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  He smiled flatly, a smile that said – well, call us old-fashioned, map boy, but down here we find it rather bracing.

  At their peak, the capital’s fearsomely poisonous gasworks consumed an annual equivalent of over 1½ tons of coal per Londoner, and the South Metropolitan was one of the largest. On the other hand, South Metropolitan gave employment to 2,000 locals, and its chairman, Sir George Livesey, was a noted philanthropist who built a nice library over the road: it now houses a Museum for Children which I’d eagerly have rushed into if it hadn’t been closed.

  The pre-Monopoly history of the brown set was full of contributions by genuinely saintly individuals, men and women who, fired by a sense of charity and justice, gave up their lives and/or wallets for the improvement of the many local unfortunates. Lord Rowton, Disraeli’s private secretary, donated £30,000 to help build Tower House and five other London hostels; Lord Rothschild erected dozens of well-appointed apartment blocks to house Whitechapel’s poorest. Salvation Army founder William Booth, Dr Barnardo, all those university volunteers . . . and what of Councillor Stanley Atkinson, whose bust I’d seen in the local history library: dead before he was my age, yet enough of decent merit still achieved to earn the legend ‘Guardian of the Poor’ below his marble shoulders? And today, we’re converting tramps’ hostels into yuppie flats and ‘do-gooder’ into an insult. Nothing is a more cynical inversion of charitable principles than ‘care in the community’, and it seemed that almost every time I passed someone else on the pavement – which in all honesty wasn’t very often – they were being unusual. A man stood by his dog in a pile of leaves surrounded by holdalls and suitcases. Another was shouting at cars from under a bus shelter: ‘And she forgot, and she’s going down the motorway, and WHOMP!’

  Number 620 was a barber’s, and seeing two old men in grey shopcoats standing idly either side of a gas heater within I darted over the threshold, desperate now for some nostalgic sustenance.

  ‘Oh, I’ve been in the trade – round here, round New Cross – for years and years,’ said the elder.

  ‘And years,’ cracked his cheeky junior. ‘Like, forty-five years.’

  This was useful and heartening. After a little prompting, I was treated to gentle tales of queuing round the block at the Astoria, of ‘the best furniture dealer in south-east London’, of billard rooms, tailors, trams and pub after pub after pub. It wasn’t quite pearly kings and singsongs, but it would do.

  On the way out – I probably should have had a haircut, but didn’t feel quite ready for the Roger Bannister look suggested by their establishment’s ambience – I turned and asked whether anyone round here minded about the whole Monopoly business. They looked at me searchingly: it had clearly never occurred to them before. ‘In Monopoly, you know, being the, um, the sort of . . .’ I faltered, suddenly aware I might be about to offend. The old feller rescued me.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that.’ For a moment we all looked out at the buses rumbling past. ‘Well, it’s always been cheap along here,’ he concluded, ‘but it was never nasty.’

  I sighed understandingly, but his colleague seemed somehow dissatisfied by this response. ‘It is now, though,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nasty.’ He nodded towards the world outside his window. ‘Why d’you think everyone’s packed up and gone? The Old Kent Road is pretty nasty these days.’

  ‘These days, maybe,’ conceded the elder immediately.

  What had gone so terribly wrong? Where was the commercial vigour celebrated in ‘Knocked ’Em in the Old Kent Road’, a music-hall paen to costermonger culture that Shirley Temple had been moved to cover? In my visits to Southwark’s local history library I’d been quite deeply affected by all the memories committed to paper by ageing borough residents, recalling an Old Kent Road that resounded with clanking trams and cries of ‘Carbolic – you wannit!’ or ‘Racing tips – I gotta horse!’. It had sounded like a two-mile fairground, lined with glasseaters swallowing light bulbs and jars-in-the-window sweetshops; a huge black man unforgettably named Lord PooFun hawked patent medicines labelled ‘African Herb Stuff’. Peek through a random threshold and you might have seen a coffin being hammered together or glowing horseshoes emerging from a forge. Even in the thirties there were butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. The Old Kent Road was a place where hot cross buns really were one a penny, where a muffin man really did parade up and down.

