Yesterday evening, my urbanist friend Denean Rowe and I finally did something we’d been talking about for ages. We put on a special screening of the classic 1985 London movie My Beautiful Laundrette, preceded by a locations walk around the parts of Nine Elms and Vauxhall where it was filmed and set.
About 35 people took part in the walk, which Denean, who has lived in the area all her life, designed and led. And all seats were taken at the fantastic Cinema Museum in Kennington, where the walkers completed their journey with the help of a short ride on a Number 196 at the end.
The whole event, originally Denean’s idea, was, I think, a great success. Eighteen of those who took part were On London supporters, who took up my offer of free tickets.
I’ve wrote a piece back in August about the film, and how it captured both the darkest sides of London in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it was nothing to see the initials “NF” – for National Front – scrawled on walls, and also glimpses of new freedoms and possibilities emerging in their midst.
The film’s core relationship, a romantic one between two young Londoners, one of them (Johnny, played by Daniel Day-Lewis) a white former bovver boy trying to change his ways, the other (Omar, played by Gordon Warnecke) brown, of Pakistani descent, looking after his ailing dad, was a bold one to portray at that time.
Watching it again – and on the original 16 millimetre film, too – underlined how big the often hard-won social attitude changes of that era were – and, as mainstream British politicians foment a new period of ethnic and cultural conflict, how important it is to protect them.
Denean’s walk began at the new Battersea Power Station tube station at the end of the Northern line extension in the regenerated Nine Elms. It quickly took us back in time, past housing of different eras and into the narrow Stewarts Road, which is straddled by a railway bridge beneath which Johnny and Omar, old schoolmates, are reunited in the film.
Other Wandsworth housing on the route told a real life story of post-war rebuilding in the form of the 1950s local authority Patmore “garden estate”. Along Wandsworth Road, we stopped to admire the sparkling pink Dirty Laundry. That premises had the same use 40 years ago, and makes a cameo appearance in My Beautiful Laundrette, as Omar, making a success of running the nearby concern belonging to his businessman uncle, considers expanding.
Finally, we came to the site of the laundrette of the film’s title, now occupied by flats close to Vauxhall in the area known as Little Portugal. My Beautiful Laundrette isn’t memorialised with a plaque, as it surely should be. Perhaps that will change.
Then it was on to the Cinema Museum, which I had never been to before. It is brilliant place, packed with movie artefacts and memorabilia, and with a fabulous bar (photo above) adjoining the screening area. A charity based at the old Master’s House buildings, it is run by volunteers and has no public funding. The museum is trying to raise £1 million to buy its home and secure its future. You can make a donation HERE.