Carousing with Kate and Naomi

Croydon (as in London Borough of_ ) is an angular grey blancmange of industrial estates, public housing, office buildings and chainstores: a very large town but nothing to attract the attention whoever it is that hands out city status. It would seem a strange choice for my father to select its registry office (the UK wedding equivalent of a US town hall) as the venue for his wedding, as the invitation that arrived this morning indicated was the case.

However, let's look at the bright side of Croydon to see if we can think of a reason why it commends itself as a venue for joyful nuptials.

It is, after all famous for producing supermodels: namely Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss. My own experience of Croydon is not that its general population are particularly beautiful or underfed, but one has to assume that two supermodels originating from one town tells you something. Possibly that supermodelling is the ideal career if you don't want to spend the rest of your life in Croydon.

Croydon is also home of the eponymous "Croydon Facelift". This is a hairstyle for women which involves pulling your hair back into a very tight ponytail on top of your head with the aid of several multi coloured scrunchies. If done tight enough, it has the effect of a facelift without the knife or the expense. Croydon Facelifts are evidently the styling of choice among a group of people known as "chavettes". Chavettes (and their male counterpart chavs) emerged as a major phenomenon relatively recently in the UK. Seemingly from nowhere, "chav" become the Oxford University Press's Word of The Year for 2004. As I have not been fully immersed in British culture for a while now, I'm still not 100% clear on where chavs came from or who exactly they are, except I think I know I don't aspire to be one. The best description of the chav I have seen can be found here. And if you want to find out whether you are an unsuspecting chav, here's the place to do it.


A Croydon Facelift


Fourthly - and possibly its most credible claim to fame - there used to be an airport in Croydon. Indeed, it was the number one airport in Britain in the Dark Ages, before Heathrow was invented. As "The Gateway to the Empire", it was a byword for glamour and romance: Charles Lindbergh and Amy Johnson were regulars.
Glamorous Croydon airport, c 1920

Then in the Second World War, it was an RAF fighter station and home of RAF Transport Command. But in typical British fashion, some bright spark went and invented Heathrow after WW2, and glamorous Croydon Airport was shut down and turned into an industrial estate and public housing.

So: absentee supermodels, a dubious hairstyle and a defunct airfield. Odd choice, odd choice. All I remember about Croydon Register Office (the UK wedding equivalent of a town hall) dates back from a wedding of a distant relative I attended in 1987. The only reason I remember anything at all was because it was the day after the random hurricane that hit the UK, and trees were lying across all the roads. Anyway, I do remember a wind swept streetcorner and a grey concrete office building, and the muted noise of the Croydon Flyover a few yards away. CRO is the sort of place that doesn't have a picture of its exterior on its website because it might put people off. I am sure the inside has had a Croydon facelift since 1987, but the interior picture on the website is the size of my thumbnail and cannot be enlarged so it's hard to tell. If it wasn't Croydon, I would take its self-description as "elegant" at face value and not worry too much about it.

Having said all this, however, perhaps the venue is rather appropriate for my father. He is not a religious type or sentimental type. A five minute wedding for $50 and a minimum fuss is probably right up his street. And knowing my father I dare say there is at least one pub within five minutes walk for pre-nuptial drinking. And also knowing the way my father operates, he'll probably bump into Kate at the bar.