SuperCroydon

First published in ‘The Coelacanth Journal: No. 3: The Moderns’ – Summer 2009

The Sound of Things to Come

I

I woke to banging, banging, banging and a dog’s whimpering half-howl.

Emerging from a dream set in a cellar lokal called the Alexander Casino in Christopher Isherwood’s 1930s Berlin, I was – for a while – in my bed in Croydon. I looked up to where the window and the orange glow of the streetlamp should be and there was a patch of half darkness in its place. Sitting up, the distant bangs floated around, stopped for a moment, and then picked up, double time, like a machine-gun rat-a-tat. A second dog echoed a whimpering response.

Looking to the right, I saw a long window where a window shouldn’t be in the grey-blue morning twilight. To the right of the window, and a little lower, in the corner of the room, a small shrine to Jesus and Ganesh twinkled and flickered in the reddish haze of a single incense stick, almost burnt to its end. They seemed happy neighbours, Jesus and Ganesh; Christ with his gruesome sacred heart glowing and beating, and Ganesh with small eyes concentrating and large ears listening to the floating bangs.

His trunk twisted and contorted in time to the drums as they continued their distant rhythmic pounding and my suburban bedroom warped and weirdly wobbled.

On the yellowy pine desk to my left, a big, ugly, dusty, LG Flatron PC monitor – purchased in 2001 from PC World on the Purley Way – melted into the greyness of a simple plastered wall; its flat dark screen turning in to a frameless mirror. The monitor’s tangle of cream-coloured cables strung themselves out and transformed themselves in to a thin metal chain. The chain, fixed to the back of the mirror, hung tight over a small black nail that had been crudely hammered in to the wall.

In front of me, beyond the foothills of my sheet-covered knees and feet, my blonde and white laminate Ikea wardrobe pulsed in time to the drums outside and became a series of heavy vertical shadows belonging to a full-length curtain, spanning the early morning gloom of the room.

High up to my left, on a disappearing shelving system, a 1/43 scale Burago Fiat Cinquecento – in a red, silver and yellow cardboard box – stretched and extruded itself in to a wooden, white-painted doorframe. To its right, a box set of three dark blue WH Smith photograph albums labelled ‘Crystal Palace Park Dinosaurs’, ‘Florence’ and ‘Slyboots’ became a plastic light switch. On and around the switch there were slight shimmers of bluish light reflecting off of small fingerprint traces of grease.

Behind my head, the metal frame of my hospital-style bed-head combined and flattened in to a cold stone window ledge. Awkwardly twisting my head around, I looked at the series of objects on the window ledge. A green plastic comb, a can of Jungle Formula insect repellent, a hair clip, a yellow pencil with a red rubber at the end, two small coins and a copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The book had been soaked in Kingfisher and Gin the day before, and smelt yeasty – like a papery bread. Inside the book, Miss Brodie’s gentle pedagogic havoc was damp with alcohol and Maharastran night air. The pages had distorted in to waves of buckled yellow. Tiny insects flitted about the choux pastry edges of the Penguin Modern Classic and skipped across the ruddy cheeks of the two 1930s schoolgirls on the book’s rippled cover. The miniature midges’ syncopated movements mimicked the rhythms floating in through the window from outside. Their tiny, delicate, flecky legs danced.

I wasn’t at home, I sleepily realized. My suburban flat had faded in to a Maharastran guesthouse just as seamlessly as the Alexander Casino had faded in to Croydon.

The drumming continued. Just behind it I could just make out something that sounded like a flute or recorder playing jazzy flurries of notes. The flurries faded in and out, carried by cold morning breezes and drowned out by the spasmodic percussion and the sound of a cock crowing.

Somewhere outside, below the window, footsteps crunched towards the front yard. A pause, followed by the rhythmic squeak, squeak, squeak of a pump being pulled and flushes of water ringing into a metal bucket. I could hear the bracelets on the woman’s arm chink and jangle as she pumped. The tone of the rings went higher with each flush, and I could almost gauge the size of the bucket and guess when it was full. Then a pause, before the same footsteps crunched back past my window and up the lane behind the guesthouse.

Now, a long, low honk sounded across the valley, like the cry of a gigantic whale pushed through an alpine horn. I imagined the ancient beast stranded at the top of one of the mountains surrounding the village, covered in barnacles of jungle vegetation; jabbering monkeys picking at its thick skin. The whale’s deep long call sounded again, shaking the surrounding trees and launching flocks of squarking birds in to the dark early morning sky. The whale honk also seemed to have shaken the drummers too, and they started to attack their skins with an extra burst of furious energy. I wondered whether they were at the top of the mountain too, standing in a big circle around the whale.

The drums and flute-flurries were now accompanied by the single bong of a bell, followed by muffled bursts of strings playing exotic arpeggios and a high female voice singing quietly but piercingly, distorted through crackling electric amplification. The strings and singing lasted a few moments and then stopped, repeating again every half a minute or so.

I ran my hand over the warm range of ripples in the sheets beside me and looked at the slight indentation in the pillow next to mine. At the end of the bed, a dark blue towel was heaped in a gentle mountain. Down to the left, a small puddle and a series of feet-shape pools led across the tiled floor, beyond the curtain, to the wet room. The showerhead dripped into a plastic bucket. I touched the towel with my big toe and felt that it was damp.

Somewhere beyond the floating percussion, flute flurries, squawks, pips and dog whines, I could hear the distant hum and rush of a jet plane flying overhead, maybe on the last leg of a long flight from London to Mumbai. Up there, a passenger sank back in to his economy class chair, head in a limp pillow, blindfold and headphones on, blanket pulled up to his neck, mind fuzzy and mouth sweet from a recent Bloody Mary. Senses dulled, his puffy pink fingers fidgeted and fumbled around in a little silver bag of honey-roasted peanuts as he listened to ‘Perfect Symmetry’ by Keane for the second time in a row.

Down below, the drums and dogs had stopped and had been replaced with a Spem in alium of avian chips and chirps and twitters. These gradually rose from the trees around the village, acquiring layer upon layer of delicate new sound as the sky grew warmer and lighter.

I imagined the morning chorus following the sun around the world like a ripple of sound as I began to drift back to sleep. A sonic Mexican wave of musical cheeps and chatters and twits accompanied me back to the 1930s and the Alexander Casino.

‘I am a Miner Bird,’ I whispered to the bar man.

Shorter version published in BD magazine, 13th November 2009

“The personal feeling and native instinct of me had been fastened irrevocably…under the low red roofs of Croydon…by the cress set rivulets in which the sand danced, and the minnows darted above the springs of Wandel.”

One hundred and fourteen years after Ruskin recalled his formative years, I’m getting off a tram close to those Wandle springs in Croydon’s Old Town, on my way to see a selection of pieces from Croydon Council’s Art Collection at a new exhibition at the Museum of Croydon.

First wandering up Church Street, past the Old Palace, London Piercing Clinic and the Chinese Supermarket, I then negotiate my way through the mobile phone covers, fruit, veg and bustle of Surrey Street Market. Ruskin’s beloved low red roofs are still there, but big-broad-shouldered regeneration projects under construction muscle in to view and hint at an ongoing story of Croydonian ambition.

The exhibition ‘Scene Unseen’ is in the Croydon Clocktower complex. Attached to the 1890s Town Hall, the Clocktower – completed in 1993 – houses one of the UK’s best libraries, the David Lean Arts Cinema, a permanent collection of Chinese pottery and ceramics and the FAT-designed Museum of Croydon. However, despite brimming with brilliant stuff, most of the Clocktower’s wonderful secrets remain unseen, even to many Croydonians.

