I haven’t had a ‘then and now’ for ages, but something Warren sent me today reminded me that I have this postcard from, I’m assuming, around 1910 that I’ve been meaning to share with you. Sadly this one hasn’t been used, which I always find a bit disappointing – I love reading the sort of things people wrote on picture postcards years ago, but the various scenes are rather charming in themselves.

I have been meaning to do a similar ‘views of Greenwich Park now’ postcard, but Warren sent me his own take on multiviews of our fair town and it made me laugh, so I’m sharing that with you instead.

Of course I sepia-ised it for fun. Here’s the original:

I know I said I’d only do happy, silly stuff this month, but dark humour counts, surely…

I’m assuming that Warren’s annual calendar will be a little more varied when it comes out later this year.

Every so often I get a little treat sent to me. Someone will be clearing their loft or chucking out a load of boxes, they’ll find some old snaps they took of Greenwich fifty years ago and they’ll think “Bet I know who will like these…”

And they’re right. I love ‘em. Dave’s pics of Pelton road, for example, or the mystery photo of the baby outside the Angerstein Arms a couple of months ago. I live for those emails – especially if they come with a little story or a personal memory.

But every so often a Phantom Treat Email stops being just a treat and becomes Treasure Trove – for example when a Greenwich photographer comes across a whole bunch of negatives he took in the 1980s and thinks ” readers might like to share them.”

Might?

Folks – these photos were taken by Richard, who used to work at the boarded up school on the Peninsula in the 1980s. He used to love the “neglected yet pleasurable” walk between Greenwich and the newly-built Thames Barrier and, happily for us, took the trouble to take his camera with him on his many walks.

We’re talking not even 30 years ago here, and yet this is a time when the Peninsula was still largely industrial, when the many of the wharves were still working and Greenwich even boasted two gasholders:

Not only are Richard’s photographs fabulously atmospheric, but historically they’re extremely important. He does include some pictures of tourist sights, like (a scaffolded) ORNC, for example, the Trinity Almshouses, complete with open door, or a misty morning in Greenwich Park) but what fascinated him most was Greenwich’s grubbier side. The jetties, factories, trunk roads, chimneys, and some rather splendid allotments.

I’m guessing those allotments bit the dust (so to speak) when the land was cleared during the frenzied race for the Dome in the late 90s, but not everything went so long ago – take Lovell’s Wharf, for instance:

Since he worked so close to the Amylum factory, Richard took pictures of that too. I’m rather hoping that someone is making a record of its coming down.

Funny – those chimneys already seem like memories – every time I go past another few feet have been nibbled away.

Richard has created an online gallery of what has to be about 100 images of a Greenwich that in some respects is as distant to us now as picture postcards from 100 years ago. I watched the entire sequence several times. What really got me, certainly the first time I watched it, was what was on the other bank of the Thames.

Take this picture from inside the Trafalgar Tavern, for example (I think it is the Traf Tavern, anyway – I guess it could be the Cutty Sark.) No prizes for guessing what’s missing…

 I seriously recommend a visit to Richard’s extraordinary photo album to see all his pictures (plus a few night time shots of Nunhead Past.) He says they’re of a ”not particularly old slice of Greenwich, but even over these few short years, irrevocably changed.”

Indeed. But of course, some things never change:

Richard was thinking about creating prints of some of these – and I think there could be a market for them. I mean – if I moved into one of the new Lovell’s Wharf apartments, I’d definitely like a few photos of the old wharf on my walls. What do you think?

Don’t you just love this piece of guerrilla art? Spotted by Stephen, it’s on the five foot walk just by the King Charles Building, filling up a potentially dangerous, stingray-shaped pothole in the ancient flags. It’s just the kind of whimsy that makes Greenwich buzz.

Born to Kiln is ’self-taught outsider artist’ Jimmy South, who also works with glass. You can read an interview with him here

He says about this piece “The pothole repairs are random acts of mosaic kindness with the hope of putting a smile on peoples faces and preventing them from stumbling over.”

