Leaving Boundary Road behind, I launched into new territory, walking along Portland Road – a long street, parallel to the coast. I was now in Hove. In the popular imagination, Hove is the posh bit, all majestic streets of villas sweeping down to the seafront, last of the rich widows and ‘The old rock ‘n’ roller / With his two-seater stroller’ out with his kids. However it isn’t all like that. Portland Road has a utilitarian feel, with the same kind of shops that can be found in virtually any town. It’s a place to buy hardware, place a bet, drink beer. I wandered along it, keeping to the shady side as the sun rose higher.
The former Granada cinema, now not even a bingo parlour, has become a rotting hulk.
Jamie Reid’s Situationist-style Sex Pistols graphics are quoted on this cute Royal Wedding tea towel. Meanwhile a sign on a nearby church combined an Nth-generation version Keith Haring copy with some clip-art to make a Royal Wedding poster. #artschoolsnarkiness
Some things
Reaching Sackville Road, I looked at a small square with a couple of shops – one of those where wind blows leaves and trash around in little eddies and whirlpools. I remembered being out with mum and buying a comic there once, OMAC (One Man Army Corps) issue 2 ‘edited, written and drawn’ by Jack Kirby in 1974. I had avoided Kirby’s work up until then, preferring artwork that looked realistic and detailed to his blocky, streamlined work. With this comic I finally got it (or as Kirby might have written, ‘WITH THIS ISSUE I FINALLY ‘GOT IT’!!!) and spent the next few years reading Kirby almost exclusively, channeling his raw pop mythology. That long-ago story felt topical in the week of a Royal Wedding, featuring as it did a city being hired for a party.
There’s a neat analysis of this story here.
Walking the virtually empty streets of Hove I doubled back into New Church Road. Many years ago when I was 5 I spent a few months in the ‘Children’s Unit’ of what was then the Lady Chichester Hospital. This was an unsettling time and I had imagined that, standing on the site with the perspective, power and freedom of an adult, I would (symbolically) dismantle the place down to the ground. But time had done the job already and it was transformed into something else.
I turned back to the route. There were drifts of blossom on the pavement, like confetti from a vast wedding…
…not some tawdry affair with a mundane prince, but something big and meaningful – perhaps the nuptials of the 50-Foot Woman from the posters adorned my route that morning…
Walking Home to 50 