Plus ça change in the bustling hurly-burly of Westbourne Grove
The chill winds are already blowing down Westbourne Grove as the recession takes hold. They would, wouldn’t they? The Grove is a peculiarly fragile and sensitive street, and has been ever since it was set up in the 1850s. At one time it was known as Bankruptcy Alley. The turnover in the shops and restaurants is allegro con brio. When we first came to live in our delightful little street, Newton Road, a quarter-century ago, the Grove was a pretty bedraggled place, only slowly emerging from the near-slummy grime which lasted from the Great Slump, through the war and into the Rachman era, the Monster operating not far from here.
In those days there were three greasyspoon caffs in the Grove or nearby streets. I liked such places. There, in mid-morning, you might spot elderly literary editors, moth-eaten opera critics and unemployed sports journalists emerging from their hangovers. Or wouldbe writers of musical comedies mopping up the runny egg from their ‘full Monties’. You don’t see that now: too many Eastern dumps, packed with dark bearded men, arguing, plotting and scowling. Afghans? Persians? Azerbaijanis? Don’t know, or care. All the same to me: scary. In the Seventies there were still a lot of cheap shops selling bric-a-brac, cracked Chinese jars, flyblown phylacteries, Burmese gongs, Congo witch-doctors’ masks and joss-stick holders from Colombo, sorry, Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte. You never saw anyone go into these musty dens, which had small back rooms, smoke-filled, in which the real business, if any, was done. Furtive men lounged in doorways. Old women pushed battered prams of firewood. There were a lot of what I call jigsaw-puzzle dogs, ownerless, homeless, Cruftless.
There was a convent of nuns, too, Sœurs de Bon Secours, I think — what were called, when I was a boy, Bone-Suckers. The convent always looked fresh-painted and spotless amid the surrounding grime. Then it disappeared: the nuns too old, no new recruits. There has been a visible decline in religious fervour over recent decades. The church where I used to go every morning at 7.30 a.m. to say my prayers, and often to hear Mass, now keeps its doors firmly shut until 10 a.m. The Carmelite friary near the bottom of Kensington Church Street still opens at 7 a.m., but it is a long way there and back. So my lifetime habit of daily churchgoing has lapsed. Will God notice? Of course. On my early walks I have observed the social and economic changes. The bric-a-brac shops and greasy spoon caffs have all gone. In their place came a new generation of smart women’s dress shops. A well-brought-up girl, educated at Roedean or Cheltenham Ladies’, or Ascot, who had inherited a large legacy from an old Tunbridge Wells aunt and had done a stint on Vogue or Harper’s, pranced the catwalk, studied design or dogsbodied for Hartnell, would set up in business. One year there were half a dozen new ones in the Grove and Ledbury Road, which crosses it. But selling dresses to young women, or middle-aged ones a fortiori, is not as easy as it looks from the posh side of the counter. At the end of the first quarter, the capital was gone. At the end of the second quarter, there was not enough in the bank to pay the next quarter’s rent. So the shop shut, to reopen soon with another aspiring upper-middle-class hopeful in eager charge. As I peered through these welcoming, ever-open doors, to inspect the looks of the new assistants (the prettier they were, I noticed, the less likely the business was to succeed), I found myself humming the tune from La Ronde. Yet there is one shoe shop, at the corner, which always hums with life, full of chatting girls, and normally a young man or two. It has survived, even flourished. I asked Mary Killen, who knows the owner (Mary knows everybody) why. ‘Oh, people go there to gossip, and buy something by accident.’ I recalled that was the reason why Heywood Hill’s bookshop, in wartime Curzon Street, where Nancy Mitford worked as an assistant, was such a success. And of course it is why Sheila’s Notting Hill Books, behind the ugly Czech embassy and just next to an eaterie which used to be called the Ark, is the most amusing place to buy books in London.
In the last decade or so, the fashion for ladies’ dress shops has been succeeded by a wave of boutiques and showrooms selling furniture. I have counted a dozen in the neighbourhood. What shops! The expense must be prodigious. Now I am not a man to buy furniture from such places. On the rare occasions we need a new sofa or bed, we go to such staid and reliable emporia as Peter Jones or John Lewis. I do not want the imaginative products of the post-Picasso 20th century translated into drawing-room clutter, or the dining-room impedimenta of the age of Damien Hirst, let alone sleeping quarters designed by someone who regards Tracey Emin’s ‘Unmade Bed’ as on a level with the ‘Mona Lisa’. In short I have no space for a comfy armchair roughly carved from an Amazonian tree trunk, or a standard lamp made out of a stainless-steel aircraft propellor, or a cupboard on daddy-long-legs stilts, or an occasional table looking like a Martian mushroom. I sometimes stand and stare into these shops and see if, per impossible, I am prepared to buy any of their contents, halfprice. No, no, no, as Amy Winehouse sings. Indeed there is no item whatsoever in any of these places I would be willing to give house room to as a gift. Who are they aiming at? The chairman of a Gulf state sovereign wealth fund? The oligarch owner of a yacht who is tired of clearing up after Peter Mandelson, Nat Rothschild, George Osborne et al? Sir Philip Green? Is the idea to entice Carla Bruni over from the rue St Honoré? I notice that one of these shops is already heading for Carey Street: ‘Sale, Sale, Sale! Everything Must Go!’ I can now buy a chromium bookcase made to look like a Hispano-Suiza bonnet circa 1930 for practically nothing. A snip!
A new fashion is already making its appearance: specialist jewellery shops. They sell pretty stuff, too. Earrings as worn by Carmen Miranda in The Road to Rio, necklaces from the days of Pola Negri and Louise Brooks. Brooches to entice Jobyna Ralston or Georgia Hale, from Gold Rush times. Some of these alluring objects please even my coldly critical eye, and I may be tempted to stop windowgazing and step inside if the slump brings prices tumbling after Christmas. The assistants in these hopeful shops are quite ravishing, not a hint of muffin-tops or bingo-wings. They give me such soulful smiles if I peep my head tentatively through the doorway. Will the fashion last? Oh no. What will be next? Gloves, à la Yvette Guilbert, perhaps.
Meanwhile the restaurants come and go. One corner site, which used to be a NatWest bank years ago, has had five eateries in turn that I can remember. Now it is occupied by something called, I think, Ping Pong. Maybe it will last. Across the lane on another transit-camp site is an oriental gobble-joint whose name would have made even Charles Lamb squirm — Urban Turban. It looks awfully neat. But as Major Yeats RM says, ‘I wouldn’t borrow half-a-crown to bet on it.’ What I hope will endure is the little Sicilian joint I have been using, tucked into an obscure entry, where the roast monkfish reminds me of the Hotel de la Poste in Avallon. But the name remains a secret or I might find Michael Winner there. Ugh!
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