By George Berger.
THE ORPINGTON-VICTORIA LINE
#3 / BICKLEY / 1980
One of the beautiful inspirations of writing is the blank page – the idea that you can put anything you want on it, the only limit being your imagination. The ultimate passport to anywhere. It’s the primal chaos of freedom, the warmth of the womb.
It can also be an oppressor of course, once a few filters have been applied. Like the pressure of a deadline to meet. Or the internal pressure of the inner narratives that threaten and taunt. The voices.
Voices that say things like ‘how on earth can you write the psychogeography of somewhere like Bickley? You’ll run out of things to say after a few lines – if you get that far’.
Another, more benign, voice chips in and says ‘then you can write about that!’ And maybe quote David Bowie…
“Down on my knees in suburbia
Down on myself in every way”
The station at Bickley belongs in an Enid Blyton novel. Four sleepy platforms, rarely inhabited. The sun always seemed to shine on those platforms, as Enid would surely have had it, only with a suspicious looking man with a foreign accent to let us know that he was a baddie. Blyton taught for a while here in 1919 at Bickley Park School.
We’ve left Orpington and Petts Wood behind now and we’re hurtling (well, dawdling) towards Bromley. But before that, the train pulls in at Bickley station.
It’s one of those places that only really exists for housing. The few token shops and pubs exist purely to serve the inhabitants. Nobody actually goes to Bickley for any kind of self-gratification.
Self-actualisation, however, was a bit of a thing around here in the 1970s, if you take the word of The Buddha Of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi’s perceptive take on growing up around there at that time.
Like many locals in my group, I read that with excitement when it came out – it caused a double-buzz by not just being brilliant but also local. I must confess I haven’t read it since, or seen the – also good – TV series since that came out. No matter, they were great. Spirit captured.
The point is, I’m not sure my recollections would tally exactly, but in my mind, it was always in Bickley he’d set it, particularly the Widmore Road area, which links Bromley to Chislehurst (and therefore Billy Idol to Siousxie Sioux).
I’ve been quite down on the previous stations, but really Bickley feels quite benign, at least when looking back on it at the age of 58. You could compare it to the space between thoughts during meditation. The quiet sweet spot that allows you space to reflect. Hanif knew, or at least his dad did. Allegedly.
Unlike Petts Wood, Bickley is old. The name was first recorded in the 13th century and started to really come into its own in the 18th century. Starting life as a hunting lodge, the landowner of the time started selling of bits of the land when he was (relatively) skint, and the posh houses started springing up.
A search for Bickley on Google brings up an estate agent’s guide to the place, which is telling. Apparently it’s so popular that they really push the envelope when describing adjacent areas as Bickley. Not unlike Stockwell being rebranded as North Clapham amongst the many sleights of hand employed by these doyens of society.
The difference between Orpington / Petts Wood and Bickley is that there are no poor bits in Bickley. Most posh-ish areas in South London / NW Kent have a token council estate or two thrown in, but not Bickley.
Bickley is where things get properly posh, like posh people want – where roads are deliberately unmade to discourage cars from actually driving down them. Where houses are detached and seriously out of reach. Estate agents should have a section marked ‘YOU WILL NEVER LIVE HERE’ for places like Bickley, on behalf of the residents who pray that your kind will indeed never darken their doors.
There are punky types of course, back when the 70s was turning into the 80s. But they seem different. They shop at Worlds End and buy the impossibly pricey clothes the rest of us can only dream about (or indeed idealistically reject). This lends some of them an unpleasant arrogance that essentially mirrors the snobbery of their forefathers, just in a different context. Squiggles rather than suits, but performing the same job. We laugh bemusedly at them, as they look down their noses at us. Punk was never unified to that extent, let’s not forget.
As I post my Petts Wood article on Facebook, my friend Michelle Brigandage posted about the Bickley Lido. I grew up in total ignorance of this beautiful oasis. We’re back to the multiverse thing – her experience of Bickley was so different (and in this case far preferable) to mine. So, you know, never take opinion as fact, pop kids. On the subject of which…
Bowie recorded the video for his Buddha of Suburbia song in a road in Bickley where my wife used to work as a cleaner. It’s brilliantly, bitterly evocative – the “Englishmen going insane” line eclipsing all. The rest is pretty golden too:
“Living in lies by the railway line
Pushing the hair from my eyes
Elvis is English and climbs the hills
Can’t tell the bullshit from the lies
Screaming along in South London
Vicious but ready to learn
Sometimes I fear that the whole world is queer
Sometimes, but always in vain”
My, how we clung onto Bowie. He knew. He was always on our side. Back at the age where it was all about sides. Every alienated kid who felt weird and isolated — ‘these children that you spit on, as they try to change their world’ — could listen to Bowie in their bedroom and know that it was going to be alright. We became ‘immune to your consultations’, or at least a little bit nearer an imagined herd immunity.
His death was announced on Facebook when I was having a bout of insomina at some crazy time in the (UK) morning – 4 or 5am. I actually went back to bed in complete denial and re-awoke to the horror that it was real. But largely that’s a story for the next essay, about Bromley South.
But!
According to Wikipedia, he lived in Bickley 1953-54, which would have made him 6 or 7 at the time. 106 Canon Rd, BR1 2SP for those taking notes or scuttling off to Google maps.
(I say that because I do it all the time… Paul Gorman’s brilliant biography of Malcolm McLaren took me twice as long to finish as it should because I was forever checking out places from his story.)
There were a couple of pubs in Widmore Road, which a trio of us decided to check out one desperate Saturday night back then. I guess I had hormonal visions of posh young women in pretty frocks, all teasing giggles and exciting flirts. Or at least smelling of nice perfume.
We ended up playing darts badly in an empty version of the Rovers Return. I guess everybody else had the sense to rove without returning – Bromley, London, wherever. Not a bulls eye to be seen. Here’s what you could have won…
I wonder if Billy Idol ever made the same mistake? These would have been his local pubs too, way back when he lived in the street just opposite. I wonder if he ever sits in his California gaff and reflects on his time in Bickley?
I do know he went to the Three Compasses pub in Bromley one night to see our mutual friend Guy Jardine DJing – what a contrast that must have been for him. He took Joan & Bill, his parents, as well. Ray from Sigue Sigue Sputnik turned up too. True story:
Strictly speaking, that all belongs to the Bromley South section, but Bromley has more than enough to talk about. Let’s be generous here, eh?
Bickley tempts generosity. It contains peace. At a price you could never afford. I would have railed with situationist angst at this when I was younger, but (privilege / financial injustice) aside – it’s a pleasant place to walk around. The frustrated demon wonders what’s going on behind all those perfect curtains but the answer is probably nowhere near as titillating as the demon would hope for. In this respect, it seems more benign than Petts Wood or Orpington – it’s every bit as Tory but perhaps a shade more liberal.
So, what to make of a place purely designed for people to live, rather than a holistic community space? Something seems very wrong about that, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Bickley is nice though, it’s pleasant. It would seem churlish and curmudgeonly to slag it off piecemeal. That tumbleweed at the start of the article – I’ve got older and reassessed tumbleweed as a good thing, a signifier of calm space rather than a malignant emptiness to be railed against as I perceived it in my teens. Was I bored, or was I boring?
Over to you Mr. Bowie, for the last word:
Big thanks to Guy Jardine for the Three Compasses photos
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.
