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  When I’d asked the local history librarian what characterised the Old Kent Road, he’d confidently replied, ‘Shopping.’ Only then he’d cupped his chin thoughtfully, and added, ‘In the old days, that is.’ I requested an update, and he didn’t hesitate: ‘The flyover.’ Harold Clunn had seethed about the traffic flow in this part of London, and given the excuse of Blitz damage around the top of the New Kent Road, in 1961 his vision finally bore fruit of the very sourest variety. By 1966 the Elephant & Castle had ceased to exist in any human sense, replaced by what the London County Council called ‘the Piccadilly of the South’; or, as everyone else saw it, two huge roundabouts and the world’s worst shopping centre.

  Fresh from this triumph, what was now the Greater London Council set its sights slightly further south, at the confluence of Tower Bridge Road and the New and Old Kents. No bombs had dropped here – in fact, the Old Kent Road survived the war almost completely unscathed – but . . . well, crossroads are just so . . . angular, guys, and, you know, this is the Old Kent Road we’re talking about. Haven’t you ever played Monopoly? Whatever we do can hardly make it worse.

  The Bricklayers Arms goods depot, a lovely Gothic library, the splendid Edgington edifice with its murals and flagpoles – more than a hundred Georgian and Victorian buildings went down on the Old Kent Road, and many hundreds more in the streets around. Most of the Monopoly addresses have a national route number – Park Lane is the A4202, Pentonville Road the A501 and New Bond Street the B406 – but unless you were particularly interested in making a taxi driver weep like a child you’d never refer to any of them in that way. Yet so effectively has the Old Kent Road’s identity been stripped away you could drive all the way to 915 and not realise the thoroughfare you’d just motored down was anything other than the A2.

  The flyover was opened in 1968, slicing literally seconds off journeys that in any case became quickly bogged down in the old Old Kent Road, the one from No. 122 upwards. Looking at that lofted arc of stained concrete I felt like Charlton Heston on the beach at the end of Planet of the Apes. It’s a pity Harold Clunn wasn’t around: I could have told him he’d finally really done it, the maniac, then repeatedly god-damned him to hell.

  The traffic scheme’s drastic precedent set the breaker’s ball rolling. As well as almost every shop along the Old Kent Road, whole streets disappeared behind it. Tragically, they thought they were doing the right thing: getting rid of the slums and clearing some open space in an area so claustrophobically overcrowded it had hardly been able to breathe for a hundred years. So up went those Trotter-family high-rise estates, many so poorly constructed that within ten years they were crumbling. Most notorious was the North Peckham Estate, where Damilola Taylor was killed in November 2000, and where 3,000 condemned flats are currently being demolished after just thirty years in existence.

  Why had Vic chosen Old Kent Road? Throughout his Brixton childhood, it was in its colourful costermonger heyday, and even at the dawn of the Monopoly era remained vigorously, brashly commercial. The board had to kick off with a pair of low-rent addresses, but there was no point humiliating anyone: the street markets of Whitechapel and Old Kent Road were cheap and cheerful, and equally proud of both. They wouldn’t mind.

  Whitechapel still wouldn’t, but there was no one left on the Old Kent Road to care one way or the other. Its post-war history was a void: when the anti-globalisation anarchists had drawn up their usual suspects list for their May Day 2000 Monopoly protests they’d found over a dozen corporate targets even on Whitechapel Road, but along OKR they could only manage one McDonald’s and that Tesco. The few commercial premises that seemed to thrive along the Old Kent Road, I reflected, were those selling a form of escape: minicab firms, long-distance call centres, off-licences.

  For a while I shuffled about in the subways underneath the flyover and its associated gyratory system, breathing in piss and solvents and generating meditations to match. I realised I’d found no trace of the establishments that might have lightened the mood, the transvestite nail bar at No. 169, or the Family Fish Restaurant, where Paul McCartney used to stop off on the way home from Linda’s chemotherapy sessions to buy her a bag of chips and a pickled onion. When he’d first driven down it to his Sussex farmhouse the Old Kent Road was still a Penny Lane kind of a street. Now it was more of an Eleanor Rigby.

