by Craig Taylor
Sometimes London reminds me of some African cities with colonial architecture that has all been knocked about a bit and nobody has cared for it. London’s a bit like that, like an ex-colonial city itself, sliding into shabbiness. London looks like a place that used to be something.
JOE JOHN AVERY
Street cleaner
Pig heads, chicken livers, cigarette butts, sycamore leaves, sweet wrappers, crisp packets, coffee cups, dirty nappies, old socks, mobile-phone bills, creased photographs – he gathers it all. There’s another scattering each hour, another hundred cigarettes, the street cleaners say, crushed underfoot every minute, or that’s how it seems.
I know the manager from school, and he said, ‘I’ll give you a job.’ I didn’t have to go in for no interviews or anything. So I come in, I been here. It was just as I was turning 16, I come back from holiday and they said come in the next day. I said, ‘No, I just want to start work,’ so I started that day. I was that excited to start.
I been all over the city, since I been here. I know most of the city like the back of my hand. All the streets, some of the landmarks and all that. This firm, they do, like, the whole of the city. I’ll show you my map … Yeah, this is my area here. These pink ones are the subways, the stairs to all the stations, and they’ll need gritting, cleaning. It gets dusty down there. You’ve got the main roads here. So you do all the little ones in the morning, and you get to this by about 9.30, and then you get to the main roads by lunchtime, after everyone’s been and had their lunch.
Every day I pick up, like, five, ten thousand things. Fags, rubbish, cups, everything. Chewing gum and cigarette ends. And cups, always McDonald’s cups. That’s all you find everywhere. That’s the biggest item, McDonald’s cups, chip cartons, burgers … Anything with a logo, it’s the big M most of the time.
They’ve put in these ashtrays for chewing gum and for fags. You get some people, they’ll chip it out on the ashtray and throw it on the floor. And you think, it’s just mad!
It’s endless. Even if it’s half clean in the gulley, you might have a couple of cigarettes and you get stones and dust builds up there, cars drive past and it all winds it into there. So you still have to do that. It all adds up, man.
Starting at a young age, it was a brand-new thing to me. So it used to take me ages. But once you get used to it, know what you’re doing, it becomes easier. Get there, get things done on time. Work as a team. Probably took me like a couple of months before I could relax and all that. I’d be working so hard, sweating. So now I can do it at a pace where it suits me, get it done on time.
Like I can have a sit-down now and have a drink before I go back. Before, sometimes I’d have to work through my break because I was just panicking I couldn’t get it done. I should have been back here and I’m still out there working and my mate had to ring me and say ‘Where are you?’ and I’ve been like ‘I’m working!’
Sundays at the market are the toughest. They don’t pack up on time, so you have to wait for them. Sometimes you get the market inspectors, they go down there and they tell them they’ve got to hurry up, get off otherwise they get fines or something. You get a dustcart, and you get a cage-motor. One’s for recycling, but if it’s raining and it’s wet, you can’t do recycling. So, you just team up work … One goes at one end of the market, and one side of it is Tower Hamlets also, and they don’t come till later, so all their stuff is blowing onto ours.
You get everything, like. Cardboard boxes, like their stock, you get cups, and you get food. Trainers, like. When people buy their new shoes they throw their old ones. They have like a stall, they do fried prawns and banana fritters, and at the end you have to disinfect it, wash it down so it’s all slippery.
Sometimes I work on Saturday, like, and we go out in the electric vehicles in teams of four to do the big pavements, two of you do one side, two of you do the other. You get sick up the walls. I’ve seen piles, like maybe four or five, where they’ve just took a couple of steps and again and again. It’s horrible like.
I get annoyed at the things people do. You’ve got to think, people have got to clean your mess. They’re not really bothered like. I think they look at it as – they’ve got to give us a job to do.
I’ve had a few rats and all that, yeah. That’s horrible, the rats. In the train stations, back of some shops, the alleyways. Monday we was at the salt station, and it was just big piles of salt. And you get maybe the odd brick or rock in there and you have to take it out, because when we put it into the machine, it gets stuck and it gets jammed. So one of the drivers for the tractor, he saw something in there and took it out with his hand, thought it was a brick. But it was a dead rat and it was rock hard. It was horrible.
The builders are the worst. You can’t keep a building site area tidy, really. If you cleaned it, they’ll throw anything on the floor. They ain’t got no respect or anything for you.
I’ve come back to my bin before and there’s a rucksack in there, and it’s exactly the same rucksack as I think the bomber used. And I was like, ‘Christ!’ So I got my stick, and I just like lifted it to see if there was any weight on it, but it was empty. I turned it upside down and it was like the zip had ripped and it was all bust inside. We just have to check, otherwise if there’s something suspicious we have to ring the police. I’ve seen bomb squads come down before and they’ve cornered off areas and all that for a suitcase and stuff. They get the buildings evacuated, and from quiet you suddenly get thousands of people all standing outside smoking, drinking coffees. You have to wait till they go in and it’s just a mess. It’s hard work that.
