The Joy of Streats

My initial reluctance to move to Streatham stemmed from a fear of being unable to get about London without the tube. Looking back, this seems ridiculous, but I genuinely could not comprehend getting on a bus or even, oh horror, an overland train being any quicker or easier or cheaper than taking the tube. Of course it then transpired to be all three, as the only tubeline I had any experience of was The Northern Misery Line and almost anything is quicker, easier and cheaper than that.

Streatham is blessed with three (count 'em, three) train stations - Streatham Common, Streatham Hill and Streatham. It is possible to walk between one and another in around 20 mins, if you really wanted to. From these three you can get into London Bridge, King's Cross Thameslink, Wimbledon, Croydon, Battersea Park, Forest Hill, Victoria, Elephant, Kentish Town, Blackfriars, etc in around half an hour. And from those places you can pretty much get anywhere by foot. I also sometimes switch trains at London Bridge and go over to Waterloo East (confusingly - actually at Waterloo, which I didn't realise for aeons) or Charing Cross which is free to do on my London Stations annual season ticket.

I have to supplement my season ticket (less than £650 a year and gets me to all those places which can't be bad) with my pay-as-you-go oyster. I hardly ever take the tube so work won't shell out for me to have a 1-3 yearly Oyster, which would get me around all the same places for a rather larger sum of money, but minus the faff of remembering to keep topped up. (Before you start wailing that your taxes are buying me season tickets - I have to pay them back out of my wages.) There are plenty of ticket stops in Streatham to top up at though, so I can't really complain.

I can't really complain about the trains either. They are generally on time, and clean, and easy to use. My journey into (and out of) work takes around 25 mins and I always get a seat. (Ha ha, you fools in East Dulwich - paying more rent AND can't get a seat on the train in the morning.) Buses tend to get rammed though, even though there are tonnes of them, and they go everywhere. South Kensington, the West End, Bloomsbury, The City and Tooting and Brixton (for the tube) as well as Croydon and Wimbledon in the other direction.

And you know, if it didn't smell so bad, I can also jump on the coach to Brighton.

My fave places to go to from Streatham:

Battersea Park Zoo
The Horniman Museum at Forest Hill
Deen City Farm and Abbey Mills (on the route of the 57)
Wimbledon (for shopping and for the tram to Ikea)
The V&A (by hopping off the 319)
 

It's better connected than you'd think.

The first in an occasional series, looking at the fine (and notsofine) hostelries of SW16.

First up...

The Bedford Park

Shamefully, I didn't go into The Bedford until I'd lived in Streatham for almost a year. This is partly because I lived alone for most of that time and didn't want to get into the habit of sitting on my own in pubs, but mostly because The Bedford looks freaking terrifying. My beloved is made of sterner stuff (brave enough, for example, to abandon North London for lawless South of the River) and as the pub is right opposite the station and as the station is the way we get home he marched straight in the second he'd had a hard enough day to warrant a pint. A little bit of gentle persuasion later and I must admit it is my favourite post-work stop off in SW16. And that's saying something because there's a great pub on the street I actually live on (of which more at a later date.)

Confounded by 4 Across.

You see, I had forgotten the most important thing to bear in mind when wondering if a pub is safe or not in Streats, and that is the fact that not only is there a Wetherspoons on the high street, there is also a Goose (i.e. a Wetherspoons with music) and both of these esteemed establishments are right next to the police station. Thus we have in place an effective drain for underage drinkers, blokes spoiling for fights and people drinking purely to get out of their faces. It's all very clever. (I went in Wetherspoons when it was blazing hot because they have air conditioning and a spirit + mixer cost £1.20. ONE POUND TWENTY. I could have got hammered for ten quid. I think that's a very dangerous thing to do.)  So although the Bedford might look like a scary dive, it's really just an authentic old boozer complete with shouty men and old lags. Yes, no doubt a fight might kick off once in a while in there, but no-one would fight me, if you see what I mean.

Some Bedford facts:

1) My friend Ray from Reading lived in SW16 in the '50s and '60s and informs me that The Bedford was a well known lesbian bar, with gangs of girls congregating in the back room (now the pool room.) He was too scared to ever drink in there.

2) At some point in the past year, management has passed to the guy who runs The Windmill down in Brixton. Thus plenty of live bands are getting put on in the room upstairs, and in the main pub over the weekend. Upstairs is a kind of rocky indie punky emo scene sort of thing, downstairs is Irish man plus keyboard all the way. Don't knock it til you've tried it!

3) The Bedford, along with some of the other shops facing the station, is falling in line with the smarten up SW16 vibe going on. Thus they have stripped back the front to reveal the original mosaic tiling round the door and generally scrubbed up the front. Looks good. Inside the bar is amazing, lots of mirror and carving which I assume is original.

4) The 'attractive beer garden' is a yard full of dead plants which looks out onto a boarded up warehouse through gates topped with razor wire. Nonetheless, it is a quiet and cool place to have an ice cold lager on a blazing hot day.

5) They have Taytos crisps behind the bar. Nuff said. Recently a sign has gone up advertising Sunday lunches. We have yet to try them. There is only one pub in Streatham for a Sunday lunch, but we'll get on to that in the following weeks.

For BITE's take on The Bedford, clicky here.

Over the weekend I completed another Streatham milestone. (Other milestones include: figuring out how beautiful The Rookery is; learning the truth between the rival Cat's Protection ladies; getting through breakfast at Chris' Place; drinking in The Bedford.) That's right my friends, on Saturday night...

... I went to Caesar's!

Fred Batt, the owner, with friend.

