Walm Lane

Upstairs at MacGowans opposite Willesden Green station

Mezzo Roma nearby

There's another Mezzo Roma in the High Road, beside the Spotted Dog.

Spotted Dog crane manoeuvre

Traffic was stopped while the crane pulled out of the site
but one car couldn't wait and darted through, horn blaring.

Willesden Green campaigners get organised

WEMBLEY MATTERS has a list of topics to be discussed concerning the redevelopment of Willesden Green library centre, demolition of the listed 19th century old library etc. Details of some of the issues involved can be found on the Keep Willesden Green website LINK.

KEEP WILLESDEN GREEN

 Please join us to discuss the development of the

WILLESDEN GREEN LIBRARY

and the impact the proposals may have on Willesden Green

FEBRUARY 16TH 2012 7pm

KINGS HALL, 155 Harlesden Road, Willesden Green, NW10 2BS 

You can use Brent's "ePetition" system to support the retention of the bookshop and or to save the old library building. The original old library is a quirky, small, turreted building, currently housing an Irish community advisory service. The high road is a 19th century and partly older setting. The Spotted Dog development has preserved the facade of that 18th century building. Some of the shops, for example the builders' merchants at the corner of Ellis Close also retain their original facades. Let's keep the distinctive local character. Here is a Google Streetview look at the old library centre:

View Larger Map

If the builders Galliford Try (how did they get the gig by the way?) are wanting to take this away, they are likely to turn the whole site into a horrible, anonymous, dreary, corporate warren. Maybe not, but what are the odds? The space around and about the current library centre is used for quite pleasing travelling markets, the French market appears at intervals and another world market has got going as well. Most architects these days just want to make a box. Oh no correction, more recently they want to created twisted boxes. Local people have different priorities, none of which involve boxes of any kind.

Sceptical but not cynical, the Willesden Herald hopes the new development will be an improvement, as the new sports centre turned out to be many times better than the old one in every way, but "Since the fate of man rests still uncertain, let's reason with the worst that may befall."

Ed

Update, Feb: The initial artist's impression of the new development shows, would you believe?, a stupid big set of letters WGCC on the site of the listed old library building. (You can see it in this report.) Can you imagine anything duller of more depressing? I have suggested a fountain, for all the good it's going to do. (Ed)

Taxidermy of The Spotted Dog

Clean gone are the sticky floors of centuries,
The fist-dented panels stone dead and buried.
Its ceilings have swallowed their last tale of smoke.
Only the facade remains, tied up outside.

--
Stephen Moran

Work underway on The Spotted Dog

Spotted Dog update

dexter moren associates

"Status: Planning Secured

"Located within a conservation area in Willesden, this new mixed-use development will provide a 5-storey building accommodating 44 apartments, a retail unit, and will importantly retain and 'celebrate' the 1762 'Spotted Dog' public house."

There is a picture of how the result will look. Thanks to anonymous commenter for the link.

The Spotted Dog site fenced off

Derelict for two years since closing, work appears to have begun on The Spotted Dog. The site has been fenced off and tidied a bit. There is an excavation underway on the east side of it.

The Spotted Dog: Demolition in progress?

 

Demolition sign on the Spotted Dog, 20 March 2009. Sphagnum

Don't cry but, "Willesden Green has a long history with the area being recorded in the Doomsday Book of 1086 as 'Wellesdone'. By the 14th Century a small settlement had formed around a woodland clearing, which later became Willesden Green. By the middle of the 18th century the village had grown and had its own pub, ‘The Spotted Dog’." (Ref: Willesden Green Conservation Area). It used to be said that a taxi driver might not know where Willesden High Road was but could take you to The Spotted Dog.

Sunday, High Road

Just happened on a nice effect at Walm Lane.