You can see some more of his pothole art here

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Dunno about you, but the first thing I think of when I think about Malcolm Hardee isn’t clothes. And yet it’s a good half way into Jody VandenBurg’s docco  The Tunnel before one of Britain’s most outrageous comics ever is seen in anything other than a full set of togs (fully-pixelated, in case you’re of a nervous disposition…)

I confess I was just too young and too scared to ever venture into the club myself – I’d heard its fearsome reputation and just going past made me nervous. Actually, it still is quite a place if you go past of a Friday night about 10.00 - and it’s somehow rather sweet that the Tunnel Club’s resident heckler who, along with Simon Munnery (who’s looking terrifyingly like Pete Beale these days), forms the main talking head-action is pleased that it’s still an ‘outside’ venue, (I was chatting to a guy of 19 who visited THAT recently and only lasted about 15 minutes before he got scared…) I told myself I was more into music anyway…

The documentary is, like Tea Time, another ‘alternative’ vision of the area covering something un-mainstream that thankfully still exists, important in that it discusses something that, by its very nature, will only ever be marginalised in history books (though I was pleased to see an entry from Mary Mills’s Greenwich and Woolwich at Work  featured in the film.) There’s no narrator, so in many ways you’re expected to know, more or less, something  of the history of Hardee, his notorious balloon act and the alternative alternative comedy circuit of the 1980s and 90s (if you don’t, try checking out this )

There’s not much point in my reinventing the wheel here – I recommend watching the video – which has been nominated for an award, so if you enjoy it, you could vote for it too. Don’t switch off when it comes to the (very long, considering the length of the movie) credits – there are more famous people interviewed during them, drawing on their own Tunnel visions, including one brave dissenting voice from Mark Lamarr, who loved Hardee but not the club itself. Presumably he, like pretty much every other performer there, died a horrible death – perhaps even the time mentioned in the movie where 350 people hummed some poor sod off the stage.

Hardee owned the Wibbley Wobbley boat in Greenland Dock up to the point of his untimely death in 2005 and I visited it the other evening to see how it’s faring.

It’s charming, complete with bunting , flowers and fairy lights, if perhaps not quite as raucous as it once was. Wider than you might expect, it really is a pub on water – plush bench seats, rope disco lights, and resident cat inside, comfy seats outside to watch the sun slip down behind the apartment blocks. When I went it was clearly a place for residents and boaty-types to enjoy a quiet drink under yellowing shipping maps pasted onto the ceiling. Sadly, French Fred no longer does food (even though it’s still advertised on a board on the Thames Path) but I still liked this place a lot. It’s a place for cool drinks on hot summer evenings, but I suspect it would be very cosy in the winter too. I just hope they start doing food again soon.

Do check out the docco. And if anyone fancies making a film about South East London’s music scene in the 19 70s, 80s and 90s, there’s a willing viewer waiting here…

I know, I know – but it would be churlish not to feel just a bit flattered that an art installation in East Greenwich Pleasaunce mentions Yours Truly…

I confess I don’t really know what to make of this installation – I mean, it’s fun, but what is it actually saying?

I think what it’s saying to me is that the venue is worth putting art in. Not that many years ago – what – six – seven (?)  it was an obscure, sweet little park that you might wander round and then forget. Now it’s a really happening place, with fun events (thanks to FoEGP – don’t think I didn’t notice actual famous people playing at last Sunday’s picnic) a really bustling cafe and ART.

And that’s why I tend to disagree with people who say that East Greenwich is ‘going downhill’ (though much of it is, of course, literally downhill…) Yes, we get the odd violent incident, exploding car, dodgy dog or theft (Big D – I hope your wife’s better soon) - but show me an area in London that doesn’t.

You only have to go back to our own local Poet Laureate C.Day-Lewis, slumming-it as schlock-pot-boiler-hack Nicholas Blake whose Crooms Hill detective won’t even venture into the wilds of Greenwich’s Orient in the fabulously mad The Worm of Death to see how far East Greenwich has come – (and this is the 1960s, not Dickens’s London). East Greenwich has always been a bit dodgy – it’s actually cleaned up its act (admittedly it didn’t have to do very much to do that) , though it does teeter on the edge of slipping back to times before the Millennium – I mean when Trafalgar Road can’t support a bookies, a lap-dancing club, a pachinko parlour, an offy OR a charity shop, we do have to start asking questions…

But back to the original question.  Why do I stay anonymous? It’s complicated, but hey, I’ll ’fess up. I might bang on about wanting to be able to review stuff without people knowing who I am, or say things I might not be able to otherwise, but actually the REAL reason the Phantom stays masked is here

Thanks to Tim and Jayson for telling me about the blink-and-you’d-miss-it flash of Greenwich in the new trailer for Gullivers Travels.  I have to say that as a trailer it’s horribly flabby – just a potted version of the film as far as I can see, and it doesn’t need the first minute at all – but it’s a nice reminder for all of us that watched bits of it being filmed (they were remarkably cool about allowing the public to wander round and take pictures – spot the odd guy out in the line up below) and besides, it’s always fun to see Jack Black being catapulted over the Old Royal Naval College…

I’m looking forward to Bubble Theatre’s latest production, which will be adapted from Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, not least because it gives me the opportunity to (slightly naughtily) use this fantastic picture, which, under any other circumstances would be decidedly off-topic.

