When London was a village........

Many years ago, I lived in London, England.
I went to school there, I went to work there, and later in life I returned to work there again.
Image result for The Old Grammarians, Streatham
Battersea Grammar School
Abbotswood Road , Streatham.
1936 - 1977
The period I'm talking about here, is in the 60's - 70's and London was very much a Village, or more - a collection of Villages held together with a lot of Traditional things for those privileged.
As a Scotsman, I should not have been privileged, but the School I had gone to made me so, and the fact that I was a member of the 'Old Boys Society' (called 'The Old Grammarians') cemented these privileges firmly.
http://www.oldgrammarians.org.uk/cgi-bin/index2.asp
Later, when We left Britain for Europe, nobody in this Association could understand! Germany, France? No....no.....no.....no.... you can't do that, particularly not those two countries!
We were almost 'struck off'......! On their site, I find no reference at all to myself despite the various positions I had held there.
Anyhow - Cricket and Soccer with Golf were my pastimes, and they took me around the 'London Villages' - Kew was 'Cricket on the Village Green', the Pavillion being seperated from the pitch and outground by the main road, difficult to cross with metal studded cricket boots, with the Church Bell ringing 6pm (it was always a Sunday at Kew!)

Image result for Cricket on the Village Green
Kew - cricket on the Village Green....
Somehow every year I was always batting, at the crease, around 6pm when the Church Clock would boom out its message.....it was Tradition!
Absolute 'village' stuff in all its forms, in the middle of the Great City of London.....Other places were the same - just for other pastimes, but always 'villages' - not 'London'!
There were even the local languages, called 'dialects' and some were very dfficult to understand indeed.Image result for London Dialects

Everything was there - local beer (for me - undrinkable) local traditions, customs, habits, even food!
Yes London was a collection of Villages.
Nowadays, from a distance, it seems to have lost a lot of that charm.

Nowadays it's terror, it's business, it's Politics - I guess that if you go and dig deeper you'll find the old London, but I don't have the time nor the ability to do that, so I'll just live from my very pleasant memories.
Mind you, I also have those from Germany, from France, from many other places in Europe, and it would be a great, monstrous error should others, mainly in Politics and Power, do finally get to destroy all of this.
I can't stop them, but maybe YOU can.

Image result for The World

 




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