  I suppose that was part of the problem. Like Whitechapel Road, OKR was always a couple of laps behind the rest of the board: the local council used horses until 1953, a year after that last tram was packed off down the road for its heartless cremation. But whereas Whitechapel was still pootling quite happily along at its own speed – now that I thought about it, almost no street had boasted such a tiny number of untenanted commercial premises – Old Kent Road had simply died on its arse. Whitechapel could draw on a long tradition of one group of poor fortune seekers arriving as the last lot moved out, but with no such tradition, OKR was left to starve. When the industries closed and the slum dwellers were relocated there were no longer 9½ shoppers in every house, and for those 915 modest commercial concerns that meant the end.

  A new park created in the void left by the demolition of a great swathe of back-to-backs was sparsely populated by crushed cider cans, and beyond it the horizon opened up into a splendid turn-again-Whittington panorama of the capital, a winning skyline of towers and steeples and cranes. This, I suppose, was an update of the view that welcomed so many travellers into London, but surveying it I felt a guilty urge to rush forth through the urban wastelands and back to where things were being built and money being spent – away from the Poo, in other words, and towards the Fun.

  At least there was a bit of activity at the park’s edge: a busy crossroads, many active commercial premises and a generous scattering of pedestrians who even at this range seemed more approachably normal. And look! There, gazing at me from the crossroads’ north-western corner, was a landmark that provoked an invigorating jolt of genuine excitement: the Thomas à Becket. This was where Chaucer’s lot had made their first stop en route to Canterbury, and where the Agincourt heroes had been feted; rather later on it evolved into the pub-cum-boxing-gym where Henry Cooper trained and sparred. And, standing outside in the mid-sixties, between those cries of pain or rage you might just have heard a very different sort of voice warbling ethereally down from the rehearsal room on the top floor: the sound, if only you knew it, of David Bowie inventing glam rock. ‘Strange bed-fellows!’ you’d quip as ’Enery and Dave walked out into the street together, and then ’Enery would butt you extremely hard in the temple.

  There didn’t seem to be any sign of the gym, and the pub downstairs was now a half-hearted wine bar, but the building’s darkly marbled Victorian flanks still radiated a residual sense of underworld infamy. For the Old Kent Road had indeed been a hard-bastard realm of full-blown Bob Hoskinsry: the area was, as we have seen, controlled by the Richardson gang, and local boy Frank Maloney – until recently Lennox Lewis’s manager – recalls regular gangland assassinations. ‘If you weren’t into crime,’ he says, referring to the early sixties, ‘people thought you were a pansy.’ Maloney was driving down the Old Kent Road with his dad one night near Christmas when a police van pulled them over: of the four cases of ‘not entirely kosher’ whisky found in the boot, three left the scene in the back of the Black Maria.

  But then the Old Kent Road has always fancied itself as a bit tasty: they even used to have boxing tournaments in the primary schools. When the first batch of Belisha beacons appeared in the mid-thirties, three hundred of the glass globes were smashed along the Old Kent Road in a year; twenty years on, Britain’s first Teddy Boys congregated on street corners around the Elephant & Castle. When they drained the Surrey Canal in 1971 a number of singed and doorless safes turned up in the sludge.

  Criminal activity, at least, was one tradition that the locals seemed determined to maintain: careworn notices outside almost
every surviving commercial concern variously ordered potential patrons to remove crash helmets or pay cab fares in advance; I’ve seen newsagents advertise their unwillingness to allow access to more than two schoolchildren at any one time, but never before a pet shop. Every other billboard heaped civic opprobrium upon those with a laissez-faire approach to road tax and TV licence renewal, and municipal poster sites of the sort that usually advertise evening classes or park concerts endeavoured instead to wean the borough’s citizenry off less wholesome pastimes – principally claiming undue housing benefit and carrying concealed weapons. Continuity of a more generally acceptable sort, however, lay close at hand. It was the ‘Est. 1928’ that drew me into Ben Beber’s tailor’s shop at No. 288, under the endearingly hand-painted sign and into an uncompromisingly spartan interior.

  With a now practised eye I quickly categorised the shop’s three occupants. The two bald ones with tape measures round their necks: tailors. The one wearing an inside-out jacket covered in chalk and pins and stretching his arms apart: scarecrow.

