by Craig Taylor
GEOFF BILLS: It’s a nightmare. But the planning is all done to meet the pressure. The pressure’s there from London. Londoners say, jump! And Surrey County Council say, how high? If you want it, we’ll do it. Rather than going back to them and saying, no, we won’t. They keep shouting up there. They keep saying, we must have more houses to meet the demand. They keep bringing more and more people into their rotten city all the time. They keep saying, let’s bring more people in, they keep wanting it, they want everything up there. Then when they’ve got it they can’t handle it, so the next thing they do is shout at all the neighbours and start saying to all the neighbouring counties, will you meet some of the demand for our housing?
MIKE BENNISON: O ne of the words is ‘infrastructure’. There is no rules or regulations that puts the infrastructure in: the schools, the drains, the parking and everything else that you need – there is nothing like that. They come along and they just keep building, don’t they? And the schools are jammed. It’s terrible.
GEOFF BILLS: It will come, the infrastructure does come, it does, they do the buildings, like they did in Chessington that was a nice little rural village. Within living memory, you’re talking about up there. That went within a matter of probably fifteen years. I lived in Chessington after it had been developed. There was no sense of community because all the people who you’ve grown up with, they all moved out and Londoners moved in. They’ve just got a totally different outlook on life. The way they go on. Hooliganism, trouble, police, violence. It’s just a bloody nightmare. It goes from ordinary living out in the suburbs to living in the inner city. It’s all been done by development, population moving, shifts in the population.
It’s untenable to live under their way of life. The inner-city way of life is totally different to the country way of life. We know people that have come from London. You talk to them and the first thing they’ll say: wherever we go we take London with us. It doesn’t matter where they live, they’ll take the way they think with them and they’ll want to turn that environment into where they are. It’s like an invading army. See what I mean? So you can get a Londoner who can move into Surrey but he still regards himself as a Londoner and what he’ll do, the insidious thing is, he’ll put pressure on the council for development, they’ll get that place turned into London one way or the other. They’ll develop it into London. They’ll bring their people in. All of a sudden you’ll find that’s another part of the county gone. That’s how it happens, all the time. It’s just a rolling bleeding expansion.
PUTTING ON A SHOW
HENRY HUDSON
Artist
He walks into a room in the Hoxton Square gallery where his work of art, Crapula, stands by itself, surrounded by a few empty plinths. The gallery is preparing for the annual Frieze Art Fair. He can’t find a light source to stick into the sculpture, so he picks up the sculpted head – which has his nose – and walks into the office where a few rays of mid-afternoon light shine through the window. He holds up the sculpture so that the resin is illuminated and the strands of human hair appear, criss-crossing in the resin. Out the window, across the square, the White Cube gallery looks grey. A group of what look to be Japanese tourists walk around the square, cameras in hand.
I was trying to think about London; about how you could take and unify everybody. I liked the idea that I could have a little bit of everybody in London in something, you know. So I was naturally drawn to the Underground, and I was down in the Tube at King’s Cross, and I felt these gusts of wind and then there it was: the tumbleweed. It was just sort of rolling at the bottom of the stairs, that’s where it catches, the hair. I didn’t necessarily want to touch it and there was only tiny amounts. I ended up spending seven months picking up hair and having people look at me in a really dodgy way. I didn’t know if it was full of diseases and I didn’t really want to be taking it back home. I’d heard about these fluffer trains, which are sent down at night after all the trains have stopped and clean the tracks. All that waste, they have to get rid of it. I called the Northern Line, but they didn’t want anything to do with me. So I was left to basically pick it up myself, this human hair.
