The Dulwich Hamlet, SLHC Podcasting & Angela Carter: a round-up

Time for a round-up (and, no, not of the gulag kind)…

First, I visited The Dulwich Hamlet and recorded this charming little vlog about the day:

Secondly, have you listened to the South London Hardcore podcast yet? You should. Aside from their football alleigances the SLHC team are a pair of decent, hardworking, sponsorship-obsessed transpontines debating the issues that effect us everyday: the capitalisation of “south London”, our cultural heritage, and international antichrono terrorism.

I had the pleasure of meeting up with them in the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre (drinking that lovely £1 Mamuśka coffee) to record an episode about my transpontinist mayoral campaign which should be up next week, so I’m giving you the heads up to listen to the other episodes before I blow them out of the water.

And thirdly… It’s twenty years since my fellow transpontine figurehead Angela Carter passed away. The as ever librarian fantastique republique Transpontine has dished out a lovely overview of her Southdom writings. I was once told, by a madly staring wide-eyed convulsively shaking gentleman at a squat party no less, that the exact moment he had heard of Angela’s death someone (never identified) launched a brick though their flat window. I bet Iain Sinclair would love that, the muppet.

Let her epitaph be the beginning our own:

“When the bourgeoisie got priced out of, first, Hampstead and Highgate – how long ago it seems! – and then from Camden Town and Islington, and the alternatives got priced (who’d have thought it?) out of Ladbroke Grove, there was nowhere else for all, repeat all, the poor sods to go, was there? That’s typical south London usage. Every statement is converted to a rhetorical question.”

Hmmm… controversial lack of a capital “S” there, Angie… On top of that, in today’s London Planned city of state-negotiated mass-produced gentrification (regeneration, urban renaissance and other cat-belly-tickling euphemisms) the old days of a few posh buggers drip-drip-dripping down here seems positively quaint, almost idyllic. Sort of.

Keep it real* comrades.

* = Enjoy defining that one.