Scene Unseen aims to reveal some of Croydon’s best-kept secrets. Croydon Council owns over 2000 artworks, gathered since 1890, when pieces were acquired to decorate the new Town Hall. This big Victorian civic investment marked the birth of the County Borough of Croydon; a significant event in the story of the gradual decline in power of Croydon’s Lords of the Manor – the Archbishops of Canterbury – who had their summer seat here.

The exhibition puts a small selection of those 2000 works on public display for the first time since 1988. This effort to make the public’s collection public is to be applauded. These are the people of Croydon’s works of art, on display for free, in a wonderful civic facility.

The pieces range from local scenes by local artists that satisfy local interest, to pieces of international significance by the likes of Max Ernst. Some of the pieces – and the collection as a whole – manage to combine the best of both worlds; revealing truly universal value through the particularly local.

The exhibition is small and simple, arranged over two rooms. The curation here is not world changing and does not aim to challenge. The pieces are simply hung and arranged in to the themes of Landscape, Croydon at War, Buildings, People and Abstract Art. However, the work begins to reveal stronger, more sophisticated themes, the closer one looks and the more one remembers to place the collection in its context.

The majority of the work documents a change in landscape that is particular to Croydon, but which will resonate with any visitor. Carefully reading the series of paintings, drawings, etchings and prints, Croydon becomes a unique microcosm of English social history and urbanism; from medieval feudalism, to post war ‘never-had-it-so-good’ space race pop. The English Everytown. Representative, but unlike anywhere else.

Produced in 1946, ‘Croydon Courageous’ by artist Norman Partridge shows crowds of people being rescued from Croydon bomb sites, with the Parish Church in the centre horizon and those familiar low red roofs present, but blown to bits. Despite being very particular to Croydon, the work manages to perfectly represent the common cultural image of wartime Britain.

Meanwhile, the portrait of black Croydon composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor by Stanmore Gibbs and two arresting pieces by Bengali mystic, writer, composer and social reformer, Rabindranath Tagore, reveal the complexities of Britain’s attitude to race and the wider implications of Empire. Tagore rejected his knighthood in 1919 as a protest against the Jalianwalabag Massacre.

In the 1960s – acting with what appears to be remarkable civic foresight – Croydon Council’s Education Department collected a series of pieces by contemporary artists that constitute the real surprise of the show. On display here are pieces by Allen Jones and Bridget Riley – both of whom taught at Croydon’s Art School – along with a delicious screenprint by Patrick Caulfield and works by Henry Moore, John Hoyland and Max Ernst. As a Croydon resident, I feel quite chuffed that I own these.

Filling the galleries with the exuberant sounds of Surrey Harmony Barber Shop Choir and the North Wood Morris, a film made by contemporary students of Croydon College Room aims to give the show a contemporary context and reveal a thriving local creative scene. It focuses on groups who continue the legacy of the Croydon Art Society, which is apparently the oldest art society in England. But one suspects that far more interesting creative activity is happening in the suburb that inspired the punk aesthetic and the dub-step sound.

So, in order to make the most of this small exhibition, to contextualize Everytown, and to seek the real Scene Unseen, I suggest you wander the streets of Croydon. Push your way through Surrey Street Market, explore the Whitgift Centre, tram-whizz past the Ikea Chimneys on Purley Way and loop around Croydon’s Old and New Towns. Climb to the top of a multi-storey car park and view the low red roofs, concrete office blocks, out-of-town sheds and suburban treetops. Recall Ruskin and listen to the punky echoes in Malcolm McClaren:

“Croydon will always be remembered [for the] rites of passage of my life – the constant roaming at night through its market streets and thereafter navigating those deep leafy suburbs into the countryside beyond – spending hours looking out of Croydon’s art school windows observing and then struggling to come to terms with these giant triffids of buildings that rise up and spread themselves all along East Croydon’s path, using charcoal pencil and anything close to hand, I drew and drew and drew”.

Welcome to SuperCroydon Tour: Sunday 20th September 2009

A walk around England’s Alphaville via its seven hills.

First published in ‘The Coelacanth Journal: No. 1: The Order of Things’ – Summer 2008

The Seven Hills of Croydon

1. Dull-useful Information

Our guide loves tours.

His particular fascination began with a little book he owns titled ‘Walks in Rome’ written by Augustus John Cuthbert Hare and edited by St. Clair Baddeley.

Published in 1905, his 17^th Edition copy is pocket-sized in two of its dimensions. In its third dimension it would require a particularly generous Edwardian pocket, being over an inch and a half thick. It has a black cover with narrow stripes in imperial red at the top and bottom. The delicately thin edges of the pages are also coloured red, giving the thickness of the book the pink-red sheen of a slab of salmon steak. On the front is a gold debossed scene of the ruined Temples of Vespasian and Saturn in the Roman Forum.

Our guide had originally found a 1^st Edition copy of ‘Walks in Rome’ in an old library in 1996, immediately attracted to its tiny dense type-face, its eccentric academic obscurity and its series of wispily delicate fold-out maps and plans. That year, he borrowed it from the library, and took it on a trip to Rome to test its impracticality and found it almost completely useless as a conventional guide book. As well as the book being obscure and delicate and hard to read, the Rome of Augustus John Cuthbert Hare had gone. It had been disfigured by the 20^th Century with its fascist typewriters, tacky tourism and autostrade packed with Fiat Cinquecenti.

On his return, the 1^st Edition copy went back to the library.

A year later, our guide discovered a 17^th Edition copy of the same book amongst piles of 1980’s Delia Smith cook books and My Little Pony Annuals in a junkshop close to the old Beejam in West Wickham and purchased it for £5.

Despite being a 17^th Edition rather than a 1^st Edition, apparently this West Wickham junkshop volume is superior to the library volume because of a series of ink and pencil notations on its pages. For instance, at the top of the bastard title page, the original owner of the book has signed their name “Emily S. Machell Smith” in blue ink and with an exquisitely Edwardian hand. At the bottom of the same page, a little note reads: “To my “Brave Comrade” with much love from Kathleen. Jan: 1906…”

These loving little notes and a series of careful underlinings and jottings made throughout by brave Emily and Kathleen seem to our guide to imbue the book with distant preciousness and almost magical powers. It has a Redy-Brek glow.

He has not ever read the whole of ‘Walks in Rome’ – it is not that kind of book – but has read bits and pieces and passages; mainly around Emily’s feint blue pencil notations and careful underlinings. According to him, these little marks focus the reader’s attention. They provide a useful edit of the book’s dense impenetrability and reveal something clear about Augustus and Emily. They are Emily pointing the way – and making a point – with the sharp end of a blue pencil.

In Hare’s introduction, Emily has marked two passages in particular in blue and drawn them to our attention. The first one:

“There is one point which cannot be sufficiently impressed upon those who wish to take away more than a mere surface impression of Rome; it is, never to see too much; never try to ‘do’ Rome.”

And the second one:

“Better by far to leave half the ruins and nine-tenths of the churches unseen, and to see well the rest; to see them not once, but again and often again; to watch them, to live with them, to love them, till they have become part of life and life’s recollections.”

