Romford
Mega mega grey thing
Where do you start with somewhere like Romford? There are already police vans roaming the streets and it's only mid-afternoon. It seems like the potential for menace is everywhere and starts from the moment all the rowdy chain bars and dodgy clubs next door throw open their doors. Just add teenagers and vodka, and wham! It's Asbotown.
Walk straight out of the station and you're confronted with an enormous LED message board from the London Borough of Havering. One sign welcomes you to Romford. It switches, and another sign warns you that drinking in the street carries a fine of £50,000 (or something). Then a blink, and another sign tells you about 'community banking' and a 'credit union' set up in Romford, which is quite useful for paying off your drinking fine. It might be best to stick to smashing up shop windows.
Perhaps bearing the above in mind, you'd want to think about ways of stay indoors. You're in luck in Romford. One of the largest features (perhaps the only feature) of Romford is the huge, labyrinthine interconnected series of depressing shopping centres that wrap over and under the town like a concrete python.
The centre of 'The Liberty' mall is made of large glass panes and lit in strange violet light. This is what it does to people; they sit under the lights on the white benches, transfixed. A coffee shop has what amounts to a walled-off pen as its seating area; perhaps some of the customers were wearing orange jumpsuits and tied to trollies. Luckily, human contact can be found in the 'talking sign' in another part of the centre. A husky female voice tells you that the disabled toilets are next to Primark.
Some books filed in the 'Recommended' section in Waterstone's, Romford:
- 'Women', by Charles Bukowski
- 'Perfume', by Patrick Süskind
- 'Crash', by J G Ballard
- 'Lolita', by Vladimir Nabokov
What else can you buy here? In one branch of the centres, Steward's Walk, you can buy an A1-sized print of James Dean on a motorbike under Brooklyn Bridge, studied with red LEDs. One of the red LEDs is the lit end of the fag in his mouth. It's a good symbol for a balance between painted glamour and complete crapitude.
In the same way that a casino-hotel complex keeps its hotel rooms grotty and its gaming floors slick and full of enticing lights, the subways and backstreets of Romford are grubby. Indeed, the community outside of the booze and the shopping centres seems to be in its death throes; shops are boarded up around the ring road, it's deathly quiet, and it's extremely difficult to negotiate around the outside by foot without a map and without getting run over.
And what better example of the death of an area could there be than the siting of the local Conservative Party Association? Among the backends of the dodgy office blocks and cheap supermarkets, a sign promises that the party will 'Look After Romford, Fighting For England, Putting Britain First!' Opposite here there is a Sims Close, where no doubt ultra-slim pixelated people run around pissing themselves and setting fire to their homes through faulty cookers.
Another centre, and one of the most disturbing mushrooms in the concrete jungle, is 'The Brewery', a very large car park with a concrete surround, the centre of which features an enormous grey stone plopsy (right). The complex appears to be devoted to going out, leisure, crappy chain restaurants and manky chain clubs, and if you go in to the main hall you are confronted by an alarmingly enormous orange-coloured escalator. Fun is only on the second floor!
Perhaps most worrying of all is the huge sign advertising the indoor "play town"... "the future of children's play." Ideal, if you want your children to look back on their carefree childhoods, running around in a concrete fluorescently-lit bunker and bemoaning the fact they have to toil outdoors in the radioactive wastelands after World War III.
And where is the actual brewery? It's relegated to a back street behind the centre; what obviously used to be a main road. It's boarded and barricaded up. Billposters for several of the dodgy clubs deface the old building. The only real sign of life here is a completely random Russian food shop that sells 'Rum Kokos', 'Waffelblätter' (waffles the size of plasma TV screens) and 'Polished Rip'. The owner, while remaining quite affable, alas doesn't take too kindly to strangers wandering in with notepads and scribbling down lists of his stock.
Still the building and 'regeneration' continues, though. One promising-looking development seems to be called the 'Dolphin Project'; ie. an Asda "over the size of a football pitch", on top of which are "affordable homes". Part of the billboard shielding the construction work advertises the church next door, apparently where "God is rebuilding lives". By putting large multinational supermarkets on people's heads. The rest of the boarding features two scary children, a demonic baby and a man who hs just had acid sprayed in his eyes.
Nearby, there is (another!) network of subways leading into a middle of a roundabout, where you can find that Romford is in fact twinned with Ludwigshafen, 799km away. If the Conservatives were really doing their job in this town, that would have been smartly changed to miles.
Yet another tunnel leads over a building site (perhaps it's the same, perhaps it's different; they all blend in) to Romford market, which sells fish and clothing. There is an incredible mess at the end of the day as bits of rotting food, driftwood, used batteries and slime are partially swept up and packed away to be sold again. The mess has even spread into surrounding shops. At the top of the market there's a circular wire sculpture that probably is supposed to read "MARKET", but you'd have to have four-dimensional eyes to read it.
Residents of Zone 6, #19 – Romford
 | Eyes as big as saucers as he and his other teenage friends help load unsold lingerie into the back of the truck. |
In marked contrast to the rest of the town there is Romford station, which is gleaming, white, busy and huge; the ticket gates (right) are of the variety you couldn't vault even if you had stilts. Don't wait on the platform as you will be knocked silly by a speeding train to Clacton-on-sea. There's a subway on the first floor you can wait inside, although you might have to run half-a-mile up a ramp to get your train. A couple of unusual adverts on the platform include one saying "Didn't you join to do something different?" aimed at the British Transport Police, who obviously frequent the station.
Statistics
Last train to Zone 1 Mon-Sat 2358, Sun 2337.
Time to Zone 1 17mins on One (fastest service)
What to do if you get stuck in Romford after the last train to Zone 1
Wander around the corner to the bus shelters, where at this time of night, lots of polite, well-behaved, well-dressed young people sit in quiet groups, sipping mineral water and discussing Proust. And if you believe that, you'll also believe that an N86 bus will rapidly arrive to take you straight back into the city. It won't. It'll just take you to Stratford. But it's a start. Oh, and you won't find any kebab shops near the bus station at all. They're all organic beauty spas. Really.
