Where my road crosses the Kennet and Avon canal, a couple of moorfowl diving this afternoon for whatever lurks on the bottom there among the bicycle frames and unthinkable things. I must say I wouldn't dive in that eau-de-nil soup even if I were a moorfowl. The gasworks across the canal from Kensal Green cemetery has been replaced by a huge Sainsbury's, but half a dozen assorted gasholders are still there apparently in use. Nearby at the top of Barlby Road, the hole that was made in the wall and fence to get at that train crash a few years back has been formalised as a locked gate... ready for next time (God forbid). A couple of hundred yards back down Barlby Road is Rootes Avenue, beside the Rootes Group offices - originally Sunbeam I think, built 1903 - where I went for parts in the seventies for my Singer Vogue. No Chrysler there now though, a vet's surgery (or was it a dentist?) and other offices instead.
The hundred yards of fifteen-foot brick wall along Harrow Road on the other side of the cemetery that fell down several years ago is... still down. With another couple of hundred yards looking ready to fall the other way, onto the pavement, at any moment. Just opposite the only speed camera in existence that I know to be a good idea.... there may be others but I don't know any.
Yes, I have been taking a small grandchild for her afternoon trot. Up in Kensal Rise, a black Maybach parked outside a restaurant making all other cars look badly tailored and semi-destitute. Outside the body shop near the William IV, a silver (but not chromed all over!) Mclaren Mercedes or Mercedes Mclaren. It was there last night too. Despite its manifest ferocity it still looks like a hairdresser's car to me. But the nipper didn't comment being under a year old and asleep.
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An interesting trot around (and description of..) my birth place - well near, I'm a Harlesden boy originally. I'm wondering Lud, does the old swimming baths still exist in Kensal Rise(or maybe Green)? - I was a swimming pool attendant there is the mid-70s, together with a stint at King George (or maybe Edward? memory fades..) swimming bath in Willesden.
They're probably all called 'Sports Leisure Complex' (or variation of..) now though.
Edited by woodbines on 31/03/2009 at 19:55
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Kennet & Avon?
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Kennet & Avon?
I think it becomes that a little way out to the West, or intersects wwith it anyway, but perhaps I am wrong. It goes through Little Venice and Paddington on its way to Regent's Park. Old narrow boats are moored near all the road crossings, and people live in them. Never fancied living in one myself though. It would be damp and might sink.
I used to know some guys who had a barge on the Thames that you got to through a graveyard in Battersea, Church Road or somewhere like that. Very picturesque but a bit sinister somehow. Stayed there in the late fifties a few times. It was OK in the summer.
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>I think it becomes that a little way out to the West
yes your right - The River Thames at Reading is a little way out west.
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All right AE, sorry, no need to go on. You were quite right of course, the Grand Union canal is the one. I think it does somewhere or other unite the K and A with the rest of the canal system though (perhaps via the Thames even).
Oh dear. My excuses are that I knew it was one I'd heard of and although born in this town I was raised as a Zummmerzet boy where the only canal is the K & A and it's down to a single lane with passing places.... Damn!
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They're probably all called 'Sports Leisure Complex' (or variation of..) now though.
If you are lucky, the baths that I learned to swim in (Mitcham SW London) were demolished to make way for a road.
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I haven't heard of a swimming pool up there woodbines but I will ask my daughter who may know. A lot of them have been closed down over the years. I still remember the Latimer Road baths five minutes from here (really in Lancaster Road) where I once went to an Oswald Mosley election meeting. That vanished years ago. The Porchester Road baths at the bottom of Queensway are still there. Someone recently told me a story about overbearing behaviour by Arab women there, but I don't remember the details.
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I think it was around 1970 that swimming "baths" affected the title of swimming "pools". Prior to that all the ones in Edinburgh were called baths. Then the Commonwealth pool was built to provide a venue for the Commonwealth Games. Within a short space of time all the others started to be named pools on their promotional literature.
Portobello open air baths mustn't have been bothered by all this and closed down some time around then I think. It was sited next to the old Portobello power station and used the residual heat from there to warm the water. It must have been an astonishingly thermodynamically efficient power station as the water was always freezing.
Good wave machine though. My pal Derek lost his front teeth diving off the concrete high dive, he hit the edge of the next lowest dive platform with the tip of his front teeth on his way past.
He went on in later life to become something important in Rover cars. Can't remember what now but at least there was eventually a motoring connection.
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Thank you for honoring my recent `colour book` Lud. (and for proving 50% of the replies in one post.)
I remember walking between the Calder Navigation canal and the river Calder as a child - both black and stinking of the industrial areas west of here, into the turdid reaches exiting Huddersfield.
It`s now improved to the point where salmon are considering it as merely `torrid` as they pass by in the middle of the North Sea - rather than being `smoked` in advance on their way up to Scotland.
Incidentally, we were talking to an original resident of Bridlington aged around 90 and she had a distinct east London accent. She said this was original Brid dialect and I wondered if its similarity originated from the sea coal trade of the sailing barge era?
Good to hear the nipper is getting a decent induction into things both wild and metallic..
Take care ;-)
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That's fascinating about the Bridlington dialect oilrag. Like the bits of old Devon dialect in parts of the American South (Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas). The Devon term for wortleberries ('erts') is still current in those states.
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A leisurely wander back to Motoring ?
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into the turdid reaches exiting Huddersfield.
That's an unusually descriptive term there, Oilrag, probably well suited to the waters you are describing. I'm a little surprised it escaped being filtered ...
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I have a an affinity with the K&A canal, which passes not a million miles from Madux Towers.
As you head east from the impressive Caen Hill flight of locks in Devizes you enter the Long Pound - no locks for - ooh - ages. The canal winds it's merry way through beautiful countryside for mile after mile, far away from any roads or housing, until you reach Honeystreet, and that lovely Public House, The Barge.
Here you leap off the narrow-boat in expectation of a well deserved pint.
And break your foot. As I did.
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Oh well sadly being totally unlinked to motoring the thread has been "locked" geddit ?
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