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| Until the very end of the month, I found myself marooned in E17. If it isn't quite the beating heart of East London, it is at least one of its nerve centres: my entry for the UK's most boring postcard picture can be found below as the bus station's exquisite features shimmer against the backdrop of an autumnal sky.... |
| OK, a travelogue based on the doubtful pleasures of Walthamstow is never going to get anybody's kidneys racing in anticipation, but I am faced with little alternative. This is what happens when those deadlines have long passed for the Monthly Message, and I wan't exactly enamoured by this particular project: when I started thinking about writing this piece, I determined that whatever else happens in my life, I would find it difficult to look back and remember E17 with any great affection. Stourbridge, Brixton, Morecambe and Chisinau, each of which may lay claim to their own unfair portion of charmlessness will doubtless fare better in my future addled recollections, but I find it hard to offer any kind of panegyric to my current abode. |
| It is a little disappointing to feel so unattached to whatever place I call my temporary home. Such is the attractiveness of Walthamstow's town centre that I frequently find myself exiting the tube one stop early,enduring a longer walk home to avoid it. Someone once proclaimed that one of the problems of communism would be that not everyone could live on Richmond Hill; under capitalism it feels as though too many of us end up living in Walthamstow. The town's High Street is dominated by what feels like a |
| never-ending market- most of what's on sale looks fairly horrible, but at least it fills the street with life. When the market's over, and the shops are shut, it's an even more depressing vista: admittedly I'm picking some of the worst things about the place to moan about, but the fire-damaged shopping centre looks almost as bad as some of the streets I encountered in Bosnia last year. I took the photo on the right during the Walthamstow Festival, when bands from all the borough's different cultual and ethnic backgrounds played at stages throughout the High Street area. It should have felt like a happy, cosmopolitan celebration: instead, to me, it felt as though we were waiting for the end of the world, with musical accompaniment. |
| It is perhaps all too easy to mock too many of the monstrosities that darken High Streets nearly everywhere, and maybe I shouldn't make too much fun of the cut-throat undercutting war between Poundland and the 99p store. Perhaps I should just join in and open branches of "Mike's 97p Emporium" over the capital and wait for the cash to flood in before I rush to judgement. Perhaps harder to bear than the ubiquity of discount stores is just plain old cruelty to the dear old apostrophe, a prime example of which can be seen below.The shop has now changed hands, and the sign has gone, so I never met the esteemed Mrs Dee Cake, nor did I get to ask her for the Electroconvulsive Therapy allegedly available at her shop. |
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| For more from Walthamstow, click here: it can't get any worse, surely. |
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| Greetings from Walthamstow Bus Station! |
| postcard is copyright Hank Mexico Photographic Services, London E17, reproduced here by kind permission. |