(Photograph: Simon from London, United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Sounds like a long-lost B&W episode of The Avengers doesn’t it? (the real1960s UK TV version, not the US cinema crap.)
If, like me, you don’t watch TV or take any newspapers (thanks Covid), you might still get your fix of what’s happening in the world from things that pop up unrequested on Google. Alternatively, you might occasionally browse The Daily Mail online – purely to laugh at the comments and generally bypass reading the all too predictable articles themselves.
The big non-news story at present in the MSM, in case you’ve missed it, is a spat in ‘Walthamstow Village’ in NE London’s E17 postcode area. Most surprisingly, despite numerous articles, the ‘lovable’ local Labour, and self-declared upper middle class MP Stella Creasy doesn’t yet appear to have joined in.
What’s upsetting the denizens of this genteel enclave, in the otherwise predominantly gritty neo-East End ‘multicultural heaven’ at the end of the Victoria Tube Line, isn’t having illegal immigrants foisted upon them – oh no, it’s far more important than that.
Have you heard of Gail’s? Neither had I, and I initially thought perhaps it was something to do with the departure of Gail Platt from Coronation Street after half a century. Apparently though it’s a national chain of bakery/coffee shops that have set their sights on ‘Walthamstow Village’. The locals are having a communal fit of the vapours, they really don’t want anything so vulgar among Orford Road’s cutesy independent emporia, but worse still the chain owner is reportedly of a ‘far-right‘ persuasion, and that of course will never do. The average price of a residential property in Orford Road incidentally is £900K+, and surprise, surprise, this is also where the MP’s office is located.
Going back to 1988 I was living in a £40 a week bedsit in London’s Caledonian Road area, but really wanted to own my own place. Despite being on a decent salary and even with a deposit, absolutely nothing was affordable (sounds almost contemporary). But then I heard of some ‘cheapish’ by London standards, aka grossly overpriced, new build flats and studios going up in Walthamstow. I went to view one Sunday afternoon, thereby failing to realise that the development was built on a former railway maintenance siding, complete with a Railway Workers’ Mission Hall, rebuilt gratis by the flat developers to blend in, and that normally the flats shook as multiple weekday trains rattled between Chingford and Liverpool Street Stations. Despite this, and really having no other affordable choice, I bought a studio flat and spent the next 18 years living there. For the first few years the 27 properties, squashed between the railway line and a council estate, were all occupied by ‘young professionals’ – until the property market crashed and many found their mortgages unaffordable, and the negative equity considerably more than the market value of their property. Several did moonlight flits. I’m mentioning all this to highlight a paradox – these flats are now 95%+ buy-to-lets with even whole families living in the tiny studios. There has been no obvious gentrification here.
Back in the 80s and 90s I really can’t recall ever hearing of ‘Walthamstow Village’, and it was a couple of years before I discovered almost by accident that there was indeed an old ‘Walthamstow Village’ complete with an ancient parish church, impressive Georgian graveyard, alms-houses, a large timbered medieval house and a small museum. However, this real ‘Walthamstow Village’ isn’t by any means the area now marketed as ‘Walthamstow Village’, as centred on Orford Road, and now the unwelcome target of Gail’s, this gentrified to the gills area is purely an estate agent invention.
Back in my day, Orford Road was a minor and rather out on a limb forgotten parade of 19th century shops with a baker, ironmonger, pub, restaurant and frankly not much else. The restaurant was the choice for the London Borough of Waltham Forest’s Conservation and Planning Department’s joint Christmas lunches – until the owner inserted a ginger-coloured wood effect UPVC frontage without planning or conservation area consent and was served with an enforcement notice. To cut a long story short, the owner went to appeal and the Planning Inspectorate’s non-local inspector ruled against LBWF, on account of him deeming the area to be very run down and its conservation area status not therefore adversely affected by the introduction of the obtrusive and garish UPVC. This was in the very early 2000s. How things have changed.
I well remember friends from Hampstead coming to visit me in my part of Walthamstow (relatively close to both the real and pseudo ‘Walthamstow Villages’) saying afterwards, ‘please don’t invite us again, we took the train from Liverpool Street, but the other passengers all looked so rough we thought we’d be mugged’. I did try to point out that these rough types were probably all commuting city office workers, but apparently these were only ‘Essex types’ and so beyond the pale for Hampstead’s shrinking violets. Now ‘Walthamstow Village’ is apparently just as demure as Hampstead and a magnet for aspirational heavily multicultural arty-farty types who are happy to pay really silly money to live amongst other champagne socialists, and gorge themselves on overpriced artisan fare. Why they feel entitled to decide which shops are welcome and which aren’t, or why they can’t just boycott those they don’t like is to me a mystery. Maybe they should consider how genuinely disgruntled people react, but there again maybe not as these are by definition ‘far-right’ despicables.
This in a nutshell is the face of modern socialist Britain on so many levels.
What ‘Walthamstow Village’ really needs I feel is a branch of Greggs or a Heron Discount Food Store and some more down-to-earth Westminster-imposed ‘cultural enrichment’, just like us lucky types have Up North in places like Hull and many other riotous locations yet to be declared imaginary ‘villages’ or indeed to be blessed/cursed, you choose, by ample lashings of gentrification.
Martin Rispin has had a career in many different sectors, most lately in the fields of English Tourism and Heritage based Urban Regeneration. He now lives, retired, in Kingston upon Hull.
If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee or sharing this piece with your friends – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!
Typically, genteel and/or aspirational types move into quaint light industrial areas or the historical heart of an area’s pub and club land and immediately start to campaign for the closure of anything that doesn’t fit in with their own sour dough and matcha aesthetic. They never seem to see the irony of what first drew them they seek to destroy (or the effect upon long standing local businesses/employment and existing satisfied residents).
If only those on the Right could take a leaf (temporarily) out of the operational manual of the moralising aspirational classes. You have to admire them if only for their commitment, energy and group organisation. They get themselves onto the parish, town and/or city council, create pressure groups, lobby their MPs and write to local papers. From my long experience engaged in activism with Right wing challenger parties we would be lucky if 8% of our membership was prepared to publicly engage in a modicum of activism. Those of a Right wing outlook will have to at least match the activism of the Left If we are to make any inroads into the restoration of small c conservative revival.
Probably easier for the type you mention as they are among friends, have virtually everything in common and aren’t continually criticised as far right, boomers, gammon etc. The Right is more of a broadchurch and not naturally drawn to explicit activism – maybe we need to rethink?
I visited Hull once. I suspect this puts me in a decided minority of the British population.
On the other hand I don’t suppose I’ve ever visited Walthamstow. I try to avoid London whenever poss, a policy formed in the old days when it was part of the First World.
Both are nice places (with unfair criticism from those who’ve never been or grumpy locals who’ve never been anywhere else). However, whilst a visitor might enjoy Hull’s ‘Fruit Market’ or Walthamstow’s Orford Road it’s clear these are untypical enclaves and the daily preserve of the arty-farty who have no truck with the other 99% of the place or its inhabitants.
It’s worse than that. Gail’s is owned by a Jewish ‘Zionist’ apparently, and that is the real impetus behind this issue. The rise of Antisemitism on the metro Left continues apace and this is just the latest example. No wonder Stella Greasy is keeping her head down and not wading in. It would be terrible perplexing for her to take sides and risk either reinforcing anti-Jewish sentiment or upsetting those who voted her in.
Most interesting insight (that of course MSM ‘don’t know about’ nor would the campaigners mention as having any possible bearing on their faux outrage).