Ealing Riots – The Aftermath

They’ve tried to ruin Ealing.  I don’t know what to say.

Burnt out cars near Ealing Green at 10am this morning.

Budgens corner store and homes above it completely gutted by fire

The area was one of several cordoned off as a crime scene

For Art's Sake on Ealing Green. What did the marauding youths want in there ffs?

Damaged shop fronts on Bond Street

Small businesses in West Ealing, already struggling in the recession, were very badly hit.

Bargain stores weren't spared. It's insane.

Blockbuster, West Ealing. Trashed

Completely trashed

The local community rallies together for a clean-up thanks to Twitter's #riotcleanup

Lots of camaraderie and brooms

Shops and restaurants boarded up on Haven Green Parade

Everywhere was eerily calm this beautiful August afternoon.  Haven Green, where some of the more serious incidents and clashes between rioters and police took place, seems back to normal.  It’s hard to imagine that less than 24 hours ago the place was like a war zone.

Did I dream it? the man on the bench is probably asking himself

It’s not all bad.  Some businesses are doing really well today which makes for a pleasant change.

That House In West Ealing

Here’s the spring/summer look for ‘That House In West Ealing’ which completely disproves the theory that less is more.   Christmas Time* at this address is especially good value for the passer-by but probably not good value at all for the occupier or the National Grid.  (* By Christmas Time I mean of course the beleaguered retailer’s version of this festive period ie from about mid-November until early Feb.)

I’ve been spring/summer cleaning the blog and have been fascinated to discover what people are actually looking for when they misguidedly stumble upon Queen of the Suburbs.  Top searches have turned out to be:

• Cote Brasserie Ealing
• Ealing Cote
• Ealing cafe

 … which seems harmless enough but thereafter it gets progressively darker and common searches like ‘crime scene tape’ along with ‘murder’ and ‘scary garden gnomes’ makes me wonder if I’m attracting the wrong sort.  Maybe I ought to work on my Search Engine Optimisation if in future I want to deter multiple seekers of  ’gyratory chairs for entertainment’ and ‘inflatable sofa girl’.

On a lighter note, here’s my DVD recommendation of the week, The Adjustment Bureau, described as “fun family viewing” by one local blogger.

Camping Weekend #2

A few weeks ago we made the most of the clement weather and went camping.   I’m sorry to say it wasn’t the fashionable festival variety as we never seem to get our act together quickly enough to book tickets.  This was just a bit of cheap and cheerful roughing it for no good reason.

Although at the last minute we all decided to wimp out of a Friday night arrival – it reverted to inclement ie it was blowing a gale and pouring with rain – we had an excellent Saturday and Sunday during which there was continuous blue sky and sunshine.  It got a bit too hot at one point and someone, it might have been me, commented that they thought it could do with being a bit cooler.

We were staying at Hayles Fruit Farm in the Cotswolds.  It’s quite basic, just a field attached to a working farm but the owners are friendly, there are wonderful views, it allows campfires and for one night only basic (ie a couple of chemical loos and one shower block) is all right.  There’s a great pub a short drive away, The Mount Inn, which is in the pretty village of Stanton.  It serves good food and has a nice outside seating area but watch your undercarriage: you have to go up a very steep hill to get there.

Note the little photo montage above. I’ve been messing about on picnik, the free photo editing site.  The children want to pay for an upgrade ($24.95 a year) but I’m not so sure – after much deliberation we’ve just signed our lives away to Spotify (£4.99 a month) and there are only so many hours in the day.

Read reviews of Hayles Fruit Farm here.

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Party In The Park (phew what a scorcher)

Mind if I put up a few pictures of the hottest day of the year so far?  They were taken at Pitshanger’s Party in the Park and of course the best bit was the Dance Gallery show organised by the fabulous and seemingly tireless Jill Wellman.

Thank you. That’s all.

Midsummer +9 In Hyde Park

I first came across Montreal-based indie rock band Arcade Fire through this wonderful interactive film The Wilderness Downtown which was recommended to me in a Tweet by someone famous.  Read what David Pescovitz over at BoingBoing has to say about it:

The Wilderness Downtown is perhaps the best browser-dominating Net art piece I’ve experienced since Jodi.org’s best work more than a decade ago.

I’ve know idea what he’s talking about tbh but click on the Wilderness Downtown link above and stick with it. It can sometimes be slow to start but I defy anyone not to feel a tiny jolt of nostalgia tinged with retrospective teenage angst and post-modern omg (what am I talking about?) as an anonymous kid-in-a-hoodie runs and runs down what could be your old street.  Interesting.

What’s even more interesting is that the band were playing in Hyde Park last night and their latest album is called The Suburbs which is the name of this blog minus Queen of.  It turned out to be an unexpectedly beautiful evening with local boys Mumford and Sons supporting and a couple of other bands we didn’t see because we got there too late.  Arcade Fire were fantastic and more than made up for what we missed.

Some people don’t like Hyde Park for gigs but I love it and not just because you can lay out your picnic rug and have a nice lie down if you get tired.  According to NME, there were complaints from various quarters about the sound quality but it was loud enough for me.  Of course I am someone who likes to have a bit of a lie down at open air concerts so I might not be the best judge of gig volume.

Here’s Arcade Fire and its approximately 900 band members (OK there are only seven of them) led by the cool and excellently named Win Butler:

Photo via Visit England Blog

The Perrys of Pitshanger Lane

Wimbledon’s on and thankfully the weather’s perked up a bit.  It turns out Ealing is quite the breeding ground for tennis talent.   Not only was there Dorothea Lambert Chambers about a hundred years ago, but three-times Wimbledon champion Fred Perry (1909 – 1995) lived here too.

