Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (25 page)

Using all that Parmesan turned my mind to Samuel Pepys, who I have already tried to credit with the invention of the doner kebab. Much of the London he knew went up in smoke in 1666. Like me, he did like a good meal, and what I like about him in particular is the fact that when preparing to leave his house as the fire drew nearer to his home on Seething Lane, near the river not far from the Tower of London, one of his last acts was to bury his Parmesan cheese in his garden. There was no more room on the cart and he obviously couldn’t bring himself to give it away or leave it to the flames. So what else can you do with such treasure but bury it? You’ve got to admire a man who risks his life for his cheese. Pepys escaped the bubonic plague of 1665 and he and his house escaped the Great Fire of 1666, though it did burn down in another fire in 1673, so there’s nothing to visit now. You can, however, pop your head inside a beautiful old church, St Olave’s, just at the top of Seething Lane on Hart Street, where the old fellow found his final resting place, though I am sorry to say that he never did find his cheese.

It’s a lot easier to get the exotic ingredients needed for your risotto now. We probably take it for granted that we can buy Parmesan cheese in the high-street supermarket. But this is quite a recent phenomenon. It was really not that long ago that you had to make a special journey to a special shop in Soho. Imagine explaining that to your wife or girlfriend! Elizabeth David, one of the great cookery writers in the years BD (before Delia), gave readers of her book
Italian Food
specific directions as to where ingredients could be sourced. She was pretty worried about the availability of good Parmesan in 1954. ‘It is exceedingly rare to find good Parmesan in this country,’ she said, and the only places to go were ‘the Italian shops of Soho’. Goodness only knows what you were meant to do if you were reading Elizabeth David’s book and lived in Redruth or Runcorn. Anyone wishing to cook Elizabeth David-style food in 50s Britain who couldn’t get to Soho would’ve struggled to find even the very basic ingredients we take for granted today, such as olive oil, which was only available from Boots, where it was sold to alleviate earache! To be fair, it’s still pretty handy for earache, but we’ve also got some culinary uses for it now.

One of those stores saving Elizabeth David’s prosciutto in 1954 was the Italian grocer’s Camisa’s on Old Compton Street that I remember from my youth. This shop is a survivor, despite the changing face and feel of Soho over the last 40 years. It is packed with all the food smells of Italy, and is extraordinary in a very straightforward, ordinary sort of way. In the window are great sparkling chunks of Parmesan, like rocks quarried from the Parmesan mines of Reggiano. Inside is a counter brimming with dishes of olives and homemade ravioli, and on the shelves opposite is enough dried pasta to weather a year-long siege of Soho. Lina Stores on Brewer Street is another treasure trove of Italian delicacies whose layout hasn’t changed since the 1940s. We owe a debt of gratitude to these two Soho stalwarts for their ground-breaking contribution to helping Britons discover that spaghetti doesn’t really grow on trees, and for continuing the good work despite an onslaught from the supermarkets. Fortunately for Camisa’s and Lina Stores, ordinary, authentic Italian grocers are pretty rare in London, and so both have loyal and regular customers. They come from far and wide to purchase their fresh pasta here.

There is a similar loyal fanbase for another grocer’s up in Muswell Hill, Martyn’s, which has been there since 1897. It’s not Italian, but it has its own peculiar heritage and, like both Lina Stores and Camisa’s, it has kept on keeping on. It sits among a parade of shops on Muswell Hill Broadway. There is a pleasing late-Victorian uniformity to the street, even down to the repeated fan-and-shell mouldings above doorways and windows. That’s because the buildings along the Broadway are all part of a planned scheme.

Here, among the usual chain stores, failing banks and mobile-phone stores, which I swear seem to breed along the high streets of Britain, is this independent food shop which seems to be bucking the trend. If you don’t care to buy your food by walking up and down aisles, and you want to have a good look at your prunes before making your regular purchase, Martyn’s is the grocer’s for you. I, for one, welcome the thought of asking for half a pound of brazils and a man behind the counter handing me a packet with the comment, ‘Your nuts, sir.’

Martyn’s was one of the very first tenants on Muswell Hill Broadway and has been in the same family from the date of that late-Victorian building boom. Just as well, as the mosaic tiles in the doorway spell out the family name in little brown-and-cream squares.

