Shepherd’s Bush Green survived because common land was hard to build on – and because people fought for it
The Green Pub holds a 4.1 from nine hundred and ninety-three people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and is named after the eight-acre triangle of grass outside the door.
Shepherd’s Bush Green. It is genuinely a green, it is genuinely public, and it is a triangle, which is unusual and which is not an accident.
Why it is a triangle
Because it is where roads met.
The green was common land at a junction on the road west – the pasture where drovers rested flocks on the walk to Smithfield, which we wrote about at the Shepherd and Flock. Roads converged, and the unclaimed ground between them took the shape the roads left.
It is a negative space. Nobody laid it out. It is what was not built on, and the triangle is the fossil of three routes that were more important than the land between them.
What has stood on the edge of it
Miles Sindercombe’s body, gibbeted, after he failed three times to kill Oliver Cromwell and poisoned himself in the Tower rather than be cut open in public. There is a pub named after him on the same green, and it does karaoke, and we wrote about it in the first batch.
The Shepherd’s Bush Empire, built in 1903 by Frank Matcham – the architect of the London Coliseum, the Palladium, and the Hippodrome in Leicester Square, where polar bears once swam in a hundred-thousand-gallon tank beneath the stage. Chaplin performed at the Empire in 1906. The BBC used it as a television theatre for forty years.
And the Central Line Wetherspoon, which we defended at length, and which is the most genuinely useful building in this entire survey.
One patch of grass. A failed regicide, a Matcham theatre, and the only room in the postcode where anybody can afford to sit down.
The green as an institution
We made the argument at Brook Green and it holds here.
Common land was not public property in the modern sense – it was land over which local people held specific ancient rights, and between 1750 and 1850 several thousand Acts of Parliament extinguished those rights and handed the ground to private owners.
The greens that survived did so because somebody fought, or because the ground was awkward, or because a road ran through it and nobody could work out who owned what.
Shepherd’s Bush Green is one of the survivors, and it is scruffy, and it is used, and it is the sort of space that London has spent forty years quietly eliminating.
The pub
Cheap, honest, a proper local, and a 4.1 across a real sample.
Verdict
Good pub, cheap pint, and eight acres of grass outside that nobody owns.
Go, drink, and sit on it, which you are allowed to do, and which is rarer in this city than it should be.
What a green is for
Nothing. That is the point and it is the hardest thing to defend at a planning meeting.
A green does not generate revenue. It does not create jobs. It cannot be shown to deliver measurable outcomes, and every few years somebody proposes putting something on it – a development, a road scheme, a landscaping project with a cafe – and the case for doing so is always well argued and the case against is always some people saying they like it as it is.
The people who like it as it is have to win every single time. The people who want to build only have to win once.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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