Many people have a real distaste for her – as an overexposed poster girl for mixed ethnicity and stylish authorship – but I am totally enamoured. Not sure whether my girl-crush is based on beauty* or a general liking to her urban family-themes. (Although I am equally excited by her essays on film and philosophy). Maybe it’s just her name that rocks my boat. So I was delighted to receive a present a few weeks ago: Zadie Smith’s NW. In hard-back. (He had listened; he knew how excited I was by the news of its publication).
Despite my love of the English author, NW especially grabbed my interest as its characters move about NW (north-west London) which is exactly where I live. Now, as I read the book, it is thrilling to experience the streets, busses, shops and trains in and around the streets, busses, shops and trains that are on the page. And vice versa.
Zadie’s NW.
Zoe’s NW.
Put on your scarf. Open the big wooden door. Close it behind you. Breathe in the cool air. Venture four steps down and turn right…
This is Abbey Road. The street is lined by beautiful pieces of architecture, that house beautiful pieces of furniture that look back through beautiful big windows, to watch the beautiful green trees outside. Each block boasts gorgeous English apartments which neighbour and mirror gorgeous English apartments which, every once and a while, neighbour humbling Soviet-looking commission flats that are left from Thatcher days. After a ten minute walk south along Abbey Road you will find Abbey Road Studios and, the even more famous zebra crossing which was put on the front of the Beatle’s Abbey Road album. No matter the time, day or night, there will always be groups of tourists walking back and forth over the road trying to get that perfect kitsch picture recreating the fab four. The tourist hoards are a public menace – stopping traffic and angering cyclists. And this exact spot is on my running route. I often wonder how many photos I could be in? There must be more than one Swedish family that has a framed photo of themselves – four smiley faces on the Abbey Road zebra crossing – and in the right hand corner blurs an image of a red-faced, sweaty girl in mid-stride, with a lopsided grin of endorphin anguished euphoria. Maybe. Check your photo.
But if you put on your scarf. Open the big wooden door. Close it behind you. Breathe in the cool air. Venture four steps down and turn left…
You will find my suburb of West Hampstead. A soup of young professionals from England, Scotland, France, Poland, Spain, Israel and Australia. A mix of twenty-somethings who drink crafted beers and thirty-somethings with a baby on the way. A variation of decrepit buildings and grand red brick apartments with rose gardens. A combination of bars and charity shops. Emma Thompson lives in West Hampstead, so does a young girl who is missing teeth and is often asking for money outside the tube station. And, of course, as every West Hampsteadian knows, we closely neighbour the prettier suburb of Hampstead (divided by one main road) so we spend our weekends crossing the border to drink coffee, to look in boutique book shops, to walk down quaint lanes, to shop at farmers markets and to picnic on top of Hampstead Heath. We are not as elegant as true Hampsteadians, or as dynamic as our far away East London friends, but we own organic. Practicing yuppies on bicycles with slight inferiority complexes (which we share with our therapists). Over the last two and a half years I have lived in three West Hampstead apartments and enjoyed countless evenings in the kitchens of my friends who live in the next street over, or around the corner, or a five minute walk away. We are a West Hampstead family nourished by avocados and company.
And if you put on your scarf. Open the big wooden door. Close it behind you. Breathe in the cool air. Venture four steps down and walk behind our flat you will find…
Kilburn suburb. A whole new world, which I am a part of too. A grey, British version of a Middle-Eastern shouk. Kilburn’s main street is a wall of one pound shops with bins outside full of cheap toothpaste and tins of beans. In Kilburn you are surrounded by worn and torn faces that show every racial gradient between white and black. Its epicentre is a place to find pickles, zataar, artichokes, chickpeas, dates, and other ‘ethnic’ foods that mainstream supermarkets don’t have the patience for. Kilburn is fantastic if you go with the current. It is the kind of place that if you go there for breakfast you will find a room of single, older men eating fry ups and £1 coffees. If you go there to buy towels, you will buy three for 50p. If you go there late at night you will finish the evening with a scrumptious kebab, and a slight degree of trepidation when walking home. This is Kilburn. If Abbey Road is beautiful due to uniformity, Kilburn is beautiful due to texture. It’s not pretty, so you either embrace the romanticism of the ugly, or don’t go.
Zadie’s characters walk through Kilburn. They go a little more north west to Willesden Green where they walk past our favourite Indian restaurant. They cross the busy main street to Hampstead and walk up the hills that my bike struggles on. They shop at supermarkets we go to and take the bus in to town that I jump on. They walk down the streets where we have spent afternoons waiting, hugging, laughing, walking. They pass our post boxes, our tube stops, our beggars and dark corners. They localise beyond the eye of the storm and go to Notting Hill for Carnivale and Soho to buy vintage cars. They stand behind me on a late Wednesday afternoon when I’m looking for lentils.
I have 23 more pages to read. And I have been thinking it would pretty awesome if the last page read thus:
They turned the corner. Ventured up the four steps. Breathed in the cool air. Opened the big wooden door. Closed it behind them. Took off their scarves… She had cooked a feast. They sat, ate, drank and talked to make the noise people make.
* This one came on to the page without me even realising it. I could have written based on beauty and white teeth but you would have probably vomited. Please note I noticed the cheap potential.