Almost a year on, the Spotted Dog is boarded-up and derelict. This is the signwriting with the prices for the closing week (still up).*

Ossian

* I was accosted by a very bleary-eyed person while taking this picture, who wanted to know why I was taking pictures, was I the police? I said it was for my blog (I didn't tell her it was for the newspaper, ahem) and she said she didn't like people taking pictures of where she lived. There are some flats nearby. She kept trying to stop me, so eventually I said, "It's a free country, I can take pictures of whatever I like, mind your own business." I regretted that afterwards but only because I thought I might take a bullet or a knife to the heart for saying it. Anyway, when I got back to the newsroom (ahem) I took a look at what I'd got and lo and behold (as they say) something strange in the corner of one of them, which I hadn't noticed at the time, but as it shows a person I won't post it. I don't include people (or try not to) unless they have given permission or are indistinguishable.

Cafe session

There was a beautiful and brilliant session in the Budapest Cafe Bar today by Andrea Pope with keyboard accompanist and vocalist, Steve Cox. Over goulash etc, we were treated to wonderful Lloyd Webber, Sondheim and other show songs as well as such delights as Autumn Leaves with "French words" and "English words" ... "not a translation". I was particularly knocked out by Andrea Pope's exquisite rendition of "Or am I losing my mind", which showed her vocal range, very strong throughout from sultry low tones through winsome middle and into effortless, mellow highs.

Walking down the high road to Cafe Budapest we passed a large corner premises with a name indecipherable to anyone who cannot read the Cyrillic alphabet - so I don't know what it's called - with signs promising Bulgarian cuisine and booze. Further along, would you believe a Moldovan cafe, then the Budapest cafe. That's all in about three blocks. At the other end we have some Polish shops, in amongst the Thai and what not. It's a great road for guaging the kind of people arriving in London from the rest of the world.

On the subject of the changing High Road: The Spotted Dog has closed! This is unbelievable. It is said that more taxi drivers know where the Spotted Dog is than know where Willesden is. It's been there since the 19th century.

Bartell Darcy

Earliest with the latest since 1884

British History Online: "...The Case is Altered in High Road and Rising Sun in Harlesden Lane had been added to the Spotted Dog by 1890..."

The Case is Altered, around the corner from Willesden Magistrates Court ("The worst in the country" - legal sources) is altered itself. Gone is the inn sign depicting a judge behind bars. It's now Ned Kelly's.

By contrast, The Willesden Herald has provided news under the same moniker since since c. 1884.

Extract from a Willesden diary

by Thomas*

I'm a born again nutter, thankfully I'm a self-medicated born again nutter (speed and weed are all I need). God forbid I were not. Have you ever tried, say just 20 mg. of chlorpromazine, Largactil, better known in prison as the liquid cosh? If you have, you will know what it feels like to be a zombie.

Enough already, I don't want to get anyone down, for I am, as per usual on an up. I have had a wonderful year, notwithstanding the fact it had a rather ominous beginning, when I lost £4,000 in a little business venture that went wrong. Anyway I've since stopped gambling again. It's easy to stop, I've done it hundreds of times.

So that was back in April and as I had whole lot of magic mushroom tea I was higher than the proverbial kite. How high is high?

I started going back to the writers group again, where I was encouraged to tackle writing my book again, which I am happy to report I started at the beginning of June and finished three months later.

Anyway I had a lovely diversion, in the middle of writing said book, when I met the most gorgeous girl and managed to get my end away, for the first time in a long, long while. It was really very funny, however as she became part of my story, I'll give you the shortened version.

What was funny to start with was, for the longest time, I had been looking for someone to share my magic mushroom tea with and when I met this girl in the Spotted Dog pub, she only tells me she's the magic mushroom Queen. I resisted telling her I was the King. However I did manage to give her my phone number, telling her she could give me a ring sometime and come up and see me.

I never had much hope for such an event, as she was only 27, with a body to die for and I'm old enough to know better. So you could have knocked me down with a feather, when she called me that same night and indeed came up to see me.

Now I have been married five times and I took my fun where I found it, however I had never been with the perfect body, that was Ashlie (her assumed name).

She told me she was a stripper by profession and a nymphomaniac. I told her I was Jesus and she could nympo maniac with me whenever she felt like it.

