Sam Redlark

crossposted from r/Imaginary London image generated by Craiyon It was a puddly Tuesday morning in late September. A gusting wind, that pushed and pulled in a multitude of directions, was blowing rain down from an opaque sky the colour of cathedral marble. The fallen leaves lay plastered against the wet pavement like loose pieces of hammered brass. They has scarcely settled before they were ground into paste by the relentless comings and goings of Londoners as they went about their business. “Good heavens!” exclaimed Patricia Bridge as we exited Gloucester Road Underground Station. A fur-trimmed leather glove, tailored to her exacting specifications from the hides of three different species of animal, pinned down a matching fur hat, that had already been blown crooked. Her right arm locked itself tightly around my bent elbow. I guided her underneath the awning of a nearby florists. During our excursion, I had unwittingly taken on the additional role of porter. The handles of her enormou...

Crossposted to r/Imaginary London (This article was written in late September, 2022, predating the amendments to the 1953 Mars Act, which will become law in the UK at the end of March 2023) ~ image generated by Craiyon “The problem is, this year, we had what the weathermen call a red Summer,” explains Tim Sandry. “Very hot and very dry. It always brings the Mars weed out.” He loops the long strap of the broad-headed rake around his wrist, then launches it partway across the river. It lands horizontally on a spongy morass of red Martian weed that has completely clogged the surface along this stretch of The Wandle, partially damming the channel and resulting in a dangerous rise in the water level upstream. Drawing-in the strap, raises the wooden handle, at which point the short, sharp prongs bite down through the fibrous tangle. With a considerable effort, that is accompanied by a serpentine motion of the rake head, he is eventually able to detach a small section of the weed-mass and dra...

image generated by Craiyon Crossed posted from r/ImaginaryLondon In a classroom in Harmondsworth, Laurie Rose is teaching a small group of pilots how to manage a plane that has been caught in a Mayblush Column on the approach into Heathrow Airport. The Mayblush is one of the four London winds. The other three are the Beamer, the Ragsail, and the Nersha, all of which carry with them pros and cons, though none affects aviation so much as the Mayblush that rises during the Summer, and is credited with putting the pink in the apples. The Mayblush column is not an entirely natural phenomenon. It is caused by a descending aircraft interacting with localised weather fronts. Rose describes it as “quicksand at 2000 feet”. Once caught, it is impossible for a plane to land safely at Heathrow. Pilots are instead instructed to make for “the lull” at Mitcham Mills Airport in South London – formerly an aerodrome called Greenroost – now an emergency runway, surrounded by a nature reserve, capable of a...

image generated by Craiyon Crossposted to r/ImaginaryLondon Near to where I grew up, in Bermondsey, there used to be a bronze statue of a woman named Bridget Hænning. As her surname might suggest, she was not a native of the British Isles. She had been born in Silkeborg, in central Denmark, In 1936, she emigrated to East London, with the intention of marrying a seaman named David Lyme. After the engagement fell through, she remained in the Capital. On the 5th November, 1940, she was making her way to a cellar dance when the air-raid sirens sounded. A squadron of German bombers had slipped into London airspace unnoticed. Seconds later. the first bombs found their indiscriminate targets. In the ensuing chaos Hænning successfully guided a large group of children to an air-raid shelter, but was killed by flying masonry before she could also get to safety. She was 25 years old when she died. If her sculptor is to be believed, she was a very beautiful young woman. It is said that, when her b...

image generated by Craiyon Cross-posted to  r/Imaginary London   Theatre season is not what you think it is. It is not the eleventh-hour tuning of an orchestra, now redirecting focus towards finding a footing in the score, like the high-strung entries in the Grand National being marshalled along the start line. It is not the tawdry gilt of the footlights that flakes off the moment you exit the stage and are enveloped in the darkness of the wings. It does not even mark the beginning of theatre season, but rather its October end. It is a withdrawal to carpenters workshops, where the bare bones of next year's stages, from which the entire world will be made anew, are sawn and nailed together. It is a retreat to the costume workshops of East London where poor women with pinched fingers - who arrived in the UK from Eastern Europe, and who never saw so much as a glimpse of Marie Antoinette, or touched the hem of Madame Pompadour's ballgown, or a gazed upon a Parisian street in any e...

image generated by Craiyon Crossposted to  r/ImaginaryLondon I have a friend named Geoffrey Jones who delights in confounding expectations and who is annoyingly good at doing so. He told me once that there are parts of the Thames that flow underground. Not those shifting cross-sections of the river that drift on passive, slow-turning currents underneath the dank bridge arches that span the upper and middle course, but significant expanses of the river that are permanently covered over and never see any daylight. I cannot claim to have rambled along the full 215-mile extent of the Thames. That said, I have explored winding stretches of its banks in piecemeal fashion. I have visited the inauspicious site of the river's beginnings and source of its constant renewal - a waterlogged meadow outside the village of Kemble. I have explored its sketchy early meanderings that unseam the boundary line between the counties of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. I have lived within walking distance o...

Image generated by Craiyon Crossposted to r/ImaginaryLondon The remnants of the buffet were being haphazardly cleared away; the uneaten food decanted from the shiny paper plates and onto a single large, oval-shaped, cardboard platter with a scalloped rim; everything was draped in sheets of cling-film; one item carelessly piled on top of another, in readiness for being carried indoors; the papery skirts of the yellow table cloths flapping in the light breeze. The garden party, that had previously crowded around the long trestle tables, had unanchored itself from the lawn terrace outside the vicarage, and dwindled into smaller groups. These were now slowly drifting apart from each other. Some were already encroaching upon the fringes of the graveyard as if carried there on invisible currents. “It speaks poorly of our bonds of Christian fellowship when we can only unite in the presence of sausage rolls,” observed Jon Scaife. I had a mouth full of one of the aforementioned sausage rolls, b...

Image generated using craiyon Crossposted from r/ImaginaryLondon In 1983, the screenplay writer, Charles Hayhurst, who was riding high on the success of his 4-part drama - Whispering Upwind - approached the BBC with an idea for a new show. “It was a high concept drama,” recalls former commissioning editor, Scot Kingsbury. “Statues in London come to life and have to find a place in contemporary society, which they achieve with varying degrees of success.” “I had this concept that was provisionally titled Dawn of a New Day ,” says Hayhurst . “ I wanted to explore the idea of London as being one of those points of convergence, where people from all over the world will come and build lives for themselves, “No matter who you are, or where you are from, there will be somewhere in the capital where you will fit in. That kind of thing. “The show was also about the organic process of integration. Linger in the big city long enough and you will become a Londoner by default. That's is a hard...