  *

  So this was it, not just the end of one road but the lot, the terminus of my final Monopoly street. And though in the horribly downbeat circumstances that should have sent me eagerly off and away it didn’t, because it wasn’t supposed to finish like this. It had started as an intention to overnight at a hotel on every set, an intention that foundered both on grounds of logistics (there weren’t any in the oranges) and budgetary prudence (remember that £305 minimum tariff at the Ritz?). Plodding round the board I’d gradually distilled this extravagant proposal into one that granted appropriate homage to Monopoly’s defining preoccupation with hotels, yet wouldn’t require me to keep the bailiffs at bay with a wardrobe full of purloined toiletry sachets wedged against my front door. I’d top and tail the Monopoly spectrum, staying at a hotel on the flattest of the flat-cap browns and the toppermost of the top-hat blues. From the Old Kent Road to Mayfair.

  Once I’d settled on this scheme, it had been the plan to throw logic and reason out of the window and epilogue my journey with the Mayfair part of the bargain – a reward for all my yomping about in the midnight rain, though more accurately a reward for Birna, effectively stuck in babysitting jail for twenty-eight turns while I occasionally traipsed through, Just Visiting. As soon as that last roll had taken me to the brown set she’d been straight on the phone to Claridge’s, booking us in for a night at what a thirties social commentator had winningly described as ‘the most aristocratic of the great Mayfair hotels’.

  And tonight was that night, because the depressing truth that had gradually emerged over many days of subsequent exhaustive inquiry was this: there were no hotels on the Old Kent Road. I’d asked the local historians and the local paper and trawled through page upon yellow page of the relevant directories, all to no avail. Just for the hell of it, I’d carried on asking all the way up the road: the barbers, the Bebers, the waitress and perhaps half a dozen retail operatives in between. Used to be, they all said, yes, used to be a load: as the bloke in the local library had told me, the Old Kent Road was London’s overland connection to the rest of Europe from the Roman era until the railway age. For almost 2,000 years I’d have been able to appraise Old Kent Road’s accommodation options at my leisure; now, though, it couldn’t even offer me a room above a pub.

  Birna couldn’t appreciate why this discovery should have proven anything other than joyously, air-punchingly liberating. Our budgetary outlooks might be separated by a single square on the Monopoly board, but that square, regrettably, was the one with the big red arrow on it. My sole regret regarding this whole Claridge’s business was that Birna had given them her real credit card number. Hers was that she’d been born 140 years too late to arrive by sedan chair.

  When I phoned her up on my mobile from the roundabout she was packed, ready to go out of the door, and certainly in no mood to tolerate disconsolate mumbling about the Old Kent Road’s room/inn situation, about needing to take some rough with my smooth.

  ‘Cobblers to that,’ she retorted. ‘You’ve taken the rough already.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Come on, you just walked up the whole length of the Old Kent Road.’

  ‘I’m supposed to walk down it again now. I always do that.’ The Mayfair hotel suddenly seemed a vacuous indulgence, a mockery of the original plan. What was the point of doing one without the other?

  ‘No time for that,’ said Birna. ‘I’ve booked us in for afternoon tea at 5.45. If you get the Bakerloo from Elephant & Castle it’ll only take half an hour. Where do you fancy going for dinner?’

  ‘The Driscoll House Hotel.’

  ‘Where? Tim? Tim?’

  Well,
now. Well, well, well. There before me, oddly marooned at the gateway of the New Kent Road, was a large and enigmatic structure of briskly institutional design, a six-floor, four-square Edwardian block that announced itself as the Driscoll House Hotel. Rooms £30 a night, £150 a week, breakfast and evening meal included. The slightly off-limits address didn’t concern me – it had always seemed monstrously snobbish of Vic and Marge to besmirch the Kent Road with an Old when they’d diplomatically united the Bond Streets. Here it was: my Old Kent Road hotel. ‘Listen,’ I muttered urgently, ‘I’ll call you back.’

  The Driscoll House reception, entered up a small flight of stairs round the side, was a dim office haphazardly stacked with confectionery and newspapers – part St Trinian’s tuck shop, part doctor’s waiting room, a combination powerfully reinforced by the scent of school dinners and Benylin. I pushed the door open with my map-ball and found myself on one side of a huge, stationery-strewn desk addressing a woman on the distant other. ‘Tomorrow night? Ooh, don’t think so. Big party of Russian schoolchildren coming in. Just one night you want?’ It was clearly an unusual request. I nodded. ‘Just a sec.’

