We once had thousands of subscribers on Kings Cross Environment a site important for lobbying to traffic calm Kings Cross. At some stage, almost 15.000 people read us. We were heard by stakeholders and moved and shifted some things with our words. When the big Kings Cross developments were built, they were quick to create a commercial “community” site, that the big powers of the area can control (who were we, the “old” residents, with our nostalgia, mostly in-the-way-demands and visions?). I was once only one of several authors, and then so many moved out of the area and stopped writing. I was then left with the torchlight in my hand as the “last man standing” or rather writing. I did ask a few promising new people to join to write to tell stories, was encouraging them, and tried to follow planning developments in the area but the return was meagre. I am therefore unable to push posts up to the former glory. I see the numbers, they went down, year on year. The answer is defo on social media, that said, probably not on Facebook. Call it natural change. It is a fast-paced world now, few have time for writing for free or doing much community-based stuff, though there will always be some. Of course, many do insta, twitter and tiktok. But it is often less communal labour and more opinionated monologues.
The bottom line is: I can’t do it on my own anymore. As I write this, I think I am hereby announcing the end of Kings Cross Environment and WC1X.org as their impact is nowadays too low and even my time too precious. Even just last year I had believed it all can be resurrected, but the stats tell me no.
If anyone has had similar experiences or suggestions it will make me feel better about this realisation. But for now, best wishes for a democratic future, in whatever form it may have to be.
Thank you for reading Kings Cross Environment over the years and supporting our united cause! Let’s celebrate our successes and move forward nevertheless with confidence. If it is important enough something else will emerge.
“London is the place for me,” the Trinidadian Calypso King Lord Kitchener once sang as the SS Empire Windrush arrived in Tilbury in 1948. But did you know that Kitchener also lived briefly in Camden’s Hampstead? So says Eric Welch, our very own Calypsonian, who will be passing the proud age of 90 this June. Born in Montserrat to Trinidadian parents, Eric would soon move back to Port of Spain – that is after his parents’ plans to move to the USA were shattered due to the torpedoing of a cruise liner at the onset of the Second World War.
Back in Trinidad,his parents kept a modest home with four siblings He remembers eating from the veg of his parents’ garden and eating fish. “ Chicken was for Christmas”, he laughs.
As a twelve-year-old, Eric started singing Calypso, and some began paying him for singing their favourites. Through a friend and a good dose of curiosity, he however ended up learning the skills of a cinema projectionist in Port of Spain’s Rio cinema, when one of the men working there, took a liking to the youth’s enthusiasm.
At this time his father started taking on better-paid work on ships and was often away for weeks. This and a little cruise of the Caribbean on a small boat with his mother awoke Eric’s passion for the sea, he says. After a while, he started doing little jobs at the harbour and began to go on board of some of the many ships. A friend then took him on the “SS Sugar Transporter” and the two asked if they could get a job there. Without a certain answer, they hatched the plan of hiding for a while to see if maybe they could get a job later. Hiding, the ship began however to leave Trinidad. “After a few hours, we arrived in Barbados. We thought they would order us to leave and send us back, but nobody was allowed to get off the ship.” Without any specific intentions of travelling that way, Eric and his friend arrived some two weeks later in June 1952, in England. They had no other possessions than what they were wearing in Trinidad. However luckily for Eric and his friend, Britain was recruiting Caribbean labourers for work, and soon Eric and his friend would have new clothes, somewhere to stay and a job. As British subjects from British-administered colonies, those who came from the Caribbean had full rights to settle in the UK and were naturalised as full and equal British citizens (ed. this remained so until the UK joined the EEC and the Nationality Act 1971 was passed).
