By George Berger.
THE ORPINGTON-VICTORIA LINE
#12 / London Victoria
Being the twelfth and final in a series of psychogeographical memories of the trainline that took me from nowhere & nothing to somewhere and… something.
I came straight up from nowhere, I’m not going straight back there.
* * *
Brixton to Victoria is the longest journey between stations by some distance, as if to underline the idea that you’re entering London ‘proper’ now. The suburbs that largely finished as we entered Brixton are well and truly over. You also pass through so many areas that you wonder why you don’t stop at any of them.
It’s as though the planners ran out of patience and hurried to the end of the plan. Consequently, we rush by Clapham High Street as though Clapham wasn’t there. Ditto Wandsworth Road. We go past the old Decca Records building — first sign of central London glamour, albeit long gone — shooting my mind back to ‘Young Parisians’ every time. Battersea Dogs Home reminds us of human kindness (and unkindness of course), as we ignore Battersea Park station on your left and Battersea Power Station on your right.
How many new worlds might have opened up if the train had stopped at these places? How many different memories would there be to look back on? Instead, these are largely non-places to me, in the same way South London is largely a non-place to those north of the border. And all because some bloke in a planning meeting had his mind on a hot date that night instead of his job. Well, OK, probably not, but simple twists of fate, you know?
Then you cross the Thames, and you know things have changed. This is the real thing, complete with tourists brandishing cameras, maps and looks of lost bewildered awe.
The famous station is essentially the star of the show around here. So much so that, over the years, I’ve spent more time socialising and drinking in the bars within the station than anywhere in the near vicinity. That’s partly down to all the local pubs being shit, but also that the station bars are actually pretty good. Which is some kind of first, it must be said.
It’s a long time since this was the kind of area Aleister Crowley would roam in search of ladies of the night. He did, however, meet friends in the bland pub opposite the station where I once sat in the late 80s, armed with a copy of Loot and perusing the small ads for a room in a house that eventually led me back south-east to Catford.
Back on the station concourse, The Iron Duke was where I used to meet Suzie, when we were drinking buddies, as referenced in the ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ piece written 20 years ago for this column. It was the first pub I’d come across to employ a pin number on the toilet door, available from the bar. (So, junkies didn’t shoot up and die in there, for our more innocent readers.)
Later, I’d meet my mate Kevin there as we hatched our plans for world domination with a website selling ‘Nubian Art’. Kev was the opposite of Ali G — he’d talk quite ‘normally’ in public, then slip into patois when he went back to the family. We didn’t take over the world, but we had some good sessions in the Iron Duke on the old rum and cokes.
I mentioned last time that Victoria is the hub to all those elsewheres, where life supposedly hangs out. Back in the 80s, a major launchpad to those faraway places was Victoria Coach Station.
The coach station was where the last dregs of the hippie trail would begin for so many people. Proper hippies, who did proper hippie things, rather than just lounging about listening to awful 70s rock music (which is all 70s rock music, pretty much).
Way cheaper than the Intercity trains, the coach station also offered regular special discount offers (a collaboration with Mars Bars sticks in the mind — our band funded a whole mini tour off the back of that). The coaches also had no toilets back then, meaning that on the motorway, you had to request a ‘pit stop’ from the driver, so you could take a piss on the hard shoulder. Different times.
Between the coach station and the train station, the legendary graffiti ‘Chris Gray Band’ lasted years, stretching back (like Easter ’65 in the Petts Wood piece) to a time when graffiti was done with paintbrushes instead of spray cans. Remembered in obscure pamphlets, the CGB were, apparently, an ‘anti-music’ band predating the Pistols. I still lean on my copy of Chris Gray’s situationist classic Leaving the Twentieth Century on the rare occasions I write anything with pen and paper. (Mainly the Metro crossword, if truth be told.)
Opposite the coach station back then, deliberately I’d wager, was a Christian café. They’d hang around on the pavement outside, trying to snare lost-looking backpackers with the offer of a free cup of tea. At one point I had — for reasons long forgotten — ‘ain’t gonna cut my hair for Jesus’ written on the back of my leather jacket. The Christians pounced and the cup of tea was free and refreshing, the conversation less so. I’ve always found these evangelists quite fascinating in concept, though the actuality usually left quite a lot to be desired.
* * *
As you pull into Victoria train station, there are seemingly endless blocks of flats on your left. They seem incongruent with the area in some ways, but London is peppered with these mini-estates, shoehorned into spare land. Less and less so now, of course, where a new generation of blocks are deliberately kept out of reach of normal people. One day, I dream all that will change.