I knew that there were a lot of tunnels meeting at King’s Cross, so I knew there’d be a lot of this stuff ending up there and sure enough there was. The best places were King’s Cross from the Hammersmith & City Line, the Metropolitan and the Circle Lines, mostly at the bottom of staircases. My studio at the time was in the Barbican, so I’d stop off and put my Marigolds on and pick it up. Or I’d just have a plastic bag, like a Tesco’s bag, and I’d have that tied inside over my hands and then I could just pick up like that and tie it into balls and stuff it into my dinner jacket. You know, you could go out to these really fancy dinners in London with Lord and Lady whatever and inside your breast pocket was a sort of dreadlock of everybody’s hair in London. It was quite romantic and disgusting at the same time, and that’s what I really liked about the whole thing.
The other place that was really good is the Central Line. Going through the Central Line at Oxford Circus to the Victoria Line. There’s quite a deep tunnel there. That’s really windy and you can get a lot there but that was really embarrassing because that tunnel’s really small and if you stop, people think you’re quite strange. I just ignored them. I mean, the irony is, once I’d got over the initial embarrassment, I didn’t really think about it. People obviously take notice of you but if you just get on and do it, nobody cares. So I’d be very quick about it. I wouldn’t mess about. Most of the time it was at the bottom of steps because that’s where it accumulated.
What was weird was that, for the amount of blonde people and probably peroxide people there are, you can’t actually differentiate some of the blonde hairs. It is mostly brown or black. Maybe because they are so caught up with one another, they don’t stand out. The hair itself tends to be dreadlocky and blacky, dark blue. With bits of cloth, bits of paper. Tiny bits of, I don’t know what it could have been, from people’s pockets. You know if you leave a card in and you put it in the wash, that sort of stuff. Initially I’d try and pick it out but it’s all part of the identity of whoever that person was. It’s clumps, basically.
So I collected a bit of this hair, like a handful, which took, I don’t know, about two weeks, and I had that in a plastic bag that was just in my studio for a while. That was it. I didn’t know what to do with it. It was there for ages. It was impossible, horrible. You can’t pull it apart. It’s knotted itself so much. You could probably stretch it apart and weave it if you knew what you were doing, but no, it’s impossible. It is a dreadlock made of all these different people’s hair. It’s fascinating in a way.
I tried putting a comb through it. Impossible. There’s no way. I bought lots of hair waxes to try and see if I could get it to stand up straight, but of course it didn’t. I knew I wanted this idea of unification somehow. I knew it was disgusting, and I wanted to somehow turn it into something hopeful or beautiful. It was just about this romantic idea that I could be holding a little piece of everybody in London.
I decided in this show I was going to make a sculpture about me in London. So I thought, well, what better way than cast a head of myself and put this hair into my mind, because that’s where it had been for such a long time, you know, almost playing with my mind because I didn’t know what to do with it. Also I thought it would be a nice way of keeping it in my head. I wanted the head to be looking up into the sky. I wanted it to be bathing in some kind of hot sun in some hopeful way and the light, specifically the amber light, was definitely a hopeful one. I’ve often been hungover or coming home late from a party. I might be walking down the street and look up. If you’re cold outside on a winter’s day in London and you look in someone’s house and you might see a fire. I like the sort of colour that comes out. It’s very beautiful. So I wanted that to be illuminating from my head.
I called it Crapula, which means hangover. It ended up with that name because it’s about that melancholy blue in
the morning when you’re walking home and you feel a bit disgusted with yourself. Like four in the morning, and you’ve been to a nightclub and you’ve got the bus home or you’re walking home. I’ve always called it melancholic blue, melancholy blue. I’ve always preferred that blue to the evening blue.
I’m not really a sculptor, so it was all very experimental and the head that you see now is actually warped. That’s not how my neck is, for example. The resin’s quite dangerous. It can set quite quickly, so we did it in different stages. Then we laid the hair in around the top of the head, poured a bit of resin in and then manoeuvred it and let it set.
It’s strange because hair is dead cells. When it’s on you, we all want to touch it, but as soon as it’s off you, in your bed or your shower, it’s suddenly, oooh, horrible. So hair’s a really weird thing. But I think it’s sort of beautiful.