In Chapter 1 of Augustus Hare’s book there is a section sub-titled ‘Dull-Useful Information’. This consists of a directory of useful places and addresses; opening times and dates; warnings and tips. Practical things are there like the times of church services, the location of bicycle hire places and the whereabouts of Sick Nurses. The following oddments are underlined and asterisked by Emily:

Tea-rooms

English churches

Church music

Telegraph Offices

Homoeopathic Physicians

Chemists

Money Changers

Shops selling Roman Pearls, Roman Ribbons and Shawls

Grocers (also for Oil and Wood, &c)

The English Dairy

Significant Churches, Palaces and Villas (with a note in the margins reading ‘Been to those marked’)

A series of organised tours and ‘courses’ ideal for ‘invalids without carriages of their own’

Dates of notable festivals

On a clear page in the back of the book, Emily has made a note of the itinerary for her trip in the same blue pencil, covering dates from February 4^th to February 11^th 1906. Our guide has tried, but cannot read all of the handwriting. However, he has worked out that on Tuesday 6^th February, Emily visited the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, the largest church in Rome. On Wednesday 7^th February she made a trip to the Barbarini Palace and apparently met someone there with the name ‘Beatrice Bonci’.

On Thursday 8^th February 1906, the day of a British General Election in which she would have had no vote, Emily chose instead to take in the Renaissance frescos of the ‘Stanze di Raffaello’. She also visited St Peter’s.

On Friday 9^th February she saw the Villa Borghese, on Saturday the church of San Pietro in Montorio and on Sunday 11^th February she made a trip to the Villa Farnesina.

It seems that Emily preferred churches and palaces to Roman ruins.

A feint note towards the back of ‘Walks in Rome’ reveals that Emily stayed at the ‘Hotel Eden’ on Via Ludovisi. Still there, close to the Villa Medici and the Spanish Steps, it is now a luxury 5 star hotel and ‘host to royalty, aristocrats, leaders and celebrities from the world over’.

“Set in the heart of the Eternal City of Rome, Hotel Eden allows guests to discover the cultural allure of Rome. The nearby attractions—Via Veneto, the Spanish Steps, and Via Condotti—are just a short walk from the hotel’s doorstep, and the hotel itself overlooks the seven historic hills of Rome. Hotel Eden provides the perfect cultural ambiance to immerse oneself in the sights, tastes, and sounds of this enchanting city.”

Our guide imagines Emily S.Machell Smith in the Hotel Eden on the morning of the 4^th February 1906, looking up from Augustus Hare’s dense, academic and eccentric tome to gaze over the seven historic hills of Rome, before devising her February 1906 itinerary. In his imagination she’s something like Helena Bonham-Carter’s Lucy Honeychurch.

He looks up past a pile of un-ironed washing at the Ikea bookshelf in Croydon that is the current home of Emily’s copy of ‘Walks in Rome’. He tries to imagine Helena Bonham-Carter’s Lucy Honeychurch in the same context.

“Cup of tea?” he asks her.

She looks around the room for a moment, eyes resting first on a cream battery-operated megaphone and then a two-headed plastic dinosaur, and then shakes her head. “Um…No, thanks”.

“Coffee? I’ve run out of proper coffee, but…”

“No. Thanks.”

“Pressed apple and mango juice?”

She shakes her head.

For the majority of the time since he purchased the little black book in 1997, it has stayed on that Ikea bookshelf in his living room. He has pulled it down maybe a dozen times to show guests or to examine for half an hour whilst devising his own tours, carefully unfolding its delicate maps before carefully folding them up again. Once or twice he has taken it on a walk around Croydon. Once he took it to Kensington. Another time he took it to Plaistow. Always accompanied by Kathleen, Emily and Augustus. Lucy Honeychurch usually declines.

For years he has wondered about distant and mysterious Emily and Kathleen. Who were they?

It occurred to him last week that these days it might not be that hard at all to find out exactly who they were.

A five minute Google and Kathleen becomes Kathleen Machell-Smith, whilst Emily turns in to Kathleen Machell-Smith’s elderly mother, perhaps explaining her winter trip to seek out Mediterranean warmth, Homoeopathic Physicians and Roman Chemists.

More Maggie Smith than Helena Bonham-Carter.

A bit more of a Google-delve and Kathleen Machell-Smith is now the mother of the novelist Christopher Isherwood, and along with her husband Frank Bradshaw-Isherwood, the subject of his 1971 book ‘Kathleen and Frank’.

Carried away with lazy Yahoo, it turns out that Augustus John Cuthbert Hare – author of numerous weird historical guidebooks and eccentric biographies – was born in Rome in 1834 but lived for most of his life at Holmhurst St Mary’s near Battle in East Sussex where, coincidentally, our guide’s parents have a static holiday caravan.

On our guide’s Ikea bookshelf, Augustus, Kathleen and Emily’s ‘Walks in Rome’ is squeezed in-between a local history book called ‘Croydon From Above’ and a glossy, A3 special supplement of Blueprint Magazine from 1993 entitled ‘Croydon the Future’. These three publications have been rubbing up against each other for over ten years. Edwardian ladies have been climbing through dusty salmon-pink-edged pages to explore empty 1960s concrete tower blocks; Crystal Palace FC have moved from Selhurst Park, through glossy stapled pages, to share the Coliseum with gladiators and take part in exciting red-and-blue-striped mock sea battles to chants of ‘Eagles!’.

On page 16 of the Blueprint special supplement, one of a series of fantastical architectural speculations likens Croydon’s seven multi storey car parks to the seven hills, explicitly inviting our guide to see Rome in Croydon.

2. The Vacant City

Croydon is a ‘big, brash and broad-shouldered’ 20^th Century idea-city with ancient roots. But no one lives there. It is pumped up and massive, but is also empty. It is vacant and full. The town centre, to our guide, is a picturesque landscape of the imagination. If he knew no better, its disconnected urban fabric could hint at a glorious past. Was this a capital of a vast transpontine state? A centre of world religious significance? The seat of some great English Czar? A great land-locked port with connections to Bombay, Shanghai and Alexandria? The film set for a Merchant-Ivory production?

Our guide asks that we seek out some of the old 18^th and 19^th Century paintings of the Roman Forum and look for Croydon in them. Pastoral scenes in oil by Giovanni Paolo Pannini or ones like Claude Lorrain’s ‘Campo Vaccino’ show a great vacant city. A beautifully broken and empty husk that is also fecundly full, with stubbly cloaked shepherds standing chatting, grazing their animals next to crumbling and overgrown triumphal arches.

“You see? Now, look for Rome in Croydon”.

Well, Central Croydon’s triumphal arch is called the ‘Arnhem Gate’. It is a great peculiar crumbling concrete gateway next to Croydon College, with a grand set of steps leading up to it. Walk through the archway and the route leads nowhere. You are confronted with a large concrete wall, a multi-storey car park’s access bridge, overgrown paving slabs and a deep railway cutting. Skateboarders rattle around it and up and down DIY ramps made from bits of old concrete and bits of old Arnhem Gate. It is as if this grand bland suburban monument was always there, and the railway and College and car park grew around it piecemeal over time. Perhaps there was once a grand avenue leading from the Arnhem Gate east towards Kent and west towards the Old Palace, River Wandle and Sutton.

What does the ‘Croydon Gate’ in Arnhem look like though? Is there one?

Elsewhere in Croydon, epic eight-lane roads are cut off and lead nowhere, suggestive of either an incomplete grand projet, or a grand projet that has been eroded, edited and compromised over time. Great towers sit empty, filled with sculptures of old stacked-up office furniture. A large vacant site next to East Croydon station contains mounds of rubble, bits of roadways, Claude Lorrain overgrowth and the Warehouse Theatre.

From Chapter 1 of ‘Walks in Rome’ – in the section sub-titled ‘Dull-Useful Information’ – we learn that “The Population of Rome in 1897 was 489,965; in 1850, 170,824; in 1513, 40,000, and in the time of Hadrian, over a million.” Today, Rome’s population is nearly 3 million.

