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

by Craig Taylor

  I was probably around 30 and had been with my boyfriend Tom for seven or eight years by that point. We’d been spending a lot of time thinking about careers, and you begin to wonder what else there is. And I guess being a girl and hitting 30 you start thinking about children. We talked about families and the long-term future, and I think we realized that maybe London wasn’t going to work, because we couldn’t afford to buy somewhere big enough for us to have the lifestyle we wanted for our children. Both of us grew up in very traditional, stable families in nice houses, and I think we both aspired to that for our children. That was going to be really difficult in London, working in the arts. I don’t think we could have done it unless we’d inherited loads of money.

  We happened upon Broadway Market by accident. I was writing an article for an art magazine about an organization that opens studios up across the East End, and quite a lot of artists had studios in Broadway Market. We ended up going there one Saturday, which is when the farmers’ market is on, and thought, this is quite nice. It didn’t feel like it was trendy in the same way that Old Street was. We’d been looking to buy a flat in Chalk Farm or further north, and realized that we couldn’t afford it. We ended up buying a flat near Broadway Market, overlooking the canal and really loved it at that time.

  But I think there was an epiphany moment when I had Sarah two and a half years ago. She was born about a month early and it was all a bit of a shock. I was in complete denial about having a baby and I’d just finished working on the Festival of Architecture. There were five hundred events and I was doing all the press for it and it was a really manic job. I had to stop working just before the Festival because I was up on maternity leave. I had this morning where it was like, oh my god, I’ve gone into labour. We rushed into hospital and it was all quite full-on. I ended up spending five days in Homerton Hospital. I felt a bit institutionalized by the whole thing. I walked out of the hospital with Sarah, who was tiny, and Tom, and we went to get a taxi. There was some pissed guy outside the hospital ranting and raving, and I remember thinking: what am I doing here? Why aren’t I at nice, middle-class Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge? And just thinking, I really don’t want to have to deal with this now, I can’t get my head around having to look out for myself in the same way that I could before.

  The sun plays across the wall behind her. She’s waiting for a delivery. Her free mornings are freighted with errands as well as periods of the kind of deep relaxation young mothers must plan because, as she says, they’re not going to be handed out free.

  We spent a day at home, and then I went out for a walk in Broadway Market, because I needed to get out of the house. I noticed all the graffiti everywhere and the gangs of kids with their fighting pitbull-type dogs. It suddenly felt like I had to really look out for this little baby and I couldn’t be relaxed about being in this quite edgy area. It became a bit of a hassle rather than something that was exciting or interesting.

  For the first time I noticed the air quality. I don’t know why but I was walking over the little canal bridge by Broadway Market and it seemed really smelly. It was probably because I’d been indoors for five days in the hospital and was just noticing the litter. I was having to find my own feet again in a different way, because none of my other friends had children and I was trying to discover places like playgroups or other groups of parents and it was just quite hard. Previously, all my friends had been working in the arts or creative industries and suddenly I was hanging out with people who were solicitors or doctors or social workers. It was a real mixture of people, which was quite interesting, but at the time I didn’t really want to deal with that because I had this new baby. I just wanted to be in a bit of a secure environment and be able to adjust to being a mum, and not have to think so much about the environment I was in.

  Previously I’d been the sort of person who pushes myself all the time. I’d be like, oh yeah, I can just nip off to Shepherd’s Bush for the evening and then go to Brixton on the way home and then back to Old Street. I thought nothing of jumping on the Tube and sitting there for an hour quite happily, and forgetting to take a drink with me and things like that. And then suddenly it was just a bit like: right, if I’m going to leave the house I’m going to have to pack up a bag with nappies in, and then walk to the Tube and it’s a bit of a hassle because if I walk this way there are loads of things to watch out for, and if I go that way it’s really noisy and smelly and I don’t want Sarah to be exposed to that. And then I can’t go on the Tube because the steps there are really annoying, so I’ll go on the bus instead. Oh no, actually I can’t go on the bus because they get really irritated by pushchairs and that’s the wrong time of day to do that. I guess when you have children you just want to stay a bit more local because you have to do things quicker, because you have to fit around sleeps or eating and things like that, and spontaneity goes a bit. So suddenly London started to feel like a hassle and a bit more isolated.

  I was amazed when I moved back to Cambridge, because in the street people move to one side if they see you coming with a buggy, and people are just polite and say hello to you if you’re walking in the park. Whereas in London, it just makes no difference, they’re just rude, you know. You say ‘Excuse me’ on a bus and they’re like, ‘What? What do you want? Mind yourself.’ They don’t make any allowances.

  You don’t want to go through a social experiment. You just want what’s best, to give them lots of space to play. But it feels like you need to have a lot of money in London to make those kinds of choices. And even then, people that I know who have got lots of money, and send their children to private schools or invest a lot of time in after-school activities, it still feels quite pressured and competitive. Their child goes to ballet one evening, then swimming another, it’s all organized activities and children have very little time away from parental supervision in London. Whereas if you’re somewhere suburban, or somewhere a bit less edgy I guess, you can give your child a bit more freedom.