  ‘Have it ready by Christmas,’ said one of the former as the latter removed his unfinished apparel; I was still noisily consulting my directories as he departed. The tailors inquired as to my business, and having told them it was soon established that the two were brothers, and that Ben Beber had been their uncle.

  ‘We were originally over the road,’ said the taller tailor, who, because I forgot to ask for names, we shall call Big Ben.

  ‘At 340, I believe,’ I replied, in a sort of smug drawl it’s too late to apologise for now.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Little Ben, circumspectly.

  ‘All in here,’ I said, patting my documents as authoritatively as their burgeoning resemblance to a papier-mâché Space Hopper permitted. I’d read in the local history library that the last Old Kent Road tailor – there had once been fifteen – shut up shop in the eighties; having just disproved this, as well as feeling rather scholarly I was also imbued with a renewed hope for the road ahead.

  Well, what a capital chump am I. I’d hardly opened my mouth before the brothers blithely revealed their imminent departure: they’d be here to hand over the Christmas suits, and then it was off to a brighter commercial future elsewhere. By the time you read this No. 288 will be under new management, or more likely no management, that wayward sign torn down, the hardboard-lined interior hidden behind whitewash. ‘People round here like a bargain,’ explained Big Ben, ‘and a tailored suit is not a bargain.’

  ‘Down to the council, too,’ added Little Ben. ‘They keep hoicking the rates up to drive us out.’ I was still too taken aback to speak, but neither Ben seemed unduly affected. ‘See it from their point of view. If it was you in the rates office, what would you prefer – faffing about with fifty little blokes like us or just firing off a couple of letters to B&Q and Toybus?’

  ‘Toys “Я” Us,’ corrected Big Ben, softly.

  Little Ben dug out an old photo of their uncle’s original shop over the road – along with many neighbouring premises now replaced by a huge Tesco’s – and together we looked at it with a sort of matter-of-fact poignancy. They seemed as resigned to their fate as the barbers, and having recovered my composure I didn’t think they’d be upset by a few direct questions.

  ‘Embarrassed? I don’t think anyone cares that much. Having a business on the Old Kent Road isn’t embarrassing. Just . . . not very profitable.’

  I imagine they’d spent too many years on the Old Kent Road to appreciate the extent of its unfortunate reputation amongst the Monopoly-playing millions. But I somehow wished they’d taken it more personally, stoutly defending the OKR when I’d insulted it. Part of me wanted to goad them into a response, to rail loudly against the Old Kent Road’s risible futility in game as in life, its international infamy as a yardstick of shabby destitution, perhaps even its shitty brownness.

  ‘Only two quid rent, weren’t it?’

  I nodded. In fact, I even delved into my backpack and ferreted out the title deed, still hoping to stir up an emotional denouement. ‘Ooh, your heart always sank when you got that one,’ smiled Big Ben, with a disloyal shudder.

  ‘Well, you didn’t have to buy it.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You didn’t have to buy it. You could have left it for someone else.’

  ‘Oh, I got it: you played the slow way. We used to deal out a load of cards at the start.’

  ‘The shorter game,’ I said, unable to stop it coming out in a shocked whisper. It was always there at the end of the rules, but I’d never come across anyone who’d played it, or at least admitted to having done so. The shorter game. How could these fine, bald tailors have even considered such a diluted and childish parody? The Shorter Game deserved to be ranked along with other lamely derivative pastimes not worthy of association with the original, like French cricket or Junior Scrabble. Why not forty questions? Or paper, scissors, bomb? Honestly. After a perfunctory farewell I left.

  I was beginning to understand why no one wanted to stick up for the Old Kent Road these days, why the only business I’d found happy to associate itself with this benighted thoroughfare in the phone book was Old Kent Dismantlers. I’m not sure what the opposite of the Midas touch might be – perhaps I should ask some retired local authority architects – but the road seemed thus cursed. And every time you tried to cheer it up or talk it round it skulked bitterly away.

  There was a greasy spoon next to the dusty mausoleum of South London Pistons and I went in: egg, chips and beans and two fat slices of crusty bread delivered to my table in less time than it takes to uncrumple three old maps and a 1933 Post Office directory. All, I realised, was not quite lost. My residual hopes were now distilled into the tale of George Carter and Sons: partly because the name so clearly inspired Dennis Waterman’s Sweeney character, but mainly because of a quiet little man who in – let me see, seventeen minutes’ time – would put on a street performance that had been running for over a century. Outside George Carter’s gaff, Old Kent Road’s show was still going on.