Those flats give me a flashback to my first ever independent (parentless) holiday. As a reward for failing my ‘O’ levels, I was packed off to Pontins in Bracklesham Bay, on the south coast. Bear with me, it eventually gets relevant.
I was with Ian Tatlock — he from the Dulwich station chapter. My initial partner in crime in both attending punk gigs and our punk band the Anabollic (sic) Steroids. Who were mainly famous for our graffiti, like the Chris Gray Band.
We made two separate day trips to Brighton nudie beach that scorching summer. It’s a long way from Bracklesham Bay, but the prize at the end of the rainbow was naked women. We’d already failed in an attempt to buy tickets for Oh! Calcutta! earlier that year, but there weren’t any age restrictions on the beach. We were basically the Inbetweeners, but in a pre-internet age.
I had no intention of ‘getting them off’ myself, but when we finally got there, it felt easier to get naked than stay clothed. So, we did, much to our amazement. It was a moment that changed me forever. The spontaneous nature of this act produced seriously painful evidence thanks to our lack of sunscreen. You really don’t want to burn your meat and two veg, trust me. We didn’t sleep well that night.
Despite this, it’s still my favourite beach all these years later. I now live nearby and still go every opportunity, every summer. Different reasons though these days, you’ll be pleased to hear. It’s very male-dominated now, but being based in Kemptown (the part of Brighton that is pretty much the gay capital of England, if not Europe) that’s hardly a surprise. It’s also maybe karma for my initial lustful motivation all those years ago. On the positive side, I’ll always make sure I pack my sunscreen. Once burned, twice shy. Well, sort of shy.
There were photos of our week (not from the beach, I hasten to add), but there aren’t anymore. Small mercies. If you’re after a mental picture, I looked like Nobbler, the gypsy kid from the Please Sir film. But with a red Crass t-shirt on — the one with a broken machine gun atop a circled A. Imagine these two pics together:
It’s not a great look. Or even a vaguely satisfactory one. I’d left school but hadn’t yet worked up the courage to stop hiding behind my fringe. Because I was hiding a forehead full of acne. On top of all my other insecurities, it took a while to actually (“1-2”) cut my hair.
Kudos, then, to Kathleen for getting off with me on the last night of the holiday. As others were hitting the Marquee or Hammersmith Palais, we’d hit the Pontins cabaret bar and Ian — being of servable appearance — got the pints in. It was now or never. As time went on, we started giving two gorgeous girls the eye. Then two others, this time reciprocated.
Like a Cool for Cats album track, the four of us started chatting and I ‘got off’ with Kathleen. In between snogs, I told her I was going to be famous one day. At the end of the holiday, I secretly sobbed like a homesick child. The end of my summer love sensation.
To drag it back to relevance, Kathleen told me she lived in the aforementioned blocks of flats you saw on your left as the train pulled into Victoria station. Yes, a tenuous link, but, hey, I’m running on fumes here. This is Victoria. And besides, it was a memorable evening, despite the cider.
I never was famous, of course. But I did go back to the chalet that night and record the greatest album of all time. Which was some sort of compensation for my earlier hopes.
Live at Pontins by the Anabollic Steroids. Trout Mask Replica had nothing on this beauty. I’d packed a kazoo, and a fistful of hand-scrawled lyrics in preparation. Ian had a biro and a one litre Woodpecker sweet cider bottle for percussion.
Two of the lyrics were written on ‘Oxford Examination’ papers, meaning they’d been written during my ‘O’ Levels, at moments when I’d decided the whole system was a load of nonsense. I still have those treasured possessions and remain proud of how I spent my time. The songs (“Chaos” and “I Live in A Bin”) were rubbish, but the spirit was immaculate in its conception.
I never heard from or saw Kathleen again, of course. But I often wondered, as I looked up at those tower blocks, whether we were ever physically closer than we’d ever know. Separated only by the crowds: had she lived in a hamlet in the countryside, that kind of distance would have felt almost inevitable. But even in the space of 100 yards in Victoria station, you could be separated by 1000 people.
Victoria memories are like hen’s teeth. But I did go to a pantomime there as a kid. It featured Eddie Yeats off Corrie as a lion, so I’m thinking it may have been an updated Wizard of Oz. Good old Eddie, role model extraordinaire. Him & Stan — you don’t get their likes on soap operas anymore.
* * *
Less ridiculously: for a brief time, there was a grown-up gig venue near Victoria. It was owned by Virgin Records and has a Wikipedia entry. They list the bands that played there, and it’s a scandal that the one band I saw there — Poison Girls — isn’t mentioned. Neither are the support that night — Frank Chickens.
