kultur for sale

Behind Dagenham Town Hall - modernist, mock-Bauhaus facade, both imperial & redbrick - Billy Smart's Circus has at last come to town. In the field ringed with railings there is one huge blue and white tent with a single peak and a flat red & white tent, jutted into sequins of smaller peaks. From the moving bus a mother points the tents out to her son who looks, then waves. The tents disappear as we move towards Romford. At last there seems to be one place - just one place - that speaks in trying to reach us

Billy Smart's Circus is coming to town - posters carousel shopwindows through Dagenham - the clown is a mutant made from Michael Jackson and Pappa Lazaru : his upturned nose says 'go', the pleading whites of his eyes say 'come to me'. In Romford Wetherspoons two young men glyph a table with a London-to-scale map, flicking beer from bottles with plans furtive as kingfishers. Above them on the wall is a sketch of Romford Market in early modern times and a tag that runs witout typo RUMFORD, ESSEX - before the amphibian days as a London Borough of Havering and one of the few to still receive & accept - as community - the travelling circus