Story Snippet: The Old Forge

This morning found myself by The Old Forge in Mill Hill (London NW7), my childhood neighbourhood. It sits at the bottom of The Ridgeway, a road running along the crest of a line of hills. It is just beneath the old convent (St Joseph’s) where my mum used to take us for some reason to meet a nun called Sister Theo and where in 2011 we filmed Jamie’s Dream School for Channel 4 with the 3Rs: Rankin, Rolf (Harris) and Robert (Winston). Here’s one of the brilliant pictures Rankin (who hails from adjacent Edgware) took on that shoot:

As I was explaining to Enfant Terrible No. 2 that this white clapboard building which comes to a point at the junction of The Ridgeway and the road beneath the convent (once famous as a training place for missionaries) was the site of Mill Hill Village’s blacksmith and when I was a boy a tea shop (where I went with my friend Daniel Glinnert). As I was explaining an old fella emerged from round the corner, doing some gardening. He explained the place had been in his wife’s family for generations, that her father (grandfather?) had been the last smithy and asked us to guess what year the forge finally closed. I was miles out – it was 1932. He went on to describe how the focus had been on shoeing, not horses, but oxen. And then he shared a little known fact: oxen cannot stand on three legs (unlike horses). They had to build a special tight pen so that the ox could lean over while being shod. It’s fabulous what stories come to light in everyday life.

There used to be bee hives by the forge at the adjacent cottage (which used to be on the same family’s land, now sold off). They are gone now, the bees caught a disease. That little corner where the forge was is a just-about-hanging-on vestige of a lost age which you can really sense at that spot.

Memory and the Internet

I’ve just woken up with the phrase ‘Electrical Discount Warehouse’ in my head. I’m fairly sure that was the name of a shop in the parade of shops in the neighbourhood where I grew up. I was trying to recall it at lunchtime yesterday when talking to my mother about that small group of shops and trying to finish reconstructing it with her. It’s always a surprising reminder of the activities of the Unconscious during sleep when you wake up having remembered something you struggled to recall when awake.

So why was I trying to reconstruct the shopping parade from memory? I was driving past it a few days ago (New Year’s Eve) and when I saw the chemist the name Brian Luckhurst sprang to mind, out of nowhere – haven’t thought about it or him for years. Now I write the name down I can begin to see his bald pate and  his person. From that thought, the sudden emergence of his name, came the question: What else was in this parade when I was a child (c.1969-1975)? It’s the kind of memory game people in prison must play. It reminds me of Terry Waite and John McCarthy.

The neighbourhood was called The Green Man after the local pub. One of my first jobs after university was working in that pub. I went in to get a bar job and the manager took one look at my John Lennon glasses and my lily-white hands and said “Accounts”. I enjoyed doing accounts, because unlike with Literature (Modern & Mediaeval Languages = foreign literature), there was an answer. It was therapeutic. By then the name had changed to The Everglades, shifting from English tradition (Robin Hood, forestry) to American exoticness (the Florida swamps – there was an ingredient I saw in the accounts every week, “jalepenos” that matched this exoticism – I was uncertain what on earth they were). I have no idea what the pub or building is called now – it still stands. The ‘race memory’ of the place is captured in the persistence of Green Man as the local name for the junction. There are no signs anywhere that actually say Green Man.

After the internet and advent of the Worldwide Web parochial memories like this by and large tend to get recorded somewhere or other. Before they were much more likely to die away, existing only in stray photos, perhaps local publications, mainly people’s heads. Some of the early films in my career are really hard to find online – my first was in 1987 (as producer-director-writer). Often there is just one artefact to be found – an image or a reference.

Let’s test that one: (“Adam Gee” “The Best” Melrose) [Melrose = production company]…

It draws a total blank, other than where I have recorded it online (i.e. IMDb). I first remember working online in the mid 90s, a couple of years after making The Best.

Of course the efficiency of the search engine(s) is an issue. Thinking about this I remember coming across the film online. It was on a British Film Institute catalogue but it seems to be too deep or the site too poorly constructed to show up in the early pages of search results.

So the memory of the WWW only gets you so far. And there’s still arguably a merit in capturing certain things from in your head and publishing them online. We all know how trivial things can come to have significant meaning in certain contexts.

So for posterity here is what I have managed to reconstruct of The Green Man – from my own memory, with input from my mother and brother, and prompted by those discussions also from my head:

• Brian Luckhurst chemist – which started the memory ball rolling…
• Dr Burke’s surgery – 2 Selvage Lane, what I passed to get to the shops
• The Railway Tavern pub – not really attached to the parade
• Pet shop on the corner – I can recall the sawdust on the floor, the smell (not unpleasant), and the owner in his grey lab-style coat (Champions? see below)
• Eric & Mavis newsagent/sweet shop – the other end of that first row of shops, formerly The Penny Shop (sweet shop)
• Express Dairy outlet – down an alley beyond E&M
• window shop? glass?
• Neptune fish & chips shop – over the road, opposite corner; chips were 5p in 1971 at point of decimalisation
• Post Office – sold singles (ex-juke box), where I bought my first 45: T-Rex, Solid Gold Easy Action
• Green Grocer – had a delivery boy who rode a heavy black bike, he turned up later in a rockabilly group called The Polecats (who had a modest hit with a rockabilly-punk cover of David Bowie’s John I’m Only Dancing) – his name was something like Bez (real name Martin)
• plumbers merchants??
• launderette??
• Mautners deli
• Electrical Discount Warehouse – a slightly later arrival my father was attracted to as a physicist who made electrical instruments
• bookies???
• butcher? (Lewis?)
• Martin’s newsagent
• Women’s hairdresser (Friends???) – end of the Neptune stretch of shops, so the two sides are: Pet Shop-Eric & Mavis, Neptune-hairdresser
• The Green Man pub – which gave its name to all this
• Mobil garage

This represents, I would estimate, over 50% of the shop units at The Green Man junction. If I was banged up in a Beirut cell for a few years, I wonder how much more my mind is capable of retrieving?