  I was getting grumpier and grumpier the more I was there. I was feeling more claustrophobic. Moving up to Cambridge I’ve kind of rediscovered that thing when you’re an art student and you’re being asked to look at the world in different ways, or try and express how you’re looking at it. I think I was forgetting to do that while I was living in London. I was forgetting to look at the good things and I was forgetting to use the good things, so I was getting more and more frustrated with it because it just felt like it was becoming more and more of an inconvenience. Whereas, moving up here I can spend more time in the garden and that’s a bit of a creative outlet. I’ve learnt how to play a bit more again. London was beginning to take that out of me, and I was feeling tired by it. If I was still there I’d just be feeling really wiped out.

  NICK STEPHENS

  Squatter

  His current squat is above a NatWest bank on Leicester Square. The windows look down on the bust of Hogarth, Tom Cruise’s handprints, tourists attempting to picnic and hydraulic cranes preparing for another premiere at the Odeon. The walls of his squat are newly beige with paint taken from a nearby B&Q skip. There are a few candles, sleeping bags, an orange couch, a Mac, a printer, a George Orwell paperback. He had recently found an electrical junction box below the lift, snuck out of the flat – always a risk – and turned on the electricity.

  *

  When you’re opening a property, it’s a monumentally stressful activity. You’re always at risk of being caught. You have to keep your wits about you and you have to make split-second judgements. First, you find a place that’s empty. I know a couple of people who have tried to squat places that haven’t been empty and they ended up being chased down the road at two o’clock in the morning by a guy with a bathrobe round his waist and a great big baseball bat. So you find a place that’s empty, you get your crew together and then you acquire access to the building. Then you whack up a Section 6 notice on the front door and you house-sit until the police or the council or the neighbours turn up. Then you deal
with them.

  The first place we squatted was a derelict council estate in Brixton. Most of the residents had been evacuated, removed and replaced some place else and the only tenants left were roving hordes of teenagers. A community of about ten of us lasted there for three months. We left due to the hostility of the remaining tenants. Our doors would be kicked in, friends of ours would be mugged, bicycles stolen, there was a lot of violence within the estate during the time of our occupancy. Early one morning someone was shot to death. Police cars and ambulances visited the place frequently. In fact, when we were squatting the place, we were changing the locks on one of the houses and the police turned up at our front door. They asked us what we were doing and we said we were squatting the place. Instead of arresting us, they looked us up and down and said that we were very brave and that if we heard or saw anything out of order we should contact them immediately. So that was our first squat and then we progressed elsewhere.

  With each squat that I inhabited, I ended up with a large community of Polish ex-pats. Each of them had a degree of some description and each of them had abilities in some form of home maintenance, be it plumbing or electrical rewiring or something of that fashion, so it was hugely beneficial for us as a community to be able to repair the things that weren’t working properly in our squat. We had about twenty-two Polish people who basically took care of all the maintenance works. They were a feisty lot. They didn’t take any shit. They were committed to saving money and to reinvesting that money in their communities back home.

  The last time I actually rented a flat was in Kilburn with my ex-girlfriend, where we cohabited a tiny room measuring about 8 metres by 5 metres. We were paying £120 a week and it drove us mad. It was the size of a large cupboard. There was barely any room to move. The bed doubled as a sofa. We had a tiny stove on which to prepare our meals and a tiny compartment which hosted a shower unit. It was horrendously small, horrendously overpriced and it drove myself and my girlfriend apart.

  Before that I lived in Chelsea and I had a job in IT, and I remember just how extraordinary it was at the time I was shifting jobs and shifting apartments, the stress involved. I think finding a place to rent in London is probably one of the most stressful activities you can partake of in this city. But squatting opened up a lot of doors. You don’t pay rent. You rarely pay council tax or bills. It affords you a lifestyle that you would otherwise not be able to afford, especially if you are a low-income earner. The minimum wage here is just over £5.75 an hour. The average rent per week, on the bottom bracket, is £70 per week. £70 a week gets you a room in a bedsit on the outskirts of London, a room in a hostel, or a roomshare with three other people in Zone 2. £70 a week doesn’t get you very much at all. Squatting, however, gives you a lot of freedom. You choose the people that you live with. You can always choose the area that you live in, because there is always an abundance of empty properties. And the lifestyle, while it lasts, is good. You can save money. You can do your thing.

  The downsides to squatting are that you are continually on the move. You have to travel with a limited amount of possessions. You can be left homeless. If you are evicted without due notice you can find yourself in rather unpleasant circumstances.

