Nairn's London by Routemaster

That's Ross Bradshaw, posing as if he was Ian Nairn on the front cover of Nairn's London, just re-issued by Penguin Books. Five Leaves basks in the glow of this as our Ian Nairn: Words in Place helped launch Nairnmania on November 10th 2013, which led to a TV programme and the release of the Penguin book. Indeed, we planned to release it at one stage before discovering that Penguin still owned the rights.
On 30th November fifty Nairnites boarded this bus - the same one that Nairn pretended to drive in 1966 - though with a different driver than Ross, for a guided tour round places dear to Ian Nairn.
The tour started on the Mile End Road in the Foxcroft & Ginger trendy cafe (two coffees - £6.19) which had been carved out of Wickham's department store of 1920. The building still has its doric columns interrupted by the remains of Spiegelhalter's the jeweller. How annoyed Wickham's must have been to have to have built round the little jewellery shop. By the way, if you ever go down the Mile End Road stop off at the 1695 alms houses for decayed ships' captains.
The next stop was The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, established in 1570 which, well, founds bells. The current founder in chief is a woman, the first in 450 years, striking a blow for women bell founders everywhere. Whitechapel made the bells of Big Ben, one small example of their work.
We then moved to the Bevis Marks synagogue "[A] great luminous room, compassionate light streaming in through big clear glass windows on to a set of curly brass chandeliers from Amsterdam that are almost at eye level. Nothing has fretted it or worried it for two hundred and fifty years... " said Nairn.
On further into the city to Leadenhall Market where once it was "... a riot of fish and fowl with row after row of turkeys and chickens on hooks right up to the cornice and the glass roof". Nowadays the fish and fowl have all gone, being replaced by bankers, plotting evil financial deeds in their wine bars as Leadenhall is next to the Lloyds building, which, I was pleased to see, is starting to look tatty.
Onwards to the Hill & Evans vinegar warehouse "Victorian wildness... demonaic" but now looking quite cuddly in front of the scary "cheesegrater" building that looks like it is going to flatten us all in its collapse.
Cheapside... West Smithfield... St Bartholemew-the-less... and a baked potato in a Chinese cafe that caters to taxi drivers. Past St Pauls, and off at Hawksmoor's Christ Church,. Spitalfields, looking naked without its pews. Up Fournier Street to see the Huguenots houses. The Five Leaves author Bill Fishman was once offered one for a thousand pounds. He did not have a thousand pounds. The buildings are now worth a couple of million each.
Back from the East End to the back of Kings Cross for talks and films. The panels included Gillian Darley, co-editor of our Ian Nairn book and Gavin Stamp, a contributor who also wrote the intro to the new Nairn's London. Our venue was The Cock Tavern in Somers Town, an Irish pub with a real fire, hanging on against the developers. The highlight for me was the talk by Travis Elborough on the Routemaster, which included some great film clips including the most ghastly performance by Tom Jones.
It was here that the event organiser David Collard sat on the bookstall table, and went through it, his Guinness doing a perfect parabola to go splat on twelve copies of our book. It somehow seemed appropriate that drink would provide a final focus, given the impact of the stuff on Ian Nairn. His death certificate was referred to in one of the discussions. People can imagine it. The table in question, now also deceased, is, Michael Rosen tells me, the very same table at which the executive committee of the Communist Party of Britain would sit round while plotting their revolution. I won the prize for the most battered copy of an original Nairn's London, the prize included a now drink-sodden copy of our own book, a new edition of London, a bottle of London Pride (declined) and a fine box of Nairn's Oatcakes. David was unharmed and is planning a rerun for all those who tried to get on the bus but will have to wait for the next one coming along in a year's time.

Sonofabook

This note from David Collard, one of the contributors to Sonofabook. I'll echo that It's a Good Thing. And it will be on sale at Five Leaves Bookshop.

Please excuse this impersonal email. 

I'm sending this to everyone I know who is likely to be interested in Sonofabook, a new literary magazine launching in March 2015. This includes you, my anonymised friend.

Sonofabook assembles an illustrious roster of contributors living and dead, yet also finds room for an essay by myself. Click on this link to see the striking cover. Go on. 

http://www.cbeditions.com/magazine.html

Subscribe now and you'll not only get the first three numbers but can choose a free book from CB editions, including their forthcoming reissue of Agota Kristof's novels The Proof and The Third Lie.

(If you haven't yet discovered Kristof you're in for a big and beneficial shock. The main obstacle to British readers is her name - but a writer more unlike the creator of Hercule Poirot is impossible to imagine.)

Do spread the word about Sonofabook. It's a Good Thing.

The TLS on London E1

The small Nottingham-based publisher New London Editions [think Five Leaves with an East London accent] specializes in reviving interest in forgotten London writers such as Alexander Baron and Roland Camberton, and their latest reprint is quite a find. Robert Poole’s only novel was originally published in 1961 and reviewed in The Yorkshire Post by Anthony Burgess who praised its “vitality and flow”, and expressed an interest in the author’s future work. There wasn’t to be any – Poole died two years later, aged forty, from an accidental overdose of painkillers.

Details of his life are sketchy. The youngest of nine children (like the novel’s protagonist), Poole was born in the East End in 1923, near the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. He had various dead-end jobs, joined the merchant navy, jumped ship in New Zealand and became a popular radio broadcaster. He was then arrested and spent a month in jail before being deported. Back in London he drifted aimlessly and in 1958 moved to Margate where he ran the bingo concession at Dreamland Amusement Park.

London E1 is set during the 1940s in Poole’s native Stepney, beset by breadline poverty, random violence, crowded slums, anti-Semitism and the Blackshirts. The novel’s narrator, Jimmy Wilson, is in prison for murder and recalls events in his life from the age of eleven when he earned a few pennies as a “Shabbas Goy”, lighting fires and candles for Orthodox Jews on Friday nights. The story then follows the next twelve years of Jimmy’s life, from his experience of the Blitz (with a tremendously powerful account of a direct hit on a crowded pub) to the mid-1950s. Young Jimmy – bright, articulate, selfconscious and clearly based on the author – falls in love with Pinkie, a haughty mixedrace girl whose mother works as a prostitute to pay for her daughter’s private education. Poole is especially adept at portraying the arrival of new immigrants from India, and their cultural impact on the working-class populations, both Jewish and Gentile.

There is plenty of evocative period detail: an all-day wedding party with gallons of booze and piles of boiled bacon sandwiches; hacksaw-wielding “gas-pipe kids” scavenging bomb sites for scrap lead; teenage girls going on the game; newly arrived Indians sleeping ten to a room and setting up the first curry houses (quite possibly, as the publishers claim, the earliest treatment in fiction of this new wave of migrants to the East End). There’s little sentiment and no nostalgia, but there is a real understanding of the consolations to be found amid ignorance and poverty, especially in the rough affection of family, friends and neighbours.

Rachel Lichtenstein rightly admits in her introduction that London E1 is no masterpiece. The writing is plain, sometimes uneven and, in a pleasing way, quite artless; the situations are memorably dramatic and clearly ripe for screen adaptation: producers should be fighting over the rights.

David Collard
TLS, 1st March 2013