Strictly Coombe Prancing

Here is your starter for 10:  What links the following collection of celebrities?: Dwight D Eisenhower, Jimmy Tarbuck, Saddam Hussein, Rupert Murdoch, John Galsworthy, and Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood?

While you are thinking, I'll explain that this (sub)urban tramp was once again initiated by random selection of a page in the London A-Z.    On page 119,  the haphazard placing of the up-turned wineglass narrowly missed the Berrylands Sewage Works and perfectly delineated the Coombe Estate, Kingston - a small slice of England whose existence had hitherto passed me by.  If you've read a previous derive, you'll know that I describe the circle, then walk it, then describe what I walked. 

To return to our poser, the celebrity list have all lived here on the Coombe Estate at some time - though I've stretched a point with two potentates, Saddam and Rupert, as it was their respective daughters in residence. I'd like to think the dads dropped in for tea, though, before being humbled in very different ways.  (Imagine them swapping humblings).  They could have been joined by Dame Nellie Melba - perhaps she contributed the pudding.

It's raining quite hard and it's unseasonally cold.  In my first hour of rambling past pile after pile of some of England's most expensive domestic real estate, I see literally no-one.  Are they in?  Have the electric gates malfunctioned and are they skeletalised with gin and tonic still in hand?  Are they at one of their other homes somewhere even grander?  Like Grand Cayman or the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg?

As a non-resident, my right to be here depends on whether I am in a car or on foot.  As a foot-slogging psychogeographer I exult in my unimpeded right of way through the hood of the latter-day versions of Galsworthy's Men of Property.  Motorists arriving at one end of the estate (though, curiously, not at the other) will find themselves confronted by Checkpoint Charlie (actually I'm not sure whether he is called Charlie, but the evening duty chap is Bill) to whom you must declare yourself if visiting an inmate.  If your credentials are in order and you trade the right banter, the 'right of using' the road is temporarily conferred on you.  

If you are on foot, the lack of regulation paving-block footpaths is a pleasant omission - you get to walk on trottoirs that are quaintly improvised, country-style, and look almost unofficial.  Judging by the high top-end SUV count, the locals don't have much need for footpaths, but as I stride out alone, I feel like Rupert Bear strolling through Nutwood while all his pals have been confined indoors by their mummies.  These pleasant paths run out, though, as the Council takes over again in the cheaper parts of the 'hood.

Kingston lay on the London to Portsmouth Road in the days of coach-and-horse travel, and the topography of this hill was later handy as the location for one of the Telegraph Stations along the route.  I suspect the locality still has some Telegraph readers to this day.

Your domestic admin is a tough call if you live here - you had better be loaded enough to employ an administrator, because the financial relationship between you,  the Council and your residents' association is fraught with complexity, depending on whether your road is 'scheduled' or 'private'.  You will get used to words like 'private' if you live here.  And to words like 'no' 'unauthorised' 'strictly forbidden' 'no right of way'.  If this wasn't such a nice and pleasant area ('pleasant' is appropriate, as part of it is named 'Mount Pleasant') a great deal of signage could be saved  by having the single legend 'fuck off'.

Golf is the game hereabouts.  One of the courses claims to be 'Surrey's friendliest' and I am sure it is very welcoming indeed to those whose demeanour passes muster with the members.  You have a few hurdles to overcome before the friendliness kicks in, however, and please don't think of dropping your Rupert trousers in the car park.  Oh, and tuck your shirt in, and make sure it has a collar.

As I pass the smart schools in grand houses which the Galsworthys once owned, I reflect that John Galsworthy's mission was to 'satirise the insular, snobbish, and acquisitive attitudes and suffocating moral codes of sections of the upper middle classes' (1) in the hope of shaming them into expurgation.  Was his work in vain?

Jimmy

Jerry (2)

My derives take me across the whole spectrum of advantage and deprivation.  Why is it that the only times I feel uncomfortable and unsafe when walking are when I pass through 'gated' communities, with their warning notices, security guards, and the paraphernalia of electronic security devices?  But on reflection, perhaps the fear of crime is justified by some malevolent genius loci, for this hill was the stamping ground of cut-purse Jerry Abershaw(e), riding out from his boozing base at the Bald Face Stag.  Jerry looks a cheekie chappy, not unlike Jimmy Tarbuck in his prime.  But Jimmy is much more morally upright.

I suspect that old money is cheek-by-jowl with new wealth in this neck of the coombe.  I'm sure some is hard-earned and hard won.  But some, judging by one or two house names, fell from the skies.  I mean names such as 'Poolswinner' 'Jackpot Manor' 'Taxhaven' 'Banker's Bonus' and 'El Gordo'.  Actually, I made these up - I won't use the similar ones I actually saw to protect the innocent, and my arse.

On the south perimeter of my circle, where the the housing is more modest, I have a cheery brief exchange - the only greeting of the day -  with a bloke who is bringing his shopping home from Asda (further up the hill, Ocado fetches it for you).

In the posh areas, neo-Georgian, mock Tudor and New England 'cottage' styles prevail, along with vernacular builds about which the Prince of Wales would be extatic.  

There is an occasional eccentric outbreak of modernism.  Wasn't this house in the Jacques Tati film 'Mon Oncle'?

                           

But the last sections of my derive (I can't do an acute accent in this thing) are largely through the uniform ubiquity of suburban England.

Suburban England

I end up in Norbiton, which I feel is the  locus-nexus of the English tv sitcom. (It's true that the Goods lived in Surbiton, Terry and June were over in Purley, and the aspiring Hancock lusted after the posher end of East Cheam, but somehow Norbiton is all of these as well as itself.  And Norbiton (thinly disguised as a fictional Climthorpe) was the place from which Reggie Perrin commuted to the hq of Sunshine Desserts.  I didn't get where I am today without knowing that.  Was Norbiton the reason why he disappeared into the sea leaving behind, like Stonehouse, a pile of clothes?

Reggie Perrin

'Climthorpe'

Having completed my circle with time on my hands and rain down my neck I enbussed (a term borrowed from Will Self) for Kingston centre-ville hoping to feel the aura of the erstwhile throne of English kings.  The commercial centre of Kingston is more like everywhere else in England than everywhere else is.  I suppose the traces of medieval layout in the bends of the streets save it from being a non-place, but the overwhelming plethora of chain-only shops is such that I got the impression that this was a board game in which all the brand names had been thrown in the air and allowed to implant themselves where they landed.  Two rival independent shops selling artists' materials, and the not-so-ubiquitous Heal's and Bentall's stand out among the dreary predictability of the usual suspects.  I didn't have long ... did I miss anything?  I certainly did miss, through lack of prior homework, one source of unique treasure, the Eadweard Muybridge (weareard Saxon-inspired forename) archive at the Kingston Museum.  Must go back.

(1) Wikipedia
(2) http://www.stand-and-deliver.org.uk/highwaymen/jerry_abershaw.htm