The British Snook Machine

This elegant thing (now in the Hunterian Museum) is a 1920s gas filled or cold cathode medical X-ray tube with a colimator extension of the anticathodeode.*

It was made by Newton and Wright in 471-3 Hornsey Road, where the Town Crier mural is.

Newton & Wright made tilting tables too:

They're invaluable in Pyelography, which, I discover, is a 'form of imaging of the renal pelvis and ureter'. 

Most of all they made Snook Machines:

I have no idea what a Snook Machine was, or how a British Snook Machine differs from a Foreign Snook Machine.  Or indeed whether one snooks with a snook machine or is snooked by a snook machine.

But now we know that there was considerable difference of opinion as to the respective merits of Valve versus Mechanical Rectification in Snook Machines.

And I know that  G.W.C. Kaye said on page 245 of Issue 2587, Volume 103, 1919 of Nature that 'MESSRS. NEWTON AND WRIGHT deserve great credit for their pertinacity in endeavouring to convince the British medical world of the particular merits of the Snook transformer'.

Newton and Wright were in the Hornsey road from at the latest 1905 until 1937. The company was then amalgamated and amalgamated until it became part of AEI.

There are many more images over at the Tumblr. 

* Proof that sentences don't have to be literary to be beautiful. Listen to the singing line in 'a colimator extension of the anticathodeode'. Pure poetry that is, lad. 

North London Model cat

The wonderful Mizhenka has captured the elusive North London Model cat here:

Cat on patrol

Cat at rest

 C'mon, you don't get that at Westfield. 

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?

Luxuria

I use the blog as a pretext to do new things and so I went to Luxuria the other day and had my nails done. 

Before: meh nails that could audition for The Crucible. Look at them, all modest and virtuous and about to tell on a witch:

After: space nails for the atomic age

I do like the way my hand is looming menacingly in that photograph. It's like the start of a low budget horror movie: 'THE HAND: Will You Escape Its Grasp?'

And I liked having my nails done, especially the hand massage. It turns out that something that millions of people do because they find it pleasant is indeed pleasant.  

This isn't always true. See, for example, bowling. 

Where: 390 Hornsey Road
When: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday & Saturday 10am to 7pm, Thursday 10am to 9pm. Call to see if they're open Sunday.
Tel: 02072632050 / 07582 937 468
They're on Facebook and on Twitter.

Why there isn't a church between Kingsland Road and Stanley Terrace.

David Draper was a child round here in the 1940s and told the BBC this story:

'After the war, the bombed areas(we as kids called them debris)became our playgrounds. On them we attended concerts organised by the local "talents", built barricades and engaged in territorial gang wars, climbed into the attics and out onto the roofs of derelict rows of condemned houses, took the lead out of the windows of the burned out church and melted it down, etc.etc.

The burnt out church in question was Saint Paul's and once stood at the corner of Kingsdown Rd. and Stanley Terrace. It must have been a beautiful structure before the blitz but had been reduced by incendiaries, to a shell whose walls and internal pillars only remained. Its pulpit was filled with a small mountain of rubble which extended from wall to wall at each side.

St Paul's after the bombs.
Image thanks to Churchcrawler on Flickr.

The door of the church had gone and the brickwork so patiently and continuously erected by workmen to seal it off was constantly being removed, just as patiently, by us kids, so we could get in and play. The floor was usually covered by about eight inches of water from end to end and made an excellent obstacle course for traversing across on old milk bottle crates and other junk.

One day whilst playing there, I and my mates, for some inexplicable reason decided to dig away at the rubble near the pulpit. We started at the left side and before long to our wonder and awe, we realised we had uncovered an arched opening over a large concrete shelf, beyond which we could see what appeared to be a small room. We clambered over the shelf,into the room one by one and as I stood there, my eyes becoming accustomed to the dark, feeling like an explorer,as I imagine pyramid explorers might have felt, entering a mummies tomb, another, strange,familiar feeling came over me.

I was looking at the walls: They were patterned in gold diamond lattice over a purple background that I had seen somewhere before. I forgot about it and I and my mates continued on with our usual activities of getting thoroughly dirty and wet.Weeks, maybe months later, I was talking with my Nan and out of the blue I said to her: "Nan, have I ever been in the old church, before it was burned?" My Nan looked at me incredulously and said: "How did you remember that?" I said to her: "It was the pattern on the wall in a room we discovered next to the pulpit". My Nan was amazed, she said: "You were only a baby then, we went into that room in the church to get a food parcel".

This is what St Paul's had looked like before the Blitz:

St Paul's before the war
Image thanks to Churchcrawler on Flickr. 

And this is what that corner looks like now:

 

The flats seem nice enough, and places to live are important. I wish, though, that there were at least a plaque to record what was there before. 

Many thanks to Churchcrawler and the BBC People's War project for making this post possible. 

The Tollington Initiative: Hornsey Road Baths 1998

Hornsey Road Baths, 1998, thanks to Daniel Lobo

Daniel Lobo, who goes by the name of Daquella Manera on flickr, took this photograph from the top of Montem Primary School around 1998. 

I'd have posted it anyway, even if this had been the only photograph of the Hornsey Road he'd taken and even if there hadn't been a story behind it because I like the way it makes it seem like derelict London is swirling around you.

But the web is serendipity country and the best things turn up by accident. This photograph is part of the Tollington Initiative, a regeneration project run by London Met (then University of North London) with the Council and the neighbourhood. A book came out of it, as did many other photographs of the Six Acres and Andover Estates.

More later.  

Civics class. Or, 'Would you like a neighbourhood forum?'

Have patience with me for this one. It's not going to be the snappiest post, but it might matter.

So, there's this thing called the Localism Act. 

It says that if twenty-one or more local people gather they can become a 'neighbourhood forum' and devise a 'neighbourhood plan' that says where they think new houses, businesses and shops should go  and what they should look like.

The Government's crib sheet to the Act says:

'Provided a neighbourhood development plan is in line with national planning policy, with the strategic vision for the wider area set by the local authority, and with other legal requirements, local people will be able to vote on it in a referendum.  If the plan is approved by a majority, then the local authority will bring it into force.'

The maps below shows the North London forums that are being set up:

There's a bigger and clearer picture here thanks to Arkady.

Yeah, I can't see a Hornsey Road forum either. That may be bad. Whatever you think of the Act it is likely to work out better for areas with forums than for areas without them. 

I have a thousand and one reasons why I'm not going to volunteer to start this, but if you're interested in setting up a Shaftesbury to Seven Sisters Road 'Hornsey Road: Tollington' forum or a Seven Sisters to the Emirates 'Hornsey Road: Ashburton Grove' one then tell me. 

If you ask nicely I'll even give you a free post. 

Lots more here and here and here.