By George Berger.
THE ORPINGTON-VICTORIA LINE
#4 / BROMLEY SOUTH / FIVE YEARS
Being the fourth 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.
“There was no ‘magic realism’ – no magic only realism – in Bromley”
– Hanif Kureishi
1976
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there
Bromley – the place where the broom grows.
As the trainline left Petts Wood, something happened. A fork. The Victoria line I’m writing about here headed off to Bromley whilst the London Bridge line sped on to Chislehurst. So all the city workers, the serious-suit commuters were best positioned in Orpington or Petts Wood. This flow of malignancy forked off to Chislehurst whilst the Victoria line went to a more westerly destination. If you could do a heat map, you’d see a slight lightening of intent on this line. Only slight, but it does tell.
Whilst many readers here will think of Sex Pistols when they hear 1976, the vast majority of people will remember the heat & the drought. The summer that tipped over from nice to oppressive. The flying ants. Jesus, it was hot. Waiting at the bus stop for hours (Jesus the buses were bad then) on the way back from school, then fights to get on as the conductor helplessly pleaded for civilisation. Because at some point, the conductor would declare the bus full & it would drive off, leaving the broken-hearted behind. What becomes of them? Another half-hour wait minimum. Worth fighting to avoid. Britain was falling apart. Jon Savage noted that “we hate Nottingham Forest…” had distilled to “we hate…”
The top of the bus stop food chain would be whoever had a 2 litre bottle of water, filled up from the taps before leaving school. An early indicator of capitalism. Or Lord Of The Flies. Same thing in some ways.
It was at Chislehurst war memorial bus stop that these daily fights would occur. The 94 bus (eventually) took me home to Petts Wood whilst the ‘Bromley contingent’ would get the 227 through Bickley and on to Bromley.
I was beginning to realise how much I desperately hated school and how much it was wearing down my will to live. A serious existential threat. So the bizarrely-dressed people in Bromley, occasionally visible from a car window provided a vicarious thrill. There was no label to hang on them at this point, but their strange attire was clearly a step up (or down) from the glam rockers. This felt nastier, more dangerous. I was excited and scared in equal measure, a bit like the time we got surrounded by Hells Angels riding on the M1 – wanting to look but worrying that doing so could have bad consequences. Heartbeat, increasing heartbeat.
Whatever these people were doing, it looked dangerous. But it also looked like a ‘fuck you’ to the obscene values of my school.
I wasn’t ready just then, but a seed was maybe sown. Little was I to know that I would become one of these creatures in a short while.
They all got out, by the way, as soon as they could. Following McLaren’s advice to get out of the suburbs ASAP. Hanif Kureishi lives in Shepherds Bush these days.
Bromley was hot. Everywhere was hot, but Bromley was shit as well. Imagine living in Brighton or Bournemouth with that weather.
1979 – BROMLEY PUNKS
Pushing through the market square
So many mothers sighing
“Prisoners of disguise
Your sentence is never through
What do you see when you look in the mirror?
Hidden identity
It’s all a fascination
All your imagination
Light up the stage
For the lovers of outrage
Let them try something new”
– Penetration, Lovers of outrage.
Bromley market square was home to Bonaparte Records – a temple which would supply both my spiritual & educational needs, where Catholic school had failed me so profoundly on both counts
There’s this line in my head. Those punks who were around just before me, some that I never got to meet, those who had ‘Bromley Punks’ on the back of their jackets, alongside Ants in great fonts and band names that served as an invitation to investigate…my idealised version of those people is hopelessly naive and yet it lingers.
Because they were there to stare at when the magic was welling up inside me. My rite of passage, a crucial 3 years older now it’s 1979. Whereas I’d looked at the Bromley Contingent with a fascinated horror, I looked at the Bromley punks and knew I was on my way to being one of them. It was all that mattered. They were the way forward. Walking up the High St, darting in and out of Bonapartes like fugitives on the run. The thrill I experienced every time I saw them was almost sexual.
Obviously, it doesn’t bear up to any logical scrutiny, but it left a deep beautiful scar in my mind. Those beautiful leaps beyond logic are the stuff teenage magic is made of.
When I wrote a book about Crass, I wanted to dedicate it to the Bromley Punks. Not the Bromley Contingent, you understand, but the class of 78/79 who I would see around and gasp in wonder at. In the end I became overcome with diabetes and exhaustion and simply forgot. May I redress the balance here.
