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  ‘A carton of jellied eels, please,’ I said, with all the enthusiasm of a child forced to choose between raw tripe and a bearded great aunt.

  Tubby didn’t look up. He was old – actually, very old now that I looked at him closely, much too old in fact to be doing anything other than accidentally stealing things from Woolworth’s. Poor soul. I raised my voice. ‘Excuse me, I’d like a . . .’

  ‘Glenn Millers!’

  I can say this reply was not one I had anticipated. He’d said it far too loudly to ignore, but I tried anyway. ‘Jel—’

  ‘Glenn Millers, you nancy!’

  I’d thought he’d been uttering some oath, perhaps the Gordon Bennett of the seafood-vending fraternity, but now realised it was something I’d said, or failed to say. Tubby was still staring at his trailer’s floor, refusing even to look me in the eye until the terrible breach of East End etiquette I had so brazenly committed was put right. Glenn Millers? Glenn Millers . . . oh, please no, please say this wasn’t some idiotically obscure rhyming-slang convention. No. What could it mean? I put the thought out of my mind and gave it another go. This time I almost made it.

  ‘I’d like a punnet . . . or a portion, or a little jug of whatever, anyway something small with jellied . . .’

  ‘Oh, you’re having a bloody laugh!’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I said. Then, because of the very low score this had achieved on the ripostograph, just to see what happened I quickly piped out ‘Jellied eels!’.

  He’d already lost his rag, and perhaps while looking for it found the handle he now flew off. ‘Glenn flaming Millers! GLENN! MILLERS!’

  It had been a long day, and I didn’t need this. Whitechapel is no place for flouncing off, but I was unable to keep my elbows in as I ferried my rouged and burnished features off down the street. Stupid bloody Cockneys and their silly-arsed lingo. Pot of the old Glenn Millers, mate, you know, the old gut fillers, the old hunger killers, the old tastes-nothing-like-vanillas?

  Still shaking my head, I slipped my one-day travelcard into the barrier at Aldgate East. But as I walked through and extracted it, I suddenly felt blood hosing into some sort of big hole in my brain, and I stopped, jammed the ticket back in the exit barrier and with lengthening strides marched furiously back down Whitechapel High Street. Damn it all to hell Isaacs, you’re not getting away with this, I may easily have thought. I’m going back, and I’m going to get my eels.

  Two minutes later I was standing back at Tubby’s counter, nodding very rapidly as I noted a gaze still directed impertinently down at the floor of his smelly caravan.

  ‘Hel-lo! Hel-lo up there!’

  Tubby looked up, then glanced down at me with mild curiosity. ‘Yes?’ he said brightly, wiping his fingers lightly across his white coat. This sudden amiability was slightly disarming, but the emergency glass had already been smashed on my mental alarm box; there was no going back. ‘Glenn Millers,’ I said, enunciating with the gleefully haughty precision of Donald Sinden.

  Tubby scratched an earlobe and looked a little uncomfortable. He seemed to be waiting for something, so I gave it to him. ‘Oh, sorry. Glenn flaming Millers.’ At this Tubby straightened himself, but there was more where that came from. ‘Flaming Glenn flaming Glenn Millers,’ I sort of sang, as if rounding off a limerick.

  Tubby was already waving a rather shaky hand above his jars and bowls to help me refine my request, and when it trembled over a tub of halved slugs in aspic, the only visually credible candidate, I paired a curt bark with a brisk nod. Complying with slapdash alacrity Tubby slopped five into a small polystyrene beaker, thwocked it on the glass shelf between us and quavered, ‘One ninety.’

  One ninety? I thought. ‘One ninety?’ I said.

  I was still clacking coins on the counter when Tubby diverted his attention to the taxi pulling up behind us, and more particularly its unusually spritely driver, who presently arrived at my shoulder.

  ‘Pint of whelks, Tubs,’ he said, chummily. Tubby seemed inordinately happy to see him, looking instantly much less like that little bald man did just as Benny Hill was about to slap his head. Immediately he began shovelling marine gastropods into Styrofoam with a crowd-pleasing panache that Tom Cruise would do well to study should he ever be offered the lead in Prawn Cocktail.

