Maghrebi magic in the shadow of the totem
Two towers dominate North Kensington’s skyline. Erno Goldfinger’s Brutalist masterpiece, Trellick Tower, stands a mere mile from the scene of the brutal blaze that engulfed Grenfell Tower five years ago. It’s charred edifice, a totem for the inequality in our Isles. Now shrouded from public view, the private grief still pours out from banners on balconies and bill-stickered bus stops along Bramley Road. A manor still in mourning and an estate that continues to recover from decades of decay.
The Lancaster West Estate, where the tower once stood, was a balls-up before the first brick was laid down. The London County Council’s bold vision of a Barbican-like Modernist utopia, furnished with gleaming towers, communal gardens, finger-blocks and streets in the sky was hastily unpicked by the borough’s beancounters keen to cut costs and ‘cleanse’ Notting Dale of it’s neglected Victorian housing stock. A Corbusian dream crushed by committee.
As the newly-installed residents of the estate peered down from their concrete citadels, their previously condemned ‘slums’ were being gratefully snapped up by squatters. With a beret-full of revolutionary zeal, the newcomers stumbled upon the idea of seceding from the United Kingdom and creating an independent state to stave off the borough’s bulldozers. A subsequent referendum declared 94% in favour of the plan. Passport to Pimlico made flesh. Indeed, the wannabe ‘Burgundians’ of The Free Independent Republic of Frestonia, with a two year-old girl as their nominated Home Secretary and an accordion-player with Dwarfism as Foreign Secretary stayed put and a characterful cabal of anarchists, artists, circus folk and drifters flourished, surviving relatively intact till the mid-1980s.
Even the soon-to-be Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, was taken by the separatists. As a childhood fan of G.K Chesterton’s Napoleon of Notting Hill, Howe cooed, “I can hardly fail to be moved by your aspirations.” No doubt a well-meaning Whitehall mandarin chucked this bohemian blueprint into the Brexit bouillabaisse along with the scraps of the Common Fisheries Policy and the bones of a Union Jack-waving Dover Sole.
Despite Howe’s praise, the Frestonian dream eventually withered on the vine and was later decanted into a local housing association. A decade or so later, the area once again drew the attention of One-Nation Conservatives. A short husky ride away, on the other side of the Westway from Frestonia was the pre-No.10 home of “Call-me-Dave” and his National Grid-busting wind turbine. Gove, Osborne, Vaizey and the rest of the Downing Street Eton Fives team were down there too. Furthermore, it was on his cycle rides home passed the Lancaster West estate that Steve Hilton, aka Mr. Blue-Sky Thinking, alighted on his ‘Hug-a-Hoodie’ speech idea.
But, whatever the locals’ political persuasions, whether they be barons, barrow-boys or sword-swallowing squatters, the ash from the Grenfell fire fell on everyone’s doorstep that fateful night and the neighbourhood rallied around like never before. Churches, mosques, charities and volunteer-groups worked in concert with local residents to help those directly-affected. Amongst those neighbours and first-responders on that midsummer night were the stall holders of nearby Golborne Road and the owners of Moroccan food business, Eat First.
Assa Ariyoshi ©
At first glance, Eat First is a gloriously wistful evocation of the street food of yore. Their trailer might resemble a truckers tea hut on the A303, with its cracked plastic stools and rickety picnic table, but it contains some incredibly accomplished and tasty cooking. This is not a food rave, nor is it a foppish edible enterprise ensconced in a whimsical vintage van. This is nuts and bolts community catering with 20 years under it’s rusty belt. Cousins Ibrahim and Mohammed who hail from Larache, a port town down the Atlantic coast from Tangier, seem as committed as ever to welcoming and filling the neighbourhoods’ bellies in the most egalitarian way possible.
In return, that community provides them with the raw materials to create their perennially popular dishes. The menu is divided into soups, sandwiches and tagines. The baguettes from neighbouring L’Etoile are soft, denture-friendly vehicles for the merguez and kofte made by Fatima in Le Marrakech, the butcher opposite. While the sardines and meaty white fish for the tagines are supplied by North Ken stalwarts, Golborne Fisheries. The soups are all rib-stickers. The standout in the stable is undoubtedly the loubia (white bean soup). An army could march on loubia and it’s easy to see why this sustaining soup is a firm favourite during Ramadan.
Tagines are lined up in clay pots awaiting their moment on the camp stove. Today’s special is ‘Meatball & Egg’; a tomatoey, shakshuka-like affair that could be soothed with a dollop of yoghurt to wrestle the bullying B.O-inducing cumin. However, it is the stuffed rghayef (flatbreads) that shine out. Literally. Thanks to the flecks of argan oil and khlea (preserved meat fat) that coat each folded layer. A sort of gözelme and paratha love-child, with its multi-layered semolina-rich crispy crunch. The pancakey bread is either stuffed with onion, garlic and chilli or spinach mixed with feta and is the stuff of ambrosial dreams. Manna from heaven when mopping up Mohammed’s rich tagines and brooding soups. However, his seemingly unique take (on request) is to use the rghayef in place of a baguette. When slathered with chilli and a dollop of bottled garlic sauce, it shape-shifts into a sarnie that starts to bend the space-time continuum – this Moroccan ‘kebab’ (particularly the Kofte & Egg wrapped in the onion, tomato & chilli rghayef) is stratospherically good. Truly, worthy of a sonnet, delirious pogoing or unabashed ululation. Maybe all three. At the same time.
Mohammed hinted that he might introduce a rghayef as a dessert, traditionally served with amlu; a honey, almond and argan oil mixture that’s poured over the top. This is enough to make me want to buy a Winnebago with a food flap and park it on the neighbouring pitch. Till then, pudding is provided by the incomparable Lisboa Patisserie diagonally opposite. A beautifully blistered pasteis de nata rounds off the feasting.
Assa Ariyoshi ©
Looking down the street as the imam’s call to Friday prayers rings out, it’s clear that this neighbourhood has rolled with the punches on more than one occasion. Having been riven by race riots in the wake of Kelso Cochrane’s murder, held to ransom by Rachman’s racketeering and pecked at by predatory developers eager to horn in homogeneity. Even so, a vibrant patchwork remains; where businesses with broad appeal like Eat First and Lisboa Patisserie still flourish next to high-end restaurants and meticulously shabby antique shops. It may be that the old guard will eventually lose out to the Aēsopification of Golborne Road, but for now, a rare balance has been struck. As I leave, high-vis tabards and tweed jackets jostle for space on that precarious picnic table. With the funereal void of Grenfell looming over our fractured national political discourse, the ghostly motto of neighbouring Frestonia still rings true, Nos Sumus Una Familia, and the hope that the divisions and recriminations of our recent past will some day feel like a bygone era.
Eat First: Opposite 64 Golborne Road, London W10