He remembers bombed-out areas and the sorry image of postwar Britain. At the Labour Exchange, he was soon asked what he could do. “Projectionist!”, he answered. This would take him to the Tower Cinema in Peckham. But his wage being low, Eric was attracted to try his luck one more time with ships, where the pay was higher. He travelled on several big ships and managed to even briefly visit Trinidad again, but also stationed in Canada, Germany, Holland and South America. Seeing a bigger world, he felt unable to return to Trinidad and settled in the end for England. Here he started working after a while in maintenance for an Insurance and later for a Wholesaler. But in the early 1950s, he also started his friendship with the famous Calypsonian Lord Kitchener, and the two admired each other’s passion for music and rhyme. Eric began singing backup vocals for “Kitch,” as Eric calls him, only ceasing after Kitchener moved away from London ( whilst being interviewed for this Eric recites two Calypso songs, “Nora” and “Underground Train”!). In 1956 Eric met Scottish-born Margaret, the love of his life, at the London East End Jazz Venue “Saint Louis.” The two lived together, mostly South of Kings Cross until her passing in 2008
Eric says he didn’t experience much racism himself in Britain, though he remembers a time when he and his friends had to move around only in groups at the height of antipathy from racist Teddy Boys. Today he spends many a day on his allotment in East London growing beetroot, spinach, corn and pumpkin and other vegetables. “I like seeing things grow”, he says simply, but it is evident that the work has also kept him physically active and strong. His biggest frustration is to see Caribbean and African countries go through independence and not grow and unite.
He adds that overall his life in London was good, for somebody who never even planned to come to England, not to speak of Kings Cross, where also some others from the Caribbean lived.
Kings Cross,, where he lived in different flats was the place where he started his long walks with his dog “Sparky” walking all across as far as Regents Park, Eric remembers, as well as some of the first Carnivals in London.
If he sang Kitchener’s hit again, he would have to sing: “Kings Cross is the Place for me!”
From all the neighbourhood, Happy Birthday!
(c) 2023 All Rights reserved!
Note: an earlier version said that Lord Kitchener lived in Kings Cross, that was a misunderstanding. Corrected as Hampstead.
The Harrison Pub on the Southside of Kings Cross, is asking for everybody’s urgent help! The inependently run pub is struggling in spite of having worked hard to serve some of the best prepared food around Kings Cross, beer and drinks and often hosting amazing and unique and quite intimate original life folk and other music.
We are told that the pub is to serve a rental-bill of 99.000 Pounds to pay back lost rental income from the pandemic period. As a first step, there is an attempt to appeal the court judgement for which The Harrison would like to raise money to cover the 15-30.000 Pounds of legal fees.
There is a brand new indie at Kings Cross if you are looking for an independent (self-declaratively) righteous, virtuous (literally – in terms of music) organic products and friendly café in the area. ”The Guitar Social ” X “Keystone Coffee ” moved into the former Italian Delicatessen space on 26 Caledonian Road, corner of Keystone Crescent, opposite the Tesco supermarket and seem to have taken the area with benevolently. From 8.00 am til 4.30 pm the shop functions as a vegan, sustainable, double-fair trade café (apparently, the real fair-trade) offering pastry and lovingly prepared sandwiches, and after 4.30 pm the space is all guitar venue and guitar school.
Josh and Nathan, part of a cooperative of four who run the place, told me they all met through refugee-support-work they engaged in. One is a poet and author, and the other does business coaching. “We were attracted to this side of Kings Cross because there are many independent shops here. We felt there is also space for a vegan, more sustainable cafe.”
Amazingly true locals and students will be rewarded with discounts there and when we visited on a morning at around 11 am, the café was well attended, with people sitting around cosy and pretty decorated tables on comfortable seats.
Welcome!
The Guitar Social X Keystone Coffee, 26 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DT
TFL is holding a consultation afternoon on Wednesday the 19th of April 2022 between 15.00 and 20.00 (drop-in) at Jean Stokes Community Centre, Carnoustie Drive N1 0DX.
It refers to the junction Kings Cross Road – Pentonville Road – Northdown Street, with implications also to Caledonian Road.
Please note this is a bit of a curious choice for a venue, as it is 15 minutes walk from the actual area discussed (up Caledonian Road after the Texaco Station).
