Walking adventures in Harlesden

Brent’s trio of adjoining “dens” aren’t very familiar to me. I know them mainly for famous associations. Neasden means Twiggy, Willesden means buses and Harlesden? Well, it’s where I once met a man who made a living re-publishing Victorian erotica, yet its reputation is for being rough. Rose Rouse, who lives there, is well aware of that. But she is also aware of so much more. In A London Safari, her new book about that patch of NW10, she puts it like this:

Harlesden is a one-off, but also a mirror and a microcosm of what is going on in cities and towns all over Britain. It is everything that diversity creates. It’s exciting with an edge that is missing from, say, Suffolk or even Kensington and Chelsea - an urban cacophony that defies description, a feast for the sense. “Big Up Harlesden,” declares the 23-year-old George The Poet who was brought up on the hardcore St Raphael’s estae and went to Cambridge University, and it’s true, it’s time to. all those yardie and gang tales have flavoured the Harlesden stew but they no longer define it.

Harlesden has more hair shops, ones selling real hair in the guise of wigs and weaves, and more fresh fish shops - boasting sea creatures that never turn up on the counters at Sainsburys - than anywhere else in the country. There is also the reggae connection in the form of the ever-present Hawkeye and the recently re-opened Starlight; Scandals and Mr Patty with their famous Jamaican patties; and O Tamariz, the best and friendliest Portuguese cafe with delicious pasteis...

It’s an ever-changing, fascinating mix-up of post-war immigrants: early layers from Ireland, Jamaica, Pakistan, Inia and Cyprus, later ones from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Columbia, Portugal, Brazil, Poland, Somalia and more, not forgetting the new media types. Harlesden is a place that shines with its own nitty-gritty light and spirit.

Non-gentrified and possibly non-gentrifiable (M&S left in 1984 and never came back), it has an atmosphere reminiscent of the Wild West. New and old, eclectic and taboo, poverty and invention, religions and irreverence - they all rub up against each other in an amazing array of different colours, foodstuffs and attitude. I come from a village in Yorkshire; for me, Harlesden is heaven because it breathes with such breadth, because its rhythms are unrecognisable and because so often it puts me not only in touch with my curiosity but also my ignorance. Blimey, there is so much that I don’t know.

She’s found quite a lot out, largely by simply walking and talking in the neighbourhood. The book’s 27 chapters each describe a Harlesden wander, including one with bats, one with George The Poet (see above), and one to a Hindu temple with a Tantric Goddess. Don Letts and Louis Theroux are in it too. Buy A London Safari by way of here or here.