Substack #4: Britpop in Walthamstow
Avoiding Oasis on the allotment, remembering the dogs.
I was a few days late with the last post, as life got in the way of the writing, so this Episode #4 feels as if it is coming hot on the heels of #3.
Last weekend most of the UK population lost their collective minds over tickets going on sale for a set of Oasis reunion gigs in 2025. (For those not caught up in the frenzy, Oasis are a commercially-successful Beatles-influenced rock band formed in Manchester in the 1990s, famous for being part of the Britpop/Cool Britannia era and infamous for the long-running saga of the Gallagher brothers Liam and Noel repeatedly fighting, falling out and breaking up the band.)
The Oasis ticket sale made headline national news all weekend, mainly because of the huge stampede to buy tickets and a ‘dynamic pricing’ system allowing the UK’s major ticket companies to hike the prices as folk were already in the online queue - more demand equals higher prices. Tickets which were £160 at the start of the sale were well over double, or more, if you were successful in getting through the lobby, the waiting room, the queue and finally to the actual ticket shop to pay. Of course, the news didn’t end there, as many tickets purchased at whatever price subsequently ended up on ticket resale websites at vastly inflated amounts.
All this Oasis hoo-ha made me think about how food and allotment pricing works, and whether I should keep a tally of the plot’s rent and running costs versus sale price value of the produce over the year.
This week’s Plot Shot
Dominating the plot this week is our statuesque cardoon, well over two metres high this summer and now actually about seven plants which have sprouted from the original. It is dying off now, so the leaves are yellow-brown and crispy.
We use its tall purple-blue thistle flowers (now faded) to attract pollinators to the plot, but we haven’t yet tried harvesting any of the huge spiny leaves for eating. I’m told the leaves need blanching for a few weeks being kept in the dark before they are cut down, then braised in a good stock (gratin de cardons, anyone?).
Current plot jobs
As summer comes to a close, we’re prepping the plot for its autumn/winter changeover, when we weed and dig over all the raised beds, pull up the summer crops and plant new ones which overwinter.
There are brassica seedlings (Cavolo nero, sprouting broccoli and Brussels sprouts) waiting in the greenhouse for space in the beds, but the beds we need are still all full of tomato plants.
Harvesting now
All the tomatoes are ripening at once! Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. We’ve grown six varieties this season, all new to us and all from the lovely folks at Franchi Seeds of Italy, and they’ve done well so far. The plants are all an unruly mess, as we’ve not bothered with pinching out or stripping lower leaves. They’re fully feral.
Our best variety this year is ‘Cuor Di Bue’, an Italian heirloom beefsteak tomato shaped like an ox-heart and as big as my hand. The fruit are absolutely huge, with orange splashes on their shoulders. The ‘Costoluto Fiorentino’ are catching up for size, all bright solid cartoon red and ribby, and we’ve had kilos of lovely piccolo plums from two ‘Muscato’ plants.
Making and eating
We’re still recovering after last week’s epic jam making marathon, and the range is *almost* clean of all the sticky crime scene spillage. We’re jammed out, and out of jars for the time being.
The main making has been our ripening tomatoes providing many breakfasts (mini plums fried with rose harissa - lovely) and much fresh tomato sauce for pasta.
We’ve also eaten more fresh ‘Brown Turkey’ figs than in any other summer. The first crop of twenty-odd large fruit has been eaten, and we hopefully have a second crop which will be ready later in the autumn.
Meanwhile, I have heard a lot about using fig leaves at this time of year to flavour cordials, sugar and drinks. I’ve never used fig leaves, so please do drop a comment if you have any go-to ideas for them.
Local E17 talent slot
I couldn’t find any links between Oasis and Walthamstow, so strong is the East-17 association with the ‘Stow. However, all the hoo-ha over Oasis ticket prices did remind me of the ‘Battle of Britpop’ between Blur and Oasis in 1995 when the two bands were slugging it out over who had better sales in the UK singles chart.
Blur’s 1994 album ‘Parklife’ *does* have a connection to E17, as most of the photos in the CD booklet - although not the album cover image, apparently - are of the band doing their best to look cool on the concrete terraces of the old Walthamstow Stadium, back in the day when it was still a dog track (a.k.a. a venue for greyhound racing).
Walthamstow Stadium was still a working dog track when I moved to Walthamstow. ‘Going down the dogs’ was considered a cheap local night out, mainly because a plastic basket of fried chicken and chips with a beer at the trackside restaurant was a bargain, and the price of the meal included a few bets on the said dogs.
Disreputable behaviour
Also part of the old Walthamstow Stadium was an onsite piano bar and nightclub, Charlie Chan’s, once something of an East London institution. On Saturday nights it was full of wide-eyed lower league footballers, would-be gangsters and lots of wide East End boys on a night out. Classy it was not. Disreputable, definitely.
The entrance via the basement car park wasn’t the club’s best feature. It was dodgy, dark and smelt bad. I always suspected that Charlie Chan’s was trading on the former glories of the footballer David Beckham having earnt his pocket money as a ‘pot boy’ collecting empty glasses but there are plenty of online stories about it being a great nightclub, back in the day.
In the early 2000s there were a lot of elderly greyhounds shuffling the E17 streets and living their best retired lives on sofas, as greyhound racing dwindled as a sport and Walthamstow gradually gentrified. The Stadium site was sold to the housing developer London & Quadrant in 2008 to be converted into flats.
The 1930s art deco front range of the old stadium is Grade II listed, which means it had to be retained as part of the development, and the neon sign was restored in 2016. It is still a local landmark - E17 shops sell photos of it as postcards and prints.
Charlie Chan’s and the Stadium are long gone, but there’s life in the old neon dog yet.