Rubbish from the city just builds up. It’s mad, you could have like loads of it; just bags and bags. The most I’ve done before, I’ve got a picture of it on my phone. It’s when it’s leafy, you know, when all the leaves are about. You get big leaves, but you got the little leaves and they’re worst because there’s loads of them. Up near St Paul’s they have big ones around the church, you get big leaves so they’re not too bad. And when it rains they all stick to the ground. It’s horrible when it’s windy and there’s loads of mess. The most I’ve done, I think there was something about like 25–28 bags there. Got to be over seven and a half stone, ten stone.
Some people come up and comment, ‘Nice to see a young boy working.’ Makes you feel good, it does. And last Christmas, I was working late shift, it was night-time and it was cold. I was sweeping out and they had these new flats built, and they’re like one-, one-and-a-half-million-pound flats for a one-bedroom. I met this nice couple, I was talking to them, and they gave me £20 and that. I said, ‘You didn’t have to do that.’ But it was nice of them. They said, ‘Go and have something to eat, it’s cold, and enjoy your Christmas.’ It’s nice that some people appreciate what you do.
JILL ADAMS AND GARY WILLIAMS
Bus operations managers
At the Victoria Coach Station, a queue has formed for the 08:00 to Hrubieszow, which also calls at Gdansk, Elblag, Olsztyn, Szczytno, Ostroleka, Koszalin, Slupsk, Gdynia, Lubaczow, and many others. There’s not much talking at this hour amongst the assembled passengers. I hear the click of a dropped suitcase handle as it hits the bus station floor.
Housed in the same building on Buckingham Palace Road is CentreComm, the emergency communication centre that runs all day every day, and acts as London Buses’ command and control, fielding the 1,300 calls a day that come down the line from London’s 23,000 bus drivers. It’s here they arrange diversions, deal with emergencies, and monitor the 1,200 or so traffic cameras that peer at London streets.
On the day I visit to speak to a Network Liaison Manager the staff are preparing for an imminent strike on the Underground. The room is calm. One monitor is stuck on Sky News, the others are fixed on street corners in London where the great red rectangles roll by. The Liaison Manager speaks to me for an hour but the whole experience becomes more interesting when one of the other employees, a duty manager named Jill, takes over when the Liaison Manager is
called away to take a conference call about the impending strike. The computer system that logs all the problems, she says, is quite slow. Jill has just returned from holiday and, one of her co-workers notes, she must have missed the adrenalin of the room. After a few minutes I have to go fetch my recorder to keep up with her voice. ‘We’ve got five people picking up calls,’ she tells me as we walk down to the radio response section. We stand behind Gary, a young man monitoring a computer screen. ‘We used to have one system that didn’t tell us the location so we’d have to rely on our drivers,’ Jill continues. ‘For some of them English isn’t even their second language so there were problems. We’d ask them: where are you right now? They’d say: I’m outside the Asda in North London. Thanks very much. But the interesting thing about this place is we’d have someone here who would say I used to do that route. I know exactly where he is.’
They sit in the CentreComm room like telemarketers, waiting to communicate. Their London is a colour-coded map that loads slowly onto their screens. The screen is dotted with colour and, near each problem area, is the symbol for the van called in to deal with the drunk falling down the stairwell or another selection from the list of coded problems. If nothing happens it is a bad day, a very rare day. Jill calmly waits for the computer to load.
JILL: So this is the system we use and what the information screens do is – Gary, can you just bring up an empty one and do a test for me, do you mind? Right, that’s an empty screen that you’d get. It will come up, we put in the origin and we put in what the incident is. If you look on the right it’s got a cause code there. It runs 1 to 99, it can be any of those.
GARY: Each number represents an incident – vandalism, security, low hit trees, general enquiries, missing persons, pickpockets, gas leaks, burst water mains, fires on or off buses … Virtually anything that affects the movement of buses within the M25, we deal with and we report, as Jill said. We have real-time information on the spot, for police, fire or ambulance, or bus operators or any other agents, RSPCA. Anything, we cover it.
JILL: If you look under ‘vandalism’, we’ve got 74s and 77s, which are specific cause codes for things being thrown at buses. Also down the bottom, you see here, these are grid references. If we get a lot of 77s – which are vandalism, bus damage – within a certain area, it pings as a red spot into the intel unit. Somebody there will go, why are we getting a lot of rocks being thrown at buses on a Wednesday afternoon at half past five? And they might say, well there used to be an after-school club and now that’s closed, so the kids have got nothing else to do. We could feed stuff through to the intel unit and it will show there’s something going on in this particular area.
GARY: The most common thing is a fare dispute on the bus. That will be a code 21 for the driver, 22 for a dispute or 20 for one of our officials. So it’s endless, just endless. Even new ones that are not on there. Today I had a dog boarding a bus. No owner. Stray dog, just getting on and getting off. I said, maybe he just wants to go home. That’s the most unusual one I’ve had today. You could only put that as Other, you know. We just deal with whatever comes in and then disseminate it to the right person. The added bonus is the CCTV. As long as we’ve got cameras at the locations we can look and say, oh, yeah, we know that point. Piccadilly at the Regent Street junction, there’s pickpockets there that work on the night shift at a certain time, so we might put a call out to the staff to say, be aware, here’s what they look like, they’re pickpocketing, please advise passengers.