I was mentally preparing myself for general horror. I've never really been into the clubbing scene and although 26 is not that old the last time I was inside a genuine club (as oppose to dingy little indie nightspots in Soho) was around three or four years ago, and even back then I felt too old, too fat and too seriously uncool to be in there.

The clubs I've been known to frequent in the past are provincial affairs called things like Visage, Destiny or Utopia - great big barns built in the late '70s/early '80s. You know the kind, you walk in, check your coat, then onto the bar by the dancefloor or maybe up to the mezzanine level to another bar to watch the dancing. Compared to what I was used to, the sheer faded glamour of Caesar's took my breath away. It's great. There is a freakin' stuffed tiger in the lobby for a start! As you walk in, there are hundreds of tables surrounding the dancefloor and at the back of that is a stage. It kind of looks like a theatre - I guess it hasn't changed much since it was built.

I went with a friend who used to be a regular fixture there a couple of years ago, and even she was worried it would be crap. Memorably, she agreed we would leave when we saw the first fight as this would mean it was nearing the end of the evening and it'd be better to head off. Naturally, as we were stood at the bar to get our first drink a bit of a brawl kicked off behind us - it was only 11 o'clock! So we let security do their thang and carried on to our vodka, agreeing we'd leave it til the third fight. We didn't see any more trouble all night.

The deal on a Saturday is, you pay 19 quid (or 24 if you happen to have a penis) then you pay no more all night. This lent the place quite a chilled atmosphere. I was worried it would be threatening and full of 16 year old girls who wanted to bottle me and sleazy middle aged men. Perhaps in the past it's been a bit like that, but it wasn't this particular night. My friend was disappointed it was so quiet and kept reassuring me it would fill up, but I was relieved it was relatively quiet (there was still about a five minute wait on for drinks, it wasn't empty by a long shot.) The reasons it's so quiet now? Partly I think because people don't have to go in there if they want to keep drinking after 11 o'clock - there are plenty of places on the high street now. Also, I don't think people are as wary about going clubbing in Brixton now. In fact, I'm pretty sure loads of people think Brixton is safer than Streatham!

Anyway, eventually Caesars is set to close, cos it's been bought by some evil development company. What a shame, another bit of history going. All the staff were lovely (apart from maybe the barmaid who told me the bar wasn't 'first come, first served, you know'. What?!) and all the punters seemed sound. Bizarrely, I only saw one couple snogging the whole night. Maybe it's not the done thing any more? All the girls were wearing the necklace I was wearing which was from Peacock's of all places - also there were just as many fat girls as skinny girls, something I've never seen in a club before. I had a really great night, even if the music was not really to my taste (I can do cheese, I can do garage, but I'm too old to know anything from less than three or four years ago...)

It strikes me that they could make a fortune by investing in some table cloths and glass candle holders, and then getting one of those middle-class strippers (a la Dita Von Teese) in and charging people to come and have a genuine old fashioned night out. I guess they might need to buy some proper glasses as well. And only serve gin - but it would be great.

On my way home I made the obligatory stop at KFC. The guy behind the counter expressed concern that I was out and about at two in the morning with a sore throat. He just laughed when I informed him, in actual fact, it was just that I'd been to Caesars.

When I first arrived in London, I lived with a lovely boy in Clapham. Clapham is great if you're loaded / really thin / work in TV. Not being loaded, we fell down the Northern Line to Tooting Bec. And then, by dint of my complete inability to be any sort of a reasonable girlfriend, we broke up. I'm a receptionist. There was no way I could afford to stay in Toots. I didn't want to leave my job, and I certainly didn't want to make an embarrassing, shuffling journey home to my parents in The North. I'd been a London a year and a half and I wasn't out of love with her yet (I'm still not out of love with her...) but what could I do? There was no way I could afford to be spending over half my wages on rent every month and still live the life I was accustomed to. And then one of my colleagues suggested something.

Move to Streatham.

Move to Streatham? Dirty, nasty Streatham? The High Road was voted Worst Street in Britain in 2002 - why would I want to live there? And how could I get around, with no tube? And it's right by Brixton, taking the overspill in guns and knives as Brixton becomes more and more gentrified. Streatham. Was he mad? Was he utterly insane? He lived there, sure, but he was a guy, a 6ft something man. I am a short fat Northerner. I couldn't even run away from a mugger, let alone beat one up. But then someone else started up, another colleague. She laughed at my terror. She pointed out I'd never even been to Streatham. And that she loved it, that it was wonderful, that it was easy to get to work (and it is, half an hour door to door and it's the last station on the overland you're gauranteed to get a seat) and cheaper travelling by train and bus than the tube. Since the contentious BBC vote the council had freaked and started doing up the high street. Both of them went on and on at me. It was the only solution.

Move to Streatham.

I went to see a flat, technically I was 'just looking' but I got totally suckered. I was shown a dingy place for about as much as I could afford and I turned it down, at which point the agent 'remembered' another place around the corner for the same price. This place turned out to have a garden, as well as a seperate kitchen and bathroom (my wages didn't quite stretch to anything above a studio.) It was the first sign that maybe living in Streatham would be okay. I took a deep breath and went for it. That was around 18 months ago. So far, I haven't been mugged. I haven't been attacked in the street and I haven't been trapped in my flat unable to go out. It was not the horror story I was expecting. A couple of weeks after I moved in, I fell into conversation with an American who lives around the corner from me. "The thing you gotta remember about Streatham is," he told me over his drink, "the thing you gotta remember is that it's just like L.A." I laughed so hard I spat out a significant amount of vodka. He'd lived in L.A. a long time and was comparing the grotty high streets / nice residential areas. But still, it made me hoot.

Streatham. London's L.A.