When I first arrived in Balham, there was a Presto supermarket on the main drag, a perky but not altogether uplifting British forerunner to later discounters Lidl and Aldi. The site is now a Waitrose. A scattering of other shops radiated Festival-of-Britain-era, dusty nostalgia and a whiff of abandonment. Spokey South London seared its way through on the High Road, a constant, chuntering conduit to Tooting and all stops down the Northern Line.
The measured, resilient Polish man who mended our vacuum cleaner appeared to have barricaded himself into his store with a weary brigade of faulty electrical appliances. He would peer at us over the mounting casualties of toasters, televisions and hostess trolleys. On the streets around us, wheel-less cars on bricks were a common sight. Plenty of homes displayed a lack of attention, betraying one continuous family’s occupation for several generations. But the whole area was changing. Windrush couples were beginning to retire, and some chose to realise their backbreaking investment in UK bricks and public sector jobs to return to warmer waters. A very different money was flooding in. As more and more homes subdivided around Clapham South, young urban professionals laid claim to the emerging flat lands. (The richer ones leapfrogged into whole houses.) Curbside cars were becoming smarter, testament to company car policies of the 1980s. A VW Golf or a Peugeot 205 appeared to be the badge of office for Young Urban Professionals, those city people, advertising folk and several other, over-educated, overpaid tribes you’d see out hunting at weekends, guided by an estate agent, waving their particulars at each other as they argued kitchen fittings. The weekend we finally left for good, Time Out voted a new bar, housed in a dank lean-to sulking in the corner of the local Sainsbury’s car park, as the coolest in London. Times, they were rapidly a-changing.
There were – and still are – plenty of World War Two souvenirs etched into the landscape. Bomb damage meant that every now and then, an entirely incongruous building had sprung up, just as with the rest of London and especially the East End, on the site of direct hit. The effect was as jarring as a mouth of ill-fitting, mismatched teeth. On Bedford Hill, the streetwalking girls paraded up and down brandishing umbrellas, whatever the weather. These were talismanic totems of the oldest profession, hangovers from the war years when the trade sprang up to ‘service’ the Canadian soldiers bivouacked on Tooting Common. As a woman, if you weren’t brandishing an umbrella, it meant you were a civilian. In the years we were there, the sex trade was shunted further south to Geraldine Road, thanks to police raids. There were more trees and better escape routes closer to Tooting Bec lido. (All this was cheerfully relayed to me by a duty sergeant in Balham police station. I was reporting that our car radio had been nicked. Again.)
Delightful curiosities were within a stone’s throw. Burt Lancaster’s favourite restaurant in London, the Sree Krishna on Tooting Broadway, was a South Indian vegetarian treasure trove. Who knew? From Here To Eternity to Sarf Lunnon? But I trusted the waiter there who told me. Sadly, I never saw the actor on one of my handful of visits. I can still taste their tomato curry, the best I’ve ever eaten. A wistful check on Google reveals that the place closed down in 2020, another glory laid to rest. A delicatessen on Nightingale Lane was run by an ex-stockbroker, with patrician benevolence and a fantastic range of pasta. Nearby, Raj was the delicate and charming proprietor of a furniture and nick-nack shop, from whom we bought a brocade chaise longue for a steal. The original Bombay Bicycle Club, a welcoming establishment run by an Indian/Polish couple who later franchised the business that inspired the band name, was a very short walk away. Much less fun were the old Bedlam buildings, now torn down, where scenes from Ken Loach’s searing, near-documentary play Cathy Come Home had been filmed on Tooting Bec Road. An intense, one-hour programme, for years it was cited as the production that changed British television forever.
One evening, a panicky ringing of our doorbell turned out to be Kika Markham, the actress, whose car had broken down outside our house. She used our phone to dial in Corin Redgrave, her husband, to the rescue. Understandably stressed, she was nevertheless extremely gracious. We were awed to be confronted a doyenne of British theatre on our doorstep. It didn’t seem very, well, Balham to us. However, there was an enclave, the Heaver Estate, of beautifully appointed houses and evident wealth just down the road, not that she’d hailed from that address. Whilst work would always take us away from Mondays to Fridays, come Sunday we could set our watches by the arrival of the 9pm New York Concorde flight, announced by a louder roar than any of the other planes stacked up over London’s south eastern approaches, as it turned for Heathrow.
