Street View: The Upside

I had barely touched the Street View functionality of Google Maps before today.  I was aware of the political and privacy arguments against the technology, but hadn’t really put it to use.

Today, while in the process of writing memoir notes about my earliest years, I was using Google Maps to check locations from my boyhood in London.  I was looking at the highest magnification to the arial of one location and accidentally pressed +Zoom again.  I was transported in StreetView and there before me, as clear as day, was the house I lived in from the age of 9 until I left home in my teens.  I spent ages just zooming the view up and down the street, and tracing my walk to primary school.  Then I was hooked.

I have now looked at each of the places I lived in from my birth to the age of about 25, each of my schools, places friends and relatives lived, places I played.  And each image brought memories flooding back in ways that probably couldn’t have happened without the pictures.  Extraordinarily powerful stuff.  Great technology.

The picture shown here is of 3, Annandale Road, Chiswick, London W4, with the blue door.  (The out of focus areas are a Google artifact.)  I lived here, in a cold-water third floor walk up, from my birth until a little before I was 10.   This is a very fashionable area today (the building at number 7 is for sale at $1.2m), but back in the early 1950s it was a heavily-bombed lower working class area.  Chiswick was grey and dirty and I am sure I lived my life in black-and-white until we moved away.

This house has hardly changed (except for the painted door).  When I lived in the building, a lady called Agnes lived on the ground floor, a spinster lady.  On the second floor lived my Nanny Bull (mother of my paternal uncle’s wife).  She was “a very old” lady (though probably younger than I am today) and as I remember, she always sat in the bay window, looking out at the street.  On the third floor, the window to the right was my bedroom.  The windows centre and left were the tiny living room.

Amazing to be given such access to our memories.

My Own London Underground!

IF today wasn’t Buy Nothing Day — and IF I happened to have a spare $8million burning a hole in my pocket — I’d be really tempted to buy this.

This is one full mile of tunnels and rooms directly under central London.  It is being sold by British Telecom who inherited the property.  As the New York Times reports:

The tunnels were built in 1940 during the blitz, when Britain came under sustained air attacks from Nazi Germany. The government decided to create eight underground bomb shelters in London, as the city’s subway stations were not big enough to accommodate all those seeking refuge.  But the BT tunnels, and one other, were never used by the public because the government needed them for its own operations. The BT tunnels soon became a temporary base for troops before D-Day while another tunnel was turned into the European headquarters of Gen. Eisenhower.  In 1944, the tunnels became a base from which the Allies helped resistance movements in Nazi-occupied countries. Members of the secret service, in offices equipped with telephones and teleprinters hidden beneath the war-torn streets, helped coordinate as many as 10,000 men and women gathering support against the Nazi regime across Europe.

After the war, the tunnel network became an important operations center for the company once known as British Telecommunications. In recent years, though, BT has used the space mostly for storage … Appearing more like the set of a James Bond movie than prime real estate, the complex still has a bar and two canteens, not in use, and a billiard room, not to mention functioning water and electricity supplies.

There are a couple of issues that need to be dealt with …

The air is dry, hot and stale. The constant rattling of London Underground trains rushing through a separate tunnel system a few feet above and the sound of giant ventilation fans make the tunnels a noisy environment.

Baffleboard, that’s what they need.  A few truck loads of baffleboard to muzzle the noise.  Then it could be a really neat downtown hideaway.  Now, about that $8 million ….

Spielers

I was born a Cockney in East London and, though we moved to Chiswick in West London before I had a memory (when the whole borough was still a mix of Victorian houses turned slums and spit-and-polish-clean workman’s cottages, not the chic area it has become), my mother liked to take me back to the east end; especially to Petticoat Lane, the Smoke’s great flea market along Wentworth Street and Middlesex Street.

I’m not sure what she went there for, but I grew to love the spielers, the stall-holders who sold their goods through their showy talk.  The kings of the trade were the china salesman who, in the course of a rambling sales pitch, could pile an entire china dinner service on a large serving platter and throw it in air, catching it again with a huge clatter.  And by that time, you were so entranced by his storytelling and feats of strength that you took out your purse and bought a plate or two.  So the theory went; and I’m sure it worked because they kept at it throughout my youth.

When I came to live here on the west coast, I was immediately drawn to the pitchmen I saw on TV:  Cal Worthing ton “and his dog Spot”, the classic used car salesman; Ron Popeil, the grandmaster of kitchen appliances and spray-on hair; Billy Mays, king of the infomercial, with his beard and trademark “Billy-back” guarantees; and the up-and-comer selling absorbent cloths.  I love listening to the pitches, analyzing the creative, reading the disclaimers, and never buying anything (OK, in the interests of full disclosure, I did buy a pasta maker from Ron Popeil in the 1980s:  it was great to use and good value).

Anyway, this whole musing was kick-started by a fascinating Lloyd Grove interview of Billy Mays in Conde Nast Portfolio.   Billy turns out to be a single-minded money-making machine, happy to launch into a detailed analysis of “direct response” advertising, and with a keen sense of the downstream revenues he can plug into.  He has developed his art of pitching, worked hard at it, and I don’t begrudge him anything he can make out of it.