Love Letter to Ealing

While I was off on holiday last week, the unthinkable happened, and violent rioting spread through London. Ealing, West London, my home for nearly 30 years, was badly hit.

I watched the Arcadia Centre, formerly The Waterglade Centre, being built as a five-or-something-year-old living five hundred metres away on Castlebar Hill. My mother worked in an Interior Design shop on Springbridge Road when I was a kid, three steps from where local hero Richard Mannington Bowes was fatally injured by yobs when he dared to intervene in their arson. My first job was in Laura Ashley in the Arcadia Centre (now Robert Dyas), just round the corner, and my friends worked in TK Maxx, the biggest thing to happen to Ealing at the time in the days before Tesco and Primark. My neighbour's kids went to Christ Church School, right next door. In 1970 the Autons broke out of the window of John Sanders - now M&S - in Doctor Who's Spearhead From Space, and caused significantly less damage than the rioters who looted the Arcadia, full of small, regularly-changing independent shops, and ransacked the mini Tesco (which used to be a Budgens) on Haven Green, a green space so immaculate that I once saw a couple get married among the flowers from the upper deck windows of the E1 bus - incidentally, a line whose bus drivers knew me by name when I was in secondary school and sixth form, and who waited for me to get into my house at night before leaving the bus stop to make sure I was safe, and the passengers of which lined up in perfect single file to wait for it. The rioters also broke windows of the surviving restaurants that looked out over the Haven (which has the most beautiful willow-the-wisp tree lights in Winter) like Pizza on the Green, hijacked a bus and crashed it into a lamp post before setting it on fire.

Further into South Ealing, opposite Ealing Studios, rioters apparently got a shock when they tried to get into The Red Lion, a beautiful little pub that Alec Guinness drank in when he was making Kind Hearts and Coronets and does the best Sunday lunches (and 23rd Birthday lunches), coming face to face with a bar-full of big, angry builders. They made a swift exit, but apparently completely trashed The Castle - which has played host to some few Boxing Day games of Trivial Pursuit - across the road instead.

When I first designed the shopfront for Blackboard Fiction, I imagined it nestling in between the gorgeous little indies at the end of the High Street and Bond Street, past the Ealing Broadway Centre and opposite Walpole Park and Ealing Studios, near For Arts Sake (art gallery/shop set up by students of my old school for a former teacher), Hippie Heaven, the Organic farm shop and the amazing Oxfam bookshop and the little Budgens supermarket where we get our Oyster cards topped up when we've been for a drink at The Grove pub (formerly Finnegan's Wake where we drank when we were seventeen). I did some proper growing-up there. I love that area with more than a small sense of pride, as it's also full of indie business success-stories, important when Ealing has been so hard-hit by chains abandoning it for the more prestigious Westfield Centre in Shepherd's Bush. This is the area that was one of the worst affected, with nearly all of these shops ransacked (obviously not the bookshop) as well as several others, like Baby e, and cars were set on fire. So was Budgens, after it had been emptied, and the flats above it - where the owners also lived - burned out. They carried up to West Ealing, damaging even tinier local businesses in their orgy of violence, and terrifying residents, like my own parents.

Ealing has weathered a few storms, most notably the bomb of 2001 that was planted, apparently by the IRA (which I never understood, Ealing being such an Irish area, although I think I understand that now) in a taxi, parked at the 82 bus stop (which I used for work at the time, temping at a Ford dealership in Alperton) across the road from The North Star and The Town House pubs, and which blew out windows and water mains in the immediate vicinity, damaging buildings and business so badly that most of Ealing Broadway was flooded, a large portion of the street behind the bus stop had to be demolished, The North Star, where my Dad has been a regular for nearly thirty years, had to have a complete refit (he grudged that it had become a 'pub for young people' afterwards but still drank there) and The Town House never really recovered; deemed the worst pub in Ealing, it finally closed down for good in 2008, its beautiful 1800s facade becoming home to first squatters then developers. Seeing a picture of the Ealing Horse (we in Ealing are proud to know what that is and it, along with the Scary Family, are part of our childhood) covered in rubble the next day reduced me and others to tears, feeling violated. However, no one died. Not a one. Most of the businesses seemed to open in other premises. Proudly, Ealing got through it, defeating an invisible enemy. This time though, the enemy is not invisible and the damage seems worse; the violation is apparently 'self-inflicted'. Personally, I don't know anyone who would treat the place they grew up in and live in in such a way.

Please, if you decide to come down our way, use sites like www.DeLootLondon.co.uk (https://www.facebook.com/pages/DeLoot-London/217405771643357) to help make sure that these businesses stay afloat in the aftermath of all of this madness, and to ensure that happy memories outweigh these new bad ones, please go to https://www.facebook.com/notes/blackboard-fiction/love-letter-to-ealing/... and leave your Ealing or West London memories below.

Thankyou.

LJ OF EALING x