Bored of excitement – The griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

My first customer of the year at Greenwich was a lady who I didn’t fancy, but also did a tiny bit on the grounds that she was wearing a National Portrait Gallery hoodie, and therefore looked very much how I imagine urban street youths would if they appeared in an Enid Blyton book.

It put me in mind of an occasion in which an acquintance of mine had his van stolen by two friendly thieves in Canning Town, who advised him that, contrary to his protests, they were going to steal his van, and that he was going to watch them. They then drove off within the speed limit, stopping at the traffic lights, where, this being summer, he could hear them retuning the radio through the open passenger window. It was, as he pointed out later, the acceptable face of theft.

[Hitting Read More now will reveal slum secrets of Spitalfields, among other things]

Less acceptable but still fairly lighthearted is the dismemberment of prostitutes in a Victorian slum. A downstairs room in Miller’s Court, which formerly occupied the spot where – yes, that’s right – the multistory car park is at the end of Artillery Row just off Bishopsgate, was described as ‘a butcher’s shambles’ by the first policeman to see it after Mary Kelly had had her face sliced off by Jack the Ripper there. This was, of course, long before the area became Ben-heavy. ‘Ben-heavy’ is a term I have been using to describe parts of London that have been invaded by immigrants from the middle class, all of whom seem to be called Amy or Alex or Abby or Henry or Hamish or Jenny or Jess or Jo or Josh or Jack or Ben or Barney or Lucy or Laura or Tom or Tilly, and who seem to live in a T Mobile advert until they are about thirty, and a Jacob’s Creek one thereafter. It’s basically a life of picnics, festivals, picnics at festivals, and saying ‘Can I get’ instead of ‘Can I have’ and ‘I’m good’ instead of ‘I’m fine’.

So awful were the conditions at Miller’s Court that the landlord couldn’t be arsed to wash the bloodstains from the walls or clear up bits of womb and such from the floor before letting the room out again. Miller’s Court was adjacent to Dorset Street (which today is the innocuous-looking service road alongside the car park), which was described as ‘the worst street in London’ by local authorities, and which in turn formed part of a massive slum called the Nichol which stretched from Spitalfields Market to Bromley-by-Bow. The Nichol housed tens of thousands of the ‘viscious poor’, who sound nice. Amusingly, when the area was flooded with police in the wake of the Ripper murders, community representatives held a huge meeting at a local pub to point out that it was the presence of the police that was the area’s only downside, and not the poverty, disease, rampant crime, prostitution, rippings, life expectancy of 24 and infant mortality rate of 80%, and, if you could just look beyond all that, just put it aside for a second, you’d see that it was great for I dunno dining out of an evening and handy for Liverpool Street station. It gives me a sense of quiet pride to reveal that the venue for this admirable rearguard action was none other than our beloved Duke of Wellington public house on Toynbee Street, from where we’ll be doing our podcasts in the next couple of months.

Anyway. Even Deptford is starting to show signs of Ben-heaviness these days, and it’s fucking horrible. When travelling through it on the way to Greenwich Market, I sit on the opposite side of the carriage to ensure that when the train passes within sight of the New Den – Millwall’s ground – I am still as far away from it as possible, and therefore doing my bit for West Ham. While Ben-heaviness is certainly not the worst thing that can happen – it’s not as bad as the decades of horrible-little-bastard heaviness which usually preceeds it, for example – it won’t last. It isn’t as if these people breed, is it.

Twitter – essentially a list of what I eat when I watch Deal Or No Deal.

Facebook – something of a walkout between Christmas and New Year when we went down to 102 members. Have subsequently bounced back to 103, though.

Photards: We have actually run out of photards, but we are off to Tottenham Court Road to get very annoyed while buying a camera on Friday, so we’ll have some new ones. In the meantime:

Top – alley leading into Greenwich Market.

Bottom: Gallant barrow with stock crates attached. The right hand tyre fell apart near Moorgate after the last day of trading 2009, and was buried with full honours.