I love the swoop of Leighton Road glissading down to Kentish Town, I love her songs, I love her reasons, her terraced houses and her seasons: the thirties flats where if you look you’ll find a plaque to Donald Cook whose rent strike back in sixty-four shook Camden Council to its core, the Assembly House where Burton starred, the gatehouse to our boulevard where suddenly the sky grows vast and Hampstead Heath is clear at last across the railway and the lights, blue air by day and starred by night, where on a white hospital roof that strange menorah stands aloof. And canopied by London planes flickered by sun and shone by rains, the softly cambered speedbumped road where cyclists mock the highway code and Russians, Irish and Somalis engage in endless smiling parleys and smokers grouped outside the Gloucester sup Guinness on their endless roster. Down by the flats in early spring I’ve heard the speckled thrushes sing, seen cherry trees agog with flower kaleidoscope an April shower, a spilling sloshing eyeshine gladness springtime Leighton full of madness when all the folk of Canteloupe eat tropic fruit and loop the loop. We have a secret worth the keeping: that under us the fields lie sleeping and country names now label blocks of flats with beds of hollyhocks, passed by chattering under-nines all holding hands in straggly lines: a new and eager generation remakes our old north London nation.
Reprinted from Roy Lockett’s collection Kentish Town and Other Loves (Hearing Eye, London 2010) by kind permission of the publisher.