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Page 27


  ‘That’s a big one,’ said Annie Walker as I three-point-turned my cylinder into her fourth-floor headquarters overlooking Dickins & Jones.

  ‘So they say,’ I rejoined, building a free and easy camaraderie that was abruptly punctured when I heard myself telling her she looked exactly like my mother. Annie was busily preparing for the imminent turning-on-the-lights ceremony, coordinating a trio of Continental work-experience girls who flapped about us stuffing envelopes and rolling up posters. Noting from one of the latter that the self-styled ‘Switch On’ was to be effected by over-toothed popster Billie Piper, I wondered aloud whether Regent Street was deliberately moving downmarket – the last hands I remembered seeing on the lever belonged to a Prime Minister. ‘Well, John Major,’ said Annie, as if he didn’t really count. ‘And I certainly wouldn’t say downmarket. Cosmopolitan, perhaps. More fashion chains.’

  ‘Like Oxford Street?’ I suggested mischievously.

  ‘We are 300 per cent superior to Oxford Street,’ she said, rather shrilly. I’d been pushing my luck, and now gave it a final sharp prod with an enormous rolled-up map.

  ‘Bond Street?’ she repeated, as dismissively amused as the bloke in Jail being offered out by a lagered-up Uncle Pennybags. ‘I was driving down Bond Street in a taxi the other day,’ she recalled with a thin smile, ‘and the driver turned to me and said “How does this place survive?” I don’t know a single major Bond Street store which isn’t in trouble.’ She paused, giving me a brief moment to marvel once more at this rivalry’s rancid gall. ‘Have you been down Bond Street yet?’ Not yet, I said, and she eased back in her chair. ‘Regent Street,’ she said, lowering her voice portentously, ‘is the only boulevard in London.’ I could see what she meant – the broad pavements and that elegant arc into Piccadilly Circus certainly make for a far classier stroll than is possible along Oxford Street – but walking up to her office I’d been aware of the overpowering Clunnish ambience imbued by those hefty structures run up along both sides in the twenties.

  When Harold Clunn describes a street as ‘one of the finest metropolitan thoroughfares in the world’, you just know in his mind’s eye he’s being driven down it standing up in the back of an open-topped Mercedes staff car, and in the mid-thirties that slightly totalitarian atmosphere was unhappily bolstered by one of those flags with the funny bent cross fluttering on top of the German Railways Information Bureau at No. 19 (or Nos 19–21, as any bleak jokers at the next-door Czechoslovak Travel office might have had it). Not, of course, that anyone at the time would have found that particularly sinister: I’m still vividly haunted by a photo I’d seen of a cheery bus inspector at Trafalgar Square proudly displaying the swastika lapel badge that identified him to tourists as a German speaker.

  The twenties overhaul that endowed Regent Street with these rather oppressive edifices in exchange for the elegance of Nash was, as ever, undertaken on economic grounds: setting the ground floors aside for retail use, the Crown Estate was able to welcome additional tenants in the four or five floors above. Annie’s office, I’d noted from my directory, would in 1933 have been occupied either by the administrative headquarters of a brewer’s chemist, a gown manufacturer, a travel agent, two wholesale milliners or a supplier of bus components.

  There were loud protests. Once a gloriously stretched-out Royal Crescent, after its makeover a distraught Country Life columnist compared Regent Street to ‘a nightmare of County Halls’. Most of the classy restaurants and cafés that had made the Regent Street experience a more rounded one were disappearing, he noted, and its ambience, once so suavely relaxed, was becoming unappealingly ‘restless’. The article concluded with what its author clearly considered a grimly apocalyptic prophesy: that promenading pedestrians would be alienated and, in due course, the curtain would thus be lowered on a gilded epoch of ‘casual shopping’.

  Yeah, right. County Hall or no, nowhere else is casual shopping still practised more seriously. The average Regent Street department store has always seemed a little less, well, average than its Oxford Street counterpart. Liberty, of course, was made out of men-o’-war, and there was something aristocratically perverse about the spelling of that Dickins who teamed up with that Jones, but what really set Regent Street apart from any other in London – to my young eyes at least – was Hamleys.

