white shirt, trousers stitched tight to our legs. My children say I was a Mod. I say those were the only clothes we had.
Around 1963 my wife and I moved to Colville Terrace,where our next-door neighbour, a big knife-fighting whore called Marie, was regularly and noisily arrested nightly at about 2 AM. I took over
New Worlds
magazine, determined to lift from science fiction some fresh conventions, which J. G. Ballard, Barrington Bayley, and I felt were needed to reinvigorate English fiction.
My main contribution to this period of experiment was Jerry Cornelius, his name pinched from a greengrocer’s sign in Notting Hill. As Mike Harrison pointed out, he was as much a technique, a narrative device, as a character. 2 Like me, Jerry relished ruins. Unlike me, he enjoyed making more of them. Through that era we called “the ‘60s”—which really ran from about 1963 with the Beatles first No. 1 single to around 1978 with Stiff’s second tour—we continued to experiment in almost every field and genre. One of the reasons that period can’t be reproduced is precisely because we hardly knew what we were doing. Now we probably know too much. We moved to a wonderful flat with a big leafy square behind it.
It was a wonderful time to have kids. I took them to music festivals and to little parks and museums, my secret boltholes like Derry and Tom’s Famous Roof Garden where little old ladies met for tea after doing their shopping. None of these places had yet become self-conscious or been persuaded to exploit their “features.” I knew we were enjoying a golden age that couldn’t last, but I was determined we should get the most out of it. Even with strikes and hard economic times, we had the first Notting Hill Carnivals, numerous open-air gigs and a general improvement in local morale.
But we could already see the end coming. One afternoon I was in my back garden when a Liberal solicitor asked me if I was coming to a newly formed “gardens committee” meeting. When I told him I wasn’t, he cheerfully informed me that that was my right. I told him that I knew what my rights were. I also sensed that this was definitely the beginning of the end.
By 1980, the Famous Roof Garden had become a private club. While it was still possible to lunch there, its casual nature had changed. Slowly I began to feel a stranger in my owncity. I had, of course, been part of the gentrification process, but I didn’t like the way people from the country and the suburbs were actually beginning to displace the locals. I like my classes mixed. We sold up and moved to Texas.
For all those years I lived around the Portobello Road, I learned that what people want more than authenticity is a provenance, a narrative. It wasn’t enough to sell a modern flowery chamber pot as “Victorian,” it had to be Oscar Wilde’s chamber pot. The developers and remodelers soon learned this lesson. The formica signs were stripped away and old buildings were made to look older.
Good, innovative writers like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd with
White Chapell, Scarlet Tracings
, and
Hawksmoor
, aware of our need for authentic as well as virtual memory, linked the past with the present to show how the city shaped us. The media, particularly TV, picked up on the idea and soon had created “London,” the character: golden-hearted London, whose dark spine was the Thames, whose dark soul was the Thames. This character appeared again and again, in all those sequels to famous Victorian novels or pastiches that spoke fruit-ily of Limehouse and Wapping.
Ackroyd played into this image, filmed for TV, lit from below, a bearded Dickens impersonator trotting in his wake, but Sinclair was having none of it. The first of London’s psycho-geographers, he headed for the M25, daring anyone who followed him to make something romantic from motorway cafes and discarded Big Mac boxes. While Ballard reflected on the curve of the Westway mirrored in suburban reservoirs, Sinclair
Around 1963 my wife and I moved to Colville Terrace,where our next-door neighbour, a big knife-fighting whore called Marie, was regularly and noisily arrested nightly at about 2 AM. I took over
New Worlds
magazine, determined to lift from science fiction some fresh conventions, which J. G. Ballard, Barrington Bayley, and I felt were needed to reinvigorate English fiction.
My main contribution to this period of experiment was Jerry Cornelius, his name pinched from a greengrocer’s sign in Notting Hill. As Mike Harrison pointed out, he was as much a technique, a narrative device, as a character. 2 Like me, Jerry relished ruins. Unlike me, he enjoyed making more of them. Through that era we called “the ‘60s”—which really ran from about 1963 with the Beatles first No. 1 single to around 1978 with Stiff’s second tour—we continued to experiment in almost every field and genre. One of the reasons that period can’t be reproduced is precisely because we hardly knew what we were doing. Now we probably know too much. We moved to a wonderful flat with a big leafy square behind it.
It was a wonderful time to have kids. I took them to music festivals and to little parks and museums, my secret boltholes like Derry and Tom’s Famous Roof Garden where little old ladies met for tea after doing their shopping. None of these places had yet become self-conscious or been persuaded to exploit their “features.” I knew we were enjoying a golden age that couldn’t last, but I was determined we should get the most out of it. Even with strikes and hard economic times, we had the first Notting Hill Carnivals, numerous open-air gigs and a general improvement in local morale.
But we could already see the end coming. One afternoon I was in my back garden when a Liberal solicitor asked me if I was coming to a newly formed “gardens committee” meeting. When I told him I wasn’t, he cheerfully informed me that that was my right. I told him that I knew what my rights were. I also sensed that this was definitely the beginning of the end.
By 1980, the Famous Roof Garden had become a private club. While it was still possible to lunch there, its casual nature had changed. Slowly I began to feel a stranger in my owncity. I had, of course, been part of the gentrification process, but I didn’t like the way people from the country and the suburbs were actually beginning to displace the locals. I like my classes mixed. We sold up and moved to Texas.
For all those years I lived around the Portobello Road, I learned that what people want more than authenticity is a provenance, a narrative. It wasn’t enough to sell a modern flowery chamber pot as “Victorian,” it had to be Oscar Wilde’s chamber pot. The developers and remodelers soon learned this lesson. The formica signs were stripped away and old buildings were made to look older.
Good, innovative writers like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd with
White Chapell, Scarlet Tracings
, and
Hawksmoor
, aware of our need for authentic as well as virtual memory, linked the past with the present to show how the city shaped us. The media, particularly TV, picked up on the idea and soon had created “London,” the character: golden-hearted London, whose dark spine was the Thames, whose dark soul was the Thames. This character appeared again and again, in all those sequels to famous Victorian novels or pastiches that spoke fruit-ily of Limehouse and Wapping.
Ackroyd played into this image, filmed for TV, lit from below, a bearded Dickens impersonator trotting in his wake, but Sinclair was having none of it. The first of London’s psycho-geographers, he headed for the M25, daring anyone who followed him to make something romantic from motorway cafes and discarded Big Mac boxes. While Ballard reflected on the curve of the Westway mirrored in suburban reservoirs, Sinclair
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