CONCRETE
CITY
One of the most obvious features of our neck of the woods at
the moment is the enormous amount of concrete being transported about. Because
of restrictions on turns at the Prince of Wales junction it all comes up to the
traffic lights outside St Peter’s and lumbers around, gradually destroying the
traffic island. This traffic comes (I presume) from the Tarmac company’s
concrete batching plant next to the bus garage on Great Western Road, beside the railway, and involves
both concrete mixer trucks and huge tipper trucks. Lots of concrete obviously
means lots of building work; the last big spike in activity was in the early
stages of Crossrail, but I think this is not destined for that scheme, which
seems to be past the big concrete stage. It’s clear that the property boom continues unabated, despite recent events. You just have to look at the skyline, where you will always see cranes somewhere. Wherever you go in London there seems to be “development” taking
place, with old buildings being swept away and new, shiny ones taking their
place, or the existing buildings being extended or
“basemented”. With all this building going on, one might ask, why do young people find it so hard to get a place to
live?
Both my churches were put up during a previous building
boom, in the 1860s and 70s, when, I have read, Chippenham Road was surfaced with wood
blocks (I don’t think that lasted long). St Mary Magdalene’s features an early use
of poured concrete, in the vault of the undercroft, a patent fireproof product,
which shows how progressive the neo-gothic architects actually were. Much as I
may fear and resent today’s concrete traffic (as a cyclist) I have to concede
that life must have been much worse then, when there was far less regulation,
and you had wooden scaffolding, steam-driven piledrivers and far more workmen.
You only have to look at the photos of the digging of the Circle Line on
display at Paddington Station to become aware of how ghastly it must have been.
The Circle, remember, basically follows the street pattern, and was built in a
huge trench dug down from the existing road; think what that would have done
for traffic on Marylebone Road! Health and safety was rudimentary, and
consideration for residents seems to have been very limited; you just had to
put up with it as they tunnelled past your house. Meanwhile, the speculative
builders were putting up whole new districts, like ours, with cheap,
meanly-built housing. They look quite solid and respectable, but were often built in a hurry and ended up being let by the floor or the room as they weren't actually nice enough for the imagined target market. The planned development of Queen’s Park was a reaction to
the free-for-all that had gone before, somewhere orderly and decent rather than
the wild west of St Peter’s Park. It can still feel a bit like that!
THE HERON KNOWS
As I was taking a bite to eat at Clarence Gate the other day
(in a break while cycling round the perimeter of Regent’s Park) I was watching the herons.
I have mentioned before that there they now seem to have adapted to humans
being an easy source of food, and they join the geese and gulls in looking for
bread; well, on this occasion I was watching with fascinated horror as a
tourist held out his hand towards a heron’s beak. Have you no imagination? Have
you not seen what they do to fish? (Probably not, of course). They stab their
beaks through fish a good deal thicker than your hand, so watch out, mate!
Blessedly, nothing happened, but then I turned to watch one heron standing on
his own in the middle of a flowerbed, stock still, classically immobile. Then a
jogger came into view. She was short and extremely skinny, and dressed entirely
in grey. As she came past him the heron clearly turned his head to follow her
progress, as if not entirely sure that she was of a different species.
A FUNNY OLD YEAR
For All Souls’ Day we invite the
families of people whose funerals we’ve done in the past year, and so I was
going through my records to find the names and addresses. Now I haven’t done
any more funerals than normal, but this year’s have been pretty memorable. I’ve
been doing funerals for thirty years, but had never done a stillborn child
until last November; and now I’ve done two. Stillbirths are not as uncommon as we
suppose, but as parish clergy we tend not to do the funerals, as the hospital
chaplains generally look after most of them. Fortunately I got to know the excellent
Rosie at St Mary’s pretty well last summer, and so when the first one came to
me last November I was able to pick her brains, and she directed me to her
colleague, Michele, who specialises in this particular ministry. So, I had
appropriate words to use, and it wasn’t too terrible. The more recent one,
where I knew the family (slightly) and the funeral was in church, was pretty
traumatic, and they remain traumatised by it all. There is clearly still work to do. So I’ve had two neo-natal deaths, and as
well the funeral of a fourteen year old who died
from an acute asthma attack. She was a twin, and I baptised them both and gave
them their First Communion when they were altar servers, before their mum sent
them to boarding school. That funeral involved a white, horse-drawn hearse, and a Pentecostal music group, but
the thing that really sticks in the memory is the remaining twin sitting at a keyboard
and singing a song she had written for her sister. Remarkable. Beside that,
going back to Colchester to do the funerals of
an old friend (aged 90), and my sister-in-law’s mother (also over 90) seemed
more or less normal. As did the burial at Kensal Green of one of our most notable characters at St Mary Mag's. But it has been a funny old year.
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