London 1981

Peter MARSHALL


Kilburn Lane/Regent St, Kensal Rise, 1981
27f-52: Brent

You can click on the image to go to the next picture

Sunday morning in Kilburn Lane, and a woman selling plants in front of a closed shop with a window full of wigs reads a Sunday paper. The corner is still recognisable, though the shopfront has changed and is now a convenience store, but the bus stop and house beyond are still there.
 
Ye Old Plough, a handsome Victorian pub rebuilt in 1892, part of whose name can be seen reflected in the shop window is now a restaurant/bar, Paradise by Way of Kensal Green, a quotation from G K Chesterton,the closing lines of whose poem 'The Rolling English Road' ends:
 
My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
 
The place is no longer a 'decent inn', and has no decent beer on tap, so any English drunkard going down the lane with ale-mug in his hand would be disappointed, though the food is said to be good. Chesterton, who died in 1936, is not buried in the nearby Kensal Green Cemetery as sometimes suggested, but in the Catholic Cemetery in Beaconsfield.