The gap between the ruinous fullness of that pastoral 40,000 in 1513, the distant emptiness of Hadrian’s Imperial million and the relative irrelevance of today’s population is beautiful. It represents an eternal filling up and emptying out, the prime value of which is to challenge, reflect and form our values.

Dull-Useful Croydon is London’s most populous borough. It has always had a pumped up status because of its roads and canals and railways and its ancient summer seat of the Archbishops of Canterbury, Lords of the Croydon Manor. However, despite the borough housing over 350,000 people, the big-scale urban downtown of Croydon – the very thing that expresses its fullness – is empty. Only around 4,000 people live in its commercial concrete heart. The once densely populated medieval Old Town is now filled with bargain shops and a multiplex cinema. An ancient residential constant can be found in the forty elderly people who have lived in the Whitgift Almshouses since 1599.

Croydon’s full emptiness – its perceived bigness and actual smallness – is now inspiring the creation of radical new visions to really fill it up. Its connections to London and Gatwick and Greater Europe via St Pancras International make it a 21^st Century buzz-city in the making. Forget backwards Eco-towns, this is already the transpontine capital city of the imagination. Schemes for crops of fifty storey villages in the sky – housing thousands of new Croydonians – imagine it eternally transformed in to a positively congested and intensely delirious city of the future.

3. Delirious New Croydon

“Rather than cheering Croydon with a sugar coating of design to its grim multi-slabs of car park, this proposal takes inspiration from the foundation of Rome and pumps up seven of them to make a greener, more contemporary polis. Reclothed as seven hills, they house the sort of cultures Londoners take for granted and Croydoners usually do without: Wellesely is matched to the ICA; Wandle to Heaven; Dingwall to the Ministry of Sound; Surrey to Portobello; Fairfield to the Comedy Store; Lansdowne to Sadlers Wells; Drummond to Holmes Place.

This new Croydon makes its desires apparent in the landscape. Where better to build signs of new times than over the old ones?…”

In 1993 our guide went on a secondary school trip to the Architecture Foundation’s ‘Croydon the Future’ exhibition. Next to the Fairfield Halls, inside a space-aged Future Systems tent that blew away, there were proposals by Branson Coates to turn the seven half redundant concrete multi-storey car parks of central Croydon in to seven culture hills.

Fifteen years later and there are still seven multi storey car parks in Croydon. They are even more redundant than before, in these days of tram-links and highly priced petrol. Despite Clarkson. They are amazingly beautiful in their continued unfashionable-ness and uncultured potential.

Every September for the past four years, our guide has been leading people on ‘Walks in Croydon’ via the flat tops and urine-soaked stairs of these seven man-made hills. Instead of Augustus John Cuthbert Hare’s Aventine, Caelian, Capitoline, Esquiline, Palatine, Quirinal and Viminal, this tour takes in Croydon via Wellesley Road, Wandle, Dingwall Road, Surrey Street, Fairfield, Lansdowne Road and Centrale.

The seven car parks are perfectly arranged in a circuit around the suburban city’s centre. They are equally spaced and publicly accessible. They provide a range of ways up and through them via stairs, lifts and ramps and their landscaped open plateau tops offer rare and beautiful city panoramas.

Focussing again on preparing for another September’s seven hills tour, our guide has a flick through Augustus’ and Emily’s little book before writing a Dull-Useful summary of Croydon’s seven hills on a sheet of A4 paper:

“Allders: Serves Allders of Croydon, third largest department store in Britain. This hill sits amongst a crop of Alphaville tower blocks and allows the visitor a rare perspective. Akin to being inside a three-dimensional black, grey and white Bridget Riley painting. Close to the art deco Electricity Showrooms, the air raid shelter of which had a revolving electric dance floor.

Dingwall: Perfect views across ‘Mini Manhattan’ and the East Croydon Gateway Site, with its Claude Lorraine landscape of crumbling rubble piles, dilapidated warehouse buildings and scrubby overgrowth. Note Richard Seifert’s ‘Thrupenny Bit’ building in the distance and his remarkable cantilevered entrance canopy to Corinthian House. Also see the towers of Crystal Palace – adjacent to Paxton’s ruins – and the floodlights of Selhurst Park to the north.

Whitgift: Here, perch above the epic Wellesley Road, Croydon’s great eight-lane imperial boulevard. See thousands of people arrive from all over the world every day via the great port of Lunar House. Imagine delirious Alsopian visions for hanging gardens, uncovered rivers and colourful villages in the sky.

Le Massif Centrale: Built on the site of Drummond hill, this is Croydon’s most populated hill, busy with House of Fraser shoppers. Views are afforded out towards the ruins of Croydon-B power station (now Ikea), the location for Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’. Also, see Wembley’s arch in the distance.

Surrey Street: Listen to the sounds of the ancient street market, London’s oldest. The Venetian Palace directly to the south is a pumping station extracting water from one of the sources of the River Wandle. Take in views across medieval rooftops and beetroot boilers.

Wandle: A vast empty hillside on the edge of the city. Views across an epic curving vehicular viaduct that spans a valley-gap in the North Downs, locating the River Bourne and the London to Brighton Road. Observe that asphalt lumps on the plateau have melted in to obscene shapes.

College: Good views of the Arnhem Gate and the Chocolate Tower. Located in a place of great pop-cultural significance. Associated with the Beatles, the Pistols, David Bowie, the Damned, Bridget Riley, the Banshees, McLean, MacLaren, Jamie Reid, walnut fairs and a world centre for crooked grinds and ollies.”

Finished for now, our guide puts down his pen, folds up his A4 summary and puts it in his jacket pocket. Emily, Kathleen and Augustus disappear. He squeezes ‘Walks in Rome’ back in between ‘Croydon From Above’ and ‘Croydon the Future’ and turns out the angle-poise lamp clamped to his Ikea bookshelf.

Surrey Street and the Fruity Market Triangle

Leaving his Fiat Cinquecento in the Ikea car park, our guide takes his friends on a tram to central Croydon. They get off the tram at Wellesely Road and wander past Greggs and Office Angels towards George Street.

A minute or so later they find themselves in the middle of Croydon town centre. They are standing on top of Crown Hill, close to the Hospital of Holy Trinity, the almshouses established by Archbishop Whitgift. For a moment our guide considers how remarkable it is that these flinty old buildings have been in continuous service as a home for the elderly for over 400 years. A tram clangs past, across Crown Hill and down Church Street, past KFC and towards the tower of the Parish Church.

They stand with their backs to the Almshouses and look south west at a lump of stuff. Tall 1880s red-brick fancy facades, binge-drink bars, a black and cream curved Deco corner and a big dumb 1990s Vue Multiplex with a big dumb roof. This lump of stuff occupies a large triangle of land right in the middle of the town, on the side of a long hill which gives way to the lower ground and lower roofs of old Croydon and the springs of the Wandle.

“Close your eyes and watch this”, he says.

Our guide closes his eyes too and then slowly begins to erase the massive triangular extrusion of bulk. He deletes bricks, cinema screens, Tiger Tiger, Nando’s and squeaky undercroft service yards one by one. He removes pavement drinking areas with outdoor heaters and a Jessops bargain camera shop. He rubs out the longest holographic display in Europe and scratches out that big dumb roof with its Death Star landscape of rooftop plant rooms, vents and galvanized service walkways.

When all the stuff has been erased, what’s left is a large triangular open space.

“Um, that was actually quite impressive” says J.

“Yes, quite…but what are we looking at?” asks K “Should I open my eyes?”

“That is the ancient market place of Croydon”, he replies “And no. Keep your eyes closed!”

