One Week With John Gulliver - Time to address a poetic injustice?

Published: 2 September, 2010

I HAVE always regretted that I never met that great Irish poet and playwright Louis MacNeice though he lived until his death, I believe, in Belsize Park.

I was hooked by MacNeice when I first heard his great radio drama, The Dark Tower.

From then on, I could not resist his poems – some of which many thought were as good as anything written by his friend WH Auden.

But what I didn’t know until I read his letters (recently published by Faber, priced £17.50), was the sheer number of homes he had had in Camden.

Although a globetrotter, whose career took him all around the world, he would always return to London, and always find a place with a postcode within the boundaries of modern-day Camden.

As the letters often explain, he thought there was nowhere better to live in the capital than the heights of Hampstead and Highgate.

He loved being within walking distance of the Heath, loved the architecture and atmosphere, and was also a regular visitor to London Zoo.

So why have none of his addresses in this neck of the woods got a Blue Plaque marking his time spent here?

He wrote some of his best works whilst in Keats Grove in Hampstead, Regent’s Park Road in Primrose Hill and North Road in Highgate, among other addresses: yet these front doors remain anonymous to the passer-by.

Instead, his home of five years in Canonbury Park South, in Islington, where he stayed between 1947 and 1952, was marked in 1996.

Surely it is time for the borough that provided a haven for this literary genius to have his affection for the streets of Camden marked in this way?

The apple has fallen far from Mr Miliband’s tree

CAN politicians ever be taken seriously?

I gulped when Ed Miliband said in a husting in Hastings over the weekend that he wasn’t “embarrassed” in describing himself as a “socialist.”

And he said that minutes after telling an audience that he was not in favour of further nationalisations.

I have no objection  to anyone deriding nationalisation as an economic lever but isn’t the notion of “social­ism” – according to any dictionary definition – something to do with the social ownership of industry?

Ed’s father, the Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband, would have had apoplexy if he had heard his son’s view on socialism.

Ralph battled for years with the notion that the Labour Party could be anything other than an instrument for the mild reform of society.

He gave short shrift to the view – Fabian in origin, probably – that Labour could change the capitalist nature of society.

It was not until the 1970s that he came to believe that the Labour party could become a true “socialist” organisation.

Apparently, he pursued these ideas through an informal discussion group he set up – the Independent Left Corresponding Society.

It met at Tony Benn’s house in Holland Park, and among the Labour MPs who attended the group was Islington MP Jeremy Corbyn.

It seems as if the Miliband brothers must have rebelled against their father’s views in their teens – and in the process got all mixed up about the philosophy he followed.

The word “social­ism”, apparently, can mean whatever you want it to mean.

Generation gain

ONLY a century or so separate them, as peace campaigner Hetty Bower – the eldest woman on the Save The Whittington Hospital march earlier this year – meets her first great-grandchild.

Little Sidney Bower Dolan is only five days old in this recent snap of Hetty the heroine, still going strong at 104.

She is one of the inspiring residents at Mary Feilding Guild – the “residential home for active elderly people” in Highgate.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man

IT took all the political skills of Lord McIntosh to save that great institution, the Working Men’s College (WMC), but save it he did when closure loomed in the early 1990s.

Once Mrs Thatcher had wound up the WMC’s funding body, the Inner London Education Authority in the late 1980s, it looked as if nothing could save the Camden Town  college.

But the recently ennobled Lord McIntosh, who was also the WMC’s principal, used his political contacts – especially among the Tories – to persuade the government to maintain public funding not only for his own college but also for those other popular Camden establishments, the City Lit and the Mary Ward Centre.

“There is no doubt he was the man of the hour, the man who saved the WMC”, the current principal Satnam Gill told me yesterday (Thursday).

Architect’s vision is one in the eye for short-sighted politicians

NEW Labour allowed the private housing market to rip, and ignored the need for social housing.

David Cameron shares this disdain for council housing.

Fortunately, there are architects like Neave Brown who know better.

So I am pleased to hear that his Dunboyne Road estate, in Gospel Oak has, been given Grade II-listed status .

Neave, who worked for the council and designed a swathe of social housing in the 1960s and 1970s, deserves his work to be recognised.

Not only is it stunningly designed and the epitome of all that is good about modernism, it also shows how local authorities can build good social housing that provides decent homes for generations of families.

Neave didn’t intend it, but his work is one in the eye for all those unimaginative politicians who cause so much damage.