Burnt Oak - Dumped Mattress Central (an humorous blogpost for Friday)

Bloggers occasionally like to share with their readers the search terms that people use to hit on their blog.

This evening's haul is fairly typical for my blog. I can imagine which of my previous blogposts the search terms have landed searchers on - most of them quite appropriate, luckily.

museum london Aeronauts Interactive Centre - That's easy: a blogpost I wrote about Grahame Park and the RAF Museum.

Andrew Travers Barnet - Innumerable posts about Barnet council and town hall tax dodgers.

relaxing at work - Ha, ha, ha! That picture of Brian Coleman asleep at his desk.

slogan on circulatory system - Bit obscure that one, but I did once try my hand at cartooning, none too successfully.

misandry - ah, yes...

famous children campaigners - I confess I have never written on this subject.

oak hill park barnet funfair - Fun fairs everywhere you turn in Barnet. Makes money for the council, y'see.

jonathan lovett pcs union - Yes, the former Father of the NUJ Chapel at the Barnet Press has gone to work for the PCS union.

valley logos - Dollis Valley Green Walk? I'm sure there are more famous valleys!

library cum cafe - I think - I hope - they are thinking of the tendency of councils such as Barnet to shove every public service they can into the one building, in order to save on the electricity bill. This drive has already ruined Burnt Oak library, and more are sure to follow.

boris johnson birthday card - Aaaah!

small funfairs - You've come to the right place, coming to Barnet!

boris johnson ugly - Oh... well, never mind.

Burnt Oak is a Shithole - At last! Some of the most popular search terms drawing people to my blog.

A little more on that last one. To be fair, I always say that while Burnt Oak is not much to look at, it is not a demoralised place. "Alright, as shitholes go," I think, is what I wrote. I have seen this said of Burnt Oak by other people.

Now someone has started a blog, "Fly Tipping in Burnt Oak", with pictures of the flytipping that takes place in this area.

I think this probably has fairly limited appeal, even to people who live in Burnt Oak and want to complain about fly tipping.

But let's see whether, in time, this blogger branches out to treat of other topics.

If the author of this blog wants to get in touch with me, please email publicity@barnettuc.org.uk, which is my Barnet trades council email. Perhaps we can think of some way to tackle the problem of flytipping in Barnet together...

The best manure in Burnt Oak

The ward level detail of the voting in the elections on 3 May is available here (scroll down to Useful downloads).

The Barnet votes for the constituency member on the London Assembly, the contest in which Andrew Dismore beat Brian Coleman, are:

Remember, there is all sorts of other detail on the Excel sheet, eg, how Camden voted, the breakdown of ward votes for the mayoral election, etc. Hours of endless amusement and Excel practice, including basic arithmetic!

Here are the votes and percentages for the ward I live in, Burnt Oak:

Candidate           Vote              Percentage
Coleman CON      360               13.9
Corby UKIP         149                5.8
Dismore LAB       1885              72.9
Poppy GRN          95                 3.7
Richards LD         96                 3.7
TOTAL                2585             100

Obviously, this is one of Dismore's best wards!

I did something I haven't done in a long time before the election, and spent a couple of happy days canvassing and knocking up for the Labour Party. I live in Burnt Oak, but as with most people and the areas they live in, I really only knew the few roads I traverse on the way to the shops or the tube station. I finally got to go around my ward.

Burnt Oak is, almost solidly, one working class estate. Dismore did well almost everywhere throughout his new constituency, Barnet and Camden, but it's no surprise he did particularly well here in Burnt Oak.

I walked around in a team with Dismore on the day of the election. Andrew was dog tired; I wish I had snapped him nodding off in a chair in the house offered by a Labour Party member to organise the day's activities. It would have made a nice foil to the famous picture of the man he defeated, Brian Coleman, sleeping off his lunch at work at the GLA.

As we went around, I gleaned that Andrew Dismore spent almost every Sunday of his time as MP for Hendon visiting his constituency. "It takes four years to knock on every door," he said. I believe he knows that from first-hand experience.

