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September 07, 2005

Its Hard Work Up North London

Burnt Oak Broadway
Watling Avenue

Again, how deceptive the universe as seen from a car can be. From the dual-carriageway, Burnt Oak Broadway seems little more than a loud, sooty corridor out of the Capital. From behind the wheel you can only pity the grey, bedraggled inhabitants going about their business among the grimy shopfronts that line this short section of the A5.

An entirely different dimension is suddenly revealed when you venture out on foot. Now the A-road is merely a roaring blur, sealed off, a scarcely-registered undertow to the vivacity of the bustling pavements. Burnt Oak is shabby, but not yet subject to the creeping gentrification that puts the seal on decline, and once sealed paves it over with ersatz fantasies of good living. Equally, it is an area that brings together every nationality, ethnicity and creed to be found in London today, but which has not yet been forced into the embarrassing chore of joylessly 'celebrating' its 'multiculturalism'. For the moment, it simply thrives admirably in less-than-ideal circumstances, thereby rendering itself superior to many communities which, in the midst of splendour, merely attain mediocrity.

The pavements are lined with huge sprawling fruit stalls offering the familiar, the exotic, and the totally unknown in equal quantity. In-between, gladdening the heart of any seedy skinflint, we find a plethora of £1 shops, downhearted estate agents, strange general stores piled high with wastebins, brooms, hairgrips, air-fresheners, AA batteries, and other uncategorizable plastic ephemera, and a good selection of charity shops. Some of these latter are of the superior non-chain variety, one in particular merely announces itself on a scrawled sheet of A4 as 'Childrens charity shop'. To make matters better, the location is well off the beaten path of those mean book dealers who scour furiously at 9:01am to clean out any decent bargains. Find of the day is a first edition of Geoffrey Fletcher's The London Nobody Knows (of which far more in an extended post to follow). Also a complete Cambridge University Course in Latin (well, you never know) for £2.37, a paperback of Being and Nothingness for 50p, and various others (I'm buying books for two now, of course).

Where better to observe this melting-pot environment than from inside its premier ethnic enclave? In a striking reversal, the superbly-named Hard Work Cafe is the true site of the exotic in Burnt Oak. Here, white and predominantly septagenarian londoners, virtually expatriated from their former home by the ravages of time and globalisation, are content to bow over their liver and bacon and mugs of tea, muttering to each other about the best place to buy talcum powder, about how 'he was...you know, like that...ever so nice, though...', and doubtless to mull over the war once again. Bangladeshi women with precariously-tumbling trolleys full of barrels of ghee and sacks of rice peer suspiciously through the window at this strange, out-of-place out-of-time eaterie.

The place is not classic in the decor sense, but has a good workaday atmosphere, is immaculately clean, with friendly and painstaking staff (final irony: as usual, these faithful preservers of white working-class exotica are second-generation immigrants to a man). The food is made and cooked on the premises, and here the Hard Work makes its way into the LBTM hall of fame with its offering of Pie, Mash and Liquor plus a huge mug of tea for a princely £2.39.

For those who have yet to sample this East End speciality, here is what Geoffrey Fletcher had to say about the meal in 1962:
"'The menu incudes hot meat pies on thick plates or you can have pies with mash. This is served with a helping of a livid pale green liquid of unearthly appearance, which stains the potato mash like verdigris...A sad-faced man appears from the rear at intervals carrying an enamel bucket of the green liquid. He picks his way over the sanded floor to deliver his cargo of fluid at the counter where the pies are dispensed."
One can't help wondering whether these descriptions were used as research by Raymond Briggs for his masterly graphic novel of lugubriously fantastic moribundia Fungus the Bogeyman (since viciously manhandled by insensitive fools into a CGI cartoon): "More slime, drear?"

(Fletcher is not the only aesthete to be struck by the mystery of East London's mean yet strangely luxurious contribution to world cuisine : In his film Black White and Green: The Way of Pie, Ian Bourn creates a lingering visual meditation on the beauty of London's Soul Food.)

Now I've tasted some awful Pie and Mash in my time, for research purposes. But this was a fine example (even if there was no 'sad-faced man' in evidence), served at thermonuclear temperature, and positively glowing with the mysterious bland, stodgy kind-heartedness of proletarian English cuisine. It was also wonderfully presented: the mashed potato flattened down into the high-edged plate and cross-hatched across its surface in an artisanal fashion recalling the way builders score drying cement. Abutting the mash from the other side of the plate, yin to a starchy yang, the square pie, its crust visibly sagging, swam in the beautiful pea-green translucent liquor (which actually seems to be some sort of attenuated variety of parsley sauce, but is reputed traditionally to be made from the stock of stewing eels).

Sated with untold strains of carbohydrate, I sat back to pore over my purchases, and to watch the customers: Mud-fisted workmen, postmen, a large Irish family for whom two tables were shunted together end-to-end. I notice that the very few non-white, non-geriatric customers choose the more ecumenical fare: burger and chips, perhaps; only those in the know feast on the sordid delights of chopped liver, full english breakfast, sagging pies, and the mysterious liquor...

After an extra tea, I plunge back into reality...London will always surprise you. No matter what it looks like from the car, still bring the camera....

Posted by robin at September 7, 2005 04:09 PM

Comments

Posted by: jim at September 8, 2005 12:20 PM

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