  Hats were always important on the OKR: the headwear class-code that was already breaking down north of the river lingered on here well after the war. But millinery was also a major local industry: the bowler had been invented just up the road, and firms in the area were still taking on apprentices. One company was successfully exporting fezzes to Egypt, as close to that sand-to-the-Arabs trading achievement as you’re ever likely to hear.

  George Carter had started selling hats from his shop at 215 Old Kent Road in 1851, and by prudent diversification into tailoring soon expanded into premises on either side. But despite this success, old man Carter remained a quiet and modest chap who unlike most of his commercial neighbours disapproved of vocal commotion; so much so, in fact, that near the end of the nineteenth century – dates differ – he devised a rather roundabout method for reminding his staff it was lunch time without having to open his mouth. A specially commissioned clock installed above the shop’s main entrance was topped with a bust of a bowler-hatted and fulsomely moustachioed gentleman – said to have been modelled on George himself – who at 1 p.m. every afternoon, in a great, clinking whir of cogs and springs and things, dramatically doffed his headgear.

  George died but his son took over the burgeoning business – by the twenties there were thirty-three branches around the capital – and all the while the little chap raised his bowler at 1 on the dot above the Old Kent Road flagship store now spanning Nos 211–217. The son died, and his son picked up the reins – in the fifties, British men were still buying five million hats a year. Only with the old man’s great-grandson at the helm did retrenchment set in. The Carter empire was in retreat throughout the sixties – somehow you couldn’t imagine David Bowie pressing his face covetously up to the window – until in 1976 the inevitable presented itself, and Mr Carter dutifully bowed to it. Wonderfully, though, the proprietors of what was now Carter’s Tyres appreciated the clock’s status as a pet landmark, and in the mid-eighti
es even had it restored: an especially zealous scribe on the local paper was delighted to report that the man with the hat also did his stuff at 1 in the morning.

  If I tell you I had especially timed my visit to be outside 211 at 1 p.m. you will have some idea of the weight I had attached to this rare – in fact, in the post-Beber world, unique – connection with the Old Kent Road’s lively pomp. I’d got to the café, No. 192, at 12.30, and began hurriedly despatching the rather wonderful food before me.

  ‘What you got there, then?’

  It was the waitress. I vaguely explained while she smoothed out the relevant documents with gratifying fascination. ‘’Ere!’ she called back to the kitchen, after extensive perusal. ‘Guess what this place was in . . .’

  ‘1914.’

  ‘. . . in 1914?’

  Steam and sizzling came out of the hatch but nothing else. She shrugged, then shouted ‘Coal merchant’s!’

  This was good, and it was about to get better: just three minutes to go until doff-time. I paid up, fumbled together my reference library and made for the door. ‘Not far to Carter’s, is it?’ I said, thumbing up the road.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said, airily. ‘Right over the road.’

  I looked across. ‘Isn’t that a pub?’ This was a question that in the interests of accuracy should have kicked off in the past tense.

  ‘Not that. There.’

  She indicated the adjacent terrace of shops – newish but still obviously unoccupied, with two floors of flats above. ‘But . . . 211 should be further up there,’ I said, weakly. ‘Well, there it is all the same,’ she said. ‘Old place burnt down couple of years ago. Awful lot of smoke. Shame, really – used to be this lovely old clock out front.’

  Blankly I walked out, and adopting a rather robotic gait set off for the Old Kent Road’s proximate conclusion. Automatically I noted the survivors and casualties. The last Rolls Estate house, a compact Regency villa set back from the road, was occupied by the Dynamic Gospel Church. The World Turned Upside Down, a crazy-name, crazy-place Victorian pub constructed in a style I can only describe as Taj Mahal Gothic, had been replaced by a dull cube squeezed between the Peabody tenements. And then there it was, squashed over a huge area like the Monty Python foot: the Bricklayers Arms interchange, a large and lonely roundabout leapfrogged by a four-lane flyover.