Vale of Health Special

To the Vale of Health this weekend for some door-related wandering. An impromptu visit, so a heartbreaking set of pictures, taken as they were with Ms.Door's camera (which is built out of tin and twigs by a stereo manufacturer) as opposed to my own (produced more recently and solidly by a printer company, and containing at least a couple of useful buttons, and not flashing for no fucking reason in broad daylight on the sunniest afternoon of the year).

There are about forty houses in the Vale, and some fantastic doors, ranging somewhat beyond the high-quality Victoriana above, and into something a bit more ambitious. The magnificently crafted door below, for example, contains the whole of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's career in a single 8x3 frame, not that you'd be able to tell because it's blurred like an epileptic five-year-old's holiday snap from the sides of Stromboli, a picture he took while rollerskating on a trampoline.


So a revisit will be in order. Not that that's a problem, because the Vale of Health is a strange, strange, wonderful place, and a constant pole in any "how different parts of London are from each other, or anywhere else" equation. (This counts double on Bank Holidays, when the workers from the fair on Hampstead Heath stay adjacent to the Vale, on a hastily constructed caravan site.)

An enviably located hamlet, it pleases partly because it isn't, or wasn't, several things you'd think it is, or was. It looks like a postcard English village and gives clues, with its name and its lack of shops and pubs, that it's some sort of temperance Saltaire or Bourneville - a small factory town built for the health and wellbeing of a philanthropist's workers. But the clues mislead. "The Vale of Health" is not somewhere that Tudor kings came to take the waters, nor was it remotely healthy. A malarial marsh that was drained and built-up, possibly not quite in that order, the name was the invention of the property developers who presumably thought "it's sort of in a valley, and if you ignore the mosquitoes then it's cleaner than Clerkenwell: We call it Pleasant Valley? Elixir Green? Vale of Health!". This book is, I think, a documentary of the early stages of the settlement. It's only a matter of time before estate agents start calling neighbourhoods Eternal Life And Fellatio Borders.

So it's not healthy, and nor was it remotely model. The lack of shops and inns is not because of any planned Quakerism, but because if the Vale was a factory town, then it was a factory town *but for poets* And you can well imagine where that leads. Things get out of hand, and get shut down. Byron, Shelley and Coleridge all have connections there, and the key sentence in the above-linked history site is "Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), on his release from prison for libelling the Prince Regent, went to live in the Vale where he stayed until 1819".

Oh, to live amongst those who have libelled the Prince Regent.

Later blue plaques include D.H.Lawrence and Rabindranath Tagore (fine door for the great man, predictably enough with the flash bouncing off it in my photo, so some other time) as this century the Vale lived up to its publicity and became a model of a village of the type where, to move there, you have to carefully scan the obituaries of the Ham & High and be able to pounce quickly and brutally with the contents of an entire hedge fund. Sacha Baron-Cohen is having trouble getting his rebuild through the planning department. It was more fun in Napoleonic times, but the doors are better now.

I mean, look at the tessellation on these honeys. The owner of the top one was even good enough to backlight it for me.

Alanis Morissette

The door to the door shop is just beyond disappointing.

The Fantastic Door

Frustration abounds today.

I had meant to bring you 'My Favourite Door', in the sense that it's the door that, although of very little other interest, has brought me the most pleasure of recent times. It opens to an Edwardian house and details, in what may very well be homemade stained-glass, what appears to be a huge cock bursting out of a rippling ocean. It never fails to brighten the day. Sometimes I make a special detour to see it.

But it's cursed, the donger-door. Several attempts have been made to photograph it, all ending with various defects of shade or focus, and today I got distracted by the door above, snapped it, and then was told by my camera to charge its failing batteries just as the light became perfect, and I narrowed in on the subject and it stopped looking like the lighthouse it was supposed to be and became what it was and is and will always be. A big, rising cock.