Now our guide imagines it medieval. Muddy and smoky with its perimeter defined by a ramshackle of timber, wattle and daub constructions rather than the Yates Wine Lodge, Iceland supermarket and 1960s shopping arcade that have taken their place. He imagines it busy with mild and nobly people and beasts. Busy with all kinds of exchange. A dirty, noisy, bustle. Brown and yellow and red and damp and muddy. Like a Breugel.

His feet squelching in imaginary mud and straw, our guide then watches the triangle being filled up again; fast-forwarding through the centuries. A flickering stop frame animation. Over time the market triangle becomes home to more and more permanent stalls, then to make-shift shacks, then to crooked brick and timber slums packed full of people, then to 1880s civic fanciness and department stores, then to slick 1990s cinemas, bars and fitness centres, until finally he’s back in 2008 again and only the western edge of the market remains as a fragment of the medieval market triangle. It is called Surrey Street and it is London’s oldest street market.

If Purley Way is Croydon’s 21st Century, non-place market-place, then Surrey Street is where you will find its good old fashion market-place, packed full of Genus Loci goodness and the ghosts of centuries’ worth of human exchange.

Today, there’s a market on Surrey Street every day except Sunday. It must be one of Greater London’s hidden gems (or one of Greater Surrey’s hidden gems – depending on which way you look at it). It is untouched by TV chefs and three-wheeler buggies. You will find few ponces here.

The faces of the market traders at the northern end of the market are as English and mild and nobly as the fruit and veg on their stalls – and the same faces go back dozens of generations. They have kept out the stalls selling ciabatta, soft cheeses, olives, dried peppers and other such exotic yuppie goods. They’ve left that to the French and Italian markets on North End. But they have half opened the door to mobile phone covers, batteries, Chinese veg and jerk chicken.

As a summer seat of the Archbishops of Canterbury, Croydon was always an important place, and its Archbishops – living in the Old Palace a spud’s throw from Surrey Street – have had a huge influence on the place. In 1276 Archbishop Kilwardby got a Charter from Edward I to enable him to collect tolls from a Wednesday market and an annual nine-day fair in June, which makes Surrey Street the remnants of the oldest street market in London.

A second charter, for a Thursday market, and a three-day fair, 20th – 22nd September, was issued in 1314; and a third, for a Saturday market, and a one-day fair on 24 June, in about 1343. Apparently when the Archbishop’s officials turned up to collect the tolls in 1344, they were violently assaulted, ‘so that their life was despaired of’.

Along with those medieval brusings, the football riots that happened around central Croydon in 2004, the drunken puking and fighting that happens on its streets after weekend dancing and binging, and the stories of Surrey Street barrow-boys beating up long-haired students in the 1980s reveal the violent streak that runs beneath Surrey Street’s cobbled surface; an angry stream that mingles with the gentler Wandle springs and rivulets and the blood and bones of beasts from the ancient meat markets.

Having been gradually filled in with a ramshackle of buildings, by the 19th Century the whole market triangle was crammed with a tight network of narrow streets and alleys. In 1861 the population within the triangle was nearly 600, with an average of more than 11 people living in each small house. Many of the buildings were lodging houses, each with an average of 24 lodgers. Apparently some of the better conducted premises were run by Italians and occupied by Italian organ grinders who entertained the people of Croydon with their little monkeys and all the latest Victorian pop songs.

Croydon’s organ grinders would hire pianos and organs from Italian manufacturers in London and replace the music with popular new tunes every 6 months or so. After a few years of grinding out pop on the streets of Croydon they would return to Italy relatively wealthy men.

Many prostitutes also lived and traded in the market triangle at that time, adding to the impression of a busy, sleazy, exotic, Hogarthian slum. The centre of all kinds of exchange.

Recently, upstanding Croydonians have expressed disgust about the former ‘For Your Eyes Only’ lap-dancing club at the end of Surrey Street and its replacement: the ‘Larry Flynt Hustler Strip Club’. However, these uses seem to fit well with the ancient character of the market Triangle. Surrey Street’s contemporary market can only hint at the market triangle’s former fruitiness though; the extent and variety of exchange that have taken place there and the richness of experience that it has offered over the years.

Along with the cheap lodgings, painted ladies and fancy Italian organ grinders, there was once a big ‘Fleshe-markett’, a beast market, a fish market on Middle Street, a dairy market, a livestock market and a corn market within the market triangle.

The corn market was housed in a purpose built hall on the High Street known as the ‘Market House’ which doubled up as Croydon’s Town Hall. It was considered the most important corn market south of the Thames. Daniel Defoe, in the 1720s, described Croydon as ‘a great Corn-Market, but chiefly for Oats and Oatmeal, all for London still’. The building was rebuilt in 1809 as the ‘Town Hall’, although the large open ground floor was still primarily used for the corn market. This hall was also cleared and converted in to a Criminal Court when the Assizes were held in Croydon.

The beast market was originally held in Surrey Street, with animals penned in the yard of the Three Tunns Inn. Broken animal bones are still turned up.

William Page, writing about the scene in the 1820s, remembered how ‘the town on Saturday was indeed a lively one . . . a continuous stream of peasants flocking in to make their weekly purchases.’ This busy, varied scene would also have been familiar to John Ruskin, whose grandmother was the landlady of the King’s Head Tavern – an Inn opposite the market triangle.

As Croydon became more urbanized, however, trade fell away and moved to shops and stores. By the late 1860s, the general market was in decline. The main corn market also suffered. It was moved to Thursday (the day of the cattle market), but this did not stop its decline. By the early 1870s, the corn market had been squeezed out of the Town Hall, and had moved to a room at the King’s Head. The Dairy Market closed down in the 1870s. After the mid 19th Century – all but livestock markets had declined.

As the various markets declined, the area’s population continued to increase. The triangle fizzed and mouldered in a state of ‘moral and physical decay’. An 1888 article in the Croydon Chronicle described it as “a human moral piggery that, for depravity, either Newcastle or Manchester, might match, but certainly not surpass.”

The response was an example of Croydon’s history of ambitious ‘regeneration’ projects and an expression of a strong sense of local civic pride which continues to this day.

In 1883 the newly formed municipal borough corporation set up a High Street Improvement Committee. This set about launching a competition to seek an architect to improve High Street and the market triangle. The competition was won by JM Brydon, architect of Chelsea Town Hall and the government offices on Parliament Square. However this scheme didn’t go ahead. It was initially considered too expensive and was scaled down and value engineered, which actually effectively saved Surrey Street and the existing medieval remnants of Bell Hill. But the scheme was finally killed off when the Council disagreed over whether to fund the project using profits from Croydon’s own water company.

However, the project to ‘improve’ the market triangle slums soon resurfaced. In 1888 Alderman Francis Coldwells – a self-made man, non-conformist and temperance advocate – set up the Middle Row Improvement Committee.

The Committee’s new scheme involved significant compulsory purchase and a deal with the Brighton Railway Company who owned land close-by on Katherine Street, including the old Croydon Central Railway Station. The new scheme involved removing the old Town Hall corn market in the market triangle, replacing it with a brand new Town Hall on Katherine Street, along with a new Library and Police Station and creating a new sunken garden on the site of the railway station. Ten new cottages on Mint Walk for the dispossessed – decanted from their Middle Street slum – would be Croydon’s first Council houses.

Despite being objected to by some local residents from the affluent Park Hill area – who complained about the increase in rates associated with the big project and a ‘loss of quaintness’ that would come about with the removal of the warren-like medieval slum at the heart of the town – the new County Borough of Croydon’s ‘Croydon Improvement Act’ received Royal Assent in 1890.

