Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (16 page)

Having made my selection - a bottle of Bond’s favourite No. 89 as it happens - I leave Floris’s feeling fragrant and refreshed. I almost expect a total stranger to walk up and hand me a bouquet of flowers just like they do in the adverts, but the closest I get is a guy with a flyer for Golf World. Even that affront (do I look like a golfer?) doesn’t dash my spirits as I wander down the street and back towards Beau.

My travels in his bubbly-bright bootsteps have thrown up a few surprises, not least the discovery that the greatest dandy of them all was not quite the peacock I’d thought him to be. As I walk past the statue of the great man himself, still perched on his pedestal and surveying his domain, I take it as a compliment that he doesn’t turn to watch me as I go. I know you’ll tell me it’s because he’s made of bronze, but I prefer to think it’s his way of giving me the thumbs up for my understated style and classy deportment. Thank goodness I left the red socks and hanky combo in the wardrobe today.

L
isten, boys and girls, I’m gonna tell you a story… If you are old enough, you’ll read that in the voice of Max Bygraves, a variety performer of yesteryear. This particular story is about a long-ago city whose streets were full of horses. No, it’s not My Little Ponyville. It’s London Town.

I never thought I would be interested in horses except as vehicles carrying hopes of a big win. I didn’t think the equine community and I shared much in common until I realised - and I confess the realisation came only recently - that I had actually shared my first adult home with a horse. Before I go much further and alarm friends and family, let me clarify.

The first house I bought was a mews house and there was probably a gap of 80 years or so between my residence and the departure of its equine inhabitants. Actually, Anne and I bought it from a potter who was sleeping upstairs and using the cobbled stalls as her studio, kiln and all. I suppose the potter’s residence threw me off the scent a bit, but I don’t think much of the internal structure had really changed since its horsey beginnings. And, of course, mews houses are dotted all over London because, along with London’s potters and musicians, the city was once full of horses needing homes. So I thought I would try to follow the trail that takes us from a transport system dominated by the nag to the glorious mess brought about by the combustion engine that we currently enjoy. Musing on our mews took me back to my first experience of parking a car in our cobbled stall in December 1981. It’s not primarily why I remember that month more vividly than others from the 1980s, but it is a contributory factor.

December 1981 was a month of momentous events in my life, parking aside. As that old French crooner Maurice Chevalier sang, ‘Ah yes, I remember it well.’ ‘It Must Be Love’, our ninth top-ten single in a row or something, was flying up the charts; we’d just bought our first house, the mews house in question; and I was about to marry Anne. I was 21 years old and it was nearly Christmas.

The group had been so busy touring and recording that there was a window of just a few days to get married and have a honeymoon. We got married on 21 December. It snowed and we had the whitest of white weddings in a church in Kentish Town. It was a beautiful affair and family and friends galore retired to Lauderdale House in Highgate for drinks and music and dance. After which Anne and I were whisked off to spend our two-day honeymoon in the Ritz in Piccadilly before I was off on the road again.

What Anne didn’t know was that I had also organised to buy her a car as a wedding and Christmas present. I’d managed to track down Anne’s favourite, a Karmann Ghia. These beauties were designed by Mr Porsche but have a VW engine. A perfect mixture of style and reliability, a bit like me.

The only problem was that the car was in Luton. Which even those with a poor grasp of geography will know is not actually in London. So on the first morning of married life, and on the pretext of sorting something out at our mews cottage in Camden, I left Anne at the Ritz having breakfast and struck north for Bedfordshire.

I roped in Lee Thompson, mate and Madness sax player, to join me as co-driver/pilot. We arrived in Luton to find the car was in beautiful nick, British racing-green with black-leather interior. Lee did all the tutting and sucking air between his teeth, while kicking the tyres and stroking the paintwork. It’s an ancient ritual men in these situations do, just like builders when they come through the front door of a possible new job. Hands were shaken and a deal was done. I was anxious to get back to my bride at the Ritz, but the words speed and haste could not be used to describe our journey back to London.