My grandfather was fascinated, in an amateur fashion, by the relationship between the penis and English architecture. He literally could not pass a church without meandering on in some detail about "great stone phalluses spurting skywards to God". Preferring, as did the rest of the family, the more uteral pleasure of the synagogue (warm dark room, limited scope for movement, meaningless background hum, free refreshments), he made a less-than-ideal travelling companion around the Renaissance towns of Italy where, as he pointed out to the locals, they hedged their bets by offering both the cock *and* the teat.

Anyway, he would be delighted to see the mezuzzah on the right-hand side of the photographed door, believing that world geography comprised only three distinct regions: a small part where there were Too Many Jews (Crown Heights, Stamford Hill, Israel), a vast swathe of Not Enough Jews (Idaho, West London, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine), and a minuscule area where it was 'just right' (Upper West Side, Hampstead, His Flat).

A couple of generations later, I still feel considerably safer, perhaps through sense-memory, in areas where I can see a few mezuzzahs on the doorframes, particularly next to a door like this one. In a row of solid 1840s semi-detached villas, this is an unimpeachably restored door. It's the sort of anthropomorphic door that would come to life in a Marvel comic and save the metropolis with its solid righteousness, catching villains in the web of its fanlight, before being written out because it's too difficult to draw.

The cheeks of the door, in contrast to the symmetry of everything else, are a random patchwork of yellow, red, orange and two shades of blue, but this designless feature among the order serves only to improve the overall effect.

I can't even begin to think how much a door like this would cost, but the scratched R-reg Peugeot outside the house suggests sacrifices have been made and domestic priorities are in the right place. I would, however, be tempted to turn the letterbox into a smiley mouth.

[Hello chumster! Thanks for the write-up...particularly the bit about pointless shite, which might be the idea. In his diaries, Alan Bennett (whose door I might photograph at some point) arrived home from a trip to find his dustbin contained several turds which had dissolved in the rain to make a kind of shit soup. On slopping it out, he made an etymological distinction: shit is the self-contained shapes, shite is what's smeared round the edges of the bin. So thank you, I think.]

No Logo

I have very little idea what's going on with this one. A random accident in a wood-stencil shop? Post-industrialist Berlin Ostalgie? A side-relief in a 30s Italian railway station? Slavonic braille? A coded comment about Facebook? The whole of 20th Century History is probably in this constructivist collage, but it would take a fuck of a lot of deciphering to figure it out.

Taken simply, the elements could be a crown, an indeterminate block, a lightning bolt/reversed Nazi ideogram, a star, and perhaps the top of a tree. You can now rearrange those elements to make up a short-story or a semiotic treatise. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing the same to make a door. This door is saying "My owner has Art. He is Alternative and Grainy. He is an Enigma (Which is not at all Empty). He has Offcuts and a tin of paint from a Shipyard." And he can think he's in a squat in 90s Bethnal Green when in fact he's in Dartmouth Park and through the door his house is worth north of £800k. Boldly, there are no jaws to the letterbox, which given its height and the fact that there's a pub opposite seems a positive invitation.

You'll notice that the brickwork on the side of the door is irregular, which is likely because the house is on the banks of the (underground) River Fleet. The Fleet rises at Highgate Ponds and empties into the Thames at Blackfriars, cutting past this door on its way down. Formerly bucolic, the Fleet became an open sewer during the Victorian population expansion of London, and subsequently became a closed sewer when it was cased and cobbled around the time this house went up in the 1860s. I've just realised that the door-piece might be an attempt at a ship, albeit not a very seaworthy one. It's like a ship design transmuted through the mind of one of the candidates for 'The Apprentice', who's understandably mistaken "business creativity" with "the first thing that comes into my head".

In most pictures of the doors of this neighbourhood you'll see strange angles and slopes cut into or around the doorframes as the terraces flow resistantly if slowly back into the river. The test when buying a house seems to be to lie a baby on a varnished floor, and if it doesn't slide off gurgling into the opposite wall then you're good to go.

I like the bell though.

I'm thinking about my doorbell

And we begin.

