Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It Read online

  Londoners

  The Days and Nights of London Now –

  As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It,

  Live It, Left It and Long for It

  Craig Taylor

  For Matt Weiland

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  PROLOGUE

  Simon Kushner, former Londoner

  PART I

  ARRIVING

  Kevin Pover, commercial airline pilot

  Raymond Lunn, on arriving from Leeds

  Jane Lanyero, on arriving from Uganda

  John Harber, a tourist from America

  Farzad Pashazadeh, on arriving from Iran

  GETTING AROUND

  Emma Clarke, voice of the London Underground

  Nicky Dorras, taxi driver

  Emily Davis, cyclist

  Craig Clark, TfL Lost Property Clerk

  Noel Gaughan, driving instructor

  Nick Tyler, civil engineer

  SEEING THE SIGHTS

  David Doherty, on Buckingham Palace

  Bruce Smith, on Big Ben

  Philip and Ann Wilson, on the Tower of London

  Tim Turner, on ‘Londin’

  EARNING ONE’S KEEP

  Ruby King, plumber

  Kamran Sheikh, currency trader

  Ruth Fordham, manicurist

  Mary Forde, publican

  LOVING ONE ANOTHER

  Alina Iqbal, a love story

  Peter Davey and Milan Selj, a couple

  Mistress Absolute, dominatrix

  Jay Hughes, nurse

  GETTING ON WITH IT

  Nikky, Lindsay and Danielle, students

  Paulo Pimentel, grief counsellor

  Liston Wingate-Denys, personal trainer

  Smartie, Londoner

  PART II

  CONTINUING YOUR JOURNEY

  Peter Rees, urban planner

  Davy Jones, street photographer

  Joe John Avery, street cleaner

  Jill Adams and Gary Williams, bus operations managers

  Paul Akers, aboriculturalist

  Elisabetta de Luca, commuter

  GLEANING ON THE MARGINS

  Sarah Constantine, skipper

  John Andrews, angler

  Mikey Thompkins, beekeeper

  Christina Oakley Harrington, Wiccan priestess

  FEEDING THE CITY

  Adam Byatt, chef

  David Smith, markets chief

  Peter Thomas et al., New Spitalfields Market traders

  CLIMBING THE LADDER

  Ashley Thomas, estate agent

  Robert Guerini, property owner

  Stephanie Walsh, property seeker

  Nick Stephens, squatter

  Mike Bennison and Geoff Bills, residents of Surrey

  PUTTING ON A SHOW

  Henry Hudson, artist

  Martins Imhangbe, actor

  Laetitia Sadier, singer

  Rinse, rapper

  Darren Flook, art gallerist

  GOING OUT

  Dan Simon, rickshaw-rider

  Daniel Serrano, cruiser

  Emmajo Read, nightclub door attendant

  Smartie, Londoner

  PART III

  MAKING A LIFE

  Jo the Geordie, who stayed in Newcastle

  Stacey the Geordie, who came to London

  GETTING ALONG

  Ed Husain, commentator

  Abul Azad, social worker

  Nicola Owen, teacher

  Guity Keens, interpreter

  Lucy Skilbeck, mother

  KEEPING THE PEACE

  Paul Jones, home security expert

  Colin Hendricks, police officer

  Nick Smith, riot witness

  Mohammed Al Hasan, suspect

  David Obiri, Jeremy Ranga and Keshav Gupta, barristers

  Charles Henty, Under-Sheriff and Secondary of London

  Barbara Tucker, protester

  STAYING ON TOP

  Stuart Fraser, Chairman,Policy and Resources

  Toby Murthwaite, student

  Paul Hawtin, hedge fund manager

  George Iacobescu, Canary Wharf developer

  LIVING AND DYING

  Alison Cathcart, marriage registrar

  Alex Blake, eyewitness

  Perry Powell, paramedic

  John Harris, funeral director

  Spencer Lee, crematorium technician

  DEPARTING

  Michael Linington, seeker

  Rob de Groot, antique clock restorer

  Ethel Hardy, old-age pensioner

  Ludmila Olszewska, former Londoner

  Smartie, Londoner

  Kevin Pover, commercial airline pilot

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Also by Craig Taylor

  Copyright

  ‘What is the city but the people?’

  – Shakespeare, Coriolanus

  ‘No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it. And yet between the one and the other there is a connection.’

  – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

  ‘If there is just one London, I have two arses.’

