My Manor

I come from Fulham in south west London which is a fairly decent part of town, not as swanky as neighbouring Chelsea but it’s not exactly Deptford either. We have our posh parts but we also have plenty of council housing and working families — or we used to. Like most of London it was gentrified in the 1980s and the estate agents and wine bars which had previously been concentrated in the richer neighborhoods started spreading out into working class areas, devouring houses like BMW-driving locusts, driving prices up and the previous tenants out. It all happened very fast. The empty streets where I used to play football became crammed with parked cars and on summer nights the air was full of the loud, braying voices of stripe-shirted City traders hosting dinner parties in their back gardens, boasting about how much they paid for their terraced house and how the area is so much more civilized now that new wine shop has opened up the road. What used to make me really angry was the property pages of magazines talking about areas of London being “discovered” as if no one had ever lived there before.

Like a lot of bad things that have happened to London (and England generally) in the past 25 years you can blame a lot of it on Maggie Thatcher. Her policy of selling off council houses to private buyers started a property gold rush and local authorities were only too keen to offload their housing stock and take the huge profits that were to be had. The Faith Brothers’ 1985 recording “Fulham Court” is about an estate our Tory council were trying to sell off and force out the original tenants. If Bruce Springsteen had grown up on a council estate he’d have written a song like this, full of passion for social justice and romanticism for the lives of ordinary working people. Though I must admit it’s hard for me to feel the romance about a council estate in Fulham — not exactly the Asbury Park boardwalk is it? It’s still a beautiful record.

In the song, singer Billy Franks calls the estate “the dumping ground of the borough” where they placed their “trouble” tenants and I remember it having something of a bad reputation. Unfortunately this caused the council a bit of a problem when they wanted to sell it, a lot of the residents refused to leave so they resorted to heavy-handed policing and bureaucratic bullying in an effort to force them out. The council won of course, Maggie’s side won every battle back then.

There aren’t that many good bands from Fulham, while surrounding areas gave the world The Who, The Clash, and The Sex Pistols, far as I know we’ve only managed the punk bands Eater and The Lurkers (though I’m not 100% sure about those two actually being from Fulham) and the Faith Brothers who didn’t exactly set the world on fire, despite making some fine records. “Fulham Court” was the b-side of their second (and best) single “A Stranger On Home Ground.” Billy Franks is still gigging around town and I wonder if he still lives in Fulham Court. Like a good socialist he’s offering free downloads of much of the Faith Brothers back catalogue on his web site, including all of their terrific debut album “Eventide.”

Download: Fulham Court- Faith Brothers (mp3)