JG Ballard’s Shepperton Home Up For Sale

JG Ballard, the most famous of all Shangailanders, subtitled his memoir, Miracles of Life,  penned shortly before his death Shanghai to Shepperton. Ballard lived in Shepperton for many years. This otherwise rather dreary suburb of London sends a special frisson of excitement through many of us Ballard fans for his various reinterpretations of the area over the course of his novels and short stories, including his masterpiece Crash. If Shanghai was once one of the most amazing and modern, yet combustible and volatile, places on earth when Ballard was a boy and lived there, so Shepperton was in many ways its antithesis, representing dreary but solid English bourgeois suburbanism. Shanghai-Shepperton – Ballard’s whole oeuvre is right there.

Now of course I’ve sadly had to report on the ongoing destruction and gutting of Ballard’s boyhood Shanghai home (see here and here, for instance). Except among a few well read folk Ballard is all but forgotten in Shanghai, his legacy unacknowledged. Among the current crop of Shanghailanders he is rarely noted for his modrnist writing which stemmed from that Shanghai-Shepperton contract but is rather mostly remembered for the (given the director) predictably  sentimental film of Empire of the Sun that didn’t do the rather wonderfully spiteful book any justice at all. There’s no blue plaques to anyone not a revolutionary hero of the Communist Party in this town, let alone British modernist writers. Ballard’s former Amherst Avenue (now Xinhua Road) family house is now almost totally unrecognisable with crass additions outside and a total gutting inside. And, having tried it, the food at the fish restaurant is pretty sub-standard as a final insult. However, pop up Panyu Road (formerly Columbia Road) and there is a disused outdoor swimming pool at the old Columbia Country Club (now a crappy chemical factory) which was inspirational to the young JG. It’s still disused and full of sludge.

It’s a different sort of debate in Shepperton – Ballard’s old semi detached house is up for sale and is a snip at 320,000 quid. Simon Sellars of the Ballardian website suggests fans club together to buy the house and turn it into a museum to all things Ballard. I think it should remain a family house, lived in, inhabited and perhaps inspire another resident to start writing. But, at the very least, a blue plaque is required PDQ. It’s essential we remember JG in Shepperton even if Shanghai stubbornly refuses to acknowledge him.

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