  One time we were squatting a house in Peckham. The house was terrible. There was only one working tap. I was dying to get out of there anyway. We were evicted prematurely on an old eviction notice and we had to leave within a week; we’d been there for about four months. Suddenly, more than twenty of us found ourselves homeless. We had no place to go. Luckily it was the summertime, so we slept on park benches in St James’s. And in the park in Westminster, near Embankment station. So we slept there and for two weeks we went roaming around London, we tried about fifteen places and for some reason each one was either too derelict to inhabit or the police came or there was some other complication. There was a lot of camaraderie. When you’re working together in such a situation, you have to be able to get along. You don’t have time to bicker, you’re too stressed really.

  We spent about two weeks being homeless before we landed upon a series of arches underneath the London Bridge railway line. We managed to acquire access to those, each one individually, and we settled in there reasonably well. There were no domestic facilities so it made life rather uncomfortable. There was one tiny kitchen, no bathroom, no shower, nothing like that, so we settled in and were in the process of making the third arch into a magnificent night cafe. We were going to have a spot of gambling. We were in the process of building the bar when we were stormed by the anti-terrorism police. I remember the exact time because I was sawing up the bar in my underwear. I was dripping with sweat and wielding a great big handsaw when the door burst open and all the local constabulary burst in: I found myself confronted with about two dozen anti-terrorist police and local councilmen. That was rather a startling experience. They evicted all of us under new anti-terrorism laws. Railways were particular targets, and railway security had been tightened. So I wouldn’t recommend squatting in arches underneath a railway track.

  MIKE BENNISON AND GEOFF BILLS

  Residents of Surrey

  The sign on the quiet private road of the Oxshott Way Estate in Cobham, Surrey reads: VEHICULAR ACCESS WITH PERMISSION ONLY. A great English oak towers over the entrance. White vans pass through the white gates and dutifully lower their speed to twenty. Not too far away is the Councillor’s large, well-kept house. He is an ex-pilot, a Conservative who grew up in Elmbridge and Long Ditton, never far from the spreading borders of London. He drives into Claygate to the home of one of his constituents, Geoff Bills. Bills’ mother readies herself for an appointment in Claygate while I talk with the two men.

  MIKE BENNISON: People round here will go bananas if you even talk about putting a house on the green belt. But people in London, I don’t think they even think about it. It’s like they think milk comes from bottles, not from cows.

  GEOFF BILLS: They’re trying to make the M25 the borders of London one way or another. So everybody regards everyone inside the M25 as you’re a Londoner now. You think to yourself, where the hell did that come from? It’s only because they’ve built a motorway out here what should have been put through London in the first place … I mean, if they’d have widened the North Circular and took all the traffic lights out and all the rest of it and put plenty of underpasses in and just carried that through it could have done the same job.

  MIKE BENNISON: We are right on the edge. We’re two minutes from the M25, and two minutes from the country. We are twenty-five minutes on the train from central London. But this is what feels like Surrey. Well it is Surrey, it was Surrey, it always will be Surrey, I don’t care what they say, personally. We want to keep all this green. We are the greenest area around. We don’t want any of that to go.

  GEOFF BILLS: It’s just this insidious, creeping urbanization. They come down, tear up nice farm fields, put fences on it, put rubble on it and spread general rubbish and just make it look an unsightly mess. Suddenly it’s turned into an industrial brownfield site, you know, overnight. You look at it and you think, that could be anywhere in Essex near the river. Somebody comes down with a load of crunched-up rubble with a few tippers and chucks it all over the fields. It’s always going on.

  MIKE BENNISON: That’s right. If you go along this road on the other side, the parallel road to this, and then go all the way round, until you hit the borders of London, right the way out, it’s all green. It’s just grass.

  GEOFF BILLS: You can see the difference within a matter of about two miles. Claygate is about the last bastion, or Chessington. And Claygate’s on its way now. They’re infilling it. I went down there the other day, I looked and thought, what’s going on here? Tippers, developers. I thought, Christ. The reason for it, it’s pretty obvious, it’s because they want to meet the demand. It’s for Londoners to move in as well. So you put one up front and they want two next to it as well.

  MIKE BENNISON: We don’t seem to be able to control anythi
ng that goes in.

  GEOFF BILLS: You can knock a house down and put flats up. The reason it’s happening is because the developers know they can sell everything they build. For everything they build there’s ten Londoners out there who want to get out of the stinking hole they’ve created of their own. They’ve turned their own place into something that’s untenable to live in. They want to get out of there. I mean, we’ve seen it ourselves.

  MIKE BENNISON: And they can afford to buy a house and knock it down, full market value or more, just knock it down and put a brand-new one up and it gets a premium. People want a brand-new house. And then they want to turn it into London. I’ve got a letter at home I could show you. Some woman’s moved into my division, and said, ‘I’ve moved into this new house, the pavement’s in a state, the trees all need cropping, all the hedges are overgrowing the footpaths which are in a terrible state, and everybody’s speeding around in their cars and I think the place is dreadful – what are you going to do about it?’ I think you’d better go off back where you came from. You knew it when you bought the damn place. We don’t want to change. My attitude is, just leave us alone. We do not want to know. We’re dead happy.