Sunnyside down

Parks should feel like cheating, like you've wriggled through a loophole in the city fabric. It doesn't take grandeur: the Heath succeeds but so does the tiny Lambeth Recreation Ground, bounded by train tracks and the backs of office buildings. 

It does, I think, take love. Wray Crescent feels cared for, Elthorne Park somehow doesn't. Just next to Elthorne Park, though, are the Sunnyside Community Gardens and they are gorgeous. 

 Go down the beaten earth path

and you're not in Kansas anymore

Oh yes, and there's a hyper mural about environmental degradation. 

Add to that the fact that they provide horticultural therapy to people with special needs and it's very very annoying to see this: 

Their roof burnt down on Monday. It might not be arson, but either way they'll need money to rebuild. 

Don't suppose you've got some spare cash? 

Pictures from a mural

New (I think) at the cafe' in Platform, in the old Hornsey Road Baths building. Go see: 

Family Home

81 Turlewray Close is a large, ungainly but not ugly, Edwardian (?) house at the northern end of the Wray Crescent Open Space. 

It's also a misfit. The half-dozen other houses are 'family homes' in estate agent speak. Smart vies with smarter up to the house whose owner threatened to sue the cricket club if they damaged his Porsche SUV. 

81 stands alone and decades behind. Its woodwork is peeling, its curtains are sagging, its garden is a neglected haven for birds. The stripey awning over the main door has a faded seaside resort air and the 'CCTV' sign in the side window might as well say 'gentrification stopped here'.

It probably doesn't help that it's next to the Islington Arts and Media School.  IAMS is doing well now (good with outstanding features Ofsted, Kaya Scodelario's alma mater) but it has a tricky history and schools are noisy.

Still, this is the view from the front gate:

And this is the garden, as photographed by Davies & Davies: 

Yes, it's on sale and yes, they are asking £2m for it.  So why is it so run down? 

In 2004 it was a nine bedroom house on sale for £775,000.

Now it's bedsits, let for £8k a month. 5% return on your £2m, assuming no repairs and no voids. 

I'm curious to see what happens next;  whether it'll stay a relic of when round here was all bedsit-land, become flats or even go back to being one huge house. 

What would you rather? More homes or a better building and better homes for fewer people? The moral, I think, is that morals in housing are hard to pin down. 

Three reasons to visit Bright Sparks

Bright Sparks have a new store on 176 Seven Sisters Road.

I'm going to assume that you're an irresponsible bastard who doesn't care that they stop broken electrical goods going to landfill by repairing and reselling them.

I'm also going to assume that you're meanspirited enough not to care that the work is done by unemployed volunteers and that the skills they're learning will help them get work.

In fact, I'll assume you're the lovechild of Katie Hopkins and Jeremy Clarkson and that you take after both your parents.  

This is why you should check them out all the same: 

This record cabinet with scrolling wooden  doors is £65:

The metal trunk next to it is £35

This rather splendid 1970s solid wood dresser is £110.

Go on. 

Permanent Wave

Shoreditch is full of people (smart, creative, well-intentioned people) who strive after quirkiness. Think Labour & Wait or Monster Supplies: wonderful stores, but just the slightest bit try hard. 

The Hornsey Road is Dickens to Shoreditch's Trollope, Destiny's Child to its Leona Lewis, Bernini to its Borromini; the Hornsey Road doesn't have to achieve eccentricity, it blazes it. It's the kid who storms out of A-levels swearing at the teacher where Shoreditch is the cutie who smokes and never gets caught. 

Take the hairdresser's at number 418. There's a white shopfront with a net curtain:

Walk inside and it's the 1970s in a catholic country:

The lady who runs it has been there 43 years, and has customers who have been coming for decades. The place, in other words, has a role. It tells its customers that they are still welcome in London, still part of London; the city is infinite and forgiving. 

Blue remembered skies

@mizhenka, much missed and in Derbyshire, used to photograph the sky over Hornsey Road at n19skies.tumblr.com

Here are three reasons to look up: 

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.