After half an hour of scraping the ice off the windscreen, and that was just on the inside, we were off. Wahey! We lurched forward, leaping and skidding on the slippery road, the previous owner’s smile rapidly evaporating as he leapt out of the way. We were heading back into town, albeit in first gear.

Though the car was a thing of beauty, it was not luxurious. It was built in the mid-70s and was functionally pretty basic. Because it was so cold, the windows were constantly steaming up. The heating consisted of a lever you slid from left to right, blue to red, cold to warm. Unfortunately, it took the length of the journey back to London before anything approaching warm air was coming out.

The journey took a good few hours. Lee had politely declined to help with the driving and was preoccupied with window-scraping duties. My abiding memory of that perilous journey back was of the car skating across empty London streets and a navigation error that took us kangaroo-leaping over a snow-covered London Bridge, the beautiful sights of the city barely visible through the steamed-up windscreen.

I finally made it back to Camden in pitch darkness. It must have been around four-ish. Never mind - at least I was home now. As I carefully navigated the car into the cobbled lane on which our new home stood, I felt a surge of relief - surely the worst was over? All I had to do now was park Anne’s new motor and nip back to the Ritz and wedded bliss. I’d been away all day - that would take some explaining. I had to consider the possibility of ruining the surprise and actually telling the truth.

Like snooker, parking is all about angles. I was tired and am no Pythagoras. As beads of perspiration pricked my forehead, and gears crashed, I edged forward and back hundreds of times, and began to question the point not only of cars, but also of life itself. I wondered why I had bought the house without considering practicalities like parking. Roger Moore - the Saint - never had a problem with his mews pad and his motor. Maybe it was the car, or maybe it was me? I settled on it being the car.

I did eventually get the car into the stall and once it was perfectly tethered with a giant bow around it I headed back to Anne. When I finally arrived at the Ritz it was well into the evening, and I had told my new wife I was just popping out for a couple of hours. She hadn’t called all the hospitals in London and no search party had been sent out for me, but I think it’s fair to say that when you have only two days together for your honeymoon, disappearing for one of them is not ideal. I think the car and the bow and Anne’s knowledge of my driving skills was explanation enough. It must have been, because if you fast-forward to the present we are still together, with two lovely daughters.

Back to that cobbled street. With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so hard on myself. While I wasn’t exactly James Hunt (another fellow mews dweller in his time), the truth was that the street was very narrow and the stall tiny. Our lovely new mews pad hadn’t, after all, been designed to accommodate people like us who wanted somewhere to park their car, though it seemed perfectly suited to that purpose, and cheap into the bargain. It was, as I now know, built for horses. And horses have a very tight turning circle.

By all accounts, Victorian mews quarters were cramped, smelly and unsanitary, and, remembering the layout of our house, I wouldn’t have wanted to share it with a horse. It’s one thing to live cosy with your Karmann Ghia, as we did - we could keep an eye on ours through an internal window, while sitting in front of a fire - it’s quite another to sleep above a stable. The idea was to keep grooms and carriages close to the big house so that its inhabitants could make that impromptu trip across town for a game of cribbage. The horses were effectively lodged at the end of the garden, hidden from public view and - crucially - down-wind from the nostrils of the rich folks.

We could only get sight of the big house that would once have owned our little hovel if we clambered up on to our roof, which, of course, being young, lithe and athletic things, we often did. Up on the roof (I’ve started humming along with the Drifters) we had a view of the world as it was 100 years before: the backs of vast houses, five or six storeys high, loomed at the end of long gardens. Most of the big houses had been turned into flats and their gardens parcelled up, while our little house was pretty much as it always had been, cobbles and all.

I am not a horse-rider. I tried once and I fell off. I had sort of assumed that, apart from the mounted police, royalty and the military, no one goes riding in London and that the mews houses, like my own first home, have for many years all been fitted out for human rather than equine habitation. But, in the spirit of adventure, I was curious to find out what our place would have looked like when Dobbin and co were in situ.

