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London SE
Charles Jennings
| SE4: | Eternal Café (closed) |
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| SE5: | what Battersea must have been like before the traffic and the stupid people |
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| SE6: | a giant plaster cat looming over the shopping precinct, descendant of the monsters at Crystal Palace, Ernest Dowson died here and no wonder |
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| SE7: | off the map with Antonioni, his green paint lavished on the park railings for extra tranquil verdancy, no noise but the constant whispering and rustling of the trees |
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| SE8: | shops that died or have run mad trying to keep going, dead retail business vanished behind plywood boards, newsagents that fax, a laughing fishmonger, halal meat |
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| SE9: | shabby nowhere way out of town, deep outer-outer suburb, |
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| SE10: | old Observatory alone on the roof of London, Royal Naval College as fabulous and inexplicable as the Royal Palace of Placentia, grey, sullen Thames coiling around the Isle of Dogs, twisting itself into a squally mass as it heads for the estuary |
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| SE13: | slumped up against Greenwich this way, Catford that, Blackheath sitting suavely at the top of the hill |
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| SE14: | another of those blokes appeared, no.1 cut, Crombie, Pit Bull on a string I thought, hallo, like you do, and bunked off quick |
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| SE15: | down the road, twinned in the same broken passageway, the Celestial Church of Christ and the Redeemed Christian Church of God, brothers against the rising tide of vandalism and rage |
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| SE16: | a mission above offices on the Old Kent Road promises to Set the Captives Free, a Gospel flyer, stuck to the pavement, said A Night of Joy but then again, why not? Demand A Night of Joy, aloft with the Heavenly Host in Bermondsey and believe that, if here, then anywhere |
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| SE18: | economic downturn council blocks, traffic crashing through like the army |
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| SE19: | some little bluffs of stonework, a few well thumbed Sphinxes, a headless Tudor sculpture in the shadow of the transmitter, the giggling plaster dinosaurs down the lower lake, plesiosaurs in two feet of black water, iguanadons like an opium dream |
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| SE23: | complacent red-faced mansions, gazing down in a municipal green, tended conifers, green buds in the lawn . . . a hyper-refined, almost macabre quietness that gets into the senseless clamour of your thoughts and makes them whisper |
London-born Charles Jennings has worked as a writer and journalist since 1984. He has contributed to the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Independent, Financial Times, Daily Mail, Harper's & Queen, Tatler, New Statesman and Spectator, as well as writing columns in The Guardian, Observer and Times. He has written for (and appeared on) radio and television and is the author of several books, including the best-selling Up North (1995) and the critically-acclaimed Fast Set (2004), both published by Abacus.
Brockley, 2006
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