Sam Redlark

image generated by Craiyon There are placenames that you might otherwise never stumble across, were you not inclining your gaze upward towards a fragment of the London Underground map, so as to avoid the shuttered stare of the passenger who is sitting opposite. These outlying suburbs have been drawn into the sprawl of the capital. On paper at least, they are now part and parcel of London. Public opinion, particularly on the issue of where one neighbourhood ends and another begins, moves more slowly than urban development, advancing at a generational pace. To some, these far-flung locales will never be a part of London. They are simply too far away, in terms of time and distance, from the hustle and bustle of the West End. Speaking their names will often conjure bucolic rural imagery that belongs in the first half of the 20th century, if not the one before it. Often these places occupy diversionary loops, or short branches, at the distant ends of one of the more far-reaching London Unde...

image generated by Craiyon I wrote two responses to this query, both very different. I don't know why. Boredom, perhaps. ~ How much does it cost to change the British monarch? The minor bell-tower protruding like a chimney stack, from the south-eastern corner of the church of St Lidwina's, chimes the half-hour past noon. In response, the Royal Mint dutifully exhales a torrent of lunchtime workers through the embedded architecture of its main entrance – a former railway arch connecting to the bowed semi-ribs of the archways that once stood their ground on either side, before they were partially demolished and absorbed into the newer building. In that strange way in which the Capital will periodically reinvent itself, what was once a conduit for incoming and outgoing rail freight is now a pedestrianised gateway for the base coin of that wealth. Many of the workers choose to settle, like a flock of London pigeons, on a nearby triangular road island with rounded corners. A few yea...

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 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...

  Cross-posted to r/ImaginaryLondon East of Tower Bridge, as the meandering Thames widens its course, the river crossings diminish to tunnels, segregated for foot, rail and road traffic, while, on the surface, a few scattered ferries ply the waters back and forth between the north and south banks. From 1973 to 1987, a precarious third option existed for anyone brave enough to take to the air: The Tramblecar ruled, if not the entirety of the skies over London, then a narrow diagonal cross-section, stretching between Silverton and Woolwich. It was, as the name suggests, a cable car, albeit one that transported vehicles. Initially this entailed paying a sum of £47 for a linking apparatus to be permanently mounted onto the roof of your car, that would allow it to be hooked up to the cable. Connecting to the line was a three stage process: Cars would first roll onto a pivoting weigh bridge that was used to determine not only the tonnage of the vehicle but also the distribution of the w...

photo credit: Pafcool2 (Wikimedia Commons) Cross-posted from r/ImaginaryLondon Mention the 2011 Croydon property boom to any estate agent based within the Capital. The likely response will be awestruck nostalgia, dating to a six-month period when it seemed as though all roads to home ownership converged upon the South London borough. “It was the speed of it,” recalls Mark Barton of Barton Sales & Letting. “I returned from a fortnight in the Seychelles to find that, during my absence, we had sold all eleven of our mainstays – rundown properties in Croydon that had been on our books for ages. I almost fell off my chair when I was given the news. It was the same for the other estate agents in the area. People were coming in off the street looking for homes that they could renovate almost from the ground up. A lot of them were first time buyers. Nobody knew why it was happening at first. It was Gary Rockley who eventually put two and two together.” The unlikely catalyst for Croydon...