Ah, Harlesden! - that corner of North-West London which estate agents constantly refer to as "up and coming" but which never seems to get up and come.
In fact, such is the neighbourhood's reputation for gun crime and general mayhem that the estate agent who rented me a flat there refused even to use the word Harlesden. Instead, the area was referred to in his office as "H", as though it were a proscribed substance, or "Willesden Junction" to potential buyers.
My next door neighbour told me that when she moved in in 2000, there was a man in a black leather trenchcoat who spent long hours pacing up and down the pavement outside her house. Once she overheard him having a conversation with a man in a car, the most readily audible words of which were: "No, boss - please, boss - no!"
Hellfire is a motif at another of Harlesden's cultural highlights: the Krazie Needles tattoo parlour. Amid the throbbing ska and leopard-skin sofas of the waiting room, the prospective customer is confronted with a large sign proclaiming "Yes It Hurts!"
Such heady days seem to have departed, along with those cheerful police notices which used to litter the streets, informing the casual passerby that a FATAL INCIDENT had taken place: a man of Afro-Caribean origin, for example, having his head dashed out on the pavement at one o'clock on a Sunday morning. Apparently the police found these notices made people nervous. I can't imagine why.
But Harlesdenians, it seems, still want something's flesh. Those concerned by the encroachments of the supermarkets might like to note that Harlesden has more independent butchers than you could shake a stick at - some are Halal, some Irish, some Jamaican - each serving to one of the cultural patchwork of residents. For ever since Abraham first made burnt offerings, butchery and cultural identity have gone hand in hand.
In between the slabs of lamb and hanging chickens, the street stalls are fragrant with tropical fruit and blaze with West African clothing. The snaking traffic booms with rap and reggae, along with the resolute Caribbean twang of the odd street preacher:
"He wants our hearts to be His throne. He wants us to know Him and the power of His resurrection..."
Amid copious warnings against the schemes of the Evil One and the torments of Hell.
Hellfire is a motif at another of Harlesden's cultural highlights: the Krazie Needles tattoo parlour. Amid the throbbing ska and leopard-skin sofas of the waiting room, the prospective customer is confronted with a large sign proclaiming "Yes It Hurts!" embellished with skulls and licked with red and yellow flames.
If proof is needed that multi-culturalism can succeed, then look no further than Harlesden. This must be one of the few places in Western Europe where you can buy a T-shirt reading "I love Somalia". Harlesden must also take the award for the world's most bizarrely named hairdressers: the "Peace and Human Rights for Central Africa Learning and Training Barber and Unisex Salon." Does a seminar on Bokassa come free with a short back and sides, one wonders?
Just across the street from this unique establishment one takes an abrupt cultural lurch to the Madeiro Centro, a Portuguese bar and social club draped with the flags of Brazil, Macao and Madeira. Inside, the regulars sit playing one of those impenetrable Iberian card-games, the only comprehensible object of which seems to be to smack your card down on the table as loudly as you possibly can.
Two doors down is the Palm Shade Wine Bar, pumping out reggae to a clientele of rakishly-hatted West Indians. And in between stands the Royal Oak Hotel, wherein the male Irish population keep ancient tradition alive by ploughing through ten pints of Guinness and thirty gaspers on a Friday night, the same on a Saturday, and, after commemorating another FATAL INCIDENT in the form of Mass at the Church of the Five Precious Wounds or Our Lady of Willesden, go for the hat-trick on a Sunday afternoon.
Our Lady of Willesden, by the way, has been a site of Marian devotion and pilgrimage since the Middle Ages, but it is very much in Harlesden rather than Willesden. Which brings us on to another puzzle: where does Harlesden end and Willesden, or indeed Neasden, begin? A question to tax the subtlest Jesuit. No wonder the area covered by this trinity of down-at-heel Victorian suburbs is known collectively as The Dens.
It is not only Roman Catholics who attribute religious significance to Harlesden. On the road in from another Den, between the derelict White Hart pub and Dunnings Freehouse, the rotting husk of a bingo hall has been converted into the "Miracle Signs & Wonders Ministries" Pentecostalist church. And further up on the same road, the traveler passes two squat arks of sooty-bricked Victorian evangelism, with a sign proclaiming:
WELCOME TO THE CENTRE OF DEEPER SPIRITUAL TRUTH
Is Harlesden the Centre of Deeper Spiritual Truth? If, as the Hindus believe, the Earth has its chakra points just as the human body has, is Harlesden one of those hot spots? You could almost believe it after a short walk up Brentford Road in the direction of the North Circular. For there, amid the legion of dreary 1930s semi's, is a sight of dreamlike incongruity.
Part gleaming mirage, part answer to a riddle, and surely worthy as the set for the next Indiana Jones movie, Brentford Road is home to the Shri Swaminarayan Hindu Temple. 5,000 tonnes of Italian marble and Bulgarian limestone went into the construction of this many-domed, gold pinnacled shrine, and every surface of the effulgent stone is drippingly ornate with carvings of goddesses, mandalas, flowers and snakes.
The visitor, ensconced in the dreamy silence of the inner sanctum and surrounded by elephant-headed deities, might forget what continent he is on altogether, until he catches sight, out of the ornamentally framed windows, of the Alamo and National car hire depot, and realises that this is, still, Harlesden.
A mile or so to the East, and almost equally as alien as the Shri Swaminarayan temple, is the little reservoir of Victorian gentility that is Roundwood Park. Here nothing disturbs the peace but the somnolent clack of bowls and the chirrup of the aviary. On benches dedicated to long-dead residents, gnarled old men sit, sunk in melancholy reflection of their five decades of low-paid labour amid the riotous flowers. Little wonder, perhaps. Just over the hill in the centre of the park, one is confronted by the immense sea of death that is the Willesden Jewish Cemetery.
Beyond this Semitic necropolis is Willesden proper, immortalised by that Duchess of The Dens, Zadie Smith. That is her territory. Let us retreat instead to Harlesden, to the Irish pubs and the yams and coconuts piled high in the street stalls, to the waft of fierce Portuguese espresso and the numbing thud of ska, where, as the board outside Harlesden Methodist Church has it: "One Planet - One People". Amen to that.
This piece first appeared in Smoke: a London Peculiar no 9