Jul 17 2010

Listen to a Londoner: Neil Arnold

Listen to a Londoner is a weekly interview with a Londoner – someone who lives in this city, born here or elsewhere. If you want to be interviewed, email littlelondonobservationist@hotmail.co.uk.

Neil Arnold, 35

Neil is a full-time monster-hunter and author. He runs the Beasts of London blog, has just had published PARANORMAL LONDON and has recently written a book on monsters in London folklore.

LLO: What sort of beasts are lurking around London then?
NA: My research covers mythical beasts, as well as the more complex folkloric stuff, and very real creatures. The flrsh and blood beasts lurking around London are mainly ‘big cats’ – puma, black leopard and lynx. These have been observed from as far and wide as Shooters Hill (Surrey puma of the 1960s), Sydenham (the ‘beast’ of Sydenham – subject of a huge hoax in 2005 when a man claimed he was attacked by a ‘panther’, although a black leopard did chase a jogger through a wood in Dulwich last year and domestic cats have been found eaten in the area), Cricklewood (a lynx was caught in a back garden by London Zoo in 2001)…however, you’d be surprised the amount of other strange beasts reported. Alligator found dead in a Dollis Hill pond, Crocodile in a Peckham bath tub, eagles, vultures escaping…London is a concrete jungle quite literally!

LLO: How long have you been interested in beasts and what sparked the interest?
NA: I became interested in monsters around the age of nine when I was given a book on mythological monsters, but also a film called ‘The Legend of Boggy Creek’ was very influential as a child.

LLO: How did you develop your reputation as an authority on the subject?
NA: I simply realised that no-one else was doing it. I took a risk, gave up my day job, and decided i wanted to follow my dreams and become a monster-hunter. With over two decades of experience, it’s been an amazing journey, and quite a weird one!

LLO: As a full time “monster hunter”, what’s your most interesting find?
NA: It does get a bit weird sometimes, and that’s just the people I’ve met over the years! However, it’s just a huge buzz researching cases throughout the world. Some are more sinister than others, and others quite down to earth, but also it involves a lot of documentation and it’s great unearthing very old newspaper reports of escaped beasts or monster sightings. I’ve seen ‘big cats’ in the wilds of Kent, been to Loch Ness, but London has reports of vampires, dragons, giant rats and killer foxes….

LLO: Best place to go for a taste of paranormal London?
NA: Certainly one of the strangest places is Highgate Cemetery which in the 1960s and early ’70s was the setting for a vampire panic, after many witnesses described seeing a seven-foot tall, red-eyed spextre behind the North Gate of the Western cemetery. It’s a tremendously gothic place.

LLO: Tell us a bit about your latest book.
NA: Paranormal London is my third book and it’s something very different. I’ve read so many regurgitative books on London folklore, ghosts ,etc, and I wanted to write something different. The book is full of short tales regarding monsters, strange beasts, the occasional UFO/ghost report, but most concerns very obscure mysteries and sheds light on more known mysteries such as the Brentford Griffin, the Highgate Vampire, Spring-Heeled Jack, etc.

LLO: What’s a typical day of “monster hunting” like, anyway?
NA: It depends…most of my time concerns writing, but at any point I could get an interesting call from a witness, or film something with a news crew. Not many people are out there ‘in the field’ as such, and I’ve had some odd experiences from being shot at, to being threatened by Satanists. It’s a colourful life!

LLO: You wrote The Saturday Strangeness on Londonist for a long time. Since this is being posted on a Saturday, want to give it one more go today?
NA: The Saturday Strangeness was Londonist’s longest running feature, but they suddenly ended it. I’d love to write something similar again…London has so many unknown stories just waiting to bewilder audiences!

LLO: Touching on a few other interests, where’s your favourite place to catch a gig in London?
NA: I used to go to gigs all the time in London, particularly The Marquee when it was on Charing Cross Road, and also the Astoria. I like the Appollo, and Forum, and also Camden Underworld is cool for smaller bands.