As we walked around, people in the street stopped to say hello. I hope it doesn't sound rude, but Andrew is not the most recognisable of politicians. If people knew him, it's because they knew him - not because of lurid headlines in a newspaper.

Wherever his main home is, Dismore had - mabye still has - a flat in Burnt Oak.

I don't agree with Dismore on all political questions, not at all, but I believe he was a good MP and will be a very good London Assembly member for Barnet and Camden. One thing we can say for sure is that he will in as short a time as feasible know every inch of his rather large estate.

There is an old saying that the best manure is the farmer's boots, which means, obviously, that the best farmer is the one who has inspected every inch of his land and knows what is going on there. I do believe that Dismore will be the best farmer for Barnet and Camden!

The Friday joke... is on me

Q. What's the best dressed woman in Burnt Oak wearing?
A. Pyjamas.

That's a bit rude to women in Burnt Oak, isn't it? But I meant me today. I nipped up to the post office - which has recently crossed the road, there's a joke, a real one, in there somewhere - and halfway realised that I hadn't got out of my pyjamas yet, just flung an old coat on on top. Still, it's dark in the evenings now and I don't think anyone noticed.

Much less cared.

Burnt Oak - alright, as shit-holes go

I can't quite believe this, but in a pub the other night I noticed on the wall a small advert for a play that's starting tonight at the Leicester Square Theatre called "Burnt Oak: Life and Death in London Town" (written by Laurence Lynch, directed by Nathan Osgood). I hope I get to see it. If I do I'll review it, you can be sure!

When people ask me where I live and I say "Burnt Oak" and they look blank, I say "top of the Northern Line, Edgware branch" and describe a tuning fork in the air, attempting to emphasize the westernmost prong. "Oh," they say. Then, if they can be arsed, "What's it like?"

I pause before answering truthfully, "It's a shit-hole." I soften the blow by saying, "But not a demoralised shit-hole." By which time they've usually wandered off. Are you still with me?

Well, I think Burnt Oak, the material fabric, the place, is a shit-hole. It would be hard to conceive of a more ugly built environment, a cankerous main street (Watling Avenue) nestling within a cheerless grid of major arterial roads leading north out of London. As I walk about my neighbourhood, I marvel to myself, "there is nothing beautiful here."

One day I'll tell you why the f**k it is I live here, but not today.

So why isn't it more demoralised? Leaving aside the spate of violent assaults and murders in the neighbourhood recently, I am quite impressed that people here aren't nastier to each other than they are. I hope I'm not being naive. I admit I don't live on Watling Avenue itself, but even there violent events are rare. It has a new bustling lease of life as a centre for grocery shopping.

Some local youth hassled some of the shopkeepers for a while, but I haven't seen any trouble of that type recently. The customers became too thick on the ground, and the callow youth of Burnt Oak finally twigged that they would never scare off blokes who learned their trade in places such as Kabul.

I live between Burnt Oak and the more prosperous Colindale. When I come back late at night, I come to Burnt Oak tube station precisely because it feels safer.

Going to Colindale, I'm worried I'll meet the Colindale Crotch-grabber on quiet Booth Road (that's my name for a man who sexually assaulted women in the area on several occasions - I suspect he was the guy who harassed me a couple of times, though luckily I came to no harm).

Yes, as shit-holes go, Burnt Oak is alright.

Psst! Wanna buy a used street market?

I couldn't help noticing in the Hendon Times today an advert for Watling Market in Burnt Oak. Yes, that's right, a whole six day a week market is up for lease, by the council.

A history on Wikipedia of Burnt Oak says of the market:

In 1936 Watling Market opened with a hundred covered shops and stalls.

Bloody hell, how times change. I've never made it down there when the market is open (Saturday mornings and shopping have never gone together for me) but I've seen it at other times, and it is in a bad way.

If ever an area was in need of some Big Society plus some serious redevelopment money, it's the back of Burnt Oak.

Don't cut our services! Don't privatise our services! No to easyCouncil!

We (trades council and friends) revived our public stalls today. We had three this morning, in Burnt Oak, High Barnet and central Finchley. I think the attitude against the Tory administration has hardened since I last did a stall in Burnt Oak in the spring.

