Photo: Trevor Fletcher https://flashbak.com/the-morning-after-evocative-photos-of-london-1980-85-415672/ The room smelt of damp - something that couldn’t be helped in an old building like this. It was small - 10’ by 9’ - and in a mess. But it was my mess – the first place I’d ever had all to m

When he first heard it was going to happen, it seemed so far away. He’d carefully written it into his diary, in block capitals and red ink so that in the highly unlikely event that he forgot, it would stand out front and centre when he flicked through the pages. Normally with a big event like thi

It was that fine rain that soaks through everything. He’d been waiting in the queue for a quarter of an hour and hadn’t moved. The labour exchange was one of the older buildings in Boomtown, brick built with sandstone lintels and window frames and it had probably been glorious when it was newly b

He’d worked in Boomtown long enough to know that all the city’s schools were pretty much the same. The buildings were a uniform collection of characterless 1960s concrete that if fitted out differently, could equally have served as an abattoir, tax office or mortuary. The school playing fields w

In People Watching Pt 14, we left our heroine distraught. She’d waited so long to hear her favourite band play live at the Moth Club but she was just turned sixteen and had been turned away at the door. But the anger and sense of injustice she felt had been tempered by her determination that befo

(Beginning to lose count...!) Been thinking about all the deals I blew over the years. These weren’t regretful thoughts, just a wistful reminiscing of what might have been if I’d rolled the dice differently. Back in the day, the government had almost complete press control – not just the media b

In the last episode of People Watching, I’d turned the telescope around and looked deep inside myself. I find this happening more frequently these days and the value of such introspection is that you see things that otherwise would be easy to miss. I’d fallen down (as I call it) many times befor

Boomtown is a pretty uncompromising place. The ten thousand streets of brutalist architecture provide a backdrop that was never intended to foster the best aspects of the human spirit and the air in the city makes things worse. Boomtown doesn’t have any seasons and under the orange sky, endures a ye

When the yellow street lights have spluttered awake and the screaming and crying from the high-rise blocks has died away, I often go walking the streets of Downtown, coat buttoned against the cold looking for haunts to go people watching. It all started sometime in ’78. It was a Saturday and I rem

They’d started going out about three months ago – he and a few mates were s’posed go to a gig downtown and as usual had met up at the Italian Café. It was a wild night. Whipping in off the sea, the wind was channelled along the streets of Boomtown, driving the rain and picking up the litter fro

His better half was on a socially-distanced night out with her friends from work and for the first time since the start of lockdown, he had the flat to himself - glorious. Opening the fridge door, the beer he’d been chilling specially for tonight, called out to him. He grabbed a bottle and chugg

Boomtown had a new mayor and Paul hoped that this time maybe something would change. He’d worked at the abattoir for too many years to think about and he knew it wasn’t doing him any good. He hoped he wasn’t like all the other workers that he watched every morning slowly shuffling along the dank

Frankie was a happy man. Happier than he could ever remember. They’d been spending more and more time together until it seemed only natural to ask her to move in with him. For days he’d tried to summon up the courage to ask her. It wasn’t the fear of her saying ‘no’ – so long as they were still

The exuberance of youth had gripped her for a few weeks now. Probably since her sixteenth birthday she’d felt a sort of invincibility that she’d never known before - a conviction that she could set the world alight. This new perspective led her to judge the other citizens of Boomtown with a sense

Over the last year or so, a forest of radio masts has sprung up around Boomtown – though if you’re expecting the latest 5G technology, you’re going to be disappointed. These are 2.5G masts, recently pulled down in Craggy Island and sold to the government of Boomtown as a cheap job lot – no questio

I’m not sure why or how this happened, but people watching over the last few weeks had taken me down to the coast. Although it’s good to be away from the urban madness, for several days I’ve had this insistent feeling in the pit of my stomach that I needed to get back to Boomtown. So, I stuffed

When the weather’s better and you don’t feel the need to stay indoors, there’s usually something going on most summer nights in the Boomtown City Square….buskers trying to get their first break, odd looking blokes dragging pallets loaded with rocks across the square, or Boomtown’s very own “Speakers

The walls in the Downtown apartments are paper thin and often in the small hours you will hear noises that chill your soul. Most nights, the darkness in Boomtown can feel uncomfortable but I recall one night in 1979 when the still air hung like a heavy blanket over everything and the night felt par

He stood almost motionless at the end of the mailboat pier, staring out across the dark water. It had been raining for hours and the cold night air seemed to hang over him like a heavy blanket, soaking him to the skin. In one hand he held a cigarette and in the other he toyed with a single wooden

The sound of a dull thud from somewhere outside had drawn his attention away from the meeting. Listening intently, the sound had quickly died away and all he could hear now was the wheezing of the machine at the end of one of the corridors. That machine was meant to feed air into the compact grou

The field of autumn wheat was gently stirred by the wind blowing in off the sea, as if a giant hand was endlessly brushing across it, back and forth, back and forth…..A broad band of ponderous cloud lurking just off shore threatened a storm but further out to sea, the sky was clear and rays from

He hated his job. As the packed morning train rumbled around the short sections of underground that ran beneath Boomtown’s streets, his right hand clung to one of those springy things that dangled from the ceiling of the carriage. He wondered what those things were called but quickly decided that

I’d never known such bad traffic. As I mentioned last time, for a short period in the late 70s and early 80s, I’d flirted with minor celebrity. I was on the way to a party in Uptown, a publisher’s launch event in a neighbourhood that I didn’t know. As we sat there inhaling the leaden fumes, I m

As I think every citizen of Boomtown knows, the city isn’t the most homely of places. Although to some the metropolis might look striking – designed by a bunch of architects coming down after the biggest bender ever – it’s far from the most practical place to live. For most, home in the city is

In Boomtown, everybody’s business is everybody’s business and its difficult to escape the feeling you’re being watched – hell, you are being watched….all the time. In People Watching Pt 5, I wrote about Boomtown’s seldom-explored coast and how some people seem to strike lucky and escape the urban

The internet can be such a double-edged sword. Crowded with yahoos who think theirs is the only opinion that matters, it’s easy to lose interest. But then suddenly, you turn a virtual corner and stumble across a place where everyone shares a common interest and it’s good to be part of the gang. Of c

Since it opened a few years back, the Moth Club has been the place to go for Boomtown’s nightlife thugs. But back in the day, the place to be seen was Neon Heart. All life poured down into the Neon Heart when it first opened in 1975. There had been a few other juke joints in town and by and large