It’s time to post the sketches of What I Did On My Summer Holidays. I was away in Europe for the whole month of August, the longest break I’ve had since moving to California, to visit family in London and attend the Urban Sketching Symposium in Poland, as well as take a few days in Berlin. Davis is too hot in the summer. Anyway let’s get on with it. I was back home in Burnt Oak, but I had to go to Edgware, one stop up to the end of the Northern Line (or a ten minute walk up Deansbrook and a short cut through the alley behind the car park). Back in California I found a bunch of old undeveloped camera film in a box from before we had moved out here, so I brought a couple back to England with me to get developed at Snappy Snaps on Station Road (same or next day developing, you can’t get that these days over here, not in Davis; I developed a film at CVS and it took two months, and no negatives back; no positives either). Well Snappy Snaps in Edgware did not disappoint, but I had no idea what was on the film. It was like a time capsule. I stopped using film two decades ago (though my friend got me a film camera last year I don’t use it much). One of the films was photos from London in about 2003, a few pics of our old flat in Crouch End, but a lot from down in the City, before all those big skyscrapers went up. The Gherkin being built. Feels like a million years ago now. the other film was more of a surprise – photos from Las Vegas in 2004, in the day or two before my wife and I got married! Some really nice family pics, all looking so much younger, that I had never seen before, because I had never developed the film. Cupid’s Wedding Chapel, it’s not even there any more. The past came back to life. It was funny that I should see these while walking around Edgware, because it’s a place full of my own past.
Above is Edgware Station, the end of the line. I stood across Station Road to draw it, people walking by, buses turning in to the bus station behind. A lot of memories are in this station, not all of which I can even remember. Getting out here as a first year pupil at Edgware School having survived the often chaotic journey on a schoolkid-packed old tube train from only one stop away, those first days being allowed to travel on public transportation by myself (or with my friend) with my own travelcard, then having the long walk up Green Lane to school, very much a choose-your-own-adventure story. Sometimes instead of the tube I’d brave the bus, the dreaded 251, they saved the oldest and dirtiest buses for the school runs. If I was very brave I’d get the 142, going all the way to the school itself, but what courageous adventurer would choose such peril, not I. Many years later, Edgware was also the unintended last stop of many late nights (well, early mornings), the end of the line for the N5 Night Bus. The Night Bus Years, now that was a time of legends. Waiting for what felt like hours (but was in fact hours) down in Trafalgar Square or Charing Cross Road, fingers greasy from cheap fried chicken, ears still ringing with Rage Against The Machine, managing to stay awake on a bus filled with sweaty nightclubbers that one by one vanish into Belsize Park, Golders Green, Hendon, not knowing exactly where we are due to foggy windows, and gently nodding off to sleep somewhere around Grahame Park, completely missing Burnt Oak and ending up in Edgware. There are only three certainties in life: Death, Taxes and Waking Up at 4am in Edgware Bus Station in the 90s. I imagine that Death when it comes will feel very much like that. I got very used to the walk back to Burnt Oak in the wee hours, passing like a ghost through the alley behind the car park, up Deansbrook Road, down Littlefield and up Orange Hill, and right into bed.
While I drew the station a bearded man started filming my page without asking or acknowledging me, as if I were a real ghost. What you doing, I said. He said he was just showing someone who he was video-chatting with; bit intrusive. Be nice to ask before shoving a phone over my shoulder, I said, before he went off still having his conversation, oblivious. I was told while I was back that there are plans to completely redevelop Edgware, to knock down the Boardwalk Shopping centre next to the bus station, and build something like ten massive tower blocks on top of the car park, completely changing the face of the area. I suppose the alley will go, no more short cut back to Burnt Oak. Who knows, but change keeps coming, and so in a few years this view of Edgware station will look very different. I remember before the Boardwalk opened, there was a junk yard where the car park is. Edgware Station opened on August 14, 1924, 101 years to the month before I drew this sketch. The extension of the Underground into what used to be open country but was becoming known as ‘Metroland’ was responsible for Edgware’s development into the town and then suburb it is today, right at London’s edge. Edgware has existed for centuries though, since Anglo-Saxon times, recorded in the tenth century as ‘Aegces Wer’. I think this was about the time my old Maths teacher started teaching at Edgware School, my school from 1987 to 1994. The school changed its name to ‘London Academy’ a few years later, and then ‘The London Academy’ (as opposed to ‘That Edgware School’ as it was known before). The old school buildings I went to were knocked down years ago, and replaced with something more modern, as were the entire surrounding estates. I have dreams about those old buildings, but they are now just ghosts. Everything changes, and only the ghosts remain.
I will tell you a ghost story now though, so if you are of a nervous disposition, look away now. Above is a row of buildings at the end of Station Road, at the corner of Penshurst Gardens, where it meets steep Hale Lane and curving Edgwarebury Lane (which stretches right up to Edgwarebury Cemetery, final resting place of Amy Winehouse. I stood outside what used to be Loppylugs Records, now an unappealing lounge bar. I wanted to draw this corner because back in the 80s my older sister used to work in the Lunn Poly travel agents, now a Polish food store. She lived in a flat on the top floor above, it was her first place after leaving home, it was the first home of my first nephew, and it also happened to be haunted, by an actual ghost. Now look, let’s be fair, I don’t really believe in ghosts, except maybe the ones that exist. Some ghost stories still give me a shiver, and my big sister used to tell me ghost stories at bedtime, like the one our grandad used to tell about the ghostly music playing where the Titanic sank, though I was never sure why that one scared us so much. It’s the way you tell ’em. Anyway I liked this flat but it was big and old and at the top of a long winding staircase, and the hallway felt like one that would get longer as you went down it. I never saw a ghost, but my sister definitely knew one was there, cold feelings in certain places, unusual things happening like the clocks setting their hands into the same place, noises in the next room. Our dog was too terrified go into the flat, but our dog was also terrified of tortoises. My sister saw the ghost at least once, a pale woman in the bedroom, but it was not scary. A family friend passing by Station Road one day did say they had seen a woman with long hair at the window, when my sister wasn’t home. Since I was a kid scared of everything (except tortoises), my sister didn’t tell me about the ghost at first and I never saw it or had any sense of it at all, but every single time I pass by this part of Station Road I think about that ghost and wonder if she is still up there. I still dream about ghosts a lot, but I think we all do. The window was open as I sketched; there wasn’t a figure there but I drew one in, looking out of the spare bedroom where I used to sleep when I stayed over. I have a few more sketches of Edgware to post but this one is already long enough with the ghost stories; there might be a few more ghosts, or at least highwaymen.
petescully 