  In the days before we had Toys ‘Я’ Us, toys were them. My local toyshop catered for the sort of parents who didn’t allow their children to watch telly, its dim shelves lined with diecast combine harvesters and nurse uniforms. But in Hamleys, all those state-of-the-art super-toys that had acquired near-mythical status in awestruck playground gossip were miraculously made flesh: the Airfix Boeing 747 with wings longer than your arms; radio-control cars that weren’t actually connected to the handset by a telephone cable; the Subbuteo Stadium edition with a TV-camera rostrum and ballboys.

  Squinting up at its many floors you somehow felt a historical connection with Edwardian children gawping at tinplate dreadnoughts – here was a shop that had been around a long time (though you wouldn’t then have known it was established in 1760), a shop that had blazed trails in juvenile entertainment technology (though you wouldn’t then have cared that ‘ping pong’ was coined there). There was something magical, something Willy Wonka about Hamleys: the bubble-blowing, plane-throwing clowns in the foyer; the model railway that circled the second-floor balcony . . . and ooh, look: there’s my mother, seated behind a little baize table demonstrating to an amply-trousered audience the extensive creative possibilities contained within a Priscilla Lobley Flower Kit.

  The Christmas she worked at Hamleys was one of almost incoherent excitement, for her children at least – show my mother a sheet of crepe paper now and she’ll yawp like a poisoned crow. Almost every day after school my siblings and I went up and hung about the shop until closing time, embarking on protracted destruction derbies with the Scalextric demonstrators and running over to the board-game department for a covetous shufti in the Monopoly Deluxe box: gold tokens, a carousel for the title deeds and – eek! – hotels with chimneys. We also spent a lot of time with a neighbouring demonstrator flogging do-it-yourself balloon kits that essentially involved daubing a sticky globule of some powerful chemical compound on to the end of a stubby straw and blowing and blowing and blowing. At the time I wasn’t quite able to explain the enduring thrill this activity seemed to generate, but because between all that blowing there was also some sucking I think I now understand: we were abusing solvents.

  So Regent Street meant something special to those who accrued childish things and those who had put them away, and even back in the thirties Annie’s Association was trying to explain what it was. ‘Many a pleasant hour can be spent increasing one’s poise and changing one’s personality,’ was the alarmingly ambitious definition of retail therapy described in another early brochure. But though Oxford Street, I could see, might reasonably be described as ‘restless’, Regent Street still manages to exude a sort of easy superiority befitting of its royal landlords, as if it doesn’t actually have to work for a living but just finds it rather amusing to dabble with all this commercial malarkey, a bit like those Sloaney girls who get jobs in art galleries. The Queen was raised in Piccadilly and owns Regent Street, and the two streets are united by a certain sense of decorum, a shared antipathy towards in-your-face commercial excess.

  But though they’ve banished the pound-a-slice pizza stalls and vomiting zombies, Regent Street does face certain blighting challenges to its image. One is another Day-Glo forest of Golf Sale placards: ‘We pressured the shopkeeper into taking his sandwich men away once, and his turnover dropped by £35,000 a week. You do the sums: I can’t imagine the chaps holding those boards get more than £40 a week.’ Another was what Annie referred to with hauteur as ‘the cloth shops’, crusty old drapers whose windows are stacked with dusty rolls of pinstriped worsted and mohair.

  I’d often wondered how these rather forsaken establishments survived in such a prestigious location,
and now I found out. When the new buildings went up in the twenties, explained Annie, the Crown Estate doled out ninety-nine-year leases at little more than peppercorn rents: one can just imagine some retired colonel fondly welcoming in the chaps who had run up his grandfather’s tropical dress uniform while splenetically skewering applications from any establishment considered unworthy of royal approval. Regent Street had just one Corner House, hidden away up its overlooked northern periphery; on Oxford Street, there were ten.

  ‘Less than twenty years to go for most of the old drapers then,’ I sighed, and Annie nodded, eagerly contemplating their more lucrative and image-consistent replacements. Personally I’ll miss the cloth shops – I’ve no idea what ‘barathea’ is, but it’s a great word to see in a shop window.