Young people may only know the man for the hundreds of clothes shops that bear his name but he remains Britain’s greatest tennis player (Come on, Tim Andy!) and the first man ever to win all four Grand Slam titles back in the 1930s.

Last Thursday a plaque was unveiled in his honour at the Brentham Club where he learnt to play.

The Perrys moved from Stockport to Ealing in 1918, having spent time in Bolton and Wallasey (Wallasey!!  Who knew??).  In “The Last Champion” by Jon Henderson, Fred is said to have described his new home town as:

A paradise after the bleak streets of the North

Oh.  Poor the North.

223 Pitshanger Lane was the postal address of this paradise found and there’s talk of a blue plaque being put up there to commemorate where the family lived between 1918 and 1935.   Of course Fred then buggered off to live in America, presumably to an even greater paradise after the bleak streets of West 5 and it’s at this point that Queen of the Suburbs loses interest.

London Listening

Jason Kottke is a man who has his eye firmly set on the webby zeitgeist.  His is a site chock full of weird and wonderful stuff and here’s what I stumbled upon the other day.  I love it (see video below).

What a thrill to learn there’s a grown man going about the place with the Jungle Book soundtrack on his iPod.  And ordinary everywomen have a penchant for Gaga and Rihanna.  My favourite person was the Scot who didn’t know what he was listening to.  Note the blue skies, dry pavements, summery clothes: the film must have been made back in the last days of the Dry Age, c. April 2011.

A Time To Blog

Now that the vet has told me I need to brush the dog’s teeth once a day (ideally twice), I’m finding it nigh on impossible to get anything done other than chase the dog around the kitchen holding a toothbrush.  Hence a short blog post mostly in note form but with some links to compensate for the apparent lack of effort.

Good Things

A good book: The Morville Hours by Katherine Swift. Beautiful and interesting.

A good film: The Closet with Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil.  Funny.

Good telly:  Scott and Bailey, a bit like Cagney and Lacey only in Manchester

A good website:  Simply Breakfast.  Lovely photos of what someone has for breakfast every day.  Now that’s what I call blogging commitment.

A good plan:  get a proper job and/or buy these mugs from Snowden Flood:

Britain’s Most Popular Hobby (after moaning about the weather)

Feeling bereft now that the Chelsea Flower Show is no longer on, having been simulcast (say, what?) on BBCs 1, 2 and HD for seven glorious days, I’m  consoling myself by cultivating my own little urban garden (when it’s warm and dry enough to venture out without sowester and galoshes, naturally).  I’m not boasting, rest-of-the-country-that-isn’t-getting-any-rain.  I’m moaning.

This year I’m loving these bronze Gazanias (above) purchased last week at Syon Park Garden Centre.  (£3.50 for 6).  In my head I like to imagine myself sitting in Cleve West’s Best In Show Garden with which, truth be told, I’ve become slightly obesessed.  Some of the plants he used are available on the Crocus website.  I want them all.

Cleve West's winning garden at this year's Chelsea Flower Show (via Niwaki)

The garden centre at Syon Park, the London pied-a-terre of the Dukes of Northumberland, was opened in 1968 and was the first of its kind in Britain.   Built around the 16th century stable block it took three years to complete at a cost of £500 000. If you’re interested, and if you have four minutes to spare, there’s an old Pathe clip you can watch (link here) in which a young Percy Thrower and someone I’ve never heard of (Jim Middleton) can be seen hard at work in the early days.

Watching the film I was more than a little interested to learn that while Henry VIII was lying in state at Syon, his coffin burst open and his corpse was mawled by dogs (mawled by dogs!!!!).  Nice to hear that little nugget of horrible history shared with what sounded like sprightly 1960s title sequences in the background (A Tomorrow’s World/Animal Magic hybrid).

Of course whenever I go to Syon Park Garden Centre I can’t help but be reminded of Barry Binch and the Swing Beans (where are they now?).  This was the jazz band set up in the Cactus House during our 1994 wedding reception in the Great Conservatory.   I’m not sure it matters too much that neither of us can remember what was being played during our First Dance.   What surely counts is that in those dark, primitive pre-internet days we managed to locate Messrs Binch and Beans at all.

The Great Conservatory, Syon Park

Missing TVU Already

It’s farewell then, Thames Valley University.  That venerable seat of learning known variously as Ealing Technical College, Ealing College of Higher Education, West London Polytechnic and, since 1992, TVU will from now on only answer to the name University of West London.  It’s a move which has upset Brunel over in UB8 because it said it had the idea to be called University of West London first.

Wev.  Having been deemed the basket-case of academia (via Times Higher Education), the new and doubtless improved UWL in Ealing (not hard, it was judged to be failing by the end of the 90s) has ditched former Thames Valley partners in crimes-against-education Slough and Reading.  Now, together with Brentford campus, it’s set to reinvent itself as somewhere worth going to study just one hour from Oxford on the train.

And look at this list of glittering alumni:  Pete Townshend of The Who; John Bird, founder of the Big Issue; Freddie Mercury of Queen; Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones; members of bands Radiohead, Reef, Tricky and Bloc Party; chefs Chris Galvin and Eyck Zimmer; author Jung Chang and Russian politician Sergey Ivanov.  Awesome.  (According to the Independent newspaper).

I quite fancy trying out Pillars Restaurant, the training kitchen for catering students where I’ve heard you can enjoy some elegant dining on the cheap.

Meanwhile Ealing Gazette readers haven’t yet reached a consensus on whether they approve of the name change.  I don’t have time to think about that let alone vote in an online poll.  I’m too busy applying to get a place on the underwater basket-weaving and twirling (combined honours) degree course at the University of Neasden (formerly Land of Leather). (with a little help from Private Eye)

Quick Vote

Do you approve of Thames Valley University being renamed as the University of West London?

 Yes 54.3% No 45.7%