'You’ll never gentrify the Bush’

Author and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi on his beloved Shepherd's Bush Road, and the search for a new local cafe

The Shepherd’s Bush Road in 1959

Writers get used to spending a lot of time alone, thinking stuff over, feeling moody. Indolence is indispensable, I have to remind my agent. When I lived in West Kensington between the mid-seventies and the late eighties, after I finished writing for the day at five o’clock, I would trot down to the Three Kings on North End Road. It was always pretty empty. I’d read the papers and drink a couple of pints with the other ghosts, old men in tired suits. It became a habit.

Moving to this house in Shepherd’s Bush in the late nineties, where I am now, I began the search for another local. It seemed like a necessity. Then I found the Rouge. Shepherd’s Bush was an area I didn’t know so well. There were a lot of scuzzy pubs, boarding houses, B&Bs and pensioners. People used to say ‘you’ll never gentrify the Bush’. It was a badge of pride that this neighbourhood was beyond respectability and the smoothings of super-capitalism.