She stayed with me for the next two nights, with me never getting off first base. We had a good time, she enjoyed the tea, the smoke and the company and I was living in hope. She disappeared over the weekend, turning up again on the Monday, staying on till the Wednesday, with still nothing going on but the rent.

Now there's an old cliche that says, if you can make them laugh, you can fuck them. Well watch the ride. I'm telling Ashlie about Marilyn Monroe in the film "Some Like It Hot" with Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn's saying to Jack how she would love to just talk to him all night and Jack Lemmon's making all kinds of faces that are saying he wanted to do anything but talk. So now I'm saying to Ashlie, forget the one about the bishop and the actress, fuck Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe, this is Jesus Christ Almighty and the fucking stripper and all we're doing is talking. Talk about laugh, I had never laughed like this, since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, and Ashlie was even worse and it went on and on, like Ariston. Ashlie was so bad I sent her into the next room for the night.

We never slept much that night and she was still laughing the next day. So I took her for a walk in the park and left her there, to laugh it off, for I sure needed a break.

She followed me home about two hours later. I had sort of made up my mind to ask her to leave because I wanted her so much it hurt. However she asked if she could have a bath and I asked her if she would like a nice cup of tea. Shit she had only been there a week and we had got through 32 pints of magic mushroom tea, for this was the last of it. So I took her her cup of tea and she just lay there, so gorgeous and fuckable. Believe me I was foaming at the mouth and hot to trot.

The next thing I know, she's out the bath wearing a G-string and a really sexy bra and telling me I could have her!

Well you'll have to refer to the book for what happened next. Suffice to say I never had to ask her if it was all right for her...

*Thomas is a Willesden-based Scottish writer.

Pink Fraud at the Spotted Dog

This Thursday, 7th August.

I'm honoured to accept this award [We've been bumped. Ed] from the Guardian, not just for myself but for all the little people who work here.

I haven't been able to look in as often as I would like, but I'm sure they're doing a wonderful job. (Watch out for those typos, chaps - and chapesses.) Most of my time these days is taken up ensuring the paper remains buoyant financially, through our diversified investments in the equine futures market.

I'm just off to another business meeting now, in the Spotted Dog. These things are sent to try us.

Ed.

BBC1's The Politics Show has just run a special feature on London, and produced more or less the same story as the Herald's Night falls on the Aussified high road. They had an Aussie interviewer interviewing an Aussie barman at The Spotted Dog. They had the stupidity or peasant cunning to call the place Neasden, when the Spotted Dog is slap-bang in the middle of Willesden High Road. The Herald demands an acknowledgement as the source of this story, and a correction to the location. Auntie Beeb you shameless old tart!

[I sent a link to the Willesden Herald to vine@bbc.co.uk - the email address of Jeremy Vine, the presenter of the Politics Show - a couple of weeks ago while listening to his radio program. Ed.]

Night falls on the Aussified high road

Ask a mini-cab driver to take you to Willesden, and you might have a problem. It's a lot easier if you just say, take me to The Spotted Dog.



It has three parts, all now Aussified for the large transient community from down under, 35º South, The Dog House, and the Sindrome.



The Sindrome used to be the Gaelic Bar. The Case is Altered further along the road (on the way to Willesden County Court) has been renamed Ned Kelly's.

The craft of signwriting is alive and well here.

Pick up LAM free London Aussie paper and others (not the Herald alas) outside the Down Under Internet Cafe. There are about six internet cafes in Willesden High Road, charging about a pound an hour. There are almost as many cheap telephone call shops, with their rates for all the strange places Willesden people phone.

More shops



I can easily think of 5 or 6 off-licences in the high road, if you don't want to go to one of the dozen or more pubs and squillion restaurants. The old Brady's off-licence used to have a counter with bars on it, like a pawnbroker's. There is a pawnbroker in the High Road too - a little treat for another day, with its traditional three brass balls.



Funny how hungry you get on the way home after 15 pints of lager. We have dozens of fried chicken, kebab, Indian, pizza, you-name-it, take aways in Willesden High Road.

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[Why are we doing this free advertising? Ed.]