  – A Thames River boatman

  INTRODUCTION

  I grew up in a small, seaside village in western Canada and most summers I travelled across the country to my grandmother’s summer cottage on the shores of Lake Simcoe in southern Ontario. The walls were covered in classic cottage decor, including a series of felt pennants from every country my grandmother had visited during a European excursion in the early Sixties. There were newspaper clippings pinned to the wall – yellowed recipes and news items. In the back kitchen, which always smelled of turpentine, someone had tacked up an aerial photograph of London – England, not nearby London, Ontario. I spent a lot of time looking at that mysterious view. At the bottom of the poster was the famous Samuel Johnson quote I’ve now heard repeated, mangled and paraphrased many times: ‘When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’ I didn’t understand it at the time. The view of Tower Bridge looked grey and forbidding. It begged the question: ‘What kind of person ended up in London?’

  Years later, that person was me. I moved to London in the middle of a petrol strike in the autumn of 2000 – a time of panic-buying, political recriminations and worries about food distribution. I arrived on an overnight transatlantic flight from Toronto and emerged from Clapham Junction train station in the afternoon. The traffic was light. The sun was warm. The newspapers warned of impending disaster, riots and a return to the Seventies; as if this city could ever move back in time.

  I knew no one really, but I had a contact. I was retrieved from the station by an Australian friend of a friend who had just enough fuel for the journey to my new home on a short street in Brixton without us having to get out and push the car. Here we were, two colonials coasting on fumes in London at the start of a new century.

  From the window of my new room I could see the blinking light of the HSBC tower in Canary Wharf, then the tallest building in England. But what lay between was a mystery. So I turned to the London A-Z given to me by a friend who had lived in London years ago, who had been so sickened by the damp he chose Prague instead. I soon learned that for many the A-Z is an article of faith. Designed around the same time as the iconic Tube
map in the 1930s, it is equally omnipresent in the city, used as much by residents as tourists. It doesn’t simply show you the way home so much as prove that the rest of London, the parts that aren’t part of your daily routine, still exist. In those first few weeks I saw it tucked into handbags and on the dashboards of cars; an essential companion to the city.

  I was grateful for the gift, though its pages were yellowing and slipping from its plastic rings. I tested it out on the first night and flipped from my new home on page 93, east to page 94, then north to page 79 and east to Canary Wharf on page 80. It is an impressive spread for a new reader. The bottom half of the two pages are filled with a mess of streets, twisting and ending, some with illegibly small names. Some seemed to give up, disappear and fade back into the page. At the top of pages 79 and 80, the Thames curved around the Isle of Dogs and then made another ‘U’ around Blackwall Point. There was a descending list of wharves printed on the blue of the river – Morden, Enderby’s, Pipers, Badcock’s, Lovell’s, Palmer’s, Columbia – and I wondered if any still served a nautical purpose or if they’d become mere decorative names. Printed in the Nineties, my A-Z showed the demolished South Eastern Gas Works where the Millennium Dome now stands. Most A-Zs are half dead, because documenting a city as alive as London will always be an impossible task.

  I walked around my neighbourhood. I lurched around, graceless, with a rucksack on my back. I looked at people’s faces on escalators for a second too long. I hadn’t yet become an urban otter – one of those sleek Londoners who moves through the city with ease. They’re the ones who seem slow and graceful but are always covering ground; who cross streets without looking back and forth; who know how to fold a newspaper crisply in the middle of a packed Tube train.

  At nearby Brixton market I came across a stallholder selling cheap, bedazzled jeans and mobile-phone paraphernalia. He sat behind a desk covered in phone cards and posters that listed different rates for the different countries. The countries were given in three columns, set in the same size type. My country was there, but it was not, by far, the most expensive, just a name among names. I tried to buy a £5 phone card. Four pounds, said the man behind the desk. How much is that one? I asked, pointing to another £5 card. Three pounds, he responded. There was a system at work here. I hesitated before it, and he left me to sell a pair of jeans to someone else.

  Later I opened a door to a payphone. It was covered with a full-length KFC ad, so I didn’t notice the man crouching inside. He had just begun an ambitious inhalation on his crack pipe and our eyes met. He apologized and I apologized and he apologized again and I closed the door.

  One day, while walking home with a friend, I looked to my left and saw the graceful movement of a pickpocket’s hand as it slid into the pocket of my friend’s coat. I looked into the pickpocket’s face. He looked back and withdrew his empty hand. He remained expressionless, purposefully vacant, and he drifted back into a stream of people. He faded into passing traffic. It was like watching an old master, well versed in perspective and street camouflage, the latest in a long line.

  Who were these Londoners? Not long after, a girl approached me outside Brixton Tube station. Her mascara was running; she had been crying for a while. Dressed in school uniform, she told me through her hiccups and tears that she was a long way from home. When I apologized and walked on, she followed and stopped me again, this time at the lip of the station. Her arm was on my jacket; a new sensation, a sincere touch. ‘Where do you need to get to?’ I asked. Her reply ‘Staines’ left me none the wiser. The way she said it made it sound wicked – a place where the mothers stand cross-armed by the windows until their daughters get home. She shivered and looked expectant, so I walked her to a bus stop, gave her a £1 coin and stood beside her, hands in my pockets. After several minutes watching double-deckers pull up and pull away, she scornfully turned away and walked off. My London self, I thought, when he finally arrives, will not be taken advantage of so easily.

