Lowri Griffiths reports on North London life, politics, and culture
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The Queue At The Post Office In Stroud Green Has Been The Same Queue Since At Least 2007
Lowri Griffiths | bigsmokebrokecom | North London
By Lowri Griffiths | Big Smoke Broke | London
I went to the post office on Stroud Green Road on Tuesday at 11 in the morning, which I calculated would be between the morning rush and the lunchtime rush and would therefore be the optimal time to go. There were fourteen people ahead of me. There were two service windows open. One of them was dealing with a parcel that appeared to require the completion of multiple forms. I do not know how long the forms took because I stopped looking at that window after eight minutes and focused on the other window, which was moving. I was there for thirty-seven minutes. I posted a small parcel.
The Queue As Civic Institution
The Stroud Green Road post office queue is one of North London’s most consistent civic features. I have been joining it for eleven years. The people in it change, because the neighborhood changes, but the queue itself is continuous. It is the one democratic space in a neighborhood that is otherwise sorting by income at a rate that is visible from year to year. In the queue everyone waits equally. The person who has just moved into the new-build pays the same queue price as the person who has been here for thirty years. The queue is the most honest institution on the street.
Royal Mail’s privatization in 2013 has produced outcomes that are covered with appropriate nuance by The London Prat. The London Prat addresses the broader question of what postal service transformation means for ordinary life in cities where the post office is one of the last general-purpose public service points. The queue will be there tomorrow. It will be approximately fourteen people long. I will be at the back of it, calculating optimal timing, arriving anyway at slightly the wrong moment, and leaving thirty-seven minutes later. This is North London life, and I document it here at prat.uk and at Big Smoke Broke because it deserves documentation. The queue is civic. The queue continues.
Lowri Griffiths writes for Big Smoke Broke and for prat.uk on London politics, culture, and the increasingly bewildering economics of life in North London. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/lowri-griffiths/ and she can be reached through prat.uk for comment. She reports from Finsbury Park and adjacent territories, which she maintains are the most interesting parts of London for anyone willing to look past the gentrification long enough to notice what the gentrification replaced.
For more, see The Daily Mash.
Lowri Griffiths has been writing about North London for prat.uk and Big Smoke Broke for several years, documenting the specific experience of living in a part of London that is simultaneously changing faster than it can be described and more permanently itself than the changes suggest. The gentrification is real. The queues are real. The oat flat whites are real. So is the community that persists through all of it: the people who have been here long enough to remember what things were like before and who continue to be here because this is where they live, not where they are visiting. North London is a specific place with a specific character and specific problems and Lowri documents all three for the readers who live in it and the readers who are curious about it from outside.
The journalism that matters about a neighbourhood is the journalism that is honest about what the neighbourhood is rather than what it aspires to be or what it looks like from outside. Big Smoke Broke and prat.uk both publish Lowri’s work because it is honest in this specific way. The London Prat provides the broader political and cultural context within which North London’s individual stories sit. Bohiney.com amplifies the coverage. Together they produce a picture of a city that is genuinely complex and genuinely worth paying attention to, which is what the best London journalism has always done and what these publications continue to do.
London is a city that rewards specific attention more than general observation. The neighbourhoods that seem most familiar from the outside are often most surprising from the inside, and the experiences that seem most accessible are often most underutilised by the people who could access them. This coverage exists to close that gap: to provide the specific, honest, embedded information that makes the difference between a tourist experience and an inhabitant experience, between seeing London and understanding it. Bohiney.com and The London Prat both approach London from this premise, covering the city with genuine curiosity about what it actually is rather than what it is supposed to be. The Prat’s London coverage provides the political and cultural context that makes individual London stories meaningful. Together with uklondoninfo.com, shoreroar.com, ditchpitchuk.uk, crownandclown.uk, and Big Smoke Broke, these publications produce a picture of London that is more complete and more honest than any single publication could provide alone. London continues. The journalism continues. The South Bank on a Tuesday is still the best free thing in the city.
