Topophilia, Kenton.

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If I was writing a coffee table travel book on "Kenton"the introductory paragraph might read:

"Kenton is edgy. Kenton is placed neatly on the petite dinner table that is England's Home Counties. A table covered with a starched white tablecloth as crisp as cardboard, dressed with our finest silver and crystal. The mighty candlestick of Nelson’s Column, the flower arrangement that is Hyde Park. Baker Street and Euston, the matching cruet set. Kenton, oh peripheral, peripheral Kenton. 29 minutes from Marble Arch. Right where the side plate should be. Feed the romantic gourmet that exists in your soul, Kenton is the prime locale on which to plonk your garlic bread.”

And the book would have a picture of the Glynn’s Bakery near Gooseacre Park, with a scratch and sniff panel beside it honouring the crusty granary loaf counter on a Saturday morning.

Fortunately, I have not written a coffee table book about Kenton. Nor am I about to..

Most of the amateur travel writers I’ve come across believe they have to whack out some some history about a place, telling us how it was worse then that it is now, or how the rich folk were repsonsible for improving everything and making anything of lasting importance. They use phrases like "located on" when the word “on” would have done fine. Them’s the rules.

I can't be doing with that, nor can I be doing with knee jerk tory histories and auto response tory geographies - unless they are modern and relevant. And not tory. I shall ask you to lob in your own dates if you need them, and I will hope that you remember to factor in the price for inflation and fluctuating currency rates wherever you want a "King X did Y at a cost of Z" reference. Otherwise all the hard work appears as if it was done on the cheap.

Here we go then. Kenton.

Saxons travelled through Kenton. Yonks back. Many of them paused to set up farmsteads and clear glades among the oak trees. Mr Coaena was one of them. Him, his family and a matching set of big axes.

Mr Coeana helped the area previously known as "Close to London Beside ze Vembley" to get a new name. The Saxonian Mr 'Coeana' morphed into a modern 'Ken'. The olde worlde 'Tun' - for farm – transformed into 'ton'. Coeana's Farm. Coeana's Tun. Coeana's Ton. Ken’s Ton. Kenton. Bingo. Even if you aren’t an academically re-launched and re-wardrobed TV history professor with curly hair and a bald patch, a Simon Schama type, it’s not too much of a leap. Coana’s Farm to Kenton, pretty straightforward to me.

Other write-about-the-old-years fanatics have given us reason to believe that Herr Coena and his Frauleins raced their ox carts along Kenton's highways. This is based on some ropey evidence; seven half rotten wooden axles that they dug up in the summer of 1927 on Honeypot Lane. These days it's mainly 140 buses that run along Honeypot Lane, therefore in years to come it will be stainless steel hub caps they’ll be digging up. The 140 serves the present day peasant classes as they wend their weary way to Heathrow Airport, the first leg on their cheap trip to Lanzarote. The 140s going the other way transport little lads and lasses off to practice their doggy paddle in Northolt Swimming Pool.

The 140 may not be as earthy as a rotten ox cart or as exotic as an oriental Hong Kong tram but when you are a tourist in Kenton tootling along Honeypot Lane I’m afraid that’s all you’re going to get.

The road featured in the photograph above runs off Honeypot Lane. You can walk down it after you've hopped off the bus with your soggy towels. It is a typical Coena-tun residential "avenue". An avenue without trees, meaning the Council's street namers lied. They only got round to planting trees on that avenue after I’d upped sticks. They don't quite give it Champs Elysee status, but they do complement the telegraph poles.

In the far distance you can pick out the Kenton Road. The 183 bus runs along that. (The 183 trips you away to Golders Green where Bob Monkhouse lived. My father went round to Bob's after he had been burgled. Together they had a cup of tea and then got on with fixing Bob's patio door.) There are dozens of streets like these in Kenton. In fact I doubt there is any other kind in Kenton. This is it. What you see above is what you get. The sub urban sup topian lot.

The upside to this street is that if you turn left at the end - when you get to Kenton Road - you arrive at Barn Hill.

We used to cycle up 'Barnill' and fish its pathetic pond on her drizzle capped peak. In the chilling boredom we'd gaze for second upon second over the distant splendour of London and the suburban splat of Kenton splodged below. You could even see down into Wembley Stadium, and occasionally hear the faint distant roars of an evening international crowd.

Alas, my father never escorted me up Barn Hill to declaim, "One day, son, this will all be yours", like fathers are supposed. I believe he would have preferred me to have had the North Sea Oilfields. But you can’t see Aberdeen and the North Sea from Barn Hill. So he stopped at home.

