And an anecdote: once there was a Jehovah's witnesses world convention in twickenham and for some weird reason, two very young, very pink, very fresh girls came knocking on number 7's door, looking for accomodation for their congress people. It happened to be a day after the night before. There was still people lying about all over the place in various state of catatonia when i took them for a guided tour, stark naked as they'd waken me up (remember i was the one with the light sleep, always moaning about noise!) and suggesting various sleeping places for their pals (including the bathtub).
Funnily enough, we never saw them again.
j.
I remember Little Chris's paintings of Yellow Submarine characters. I especially remember the ones in No.7's hallway, of the 'apple bonkers', painted in those little recesses, meant for statues, I think, on either side of the kitchen door.
Surely there must be some photo's of them somewhere.
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No.7 was in many ways the heart of the street. Accessible to everyone and the kitchen was the most accessible room. The walls were filled with writing, comic, philosophical and poetic. Often, in the dead of night when there was nowhere else still buzzing, night-owls would gravitate there. (Which is probably why Joelle could never get a good night's sleep, as she lived in the room next to the kitchen.)
Although there was a ban on drug use in that house, people would arrive in the kitchen already stoned, after partying elsewhere, just to hang-out for a bit longer before they went to bed. There were no seats there, so no-one could get too rooted in. It was a small room with a regular flow of people in and out. There was lots of interesting, sometimes quite important, conversation in there. That kitchen had a strong vibe to it.
When No.7 was demolished, for some strange reason the walls of the kitchen were left standing. It wasn't standard practice. Normally they would break the house down to a heap of rubble, but they left the kitchen standing, with the rest of the house crushed to rubble all around it.
It wasn't long before someone, I think it was Bill C, slung some beams across the top of the walls and boarded it over creating a platform. Then he erected his prefabricated, sectional, fibreglass-onion-dome up there. It looked strangely like a mosque with the door in the centre and those little recesses with the apple-bonkers, symmetrically on either side. It even attracted attention from people walking over the railway bridge, who were too far away to see what it really was. They would have to walk all the way round and into Grosvenor Road before they could see that it was just a half demolished house with a fibreglass onion.
One evening, it might have been my last ever acid-trip. It was dark and the onion was glowing due to a light inside. The walls that it stood on were in darkness so it looked like it was hovering. As I walked past it started to make the weirdest, alien sounds. I think Ken S was in there playing with an electronic sound synthesizer keyboard. We weren't so used to hearing electronic sounds in those days so it was quite a spooky novelty. (mind-you---)
Last edited by Dominic on Sat Jan 03, 2009 10:35 pm, edited 9 times in total.
yes, it was Bill who did that -- the onion dome originally came from the Polytantric (up in Camden) who i think did a lot of behind the scenes work re the early Stonehenge festivals
As no one as yet added this photo to this topic, i can't resist the temptation of showing off:
me threatening a labour councillor with a pointed stick
Here is the real story of the event (out of weeds home page):
Within a few weeks of being squatted, Number 7 was boarded up by workmen who refused to identify themselves. However after some rather terse negotiating they agreed to leave the back door unblocked, to the relief of those still inside.
Local councillor Ken Elmes, offering help and support, hurriedly arranged for the press to come round. The resulting photograph of him, claw-hammer in hand, in the act of removing one of the boards led to a series of wild allegations by cut-and-paste pulp pop writer George Tremlett, the publicity seeking Tory Housing Chairman. He appeared to be quite deliberately attempting to mislead the council, the press, and the public with a series of inaccurate statements claiming that "the first squatters [were] let in by Cllr. K. Elmes [who] helped the squatters break down doors and windows to get into buildings and was photographed doing so" and that he "broke down the door of an empty house in Grosvenor Road with an axe".
Transcriptions of some of George Tremlett's rantings can be found in the James Saunders play "Squat". Ken's own account of the incident appears in his recently published autobiography "If I only had time" (Ecomex Press, 1998)
