Bonnington Square, Red Duke of York potatoes, Ray Davies and an extraordinary tortilla
Abundance: Monday 29 July 2024
A little over a quarter of a century ago, I lived in Bonnington Square, London. Built in the 1870s to house railway workers, a combination of wartime bombing and a council keen on redevelopment meant that this rectangle of Vauxhall was largely empty and earmarked for demolition a century later. In came squatters. A housing co-operative was formed, a vegetarian cafe1, whole food shop, and a club sprang up, and the bomb site in the middle of the square transformed into a flourishing garden. It is an extraordinary story of urban, community transformation2.
I had no idea of this when I moved there: I’d just fallen out of the back of the van of a relationship, via the ‘to let’ pages of Loot, into a fairly small room in a fairly rough around the edges flat in the corner of the square. I was not in a great way.
Every day I cycled to an office just to the east of Euston train station. It was becoming increasingly obvious that I wasn’t suited to someone else’s hours, to someone else’s idea of how I should spend my day, to someone else allocating my time. I didn’t have the brain or way of thinking to suit. I hadn’t yet realised that was ok, that there were upsides to being wired a little differently to many, and I hadn’t yet come up with an alternative scenario for life.
The London Eye was being constructed at the time, the wheel itself horizontal as it was slowly meccanoed together. Over days and weeks it was pulled to the perpendicular, like a slowmo of a bicycle having its wheel repaired and readied for the off. On its last day, I couldn’t help thinking it wasn’t quite vertical. Even now, it looks like it’s at three minutes to twelve, rather than spot on noon.
The 4 mile cycle left me exhausted, running as I was on few resources. I’d lock my bike at work and walk the minute to a Portuguese cafe where every day I ordered the same: coffee and a wedge of tortilla. The tortilla, tight with onions and potato, its surface rippled the colour of onion skin, came warm, and wrapped in greaseproof paper. The smell couldn’t have been more savoury and I couldn’t have been more hungry.
On a good day, I managed to get to my desk to eat it; on others, I’d push as much of it as I could into my face before I left the cafe. Every mouthful put me back together enough to get through at least some of the day. Often, I’d head back to the cafe midmorning; occasionally for lunch too. I ordered the same, always, because no matter how much I ate, nothing tasted as good and no amount of it diluted the pleasure.
Below, more words and a recipe for Bonnington tortilla