To conclude this Sunday morning reflection on memory, individual and group recall, and the internet, let’s see what the Web can find visually of these fragments I have retrieved…

One tiny picture of The Green Man pub from a personal collection of pub pictures in the locality (personal local history site)

Green Man – Hale Lane, Edgware

A shot of the pet shop part of the parade froma specialist bus site

Alan Le???? was a second hairdresser I think. To its left in the image seems to be some kind of office (solicitor? accountant?) – the pet shop is behind the back of this 221 Routemaster bus. The phone number on the office is 0181 so after the expansion of 01 London numbers to 081 to 0181 making this around 1995 so the photo must be misleading in that the bus was vintage at this juncture.

A good picture of the pub from well before my time (must have been rebuilt in the 30s) from a pub wiki

T. Gill was the publican

Another early photo of the pub from the local authority archives

There seems to have been a garage attached – the Mobil garage ended up on the other side of the pub

A more recent photo of The Green Man building from Tripadvisor labelled “Greenman, Edgware (As it used to be called)”. This iteration is (ugh) The Jolly Badger.

You can see the clapboard fabric of The Green Man building and the Mobil garage (now a different brand).

So, so far, only one image from the era in question – the very first one, small and black & white.

Although this one looks old it is labelled 1983 and Everglades, so just before I worked there with the jalapenos.

I just found by chance this reference to the pet shop on a local blog:

4. The Pet shop at The Green Man. I’m sorry to say I can’t recall the name of this. Please leave a comment if you can. I was never allowed to keep pets, but we loved fishing and this was the place I bought my first floats, fishing line and maggots. I had acquired a fishing rod at a local jumble sale, one of the old bamboo style efforts, with a cork handle and rubber bung on the end. It came with a Hardy reel, which I soon found out was a fly fishing model. I traded this for a more suitable coarse fishing model, having restored it to working order. I recently saw a similar model on sale for nearly £200. I think I didn’t get the best of that deal!

Glyn Burns said…
I think the pet shop at the Green Man was called Champions.

5 August 2019 at 05:44

survives little changed

Bottom line, just the one tiny contemporary photo; establishments that have survived the decades; personal memories.

Here at King Neptune is an apposite place to conclude as it is the Fisher King at the very end of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land who says:

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

As one commentator puts it: “the king will do his best to put in order what remains of his kingdom”. The gathering of fragments. Of memories. Striving for order. Constructing and reconstructing visions and patterns. Setting the lands in order.

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

                  Shantih     shantih     shantih

The Mystery of the Second Seal

18 Aug 18

Got a mention on Robert Elms’ Show on BBC Radio London this morning – which was a kick (it’s the radio show I listen to most regularly due to shared Londonphilia). During the week in his regular Notes & Queries a question was sent in by a listener about an image of Seals (actually Sealions I think) on a building at Apex Corner in Mill Hill which is where I grew up and it’s an image I noticed again a week or two before it cropped up on the radio.

After a couple of days I came up with a theory and emailed it in after the event in case Robert was still interested.

From: Adam Gee Date: 18 August 2018 at 10:03:56 BST To: Robert Elms Subject: The seals at Apex Corner Dear Robert I’m not sure if you solved the Seals at Mill Hill mystery on Wednesday as I missed the very end of the show but I reckon I may have solved it. I’d noticed those bas reliefs again recently, a few days before the show. In the 50s the name Apex Corner was replaced by Northway Circus and so at the year of construction that name may well have applied. So the seals/sealions with balls was probably derived from the word Circus. The next roundabout down where the model shop (Blunt’s) was is also named a circus – Mill Hill Circus. All the best ADAM

My timing turned out to be good as he was about to discuss listener contributions and ‘responsibilities’ and opened that section with my email. He then went on a bit of a riff about Circuses in the sense of roundabouts/circular roadways around London and which was his favourite (Cambridge C.).

I noticed the seals/sealions are not findable on the Web so this post is about redressing that lacuna. I photographed them on the way up to Cambridge (city not circus) the other day.

The 1958 bas relief

The 1959 sister

The context – 1958 this end, 1959 is by the To Let sign

The next three archive photos are courtesy of the Francis Crick Archive. I include them for a bit of historical and geographic context for the mystery Sealions.

Northway Circus aka Apex Corner 1960 (before pedestrian subway)

Northway Circus aka Apex Corner 1961 (with pedestrian subway) – I arrived down the road at The Green Man in 1963

Northway Circus c.1955 – sealions parade is at left-hand end (not yet built)