Part One

Tales of the City I

London-RIP readers tell us their tales of the city. Email us and tell us yours.

RIP: The Earl of Mustard

Peter Parke remembers an intriguing soft-shoe shuffler: "I started working for Leo Burnett-London Press Exchange in St Martin's Lane in 1971, and one of the agency pubs was the Green Man and French Horn in the Lane (almost next door to a gunmakers called Roberts, I think). The pub was also called the Long Bar. It used to have sawdust on the floor, and was run by a Scottish bloke called Alastair who later had a pub in Chancery Lane (Blue Posts, maybe). One of the really good things about the place was that you could get a cheque cashed if you ran out of drinking money, but my salary at the time was �507 per annum, so we really appreciated the booze we could buy.

The Earl of Mustard was an old bloke who used to busk to the cinema and theatre queues around Leicester Square. He had a wind-up gramophone, and did tap dances and soft-shoe shuffles, which weren't much to my taste in those days. He did try to turn out fairly smart, with a top hat on occasion. I have an impression that he spoke in a sort of fruity, WC Fields style. We used to drink in the Long Bar until quite late, and if you were lucky, the Earl would come in with a Gladstone bag full of small change to be exchanged for notes with the landlord. Often, he'd have 50 or 60 quid on a good night. So on balance he was probably earning more in a week or two than we did in a year. We'd buy him a drink, but I don't remember getting one back. I don't think we ever found out much about him, like where he lived and what he was before he joined the nobility. As things go, we started using other pubs (the Welsh Harp and the Brewmaster), and then I moved to work in Great Portland Street just before the tarted-up Covent Garden reopened. I never saw the Earl of Mustard again, and wonder what his subsequent career was.

More track tales

Sue from north London says: "Tale of a track made me think about another dog track on Hackney Marshes which was close to where I lived as a child. I never went there but I can remember how the road was full of cars on a Saturday night when there was racing and we could hear the crowds from our house which always seemed really exciting. Also the Salvation Army band playing on the corner of the street on a Sunday morning and the man calling 'late fiinal' with the evening paper. My recollections seem to be all about sound - I don't know if they count as RIP except everywhere seems so much noiser now so maybe you wouldn't hear these individual things..."

The Parkland Walk: gone to the dogshit

Memories of political campaigns past from this London-RIP reader. "I remember when 'they' were going to turn the Parkland Walk into a motorway connecting Finsbury Park and Highgate straight onto the M1. We were spurred into action when we realised our kitchen might be the hard shoulder. So were many others.

At a packed meeting in Hornsey Town Hall, the local community vowed never to let it happen. Bruce Kent (where did he live?) made an impassioned speech. Protest songs were written, more meetings were convened and finally the Parkland Walk was saved. For a while the PW become the perfect linear nature park with a nature centre in the old Stroud Green Railway Station.

What went wrong? Now the area is overgrown with weeds and on a hot day the smell of dogshit is overwhelming. Unsavoury characters lurk behind overgrown bushes and the nature building is a drop-in centre. My own negative experiences have been a flasher and a lone cyclist who insisted I 'rub his cramp'. Still, I persisted in walking along the Parkland Walk until someone got stabbed near the entrance to Finsbury Park. A route I used every day. . ." Liza, Crouch End.

The onion man