Hammersmith is relentlessly self improving. It used to have the scuzziest pub in London, the Clarendon, now long gone. It is now part of a shopping mall. Squatting over the mall and tube station as if they are eggs to be hatched is the new, huge Coca Cola building.Other revamped Hammersmith landmarks include The Hammersmith Palais, round the corner up the Shepherds Bush Road, which has been a danceateria since about World War 2. Underneath the M4, The Hammersmith Apollo or whatever it is now called, used to be a great rock venue (in autumn 1996 it was running, Dear Jesus, Riverdance a show). But it was a great place to see rock artists on the way up or the way down including David Bowie and Paul McCartney. The Lyric Theatre was given a new face, but still looks ornate and gilded inside.
Hammersmith is also distinguished by being ringed round with feed-in roads to the M4, an ecologically friendly building that is quite nice inside called the Ark, and HarperCollins Publishers inspried by, appropriately enough, a Scandinavian prison.
Like many London areas, Hammersmith is a bit difficult to characterize. There are pockets of posh housing, left over from its village days. It has a beautiful walk along the river from its bridge to Chiswick. The Dove is only one of about five OK pubs along the river, which also has a lot of rowing clubs. Lots of revealing lyrcra in summer. The policeman Harry Daley in his autobiography This Small Cloud portrays Hammersmith in the 30s as being a mini-East End in the West of crime and vice. He remembers the riverside walk as where the lowest order of prostitute massaged tired old cocks in bushes. Nothing much changed there then.
Hammersmith has been a place since at least the 13th century. Then as now it really exists because of its junction of roads. The IRA failed to blow up its bridge in 1996. The explosive didn't go off.
About Hammersmith police, I only know that they are much given to arresting people for walking home at the wrong time of night.
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