Overlooked Britain
This is a story that it as jubilant as it is jolly, yet as mournful as it is downright sad; of a house of extraordinary singularity – floor after floor made you yell out loud with bemused delight – that has now gone.
Realising all too well that, thanks to its particular circumstances, it would not last for long, I determined to photograph its every peculiar detail. I was right to do so, as no trace of it remains today.
No 63 Hornsey Road was an ordinary north London terraced house on a congested arterial road out of London that had been attacked with a vigorous originality that quite took your breath away.
A local and diminutive septuagenarian sweetheart called Mrs Daisy Rogers – with a character to match her decorative schemes – was responsible for it all. She was determinedly unaware that there was anything out of the ordinary: ‘Anyone can paint walls. I wanted to
make it look pretty, you see. I had no leanings towards the artistic. It was just a matter of splashing on the paint, finding shells, and going out and getting another chandelier or two to smash up for the ‘jewels’ which you embed in plaster of Paris. Did I suggest that they may look like a heap of jewels from Araby?’
These are her explanations for the terrifying decorative explosion and, when asked how she came to use such a mixture of colours, she says that the local paint shop was closing down and that she bought about 200 tins of whatever was going at the time.
Sometimes she created a terrain of calico steeped in plaster of Paris and then draped over screwed-up newspapers to bulge out the folds. Onto this she would fling pot after pot of paint mixed with Polyfilla, so that the thick drips of intermingling hues slithered slowly to the floor.
The kitchen, I fear somewhat insanitary (no Formica-clad spick and span creation), was the most adventurous of the lot. From floor to ceiling, grottoes were gouged out that bulged, twisted and curved with brilliant colours and curious forms.
Before realising her surrealist dream, Daisy had led a particularly conventional life with her first husband, a scientist, ‘who got cleverer and cleverer’. They lived in a large house with a great deal of polished furniture. ‘I really worked hard, so that you could eat off the floor, but who wants to?’
A mask of his likeness is in the ‘Blue Grotto’ under the kitchen table. ‘I thought it would be a suitable place for him. It’s not that I had anything against him; it’s just that he was bad-tempered and dull. I think that, if people are like that, they deserve to lose you.’
She met her second husband, ‘Rogie’, in 1961, ‘on 6th April at twenty minutes to four and we eloped in June’.
He already had a shop on the ground floor of No 63 and they moved into the whole house in 1966. It was painted dark brown and pale green (always the colour of choice for the staff quarters of 19thcentury stately homes) and they set to work immediately, starting at the top by painting enormous eyes in Siamese pink and kingfisher blue. The last flight was enhanced by the head of a transparent plastic woman, filled with dried teazles, looming over pink octopuses and shell-encrusted mirrors.
It has now all gone. Daisy moved into a small, new house ‘with a fridge and washing machine and a proper gas stove and stainless steel sink’.
‘You know,’ she mused, ‘nice things.’