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…