MARTINS IMHANGBE
Actor
When I got to secondary school I got involved in little drama things. I was pushed to be involved, because everyone was saying, oh you’re quite funny, you’re quite this, you’re quite that. So I got involved in a youth art centre in Deptford. And that’s when I really thought, boom, this is what I want to do. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.
I’ve got friends that look for quick fixes, that would rather get a job now than go on to university or something bigger. And they went on to get jobs and they were getting their cars, they had the money and you’re thinking, okay, you’ve got money now, but there’s nothing to fall back on. No education, no training, no nothing. I’d rather go the long way than take a short cut. But three years in drama school – and I can’t do any professional work. I’ve got friends that have already got agents that are auditioning for stuff, so you kind of think, three whole years! You can’t audition, you can’t do nothing. But I try not to think about that at all. I’m going to do this training and at the end of it I’m going to get what I wanted to get out of it. So it’s a personal thing, really. It’s about finding your own focus, your own drive.
In my youth arts centre I done a workshop with the police. I played a police officer and the police officers played young people, so we put ourselves in a police officer’s shoes and vice versa. We had a whole discussion about how it felt being a police officer and a young person. A lot of conflict was happening between police and young people, and young people always thought that the police are against them, because the police can stop and search anyone, for any reason. So young people feel that the police are picking on them. They don’t know what the procedures are, so they don’t know what to say to a police officer if they get stopped and searched. I’ve been stopped and searched before. They said I looked suspicious and that this is a drug hotspot. [He gestures around at the Subway restaurant, where we’re eating 6-inch sandwiches. The gesture continues, gets bigger, to suggest Lewisham in general.]
So they stopped and searched me and because I really know the procedures and understand why they do some things, I was cool about it. I’ve done nothing, so what can they say. They gave you a record of why they stopped and searched you and that was it. But other people don’t know that. They’ll be like, why are you touching me for? Why are you trying to stop me? What have I done? Don’t touch me. And that causes conflict and it makes it a bigger affair. It’s frustrating. But it happens a lot. You could be in a group with your friends going home and they just stop you, saying, why are you in a group? They can stop you for any apparent reason.
Nowadays you can get into a conflict for the dumbest reasons. By looking at someone wrongly. Bumping someone by accident. Stepping on someone’s trainers. There’s been fights over that. And it spreads from one generation to another. The older lot recruit youngers and give them their name. So say, for example, you’re called Killer and you recruit someone who’s younger than you. You give them the name Younger Killer. And they do most of the things that you don’t want to do. For example, say you’re selling drugs and you don’t want to do that. You would give it to your younger to do it and then your younger will do it because he wants to keep up with your name. He sees you as a big boss, so he’ll do it just to keep up the name.
[His demeanour changes when another black kid walks into the Subway. He looks up, acknowledges him. It’s quick, respectful, automatic; then back down to the sandwich. He’s an Arsenal fan, missing the match to be here while the rain pounds down on the Lewisham streets. ‘How old do you think I am?’ he says at one point. ‘I don’t look nineteen, do I?’]
You know about postcode wars? If you live in SE13 and I live in SE14 then we might not get along with each other. Or you live on that street and I live on this street and there might be conflicts because we don’t like each other. A lot of people don’t know what they’re fighting for because there’s this old thing about Peckham and Lewisham. But the people in this generation don’t really know why they’re still doing it. It’s just one of them things that has been passed down and they don’t know why they hate each other.
If you ask a lot of young people in Lewisham, why don’t you like Peckham? They will say, oh, because I don’t like them, innit. That’s the reason. There’s no deeper thing. They’re not like us and we don’t like them. But why? They don’t know. There was a gang fight the other day, in Lewisham. There were these young schoolgirls and this group of boys were insulting them. The schoolgirls called some other boys, probably their older brothers or something, and then they all came down and there was this whole conflict near the town centre, by the police station. This is the biggest police station in Europe and they want to be having a big old conflict over there. It’s like they don’t care about the aftermath. When they’ve been arrested and get sentenced, that’s when they start worrying about things. They’re living for the now.
