London's best-kept secret

A trip home

Dear Friend,

I hope you’ve been having a good week. If, like me, you are an enthusiastic viewer of Eurovision, I hope you enjoyed last night’s festivities. (Although clearly Norway ought to have won). 

Thank you for your patience last week when I didn’t write as usual. As I said might happen in my last letter, I was consumed by the Coronation of Charles III. Well, not entirely – but I was consumed by London altogether.

On my visit, I went to a good friend’s birthday party. The birthday-woman is a friend who often comes to Paris, and so friends who live in Paris came too, and it was fun to see them in a different context and see their impressions of London life. For example, one American friend on this trip discovered what she now considers to be Britain’s greatest export: gin and tonic in a tin. “I had seen them on Fleabag,” she said, “but I didn’t know they were a real thing!”. Same for the town of Richmond in southwest London, which she said she thought had been invented for the Apple TV series, Ted Lasso. 

Well, no! In fact, Richmond is a very real affluent part of greater London and a few miles from where I grew up. I grew up on the border of Richmond and Hounslow borough, on the Hounslow side. Richmond is one of the wealthiest boroughs in London and Hounslow one of the least wealthy. In fact, I recall reading a few years ago that there was a 10-year difference in life expectancy between the two. Richmond is beautiful. It sits alongside the Thames; it’s full of greenery, from the vast, deer-filled Richmond Park to the world-famous botanical gardens in neighbouring Kew. With its elegant old-fashioned lamp posts, picturesque bridges and sweet cobblestone streets (including the Ted Lasso one), it is one of the few parts of London that looks rather like Paris (and indeed a lot of more affluent Frenchies in London choose to live there).

But despite its beauty, I’ve always felt there’s something a bit, sort of, off, about Richmond – something a bit sad deep in its foundations. 

“ …if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death..” — Virginia Woolf

Goodness!

Despite this notable literary slight, Richmond remains one of the most desirable places to live in London. Hounslow, by contrast, is much maligned. It’s what the French would call a quartier populaire meaning its a down-to-earth, traditionally working-class area. Hounslow Borough is quite large and takes in some pretty parks and smarter areas, but it’s true that Hounslow High Street is not the most visually dazzling place. When I call it to mind, I think mostly of the colour grey, peppered with brightly coloured shop signs and windows. The architecture is a hotchpotch of different 20th-century buildings, built with practicality rather than looks in mind. It is very close to Heathrow Airport and planes fly low overhead. (Because I grew up in that area, I never notice the sound of them.) And yet, Hounslow, for me, has a likeable soul. 

In the sketch show People Just do Nothing, which is set in Hounslow, there’s a clip I love where the main character Chabuddy G, played by Hounslower Asim Chaudhry, takes the viewer on a tour of the High Street, which is described as  “London’s best-kept secret”. He starts: 

“Located only 90 minutes from the bubbling West End, and a cool 15 minutes from the UK’s busiest and loudest airport, you can really see why people from all over the world end up here.” 

Where Richmond is quite a homogeneous place, and much more predominantly white than other parts of London, Hounslow is diverse and is particularly known for the large Indian and Pakistani community. In the sketch, Chabuddy G says: 

“[There are so many] different flavours of humans. We’ve got Indians, we’ve got Pakistanis, we’ve got Romanians, we've got Somalians, we've got Philippinos and many, many more. We are literally UKIP’s idea of hell on Earth”. 

The tone of the video is tongue-in-cheek, playing on Hounslow’s reputation as an undesirable place to live and visit. But I do think Hounslow has real character. Where so many places in London have been hollowed out by gentrification and pretension, Hounslow High Street keeps being itself. An example: Since I was a child, we’ve been visiting Hounslow Heath car-boot sale, held in a huge field on the western side of the town. There is always a man (the same one) who walks around with his green parrot on his shoulder. There is always an ice-cream truck and the same food-van selling egg and sausage baps, and tea out of polystyrene cups. Near the shopping centre, there is an evangelical church set in a modernist building with a slanted roof, going down in a triangle shape with windows of descending size (imagine something a bit like the Adidas logo). A message is always displayed on the windows across several neon signs. For many years they read: 

—

Jesus is alive in Hounslow 

—

An impromptu memorial mural of the Queen near Hounslow East tube station

Funnily enough, like Richmond, Hounslow also has its own fictional football team: the Hounslow Harriers as featured in Bend it Like Beckham – one of Hounslow’s moments of fame, as well as being where Mo Farah grew up, the memorial mural of the Queen that went viral and a visit to a Hounslow kebab shop from King Charles himself.

—

Just as I get to spend these chunks of quality time in the UK, I also get to enjoy friends and family coming to stay with me here in Paris. This week, my friend Agnes has been here. We met when we were four and hit it off more or less immediately thanks to our shared passion for musicals and things poetical and literary. Almost instantly we began bothering those around us with our joint rambunctious approach to life. 

I previously wrote about how each person appreciates and notices different things when they come here. Some Parisian things that have delighted Agnes so far: the Orangina glass swirled with an orange-peel design, the whimsical-sounding Métro station names (Chateau Rouge, Château d’Eau), the dancers practicing at Le 104, a cultural centre in the north of the city where we went today. 

Sketches of dancers at Le 104

Agnes has visited several times and is now quite familiar with the pocket of the city that I live in, even having her own favourite baker (Boulangerie Farah et Nadine on Rue Duheme), supermarket (Monoprix!) and local bar (La Piscine, rue du Poteau). In fact, she’s so local that she even had her own drama with a broken lock/door – a rite of passage for anyone who lives in Paris.

She spent some hours yesterday shut into the bedroom of her Airbnb as me, my partner, my dog Babbet and my friend Diane lingered supportively under her second-floor window, like a strange and largely ineffectual rescue committee. Eventually she broke herself out of the bedroom using a coat-hanger, and we went on to have a lovely day in sunny Paris. 

Her three words to describe Paris are: Delicious pastel escape

---

Thirty-second book club 

I recently read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing for the first time. Berger makes a lot of brilliant points, particularly about the depiction of women and particularly about advertising imagery, and the book really made me think about how little critical thinking we have when it comes to visual culture. Berger describes the profusion of advertising images, the way they hark vaguely back to images and archetypes of the past, while selling dreams of the future – leaving us here in the present, feeling a sense of lack. 

“Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and this car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal. It proposes to each of us we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. 

This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer – even though we will be poorer by having spent our money.” 

The glut of images described in the book is just exponentially larger now than it was in the Seventies, and his words feel more worth reading than ever. 

---

Thank you for reading this letter about London, home, noticing and John Berger. To read me writing about something more succinct and pegged to the news agenda, here is an article I wrote for The Telegraph this week about the green-conscious changes going on in Paris ahead of the Olympic Games, including making parts of the Seine swimmable. (If you wish to read the article, and the pay/registration-wall is causing bother, let me know and I can send you a PDF of the text.)

Please subscribe/sponsor/share this letter if you like it!

I’ll write next week. Have a lovely few days!

Yours, 

Hannah