I first saw the Pistols on TV summer 76 and, aged 13, was fascinated from the off by this apparent transgression somehow getting on telly. You saw these kinds at football every week, but they were disapproved of by all media, by everyone really, and they were never in bands!
I watched with a scared fascination at a distance as the punk liberation explosion blasted open a black hole, out of which came a new generation of virginal creatives. As each month took me nearer maturity and mutiny, I loved this more and more. So I loved punk, but I was acutely aware that I wasn’t ‘a punk’. That was a different ball-game altogether – wearing the clobber, dying the hair in crazy colours, ‘living the life’ as I imagined it. In many ways, wearing the clobber and dying the hair was living the life. Lovers of outrage. I longed to be able to do that, it was my destiny.
The transition from liking punk to being punk was happening. My best mate at the time liked punk but didn’t feel the slightest need or desire to be a punk. Consequently he went off and earned a fortune being straight (now comfortably retired) and I wouldn’t see him for another 40 years. We’re good friends again now, which seems to signal both the beginning and the end of something.
Bonaparte Records was the epicentre, slap bang in the middle of the market square that Bowie pushed through in Five Years. So many people sighing, but not the peacock punks. They were the lone symbol of sanity in amongst the horrors of modern life.
Guy Jardine, he who supplied the Billy Idol photos in the last article, worked behind the counter. I remember checking through the records as Guy played house DJ and put on ‘Black Horse’ by Cult Maniax. I went straight to the counter & bought it. As did the only other bloke in the shop (some stiff) at the time. Magic moments, as Perry Como would have it.
1987
A soldier with a broken arm
Fixed his stare to the wheels of a Cadillac
A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest
And a queer threw up at the sight of that
- All the Bromley contingent long gone, leaving a profound sense of being left behind. A sense that life was elsewhere. Surely it had to be, otherwise it didn’t exist. Frampton, Bowie, Kureishi, all elsewhere, living the high life I was missing out on. A grief without a pang. Only the pang was getting bigger.
My punk band had formed, done OK and then split up, thereby forcing a change of direction in my life and I was back living with my parents in Petts Wood. It’s a year with a rather empty diary in the great scheme of things, between the band stopping and me moving to Brighton in January 1988.
This year was mainly spent drinking in Bromley with my partner in Guinness and punk Steve Steroid, and following the fortunes of Bromley FC whenever they played at home. That was also partly related to drinking – you could drink on the terraces and the bar opened at half time – 3.45pm – when all the pubs were closed in the draconian licensing hours days.
Quite a lot of the old Bromley punks would go to Bromley every other Saturday. We even got a mention in the programme one week, along the lines of ‘society may reject you, but we love you!’. As well they might – we were a noisy lot compared to most opposition fans. Singing your heart & voice out on a Saturday afternoon has long been a necessary release against the intolerable boredom of everyday midweek living; a safety valve of sorts. The less savoury elements would do everything they could to put off the opposition goalie with the most vile comments they could think of. Even I blushed.
I loved starting some of the songs there, perhaps the peak of my musical achievements. There’s a whole book to be written about how and why football songs start and finish. It is, however, a culture way beyond most writers – perhaps the least recuperated of all, even if the beautiful game itself has been stolen.
Give me a B-ee-ee! B-ee-ee!
Give me an R-arr-arr! R-arr-arr!
Givem me an O-oh-oh! O-oh-oh!
Give me an L-eh-el!
Eh?
Yes I managed to spell Bromley wrong and that’s my main memory of all that. The peak of my singing career was a comedy moment.
After the match we’d decamp to Bromley town centre and the triumvirate of pubs: The Three Compasses, The Railway and the Swan & Mitre. Almost always in that order. I shudder to think how many pints we put away over the course of a typical day. More than I could afford these days, by some distance. Financially or physically.
The Three Compasses had a biker / rocker leaning clientele. The Railway hosted a newer generation of alternative types, perhaps the first generation where you wouldn’t obviously use the word ‘punk’ anymore. Psychobillies, goths maybe. The Swan & Mitre was a tad straighter, with no obvious magnetism in hindsight, other than it was the pub to which Bowie decamped after marrying Angie. Not that you could tell.
I was lost. The miner’s strike was lost. The Battle of the Beanfield felt like a leap in the direction of fascism. Still the good folk of Bromley voted for Thatcher, electing her for the third time in the June of that year. It was time to leave.
