Narcotically-induced mischief in an urban wasteland

Fifteen minutes by rail from Paddington, Southall is a ‘Little India’ in the borough of Ealing. An ornate Hindu temple there, the Shree Ram, is set back from the beep and brake of traffic on King Street. When I visited, a pooja (prayer meeting) was underway. Incense fumes — a sweet suffocating presence — wafted round statuettes of the blue-skinned Krishna. The priest was surprised to see me: ‘You are coming from — ?’ ‘Paddington.’ ‘But you don’t look particularly Indian.’ ‘I’m not Indian.’ (With his sandalwood caste-mark and Nehru shirt, the priest himself was of Gujarati origin.)

Racially diverse, Southall is distinctly out-at-elbow and peeling paint, but bustling all the same. Saffron-coloured sweetmeats and sweet jalebi spill from the Punjabi stalls off Orchard Avenue (where Blair Peach was killed by the police in 1979.) In the back of Somali supermarkets, bearded men chew on narcotic khat leaves leavened with sticks of Juicy Fruit to take the edge off the bitterness. The men have a glazed, contented look.

At a certain point, Southall intersects with the Paddington arm of the Grand Union Canal, where aircraft coming in to land at Heathrow disturb the khat-green waters. From a canalside pub there called the Hambrough Tavern you can watch the swans peck at bits of naan bread. The Hambrough used to be a skinhead ‘Oi!’ music venue; it was burned down in the 1981 Southall race riot and rebuilt.

Lilian Pizzichini, the writer and journalist, lived on this stretch of water in a leaking houseboat in 2007. Music Night at the Apollo is her account of that year in Southall, when she was emotionally adrift on the Grand Union and, it seems, strung out on quantities of khat, heroin and alcohol combined.