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Five disgustingly gentrified street names near Victoria Park

Mike Pollitt | Monday 11 April, 2011 11:13

Gentrification is not a bad thing in itself. Give me the choice of a dirty, smelly old-school boozer with links to the EDF or a gastro-cafe-cum-interior-design-studio with links to the slow food movement, and it’s a skinny latte and Ercol chair all the way. But things can go too far. A case in point: the fetish for giving new developments sickeningly twee names. Here are five of the most vomit-inducing examples from the environs of Victoria Park.

View Twee streets in a larger map

Twig Folly Close

Twig Folly Close would be an uncomfortably schmaltzy name for a row of idyllic country cottages in deepest Wessex. For a collection of modern-build flats backing onto Roman Rd, it’s positively offensive. And since when was a twig something that deserved to be mermorialised in stone? Mental.

Nightingale Mews
“A secretive bird which likes nothing better than hiding in the middle of an impenetrable bush or thicket.” So says the RSPB website of the Nightingale. Keats makes a similar point about the bird’s habitat, albeit slightly more long-windedly.

“Tender is the night…
…but here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous blooms and windy mossy ways.”

So isn’t it just uncanny how appropriately the name fits a sandy stone collection of buildings across the road from Fitness First? No, no it is not.

Four Seasons Close

Managing to traduce the memory of Vivaldi’s lovely music, Pizza Express’s excellent pizza and a fine chain of luxury hotels in one go is quite an achievement. But this place manages it.

Redwood Close

And just next door to the Four Seasons we find this tribute to the mighty tree which has wowed many a visitior to its home in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Those are the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, not Bow. Bow has no links with Sequoia trees, so why does it have houses named after them? (Amateur dendrologists among you should note, however, that there are some redwoods alive and well in London, as this very helpful/slightly obsessive website shows. How cute is this little baby tree in Paddington?! Anyone know if it’s still there?)

Waterside Close

So there exists such a place as a junction between Candy Street and Waterside Close. Here we have a location mixing saccharine sweetness with vague inanity to create an elixir of inoffensiveness so sickly it takes the breath away. Why has this been allowed to happen? How can we make it stop?

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