Down Wembley way

Great excitement in north west London on Thursday.

I had a meeting with our accountants whose tenth floor office overlooks Wembley Stadium.

Over the past ten years they've had a ringside seat as the old stadium was demolished and the new one took its place.

At first the gleaming new stadium – which is much taller than the old one, even without its arch – seemed out of place in an area characterised by two-storey suburban houses built in the Thirties and grim high rise offices, disturbing relics of the Sixties and Seventies.

Today, in the area around the stadium, some of the older monstrosities have gone (or been refurbished) and shiny new apartments have appeared and the area has been rebranded Wembley City.

On Thursday the sound of live music alerted me to the opening of London Designer Outlet, which seems a strange name for "Wembley's newest shopping, eating and entertainment destination".

It's not very big and quite a few units haven't been let yet, but it's a welcome addition to the area.

I was attracted to a Cafe Nero where they were handing out free croissants. I found a table and sat there, with my laptop, for an hour or so.

On a whim I rang my mother, who was born in 1930 and grew up in Wembley. (Old photographs show that the stadium was surrounded by fields when it was first built in 1923. Hard to imagine now, especially as I was sitting exactly where those fields had been.)

I asked her what my grandparents' address was so I could have a look at the house.

It was Rosslyn Gardens, a short drive from 'Wembley City'.

My grandfather was a doctor and when he retired my grandparents moved to Colchester so I must have been three or four years old the last time I saw the house.

The tree-lined residential street was almost as I remembered it, although it seemed a lot wider in those days.

The house too seemed smaller. My grandfather's surgery was part of it. It had its own entrance so patients didn't have to go through the house.

I've written about this before, I think, but I'm told that my grandfather, like many doctors in the post war period, wasn't a huge fan of the NHS, or the way it was introduced.

His patient list (ie his business), which he had built up between the wars, was effectively commandeered by the state in 1948.

This isn't an argument against the NHS (that's a different debate), but there was a generation of GPs who were less than happy when their practices were taken over and nationalised.

It's a story rarely if ever told, perhaps because it sits uncomfortably with the modern orthodoxy that the pre-NHS healthcare system in Britain was a blot on civilisation and the NHS represented a giant step forward.

That generation of doctors are dead now so everyone accepts, without quibble it seems, that the NHS saved the nation from a fate worse than death (health inequalities, allegedly, and avaricious private quacks).

That's not how I remember my grandfather (a lifelong pipe smoker, by the way). He would be amazed, I'm sure, by the salaries doctors currently earn, the absence of home visits, and the tendency of current GPs to send you to hospital so someone else can examine you and decide what to do.

Anyway, it was interesting to see the house. The separate entrance is long gone and you would never guess that part of the house had been a surgery.

PS. My grandfather fought in the desert in the First World War. A decade or so later he had all his teeth removed.

I remember being told the two things were linked - the sand ground them down, something like that - but perhaps I imagined it.

It does seem a bit far-fetched. Did Lawrence of Arabia have his teeth removed? I think we should be told.

Then again, he was killed in a motor cycle accident before they had a chance to whip them out.

Comments

[The Blocked Dwarf]

"Then again, he was killed in a motor cycle accident ...."

He was? I always thought the illuminati (or was it the Masons?) had him killed - crossbow bolt cunnily disguised as a swagger stick shot from some grassy knoll en route...or TPTB swapped those coins in his gas tank for Strontium...

*continues folding himself a rather dashing hat out of used cigarette packet foil*

[Tony]

I've no idea whether Lawrence of Arabia has all his teeth removed but his death seems to have been the initial trigger for the Bully State that we now face.
http://motorcycleminds.org/?p=1232
"At the age of 46, two months after leaving the service, Lawrence was fatally injured in an accident on his Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle in Dorset, close to his cottage, Clouds Hill, near Wareham.
One of the several doctors attending him was a young neurosurgeon, Hugh Cairns.
He was moved by the tragedy in a way that was to have far-reaching consequences. At the beginning of the Second World War, he highlighted the unnecessary loss of life among army motorcycle dispatch riders as a result of head injuries. His research concluded that the adoption of crash helmets as standard by both military and civilian motorcyclists would result in considerable saving of life.
It was 32 years later, however, that motorcycle crash helmets were made compulsory in the United Kingdom. As a consequence of treating T.E. Lawrence and through his research at Oxford, Sir Hugh Cairns’ work largely pioneered legislation for protective headgear by motorcyclists and subsequently in the workplace and for many sports worldwide."