In truth, it was a largely forgetful gig, bar one big moment. A Polish guy called Tanju had been writing to me / Flowers in the Dustbin (my band), from behind the iron curtain. He asked me to send a record, explaining that he couldn’t pay for it. I duly obliged and then arranged to meet him at this gig.
I mention this because he told me the record had arrived smashed to bits. Other than the sometimes-moving letters that came in c/o Rough Trade, there were two moments that I felt validated by in that band. One was our first record being a clue in the Fred Dellar NME crossword and the other was Tanju telling me that. It was an odd venue for PGs to be playing (and I admired them for that) — very glitzy and 70s glam pretensions. And tales of Soviets smashing anarcho records.
(If you’re out there Tanju, and you happen to stumble on this, please do get in touch, I’d love to hear from you. I’m married to a Polish woman now and I go there a lot).
***
So, what’s the real story of Victoria, now I’ve got my pub anecdotes out of the way?
There’s not a lot in Victoria itself really. Not much to hang a memory on. Like Green Park and Penge East, it serves more as a crossroads where you change transport on the way to somewhere you actually need to be. A launchpad. Unless you’re a Catholic visiting the Cathedral, there are few reasons to look on it as an endpoint to travel.
The station opened in 1861, after much messing about in the previous two decades, from planners who couldn’t make their mind up about what to do next. Bad ideas had been flying about like a Sunak cabinet on coke, before they finally settled on the line that now takes smiling delighted passengers to Brighton and then cruelly returns them.
Before that, south London was served by three termini (to get all Partridge about it): London Bridge, Waterloo and the Bricklayer’s Arms. The delightfully named latter was in Southwark, meaning all three stations committed the ultimate sin of not being in north London. Victoria was built to rectify this abomination, despite London Bridge being a matter of yards away from qualifying.
* * *
You can go pretty much anywhere from Victoria. Anywhere in London, that is — which seemed all that mattered back in the 80s to this teenage kicker. The Bromley Contingent went two stops to Sloane square and then Sex, for instance. In the opposite direction, you’re a couple of stops from the Houses of Parliament.
For me, it was often Hammersmith — the Palais, the Fulham Greyhound or the Clarendon. The Clarendon had two venues in one — the bigger one upstairs and the smaller one in the basement. In the middle was the pub bar, which felt like my local for a year or two. Meeting up with various folk from places like Harrow — our NW London mirrors.
I wrote my first book for Virgin Books, which was situated near there. The first meeting with them was in a pub in the middle of a shopping mall (word used deliberately) that had been built on the demolished site of the Clarendon. Fast forward to 1998 and as I waited for the meeting, I was surrounded by the chatterati, in a pub that seemed to model itself on an airport Starbucks, which was, in turn, surrounded by all the usual shops. The shops in malls up and down the line, up and down the country, all around the world.
They knocked the Clarendon down for that?
I was smoking a lot of dope back in the 80s and I had a pretty defined routine: spliff on the way to Petts Wood station — train to Victoria — District / Circle towards Hammersmith. Sunglasses after dark to hide my red, red eyes, cassette bootleg (as it still was then) of Bowie as Ziggy for the last time at Hammersmith Odeon. Dreams of meaning something to someone the way Bowie meant so much to me. Rock ‘n’ roll suicide, the last song. A song I always wanted to cover with tears in my bloodshot eyes.
London Victoria station. A place busy enough and wide enough to be in Manhattan. And wonderful enough too. Bizarrely, a place that is still on my line, now I live in deepest Sussex, down in Lewes.
* * *
So, there we are. A train line completed in considerably more than the 35 minutes it used to take back in the day. A line of quirks, idiosyncrasies and mind-numbing boredom, in various quantities.
But also, a lifetime of memories and half-memories. I want to revisit something I wrote way back near the start of this series of articles:
They say, ‘it’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at’ and it ought to be true. But when you meet someone, it’s always ‘where are you from?’ In other words, where you’re from is one of the first clues people want as they decode where you’re at
I turned 60 whilst metaphorically travelling this line. A 3:AM friend asked me how that made me feel, and I realised that one of the more profound thoughts I’ve hung on it is that it really is where you’re at, not where you’re from. The past is the foreign country I’ve attempted to map out here, but it hasn’t been where I’ve lived for many years; it’s most certainly not ‘where I’m at’ and nor should it be. I’ve learned to live from the inside out and, over time, largely discarded the shackles of upbringing as identity.