Business was brisk in Burnt Oak. There were four of us personing the stall; we also went up and down the shops in Watling Avenue asking the shopkeepers whether they would display our advert for the lobby of the council meeting on Tuesday 14 September (6-7pm, Hendon Town Hall, NW4 4BG).

We are going to need many more such stalls and mobilising of the residents, encouraging them to DO SOMETHING about what many are unhappy about. People lack confidence that they can make their views heard. I felt more than ever before that whether one enjoys doing such activity or not, it is vitally necessary now. There is no alternative to getting onto the streets, talking to people, and convincing them that unless they actively resist, services will be cut and/or privatised, their living standards will fall, and the area they live in will be degraded. (Burnt Oak, much as I like it, is already no oil painting.)

Knowing this made it a lot easier to motivate myself; actually, it is no harship at all to talk to fellow Barnet residents. I learned some interesting stories of things that are going on in the area, and among the council workforce, since many council workers live in the area.

Next stalls: Saturday 11 and Saturday 18 September, Burnt Oak, High Barnet and central Finchley, from about 10.30 till noon; and also Golders Green tomorrow, and Sunday 12 and Sunday 19 September. If you want to help out or know more, come by the stalls or email info@barnettuc.org.uk.

Never mind the politics

I have read on some blog comments (eg, this one) that Malcolm McLaren was from Burnt Oak, at least, that he attended Orange Hill grammar school. Stone me! Can anyone confirm?

I'm off to Blackpool in a couple of hours for the trades councils conference. As to what is happening in the wider world of politics right now, my only comment is "what he said".

Cappuccino sighted in Burnt Oak

Burnt Oak is not noted for its fine dining opportunities. The cafes on Watling Avenue and Burnt Oak Broadway are alright in their own way. (I will spare you the sordid details of every cup of tea I've ever drunk in one or other of them - since I am not standing for election there is no call for such shameless name-dropping.) But none of them provides the decent coffee and pastry that I have come to expect almost as a human right.

Imagine my delight, then, when as I bustled up the road to Edgware Hospital this morning for my free cholesterol check, I saw a new cafe called "Lalgerois". It boasted "pastries, paninis, coffee, wedding cakes". Behind that eccentric spelling - it should be "l'algerois", non? - I thought, might nestle a north African eatery. I was right!

After a 14-hour fast (I think, the longest I have ever gone without something passing my lips), my appointment with the phlebotomist over, I went in there and fell on a tasty apricot danish and very acceptable cup of strong coffee.

Just opposite Lloyds Motor Spares, Lalgerois has a pleasant salon with tables inside and outside, a really impressive display of cakes, a charming lady serving, and the sound of French hip-hop drifting not too obtrusively from the kitchen.

Added to the shisha garden that has rather incongruously opened in the car-park of the Lansdowne pub, perhaps the northern end of the Edgware Road like the southern will soon have its own "Arab quarter". (Apologies to any Iranians reading, who generally, not always for good reasons, hate for their culture to be mistaken for Arabic.)

I, for one, would be most happy for that.

Dog tracks and frigidaires

I had a drink tonight with a colleague from Barnet trades council. It turns out he grew up in Burnt Oak in the 1950s and 60s. For me this was like striking gold.

I have been thinking lately that Burnt Oak's past was clearly more illustrious than its present. The clues are there in the grand building on the junction of Stag Lane and the Broadway - once a Co-op department store! A department store, in Burnt Oak, I ask you! And in the fact that Burnt Oak once had a cinema - actually, two, it transpires. I knew this from seeing a picture of one of them on Rog T's blog.

Roger is running a great quiz at the moment about the history of Barnet. In the course of this post I will reveal the answer to one of his questions. That can't be helped really and, to be honest, not that many people read this blog - if you are here, your reward is a head start in Roger's quiz!

Back to my friend. Tonight he painted a moving picture of a hidden, substantially lost, history of Burnt Oak. I will find a way to record it less ephemerally than I can here - an oral history project, or even a guided walk: "Working class Burnt Oak" - no, they won't come flocking, but to me and perhaps to a few other people this story is fascinating.

