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

  I moved back south of the river. My Highbury landlady said, ‘I used to have friends who lived south of the river. Whatever happened to them?’ as if a passport were necessary to make the journey. Again I was living with someone else’s furniture, carpets and net curtains. The Portuguese shop beneath the flat sold custard tarts and dusty salt fish. Portuguese men congregated in the room at the back and occasionally the owner left the door open an inch, so I would see them sitting, hands clasped, speaking quietly, on mornings when I came downstairs for a puffed, doughy croissant. There are half-opened doors everywhere in London, and some days I glimpsed inside the clubs of St James’s Square; I saw the paintings on the wall of the Garrick; the smoke hanging above the pool tables in Dalston’s old Fenerbahce Social Club. There were only so many doors I could pass through in London, even if I knocked on them all.

  My visa expired. The day slipped past silently. I checked with a lawyer, and she advised me to fly out of the country immediately so that I would not be an overstayer, a weighty term in the world of immigration law. I left immediately and slept on a friend’s couch in Toronto. She asked me if I was going back, and how I felt about London. I contorted with each answer. I felt a mixture of love, ambivalence and loathing. Back in Canada, I remembered what it was like to live in a village, to walk under dark skies, to hear the rustle of trees and experience the consistent tempo, the pace, of life. It made sense when days had mornings and afternoons, and weeks had Sunday rituals. I understood that this is how life plays out. Growth, family, death. Yet all this can be dispensed with in London. It encourages defiance. I missed what it gave me, who it allowed me to be. In London, on the rare nights I could afford a minicab home, I rolled down the window and watched the lights on the Thames. Most late-night minicabbers reaffirmed their love of the city with the same view. I loved its messiness, its attempts at order. I loved the anonymity it afforded.

  Most all of all I missed its energy. London is propulsion, it rewards those people who push forward. I remembered my disappointment at walking in New York and reaching the water, the point of turning around. In London, even on the days when my knees hurt, my hip hurt and my Achilles tendon hurt, I could keep going. I could push on.

  I wasn’t an Anglophile. My accent wasn’t giving way to transatlanticism. I didn’t want London as accoutrement, to be the guy who used to live there, advising my parents’ retired friends on tourist itineraries. I just wanted to be back.

  It isn’t a two-way relationship. It’s no use thinking this place loses any sleep over me. It disgorges people every day, sneezing black grime, heading back to other corners of the country or the far corners of the world. At the same time it was sucking in rich Russians in private jets. Packed 24-hour buses from Warsaw were arriving at Victoria Coach Station. The M25 was clogged with cars from other parts of the country filled with suitcases and potted plants. In the last ten years, the foreign-born population of London was busy doubling in size, reaching more than 2.2 million people, almost a third of the city. In addition to long-standing Irish, Indian, Jamaican and Bangladeshi communities, there were suddenly many new immigrants from Nigeria, Slovenia, Ghana, Vietnam, Somalia. London is an accordion breathing in and out. All these incomers crashed up against its great gleaming slippery wall, trying to get a hold.

  Somehow I was given permission to return. Armed with a single piece of paper from the Home Office, I remember bending my passport open to show the Heathrow immigration officer this incontrovertible evidence that I belonged. It was masochism; it was happiness, purpose, a decision, a path. There’s nothing like wandering around a city you’ve already left to define an internal change. I felt different: defiant, bold, victorious.

  I didn’t dare call myself a Londoner. But around that point I began to ask, who is? Who gets to choose? I began to feel as if I belonged. I guess secretly I was attaching another very inclusive definition to the word ‘Londoners’: if a person could get there, could stay there by whatever means possible, they could be a Londoner. It was then that the idea for this book began to take shape.

  For me the geography, the architecture, the great mass of London facts and figures, all its history – these felt secondary to the lives of people here at the tail end of this first decade of the twenty-first century. I began to conceive of a book that might yield the richness of London now, a collage of voices that together would draw a picture of the city and find testimony in lively, demotic speech, as Studs Terkel and Ronald Blythe had done in their pioneering oral histories. I was inspired by books that focused on voices that were otherwise rarely heard, that relied on its subjects for poetry.

