Goodbye, Earl's Court

Earl’s Court as I first remember it was where Australian travellers found a cheap bed for the night. It was also the place to go for beers with unfamiliar labels, and bags of kiwi fruit, a rare delicacy in the 1980s. And at a time when Neighbours was riding high in the TV ratings there was fun to be had eavesdropping on conversations littered with ‘fair dinkum’ and ‘strewth’.

There are some troubling details: skyscrapers being built in a largely low-rise Victorian neighbourhood and the way streets at the perimeter of the site will be overlooked and overshadowed

Older generations will remember earlier waves of immigrants. There were the Polish soldiers who were resettled there after the second world war and set up shops, cafes and clubs. There were also new arrivals from Commonwealth nations, including V.S. Naipaul. His semi-autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival describes a discomfiting stay in a down at heel Earl’s Court guest house in 1950, surrounded by ‘drifters from many countries of Europe and North Africa’.