  She rose and disappeared through a side door and I began idly inspecting my arrestingly peculiar surroundings. What was this place? It looked like an old girls’ school and smelt like an old people’s home. Kurdish refugees maybe, or distressed publicans but Russian schoolkids? There was a sort of information factsheet Sellotaped obliquely to the wall and I read it: ‘Situated on one of the main South London Roads,’ it began, ‘Driscoll House warmly welcomes men and women guests from all over the world of every race, colour or creed.’ Well, that was nice. Slightly mad, perhaps, but certainly well meaning. I read on. ‘The main Building has 200 single rooms . . . priority is given to the long-term guest . . . there are 8 Pianos for the use of residents . . . during the past 80 years, 50,000 guests have stayed from 210 different countries . . . in the interest of others, no one with an infectious or contagious disease may stay in the hotel . . . visits are made to the Galleries of Parliament to listen to debates.’

  With a sort of comic foreboding, I read it all over again. I’d got to the contagious diseases bit when the receptionist returned. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘Mr Driscoll says there’s three rooms left tonight, then we’re full of Russians until Christmas.’

  Mr Driscoll? A barking-mad family-run hotel that spanned the Monopoly era and beyond. It was perfect; I felt as if I’d been led here by some divine Uncle Pennybags brandishing his enchanted cane in the clouds above. Tonight it must be. ‘I’ve just got to make a phone call,’ I said, and dashed outside. Then I dashed back in, blurted that I’d be very interested in having a chat with Mr Driscoll, and dashed out once more.

  ‘I’m not cancelling Claridge’s,’ retorted Birna, who wasn’t about to let the surrounding presence of what sounded like a well-populated pavement impinge on her shrillness: I could just picture her swinging her overnight bag through the pedestrians in furious accompaniment to her words. She waited until I’d detailed the scenario, majoring on the looming unavailability of accommodation, before playing her joker: ‘I can’t, anyway. Why do you think they ask for your credit card in advance?’

  The strident alacrity with which Birna agreed that I should stay on the New Kent Road while she stayed in Mayfair should probably have depressed me more than it seemed to. But though my unalloyed excitement at discovering Driscoll House was now slightly alloyed, the itinerary I sketched out walking back up the hotel steps presented a satisfactory compromise: wake up at the crack here, then nip on to a Bakerloo train and meet Birna for breakfast at Claridge’s. Checkout wasn’t until noon – I could still fit in five hours there. Not at this stage realising that Monopoly was doing to me what it had done to Mike Grabsky when he packed his wife off to Malaysia alone, I marched happily back into the reception.

  ‘Mister . . .?’

  ‘Moore,’ I replied, to the large-spectacled, elderly gentleman who was now standing by the desk. There was hardly a wrinkle on his face but that slight quaver in the voice suggested he couldn’t have been under eighty.

  ‘Terence Driscoll,’ he said, holding out a large hand. ‘I hear you wanted a word.’

  I think it was my overeagerness that did it. Peeling off the map-ball’s crumpled epidermis I began to lay out a messy timeline across that huge desk, nattering helplessly as I did so about Charlie Chaplin, homburg hats, Henry Cooper, the Family Fish Restaurant and tanning factories. My interview had become a lecture, and there was a new steadiness in Terence Driscoll’s voice when at length he next employed it.

  ‘I think there’s been a misunderstanding,’ he said, peering in wary disbelief at the desk as if I’d just halved a sheep’s head on it.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘This is a student residence. For students. Foreign students.’

  ‘But . . . but you warmly welcome men and women of every creed,’ I said in mounting distress, paraphrasing clumsily from the factsheet.

  ‘Students of every creed. Now I bid you good day and must ask you to leave.’

  ‘No!’ I yelped impulsively, which as a polemical gambit perhaps left something to be desired.

  ‘We don’t have a bar,’ piped a voice through the side door. It was the woman who’d greeted me initially.

