Dalling Road (Dark Streets Of London)

Dalling Road in Hammersmith, west London, is referenced in 'Dark Streets of London', a track on The Pogues' 1984 debut album Red Roses for Me. The song is a gritty, affectionate portrait of the city's more marginal streets and the characters who inhabit them -- the kind of late-night London populated by drinkers, workers, the down-and-out, and the restless. Dalling Road, a quiet residential street in the Ravenscourt Park area of Hammersmith, gives the song a specific geographical anchor in the west London world The Pogues inhabited in their early years.

The Pogues formed in London in 1982, emerging from the Irish immigrant and music community centred around the pubs and flats of north and west London. Shane MacGowan and several of the band members lived in bedsits and shared houses in the areas referenced in their early songs -- the geography of cheap rent, late-night buses, and the particular London experience of the Irish diaspora. Dalling Road, with its Victorian terraces and its proximity to the Hammersmith pubs, is entirely typical of the world those songs describe.

Dalling Road today is a pleasant, leafy residential street near Ravenscourt Park tube station, considerably more gentrified than the world 'Dark Streets of London' evokes. The Pogues' early London geography -- Hammersmith, King's Cross, Camden -- has been transformed by property prices and demographic change, but the song preserves the memory of the city as it was for a particular community in the early 1980s.