Half price sale at the geranium shop for the blind

Walm Lane

Support Geranium Shops for the Blind.

Tread softly, for you tread on Murmurons from Jupiter

Don't dig it up, don't tramp it down,
The wildflower purple crown vetch,
It's that they eat and that alone,
Potatomen from the planet Kvetch.

Many extraterrestrials here
Are tiny and struggle to survive.
Bamlards from Gliese five-eighty-four
Subsist entirely on baby chives.

Extraterrestrials like the Balleyes
From Venus can hardly be seen,
They're so tiny, and so specialised,
They live on the fumes from Windowlene.

--
Stephen Moran

Basketball in Roundwood Park

Earlier today

Self-help workshops at Queens Parade

Corner of Walm Lane and Willesden Lane

9th annual short story competition is open

The ninth annual international short story competition is now open. Entries are now via The Willesden Herald Submissions Manager, thanks to Submittable.com. There are more details at www.willesdenherald.com and www.newshortstories.com. Looking forward to reading lots of new stories here.

Blue clouds over Peter Avenue

Monday

Where's the poetry?

Opening times for the Willesden children's library

I went into the half of the library that's been plonked in The Lewinson Centre on the High Road. The other "half" is at George Furniss House, Grange Road. I asked the man, down behind the desk, where the poetry books were. He suggested looking in the other half of the library at George Furniss House. I told him I'd been there and they have no poetry. The man said, "We only have children's books here." I said, "Oh, is this the children's library?" "Yes." "Okay," I said. "By the way, children should have poetry too!"

Feargal

Designer jumble sale

Queens Parade, Walm Lane

"Secondhand designer fashion at affordable prices". Link

The steampunk dinosaurs that ate Willesden

Demolition of the Willesden library centre continued today.

Brent Artists summer show

Sign on gallery door, Queens Parade (Walm Lane)

Full details online at BAR.

Demolition of the Willesden Library Centre (video)

A perfectly good building, which contained the local library, museum, cinema, art gallery, concourse, bookshop, café bar, performance spaces, meeting rooms and council one-stop shop is being demolished. In its place there will be a Stalinist sounding "Cultural Centre" with council offices and four blocks of luxury flats, currently advertised in Singapore as "For Sale - the Library at Willesden Green" with a list of features including "No affordable or key worker housing", "Gated development" and "Underground car park". Our library centre (by the way a good, literate and fluent name for it, now appropriated by developers of the apartments) was used by innumerable community groups and was nearly always packed with schoolchildren studying at the reading tables. There will be two years at least now during which pupils and students who would have made use of the spaces will lose out on their education. This is all thanks to our local Labour (would you believe?) council, which has also closed six other libraries, out of 12, in the past year. One of the libraries they closed and stripped and sold to property developers, was the Kensal Rise library, on a site donated by All Souls College in Oxford on condition that it be used for a community library and opened in 1900 by Mark Twain. In the past five years or so, they have taken £600,000 from the Heritage lottery fund to renovate the building you see being demolished, and to move in the Brent museum from its previous home at The Grange (where have they sold that, by the way?). What a rotten shower they are. They are not fit to run a whelk stall let alone local government. They sold the town hall as well and got themselves a new office block with no parking and not enough space, hence more offices on top of where our old library stood. Don't they make you sick?

Mezzoroma special today

Willesden High Road (beside the Spotted Dog)

The demolition of the library centre (2)

Thursday

I wonder if they are smashing that wonderful theatre lighting rig. I think they've reached where it was now. Wanton vandalism, waste of public resources, betrayal, sellout. Thank you Labour.

Food for Thought: today's specials

Willesden High Road

Summer flowers

Frontenac, Peter Avenue

What are they, anyone?

Update: Two suggestions so far: 1. Triffids. 2. Acanthus (x 5). 3. Delphinium.

I think, a la Eurovision voting, only Acanthus can now win. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions.

From Mordell Gardens: "Acanthus mollis (or spinosa - need to see leaf to check)". From American friends: They are also called "bear's britches".

King Edward VII park this evening

Every dog has its day.

Mackerel sky

Smart new signboard at the Northeast entrance

Peace in the community - mural

Grange Road

Boxing gloves for sale

Charity shop window, Walm Lane

True Buddha temple - Friday

Bunting blowing in the wind

Demolition of Willesden Library Centre

1. From Grange Road

2. Closer up, with jet descending

3. The Willesden Bookshop is next.

"The heart of Willesden Green"

They have painted the hoarding around the library centre.

The library centre is being demolished.

By the way, I think it's Willesden, not "Willesden Green", which is down by the station of that name, to be more precise. They were two separate hamlets. Willesden was also the name of quite a large London borough before it was merged with Wembley to create the horror that is the present London Borough of Brent.  However, nobody cares, as the word Green will probably help to sell new flats overseas, making a killing for the developers at our expense.

They are now in the process of demolishing the excellent pub restaurant and beer garden, now known as The Queensbury, formerly The Green (which is in Willesden Green), for another block of flats, ten storeys high, which will be in a place with nothing left of any value anymore to recommend it, except to overseas investors. None of the people in charge seems to give a damn about what is left for future generations. They are too busy looting and pillaging what was left to us by previous generations.

More: Singapore: "For Sale - the Library at Willesden Green"

Success stories: Emma Martin

A rave review for a short story collection "Two Girls in a Boat" by New Zealand author Emma Martin, who recently won the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story prize. We're proud around here that her story "Victor" was included in Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 5.

Coming soon

Submissions can be uploaded starting from August 1st this year. The website has been spruced up and the rules given a shake-out. One of the main things is it's a bit more expensive and you can enter as many times as you like. The idea is to try and make the competition and publication of the anthology all self-supporting, instead of having to issue appeals for backing as part of the process. The entry fee has gone up from £3 to £6. Part of that goes to pay for the sparkly new submission system, which replaces our previous homemade database and forms. Here is the link: come see the paradise.

Catnap

On a sultry evening in the backstreets of Willesden

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.