Demolition of the medieval market triangle started in 1893 and the area had been comprehensively redeveloped with large, ornate, red brick buildings by the end of the decade. Gone were the little lanes and the clapboard ramshackle. Gone were the overcrowded slums, lodging houses. Italians and painted ladies.

A fancy commemorative water fountain was built on the junction between High Street and Surrey Street to celebrate completion of this ambitious improvement scheme. It remains to this day – going unnoticed next to the flower stall and Millets camping and outdoors shop.

The third Town Hall – expressive of Victorian civic grandeur – opened in 1896. The complex included a small Corn Exchange in Katharine Street, but this was never popular and closed in 1907. Corn dealing on a small scale returned briefly to the King’s Head, before disappearing from Croydon altogether.

But what of about the market? Did all of this super ambitious Victorian regeneration kill it off? Well, nearly. By the early 20th Century the only survival was the general Saturday market in Surrey Street. This had held on, and it represented the only link back to the markets of the time of Archibishop Kilwardby and those which are bound to have existed before he granted his charter.

However, by 1922, Surrey Street market was showing signs of revival – being held daily – possibly in response to demand created by increased food prices in the shops and growing suburban population in Croydon. The market triangle’s fruity character was bubbling up to the surface again.

Now it’s the early 21st Century and that daily market is still there; every day except Sunday.

Sipping a pint of Ordinary at the old Dog and Bull, our guide has got used to the absence of music and listens to the background cries of “Eeer-y’arGetchastrawbriz” and “FiftyFifty!” from the female Noddy Holder look-alike market trader outside. He un-wraps the cellophane from a cheese roll taken from under a cracked and yellowing plastic dome on the counter and sinks his teeth in deep. Looking around, there are those same mild, nobly faces. An old man on a stool gazes across the bar in silence. A man with a curtain beard and a woman with frizzy hair are mumbling to each other next to the piano. A man with a leather jacket and a leathery face is laughing with the antipodean barman.

On the wall there’s the famous Young’s publicity photograph of Prince Charles when he pulled a pint at the Dog and Bull in the 1980s alongside some old black and white photographs of the market and the Almshouses in the early 20th Century and a ‘Winter Warmer Ale’ poster.

www.pubs.com describes the Dog and Bull as ‘a good old ‘spit and sawdust’ local with bare floorboards, smoky panelling and cream painted walls.’ And apparently the well known beer writer Roger Protz once wrote – “The day Young’s turn the Dog and Bull into a wine bar called Johnnies is the day I emigrate”. Our guide hasn’t ever heard of the well known beer writer Roger Protz and recalls Phil Collins making a similar comment about what he’d do if Labour ever won the general election. Or was it Kenny Everett? An image of Roger Protz begins to form in our guide’s mind; a disturbing mix of Collins and Everett with a Union Jack waistcoat. It’s starting to put him off his pint of Ordinary, so he thinks of something else instead.

In the 1990s the Dog and Bull extended in to a neighbouring shop – but you’d be hard-placed to find the joins. The neighbouring shop was apparently where Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs of cult indie pop band St Etienne had a Saturday job. They’d go to nearby Beanos – the world-renowned second hand record shop – during lunch breaks to flick through its packed racks of vinyl.

Beanos is unique. Set up in 1975 it moved from its small shop on Surrey Street to a large old Victorian printer’s warehouse in nearby Middle Street in the 1990s. Until recently it was the largest second hand record shop in Europe, spread over three floors, with a 1950s style café at the top. However, faced with an explosion in internet shopping, its owner David Lashmar – former member of the psychedelic rock band ‘Dead Sea Fruit’ – has recently had to scale down the operation to keep the place alive. It remains a wonderful shop though, and plans are afoot to convert the upper floors in to an open independent marketplace – right at the heart of the old market triangle.

Another place of musical significance on Surrey Street is ‘Mixing Records’, formerly known as Big Apple Records, and occupying part of an old medieval row of shops called ‘Butcher’s Row’. This shop was home to the development of ‘Dubstep’ – an underground dance music genre which came out of Croydon around the turn of the milenium and has since gone on to be influentual and popular internationally. Succesful Dubstep artists Hatcha and Skream worked in the shop whilst others with equally evocative names like Loefah, Zed Bias, Digital Mystikz, Horsepower and El-B were apparently often to be found hanging around there.

Our guide imagines that Surrey Street’s 19th Century’s organ-grinders would probably have had equally exotic names.

They wouldn’t have known the finger-licking delights of KFC though, which currently serves up its family buckets of chicken and beans from the other remaining medieval building in the market triangle. Before this wonky, patched up, timber-framed building was a KFC, it was a chicken shop owned by TV presenter and former Crystal Palace, Arsenal and England striker, Ian Wright.

It’s a ramshackle remnant of Croydon’s medieval slums, although a bit of a Ship of Theseus. He’s pretty sure that the warped old beams in the first floor roof space are original though, and it is magic that these remain – spotty teenagers chomping on greasy battered chicken beneath them – especially given Croydon’s continuous obsession with progress, renewal and regeneration.

Along with the 1880s clearance of the market triangle slums, Surrey Street was the scene of another demonstration of Croydon’s Victorian ambition and obsession with progress.

Surrey Street is on the ridgeline of the North Downs and the River Wandle bubbles up around here. In the middle ages the lower Old Town around the Archibishops’ Old Palace was filled with rivulets, streams and ponds. The streams and ponds were culverted by the Croydon Local Board of Health, and the only remaining clue of this former watery world is the Victorian Pumping Station tucked between the old Telephone exchange and Surrey Street multi-storey car park. It stands empty like a romantic folly; a polychromatic mix between a Venetian Palazzo and an English castle’s gatehouse; built in 1851, it is beautifully contemporary with local boy Ruskin’s Stone’s of Venice.

The Croydon Local Board of Health was set up in 1849 in response to the Public Health Act. The Board worked quickly, setting about a programme of pioneering work in sanitary science which saw Croydon soon became the first town in the country to receive the benefits of public water supply and sewerage. The water supply came from the Wandle springs. Water was pumped from the Pumping Station at Surrey Street up to the equally Italianate and romantic water tower at Park Hill.

Thames Water still pump from Surrey Street. The pumping machinery was moved from the Victorian Pumping Station years ago. The replacement pumps are housed in a utilitarian box next to the steps of the beautiful old folly. The contrast in the design of these pump housings tells the story of a loss of architectural exuberance and confident expression of civic pride over the past 150 years. Venetian polychromatic brickwork, castellations and gothic arches have been replaced with a dumb, metal box.

However, the site is soon to be the scene of the latest wave of Croydon’s ambition. Thames Water’s box will soon be screened and the space around the Pumping Station turned in to an urban ‘piazza’. Next door, the old telephone exchange is being converted in to luxury apartments and a new block wrapping the multi-storey car park will include flats and snazzy new boutique shops.

Our guide has taken his friends up the escalators to the top floor of the Vue multiplex. They stand at the huge window which looks down over Surrey Street and out over the roofs of Old Town. In its mish-mash composition, it looks as medieval as it ever has.

“Somewhere amongst that lot there’s apparently a big boiler where an old Surrey Street family boil up fresh beetroot every day”, he says.

Below, a building site has been cleared and a big hole has been dug for foundations. He wonders what the contractors have unearthed and where the ancient spoil has been disposed of. Striations of mud have been made visible; the compacted debris of centuries. Bones and rotten vegetables and bits of old buildings.