  Anyone who wants to write about London works in the shadow of a stack of great books. There’s no point in trying to out-Ackroyd Peter Ackroyd, out-Sinclair Iain Sinclair, or cram in more sheer fact than Jerry White’s histories of the past two centuries. But perhaps there was a different history accessible to me. I wanted to find people who had dreamt of London, battled London, been rewarded by London, been hurt by London. Those who stayed for a day and then got the hell out. Those who had never left. Perhaps I could find people who worked with the stuff of the city, who made it work each day.

  Every Londoner must have a story, I was told. But it’s not true. Some people retract when they come in contact with this city, like salt on an anemone; they become lesser versions and pine for the country. But more often than not, the word ‘London’ stirred up great emotion. Asking them about the city, people grinned unabashedly, winced or sighed, or would roll their eyes or reminisce. London meant a new beginning, a hell-hole, a wonderland; too big, too foul; a safety blanket, point of pride, unfortunate problem, temporary mattress location; safety, salvation, life’s work. A place to stack empty tins of lager. Stage, Mecca, my water, my oxygen. London as cell, jail and favour. London meant ‘not living in England while living in England’, it meant ‘ignoring what my father said’, it meant ‘I hope I like the husband I’m going to meet at the airport.’ Londoners cling to reserve, but find a reason to ask a question and their reserve is broken. Living history is thrilling, especially in an eloquent city, in a talkative town, in a place where people fought to get here, fought to stay here, fought to get out.

  There were those who had reasons to love it and who still felt its power. There were those who had come from much worse, who conveyed in a gesture the deprivation that came before, the not-quite living, not quite able to be oneself, the low horizons, the shabby estates. The man who slashed the canvas of a lorry and leapt out to run towards London down the motorway. Those who still couldn’t believe their luck, couldn’t believe the variety of sandwiches they could buy at Pret. The new Chinese arrival who watched students march down the Strand and looked for tanks. Those who had quietly made millions. I learned never to be surprised at the variety of love for this place, which was often marrow deep.

  Over five years, I interviewed around 200 people all over London. Some interviews took months to arrange and lasted ten minutes. Other people I met on a lark, visited multiple times and interviewed for hours on end. After speaking to me, most said, ‘There’s someone you should talk to.’ There was always one more person. I was sometimes bruised by the onrush of sound, noise and stories. London keeps talking; it unspools regardless.

  I avoided the official voices of London. I didn’t want local politics or a report from City Hall. I shied away from bland professional soundbites and the monotone of the (mostly) men who populate Speaker’s Corner. I spoke to a few taxi drivers, those famed London talkers, but stayed away from cabbies who resembled professional interviewees, the edges of their stock answers rounded by years of performance. I sensed that a more pressing, varied, insistent conversation was happening elsewhere. In London, ‘I know the answer’ is never as exciting as ‘I’m not sure but I may have found a way.’ The historian’s single perspective gave way to conflicting accounts. Tell me about the history of London, I asked one teenager. He replied: ‘It started with me; it ends with me.’

  In Vic
torian pubs and chain cafes, sitting rooms and offices, I listened to a parade of London voices from all the thirty-two boroughs of Greater London; from Buckhurst Hill in the east to Hounslow in the west, from Barnet in the north to Morden in the south. I ranged over some 600 square miles, but I still don’t know the city. I get lost, I use another (smaller) A-Z constantly. There is only one definite I came away with. It was a statement made by a pest control officer I spoke to years ago who said, ‘The bedbugs in Tottenham look just the same as the bedbugs in South Ken.’ Anything else seemed too grand. Anything else could be contested by another voice. ‘It’s too expensive.’ ‘Try Tokyo.’ ‘It rains too much.’ ‘There’s always Vancouver.’ This city, after all, is eager to see you out. ‘If you care about mortgages above all, get one elsewhere.’ ‘If you care about your health, there must be better options.’ ‘But I couldn’t be anywhere else,’ I was told. ‘This place is mine,’ I was told, often.