Just a few details that stood out for me:

My friend's mother had no washing machine. A man came around the houses and rented them a washing machine for a couple of hours. He'd wheel it off his van and into their house and come back and collect it later. If they had an extra 9d (9 old pence) to spare, they could also hire a spinner to dry the clothes. His family had no fridge, they kept perishables in their 'larder' in the back garden - a hole dug in the ground!

Every Saturday and Sunday morning a fleet of 8 or 9 coaches would wait outside the Bald Faced Stag pub to take families to the seaside in Essex or Kent for the day. You bought your ticket at one of the local shops.

There were many factories along the Edgware Road, some related to the aircraft industry, some manufacturing domestic goods - there was, for example, a big Frigidaire factory making, you guessed it, fridges.

Most people did not go to central London often; my friend went there once or twice a year. All their entertainment was local: a trip to one of the innumerable cinemas in the area, or to the Golders Green Hippodrome, or to Hendon dog track. London Undergound's sports ground was next to the tube line, and included several football pitches and a running track. There was even a Burnt Oak Labour Club! Halcyon days, indeed.

There were notorious gangs of local kids, including the Burnt Oak mob, who had rumbles with gangs from other parts of London, eg, Canning Town.

And, yes, kids played safely outdoors in the streets at all hours, and everyone knew their neighbours.

I'm really stirred by this picture. It's not that long ago, and it's not some kind of Gothic horror story, where everyone wallows around in Dickensian squalor. But it does seem to me to be a completely lost world.

What has changed? The ethnic make-up of the area has changed, but that doesn't look to me to have been decisive. Most families were white English, but not all. My friend says there were many Irish families living in the area (I knew that already) and some Caribbean families.

As far as I can see, the major change has been the loss of the local jobs, and with them much of the heart of the community. People are more geographically mobile these days, which has its advantages, but it also gives people less stake in their neighbourhood.

Another change that seems to me very important is the level of consumption. I think this is a mixed blessing. It is wonderful that most people today have, almost as a human right, a fridge, a washing machine... But do we all of us need to have a car? And I don't mean does every family need to have a car, I mean does every single member of every family need to have a car?

It's not so much the amount of consumption that is problematic, but the way we consume: at home, in private. The social sphere has lost out badly to private consumption, as public transport has lost out to the car culture. I think we are the worse off for that.

Illustrative of this whole story for me is the fate of the Hendon dog track. Dog racing might seem a pretty lowbrow pursuit, but at least a trip to the dogs was a social event. What replaced Hendon dog track (and several homes, which were compulsorily purchased)?

Brent Cross shopping centre, for heaven's sake! Very exciting in its heyday, the first of its kind, but now the shopping centre is so ubiquitous we don't seem to be able to build a new school without including one in the plans somewhere.

You can argue, I suppose, that people - including my friend's family - needed somewhere to go to buy their new fridges, but I think I would prefer the world we have lost, with its cinemas and dog tracks, sports grounds and weekend coaches to the seaside. Burnt Oak is a sight sorrier for the loss of all this.

It's an ill wind... it certainly is!

A very interesting (not necessarily good) article in the Guardian about a conference to discuss the challenge to local government finances, and the opportunity it provides to innovate, transform service delivery, personalise services, yadda yadda yadda. I can only concur with the first comment on the website:

Cynical old me sees a brand of disaster capitalism there. Excited by the recession? Maybe with an eye to your business, but ...it's having an appalling effect on the lives of the public and service users of all hues.

Your favourite and mine, ex-Barnet council leader Mike Freer tries his tired joke about the joys of personalisation on an audience of "senior council officials, civil servants, policemen [sic], charity leaders, new media experts, directors of private sector outsourcing companies and consultants, and other delegates from a variety of fields":

Building on the experience of personal budgets, which had led older residents to choose to pay for trips to the seaside and dance classes, rather than day centre services, he suggested that residents should decide – sometimes street by street – on the level of provision they required.

I can tell you now, Mike, that we all require a good level of service provision, but only some of us are going to be able to afford to pay for it (and those that can might well resent having to do so, when they are already paying council tax).