Once you do step over the threshold, you’ll find comforting jars of lemon curd along with cardamom seeds, preserves and pastes, grains, nuts and dried fruit. The old mahogany counter runs the length of the shop and behind it the shelves reach up to the ceiling. There’s even a set of old brass scales. There is nothing lurid or brash or branded here, except Martyn’s own brands of packeted tea, herbs and spices and the old tins of ‘Golden Brandy Snaps’ and Peek Frean’s ‘Princess’ biscuits which are now used to store coffee beans.

The colours are all muted creams, browns and greens, like a Farrow & Ball paint chart. But this is not a heritage shop: the goods are real enough and the customers are loyal. I met one of them on my last visit, a young lady called Hettie Bowers, who at the age of 100 still comes in for her coffee.

I suspect Hettie would agree with me that over the last 100 years, food on offer in the capital has certainly become more diverse and, in the absence of chalk and lead, much improved. Individual restaurants and cafes come and go with changing tastes and styles, and each new generation often wants something a bit different. The fact that some dodgy diners that overcooked your carrots have perished to make way for the array of new arrivals is probably not to be mourned. But the disappearance of places like the New Piccadilly cafe is why I now cherish places like Cooke’s, the Lorelei and Bar Italia, and shops like Martyn’s, Camisa’s and Lina Stores all the more. These once ordinary, everyday places, which are not part of a chain or big brand and are sometimes just a bit off the beaten track, are becoming extraordinary and exceptional because fewer and fewer of them exist. Perhaps if we know more about the history of these places and how they’ve come to be where they are, we will make more effort to patronise them and, who knows, make a difference to their chances of survival. In an attempt to do my bit, I hope the various stories in this chapter will encourage us all to cherish some of the long-standing gems that are out there. But somehow I feel frustrated and even forlorn about the whole thing. Perhaps it is low blood sugar that has made me a bit maudlin, and I need some food inside me. It’s too early for a kebab. I feel I ought to have something traditional, so perhaps I’ll see if I can find a place selling that Huguenot/Jewish fusion food that seems to have become all the rage.

I
like watching all sports. I would happily sit down with Beau Brummell and chums and watch competitive raindrop racing. It has also been observed in my house that if the TV screen is mainly green and there is a ball rolling around, I am instantly transfixed. Although for my own sanity, my family draw the line at crown green bowls. While I am very happy to cheer on the lads of many colours from the comfort of my sofa, you can never beat the live experience, and I learnt from an early age that it sometimes takes a bit of grit and determination just to get to a game, let alone the perseverance needed to stick it out through thick and thin. And I’m not just talking about extricating myself from the pub.

There are two spectator sports that play an important part in my personal sporting landscape, and they’ve experienced contrasting fortunes over the last 50 years. They are both sports that we went to watch in our droves every week from the 1930s through to the 1960s: football and greyhound racing. Before the Second World War, greyhound racing came close second to football in that often-run race, the popularity stakes - not quite a photo finish, but it gave football a good run for its money.

Sometimes the two sports shared some of London’s most glamorous grounds, like Wembley and my home turf Stamford Bridge. There were 220 tracks across the country, with weekly attendances topping five million. Despite the BBC’s refusal to broadcast commentaries on the big meetings, like the Greyhound Derby, it had a huge following. The BBC didn’t consider greyhound racing to be a desirable or useful sport, and its working-class roots didn’t appeal to the bigwigs who saw the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and Wimbledon as jewels in the crown of the broadcasting calendar and the epitome of British sporting endeavour. The BBC only started covering greyhound racing because its popularity made it impossible not to. In 1953 the BBC showed three races, but dared not broadcast the results of any other races for fear it would encourage gambling among the masses. Isn’t it nice to be treated like adults?

But while football is now London’s dominant sport, greyhound racing is in terminal decline, very much on the last of its four skinny legs. Given the close association of these two sports, which often shared both stadiums and supporters, and their contrasting fates, I thought I would take a closer look at their history in the capital, which means boldly going where I have not ventured before and revisiting a few old haunts too. I’ll start with greyhound racing, as I think football will be able to survive without my immediate attention, while the whole greyhound racing business looks extremely fragile, Walthamstow dog track having turned off the power to the electric hare in the summer of 2008 after 76 years in business.