  *

  Whatever it is, Londoners is not a definitive portrait; it’s a snapshot of London here and now. I never did manage to sort out just who is, and who isn’t, a Londoner. True Londoners, I was told more than once, are true cockneys, and to become one of those you must be born within earshot of Bow Bells. Or: true Londoners are born within the ring of the M25 motorway. Or are those who have spent a great deal of time in London – at least 70 years, or 52 years, or 33 years, 11 years, 8 years, 2 years or, in one case, just over a month. ‘But it was a very good month,’ this new Londoner said, fresh from the north of England. ‘I’ve totally forgotten Macclesfield.’

  If you want true Londoners, I was told, they all now live by the seaside. True Londoners are extinct, another said. Foreigners can’t be Londoners, a BNP campaigner asserted one Saturday on Hampstead High Street, before telling me a moving story of his own father’s journey from Cyprus to London and the way this shell-shocked man took refuge and was welcomed in the city. It made no sense, given his political views. A true Londoner would never support Man U, I was told. ‘The only thing I know’ – and this I was told in a very loud pub in Cricklewood – ‘is that a real Londoner would never, ever, ever eat at one of those bloody Angus bloody Steak Houses in the West End. That’s how you tell,’ the man said, wavering, steadying himself with a hand on the bar. ‘That’s how you tell.’

  To truly experience the city, I was told, you needed to be a first-generation immigrant, for that’s when London hits you, comes at you hard and you mould yourself to it: the mysterious eventually transforms into the commonplace. But then, some said a Londoner had to have an existing connection to the city to build on. They needed to reverse or improve the work of their parents.

  Some Londoners are trying to loosen their ties to the city. ‘Society in London is dreadful,’ said a wealthy woman in an airy South Kensington flat. ‘I won’t have my daughters marrying into London society. The only real society these days is Austrian.’

  A Londoner would never call himself a Londoner, I was told. On this housing estate the postcode is what’s important, I was told.

  *

  The only definition of a Londoner I followed was the people you see around you. The ones who stock the Tube trains and fill the pavements and queue in Tesco with armfuls of plastic-wrapped veg. Whatever their reason or origin, they are laughing, rushing, conniving, snatching free evening newspapers, speaking into phones, complaining, sweeping floors, tending to hedge funds, pushing empty pint glasses, marching, arguing, drinking, kneeling, swaying, huffing at those who stand on the left-hand side of the escalator, moving, moving, always moving. It’s a city of verbs.

  It’s been exhilarating to capture all these words, all the conversation, loose talk, asides, grumbles, false history, outright lies, wild exaggerations, declarations, mistakes, strings of anger hung with expletive, affirmations and sometimes revelations – so much that is, really, so little. The voices are here: wise and ridiculous, refuting and improving and refracting. Each of the people I talked to demonstrated the shortcomings of any A-Z. Each person added another layer of meaning to these streets.

  Near the end I looked through my notebooks, the ones I had labelled ‘London Chase’. I had filled at least fourteen, and my writing became increasingly erratic and rushed as names piled upon names, directions on directions, numbers on numbers. When I open them now I can see that the act of researching this book mirrored the act of living here. I developed within myself a complicated love. London Chase – it’s exhilarating, frustrating, surprising, reaffirming. It’s tiring, it’s never-ending, it fills your life. That figure I’m chasing, out in the distance, out in the grey streets, always slips away.

  PROLOGUE

  SIMON KUSHNER

  Former Londoner

  When I first arrived I moved into a house in North London with a bunch of my mates. It was an old, condemned house that the landlord hadn’t made any improvements to in decades. The wind blew straight through the walls and there was fungus growing on the wallpaper, and the garden at the back was just a rubbish dump. There were broken planks and bricks and bits of wood with nails sticking out and broken glass and a pile of rubble. It was your typical London garden, which in the winter is dead and in the summer manages somehow to grow about six feet of grass in the space of a month. Then it all settles down into a mush a month later when the summer ends.