So to find out more I headed for Elvaston Mews in west London, to check out a mews stable that was still operating as originally intended, one of London’s last livery yards. It is just a brisk walk from Hyde Park, which at over 350 acres is the largest area of open land in central London and a place where generations of fashionable Londoners have come to exercise their horses. Heading south from the park’s fading red gates, I strode down Queen’s Gate and passed one of London’s many statues of men on horseback. This one is of the obscure Lord Napier of Magdala, a Victorian military man who in 1868 captured a fortress called Magdala in Abyssinia, modern-day Ethiopia. A final-year student at the nearby Royal College of Art, Eleonora Aguiari, wrapped Lord Napier, horse, plinth and all in bright-red duct tape as part of her end-of-year show in 2004, her aim to bring public attention to the obscure and ignored topics of the past, like Lord Napier’s imperial campaign.

Once you stop and take notice of these features of our streets, it is a never-ending source of fascination. The stories they have to tell of the past and present are part of what makes living in this vast and ancient city such a joy. On this occasion I had no artistic or political agenda to pursue - I had other matters in mind and I’d left my duct tape at home - so I used the man on horseback as a handy and fitting signpost and strolled on down the wide tree-lined street in search of the turning on my right that would take me to my mews.

Turning into the mews itself, which is tucked away behind the big houses at the front, I was greeted by a sight which must once have been commonplace in these parts: a pair of horses tethered to the wall of the corner building, and both on the receiving end of a little light grooming. I’m no expert on these things, but judging by the swish of their tails, they looked like they were enjoying themselves. The woman wielding the brush was Jenny Dickinson, who had been running the stables here for the past ten years, offering her clients what’s known as a full livery service - bed, board and daily exercise. On this particular day she had six guests in residence, although she told me there was actually room for nine horses.

I was surprised to see how far back the building seemed to stretch. It felt much larger than my old mews house, with three stalls off to the right of the cobbled corridor, each still boasting the original white ceramic tiles that were put in when the place was first built 200 years before. I know a saddle when I see one, and there were several hanging from the walls, together with other paraphernalia which no doubt served equally useful horse-related purposes - although quite what they might be was well beyond my understanding.

The whole place had a pleasing farmyard pong - a comforting blend of horseflesh, straw and polish. All in all, it was easy to imagine that crossing the threshold from street to stalls had whisked me away from the modern city and set me down in a country stables far from the madding crowd. I could almost imagine the sound of hammer on anvil as the local blacksmith bashes away at his metalwork next door. It was only when I emerged blinking into the autumn sunlight that I realised I hadn’t imagined that sound at all: as if stage-managed to complete this illusion of rural bliss, there really was a blacksmith hard at work, shoeing one of Jenny’s trusty steeds. As he took a breather between hooves, he explained to me that by day he works as a farrier to the Household Cavalry, but he also offers a mobile service to civilians like Jenny. He carries his portable forge and anvil around in the back of an estate car, the equine equivalent of the AA man, always there in an emergency to help put your transport back on the road.

As it turns out, I was fortunate to make my visit when I did. Since then not only has the yard closed, but a planning application has just been approved to convert this fabulous mews into a two-million-quid luxury home. I think that there must surely be enough two-million-quid homes in London to go round. What we have lost here is one of central London’s last working stables. As far as I’ve been able to discover, there’s only the one in Bathurst Mews in nearby Knightsbridge left. There is something sort of life-enhancing to think of people trotting out in Hyde Park at 6.30 on a summer’s morning, just as they have for the last 250 years. Added to that, it’s something that’s traditional but vibrant and it generally adds to the mix of old and new in London as a living, breathing city. To lose all that for the sake of yet another tasteless home for a multimillionaire seems to be a very bad turn of events. Before I get too worked up someone throw a blanket over me and give me a sugar lump, and I’ll rein myself in. (Boom, boom!)