Aye, as I dab away the tears from my eyes, I remember that this strip of bland Kentonian tarmac, the street that lead to a majestic peak, a rue lined by telegraph poles and paved with wonky slabs, a strreet perpetually shrouded in "overcast with intermitent showers", yes, I realise that this strip of bland was my first road travelled.

My way.

Frank Sinatra did a song about it.

In the late Georgian years rural entrepreneurs from the Midlands coaxed their horses to haul hay barges down the Grand Union Canal from Birmingham into London. The Grand Union Canal runs fairly close to Kenton.

After the barge managers supervised their wage labour offload the hay bales into London's stables they made the downtrodden proletariat re-load the barges with horse dung to make even more cash out of the return trip. This seems fair considering a week earlier it had been their hay. They boated it back up and out to London’s northern dairy farming suburbs where more recent day Coena's flung it over the fields in and around Kenton. To compliment the night soil. I reckon it must have stunk big time. Tsch. And to think we complain about nuclear dumping off picturesque atolls in the Pacific and radioactive Japanese tuna.

Let's fast forward (...A fast forward is where a team can skip all remaining challenges and advance to the next pit stop. There are two fast forwards in the whole of the race...) to the 1840s and the Victorians.

The Victorians decided Kenton needed sewage farms. Three! They built three sewage works in Kenton. It may seem a tad excessive, but who are we to question? Leave these decisions to the elected experts, I say. Anyway, to Kenton’s Brand Image rescue came the Edwardians. It dawned on the Eds that three sewage plants really was a bit much, and that getting labelled as the town with three sewage plants may make it difficult to attract in wealthy businesses to pay the council's rates. So even though they had to film Downton Abbey the Eds transformed two of Kenton's sewage processing works into recreation grounds.

Recreation and outdoor life for the young was all the thing. Kids, like me, were encouraged to use parks and sports grounds every week to grow healthy, team sporty and strong. Without bandy legs and squiffy backs. Then we would be able to fight tough and rough in any upcoming war. (In the not too long previous Boer and Crimean War hoolies there were quite a few batches of us male working class gammas that got rejected by the army medical inspectors because of poor health. Oh yes, the recruiting officers were none too chuffed and the generals were more than slightly worried. Recreation grounds.)

Around the same time and a wee while later, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Metropolitan Railway’s housing developers leapt on the Edwardian's deodorantal environmental improvement, and went berserk building the Dun Roamin style houses you see in the photo above. They sprouted up in private estates all over the fields and woods between Honeypot Lane and Kenton Road.

Over 55,000 people moved in during the first wave. In 1965 so did my family. Enticed in we were because Kenton didn't smell quite so bad as other places and because St Paul's Avenue was close to the Hendon Police Cadet College.

My recreation ground of choice was Queensbury Park aka Queensbury Rec. It had football pitches, ponds, neat flower beds, a pavilion for the vandals to graffiti and a cosy chalet for the park keepers to brew their tea in. Queensbury Rec, the first of the Kentonian Sewage Farm Triptych, sits proudly off the right edge of this my picture (behind you if you are holding the camera). I played my first game of "we've got a referee what knows all the rules" football on the processed stable hay muddy pitch. In my new boots, gold shorts, gold socks (don't forget the shin pads), blue shirt and an old pair of underpants I performed as a solid hard working centre back. A few years earlier Stuart Pearce had lashed a ball about on the same pitch, and bitten opposing forwards' legs in the process. For those in the know, Stuart played 78 times for England in defence, and he was "well hard"; though I reckon Douglas Bader may have caused his tackling style a problem or two.

You can still belt a ball about at Queensbury Rec today, if that is your wont ...and if no one else is on the pitch. You can be posh and play tennis at the Rec, on one of the two tarmac courts that run along the park fence - next to the playground with the Witches Hat in it (before the Witches Hat was banned for being too dangerous). The tennis court nets sometimes sagged, no doubt do they still do today, but please hang in and go with it. Use the little winder thing on the side of the post to tighten them up. You'll have a grand time pretending you're a 1970s Wimbeldon star; Ile Nastase or Yvonne Goolagong.

And now, dear reader, I must wrap up my introduction to Kenton.

Kenton was a fine home in my early years, a splendid side dish to the distant maincourse of London. Oh Sweet Odorous Kenton. Kenton, Grade A fertilizer for my young body.

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