I can’t quite work out how they’re going to do it – but that’s part of the fun of a Bubble show.  Aliens, robots, creepy statues, damaged spaceships – what’s not to like? I hope it’s all going to be in garish Technicolor and Return to the Forbidden Planet kitsch – but hell, I’m ready to see whatever they come up with.

I notice you can get involved, too. The deadline for actors’ CVs is TODAY but if you’re technically-minded, you have a couple more days to apply for backstage stuff – like lighting people, stage managers and what will almost certainly turn out to be one hell of a challenge, prop-makers.

Summer’s suddenly looking better…

Here’s a lovely thing to look out for for all you people who are going to be doing Bank Holiday trips to the sundry DIY superstores in Charlton today. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been past this modern sculpture, meant to say something about it and totally forgotten, but hey – I’ve remembered at last. As you can see from the above photo, it’s on the wall surrounding the industrial estate containing the dreaded Macro, a place I have never entered.

What I really like is that for once, instead of doing something as cheap and nastily as possible, whoever it was built the wall thought ‘ You know what we need here is a bit of Art,’ and they went ahead and commissioned something unique. It’s totally appropriate for the area, and created in specially fired bricks, yet it ’s simple and elegant - something a bit special to just happen upon. I love those moments…

For once, too, I didn’t have to spend too long searching for information about a modern work of Greenwich Art. It’s called, unsurprisingly, ‘Knots’  and it is, according to the artist,  John McKenna a “brick relief sculpture comprising of two large knots 7.5 m/24ft wide by 1m/ 3ft high, tied around a pillar, sited on the enabling road route to the Greenwich Millennium site, London.” 

In case you’re wondering, the knot on the right is a Carrick Bend, which is used for joining two bits of really heavy-duty rope together – the sort of rope that would have been used in the industry round here. It doesn’t get itself in a pickle even if the rope is soaked with water or carries really heavy loads. The rope on the left is tied in the slightly more familiar Double Sheet, which is used for joining two pieces of unequal weight or thickness together.

Just in case you’re buying rope – or anything else for that matter, at Wickes this weekend, then…

Yep, folks, the guys at Bubble Theatre are at it again, creating something as-yet-a-mystery but without doubt truly exciting for us to enjoy while wandering round sundry parks across South London this summer.

They’re based over at Rotherhithe and despite having their grants cut to virtually nothing (they committed the cardinal sin of producing theatre people might actually enjoy…) they’re still creating really incredible, innovative stuff.

If you’ve never seen a Bubble show, then it’s hard to fully describe the magic created by a promenade performance that uses the very landscape it’s set in as both constraint and opportunity.

Beginning in the last of the day’s sun, the performance glides through the dusk and plunges into darkness, using a combination of whatever landscape the venue provides, some really quirky props, the actors skills, the audience’s imagination and quite a lot of torches to make something unique to each space. Last year’s Odyssey was absolutely wonderful – I still can’t walk through a certain part of Oxleas Wood without thinking of the trees and their haunting mementos of sailors lost at sea.

Losing their cash made Bubble return to the drawing board and think of new ways that they could involve their audience, and they came up with Fan made Theatre . People buy ’stakes’ in the production (which in reality amounts to buying a ticket in advance and giving Bubble a fiver) which means that they actually have a hands-on say in what show goes on.

Stakeholders are invited to submit ideas for shows they’d like to see. It can be a story, a title or even just an idea – the only things they ask you to bear in mind are that the show needs to be quite robust for English weather in July/August (I’ve trudged round sundry parks in pouring rain, which sometimes actually made the shows even more magical) and be something that would enchant people of all ages.

When all the ideas are in (the deadline’s 19th April, so get your skates on) they’ll be discussed by a panel of ‘glittering intellectuals’ (Yours Truly was invited to join it, but sadly the paper bag really gets in the way of play reading…) and whittled down to a pithy five.

Everyone gets to vote on the shortlist. This year a team of actors will work on each of the 5 shortlisted proposals during the week of 3rd-7th May. Stakeholders are invited to drop into the workshop and/or come along on Saturday 8th May.

I know we already mentioned the unveiling of a plaque to those cheery chaps Squeeze last Tuesday, but local photographer Warren King’s sent me some pics and I can’t resist ‘em…

It’s a busy weekend for me, so I’ll just leave you to enjoy ‘em…