  She rounded off with a dutiful résumé explaining how the Crown Estate was now marketing Regent Street as a ‘branded entity’. Her parting words were delivered in a dreamy, Utopian sigh: ‘If I could change one thing, it would be to rename Piccadilly Circus Tube station as Regent Street.’

  I chortled at the hilarious improbability of this, but noisily bullying my laminated tube into the jockey-sized lift realised that the way things are going she might yet live to see her dream come true. It’s not as if Tube station names are set in stone: Green Park was once Dover Street; passengers alighting at what is now Tower Hill were for sixty-two years met by signs reading Mark Lane, and they only settled on Lambeth North at the fourth attempt. And in an age of rampant corporate sponsorship there is no cow so sacred that you couldn’t spray your slogan on its udders if the price was right. Opened in 1937, the historic Brockwell Park Lido in Brixton recently emerged from refurbishment with a huge pink and blue logo on its pool floor and a new name: the Evian Lido. We gaze down on our capital from a pod on the British Airways London Eye. It’s just as well Post Office station changed its name to St Paul’s in 1937, because otherwise people would now have to ask for day returns to Consignia, and I don’t think they’d be able to do that without eating at least a small part of the ticket clerk’s face.

  A sudden and fearful rain began to beat down almost as soon as I stepped foot back on Regent Street, sending everyone scurrying into Dickins & Jones and Liberty. For a while I brazened it out, moistly inspecting the carnival of tat and fast food heaped together in Regent Street’s forgotten northern appendix, like a funfair outside the palace walls. Here were Camilla Parker-Bowles masks and ‘Small Pecker’ condoms, as well as many examples of the phenomenon known as Big-Mouth Billy Bass, a voice-activated latex trout which bends in the middle and sings nine seconds of ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ when you shout at it. I’m not sure what the royal landlady would have to say about Camilla and the condoms, but she’d certainly approve of the flexible fish. It’s been said that the Queen has no sense of humour, yet she has no less than ten Big-Mouth Billy Basses installed in her palaces. Sorry – delete ‘yet’ and insert ‘because’.

  I could see the chaps out flogging umbrellas down Oxford Street, and with my new jeans beginning to shrink around me I splashed off towards the nearest vendor. I never made it. Fumbling for the requisite £3 – another special price, I’m sure you’ll agree – I winded yet another approaching shopper with a gut-ful of Iberian peninsula, and belatedly grasped the hazardous impracticalities of an additional manual burden. What was worse – to shop till I drip-dropped, or arrive at Regent Street’s southern conclusion with my brolly rib-tips festooned with toupees, spectacle arms and bloody earrings?

  A close call, but one decided when I hit upon the obvious solution. A minute later I was striding past Liberty beneath an impressive acreage of unfurled laminate held in both upraised arms, like Atlas given a let-off. One of the drawbacks to this system, as I pondered watching a hapless Golf Saler receiving cider-scented grief from an obscurely furious pisshead, was that I appeared to be advertising a continent. Another was that it rendered actually going into any shops a logistical impossibility – though this wasn’t an especially tearful tragedy, as the only one I might have wanted to go into was Hamleys, and the last time I’d been in there the boy who once quivered with incredulous glee had become the father mumbling truculently at the price tags as he homed in on a combine harvester.

  The shops petered out as Regent Street swooped into its final parade. Here was the Café Royal, a regular House of Windsor lunch hangout in the Café de Paris era but now associated with an even more bizarrely feudal institution: gentlemen’s evenings where dinner-suited patrons despatch many courses of fine food while two young men in big shorts batter each other to bloody oblivion in a central ring. Veeraswamy, London’s oldest Indian restaurant; a Cheers bar done up in precise homage to the eponymous TV show, except that in this one nobody knows your name.

  With lengthening strides I splashed eagerly towards Piccadilly Circus Tube; then stopped, lowered my head in weary recollection and in doing so emptied the Adriatic Sea down the neck of a passing child. ‘What are you playing at, you great arse?’ barked his mother at me, only in Scandinavian. It was all right for her. She only had to change a young boy’s clothes under a brolly in the middle of the West End, whereas I had to turn around and walk up and down Bond Street in the pissing rain with a big map on my head.

