It's Friday, so in the time honoured tradition of the Barnet Blogs, it's time for a joke. Once again, I am endebted to my Twitter buddy, wonderful author and all round wonderful chap Robert Wilkinson for providing us with this weeks Twitter.
I guessed orange, but it was chocolate; I guessed toffee, but it was peanut; I guessed raisin, but it was coffee...
— Robert Wilkinson (@robertwlk) July 14, 2023
I was wrong on so many Revels.
It has been a good week for me. On Monday, my band, The False Dots released our Summer video. We did our best to make a fun video that people with North London connections would enjoy. As a musician, you know you've got it right when people you don't know stop you and tell you they like it. It's happened to me three times so far. With our recent videos, people have been as interested in the video side as the music. Both of our major video featuring local landmarks have generated a huge amount about long lost pubs. When we released the Burnt Oak Boogie, lots of people asked me about The Bald Faced Stag, The Prince of Wales and The Broadway in Burnt Oak. When I was growning up, Burnt Oak was defined by its pubs. Burnt Oak was a white, working class area and the pubs reflected that. As we documented in the song, we had a residency at the Bald Faced Stag in 1983-84. When I say this, many people have asked about it, expecting tales of Wild West style brawls, shenanigans etc. What surprises people is that we had no such experiences. It may be because my then girlfriends family were well known faces, who locals were a bit way of. We used to do the gigs, get well looked after and well paid and go home. What at first surprised me was the musical knowledge of many of the locals. When I'd been in the Stag before we started playing there, fearsome looking chaps smoking roll ups would scowl at you if you weren't a familiar face. Once we started playing there, I found many had encyclopedic knowledge of various musical genre's, especially Ska and Mod music. After a couple of gigs at the pub, we were well known enough to walk in and the same faces that used to scare the hell out of me when I was a teenager would bring down singles for us to play between the sets. The Stag was their pub and we respected that. The fact that we gave them a good night out and would play the music they wanted to hear was appreciated. I used to prefer playing there to posher boozers, where people were too respectable to enjoy themselves. The False Dots have always encouraged people to get involved, whether it was inviting local punk poets up to do a piece, getting the audience to become our "Dance troupe" or inviting people up for a jam (where we can), it's been the best bit of the journey.
About seven years ago, I started to think that people had forgotten how to enjoy themselves. Pubs like The Stag simply don't exist. There are a number of reasons. Demographic shift is probably the main one, but the banning of smoking in pubs was also a huge factor. Pubs used to exist to sell the beer, in as large quantities as possible, to punters. Now they are more interested in selling food. As a result, they've become boring. That is why I love the last few outposts of proper boozerdom, such as The Dublin Castle in Camden Town.
With our new video, we feature three pubs. Two, The Beehive and The Sparrowhawk, both in Edgware are long gone. In their day, they were iconic spots. Maybe a quarter of the population of HA8 existed at one time as a result of people hooking up in one or other of them. The Beehive had a reputation. A bunch of rather heavy bikers would deal illicit substances at the back. As fights and bad behaviour were bad for business, it was actually a far more laid back place than many people realised. For me, Monday night was the best. This was the night that the Au Pairs had their night off. It had a good juke box and was always fun. The Sparrowhawk was the local pub that did music. There was a big Rockabilly and rock and roll scene there, Friends of The Earth would host gigs, usually of hippy bands. Local charities would hold dinner/dances there. Now it is a Tesco. The Beehive is an Indian restaurant.
The third pub we feature, and this was a point I was trying to make subtly, was the Orange Tree. This was always a far more up market pub. You could get a 251 bus from the Bald Faced Stag to the Orange Tree and go from an earthy, working class pub, to a doyen of footballers, accountants and Estate Agents. The cars in the Orange Tree car park were always the best motors you'd see in North West London. The Orange Tree was a gastro pub before Gastro Pubs were invented. Whilst the patrons of the Stag have largely died or moved away, The Orange Tree goes from strength to strength.
If someone had come from 2023 to see us in 1983 playing at the Stag and said that in 40 years, of the Stag, Beehive, Sparrowhawk and Orange Tree, only the Orange Tree would remain, I would have thought you an idiot. But the truth is that the demographic change that his transformed Burnt Oak has not happened in Totteridge and it probably wont. I suspect that the Orange Tree may well be the last pub left in the Borough of Barnet at some point in the next 50 years. But, hey, what the hell do I know
I will never truly understand the absurdities of life. Reading the future is always a thankless task. What seems to be permanent and part of life, simply disappears and new normals emerge. The demise of Woolworths, the disappearance of Banks, the demise of the the White Lion football ground, the movement of Barnet FC to Harrow. I cannot imagine where things will be in another 40 years. I'll be 100 years old by then, if I'm still around. I wonder if I'll be making videos mourning the passing of Iceland and all the luxury flats that are the blight of the Borough of Barnet? It is worth remembering that in a capitalist society, things only exist because people want them. The UK's population would be dramatically falling if it wasn't for immigration. If Suella Braverman gets her way and immigration stops, in 40 years time we won't need these awful monstrosities. Who knows, maybe they'll be knocking them down and building decent houses where people are not housed in prison cell like tiny spaces, with no gardens and no sunshine?
Anyway, if you haven't seen it, please have a shufti at our new video
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