Broken Homes

The buildings may have burnt down, but the people had survived and they weren’t going to give up their rights without a fight. Or at the very least a hefty wodge of cash. Since Charles II, despite being the king of bling, was famously short of readies and already had a war going with the Dutch, London got rebuilt with its donkey tracks intact. And Wren had to be content with the odd church dotted around the place.
    In the 1970s a group of developers had similar grandiose plans for the strip of the South Bank between the London Studios and the Oxo Tower. Although, unlike Wren and his merry band of wig-wearing social improvers, their plans were ambitious only in monetary terms. Architecturally, the best they could come up with was a couple of glass boxes plonked down amongst windy concrete squares. It was indistinguishable from hundreds of similar schemes that had been inflicted on the inhabitants of London since the end of the war. But this time the locals weren’t having it, and you really haven’t seen aggro until you piss off a working-class community in south London. They fought the plans for years until finally they wore down the developers through a combination of organised protest, savvy media skills and cockney rhyming slang. Thus was born the Coin Street Community Builders whose unofficial motto was Building houses that people might actually want to live in . It was revolutionary stuff.
    Another radical notion was the idea that people who lived near the river might actually want to walk along the riverbank. So they threw in a rectangular park that ran from Stanford Street down to the Thames Path. It was in this park, named after local activist Bernie Spain, that the God and Goddess of the River Thames planned to hold their Spring Court.
    ‘But why there?’ asked Lesley.
    Nightingale, even after an afternoon in the library, couldn’t answer that.
    We’d recruited some PCSOs from the local Safer Neighbourhood Team and they were already closing off Upper Ground Street when we arrived late in the morning. It had been bucketing down the day before. But that had let up overnight, to give way to one of the luminous pearl-coloured days which would be almost pretty, if the persistent drizzle wasn’t leaking down the back of your collar. We’d considered wearing uniform but Lesley said, what with her mask and everything, she’d look like a plastic cop monster from Doctor Who . I managed to restrain myself from telling her their real name.
    As the highest ranking non-plastic policeman, Nightingale went off to marshal the PSCOs and their handlers while me and Lesley dealt with the stallholders who were beginning to arrive along Upper Ground. Next to the park was Gabriel’s Wharf, a sort of permanent retail fair with cafés, pizzerias and a couple of upmarket restaurants. Lesley handled that side while I made sure that the booths were being set up in the correctly allocated spaces – ticking them off on my slightly damp clipboard as I went.
    I’d just worked my way down to the Thames Path when I spotted a white skinhead approaching with a heavy duty power tool slung over his shoulder. I walked briskly to intercept him but found, as I got closer, that it was only Uncle Bailiff – Mama Thames’s odd job man, carrying an angle grinder.
    ‘Wotcha,’ he said. He was stocky, middle aged, but as a solid as a block of stone. He wore a spider web tattoo on his neck and had, according to rumour, arrived at Mama Thames’s house to collect an outstanding bank debt and never left. Lesley had gone so far as to run a missing persons check. But whoever he was before he was Mama Thames’s, she could never discover.
    ‘All right,’ I said and nodded at the angle grinder. ‘What’s that for?’
    ‘Access, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘For the grand debarkation.’
    Poking out into the river at that point was a wooden pier, a remnant of the time when this part of the South Bank still boasted warehouses and industry. It was solidly built so that even my size elevens didn’t rattle the boards as I followed Uncle Bailiff along it towards the end. The tide was out and I glanced over the railing at the glistening mud. The year before I’d pulled myself ashore not fifty metres downstream. I noticed that a metal railing had been retrofitted onto the pier, presumably to stop tourists and small children from taking a dive. I also noticed that there were no gaps to allow passengers to board, or climb off, a boat.
    ‘Hey,’ I