The Stroud Green Badge

The Stroud Green Badge

An Abruzzo presentosa

A presentosa from the Abruzzo region of Italy:

More to come!

A Walk Round Stroud Green

Meet Hermes

Meet Hermes

My door knocker.  Victorian, about the 1880s.   Best thing about the house.    I'm rather proud of him.

Stroud Green Interiors.

#2




#1 Gadz bar

The Stroud Green Badge, 1773

Anyone know what these are?  Along the Parkland Walk:

More at the Wall of Shame

Oh look:

I wonder if the lady from Lawson Court who dumped her IKEA packaging at the Wall of Shame last night would care to remove it?    Name and address in plain sight.  Perhaps Haringey enforcement might pay her a little courtesy visit to explain about what we call 'recycling'.   Thanks.

A spooky coincidence on Stroud Green Road

Here's a strange link between my family's past and the present.

Around 120 years ago - some time after 1890 - a distant forebear of mine had a photograph of himself taken in a Victorian cemetery. The picture shows him laying flowers at a tombstone, dedicated to various members of the Wilkinson branch of the family.

He was most probably a chap called Walter Wilkinson, married to my great great aunt Emily.  But I've no idea where the cemetery is.

But, oddly, I do know something about the photographer.  The picture was taken by photographer A.W. Lee, of 118 Stroud Green Road, London N.   And the site of A.W. Lee's studio is just a stone's throw from where I live now.  So I have to imagine my great-great relative getting off a horse-drawn bus down the road from my house in about 1890, and going to see the photographer to pay him, or perhaps pick up the print.  The house isn't there any more - it was bombed.

Good old Walter Wilkinson.  I think I might have liked him - he has a place in family lore.  Emily and he were joint licensees of a famous London pub, the Olde King Lud, at Ludgate Circus in central London.   It was a nice old Victorian boozer, which I visited once or twice when I worked as a journalist in Fleet Street - it had fine carvings of King Lud above the doors.  The carvings are still there, but it's a sandwich bar now - another lost bit of London history.   Photos below - then and now.

 

Every picture tells a story

Two pictures, one location. On the way in and out of Finsbury Park.   Everybody loves a sunset.....

....but what's the story of this load of old rubbish?   Sigh.

'Thatcher Halts Survey on Sex' !

The Sunday Times, 9 September 1989.  This was a bit of a break for me - the splash that brought together Margaret Thatcher, sex, Aids and politics in one front page story.   Thatcher was determined to prevent the Department of Health from commissioning a survey into what the British actually got up to in bed, our sexual habits and lifestyle, even though the Aids scare was at its height and it could have helped save lives. I got to hear about it, and the result was my story in the Sunday Times headlined "Thatcher Halts Survey on Sex".   It led the broadcast news bulletins all day and was the story of the week.

It was a very easy story to write - everything was confirmed very quickly with the Department of Health and Number Ten, I did a couple of phone interviews with the main people, and then the story just wrote itself.   

What subsequently became the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles was soon after funded instead by the Wellcome Foundation, and is still in business.  My Sunday Times story of 1989 is now part of the 'Institute of Sexology' exhibition at the Wellcome Foundation gallery in London, and a copy of the paper is on display there in a glass case.  Creepy!  This is me with the exhibition catalogue today.  Yay!

Oh dear......

Why?    This is the end of my street this morning, it's been like it for a fortnight, and - whoever is doing this - it ain't good.