JILL: Right now it’s quiet. We’ve got the Peckham Rye log. So that tells us exactly what Gary’s just put in, and if you click on there it will tell you who the nearest member of the forward response unit is to that incident. Have you clicked it?
GARY: Yeah, it’s updating. Sometimes it’s a little slow.
JILL: It’s all done through their mobile phones and GPS. [The screen updates.] Right, there you go. See, there’s the nearest person. She’s 4.8 kilometres away from there. But the next person actually with a van will be the Lambeth bloke, right there – so we double click him and in a second, okay, his van will turn to purple. We still have to physically phone them. [We wait for the screen to update.] Ah, there you go, that’s where the incident is and that’s his van. So we can set him as still ongoing, or we can click on his name and put him on as meal break and it turns black so we can’t use him. The screen looks like it has measles and chickenpox and any other kind of spotty sort of ailment that you can think of. That’s basically how it works. That’s how we manage to get people to incidents very quickly.
GARY: So they can deal with it.
JILL: A lot of the people in here actually have been out and done the van jobs. They’ve been inspectors, they’ve been revenue inspectors, they’ve been roadside officials and bus drivers. I’ve been a manager here for three years. But before that I was a bus station controller, a bus driver, a bus driving instructor. And I was working for the police before that as a police driver, did rapid response with them. I’ve literally stood in the middle of Oxford Street doing first aid on somebody whose foot was hanging off underneath a bus, and I was trying to phone here to say Oxford Street’s about to shut eastbound just past Oxford Circus, can you put the diversion in via Regent Street. And while I’m phoning them, there’s buses stopping the other way having a look and I’m like, naff off, and meanwhile someone comes up and says, where do I get a bus to Piccadilly Circus, my love?
GARY: Yeah, happens all the time.
JILL: They actually hate it when it’s a bit quiet like this. Don’t you Gary?
GARY: Oh, yeah. [He sighs.]
JILL: No, seriously, they prefer something to be happening because one, the day goes quickly and two, this office runs best when something’s happening, they get stuck into it, you know. They actually thrive on it. They love it. You love it when it’s busy, don’t you, Gary?
GARY: [Dubiously] Oh yeah.
JILL: Yeah, you do, you liar! Don’t try and bullshit me. Even if it’s just a bus driver who calls up and says, someone’s calling me this, that and the other and we know that, 99.9 per cent of the time, it will just blow over – this is just what the drivers need. These guys, remember, they were drivers themselves. You just speak to them in a way that you’d like to be spoken to.
GARY: We’ve got the radio, the CCTV cameras here.
JILL: These guys know this city better than anyone; they know where all the cameras are and everything. They know it off by heart. They’re dynamite, these guys.
GARY: We just need to get out more.
PAUL AKERS
Arboriculturalist
He walks at a slower pace than his co-workers at Westminster City Hall. Most others move with purpose towards the elevators. He ambles. ‘Look out there,’ he says, after we exit the elevator. He’s looking out the window. Across the rubble of a half-demolished building he can see a handsome plane tree. ‘We planted that fifteen years ago.’
I grew up in Ruislip, big garden, backed onto a wood. I was able to roam and play freely with friends in the woods, climbing trees, falling out, landing in the river underneath and so on. Just having freedom and encouragement and deriving enjoyment from that environment really. It’s changed a bit now, but the woods are still there. Ruislip Woods are still very well known for their extensive collection of oak trees. A lot of the oak trees from Ruislip Woods were felled to provide timber for the building of the Royal Albert Hall.
In those days arboriculture hadn’t really emerged as a recognized profession. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that arboriculture became more of a recognized profession to be working in. The councils then began to wake up to the need to have specialists looking after this unique and much prized and valued resource.
There are many benefits derived from trees, of course. Purer air in terms of atmospheric pollution and so on. Quality of life. And trees can increase the value of properties. The right tree in the right place: that is the practice we promote as far as is possible in terms of planting n
ew trees in pavements and thoroughfares in the city. We assess the new planting site very carefully indeed. We take some time considering whether it’s suitable or not and if it is, the best type of tree to plant in it so that those new trees are going to provide maximum effect and minimum inconvenience. Something that is compatible with the size of the buildings, the width of the road, the width of the pavement.
Some streets are very narrow, very tight, very compact and there isn’t a lot of space for big trees to grow satisfactorily. So we plant something that is more upright and its branches grow more vertically than horizontally. One tree we plant a lot of are Chanticleer pears, a non-fruiting pear. They come into flower in the spring, nice clusters of single white blossom smothering the whole tree. They’re like snowmen or igloos, the whole canopy is completely white for a few weeks. There’s a whole load of them if you go down Oxford Street for example, from Marble Arch going right the way down to Oxford Circus.
They don’t get many serious pests or diseases. They look after themselves well and don’t need very much pruning. They tolerate the conditions that Oxford Street offers them, the jostle and the hustle. The problem we do get down Oxford Street is slightly unusual, people will chain their pushbikes to the trees and pedals and chains do sometimes cause abrasion of the actual trunks. But they tolerate that too. They’re quite good in that respect.