  I regularly felt lonely, duped, underprepared, faceless, friendless, but mostly a mixture of those on nights when I was pressed against the steamed windows of the 159 bus by grunting old men, big-hipped matriarchs or by a Londoner who insisted on making room for his fold-up bike. Moisture seeped into the dewy Routemasters; if I slipped my hand beneath the seat, I’d have plucked mushrooms. On some nights, after more of the city revealed itself, I walked home through a new combination of streets, attentive, watchful, aware of my setting. Not far from my rented room was the Southwyck House estate, also known as the Barrier Block, the most unwelcoming public housing estate in Brixton. The design was meant to minimize noise for residents but the result is a huge layered wall dotted with depressingly small windows. It’s often mistaken for Brixton Prison. I became transfixed by it one night when walking by, drunk. What was scarier? The sodium lights and the small rectangular windows, or the personal touches, the shadows of stuffed animals? The Barrier Block looked stronger than the Bank of England, more powerful than Parliament; and who knew anything of the lives of the people who lived there? Why did my old A-Z feel more and more incomplete and bloodless with each day?

  Most nights on the way home I walked past a man who said: bruv, bruv, bruv, skunkweed, bruv, bruv, bruv – and every night I waved him away, regretfully, as if to say, ‘Sorry, but I’m managing.’ Since our first meeting, the schoolgirl had staked out her ground on a stretch of pavement on Brixton High Street near a shoe shop. She walked in a slow circle, leaning up against the telephone box when commuters poured out of the station. I saw her almost every week, same tears, same uniform.

  I learned to protect myself from the curtains of rain, the dripping archways, the faulty awnings; how to flick an umbrella back into shape, how to wrestle it out of the wind, how to go low when a passing umbrella goes high. I also felt the city assert itself against me. Waking up one night in an empty Tube carriage, as a cleaner tapped my leg, I thought, ‘Why can’t this train take me somewhere else?’

  ‘Skunk weed?’ the man asked softly. I walked past, head down. It was a test, this insistent voice, a way to measure my survival. My outer shell was hardening. But someone calling you brother, calling you bruv, even for a moment, it counts, doesn’t it?

  Sometime during those first months in London I felt compelled to learn more about the city, to go beyond my neighbourhood. I didn’t want my experience to be limited to the first person singular. I felt a vertiginous rush when thinking of the multitudes that swelled London, at the vast array of experiences housed in the city. I never knew when it was going to come – the press of history. One morning I felt sick in the entrance to an old schoolhouse in Bermondsey which had been converted into flats. The woman I was dating lived there, and when I left her flat she was in the kitchen smoking a cigarette, drinking Red Bull and doing her stretches. In the lobby hung a black-and-white photograph of students who had attended classes there a hundred years before, all gazing towards the camera, heads raised and expectant looks on their faces, with no idea they’d some day be fashionable artwork. In that moment I sensed how brief my own London would be.

  A week later, when I visited her at work at the Royal Ballet I picked up the tickets late after spending too long speaking to a human statue out on the corner of Floral Street in Covent Garden. He was on break and when I asked him how he did it, he said, ‘You learn discipline in Estonia.’ Then he smoked his cigarette and I could see a smudge of silver paint on the filter.

  That night I watched a group of teenagers, mostly girls, spilling onto the street outside the Royal Opera House. They had come to London for the ballet and already, because it was so brief, because it had already gone for me, I envied them their first experience of the city, even the way they were nearly mashed by a black cab, naively believing it was going to stop at that zebra crossing on Bow Street.

  I moved to Highbury, North London, and spent most of my time on the Holloway Road where the pavements are covered with orphaned office furniture. Past the chairs are the runny-egg cafes, the
sex shops, an old library, a cycle shop, a Buddhist centre and the Turkish men selling cigarettes. Not long ago the London Metropolitan University commissioned a Daniel Libeskind building on the Holloway Road, but it didn’t elevate the tone. The same wrappers and rubbish cling to it. I used the Internet cafes with their yellowed keyboards and a crowd of teenagers playing multi-player video games, and I noticed the download folders were full of documents left behind by others trying to persevere in London. One day I sat and clicked open Nigerian CVs, Kiwi CVs, Polish CVs, old London Underground journey-plan PDFs, instructions for interviews, a digital detritus left by people pushing through the city. All that accumulated education and work experience. Did achievement elsewhere mean anything here?