I was very young, maybe six, maybe even five, when my mother took me out, one bitterly cold day, wrapped in scarf and coat and Wellingtons, to the most magical place I’d ever been.
It was a bus ride away, which to a boy that age is like traversing the Arctic; it was even further than Nanny Bob’s house, and if going to Nanny Bob’s meant crossing the big road, and we were going even further from home than that, then surely we were putting our lives in danger even thinking about the trip.
I remember the dull yellow insides of the upstairs of the bus, the stairs so steep, each one so deep it took mountain-climbing gear, ropes, pulleys, and a smiling conductor at the top to pull you up the last few treacherous feet.
But we got there. And when we got there, my father was waiting for us outside, fresh from work, wearing his big coat with the dark collar. “Come on, son”, he said. “There’s someone who wants to meet you.”
That was when I first went up the two escalators, across the top floor, through gauzy curtains and tinselled pillars, to see Father Christmas. Other visits followed, but none ever felt as astonishing as that first trip.
On the way back downstairs, I looked around at the rest of the place. Huge refrigerators, big enough for me and all of my mates to hide in. Dresses so glamourous they would make even the old witch down the road look lovely. Shiny things for the kitchen and living room. A jacket that my dad really liked, but couldn’t afford, so he pretended it didn’t suit him.
When we came out, I turned around, reluctant to leave this amazing palace of wonders. I didn’t know it then, but it had a name. Officially it was Union Point. On the outside of the upper floor, above the window where, I was certain, Father Christmas was watching me walk away, there was a tower, and on the side of it were three letters, set in relief on the great white panel mouldings. LCS. London Co-Operative Society. Everybody knew it as the Co-Op.
I grew up. Union Point was still the Co-Op. Father Christmas wasn’t still Father Christmas but a man in a false cotton-wool beard. The Co-Op closed, leaving an empty building, boarded up against the indifference of shoppers who had been tempted away from the High Road by the sirens of the newly built Shopping City a few miles away.
It stayed empty for years, eventually becoming occupied by a carpet retailer who tacked garish greeny-blue plastic all over the beautiful original façade. The upper floors looked empty, old curtains hanging dusty and torn in the grimy windows.
I’d go past it so often it stopped registering. On the way to work, or off into town, or seeing girls from so many different parts of London, by bus or by car, Union Point was either the sure sign of a good night to come, or the last marker on the drink-blurred journey home.
Recently, life wasn’t good to Union Point, or to me, which meant we saw each other every fortnight as I went to sign on in the JobCentre that had been built next door to it, a modern redbrick slab butted up against its 1930s classicism. I’d walk through the park and along Lordship Lane, and there it’d be, its upper floors retaining their dignity despite the cheap nylon twist carpet offered half-price on the street level, the façade the same despite the modern flats that had been carved out of its interior. Always, always, the same three letters, LCS.
Everybody knows Union Point. It’s the place you saw on the news on Sunday morning, flames swirling from every window. You saw it today; mortally wounded, empty, broken-backed, its roof bowed under its own weight, aching to give up and collapse in on itself like a dying whale. Union Point: destroyed, purposefully, by the people it had watched over for the last eighty years.
Tonight, there are cranes at the corner of Lansdowne Road and Tottenham High Road. Union Point is so badly damaged it cannot stand, and will be demolished. You might see it on the news. Many families will be homeless, their possessions devoured by the fire that destroyed their building. But until the wrecking ball swings, the last remaining part of Union Point that stays recognisable, defiantly unchanging even in its own death, the tower, staying upright only by its own will, and the letters: LCS.
I have no moral point to make. No symbolism, no analogy connecting Union Point with the social cohesion of this country. No ironic juxtaposition of its name and its origin against the selfishness that brought its end. My opinions over the last few days have swung, wildly, from hour to hour. I don’t know what’s happening, but I feel it will get worse.
So, for as long as I can, while the mobs and the flames stay just far enough away on the other side of the borough, so long as the sirens get no closer than the main road two hundred yards from my home, I’m going to sit and feel as safe as it’s possible to feel tonight, and I’m going to raise a quiet glass to those three letters that have there in the edge of my vision for most of my life.
Goodbye, Union Point, Goodbye, the Co-Op. Goodbye, you life-long lodestone. Goodbye, thank you, and sleep well to those unforgettable three letters: LCS.