At first, when I started Lewisham College, we done physical fitness and I wasn’t too keen on that. In my mind I thought acting was acting. I didn’t know there was all these different elements to it. There’s all this movement, you have to be good with your posture, your voice and all of that. I didn’t really appreciate it much when I started, but I grew into it. Having a physical workshop and then going into a script and going into acting, I felt that I was more free. I felt I was more free and open, yeah, now I’m more open to it. I’m excited to do it. Like in my auditions, they played with the text, so with my monologue, they asked me to do it as if I’m a paracetamol tablet. Do your monologue as if you’re a paracetamol, they said. At first, I was like, what? It was hard, but then I thought about pain and the flow of it going in. So my movement was all … I tried to embody the paracetamol going into me and stuff like that. That’s the first thing that came into my head.
Then they said, do your monologue as if you’re a wet pond in the middle of nowhere. A wet pond in the middle of nowhere! I had to imagine it. It’s all about how quick your imagination is. I pictured it being cold and lifeless and so I just started my monologue in a still voice in a still way.
They also asked me to be a dog, because my character, Angelo, he was a duke and his personality was kind of doggish-like and he was a snob and so, yeah, they were saying what animal can you relate to your character? So I said, a dog. And they were like, become 90 per cent dog and 10 per cent human. I swear. And this was an audition. So I had to embody it and she was like, she’ll do it with me if it makes me feel embarrassed. But I was like, no, it’s okay. I’m all right with it, and then I started behaving like a dog. I was on the floor breathing like a dog, barking and stuff like that and then she was like, okay, okay, now 60 per cent dog, 40 per cent human. So it’s like evolution. You have to have the dog qualities but slowly come out of it. And then 50 per cent dog and 50 per cent … down to 10 per cent dog and 90 per cent human.
This year my tutor entered me for a UK-wide schools competition. She chose me out of the whole year group to represent Lewisham College. I sat with my drama teach and we were trying to look for a monologue that I can relate to and people can look at me and believe. A c
haracter that’s my age and that I can relate to. We were going through a monologue book and we came across the Stephen Lawrence monologue. It happened in Eltham, which is quite up the road and yeah, it was just a perfect monologue. Because I know the story of Stephen Lawrence. There was a racial attack in 1993. Basically, he went to Blackheath Bluecoat School and he left school with his friend Duwayne Brooks and these guys was running towards them shouting abusive stuff, they were saying, ‘Come here, you niggers,’ blah, blah, blah. One of them caught up to Stephen Lawrence and hit him with an axe. Duwayne Brooks carried on running but then he realized that Stephen Lawrence wasn’t with him no more. So he went back and saw his friend laying on the floor with blood pouring from him and he didn’t know what to do and he was in shock, so he ran across to the phone box and he dialled 999. But when the police came they treated Duwayne Brooks as a suspect. He was saying, that’s my friend, and they’re asking him questions like are you sure they called you ‘niggers’? Are you sure they done this? And he was saying that if they had asked for descriptions of the boys’ details, the other boys, they would have been sensible questions. They were making him feel like a suspect, and his friend’s just been murdered … so that’s what actually happened. Sad story and they still haven’t found the people who did it.
So I went to the first heat in Nottingham. There was sixteen people, we all done our monologues one by one, and then they picked first, second and third. I came second out of sixteen people in the heat. They really thought I connected with the piece. It’s emotional and it sends out a message as well, it makes people aware to the fact that this stuff happens. I feel very passionate about wrongful acts, about people getting caught for no reason, so I just felt good that I could tap into it. I went on to the final in Manchester, in which I came runner-up. It was an honour to be put up for that competition. The murder happened in Eltham and I took it all the way to Manchester. I don’t think they would have heard of the Stephen Lawrence story. I don’t even know if they know that it’s a real story.
