Clays Lane: A Beautiful Failure

At night, lit-up and standing squarely on its pedestal of poisoned earth, Clays Lane Housing Cooperative resembled Staasi HQ or that Nazi holiday camp on the Baltic Sea. It looked more like a jerry-built ‘institution’ than a socialist experiment. Newham Council had obviously gone to the trouble of finding the least commercially plausible land under their remit, an ex-rubbish dump on the Leyton/Stratford border next to a railway marshalling yard. This was also the vicinity they’d allowed the ‘Caravan Dwellers’ to stay. A rough and ready bunch of Gypsy-types and angry dogs that would bite your arse as soon as look at you.

Ten courtyards all named after one of The Rochdale Pioneers, those C19th devisers of cooperative principles and a main office block cum meetings room cum community centre (also containing two worker’s cooperatives: a launderette and a general groceries shop). Five hundred tenants in total all paying (or, too often, not paying) a rent set low for the area. Thus, it attracted students, folk on benefits and an array and assortment of otherwise itinerants, Rastafarians, punks and an alarmingly large volume of Celts, many of whom seemed to view the whole thing as one big party venue.

There were meant to be rigid ‘selection’ procedures both at the application stage and when being interviewed by ‘house members’ but these were not always adhered to. Having passed the application stage new house members were often accepted almost ‘on the nod’ depending on the human make-up of that particular house. Not everyone took much interest or even attended such events. “Do you drink?” “Aye, you’ll do”. The more middle-class households however would have pertinent questions to ask and discuss to ensure prospective house-sharers ‘fitted in’ with their values, way of life, etc. In other words, they wanted people pretty much like themselves.

The less conforming households were a right old rag-tag of individuals, often the stuff of social experiments. A trainee chef from Hong Kong could find himself sharing with an Australian party-animal and a born-again Christian from Derry. Some households had political dimensions such as a six-person household being occupied by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party and quite honestly, if you’d ever spent any time at all with such an intense and humourless bunch, you’d be glad that they all stuck together.

Whatever they were in terms of theory, in effect, they seemed to put off any possibility of ordinary working-class people joining their cause. They were caucus and cabal and clique of middle-class angst, guilt and bitterness toward their own class which they could safely run home to when things got a bit iffy. A factory worker would be far more likely to join the Moonies than this bunch of cheerless drips. Nowadays their leading lights can be found at Conservative Party HQ formulating policy of anything but a left-wing nature. Spurned by the common man they seem now to have chosen to help squash him.

All the courtyards were split into different sized homesteads: a mixture of ten-bed, six, four, two and two bungalows, the latter two being for couples. In one of these in Howarth Court lived Elwyn Flowers. I mention this because he was a notable figure around the co-op, involved as he was in many of its schemes and aspirations (he was the brains behind the worker’s co-ops and many of the other committees and manoeuvres).

A ramshackle figure who dressed in clothes the local charity shops would refuse if offered, it was his room that provided much mystery and rumour. Was it really such a messy shambles that some had reported? Were there really dead canaries buried beneath all the tins, soiled toilet paper and cider bottles strewn about his floor? Nobody really wanted to find out for sure.

The origins of Elwyn Flowers were steeped in mystery too. He seemed to speak in the English tongue, but this notion came into question when he was drunk which he often was. Then it was all ‘whae’ and ‘fit’ and ‘ach’ leading the confused listener to wonder if he was either in some sort of pain, was suffering an epileptic fit or maybe just from some place up north where they communicated in a simplistic manner.

He sort of roamed around the place expressing ideas as he went. “Have you ever tried to grill an egg?” he’d ask you just out of the blue then wander off to leave you non-plussed and strangely agitated.

There was a disused bike-track to the east of the estate, it’s route now weeded and scarred with graffiti. One Saturday morning I wake up hung-over, mouth dry and head mildly pounding. I am in my mid-twenties and playing the Scot in London stereotype for all it is worth ie every activity must in some major way involve getting hammered. Going on a train journey? Hammered! Starting a new job? Hammered! A visit to the clap clinic? Double hammered. Thon wee cotton-bud thing stings. Any man would be due a drink before, after and even during such a procedure.

Thing is, though, that I’m sharing a bed with the original English Rose, and she’s not ever-so enamoured with me getting hammered.

