London has turned inside out…..

……places like Islington and Notting Hill were once rough, whereas suburbs like Harrow and Croydon were not. Now it’s the other way round. The first poor part of London to make the turn was Fulham, childhood home of my old friend Brian Jones. We try to out-working class each other with nostalgic tales about poverty, petty crime and uncles who could play the spoons. I remember him telling me that on hot summer nights, his mum would take the tin bath up to the roof of their crumbling old tenement in St. Olaf’s Road and bathe him and his siblings al fresco. With those ex-council flats now fetching at least half a million, it’s hard to imagine that happening now. But when this was in the charts, it was probably quite commonplace. The Drifters had the original hit but for Brian, and for a London that has long disappeared, it has to be Kenny.