  ‘I can live without a bar for one night,’ I said, in a pleading whine that was too little, too late.

  ‘Can you?’ returned Mr Driscoll, rather unnecessarily. One of the smaller tragedies of the unfolding situation was that I would never now get to call him Terry.

  ‘We have to think about security,’ said the woman, adopting a sort of strident bleat. ‘There are . . . young girls staying with us.’

  Good God. Not sure whether to blush or blanch I wanly crumpled up my documents and walked slowly towards the door.

  ‘I’m ninety years old!’ cried Mr Driscoll as I pushed it open with an armful of Ordnance Survey.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ I mumbled without turning.

  Birna was on the Piccadilly line when I phoned her back. ‘We’re about to go underground,’ she shouted above the usual terminal-velocity Tube-train rattle. ‘What is it?’ In a numb and unpunctuated monotone I explained. ‘He actually bid you good day?’ There was a pause, then Birna said: ‘I’m losing reception. Just go to Claridge’s.’ I was walking down Bond Street, past that silly bench statue in fact, when Birna next phoned.

  ‘Where is this place?’

  ‘Well, you know: here. Mayfair.’

  ‘No. This hostel place. I’m at Elephant & Castle.’

  I stopped dead. Sheet IX3 detached itself and I distractedly pinned it to the pavement with a foot. ‘What?’

  To put her sacrifice into context, it might help to explain at this point that Birna not only owns, but regularly wears, a velvet Coronation gown weightily accessorised with ermine-effect trimming. And there she was, walking under a south London gyratory system after dark in her Claridge’s finery while I battled my shambolic mobile library across Mayfair. ‘It’s, um, New Kent Road,’ I said blankly. ‘Number 172. But you don’t . . . this is . . .’

  ‘You want to know what it’s like, don’t you?’

  I did, and said so. At the same time, however, I felt it only fair to brief her. ‘If you’re really sure you want to do this,’ I said quickly, ‘you’re going to have to look like a student. Slouch or something. Take your make-up off. And no questions – they don’t like questions.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said, stoutly. ‘I think this is it now. “Established 1913”?’

  ‘That’s it. Just wait there a minute.’

  Though still tremblingly moved by this act of heroic martyrdom, I knew it would come to naught if Birna didn’t learn from my mistakes. I took a deep breath. ‘You might need to do a voice.’ Clicking footsteps but no reply. ‘Foreign students only. Do your Icelandic accent.’

  A pause, a sigh. ‘Anything else I should know?’

  I thought back to the most heinously memorable clause i
n that eclectic factsheet, and placed it in mental context beside Birna’s habit of leaping out of bed at 4 a.m. to disinfect the cooker hood filter. ‘Actually, yes there is,’ I said. ‘They’ve got eight pianos.’

  And so it ludicrously came to pass that as I rustled awkwardly through the revolving mahogany doors of Claridge’s, Birna was squeaking along crevassed lino up an endless, dark corridor two storeys above the New Kent Road. And that was before I checked in and found that I didn’t have just room 105 at my disposal, but 106 as well. We’d – I’d – been upgraded to a suite. Bundling maps-first through one of its entrance doors, I found myself in Poirot land, two huge rooms of hexagonal chrome fittings, angular walnut inlay and illuminated globes held up by arched-back nudes.

  The bath was an imperial sarcophagus of Dr Foster depth, and if our bed at home was a king size, here was God’s own divan. There were buttons everywhere marked ‘WAITER’, ‘VALET’ and ‘MAID’; I couldn’t begin to imagine under what circumstances each might be required, but there was another knob marked ‘PRIVACY’ which I hoped you didn’t need to keep permanently depressed in order to prevent all three of them bursting in at once. I flicked through the information leaflet and discovered that if at any point I found myself with any syringes I needed to dispose of, I merely had to dial 0. Before I padded out and down to tea I flicked on one of my two tellies: it was tuned to Al-Jazeera.

  I phoned Birna again as I sat before a pageant of starched linen in the foyer tea room. ‘Are the waiters still wearing knee breeches?’ said the lost and tiny voice that answered, still retaining a vestigial Scandinavian lips. She’d been to Claridge’s for tea once many years previously, an experience inevitably accorded generous space in her memory bank.