Racing and hunting with hounds have ancient roots. Tombs of the pharaohs are adorned with images of hounds, and historians think that Cleopatra indulged in a bit of dog racing, presumably when she wasn’t chasing Mark Antony. Maybe she combined the two. I can imagine it now, with Sid James as Mark Antony dressed as the rabbit in
Carry On up the Dog Track
. Yes, I like it.

Elizabeth I loved her hounds and she is credited with establishing the rules for competitive game hunting with hounds, where two dogs were pitched against each other to hunt down their prey. At the start of the 1600s, competition using hounds to hunt hares - known as hare coursing - was all the rage. After a morning’s hare coursing you’d head off to the Globe Theatre for an afternoon play. Perhaps you’d fail to find a laugh in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
while indulging in the new fad of smoking tobacco. Presumably, it would then be a few pints of sack and on to a thrash-lute club to dance a few quadrilles, before heading off for an eel pie and then home to bed. The perfect end to the perfect day.

The modern version of this sport, despite its noble British ancestry, was actually developed in America and then imported back to the mother country. The Americans had applied a bit of technology to the process, inventing the mechanical ‘lure’ or dummy hare, and bringing it into the cities. Greyhound racing of the kind enjoyed until recently at Walthamstow is a twentieth-century phenomenon. The first meeting round a track with a mechanical hare actually took place at the Belle Vue Stadium in Manchester in July 1926, which even I can’t claim is in north-west London. The first meeting in London was at the old 1908 Olympic Stadium at White City in June 1927.

Reminiscing about the old days with Carolyn Baker, whose dad owned Romford dog track, I discover that in the 1920s, before the mechanisation of the sport had come to Romford, they had an ingenious method of pulling the lure (which was nothing more than a flea-bitten bundle of rags with ears) along at speed. This involved putting a car up on bricks and attaching the wire of the lure to the rim of one of the tyreless wheels, and then it was a case of clutch in, select gear and foot hard down to the floor. The wheels of the car spun round while the car went nowhere but the lure got wound in like a yo-yo. So next time you see a car on bricks, don’t rush to conclusions about the theft of a set of alloys - perhaps you’ve just missed some urban hare coursing.

The revolution in greyhound racing came to Britain when Charles Munn, an American entrepreneur, bought the licence to exploit the mechanical hare outside the USA. Instead of a bundle of rags pulled around a field on a wire, a sprightly little rabbit could now be set off, like a furry train on a monorail, to run round and round a track, race after race. In the 1920s Munn’s innovation proved to be a great success. Cities took to the sport and in London dog tracks were incorporated into some football stadiums, including Chelsea, which already had a big running track around the perimeter of the pitch. Stamford Bridge hosted dog racing from 1937 through to 1968. Unfortunately, I never saw any greyhound racing at the Bridge, but I certainly saw a few people being chased around that old track in my time!

There are differing opinions on how many dog tracks London boasted, but about 15 were in operation at any one time. As well as Wembley and Stamford Bridge, White City was the big greyhound venue, attracting crowds of up to 100,000 to its meets. White City has been demolished now, but the same site currently hosts the BBC, those greyhound racing lovers. I am informed you can still see the chasing of tails and packs running around in circles, and all without a bunny or greyhound in sight. Haringey, Hendon and Hackney Wick have also gone, and there’s no longer dog racing at West Ham, Walthamstow or Wandsworth. I don’t know what’s wrong with London’s Hs and Ws.

In the heyday of the sport, Romford had to compete with these and other London greyhound stadiums for business, and Carolyn recalls her father experimenting with special events to keep the punters coming to his track. One of his more radical and imaginative innovations was novelty racing with cheetahs. No, I didn’t believe that either, until photographic evidence was produced to prove the point. The novelty lasted for two weekends in the 1930s. They quickly learnt that they had to use real bait to get the big cats to run, and they also had problems controlling the beasts when they weren’t running. I’m not sure I’d have been too keen to be in the crowd. The experiment didn’t last long.