With the local papers full of stories about what a mess Burnt Oak is, for example, we have to wonder how it is going to get cleaner - we'll have a whipround shall we? If we can't afford to, it isn't, necessarily, because we don't require or value a pleasant environment.

Trees reach Edgware Road

Barnet council's plan to plant 100 odd trees alongside the Edgware Road around Burnt Oak is going ahead. Hoorah! They are always going on about what a green, leafy borough it is, without addressing the fact that vast swathes of it are in fact horrible and grey.

Read the Times series report here.

Of course, they are not spending Barnet money on it - the money is coming from the Mayor of London.

Back to bed. (The flu-o-meter is showing six days now.)

Redwing regrets choosing UK for winter break

From the RSPB website (I'll take my own picture if he comes back!)

For the past few days a biggish, reddish bird has been flying around the neighbourhood. I have at last identified this as a redwing, a small thrush. These birds live in large numbers in northern parts, including Iceland, Scandanavia and Russia, and fly south for the winter. Hundreds of thousands usually winter in the UK. They must be regretting their choice this year.

They live out in the countryside, and only come into town gardens when there is snow lying on the fields. That explains my recent visitor. He will only get a drink of water and a bath here, I'm afraid. I keep the birdbath going all year round, but I don't feed the birds.

To feed birds properly is a responsible job, and I've read that you have to be reliable, or birds waste precious energy turning up for a meal when there is nothing being served. Any visitors here are welcome to scratch around in the leaves for insects - I leave the garden messy until the spring.

I do like my birds, I have to admit. I am not a fanatical twitcher, but I have identified 22 species in the garden. (The redwing made it 22.) This is not a bad haul, I think, given it's Colindale/Burnt Oak. I hope we don't lose any more green space around here, though, or it will soon not be worth our winter visitors' journey.

The inevitable Barnet-in-the-snow-pictures

Everybody's doing it, and why not? It only happens once every 30 years, apparently, that we get this much snow. I couldn't resist building a snow cat in the garden today (too lazy to make a snow man), and I feel like sharing some snowy snaps taken yesterday and today around Burnt Oak and Edgware.

I could have included any number of shitty-looking, half- or ungritted pavements and roads, because I saw many today, with people sliding about all over them, but today I am on a Barnet-can-look-quite-nice-in-the-snow tip.

Transition Burnt Oak? Why not!

In inverse proportion, it seems, as world leaders fail to act against catastrophic climate change, Transition Town mania is gripping the UK. I recently joined Transition Belsize - I can get there on the Northern Line. Tonight in the foyer of Kilburn's Tricycle Theatre I met some people well on their way to founding Transition Brent.

This movement began in the more likely setting of Totnes, Devon and is an increasingly global movement. You can find out more about Transition Towns (and villages/cities/forests/islands) here.

The basic idea is:

A Transition Initiative is a community... working together to look Peak Oil [the end of cheap oil] and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question:

"for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?"

For an idea of what a Transition Initiative does, take a look at Transition Belsize's meetup page.

You won't be surprised to learn that this is a very middle-class movement. This is a strength - it is well-resourced. But it raises the question of how far this movement can reach into the wider population, therefore, of how much effect it can have. Could there ever be a Transition Burnt Oak, for example? For it really to grow, I think this movement will have to address what environmentalists tend to call 'social justice issues' - what I call, class issues!

The main item of local news in Kent where I've been for a week is the government's decision not to build a new nuclear power station (they have two already!) at Dungeness, largely for environmental reasons: it's a special habitat for wildlife. Most of the local people are clamouring for a new nuclear power station to be built in the area because it will mean jobs. It's a topsy-turvy world, all right.

I am involved with a campaign called Workers' Climate Action. It champions the far from revolutionary idea that we need a "just" transition to a low-carbon economy. That is, a transition which recognises the fundamental fact that most people in this society need to work in order to live. Dismantling polluting industries should go hand in hand with creating new 'green' jobs, and ordinary working-class people should have control over the process.

Otherwise, it just isn't going to happen!

So maybe Burnt Oak is not ready to be a Transition Town just yet, but just maybe it is ready to be a Just Transition Town.