In 1966 the Italian director Michaelangelo Antonioni made the film Blow-Up, about a photographer’s accidental involvement with a gun murder. In one scene David Hemmings is driving his open-top Rolls Royce along a street in which all the buildings are painted red. This is the Stockwell Road, and the buildings were the premises of the motorcycle dealers Pride & Clarke.
The Brixton Academy used to be The Astoria cinema. I once saw an Andy Warhol film there – Lonesome Cowboys. I remember thinking how funny it was and wondering how much of the film was Warhol’s and how much Paul Morrissey’s. But I don’t remember much else about it – the plot or any of the scenes – except someone shooting, or threatening to shoot, Taylor Mead.
Violette Bushell was a pupil at the school in Stockwell Road and as a teenager went dancing at The Swan. In 1940 she married Etienne Szabo, a captain in the Free French Army. After he was killed at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942, she joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and became a secret agent in occupied France. In 1944 she was captured and tortured by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp where she was shot in January 1945.
I usually get my hair cut at a barber’s a few doors away from the Academy. The barber is a Greek Cypriot with a strange haircut – a darkish crop except for a big white fringe in the front. When he’s cutting my hair I can feel his stomach pressing into my shoulder. You don’t hear too much about Cyprus these days – when I was a child the news was always full of stories about EOKA shooting British soldiers.
The J-Bar was a nightclub in Stockwell Road. A detached, squarish building painted blue and yellow; it was closed down in October 2006 after a police raid in which drugs and two loaded handguns were found hidden in loudspeakers. That was the latest in a series of incidents at the J-Bar, which included reports of gunshots and on another occasion a large mob throwing bottles and stones at a person who was trying to leave the club.
There’s a small hole in the window of the William Hill betting shop. I guess it must be a bullet hole from a couple of days ago, when those kids shot the little girl at the shop next door.
On 21 March 2005, at the Brixton Academy in Stockwell Road, gunfire halted a concert by the American rapper Nas. 20 minutes into his show a gun went off at the back of the stalls, then there was a second round of shots which caused pandemonium in the auditorium and a rush for the doors, causing a bottleneck. 30 police, many of them armed, arrived within half an hour, by which time most concertgoers had been evacuated. There were questions as to how a gun could have been smuggled past the security cordon of a bag search and a handheld metal detector.
I stop to buy a paper in the Stockwell Convenience Store. Whenever I’ve gone in there the African guy behind the counter is having a mobile phone conversation – I don’t think I’ve ever heard him speak directly to a customer. I glance through the paper as I walk up the road: ‘Two Britons shot dead during Florida holiday’, ‘Rebel fighters have been found shot in the head’, ‘Syrian forces shoot dead eight protestors’.
All Bout Money (ABM) are a gang located on and around the Stockwell Park Estate. ABM and the Lambeth-based 031 gang fell out over a minor issue in 2006-07 and have been in conflict ever since. On 29 March 2011, three 031 members riding bicycles chased two ABM members into the Stockwell Food and Wine Shop on Stockwell Road and fired shots into the shop. They missed the two youths, but bystanders Thusha Kamaleswaran, aged five, was hit in the chest and Roshan Selvakumar, 35, suffered a head wound.
A youth wearing a black t-shirt with ‘Son of a Gun’ printed across it pushes a woman in a wheelchair along the pavement, forcing me to step into the road. The woman’s also dressed in black and inhaling rapid, exaggerated puffs of her cigarette. She starts thumping her chest and shouts, ‘I’m expecting a shitload!’ ‘You’re paranoid,’ says the boy.
In the 18th century tea was highly taxed and the smuggling of tea into the country was big business. Much of it came from Holland and was distributed from the south coast of England along a network of secret routes to the main market in London, the centre of the official tea trade. The dealers often met with the smugglers at The Swan in the Stockwell Road, near the warehouses, owned or leased by the smuggling gangs, where the tea was stored. The smugglers’ route to Stockwell ran across Clapham Common and, one night in 1743, Custom and Excise officers were tipped off about a gang that would be crossing the common with horses loaded with tea. The armed revenue men lay in wait to ambush the gang. The smugglers – said to number more than twenty – arrived and stood their ground when confronted. Outnumbered, the officers retreated as the smugglers fired their guns and moved on with their contraband, cheering as they went.
I pass by the Spiritualist Church. My Aunt Elsie was a spiritualist medium. Her sister, my grandmother, said that she became a spiritualist after my father was killed in the Second World War, shot at the Battle of the Reichswald in February 1945.
On 27 December 1994, Wayne Hutchinson, recently released from a psychiatric hospital, went to Mixes club in Stockwell Road and shot the doorman twice at point-blank range, fatally injuring him. The previous day he had blasted the windows of a house on the Stockwell Park Estate with the same sawn-off shotgun. On December 31 he stabbed a man, who happened to be walking along the Stockwell Road, in the chest. The next day he stabbed a man and a woman in a shop in Landor Road, killing the woman. He later told police that he had a gift of knowing when people were ‘taking the piss’ and that all those people he had attacked over the Christmas period ‘deserved what happened’.
I go into a Portuguese café to buy a loaf of bread. There are a lot of Portuguese cafés along this bit of the road and there are always customers in them, drinking coffee and watching football on TV. It wasn’t that long ago that Portugal had a full-scale revolution and hardly anyone was killed, just four demonstrators shot by the secret police.
On 22 July 2005 Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician, took the no.2 bus from Brixton, up Stockwell Road and got off outside The Swan. He crossed over Clapham Road, entered the Tube station, walked down the escalator and boarded a train. Three specialist firearms police officers followed him into the carriage and shot him seven times in the head. He died at the scene.
I look in the window of Brixton Cycles, opposite the school. I don’t want to buy anything; I just like looking at the bikes and the skateboards. I notice that one of the BMX bikes is called a Bombshell and another a Roadkill.
On 3 May 1922 a war memorial was unveiled on the triangle of common land at the top of Stockwell Road to commemorate the deaths of 574 local men in the First World War. Five of them once lived in Stockwell Road. The architect Frank Twydals Dear designed the memorial, a clock tower built of Portland stone.
The Swan seems to specialize in tribute bands. When I walk past I often note their names on the posters outside, like Wham!Duran and Guns N Maiden. When Frankie Goes to Hollywood were popular in the 1980s, a band called Paddy Goes to Holyhead played there, which I remember made me laugh.
Tony Rickaby
Tony Rickaby studied at St. Martin’s School of Art and his conceptual works, installations and paintings have been shown throughout Europe and the US. His current practice concerns historical and autobiographical reflections on parts of South London, where he lives. He has written for Aspidistra, Athregeum, Streetcake and Young, Fresh & Relevant and produced animations and visual poems for Drunken Boat, Locus Novus, Otholiths and Suss. www.tonyrickaby.co.uk
I enjoyed your piece. Fascinating.I wasn’t really aware of the extent of your practice.