The market is being closed and packed away for the day. Boys wheel barrows down side alleys and lock them up in shacks. Battered cauliflower, damp cabbage bits and waves of cardboard are being swept up in to the kerbs and thrown in to the back of a rubbish lorry, its orange lamps flashing in the lead lights of the Dog and Bull.c

“Visiting IKEA Croydon is very similar to the experience of visiting Tate Modern”, our guide said as he indicated left to turn the Fiat Cinquecento on to the Purley Way.

“Throngs of public circulating around, gazing at specially curated and tempting chunks of modernity. Rubber-soled feet on the end of combat-trousered legs squeaking on shiny, shiny floors.”

G had just noticed the twin IKEA towers – the old chimneys of what was the huge Croydon B Power Station, topped with their yellow and blue bands. He asked the guide whether he went there often.

“I used to go there for meatballs, gravy and chips when I worked around the corner. I thought about taking you all for lunch there today, but I thought you’d prefer Wing Yip….unless you’d prefer meatballs and gravy?”

“No! Definitely Wing Yip…I’d just forgotten that Purley Way was in Croydon”.

Choosing the Wing Yip centre as the place to lunch seemed perfect because of its irresistible kitsch charm and the happy Shanghai associations – but also because of its out-of-town road-side status. Particularly its out-of-town, road-side, Purley Way, Croydon status.

Along with the Hanger Lane Gyratory, Brent Cross and Lakeside Thurrock, The Purley Way Croydon (the A23) is one of the most familiar ‘place’ names in Greater London, if not the South East of England…if not in the UK.

The A23, Purley Way, is a key road in to (or out of) London. Made famous by countless Christmas blue-cross-sale adverts, the Eye in the Sky and possibly also because of Croydon Airport, London’s first airport.

On the IKEA map of London, the Purley Way is more prominent and important than central London, which is represented as a black hole. And more important still on IKEA’S map are of course the ‘IKEA towers’ – drawn lovingly as a friendly cartoon icon that dominates London.

In the real London (not IKEA map London) the IKEA towers don’t quite visually dominate the whole of the capital but they are landmarks in the London psyche. And as physical structures, they certainly do constitute a local landmark in south London. Travelling from all over London and the South East, IKEA day-trippers point their cars at the two blue-and-yellow-topped chimneys. For most, Purley Way, and especially IKEA and its towers are the only reason they would ever visit Croydon.

Unlike other car-centric, bland, out-of-town non-places, the IKEA towers actually create a sense of place at Valley Park, Purley Way. The bus and Tramlink stops next door also makes the place super-accessible via public transport meaning that unlike other out-of-town shopping environments IKEA even enjoys lots of pedestrian visitors and an interesting mix of people, age groups, gender and ethnicity. Put some homes there too and you might almost have a functioning city.

A trip to IKEA Croydon is a popular family day out (3 million visitors per year). It’s always chock full of consumers shuffling themselves around pseudo-Scandinavian room-sets, flirting with and then shutting out everyone else, gazing at contemporary perfection, projecting themselves a faultless, unique and modern life.

It’s an art gallery-like experience. More specifically, it’s very similar to a trip to Tate Modern (3.6 million visitors per year). Looking. Shuffling. Self-awareness. Hunger. Flirting. Looking. Imagining. Not quite enjoying. Smugness. Not quite understanding.

The route gets more frenzied when the abstract room-set realm of contemporary lifestyle projection gives way to the immediate temptation of take-away-able kitchenware, picture frames, candle-sticks, potato mashers, cushions, bedside lamps and the meat-ball bonanza of the IKEA restaurant. These parts of the store are where you get to either take a piece of the dream and put it in your basket or else put it in your mouth, chew it and wash it down with a cup of coffee. Haven’t got much change? Don’t worry; you can get an IKEA hotdog for only 35p. Like the Tate Modern gift shop and cafe, this is where all the real action is.

And what about the ‘warehouse’ zone of the store? In a piece for ‘Tate etc.’ in 2005, novelist Lawrence Norfolk writes about using the Tate archive as a researcher-consumer: “The Tate archive is to art what the warehouse section at IKEA is to home furnishings. Anything that one could want is here. All one has to do is get hold of it.”

Both Tate Modern and IKEA Croydon accommodate a shuffling mass of people viewing a perfect contemporary world which they are then invited to take away with them. Both places sell Mark Rothko prints.
To an extent, both places neuter, popularise and commodity 20th Century modernism (is Tate Modern an IKEA for the mind?). IKEA is successful at progressing the modernist agenda by empowering the mass public to improve their living environments and promoting a degree of supposedly progressive self-expression (remember ‘Chuck out your chintz?’) – Albeit from a limited palette. IKEA’s reach is impressive because it affects so many of our own homes physically. A Swedish home-furnishing brand has noticeably altered the taste and habits of a nation.

It is probably the associations with positive change and mass popularity that inspired the decision to make IKEA Croydon a Polling Station.

There are also physical similarities between IKEA Croydon and Tate Modern. Like the Tate, IKEA Croydon occupies an old power station. In fact IKEA’s inhabitation of the Croydon B power station site pre-dates the Tate’s move to Bankside by several years. Consistent with Croydon’s tradition of having the ‘first of’ or the ‘most of’ or the ‘biggest’ (but not always the best) Croydon B power station was among the fist ex-industrial sites in London to be ‘regenerated’. Having lain empty for several years, Croydon B was used as a set for Terry Gilliam’s film ‘Brazil’ before plans were drawn up for the ‘Powerhouse’ – a multi-million pound retail scheme that was designed to occupy the grand turbine hall of the power station.

Eventually IKEA purchased the site and, to the despair of English Heritage – who just missed the opportunity to list the Art Deco turbine hall – the main body of the power station was demolished to make way for the now familiar retail shed in the 1990s. The twin red-brick chimneys are all that remain of the original building. Now the chimneys create the biggest branded signpost in South London.

Strangely, in 2003 it was reported that IKEA were planning to demolish the chimneys to save the ongoing expense of maintaining them. Strange because IKEA did not initially seem to take in to account the inherent value to their brand and sales figures of owning these physical and psychological signpost-landmarks. Less surprising is how unaware IKEA were of the place that the chimneys held in the London’s cultural memory. Unaware perhaps of the poem about the chimneys submitted to the local paper and possibly also the role of the structures in Shena Mackay’s novel ‘Heligoland’.

When the news of the possible demolition went public, however, all hell broke loose. Local people wrote in to the Croydon Guardian and Croydon Advertiser to complain. Articles about the chimneys and Croydon B’s place in the history of Croydon followed and the Council attempted to list the structures.

In response, and surprised perhaps by the reaction, IKEA wrote an open letter to the local paper promising not to demolish the chimneys and called for ideas from the public for possible new uses for the much-loved structures.

Emerging ideas included using the chimneys to generate power again by installing wind turbines. Another suggestion was that a viewing gallery and suburban art gallery could be introduced around the chimneys. A suburban Tate? Now there’s an idea.

The similarities between Tate Modern and IKEA Croydon are symbolic of the overlapping of culture and art and architecture and shopping. Where Tate Modern is a monument to the fixing of modern art in to our common culture using ‘lifestyle’ as a way in, IKEA Croydon is about fixing a certain image of the modern life in to our common culture using the appeal of modern art and design as a way in. Both begin to feed back on each other and it becomes hard to find the joins.

Croydon: he is obsessed with it. One of the best expressions of his obsession is the ‘Croydon tour’ that he periodically take friends on. A tour which he is sure should convince anyone who shares any of his sensibilities that Croydon is one of the strangest and most beautiful of cities. A place deserving love and attention. Without irony. You must understand.

Patrons of the tour do not knowingly sign up. They do not pay a penny for the pleasure. There is no ticket. In fact, until now, nobody even knows that the tour exists…not even the lucky few who have taken it. He has only just worked out that it exists himself, and he’s our guide.

