Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Karl Marx
who spent more than half his life in London, much of it in bourgeois
Hampstead. Marx asked for a simple grave topped by a headstone, but by 1954 the
Communist movement decided to move his tomb to a more prominent position and
erect the vulgar bronze bust that now surmounts a granite plinth bearing the words
“Workers of all lands, unite”, from
he Communist Manifesto
. He has been visited here
by Khrushchev, Brezhnev and just about every postwar Communist leader in the world.
Buried along with Marx are his grandson, wife and housekeeper, Helene Delmuth,
whom he got pregnant. Engels accepted paternity to avoid a bourgeois scandal and
only told Marx's daughter, Eleanor, on his deathbed in 1895. Eleanor committed
suicide a few years later after discovering her common-law husband had secretly
married someone else. Her ashes were finally placed in the family vault in 1954, having
been seized from the Communist Party headquarters in London by the police in 1921.
Lesser-known Communists such as Yusef Mohamed Dadoo, chairman of the South
African Communist Party until his death in 1983, cluster around Marx. Not far away
is
George Eliot
is grave and, behind it, that of her lover, George Henry Lewes.
Alexandra Palace
Alexandra Palace Way •
T
020 8365 2121,
W
alexandrapalace.com • Bus #W3 from Alexandra Palace train station or walk from
!
Wood Green
Built in 1873 on North London's commanding heights of Muswell Hill,
Alexandra
Palace
is London's only surviving example of a Victorian “People's Palace”, since its more
famous rival, Crystal Palace, burnt down in 1936 (see p.313). However, the history of
“Ally Pally” is almost as tragic as that of Crystal Palace. Sixteen days after the of
cial
opening, the place burnt down and, despite being rebuilt within two years and boasting
a theatre, a reading room, an exhibition hall and a concert room with one of the world's
largest organs, it was a commercial failure. During World War I more than seventeen
thousand German POWs passed through its gates, and in 1936 the world's first
television transmission took place here. It was the venue for the
International Times'
“14 Hour Technicolour Dream” in 1967, which featured performances by, among
others, Pink Floyd and Soft Machine. The palace was rebuilt again after another
devastating fire in 1980, and there are plans afoot to restore the Victorian theatre and
BBC studios for visitors. Meanwhile, the annual round of shows and gigs continues, and
there's a pub - appropriately named
Phoenix Bar
- with great views, an indoor ice rink, a
boating lake, a pitch and putt course and a garden centre, as well as regular funfairs.
20
Golders Green
If the East End is the spiritual home of working-class Jews,
Golders Green
and the
suburbs to the northwest of Hampstead, are its middle-class equivalent. A hundred years
ago this whole area was open countryside but, like much of suburbia, it was transformed
overnight by the arrival of the tube in 1907. Before and after World War II, the area was
heavily colonized by Jews moving out of the old East End ghetto around Spitalfields or
fleeing as refugees from the Nazis. Nowadays, Golders Green, along with Stamford Hill,
is one of the most distinctively Jewish areas in London. The Orthodox community has a
particularly strong presence here and there's a profusion of kosher shops beyond the
railway bridge on Golders Green Road, at their busiest on Sundays.
Hampstead Garden Suburb
W
hgs.org.uk •
!
Golders Green
Much of Golders Green is architecturally bland, the one exception being
Hampstead
Garden Suburb
,
begun in 1907. This model housing development was the Utopian
dream of
Henrietta Barnett
, who believed the key to social reform was to create a mixed
social environment where “the poor shall teach the rich, and the rich, let us hope, shall
help the poor to help themselves”. Yet from the start the suburb was socially segregated,
