Top of the morning to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are. You guessed it. It’s hour has come round. It’s time for your daily London fix.
And today we’re going somewhere beautiful.
White stucco. Willow trees. Narrowboats. Water gently lapping against the side of the canal.
One of those London places that seems to lower its voice.
And then, just a stone’s throw away, we come to a little mews.
Pindock Mews.
And suddenly the soundtrack changes.
Because at number 3 Pindock Mews lived Sid and Nancy.
Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.
White stucco and black leather.
The gentle slap of canal water against narrowboats and the ferocious racket of the Sex Pistols.
That’s London for you.
And there’s a reason we’re going there today.
October 12th.
Because on this day in 1978, 3,500 miles away from Pindock Mews, in Room 100 of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, Nancy Spungen was found dead.
She was twenty years old.
Twenty.
That’s worth holding onto.
Because Sid and Nancy have become almost cartoon figures now.
Punk Romeo and Juliet.
The photographs. The sneers. The leather jackets. The drugs. The blood. The headlines.
And the trouble with becoming an icon is that eventually people stop seeing the human being underneath.
Especially Nancy.
So let’s put her back into the picture.
Nancy Laura Spungen was American.
Born in Philadelphia in 1958.
She was bright. Difficult. Volatile. Troubled from an early age.
And very young when she arrived in London.
Nineteen.
Imagine that.
London in 1977.
Punk London.
The Sex Pistols.
The Clash.
The Roxy.
The King’s Road.
SEX, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop.
Safety pins. Torn clothes. Spiked hair.
A generation apparently declaring war on everything that had gone before it.
And into all of that walks this nineteen-year-old American girl.
Nancy.
She meets Sid Vicious.
And the fuse is lit.
Sid, incidentally, was a London boy.
Born John Simon Ritchie in Lewisham in 1957.
He’d had a chaotic childhood himself.
And by the time Nancy met him he had become Sid Vicious, bassist with the Sex Pistols.
Though “bassist” may be putting it rather generously.
What mattered was the look.
The presence.
The danger.
Sid looked like punk.
And Nancy fell for him.
Hard.
And he fell for her.
Hard.
Which was part of the problem.
Because theirs wasn’t one of those relationships where two damaged people somehow steady each other.
Quite the reverse.
They accelerated each other.
Drugs.
Rows.
Violence.
Heroin.
More rows.
More heroin.
A downward spiral with the accelerator jammed to the floor.
And for a time their London home was here.
3 Pindock Mews.
That’s the detail that gets me.
Because Pindock Mews is right by Little Venice.
I know Little Venice extremely well.
We walk there.
It’s elegant. Peaceful. Moneyed.
Creamy white houses.
Canals.
Houseboats.
Trees trailing over the water.
Robert Browning country.
And tucked away behind all that serenity, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen were living out one of the most combustible relationships of the 1970s.
Point and counterpoint.
London does that better than anywhere.
Eventually the Sex Pistols disintegrated.
Sid and Nancy went to New York.
And they checked into the Chelsea Hotel.
Now there’s another name with a mythology attached to it.
The Chelsea.
Arthur Miller lived there.
Dylan Thomas stayed there.
Bob Dylan.
Leonard Cohen.
Patti Smith.
Janis Joplin.
Artists, writers, musicians, bohemians, geniuses, wrecks.
Sometimes several of those things in the same person.
Sid and Nancy were in Room 100.
And on the morning of October 12th, 1978, Nancy was found on the bathroom floor.
She had been stabbed in the abdomen.
She was twenty years old.
Sid was arrested and charged with her murder.
And this is where we have to be careful.
Because he never stood trial.
Sid maintained that he couldn’t remember what had happened.
There were other people in and out of the room.
There have been theories ever since about what happened that night.
But there was never a trial.
There was never a verdict.
There never could be.
Because less than four months later, on February 2nd, 1979, Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose.
He was twenty-one.
Twenty-one.
Nancy twenty.
Sid twenty-one.
That’s the part the mythology tends to obscure.
They were kids.
Two desperately troubled kids who became famous enough for the whole world to watch them destroy themselves.
And perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to Pindock Mews.
Because there they are in the London landscape.
Not yet Room 100.
Not yet the police photographs.
Not yet the headlines.
Just Sid and Nancy.
Living in a little mews close by one of the loveliest stretches of water in London.
You can stand there today and hear almost nothing.
A car door closing.
Footsteps.
Maybe a bird.
And just around the corner, the canal.
Narrowboats moving at walking pace.
Water against wood.
Little Venice doing what Little Venice does.
Being beautiful.
Being calm.
Being London.
And once upon a time, just yards away, behind one of those doors, were Sid and Nancy.
You couldn’t invent the contrast.
You wouldn’t dare.
But London did.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
See you tomorrow.