Kings Cross Environment has questions about how the design connects and continues. For example, there should be thinking about safeguarding vulnerable cyclists moving from Caledonian Road into Pentonville Road and then wishing to turn into Kings Cross Road, or even East Bound cycle traffic on Pentonville Road, coming from St. Pancras Station, wishing to turn right into Kings Cross Road. Further, there are questions about how cycle lanes continue, and how safely they are apart from traffic for the continuation of Pentonville Road Eastbound and on Kings Cross Road. Crossing ability in one go for pedestrians should be a good thing.
TFL is also happy to get feedback online on their link here
The Met Police get their fair share of bad press these days, but here is one coppa, who likes to give back to the community he served, by putting his memories of Kings Cross out in the open to the public.
Chris Foster served as a Bobby on the Beat Kings Cross, something many would like to see back. He will share with you his memories of Kings Cross this Saturday. If you want a pre-taste check out this feature in the CNJ.
Saturday, 1st of April 2023, 11 am meeting at the Chapel of Rest, in St. George’s Garden.
The sweat and efforts of so many over decades, after multiple accidents, even deaths, have finally resulted in the most significant change in 50 years for the roads of Kings Cross on the 18th. March 2023.
All roads at Kings Cross including the gyratory roads, which has been an urban racing ground since their inception, are finally and ultimately reduced to 20 Miles!
Kings Cross has become safer overnight.
We will leave any comment for now, and just like to say thank you, for listening to the community in the end.
There is of course more to do here on the roads of the gyratory, but for now, just thank you and this gallery of 20 Mile signs for us all to celebrate!
Thanks go out to all campaigners and activists over the years, all political representatives who were on our side, and also, glad to say for once, thank you, to TFL and Mayor Sadiq Khan. – better late than never!
There is a new consultation on a section of the Kings Cross Gyratory running, and TFL is asking for residents’ and through-travelers’ feedback.
“There have been plans to make significant improvements to the area around Kings Cross and the gyratory for several years” we can read in the introduction of this new consultation by Transport for London (TFL) for part of Kings Cross.
Years? More like decades to many of us, and we can prove it!
But that put aside, here we are, being asked yet one more time to raise once again our expectations, by giving our critical suggestions for improvements, at least for one end of the gyratory, namely the junction Pentonville Road / Kings Cross Road / Northdown Street.
Will it be different now? We can only hope.
Whilst this particular section of the Kings Cross Gyratory is indeed a well-known trouble spot, especially for pedestrians and exposed cyclists, the proposal begs residents’ and visitors’ careful reading. This is not the least because it involves only a single section of the gyratory.
TFL are at least transparent about the fact that there was a consultation in 2017 and a plan, which came after years of lobbying and pressure on then-Mayor Boris Johnson and TFL, following cycle deaths (Min Joo “Deep” Lee, Madelaine Rosie Wright, Jerome Roussel, Emma Foa, Wendy Gay) on our roads on top of hair-rising reports on air and noise pollution.
It is to be remembered that in 2017 plans were then ready to be delivered. Whilst there was some critique, as there always would be, Evening Standard and a well-read cycling blog called it radical at the time. Even Sadiq Khan told us later, he would deliver it, subject to funding. But funding never came, nor did the changes.
TFL and the community may have to be pragmatic in times of economic budget shortfalls (note, the same problem in 2015 see this report by our own brilliant Sophie Talbot). But there are some essential questions:
Does the proposal connect to the rest of the gyratory and justify an isolated step-by-step change of the gyratory?
To what extent do the proposals as suggested in the model solve problems at this spot?
At least TFL have not forgotten the gyratory and the people who died here, nor those who have to live with the gyratory – not that it was without the community reminding stakeholders regularly and persistently of their obligations.
TFL say they will consult properly, meet people, and following any input, one can only hope that TFL will continue on that basis.
Many on this blog have argued that the gyratory as a whole needs to be addressed, and presumably, that is even more important since St Pancras became an international station, but also due to the extensive development of Kings Cross North and because of the vision of Kings Cross being part of the London Knowledge Hub, besides Kings Cross / St Pancras linking up multiple train, bus and tube networks. It means that the area is denser and more populated than ever before.
Kings Cross Environment 