Local legends?Hello. I'm Richard Tyrone Jones, a poet and Director of 'Utter!' Spoken Word, one of London's longest running spoken word nights.

I run tours around London where I tell people some stories about local culture which are true, and some which I've just made up. Their job is to guess what's real and what's not. I'm here in Crouch end in North London to tell you a poetical story about the darkest, yet also the most heroic period of Crouch end's history... Is it true? Listen and decide...

The martyrs of Crouch End Clock Tower

Now Crouch End was part of the Municipal Borough of Hornsey, up to 1965,But in that year, the Local Govt Act meant London's, well, local government was reorganisedso Crouch End was left in limbo, neither Islington nor Harringey. No overarching local authority at all

though for some months councillors continued to run Crouch End's affairs from the modernist monolith of the town hall. (Shot of Town Hall).

This proved unpopular with certain figures in the quasi-fascistic Islington (pft!) council regime,who started issuing housing benefit to a small minority of Crouchenders who held islington (pft!) sympathies... incidents like these

soon sparked a low-level parking war, with Harringey traffic inspectors retaliating by ticketing cars with Islington parking passesand binmen from Haringey and Islington (pft!) had fistfights over who'd collect rubbish... until in the summer of 1965, three Haringey council workers just... vanished. To this day their bodies have never been found. it can only be presumed these brave binmen

met their doom in the hungry jaws of the back of an Islington (pft!) binvan.

Throughout April incursions continued until almost two-thirds of Hornsey's council housing stock was being administered by Islington (pft!) Housing Officers at point of knife and barrel of glock.It is believed Islington's aim was the clear running water of the New River.So what stopped them? Why, the heroic martyrs of... Crouch End clock tower.

On May 17th 1965, here, twelve militiamen from Haringey Housing department (and a spaniel called Clive) holed up under attack from islington (pft!) forces. Surrounded on both sides, outnumbered and outgunned, they still managed to hold out for three days, sniping from the clocktower at islington (pft!) (pft!) irregulars who had infiltrated the Broadway.

while around them shoppers... continued shopping, thinking the bangs were just cars backfiring,while in fact they were the last reports of brave Crouch End soldiers expiring.

But the Harringey soldiers' brave sacrifice meant a column of volunteers from Tottenham could outflank the enemy along Ferme park Road, and soon there was no stoppin' 'em.The forces of perfidious Islington (pft) found themselves cut off by a pincer movement With their surrender, the Haringey civil war soon reached its bloody denouement. (end).In revenge for their sneak attack, the Islingtonites (pft) were shot in the face like dogsin the cellar of the Clocktower, where their blood would oil the cogs.Though it would be several months before Ferme park and Highgate were freedand many spies in the Council had to be rooted out like weeds

by the Harringey secret service, this was their finest hour, and without the brave sacrifice of the martyrs of Crouch End clocktower

we'd all be speaking Islingtonian now.... (pft!)

Now, your job, dear viewer, is to take a local landmark, place or piece of art - anything you find curious in your local area, or 'endz'- and then to make up a tall story which explains how it came to be there. Maybe there's a statue of someone and nobody knows who they are, so you can make up a story about what they did, like invent dubstep back in Victorian Times. Maybe there's a shopping centre that's haunted because someone met a very unusual death there. Or a strange building that might have been a pagan temple... let your imagination run wild! The best way to make someone believe a story is to frame it by mentioning true events

or people, like the 1965 Local Government Act, which makes it seem a bit more believable, and adding specific details, like the name of the dog. And then when you've written this as a story, poem, rap or however you want to present it, post it up on the facebook group - either in writing or in a link to a video clip - preferably with a picture or a link to a picture of what you've written about so we can visualise it - and we can all give you some constructive feedback on how to make it even better or how else you could add to your local legend.

(Remember if some of you are scared about the idea of writing a poem, just write a story, and then hit return whenever you get to a word that seems particularly important in the story. That's all a poem is, really. It doesn't have to rhyme.)

And don't worry about making your first draft perfect. The best writers rewrite and rewrite and rewrite things, and there's no reason why

you should be different!

Then when you've finished it, try telling it to some gullible people, like children or American tourists and see how many of them believe you. It's fun if you start the story off to be quite believable then get more and more wild and ridiculous and see the look on their face just when they realise that you're giving them a load of old horseshite...

Shot of the Harringey Arms.

One last fact about the insurrection of 1965 - this historic pub was previously known as the Nag's Head but during the civil conflict, the bank vaults next door were used as the Hornsey Borough Council arms dump, it was very hot work down there, and the arms manufacturers would drink at the pub next door after their shifts which is why its name was changed in tribute to the arms they provided which helped liberate Harringey: the Harringey Arms.