I wasn’t completely unaware that SW12 was on the ‘up’. The sights and sounds of incoming spending power were sewing their way into the visual landscape. Whilst the tsunami of wooden window shutters and eau-de-nil paint was still a distant, decor-day landing that would swamp the beaches of middle class sensitivity in the Noughties, the evidence was there if you looked. Most signs were more reductive than incremental. For coded, discrete wealth, it was a time of stripping back, of returning one’s surroundings to their original. Sash window companies boomed. The home owners restoring pointing were actually anointing. Freshly exposed Victoriana meant victory. The bells, whistles and ugly achitectural gee-gaws of the 20th Century were leaving the area in a caravan of skips. The words ‘Kevin McCloud’ were just beginning to be heard around dining tables of ever-so-slightly mismatched chairs on Saturday nights. Looking back now, McCloud resembles an old testament prophet, a forerunner to today’s tart-up-your-home gospels, the telly shows that fill the schedules. At the time, we rag rolled happily along with the rest of our pack. Our spare bedroom appeared to have suffered a tragic accident in a sun-tanning shop. The latter, too, was a growing phenomenon, oblivious to skin cancer scares, sprouting along the capital’s southern, arterial roads. Patrons would emerge blinking from tanning ‘parlours’, slightly panda-eyed, crossly red and about fifteen quid lighter after 30 minutes.
Besides the shinier, gleamier additions to Balham’s car park, their Germanic credentials winking in their front grills, there were the children. Emblematic ambassadors of Clapham, Balham and Wandsworth’s resurgence, the offspring of the most aspirant were paraded in early doors Boden or jaunty Crew Clothing. Their out-of-school uniforms were continually, competitively smartened up by parents tingling with a Salcomby-Southwold-meets-Dordogne-not-forgetting-Rock vibe. They were of a very particular strata, different from the kids who emerged from hunkering, middle market SUVs outside our house every morning, disgorged platoons of miniature, fearless GIs running from helicopter motherships towards Chestnut Grove school with scant regard for the Highway Code or, apparently, their own lives. Pens, satchels and caution were thrown to the winds time and again as I walked through the chaos to the tube.
A little further afield, Northcote Road, near Clapham Junction, had been christened ‘Nappy Valley’ some years before and was now enjoying its confirmation. Couples blocked its weekend pavements with ever more monstrous pushchairs in strained displays of early family unity. A wonderful road of delightfully independent businesses, the street fulfilled the idea of shopping as leisure perfectly. The bakers? Ra-Ra-El, a Caribbean treat. Butchers? Dove. Still there, a meaty holy of holies. Booze? The aptly named Philglass & Swiggott proffered bottles from independent growers and off-the-beaten-track domaines. A charming, enterprising man opened Palmer, a smallish clothing store appealing to men, women and children that became, for a moment, a mini empire, stretching as far as lucre-encrusted Chiswick. Osteria Antica Bologna served as THE place for authentically posh Italian, rather less wallet-walloping than Bruce Poole’s Chez Bruce on Bellevue Road, which was where you went if your parents were paying. On that row of expensive shops, gift emporium The Lucky Parrot’s owner and slightly intimidating proprietress, Ginny Moore, was a fascinating offcut of true Hampstead bizarre. Back on eateries, and being truthful, pizza was still terribly exciting in the 1980s. I never felt short changed by a capricciosa as centrepiece to a night out. Pizza Express near Wandsworth Common still managed, just, through curious batsqueaks, to transmit that it was something more than a functional feeding station.
As a friend, beaten back by publishers, agents and advisors, sternly reminded me, memoir doesn’t sell. I know that. It’s completely understandable. But, as must be rather evident by now, fuzzy, inaccurate editions of it don’t shift from the synapses’ shelves either. The remainders remain. Perhaps they always will.
willawdry 