By George Berger.
THE ORPINGTON-VICTORIA LINE
#1 / ORPINGTON / 1982
Being the first in a series of psychogeographical memories of the trainline that took me from nowhere & nothing to somewhere and …something. Or other.
Yes, other. I came straight up from nowhere, I’m not going straight back there.
Almost all psychogeography concentrates on the great places, the interesting places. Places that provide context for action. The places we like to read about or watch on telly but in the most part never get to live in.
This series of articles is an attempt to map out the rest of the territory — that stuff that actually makes up most of the map. From London’s largest Borough (Bromley), up through Bowie’s youthful playground, to riot-era Brixton and then central London itself — gateway to real life. Which was, of course, elsewhere, if you lived in Orpington in 1982. Ask any earnest young longmac inhabitant.
If history is written by the winners, then the winners must all have lived in North London in the 80s. Of course, South London has got quite trendy these days, at least to a (compass) point. Now that I’ve left. Obviously.
In the eighties, North London was London, as far as any media or creative representations were concerned. South London only featured in dramas when there was a criminal enclave to portray. No wonder taxis refuse to take you sarf of the river, when they’re not busy ringing Robert Elms’ radio show to express their broad stroke vulgarity.
That’s one form of snobbery. The second is the acute snobbery of those residing in central London to those out in the suburbs generally. Like South London, the suburbs only played a cliched part in any cultural media or inner circle coffee chat. The fact that most Londoners lived there was simply dismissed with condescending pity and barely disguised contempt. Not ‘real’ Londoners, guv. Which is fine, unless you still live there.
Patti Smith sang of being ‘outside of society’ and it felt a heroic stance. But the outer suburbs are outside of everywhere, outside of life itself in your more sullen moments. Fellow suburbanites Sham 69 sang ‘we come from places you don’t wanna go’ and they were right, albeit accidentally.
Malcolm McLaren suggested that what counts is to get out of the suburbs as quickly as you possibly can. Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’ was an earlier, gentler take on the same message. Which cool young suburbanites took literally, and who can blame them? They were tantalisingly on the edge of one of the greatest, most romantic, cities in the world, a place that had everything and more to offer a brave young soul rebel. Only a fool would ignore the beautiful surge of possibility in the luck of being near all that.
In the case of Orpington, there were two trainlines getting us out of those suburbs: one up to London Victoria and one up to London Charing Cross, by way of London Bridge.
As I sit once more on that train, I hope to rid myself of some of the suburban demons that taunted me as a youngster — each station further away from the centre was another rung down the hipness ladder — I blame the Clash, but that’s another story in a different kitchen. There’s a couple of lairy builders, some vaguely unsettling hoodie teenagers and a smattering of wallpaper people sinking into their seats and trying not to be seen.
So, yes, Orpington. Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky. And — profoundly — all the same. That sameness in architecture gives contextual comfort to life’s conformists, which over time had become the group mind of the area. Which, in the spiritual emptiness of the post-WW2 consumerist age, became the nearest to existential meaning many had. An emptiness propped up by fear and hatred of ‘other’, drip fed by a media about to strengthen its grip to devastating effect on the UK’s future.
On the second escape line, Orpington-Charing Cross transports hordes of besuited commuted Daily Mail masses to the City of London, where they earn good money for often nefarious deeds (arms trade anyone? Climate change?)
Orpington is, therefore, a safe Tory seat — famously so in the 1960s — which makes voting little more than a futile gesture, confirmed by the Kent-Brexit-style smirks of the blatantly Tory vote administrators at the polling station. Both they and I know the result before the vote has even started. Even during the years of Labour governments. That’s how I met democracy in 1983.
But is Orpington in South London or Kent? In 1980 it was in Kent. Postally, it still is. 01689 instead of 0208. BR6 not SE29. Increasingly, however, news reports in the 2020s call it South London. When there’s a murder or something. You can judge people’s aspirations — and become alienated from them — by which way they fall on the question ‘where are you from?’ Malcolm McLaren or 1982 local MP Ivor Stanbrook (a man of solid Torytude who once effortlessly wiped the floor with me with dishonest bellendery at a Question Time style election event)?
London’s middle-age spread was surely anticipated by building the M25 as a sort of belt to hold the pinstripe trousers up and call everywhere contained therein London at some point in the not too distant future.
It is, however, the Kent-leaning mythical past imagined in Brexit-minds that fires the romance in the majority of Orpington souls. Little boxes, all the same. The gentle thud of leather on arses. Wikipedia tells us ‘Stone Age tools have been found in several areas of Orpington’, missing the nod and wink.
How easy it would be — and how tempting it is — to simply do a hatchet job on Orpington as some kind of powerless revenge for the misfortune of having to grow up around there. Because I didn’t grow up in Notting Hill or Brixton or Camden. Because the Clash would never have written about Orpington and nor did anyone else. Because you get why. Places that revel in anonymity are hardly great subject matters for songs.
Nonetheless, Orpington is the start of this train journey. Six (now eight) platforms, all containing the seductive promise of better destinations. Cooler, hipper, more important. Better. Just better. The rush hour lower middle class crammed into man at C&A suits, themselves in turn crammed into the meat racks to pursue the dream of being upper middle class. Or at least middle middle class.
To stand out from all this requires character and bravery. Thankfully, there is plenty to be found in 1982.
Orpington has one massive saving grace at that point in time. Orpington College of Further Education. The place you can go if you fuck up your O Levels or just need to leave school in search of something more human and progressive. I did both.
