A home from home on streets of Cricklewood, London

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Back through the years I’ve always been a bit wary of what we’d loosely call sporting trips to places like London or Manchester. With the best will in the world and even with the invocation of all the patron saints of moderation, too many pints of John Smith’s extra smooth tend to be consumed and the cause of restraint is normally not helped either by the hospitality of the hosts.

Anyway the weekend before last, I was one of a travelling party making the trip to good old London town for the Connacht championship clash with the home side, booked into the heart of Cricklewood, a name that immediately conjures up images of Irish emigrants leaving the home sod and starting out on a new life far removed in many cases from the rural setting where they grew up.

“The craic was good in Cricklewood, And they wouldn’t leave the crown, With glasses flying and Biddys’ crying, Sure Paddy was going to town.”  That verse from the Dubliners song list (written by Dominic Behan), whether delivered by either Ronnie Drew or Luke Kelly, was always a pretty powerful tuning fork for people here in Ireland of what life could be like for a lot of Irish taking the boat for London for the best part of the last 100 years.

Today Cricklewood is a much changed place from the setting of that song back in 1939, with most of the Irish having moved out, and on a walk through the streets, the people you meet, are far more likely to be of Indian, Pakistani or Turkish roots. But the pubs still continue to thrive in Cricklewood on a largely Irish trade. Places like The Crown, Barretts, Lucky Seven, McGoverns or the Kingdom still have a largely Irish clientele, many of them in the fifty plus category. The place is still like a spiritual home to a generation of Irish.

The bulk of the Irish may have gone but the place still reeks of atmosphere. It’s no Kensington or Chelsea but it’s one of those pockets of a great city where all human life manifests itself. The cast and stories of Eastenders could sit very easily on the high street with its mix of value-for-money diners, small shops and dark skinned faces. And yet everywhere the streets seem to say to you that: the Irish were here.

I have been told by some of my more learned colleagues that I should see Jimmy Murphy’s play, The Kings of the Kilburn High Road, a work zooming in on the fortunes of six Irish emigrants in the 1970s, who inevitably fall on hard times as they grow older and their bodies as well as their minds, just couldn’t sustain the battering from hard physical labour and sustained heavy drinking. Many Irish did do well in London over the years, but many more too fell heavily on the thorns of life (to paraphrase Shelley) and bled profusely.