LLO: And the best place to deck yourself out in 60’s fashion?
NA: I think as a monster-hunter people expect me to look like some bearded, wizard-type in a safari jacket, ha! I love ’60s culture and tend to pick stuff up in markets really because then you tend to find an item noone else has, rather than the more commercial stores which are destroying the boutiques.

Thanks Neil!

For more Listen to a Londoner posts, click here.

Apr 24 2010

Listen to a Londoner: Jackie Kingsley and Michael Shamash

Listen to a Londoner is a weekly interview post with people who live (or have lived for a while) in London. If you fit the bill and want to be interviewed, give me a shout at littlelondonobservationist@hotmail.co.uk. Always looking for new volunteers.

Michael and Jackie from London RIP

In this ever-changing city that is slowly being devoured by corporate coffee chains and high street shops, Michael and Jackie have frozen a few favourite London locations that have been lost to the times on their website, London RIP. They welcome and encourage others to reminisce and contribute their own loved and lost locations from London life.

LLO: Tell us a bit about your website London RIP.
M&J: London-RIP celebrates the London places we’ve lost and are losing. It’s a very personal record of an ever-changing landscape and we invite people to contribute their memories of their favourite places. We’re not particularly interested in places that are “important” – more the pubs, clubs, cinemas, record shops and bookshops that make up the city as people really experience it. We’ve been friends since the 70s, so London-RIP tends to focus on that era a bit, but we’re just as interested in what’s happening now, especially as London is going through such a period of change.

LLO: Which London loss has been the most disappointing for you?
M&J: Our ex-local pub, The Royal Oak, in Temple Fortune. There wasn’t anything particularly special or wow about it, and that’s the point. It was just an average local boozer which happened to be at the heart of the community. Its loss is emblematic of all the local pub closures going on in London.

LLO: What was the most unique place you can remember that has now disappeared?
M&J: Production Village in Cricklewood. It was a faux village that was actually a film set, and had a pub that served a vile beverage called Hog’s Grunt. The whole place was mad as a box of frogs and utterly unrepeatable.

LLO: The two of you met in the late 70s. What were the best pubs and clubs in London back then that aren’t around any more?
M&J: Neither of us ever saw the Sex Pistols at the Roxy or anything like that, so we can’t pretend nostalgia for anything particularly lionised, but we do miss a lot of the mid-sized music venues that seem to be disappearing – the Music Machine, later the Camden Palace is an exception because it’s still a venue, but places like The Moonlight and The Nashville have sadly gone.

LLO: You ask your readers and share Emma Thompson’s anwers – what aspects of London’s past do you miss most? What are your own top 5 answers to this question?
M&J:
1.) Cheap and cheerful cafes
2.) Non-ironic, sensible specialist shops (eg haberdashers as opposed to chichi cheesemakers)
3.) Being able to park in Regent Street (not environmentally sound, but very handy)
4.) Green line coaches
5.) Someone we met recently remarked that 15 years ago you could safely shout at policemen if you felt like it. The context of this was watching some bloke handcuffed on the ground surrounded by angry coppers after what looked like a pub scuffle. Not sure if you really could shout at policemen (at least without getting a good hiding), but we like the idea of everything being a bit less serious and officious than it is now.

LLO: What has been the most drastic or surprising way London has changed since your childhood?
M&J: The move towards the city centre, particularly the east. In the 70s and 80s, some people predicted that London would become like an American city with the centre dead apart from commuters and life revolving around the suburbs. That so hasn’t happened, with places like Hoxton becoming the new Camden (and rapidly evolving into the new Hampstead).

LLO: Share a photo of a well-missed London location?
M&J: The picture is of Oriental City. It certainly wasn’t very promising from the outside, but this oriental shopping mall and all-round food paradise was a wonderland at the Colindale end of the Edgware Road. The real Chinatown, RIP.