It’s that trainline again. Bringing all the young dudes down from as far as Herne Hill to produce the finest melting pot of youth culture you could wish for outside the city centre. Legend has it that Siouxsie attended. Photographic proof has it that Billy Idol did too, if you accept that the longhair with the Lennon specs in the photo on the college wall is indeed William Broad.
Which all feels a bit Loch Ness, but these things are clung to ferociously, as inspiring drips of water in the art-free suburban desert. The Borough of Bromley, of which Orpington is a part, is the largest London borough but the only one without a gig venue in 1982. The council that successfully stopped Ken Livingstone providing cheap bus fares to Londoners and considered it a victory. We’re starving to death here.
Or we would be if it wasn’t for those train lines…
Though mostly not actual students there, we hang around in the canteen most days and meet wonderful people — the local resistance (which is indeed the name of an Orpington punk band). The wild and thoughtful youth of south-east London. (Which is south London, by the way: south-west London is actually a part of north London in all but map). Marvelous peacocks whose appearance alone says something loud and clear to the straights — two fingers baby, two fingers. Buy one, get one free.
We talk Kerouac, The Prisoner, James Dean, radical politics, radical social values, Hesse, Huxley, situationism, the recent Ants sellout, different hair dye brands, the meaning of life. We hungrily devour each other’s discoveries and opinions and the glory of being teenage. We fall unreasonably in love with each other and get our brittle hearts broken on a regular basis, as is the way.
There are great people and they’re not all reverse-commuters. The worst boredom brings out the best characters locally, many of whom I still consider my best friends and many of whom never felt my need to follow the MM pied piper to different climes. In generous moments I want to define the place — as they usually do — by its vibrant minority rather than the grey masses that smother them in numbers and seek to wear them down daily.
It’s to Orpington I decamp when the trauma of my punk rock hair & clothing becomes too much for my dad and I consequently leave home. A big old shared house in Orchard Grove, between the station and the High Street. As such, a dream description for estate agents and property developers and consequently long since demolished for yuppie flats. Even gentrified areas can be gentrified. I’ve accidently gone the wrong way, one stop down the trainline from Petts Wood, star of the next episode. But at least I’m on that line.
It’s here I lose my virginity to both sex and drugs and also form the rock n roll band that would shape my life. I’d like to say I do a lot of growing up very quickly but it’s more traumatic than that; because I’m simply not emotionally ready to fall out of the nest, my wings are nowhere near formed enough. There are horrendous dark moments of overwhelming loneliness and teenage cutarm despair, a Bosch canvas on which I paint my milestones.
Forty years on, with an ailing mind, I date many things in my past by record releases: cross-checked with Google and relatively reliable. It tells me ‘Baby It’s True’ by Mari Wilson came out 7th May 1982, making me 18 years old when I hit the big wide world. But I’m a frighteningly young 18, to the point where I’ve always remembered this milestone as me being 17 tops. I buy ‘Baby It’s True’ for my first love and mean every word as I sing along. It’s a big hit generally in our house, if not elsewhere (that place where life apparently is).
Though the inhabitants are only a few years older than me, those crucial few years take them back to a pre-punk where they clearly listened to ‘proper’ music and not the glam rock I was amusing myself with. Hence I’m introduced to Carly Simon, the Faces, Carole King and Jimi Hendrix. And to a bong, which looks very exotic and threatening. The first time I nervously put my mouth to it, I wonder if this spells the beginning of a descent into a murky seedy world where I end up addicted, then OD’ed, on the filthy floor of some squat. Spoiler: it doesn’t happen. Not all of it anyway, the filthy squats would appear later though.
The house is vegetarian, which is good because so am I. It’s also pretty much socialist (SWP in the main) and as such a reassuring vanguard of opposition to the Tory blue sea in which it stays afloat. I’m a good little anarchist by this point and we have endless, pointless arguments about the Kronstadt Uprising, the Spanish Civil War and other anarchist vs. socialist moments in history. It’s as boring as it sounds, though I fear I could never do justice to how cringeworthy it also is. There is constant ‘come the revolution’ chat and they actually believe it.
That aside, the house is a beacon and magnet to local aspiring freaks, misfits and dropouts, as it should be. Better decide which side you’re on, this ship goes down before too long. Because Thatcher has performed a war ritual in April 1982, that she may hold onto power in next year’s election. 1100 sacrificed and she’s just getting started. Baby it’s true. There’s a future to be fought for in the UK at this moment and both sides know it. Sadly we are deep in enemy territory in Orpington, which isn’t a great time or place to be stuck in the endgame of a traumatic puberty. And we’ll lose, but of course we don’t know that yet.
It’s the spiritual opposite of Swinging London in every respect. It’s arguments in the pub with pasty-faced Tory boys; it’s threatening shouts in the street from cars passing by. It’s bad news on the doorstep with every new bit of news. Crucially it’s also falling in love with a woman from further up the train line in Sydenham Hill, who will tear my life apart over the next ten years.
I’m drawn, with more than a hint of jealousy, to the title of Robert Elm’s wonderful paean to central London: London Made Us. Did Orpington make me?
No it fucking well didn’t. I wouldn’t let it. I’m proud of that. Fuck off Orpington.
I’m on the first train out of here. Platform 6, calling at Petts Wood, Bickley, Bromley South, Shortlands, Beckenham Junction, Kent House, Penge East, Sydenham Hill, West Dulwich, Brixton and London Victoria.
An archive of all the articles in this series can be found here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Berger has resumed this 3:AM column after a 15 year hiatus. He’s written the official biographies of Crass and The Levellers, a book on mindfulness and various other books that can be found here. He’s also the singer in Flowers in the Dustbin. He’s recently finished his memoirs In Case Of Dementia, Break Glass.
