Nor did Jail or ‘Go To Jail’, reflect actual physical places, but I decided that I would visit HMP Pentonville as the Jail because it was near Pentonville Road, the property immediately before the Jail on the monopoly board, and I thought I would visit New Scotland Yard when I got to the ‘Go To Jail’ corner of the monopoly board.
The Monopoly game was originally created in the US in the early 1900’s and it wasn’t until the 1930’s that the UK edition was created, and therefore the Electric Company and Water Works didn’t actually relate to any particular location – they were just places on the monopoly board.
I wasn’t going to worry about the Chance and Community Chest cards, nor would I visit the two utilities – Electric Company and Water Works. Always on the lookout for another adventure, I decided to walk from Old Kent Road to Mayfair via every property and every railway station on the board – and in the order that they appeared on the board. Having moved to London several years ago, and walked many of the streets of London during my various walking adventures, I had visited many of the streets on the monopoly board and two of the four railway stations. We could recite the order that each property appeared in on the board without looking, and we knew the cost of each property, the rental that had to be paid on each property if it was an empty lot, had one, two, three or four houses, or a hotel. I don’t think we knew (or even cared) that the streets and railway stations, of the game we loved so much, were real. We lived in New Zealand, 12,000 miles away from London (and the streets of the monopoly board), on the other side of the world. Every school holidays we would spend a sizable junk of our day buying and selling properties, building them up with houses and hotels to increase the rent that we would receive when someone landed on our properties, passing GO, going to Jail without passing GO, being wiped out when we had to pay property taxes, and occasionally landing on free parking. As a kid my cousins and I used to spend hours and hours playing Monopoly on the floor at our grandparents place.
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