I've long had the daydream idea of producing a large, glossy hardback detailing a social and pictorial history of front doors, inspired largely by the fact that one of S.'s friends somehow managed to finagle a five-figure research grant from a German university for a Ph.D. on door-entry systems. If the buttons on the sides are worth the big Euros, then how much for the doors themselves?

Very little, I'd wager. Perhaps the price of a few copies at Zwemmers bookshop, which has closed down anyway, no doubt because it was usually window-displaying coffee-table books about doors.

As I'm not blessed with the skills required to dupe continental academia out of fantastic sums (I imagine the man must have gone in there like something from a Marx Brothers film: cheque and pen in hand, broken briefcase scattering papers, fast-talking the Dean into signing while apes and peacocks whirled around the room and his brother propositioned a dancing-girl with a horn and a kazoo) the idea is surfacing here. We'll have a door at the top of each post. I'll talk about the door and its history and what it represents. I may wander a little.

The doors above, which I like a lot, are at an estimate from 1900. The houses they're attached to are relatively late additions to a Victorian neighbourhood where, going up the hill, you can trace the houses from around 1840 to 1860 to a spate of 1880s to these...solid redbrick, no longer London brick, houses of a second-tier neighbourhood that had achieved respectability if not desirability. They are lovely doors, numbers seven and five.

If you click in for a closer look, you'll see that the stained glass designs are identical, the pleasing nine-panel conforming to Aristotelian (and hence late-Victorian) ideals of order, symmetry and, with the central ring, definiteness. They are fine things to come home to and to open, and be ported into your interior life. But how does Number 5 actually get into his house? I'm sure he walks up his path every night and looks over to his neighbour-door with disdain at the shiny suburban brass handle that's latched onto an otherwise admittedly fine piece of wood. He prefers the pale blue to the red, but still, it works a nice contrast and at least he's got the original glass. But the bottom lock on Number 5 tells a hundred stories of someone shambling wearily home and literally opening the door with the key: turning the latch and pushing with the key-hand. Number 5: you've already knocked your lock out of kilter, you're now just waiting to break your key in it and with call-out fees and VAT and it is a very *old* lock and *we wouldn't want to damage your door*, you're probably looking at a £300 hit in the very near future. And for that sort of money you could sort out your damp-proof course, which incidentally you might want to have a look at.

I'll also point out that Number 5 has the same sort of doorbell as I do. I'm not sure what they're called, but if they're called the 'oblong-of-plastic-that-might-as-well-be-fucking-empty' then it wouldn't be too far away from the mark. Mine, and presumably his, came with the house when bought and is such a hassle to change that you play mental tricks convincing yourself that life is actually preferable without a functioning doorbell, in much the same way as a man in love with a vegetarian can convince themselves that life is preferable without meat, or a man in Hull can forget about the existence of any other town. As Dostoyevsky said: "Man can get used to anything: the beast". This rather ignores the reality of hiking to the far end of Regis Road every other morning, walking past the tip and the car-pound to collect any missed deliveries, or for that matter letters bigger than the stamp itself, not that they get delivered to the right address anyway, and wonderful though it is to collect my neighbours' parcels from the depot I'm sure that they'd drop mine round too only my doorbell doesn't fucking work.

The bell is supposed to be a wireless wonderbell, and you put three expensive batteries the size of vases into a separate box with the approximate dimensions of a 1980s midi Hi-Fi system. The bell will ring, deafeningly, the first three times it is pushed. On one of those occasions the ill-fitting grey knob in the middle of the bell will stick into the casing, and the deafening noise will continue. The bell will not work again. On opening the box, you'll find that the batteries, which are large and corrosive, have leaked. You put the box away and do without a doorbell. Two months later, with the optimism of the forgetful, you buy some new batteries. Repeat. I'm sure this also happens to Number 5. I'd ring his bell and ask him, if I thought it would do any good.

I seem to have wandered. I've considered the headline "Solipsistic Bell End" for this post, but that would only create the right impression...Next time I promise to maybe talk a little more about doors.