  Actually, I wouldn’t be doing exactly that, because guess what – there is no Bond Street. Sort it out, Marge: you could have had New Bond Street or Old Bond Street, or just given up and gone for Mayfair, which – just to queer the pitch further – extends across both. (In the twenties the council proposed to cut the crap and call the whole thing Bond Street, but the local ratepayers voted overwhelmingly against it.) Still, just this once I’ll let it lie, mainly because the street association’s website – the closest I was allowed to get to a meeting – makes a particular point of referring to ‘the Bond Streets’, which you can call laudably precise or really fucking silly, depending on whether you’re wrong or right.

  Arriving at its proximate junction with Piccadilly, I realised I had no memory of walking or even driving down Bond Street. This seemed an exceptional omission – here was a pivotal thoroughfare of considerable length and global repute – but one that was eloquently explained as I peered into the window of Dolce & Gabbana to be met by a glare whose intimidating superciliousness even Alan Rickman could never hope to match. I hadn’t been ignoring Bond Street – it had been ignoring me.

  I don’t expect my case was helped by the scene that immediately preceded this encounter: as suddenly as it started the rain had stopped, and before stowing my rerolled map I’d elected to disperse its accumulated precipitation by means of a short but vigorous one-man light-sabre fight. But though that might have excused the D&G doorman’s sneers, it could scarcely justify the pantomime loathing displayed by four further staff members who skulked close behind as I wandered around the store’s sparse and otherwise uncustomered interior, poking my map into unpriced racks of fur-embroidered denim, lime-coloured leather and other season essentials from the emperor’s new wardrobe. Literally shown the door, I felt like Cinderella being hounded back into the scullery by a surfeit of Ugly Sisters.

  Well, plus ça change, I suppose. Old Bond Street was the work of Sir Thomas Bond, not a lordly landlord this time but a pioneering developer, who in 1686 bought up and pulled down Clarendon House – a mansion not yet twenty years old – and laid roads through its grounds. Its more extensive northward continuation New Bond Street has, in fact, enjoyed just fourteen summers fewer; the seamlessly connected pavements of both were swiftly lined with bijou upmarket homes.

  But as Mayfair grew up to the east, Bond Street acquired a more commercial aspect, its narrow houses commandeered as shops for the burgeoning aristocratic neighbourhood. It got its big break in 1784, when the astonishingly influential Duchess of Devonshire orchestrated a boycott of the more fashionable shopping streets of Covent Garden, whose residents had voted against her mate Charles James Fox. By the end of the eighteenth century Bond Street ‘abounded with shopkeepers of superior taste’,
and was patrolled by the Bond Street Loungers, definitive work-shy fops who inaugurated the street’s long tradition of attracting ponced-up layabouts in dyed wigs.

  Ridicule, it has been said, is nothing to be scared of, but for the Loungers it should have been. Their nemesis was the enemy within, the extremely mad Lord Camelford, who lived over what is now the Hermès shop and spent much of the early nineteenth century patrolling Bond Street with his footman – a black prizefighter – looking for Loungers to slap about.

  Already court-martialled for mutiny after shooting one naval officer and challenging another to a duel, in his early twenties Camelford enjoyed a brief but glorious second career as London’s lariest lord. When he couldn’t find a Lounger to work over he’d take on the whole street: while the capital celebrated peace with France on the night of 7 October 1801, Camelford provocatively refused to join in, successfully luring an angry mob to his door. Eagerly rushing out alone with a bludgeon and a sword, the young lord was quickly beaten to the ground; having been hauled back inside by his servants he crawled out on to a balcony and opened up on the crowd below with a pistol. Three years later, having failed to get in deep enough shit even while touring Napoleonic France under a false name, Camelford challenged an officer known to be a crack shot to a duel in Holland Park, with predictably terminal consequences.

  In the post-Camelford era, Bond Street gratefully returned to its business as a hoity-toity purveyor of flash stuff. As Regent Street moved towards the mass market, Bond Street continued to make its living by selling a small number of people a small number of very expensive things. For many decades a men’s retail playground on the Pall Mall model – gun shops, dealers in awful sporting prints and the like – by the turn of the twentieth century the boot was on the other foot: a daintier one with painted toenails.