The tour is veiled in an extremely carefully orchestrated and convincing routine which is designed to appear to accidentally represent a section through a typically mundane Croydon everyday. In actual fact it is specially and artificially fortified with select concentrated Croydon highlights. His Croydon tour is a tour of SuperCroydon. Not a lie. Just carefully and lovingly authored. Super like all tours.

A tour of SuperCroydon typically depends on three or four or five key scenes, moments, landmarks, fruits, excuses. Selected, separated and carefully placed although apparently scattered about the Croydon landscape. Always with a view to increasing the chances of epic road or rail routes in between. One of these scenes is designed by our guide to take precedence over all the others. It is the main excuse for the day. The biggest and juiciest fruit, the statue that cries milk, the biggest bonsai in the world, China’s fifth most famous rock. It is the reason our guide must invent to force his patron to confront the pain of pulling themselves away from the hot city soup of London cool to spend a day in suburban zones five and six, half-way to Gatwick, the home of Nestle UK, Kate Moss and Feroz Abassi, the Saffron Valley, London’s other city.

His most recent excuse for a tour of SuperCroydon was an invitation he made some friends to take lunch on the A23. Familiar to most as the Purley Way. D.F.S-M.F.I-bank-holiday-bargain-P.C-World-blue-cross-sale-Magnet-Megabowl.

On the lunch menu: not meatballs and chips from Ikea this time but a Chinese feast at the magical Wing Yip complex.

Our guide is not sure quite how long the complex has been there on the Purley Way. He thinks he remembers passing its unforgettable 20ft high oriental entrance gate a decade ago when he used to go to float around the lazy river and bask in the shade of water-chutes and plastic-palms on the artificial beach at the Croydon Water Palace – the wonderfully sedentary P.E. swimming option on offer to final year pupils at Edenham High School. Edenham High School, our guide reminds us, is the Today Programme and Daily Mail’s favourite successful suburban cash-strapped school, recently forced to send children home for lack of supply teacher nourishment. Constantly on the edge of Bedlem and proud of its well behaved students and results and motto: “Always use your common sense”, it must be the only school in the world able to boast an alumni who’s employments range from being part of the team who animated the innovative comedy hit ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ (starring Bob Hoskins) to incarceration in camp X-ray for fighting with the Taliban. There is a strong sense that the zeitgeist would probably send his children to Edenham High School – attracted especially to the well resourced library, which is now called the literacy zone.

Wing Yip. Unforgettable. A big dragon of a shed sitting in its own car-park, decorated with a bristling skin of Cino-Travis Perkins ornament, boasting a Chinese supermarket and bakery, a Chinese restaurant, a Malaysian restaurant, a Chinese opticians, an Estate Agents and is now one of our guide’s favourite SuperCroydon attractions. It is next to Kingdom of Leather and close to what was Croydon Airport: London’s first airport and famously the place where Neville Chamberlain waved about a piece of paper.

Wing Yip is great not only thanks to the kitsch roadside charm one could derive from its entrance gate and ornamental mock cinoisery but because there is something genuinely Chinese about it. In fact, the roadside kitsch of Wing Yip is beautiful, not because it is a mockery, not because it is a theme-park folly of the real Chinese McCoy, but because it is like a diluted version of the other-worldly and bizarre mix of the utilitarian and the kitsch that one actually finds in China. On a Saturday lunch-time the restaurant is filled with Chinese families eating Dim sum and Pork Belly and chicken feet, having just shopped in the harsh fairy-tale fluorescence of the supermarket and the Chinese newsagents and Kingdom of Leather. The delightfully bland and shiny arcade at the centre of Wing Yip – with its opticians, bakery, estate agents – is the South London hub of a suburban community that has long fled the central London China-town home that it is associated with. Wing Yip has a big car park.

All of this, our guide was sure, would make for a wonderful excuse for a tour, and a treat for his most recent patrons, G, J and K; being especially aware that the key to the art of devising tours is the ability to subtly provoke and then harness positive memories and associations.

A year previously he had spent two of the oddest weeks of his life with J and G on a tour of Shanghai and the surrounding area. On that tour they were taken to subterranean lakes where neon-lit stalactites were given labels in English: “Longevity Turtle” and “Blind Imitation to Ludicrous Effect” and “The Dark Drang Comes Out of the Water”. On that tour they were taken to an island in ‘Thousand Island Lake region’ where everyone ate mandarin oranges and played with tiny bows and arrows. Thousand Island Lake was formed when the Chinese government flooded an area the size of Greater London to create hydro-electric damns and approximately one thousand islands. On that tour they were taken on a six hour coach ride to see the second most famous rock in China. On that tour they visited the biggest B&Q on earth and bought snakes in jars, fake handbags, squids on sticks and DVDs for 80p. On that tour they stayed in a huge and cold hotel in an industrial area where they were told it was too dangerous to step outside because it was ‘bandit country’. In this hotel they were nourished with pot-noodle and a non-stop Kenny-G loop in the brothel-bar-karaoke-sauna. They stepped out of the hotel. There were bandits. The bandits, it seemed to them, must have been related to the pirates in Disney’s ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’. On that tour, in the tingling bleached bright mid-morning of a sleepless hang-over, they visited an ancient town described to them as the ‘Venice of China’ which heaved uncomfortably with shuffling Chinese tourists all wearing the same synthetic fibre suits, clip-on ties, slip-on shoes and white socks. Our guide and his friends had enjoyed China.

By association, our guide was sure that G and J and K would enjoy Wing Yip, and therefore the day. Flying over the uber-fly Croydon fly-over in the low-slung back seat of a Fiat Cinquecento, the epically especially debased Edge-city alphaville of Croydon’s skyline moving a special slant across their sunglasses, the lazy satisfaction of bellies full of pork belly, fried chicken dumplings and tongues dry with Chinese tea, our guide knew that his passengers would feel themselves slipping in to love with SuperCroydon…

Published in BD Magazine, 26th Feb 2006

Croydon is a Super Suburb. A C20th idea-city transposed onto a medieval market town, in the middle of semi-detached suburbia. A rudely beautiful product of civic ambition, popular aspiration, geographical accident and imperfect political and economic speculations.

The views from the 19th floor of Taberner House, Croydon Council’s Pirelli-like offices, are revealing.

From the north side the view is epically urban. A motorway cuts through collages of post-war tower-blocks. Seiffert’s NLA wedding-cake and Lunar House’s space-age rooftop wing compete for attention, whilst the Millennium Dome and Wembley Arch are pathetic miniatures on the horizon. Down below, the Fairfield Halls’ ‘Bootleg Beatles’ posters provide melancholy 1960s feedback.

But from Taberner House’s south side, the view is of green-belt Surrey. In the southern half of London’s biggest Borough, the last of Croydon’s tower-blocks tip-toe their way into a landscape of clay-tile roofs, playing fields and church spires.

Croydon is a place where the mildly provincial coexists with, and often generates, the boldly radical. Central Croydon, with its towers and flyovers, is not the result of wartime bombing, but the speculative ambitions of provincial town fathers.

Croydon’s self-confidence sets it apart.

Many find the resulting urban bricolage uncomfortable, but closer examination finds an ideal landscape for exercising the imagination and honestly generating culture. Ikea’s inhabitation of Croydon B power station was a proto-Tate Modern, Croydon College inspired Punks, whilst Birds Portchmouth Russums’s 1993 fantasy to place alien culture-dromes atop Croydon’s multi-storey car parks couldn’t have been more consistent with the place’s unique spirit.