London Place 28: St Barnabas Church

As much as last time I thought "I should write about a gallery", this time I thought "I should do a church", though, in this case, rather than not really having an angle, I have too many angles when it comes to churches. The three churches I attended regularly at any point were Ealing Abbey (bad monks angle!), St Mary's Acton (losing faith angle!) and St Michael's Barnes (all kinds of bittersweet good vibes angles!).

But I'll leave those for now, because I'm thinking about Ealing and not in a bad way. I'm from Ealing, distinct world that it was, as much as I'm from London. 

So to Pitshanger, perhaps the Ealingest of Ealing. I don't think I've been to Pitshanger in more than 25 years, but I doubt it's changed much. Why would it change?

Just looking at Googlemaps to remind myself of how it all fitted together, it gave me a strange feeling - so many places of interest within a small place, some much closer as the crow flies than I imagined them to be - "was that really there? That felt like it was in a different timezone."

Roughly speaking, Pitshanger is North Ealing, the part just beneath the A40. There's a connected area of different green spaces, which the River Brent runs through, incorporating sites like Hanwell Town Football Club, St Benedict's School sports ground, Scotch Common, Cleveland Park, Gurnell Leisure Centre, Brentham Cricket Club, Ealing Hockey Club, Ealing Golf Club and Pitshanger Park itself. My first home, until I was 5, was just to the southwest of Cleveland Park.

Some of it is quite historic, like St Mary's Church Perivale (13th century), and Pitshanger Village itself.

To the village's north was Pitshanger Park, to its south Notting Hill & Ealing High School, where my sisters went, & St Benedict's School, where my brother and I went when we were young.

As I remember there was a row of shops on Pitshanger Lane, including a fishmonger, greengrocer, toy shop, shoe shop, amongst others. At the eastern end on the left was St Barnabas Church and its church hall.

St Barnabas figures prominently in my memories as, above all, a place I couldn't sit still. My three older siblings were in Ealing Youth Orchestra, which rehearsed in the church hall (where I also remember my sisters having ballet lessons).

They'd rehearse on a Friday evening and often go to the Kent pub, along the road, afterwards. I remember being jealous of this social life which my musical incompetence would never allow me to partake in.

So I'd regularly be dragged along to concerts which took place in the church. doing my best (I thought) to not let my wrigliness show too much. It would be unfair to entirely blame my chronic indifference to classical music on these childhood trials, but this was not my natural element.

Yet now, there's a stillness and beauty in those memories. There were concerts, there were carol services, they're terribly evocative evenings now. What's more, I think those memories help me place my siblings as teenagers, which is sometimes something I find tricky, since I myself was so sollipsistic at that age, and they, somewhat older, were living more expansive lives where it sometimrs felt they'd become strangers to me.

It also reminds me, on a similar line, of how often, as the youngest, it was just me and my mother, and those are memories I treasure too.

I remember one time (and this might have been one of the last EYO concerts I attended) they were bold enough to plan an outdoor summer concert in Cleveland Park - they had a stage, a tent, it was the social event of the season. Needless to say, the day saw the worst weather of the summer. Not just rain, which they were prepared to deal with, but torrential, impossible, swirling rain. So everyone was forced to take the picnic back into St Barnabas. I have this sharp memory of eating potato salad and drinking lemonade listening to the orchestra playing the music from Raiders of the Lost Ark, finally free to wriggle just a little. I think I'd have enjoyed the concerts more if they'd all been like that.