by Craig Taylor
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?