I still go there, from Lewes to Victoria these days, on the way to elsewhere. Then back again. These days, my platforms are (for those who know) on that little side bit — platforms 15-19. It’s like our own little VIP lounge and it has a lovely little bar — so nice that I almost hope I’ve just missed a train, so I have an excuse to pop in there for an hour. The toilets still need a special pin number, available from the bar.
“And now, the end is near…” — it’s the final stop on the line and the final stop in a series of articles that have taken a couple of years to complete. So, there is a sense of completion, of finality, as I sit here with a whisky at my side and a laptop perched on a pillow on my knee. In Lewes, where I’ve somehow ended up and settled down, after pinballing it around for some decades.
It’s the end of the line for my old train journey, my new train journey, and this series of articles. Because of that, the past I’ve largely concentrated on crashes into the present, like strands of DNA, or ivy around a tree.
As we pull into London Victoria from Lewes, so I pull in from Orpington as well. The early 80s merges with the present moment and a few home truths feel pertinent as the sole hits the platform and the soul hits the city.
Life isn’t elsewhere, as we so earnestly believed and so believably yearned for. Life was never elsewhere. There may have been some great books in Petts Wood library, but none of them taught me that. The library then seemed a mere compensation, a partially drawn escape map, when it could have been the centre of the universe. Or at least pointed me there. Maybe it did point me there, but I wasn’t ready to notice.
Life isn’t elsewhere. It’s not at the next station, or the next year, or when you win the lottery, or find the perfect partner. Life is not to be found in going back to the 60s, or the 80s, or any moment when you used to feel better or more inspired. Or whatever.
It’s not any of those things — it’s already here, right now. Inside you, silently waiting for you to notice. “The kingdom of heaven is within” as Jesus perceptively pointed out. Life is right in front of you, ready to be lived, in the moment, whenever you’re ready to begin. Life is right here, right now — wherever you happen to be sitting as you read this. So get out and live it.
They say the past is a different country, but for me it’s a different train line to the same destination. I excavated long lost memories, and no doubt left an equal number still in the ground. I’ve remembered a hundred friends, and shed some tears over those who aren’t around anymore, or have simply lost touch. A small number have died in the two years since we left Orpington Station in the first article.
I’ve felt pride and shame, and also felt incredibly small when considering how many other people could — and should — write completely different stories with the same chapter titles. All those commuters, all those adventurers, all those rebels who burned brightly like Kerouac’s roman candles. The mad ones, the sane ones, the unhappy ones and the ones whose joy and purpose lit a flame that we all may see a little more clearly. The heroes and the villains. All with their own private stories, unrealised memoirs, crammed into those suburban cattle trucks as they rushed through the suburbs with varying degrees of purpose.
Perhaps most of all, I’ve felt a longing for all the people and the situations I’ve remembered and miss. I am unashamedly in love with so many of these people and so much of this nostalgia. But it’s not for endless revisiting — you can’t put your arms around a memory, as an unwise man once pointed. “It doesn’t pay to try / all the smart boys know why.”
So, all these tangents are careering through my head like out-of-control fireworks — the past colliding with the present, Lewes colliding with Orpington. My life choices colliding with a time before I had life choices. The idea of these articles being objectively about places when we all know there’s no such thing as true objectivity.
And, right in the middle of all the unruly chaos of writing this final piece, Melanie dies. Melanie Safka — the singer I first encountered back in Sydenham Hill when CH showed me the CND symbol on the back of her Candles in the Rain album and I opened my mind beyond punk rock and into peace and love. The singer whose album was on near-permanent rotation when I first left home to live in the shared house in Orpington. As the journey now reaches its terminus, so does my story. And now, so does Melanie’s. Eras ending all over the place. Little deaths and big deaths. Only 76.
As age plays its oft-cruel tricks on us all, the number of memories marked by peoples’ passing grows. From lovers to close friends, to distant pop stars and cultural heroes. Victoria as purgatory, the coach station or tube system as the afterlife. The new life.
It feels like the funeral scene in Land and Freedom. Lost friends, acquaintances and comrades, I salute you all.
* * *
No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. And, no doubt, the train on platform 2 is running approximately 20 minutes late.
An archive of all the articles in this series can be found here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Berger has resumed this 3:AM column after a 15 year hiatus. He’s written the official biographies of Crass and The Levellers, a book on mindfulness and various other books that can be found here. He’s also the singer in Flowers in the Dustbin. He’s recently finished his memoirs In Case Of Dementia, Break Glass.
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