  He said whelks; he got whelks. What was wrong with these people? Suddenly possessed with the reckless defiance of a Russian toastmaster, after a quick glance at its modest but rather alien contents I upended the tub into my mouth.

  The soured, fibrous flesh was pretty much as expected, as was the stubborn latex sheathing it, as was the gelatinous pork-pie padding embalming it. I hadn’t, however, expected bones, not at least of such knuckled enormity. They say eating an oyster is like swimming in the sea with your mouth open, but taking all consistency issues into account this was more akin to biting the hand off a corpse dragged out after three weeks in the Thames. I was wondering what to do with the pickled vertebra painfully tenting my cheeks like a puffer fish when a muted round of tinny applause rose up from Tubby’s feet.

  ‘Weakest Link, innit?’ said the cabbie, and following the tilt of his head I noted the tips of a rabbit’s-ear aerial poking up above the counter.

  ‘Spot on,’ said Tubby. ‘Dozy bunch tonight.’ He tutted. ‘Like: Who is Michael Schumacher’s brother?’ The cabbie rolled his eyes and snorted slightly: it wasn’t even worth answering. Tubby continued. ‘And, right, whose big band had a hit with “Moonlight Serenade”?’

  As he said this, something seemed to occur to Tubby; I was spitting out sheep’s teeth into my polystyrene beaker when it also occurred to me. The cabbie issued a vague, wondering hum, one accompanied with a slow shaking of the head. ‘Got me, Tubs mate. Sounds a bit before my time.’ Tubby tutted theatrically. Or at least I imagine he did. By then I was downing the Tube stairs three at a go.

  The Old Kent Road is in every literal fashion streets apart from its brethren on the board. All the other Monopoly addresses are contained either within the Circle line that girdles London’s central area, or lie a single Tube stop beyond its perimeter, but if the Circle line is a bottle on its side – and in Harry Beck’s map it kind of is – then the Old Kent Road is the straw that dropped out of its neck and got washed off right across the Thames and miles down some south London gutter. And it’s so long: most of the Monopoly streets were contained in sheets V9 (West End) and V10 (City) on the 1914 Ordnance Survey maps of the capital I’d acquired in some outburst of academic enthusiasm – but sheet IX3 was just titled Old Kent Road, and even that chopped a bit off the southern end. Pottering up and down every individual street to date, I’d never once had to turn a page of my A–Z; standing at the southern end of OKR, as I’d already taken to calling it, ahead of me lay a two-mile north-easterly march across pages 39, 40, 54 and 55. I looked above the door of the mini-mart next to me. It was No. 915.

  My aunt Helen lives in Greenwich, and it became a tradition for my father to drive us home from festive visits along the Old Kent Road. Because most of these excursions overlapped with our Monopoly period, the excitement generated was considerable. Regent Street, Trafalgar Square – by the age of ten I felt entitled to express a degree of worldly nonchalance about most of the streets on the board, but Old Kent Road was different.

  In all honesty the very idea that Old Kent Road might actually enjoy any sort of extra-Monopoly existence seemed somehow implausible. That funereally joyless name and an absurd two-quid rent suggested a mythical, monochrome netherworld of barefoot urchins, rag-and-bone men and dead dogs. And yet there we were, bearing right past New Cross Gate station and approaching that first street sign labelled with those three short but evocative words. Pressing our faces to the near-side rear window in a fashion incompatible with today’s more fastidious approach to passenger safety, my brother, sister and I eagerly scanned the passing pavements: was it, could it really be, that bad? Regretably, because it was always dark by then we never really found out. My memory was of a log a
nd very straight road lined with a great many chip shops, one of which we once persuaded my father to procure our supper from, as I recall a request he agreed to only with significant reluctance and effected with indecent speed.

