as well. A big-boned bloke in a shell suit is inspecting it. Was it his? Maybe he was on a stag night and his mates did up his motor for a laugh. The road is a dead end so I walk back and around Drayton Park station with the river valley off to my left under the Ashburton Grove forklift centre – for all your forklift needs. There’s a beautiful big sky that’ll be lost when Arsenal build their new dream stadium. To the right is Highbury Hill, with allotments on the other side of the road banking down to the railway like vineyards, a vision of a different London.
And so into the reclaimed urban landscape of Gillespie Park. It’s an ecology centre developed on old ground near the railway, with different landscape areas and an organic café. I sit down for a while and stare out at the little stone circle and neat marshland pools, surrounded by grassland and meadow in a little urban forest created by local people, and listen to the sounds of thirteen year olds being taught about ‘nature’ by their teacher.
‘Can we catch some tadpoles sir. Goo on.’
‘No, now we’re going to look at the water meadow.’
‘Aww fuckin’ boring.’
The kid sticks his net into the pool anyway and swishes it around, while shouting, ‘Come on, you little bastards.’ The teacher, evidently of the ‘smile benignly and hope the little fucker will go away’ school of discipline, smiles benignly and begins telling the group about the importance of medicinal herbs.
I walk up the track past the ‘wetlands’ and can see Isledon village on the other side of the tracks. You get a sense of how the railway carved through the landscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Even then, when progress was a religion, people would have been aware of the landscape that would be lost:
I am glad there is a sketch of it before the threatened railway comes, which is to cut through Wells’ Row into the garden of Mr I. and go to Hackney. We are all very much amazed at the thought of it, but I fear there is little doubt it will come in that direction.
local girl Elisabeth Hole to her friend Miss Nicols,December 1840
In Gillespie Park it’s hard to discern the real contours of the land because it’s obviously been built up. There’s a little tunnel into the trees, then down a dirt track to a wooden walkway and to the left is marshland. It’s like a riverside. I stop and look across to the little meadow with another stone circle on the left. The rain lets up for a while and I sit down at a bench behind the stone circle with my notebook. Nearby, in the circle itself, sit four dishevelled figures. Two black guys, one old and rasta-ish with a high-pitched Jamaican accent, one young with a little woolly hat and nervy and loud, a tough-looking middle-aged cockney ex-soldier type and a rock-chick blonde in her late forties with leather jacket and strange heavy, jerky make-up. They look battered and hurt and are all talking very loudly, the men trying to get the attention of and impress the woman, as a spliff is passed around and they sip from cans of Tennent’s Super. They must be twenty-first century druids. The younger bloke, whose name is Michael, starts to shout out, ‘Poetry is lovely! Poetry is beautiful! Chelsea will win the league.’ I finish my quick notes and get up to go, as he smiles at me still singing the joys of football and poetry.
‘You’re right about the poetry anyway,’ I say.
‘Do you know any poems?’ he asks. I recite the Spike Milligan one about the water cycle:
There are holes in the sky where the rain gets inThey are ever so small, that’s why rain is thin.
‘Spike is a genius. What a man!’ he yells. ‘We love Spike, Spike understands us!’ and he starts to sing some strange song that I’ve never heard before. Maybe it was the theme tune to the Q series. Then the little Jamaican bloke with a high-pitched singsong accent jabs me in the chest, his sad but friendly eyes open wide, and he smiles.
‘If ya fell off de earth which way would ya fall?’
‘Er, sideways,’ I say, trying to be clever, because it is obviously a trick question.
‘NO ya silly fella. Ya’d fall up. And once ya in space dere is only one way to go anyway and dat’s up. Dere’s only up.’
‘The only way is up!’ sings Michael. ‘Baby, you and meeeeee eeeee.’
‘Whatever happened to her?’ asks the woman.
‘Whatever happened to who?’
‘To Yazz … ’
At this strange turn in the conversation I wave goodbye and walk towards the trees. The little gathering is a bit too similar to the blatherings of my own circle of friends, confirming my suspicion that many of us are only a broken heart and a crate of strong cider away from this kind of life. I can see Arsenal stadium up to the right, looming over the houses. At a little arched entrance, a green door to the secret garden, I come out onto Gillespie Road.
This is the heart of Arsenal territory, where every fortnight in winter a red and white fat-bloke tsunami gathers momentum along Gillespie Road, replica-shirted waddlers dragged into its irrepressible wake from chip shop doorways and pub lounges, as it heads west towards Highbury Stadium. As an organism it is magnificent in its tracksuit-bottomed lard power, each individual walking slowly and thoughtfully in the footsteps of eight decades of Arsenal supporters. Back in the days of silent film, when the Gunners first parachuted into this no-man’s-land vale between Highbury and Finsbury Park from their true home in Woolwich, south London, football fans lived a black-and-white existence and moved from place to place at an astonishing 20 m.p.h., while waving rattles and wearing thick cardboard suits in all weathers. No wonder they were thin. Going to a game was a high-quality cardiovascular workout.
(Then: Come on Arsenal. Play up. Give them what for (hits small child on head with rattle) spiffing lumme stone the crows lord a mercy and God save the King.
Now: Fack in’ kant barrstudd get airt uv itt you wankahh youuurr shiiiitttttt!!)
The source of this vast flow of heavily cholesteroled humanity is the pubs of Blackstock Road – the Arsenal Tavern, the Gunners, the Woodbine, the Bank of Friendship and the Kings Head. Further north are the Blackstock Arms and the Twelve Pins. To the south, the Highbury Barn. The pubs swell with bullfrog stomachs and bladders as lager is swilled in industrial-sized portions.
Walk from the south and there’s a different perspective. People in chinos with City accents jump out of sports cars parked in side streets, couples and larger groups sit in the Italian restaurants of Highbury Park chewing on squid and culture and tactical ideas gleaned from the broadsheets and Serie A. As I mentioned before, the scut line is around my street. Here, outside the Arsenal Fish Bar, which is actually a post-modern twenty-first-century Chinese takeaway, lard-bellied skinheads stuff trays of chips down their throats to soak up the beer. Inside the café, on the walls nearest the counter, there’s a picture of ex-Gunners superstar Nigel Winterburn looking like he’s in a police photo and has been arrested for stealing an unco-ordinated outfit from C&A, which he is wearing (should have destroyed the evidence, Nige).
In the Arsenal museum they have lots of great cut-out figures of many of the players who have long since departed. And a film, with Bob Wilson’s head popping up at the most inopportune moments. He does the voiceover but materializes (bad) magically every time there’s something profound to say, then dematerializes (good) in the style of the Star Trek transporter. Lots of nice old photos, and they make no bones about the fact that they never actually officially won promotion to the top division – in fact they’re even quite proud of