  It was a really dirty neighbourhood. The local council never used to collect the rubbish. Something that struck me about London was how you’ll have the front entrance into the house and right beside it is where the garbage gets put. People leave their rubbish in front of their houses, right next to the front door. I thought that was just incredible. Or you’d see kids walking along with McDonald’s, eating a Big Mac meal. As they’d finish, they’d drop the packet, drop the wrapper and drop the cup. They walked along leaving a trail of garbage behind them. There was rubbish everywhere.

  London is actually a beautiful place when the weather’s good; the mood is lighter and everybody’s smiling. But for the other 350 days a year, it’s miserable. You’re standing there waiting for the bus in the rain or you’re waiting for a train on a platform and it’s freezing. Always a persistent drizzle – or if it’s not drizzling, it’s overcast and cold. My first winter in London I was so cold, that cold that gets into your bones. I remember getting into a hot bath, trying to warm up and being cold in the bath. Or I’d have cold sweats where I’d be freezing cold but my body would still be sweating. A cold London sweat.

  Most of the time everything’s grey, the clouds are low, there’s no perspective. You can’t see above the buildings, there’s no horizon. You’re surrounded by buildings all the time, you know? Your entire space is about one block in front of you and two blocks to the side, and the clouds are at the heart of the buildings. I’ve always found that if you live in a cramped place, you have cramped thoughts. London has that sense of being claustrophobic, and there’s a general cynicism, a pessimism, that invades your thoughts.

  Invariably there wasn’t a decent supermarket within walking distance, so every day you’d get your daily supplies and carry them around with you. It was like a mission. What I hated the most was the homogeneity of the food. You’d go to any Tesco’s and the food would be exactly the same: crap. The fruit and vegetables were terrible and the processed food – not all of it, the TV meals were actually pretty good – but the fruit and vegetables and the meat and the chicken, it just used to drive me insane. My last year in London I’d really had it. I used to walk into Tesco’s and walk back out without buying anything.

  I think for me the environment itself was toxic, you know? The lack of sunshine, the lack of fresh air. You clean your ears, you blow your nose and black stuff comes out. It’s a toxic environment, it’s not conducive to a healthy lifestyle. There’s too many people fighting for space on the Tube, everyone’s in a rush, everyone’s in a bad mood. You cannot talk to a stranger. You see it when you’re walking along the pavement in traffic and there’s a million people out, like in Oxford Stre
et when it’s busy. Not a single person will get out of your way. You become affirmative in the way you move, in the way you walk. You have to adopt that attitude: that I am going to walk straight and you are going to get out of my way. Eventually it just becomes part of your normal way of living. You don’t look anyone in the eye. You just look down. Once you’ve been there long enough you develop that mentality.

  I became like that too. You have to become like that. I’d been there about five years and I was on a bus and I had to get off. There was a bunch of tourists standing next to the exit when the bus stopped and they weren’t getting out of my way, so I was like, ‘Get the fuck out of my way! Just move!’ And I got off the bus and I remember standing there, struck by my own callousness. I would never have done that before. It’d taken me five or six years but I’d become just like every other Londoner. You live there long enough you will become like that. You have to, otherwise you miss your bus stop.

  His voice crackles and is cut through with the digital fuzz of conversations held between laptops. It’s overcast in Cape Town, he says, but the last week has been beautiful, high twenties, beach weather.

  London was just more hassle than it was worth. Everything was too much, it was a fuss, a big struggle just to get from one place to the next. Having to negotiate the buses and the weather and the Tube strikes. I mean, I’m lumping it all together and obviously it doesn’t all happen on the same day … but every day it did, and I just got sick of it. You know, the things that are amazing are the museums, the concerts, the exhibitions, those are the things I loved about being there and I used a lot of those resources. I used to go to galleries all the time. I went to all the festivals. But after ten years you’ve done all of that. You’ve done it to exhaustion and all you’re left with is the awful public transport and the shit weather and the lousy people. It just became an exercise in frustration management.