1991
I heard telephones, opera house, favourite melodies
I saw boys, toys, electric irons and TV’s
“Department stores are our new cathedrals”
– The Pop Group, We Are All Prostitutes
Come 1991, I’d just yo-yo’ed back from Brighton to Catford, courtesy of a ‘room available’ ad in Loot. Though just up the road from Bromley, that bit more ‘inner’, it’s telling that I never even glanced in that direction. Had I done, I would have noticed the massive Glades shopping temple being constructed, completely rewiring the town centre as it stretched from the Market Square down most of the High Street towards Bromley South station. Bluewater lite.
If you look up the history of Bromley on the gov.uk site, there’s talk of Keston (where the Romans settled due to its natural spring), Crystal Palace (the destruction by fire in 1936) and the heroic part Biggin Hill played in the Battle of Britain. Not much about Bromley itself, you’ll notice.
Thanks too to the train lines, stretching right down to Kent with high speed connections, Bromley now became even more of a mecca to consumerism. The High St was paved over and Bromley entered a new phase of pretty much officially being in London rather than Kent. These days, even Orpington is described as ‘south London’ when there’s a crime feature on the news (no other reasons to mention its existence). People would get the train from far flung Kentish towns to shop there on a Saturday. A dream come true for Bromley Council, eclipsing their previous greatest achievement of legally blocking Ken Livingstone’s plans for cheap bus fares in London. Mean-spirited doesn’t begin to describe it.
2022
And it was cold and it rained, so I felt like an actor
And I thought of Ma and I wanted to get back there
Thanks in part to Covid, I hadn’t seen my mum for a couple of years, so we decided to meet at Bromley South station, after which we decamped to the Richmal Crompton, aka the Wetherspoons opposite BS station.
Richmal Crompton, famous for the Just William books, had a house built on Bromley Common, so presumably loved it in Bromley. Back when it was assuredly in Kent. The pub boasts photos of HG Wells, Billy Idol, Siouxsie & Bowie, people who would have likely been refused service in it, had it existed at the time, or at least felt the hostility of the locals. OK maybe HG Wells wouldn’t have had any problems, but he did call Bromley a “morbid sprawl of population”. If you’re after a more contemporary take, comedian Frankie Boyle describes it as “a lobotomy made out of bricks”. Bromley that is, not the pub, though there’s an argument that the pub takes this concept further. It’s heartbreaking in there.
The Weatherspoons fulfils its aim – McDonalds-like – of being a place of familiar refuge that feels the same whether you’re in Bromley, Barnsley or Brighton. It’s a pernicious place, but as you walk through the door of the Richmal Crompton, you could be anywhere. You can forget you’re in Bromley. So we walk through the door.
Nonetheless, my mum loves Bromley and moved back to the area from Merseyside, when my dad died back in 1998. The RC a massive hangar of a pub, seemingly as big as a football pitch. Luckily it’s daytime and sparsely populated. Breathing space is useful as I’m not 100% comfortable to be here, particularly as Covid is still in the air. But it sure as hell beats being anywhere that reminds you where you are.
My heart and mind are a wild mixture of emotions being back on the old turf. This used to be my playground. No-one I know is around, which is so different to how things were back in the 80s. I feel like I’m in disguise. Doesn’t anybody recognise me from the punk rock times? Clearly not. Of course not. No welcoming party, no red carpet, no brass band, just Bromley getting on with doing what it does best.
Meeting up with my mum, so many of the previous years fall into perspective. Punk rock, and all my mum’s anxieties about me being a punk rocker, are well in the past. And culturally, it feels like punk kind of won. My mum is strangely proud that I was a punk now, a marked difference to how she felt at the time. It’s nice. Vindicating. She rings me up when her crossword asks her about the Clash – she’s eternally convinced I wrote a book about them.
My dad wanted to be an artist, a dream almost immediately extinguished by the random reverse lottery of serious poverty. He hated me being a punk, strolling down Bromley High Street with my freak friends. I was an artist. Am an artist. Because of punk. Because being a punk was an artform in itself.
Sadly my dad passed away before (I think) he could filter any of this as anything other than my being a failure. But sitting with my mum feels like a vindication of sorts. In a Wetherspoons in Bromley, a strange venue for such a nice thought.
No magic, only realism. The place where the broom grows. The broom that tries to emulate the real rain in Taxi Driver. But fails.
In memory of Michael Potter RIP. Bromley FC and Railway pub regular.
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.
