By George Berger.
THE ORPINGTON-VICTORIA LINE
#6 / BECKENHAM JUNCTION
Being the sixth in a series of psychogeographical memories of the trainline that took me from nowhere & nothing to somewhere and …something.
I came straight up from nowhere, I’m not going straight back there.
* * *
When I was young & innocent, my first window into the world was the Roberts transistor radio. Learning language was closely followed by hearing song lyrics. Words that swept me away from the banality of the living room and into magical worlds that would inform my life’s hopes, dreams and ambitions.
The Seekers promise intrigued me: “there’s a new world out there, they call the Promised Land”. Scott Mackenzie’s musical travelogue informed me that if I made it to San Francisco “you’re gonna meet some gentle people there”. The cornucopia of other songs filled with late 60s peace-loving optimism gave me a great sense of a better future on the way.
But where? There was no map reference, other than San Francisco, and that was in America. A place only reached then by the international jet set and tax-exile rock stars.
Imagine, then, the excitement when it turned out that David Bowie lived in Beckenham. Lived in a massive shared house in Beckenham. Chose to live in Beckenham!
A house that surely functioned as an embassy for the Promised Land — beautiful women in afros and kaftans, plotting the beautiful future with gentle people who’d written bestselling counterculture anthems and probably actually been to San Francisco. But still came home. David Bowie, who could live anywhere in the world and almost certainly other planets too, actually decided that Beckenham was the place to be!
The Bowie abode was called Haddon Hall and was in Southend Road, which gently meanders down to Beckenham Junction train station, as its inhabitants surely did as well, decked out in flares and smiley stoned dreams.
Keep going past the station and next left is Albermarle Road, where Wally Hope stayed for a time. It’s a delicious thought that both of them — the founder of Beckenham Free Festival and the founder of Stonehenge Free Festival, may have lived there at the same time. Maybe Wally caught the same train of thought that I did?
Keep going further down the road and you’ll hit Beckenham High Street, where Bowie founded Beckenham Arts Lab in the back of the Three Tuns pub. It’s easy, then, to imagine the Beckenham 70s to be a San Fran-style hotspot of beautiful people. That would be an absurd distortion of proportion of course. Beckenham was and is a Tory straight-Ashbury with the worst selection of pubs on the whole of the train line. Further still down the High Street and you’ll come to Beckenham Odeon, where I unwittingly had my life changed watching Cat People in 1982; things have never been the same since.
In the self-realisation of writing these words down, I wonder if I’ve actually been searching for that promised land ever since — living a life based on chasing an illusion I heard in a Seekers song when I could barely walk. Wonder if this series of articles about places on a trainline hides behind concepts like psychogeography as a safe word that (conveniently) gives too much responsibility for my entertainment and contentedness over to my surroundings.
Put Beckenham Junction up against this impossible requirement to be Shangri-La and of course it will fail. Just like everywhere else will fail. The erroneous nonsense that ‘life is elsewhere’. But then, isn’t everything we look at in life measured against our expectations of what it could be in our dreams?
Of course, that’s not to say that all places are the same. Beckenham still manages to gives off a more benign village vibe than the other stations we’ve travelled through thus far. A nicer place to be stoned perhaps. Closer in but seeming further out.
Wally Hope died in 1975. Bowie killed off his personas one by one as he progressed through the 70s. Haddon Hall was demolished for flats and The Three Tuns is now some kind of pizza place. In this context, Beckenham is the place of dead dreams, with only a blue plaque to forgotten possibility outside the pizza joint to whisper what might have been.
And wasn’t. With a capital W.
The winners are selling pizza, wine and right-wing realities in an obscene victory parade that has lasted decades and shows no sign of stopping any time soon. The arteries have hardened and the alternatives have been all but stamped out. How nice it would be to say ‘till the next time’, but all that glorious alternative culture can be safely placed in a box by academics, marked 1955-1995… or whatever exact dates they decide to recuperate it with.
Don’t turn on, turn in – and make sure you’re not late or else!
Don’t tune in, tune out – ignore the voices in the back of your head and forget your stupid childhood dreams.
Don’t drop out – go to University and start preparing for a lifetime of meaningless drudgery and soulless competition. Consumer fascism.
These are the thoughts that Beckenham Junction inspires. A distinct lack of punk rock in this article, because despite its position betwixt punk strongholds Bromley and Croydon, there isn’t really anything spikey to report here.
Notable celebrities include the likes of Julie Andrews, Floella Benjamin and Petula Clarke, who was surely not thinking of BJ when she sang ‘Downtown’, another enchanting fairytale of a better place elsewhere. These celebs reflect the genteel nature of Beckenham, which is surely not a criticism. 1980 saw the formation of local act Haircut 100, which gives another clue as to how the radical gentleness of hippies faded out to a sticky sickly nicety-niceness, all style, no substance and no substances.
Tripadvisor lists ’Things to do in Beckenham’, mentioning various parks, the golf club, some pubs, the cinema and a gift shop. In its defence, also a couple of art galleries, perhaps the last hangover from more interesting and creative times. The parks include the Bowie festival one but, really, it’s just a park. You could, should you choose, look at the difference between Beckenham in the interesting years and nowadays as symbolic of the wholesale culture-cleansing that’s been waged in the intervening years. The tearful retreat of art and therefore hope. Should you choose.
It’s alright though, Beckenham. It’s pleasant. A friend of mine from there wanted to be an actor, which still kind of gives a clue. Another friend used to nick a car every Friday to drive down to the nightclub next to Beckenham Junction station, which is a social mobility of sorts. A lot of cricketers seem to have lived there over the years. Tea and cucumber sandwiches all round.
There are worse things it could be. Orpington, for instance. Or better things, like Beckenham in the 70s, when Bowie lived there.
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.