  Staring ahead at the endless, undeviating thoroughfare before me it seemed difficult to accept that in the intervening twenty or more years I could not remember once returning. The weather was trying very hard to make Old Kent Road alluring – the heavens solar and hugely blue, the air infused with a wintry crispness that seemed to emphasise how near I was to its bucolic terminus. I had to admit, however, that this initial stretch didn’t seem entirely becoming: the guano-streaked shell of an abandoned pub opposite, a ‘members only’ club that looked more like a low-rent, high-security minicab office. Two ambulances were idling outside the mini-mart, implying imminent local excitement of the sort that at 10.20 a.m. I wasn’t quite ready for.

  I went into a café under the first railway bridge, one run by a silent oriental who if the sign outside was taken at face value wished to be known as Dave, and sat at the window with a big mug of tea, stoutly attempting to reminisce upon what had to be the Old Kent Road’s happier times. This, I realised with a jolt, was the endgame. I’d brought the board along out of habit, but needn’t have bothered: I’d already had my last roll of the dice. Instead of a dark-blue bang I was going out with a tired, brown whimper. It wouldn’t do. The Old Kent Road, I decided, would surprise me.

  It was Roman, of course, and not just any old via but Watling Street, the important road which connected Dover to London before heading on towards Leicester. The period artefacts that still regularly turn up during roadworks attest to the volume of ancient traffic, a volume that having been turned down a bit in the dark ages was cranked up to deafening levels in medieval times. Chaucer was one of the many pilgrims who strode past my café window; fifteen years after his death, the Old Kent Road was filled with crowds welcoming the conquering heroes as they marched triumphantly home from Agincourt. Lined with windmills, it made a jolly holiday route out of town towards the coast: the Kent Road that Dickens had David Copperfield flee from London along was still a rural affair down this end, its pastures and market gardens interrupted only by inns and taverns catering for the passing trade. In 1805, they were joined by another firm pitched at a more esoteric breed of Channel-bound traveller: John Edgington & Co. – marquee, tent, flag and canvas goods manufacturers and purveyors of exploring equipment. The splendid Edgington façade, decorated with an oil-painted mural of tents from the jousting age, concealed three floors of cannons, telescopes and ice axes: Livingstone’s Stanley was just one of the notables who kitted himself up on the way past. And flanking Edgington’s at the road’s northern fundament – where, à la Bond Street, it rather pointlessly evolved into the New Kent Road – were grand Georgian residences erected by the landlords who owned most of the area around: the Rolls family, no less, one of whom was later to strike up that auspicious relationship with Mr Royce.

  Holding on to these images, I swallowed the last of my tea, bundled all maps and directories under an arm for handy reference, bade Dave farewell and set off. Things looked up almost immediately: there, bravely decorated with appropriate murals, was the famous Gracelands Palace, a Chinese restaurant managed by the arrestingly eccentric Paul ‘Elvis’ Chan. Every night an amply rhinestoned Paul diverts his patrons with wholehearted renditions of The King’s greatest numbers, wandering about what is hardly an expansive dining area, one hand on his mike and the other clamped to a highly active pelvis. Many of my friends have made the pilgrimage to the Gracelands Palace, universally describing an evening of peerless entertainment. Part of this, it seems, stems from the fact that Paul, though very loud, isn’t actually very good – but that’s OK, because he takes the consequent joshing in good heart, even when, as one friend reported, it extends to bellowed heckles of ‘Elvis – leave the building!’.

  But next along was an eighteen-storey tower block with a pub set into its basement, and opposite, lying in a considerable area of bleakly rubbled open space, was a Lidl: grocers to the underclass. The bad thoughts were coming back, and the history had already done almost all it could to help. Throughout the late eighteenth century the Rolls Estate prospered along with its genteel tenants, but in 1811 the Surrey Canal arrived, luring industries of a fetidity remarkable even by brown-set standards. Tanneries attracted outworkers who scoured the streets harvesting a natural astringent required in the production process: dog crap. There was a fat-rendering soap plant – and – all aboard for the factory tour – a ‘hair and felt works’.

  Merrily embracing the in-for-a-penny school of civil planning, a couple of prisons, a workhouse and a loony bin were stuck up the top, and an asylum for distressed publicans halfway down. And, would you believe it, off buggered the gentry, leaving their big old houses to be split into grubby bedsits. The farms and fields around were quickly crisscrossed with modest Victorian terraces, often occupied by City clerks who walked into work, and when the enormous Bricklayers Arms goods station opened in 1845 any spaces left in between were filled with back-to-back railway cottages, packed as tight as four green ones on that brown Monopoly strip.