 I hear the sound of bagpipes wafting their skirl across the summer breeze. Have I died through the night and gone to Scottish heaven? Maybe that fourteenth pint and the half-bottle carry-out was the final straw and I am now in the world, however ironically, of the spirits.

 This calling from Caledonia seems to be coming from the general vicinity of the cycle track.

“Can you hear bagpipes?”

"Sorry?" She can't understand what I'm saying at the best of times let alone while half-asleep and having to deal with bagpipe chat.

“Bagpipes. I hear bagpipes from over at the bike track”.

It is not easy being Mick Ryan and it shows. Mick Ryan mooches about like it is somewhat of a burden being Mick Ryan at all. Yes, there is definitely something wryly humorous about being Mick Ryan as if God has made rather a pithy joke. In fact, if God appeared, Mick would have rather a humorous conversation with him on the subject of being Mick Ryan along the lines of ‘What the hell were you thinking lumbering me with this?’

Mick Ryan didn’t view God as being worthy of any greater respect than he gave everyone else. In this he was a true socialist. Mick would view God lugubriously the same as he would a rainy day.

Mick had a racing bike although no-one ever saw him ride it. Mick had a souped-up sound system, yet he only ever played one tune on it: Weather Report’s Nubian Sundance. No-one could ever remember anything Mick ever said (at least, not for very long).

Mick was Mick and if you didn’t like it then you could just as easily render yourself Mickless than share his company at all.

If Mick Ryan had any ambitions or dreams, then he kept them very much to himself and showed not the slightest evidence of ever pursuing them.

He’d taken a fancy, perhaps through economic necessity, to possibly the cheapest beer available on the UK market. It came in brown plastic two-litre containers and when you’d drank from it sufficiently the ‘bottle’ buckled into a distorted shape and no matter how you fashioned and squeezed it wouldn’t return to its original shape. So, you found yourself getting slightly pie-eyed while drinking from this increasingly Picasso-esque vessel. To accompany this delightful beverage, Mick would roll cigarettes thin enough to shame the most miserly Pentonville detainee.

Individuals like Mick seemed to arrive in Clays Lane as if out of nowhere and as if it was somehow ordained by some saint of the itinerant that they should dwell there. They became part of the fabric of the place as if that was their only role in life.

Old hippies, proto-new-agers, renegades from times past shunted out to the far reaches to semi-exist.

 

Steve Murray, an Iggy Pop from Edinburgh asked me if I’d heard the bagpipes and I told him I had. He looked worried, sharing my unspoken notion that this was a portent of doom. Maybe all the Scots in Clays Lane were due for extinction, and this was the sign. Like elephants we were to cross over to the disused bike track, lie down and die.

Steve dressed like Eddie Cochran had he lived and gone to seed from too much speed and ale. Scuffed biker’s jacket and boots and trews that were once denim but were now matted from too many uncarpeted floors and the spillage of fluids varied. His trousers were a calendar of his life with all the dates muddled. He probably didn’t even take them fully off to fornicate with the long-suffering Linda or any other of his drunken conquests.

Steve liked his music loud and not very tuneful. The Butthole Surfers. The Cramps. He busked with me once down Stratford tubeway and folk started taking their money back. A whirling dervish that frightened their kids he swooped and whooped like David Johannsson with nippy piles.

‘Talkin’ bout ma babyuuuuuu. She cumin after youuuuuuuu’.

What he didn’t realise was that I was actually playing Donovan’s Mellow Yellow at the time!

“It was definitely bagpipes though, Davie, wasn’t it?”

“Aye, Steve. I’m afraid it was.

Together we walked into the ever-setting sun.

 

The problem with Clays Lane was one of consciousness. Many of its inhabitants over the years may never have understood the word ‘Cooperative’ in its political or social sense. There should have been induction classes right from the off where folk would be introduced to the concept and its principles, and an attempt should have been made for these to be followed more devotedly than they ever were. There were those like Elwyn Flowers who promoted the cause but few others. Clays Lane was a beautiful anarchy that shone briefly but, like the sun itself, one day the fuel would run out.

It succumbed in the end to commercial forces and became part of the 2012 Olympic infrastructure. I couldn't help hoping at the time when watching the opening ceremony that the Olympic flame would somehow connect with one of those ancient methane bubbles beneath the scheme. A fitting way for Clays Lane to express its last irreverent goodbye.