making millions out of the Aqua Sauna on Hornsey Road and two other saunas (only one of which had a sauna). 

She claimed to be shocked, shocked that anything illegal was going on in her establishments. Then she was fined £2m and opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate having dodged a jail sentence. 

The story made the nationals, who wrote about her house (named 'Bunty's corner' after a dog buried in the garden), her white Rolls-Royce, the 1000-1500 men who visited her saunas every week and (magnificently) that she had advertised in the British Transport Police's official magazine.  

The journalists made the Aqua Sauna sound like it belonged in: 

A) an x-rated Whisky Galore: 'Daly was wheeled from court past flowers and pot plants from well-wishers stacked against a wall. Messages included one from ''a customer" which read: "Keep smiling, the end is near." '; 

B) an N7 Lilya 4 Ever: 'Fiona was 21 when she worked for Daly. "She was the worst brothel owner I ever worked for," she said. "OK, so she didn't rape or beat me like most of the male pimps did, but she was cruel and nasty. We had to work 12-hour shifts and ask her permission to go and buy a sandwich." '; or 

C) Juvenal's Satires: 'one would suppose that in a "grown-up" world, there would be no hiddenness, no shame, no furtive visits to Josie Daly's massage establishments'

I don't know which of these takes is closest to the truth. I can guess and you can probably guess what my guess would be, but my biases aren't evidence. I do know, however, that all this happened in 2000 and that I took this photograph last month: 

They didn't even change the name.