  Just as the foreign refugees settled in Whitechapel, so the areas around the Old Kent Road – Walworth, Peckham, South Bermondsey – were packed with economic migrants from the provinces and those whose old homes in the City were making way for new offices. So enthusiastic was the development that by the thirties this part of south London had not only the highest population density in the south of England but one of the highest in Europe: 280 residents an acre, each house home to an average 9½ Londoners. A modern footnote on my 1914 map expresses astonishment that within all its square mileage there was not ‘a single acre of open space’.

  Charlie Chaplin constructed his downtrodden street character from memories of a desperate early childhood on Barlow Street, just off the top of the Old Kent Road, and life was barely less harsh when Michael Caine was born down the other end half a century later. The porters at Bricklayers Arms were considered the aristocracy: a lot of the rest scraped a living at home, dyeing children’s hats in portable boilers or peeling onions for the pickle factory up the road. A halved sheep’s head was a treat, and healthcare was administered by a quack who drove about in a van emblazoned with an unmissable special offer: ‘Buy one of my tins of foot ointment and I’ll pull out one of your teeth!’ The workhouse was still going in 1930, and eight years later a survey pronounced a quarter of the local housing stock unfit for human habitation.

  The Old Kent Road’s reputation by the early Monopoly era may be imagined from Harold Clunn’s description of its former gentility during the Rolls Estate’s heyday, or more particularly the way he prefaces this with the words ‘Absurd though it may appear to our readers . . .’.

  But hang on just a moment. Though even George Orwell might have called the streets around ‘a huge, graceless wilderness’ of ‘smoke-dim slums’, Old Kent Road itself remained a respectable and even exciting thoroughfare in the thirties. The Trocadero up at the top of New Kent Road was the largest cinema in the world, with 6,000 seats. And on the Old Kent Road proper the 1930 Astoria was joined in 1937 by the Regal; each had a capacity of over 2,000 and was full almost every night. The department stores at Elephant & Castle employed 1,000 staff and like their brethren up the Whitechapel Road were still keeping local shoppers away from the West End. And it was surely an indication of appropriate respect that in a city with more than three hundred bus services, the No. 1 should have been routed across the Old Kent Road. It still is.

  And despite the emotional disincentives of their environment, the locals nurtured a community spirit that out-East-Ended the East End. They did everything together, even sharing holidays: day-trip piss-ups round the countryside in charabancs for those who could afford it, six weeks’ summer hop picking for those who couldn’t. When a local shopkeeper died, mourners lined the streets in their thousands; as they did, remember, to see o
ff that final tram. The royalism was almost hysterical: when the Mayor of Bermondsey failed to turn out for the 1935 Jubilee, a baying crowd of 2,000 burnt his effigy outside the town hall. A popular local banner strung between houses on Coronation days read: ‘Lousy but Loyal’. Even in the 1977 Jubilee they wrapped all the lampposts with foil.

  The sun was shining almost straight into my eyes, somehow suggesting that hope lay on the horizon. But as is so often the way, that horizon never seemed to get any nearer. A drive-through KFC; a tool-hire depot; a self-storage warehouse; another sixties council block. Nearly every structure was large and at least relatively new, yet all seemed dwarfed by their own empty car parks and the wasteland between them, white space that I knew I wouldn’t find on any of the old maps even as I battled them open on every junction. It wasn’t until I got to No. 726 that I came up to a parade of original Old Kent Road Victorian shops, a marooned parade of seven on either side – ten of them were boarded up, including the third such pub. Two yawning fifteen-year-olds shambled past smoking dope. And then I looked up and there was the gasworks.

  Actually I didn’t need to look, having smelt it a mile off. ‘It’s closed, really,’ said the security guard apparently in sole charge of its giant blue cylinders, ‘we’re just storing the gas here these days.’

  ‘But you’re not storing it very well,’ I felt compelled to reply. ‘The whole place stinks.’