by Craig Taylor
We used to have a gallery in Bethnal Green and we were looking for somewhere to move and I wanted a big space. Everywhere seemed to have been chopped up into live/work units and had hideous sunken lights in the ceiling and fake floorboards on the ground, it’s just disgusting, and not my idea of the gallery I wanted. I wanted a disused industrial space that had an urban feel to it, which oddly now is very difficult to get, an urban environment, it’s like having a fake Tudor house. But then we found this place.
I don’t know originally what the building was. The whole area was the garment industry, first Jewish and then slowly but surely Asian. We’re the only non-Muslim business on our street. The neighbours come in and they’re quite friendly but I think they just think we’re nuts. They’ll tell you, they’ll see things coming off the truck like a head wearing an old man’s jacket and they’ll ask, so people buy this? And I say, yeah, sometimes. And they look at you as though you’re mad. You never dare tell them how much you sell it for. They think you’ve managed to pull off an amazing con trick. When we moved there were certain people saying, you’ll have problems about what kinds of work you show and because you’ll have people drinking on the street. We’re right next to the biggest mosque in London, after all. So I went and asked some people next door, what’s the religious calendar, what days would be a disaster to have people drinking on the street? Then you ask people, please don’t drink on the street outside. You know, in the same way there’s certain things you wouldn’t do outside of a church in Italy. It’s the same deal. Like don’t go out in your bikini. Don’t drink on the street outside on a major religious festival. It’s not very nice. It will annoy them. But the thing about what we show – they don’t come in. My neighbours downstairs have never been in and my neighbours upstairs have never been in. They come into the office and stand there and chat to you but they don’t go in, in the same way I wouldn’t go through their inventory, you know what I mean? I don’t look to see what they’ve been selling. It’s of no interest.
As soon as you do something like this, other galleries come round. People think, right … And you can suddenly spot the white people in skinny jeans wandering up and down the street holding estate agent leaflets. I’m really sorry, I think I might have fucked up the neighbourhood.
Berlin is now in the moment that London was in when I moved here. There’s a lot of people moving in from everywhere, you can still get studios, there’s a new gallery opening every weekend. But does Berlin become London? I don’t think so. It’ll become something else. It’ll become whatever Berlin is in the same way that London won’t become New York.
London is established now. It’s got roots now. I think what has happened is a mixture of the Turner Prize … well, I guess the Turner Prize, Saatchi and Tate Modern and a few famous individuals like the Damiens and the Tracys and all those kind of things. They grow in the sophistication of London. Now everyone drinks cappuccinos and knows a bit about art, whether you hate it or you love it. Tate Modern gets four million visitors a year. That’s phenomenal. Most of them are school kids dragged there and are not interested in the slightest, but it’s still four million people a year.
I think now art is in a place, not just in London but in the UK in general, where people do have an opinion: they care to hate and they care to love. No matter what your background now, you can probably name a living artist, or even two or three. You might be able to name a couple of galleries. You might know who’s won the Turner Prize. If you’re from Newcastle you might be proud of the Angel of the North or, if you’re from London, you might think that Tate Modern is a pain in the arse and has wrecked the South Bank of the river, or you might think it’s amazing and it’s brought people from all over the world here. Whatever your thoughts, art is here and it’s got roots now and it won’t blow away.
In a way it’s different to a literary boom or even a pop music boom because art needs buildings and permanent things. Once you have a flourish it tends to hang around for quite a long time. Unlike, say, music and stuff like that which may have a few venues and can close very quickly, sadly, or record labels that shut up shop, once art has found its roots in a place and once those places have been developed, they are always going to need stuff in them and they’re always going to need ways of getting people to come and visit them. Like it or not, you’ve now got an art scene in this city.
GOING OUT
DAN SIMON
Rickshaw-rider
Rickshaw-riding brought me into contact with a great deal of people, people that you would never normally meet. It gave me an insight into London which I think few people ever get. It was a very romantic time of my life. My relationship with the city was quite intimate. It was very satisfying to see people that you normally would hold a barrier up to in the street and being able to converse with them, they were just like anybody else, not just the down-and-outs but people of all calibres from all walks of life. Rickshaw-riding was an amazing medium whereby you could communicate with just about anybody on any level. I found myself speaking as candidly to celebrities as I would to people that genuinely fascinated me. Distilling from them their life stories and experiences. It built me up as a whole and those years were the most memorable of my life, I can honestly say. They were definitely my best years in London.
Soho has got an enormous amount to offer in terms of sights, sounds and smells. It tends to operate on a shift rota. In the early afternoon you’ve got the smell of frying fish that emanates from the kitchens. Further down you’ve got the faint smell of bread and coffee that comes from all the local coffee shops. Soho’s quite alive at that time, there’s a lot of people toing and froing about the streets, it’s busy, it’s always loud with tourists, Londoners, commuters. Later on into the night it changes a little. There’s a lot more beer, a lot more alcohol going up and down the streets.
You get a lot of bravado. Men who are desperately needing to be perceived as men, for some reason. It’s funny because a lot of the men that we take as rickshaw passengers, the ones who are the most full of bravado are, for some reason, the ones who are most eager to sit on their friends’ laps when we have to squeeze three of them into the back seat. They love it. In fact not only do they love it, they plead to be the ones that are doing the sitting-on-the-knees thing. It’s incredible to watch. You get three great big beefed-up guys who are trying to manifest their heterosexuality in every conceivable way and they end up contesting with each other as to who’s going to sit on each other’s laps.
My very first fare were two guys I picked up in Covent Garden. They were a couple of drunken guys wearing suits and they wanted to go to Liverpool Street Station. I equated Liverpool Street Station, for some reason, with St Paul’s and I charged them £7 each and ended up on an excruciating journey which lasted over an hour and a half because I got lost and ended up going via Angel, Islington, up Pentonville Road. The hill up to the Angel was so extraordinary. The pain I was suffering was immense and it was pissing down with rain. It was an all-over ache that started at the bottom of my feet and worked its way all the way up to the bottom of my neck. It was pouring down with rain and I was pouring with sweat and I ended up pulling the rickshaw over to the side of the street where a bus stop full of people were jeering at me. They were just going, come on mate, you can do it, get up the hill. And I looked back at the two guys and they were just slouching over each other with cigarettes and I said, guys, look, I’m going to have to leave you here, I don’t know where the hell I’m going. And they said, well man, listen, you’ve got to go back down the hill. I said, what do you mean, I’ve got to go back down the hill? I’ve just taken you up the hill. They said, no, no, you’re going the wrong way. I said, why the fuck didn’t you tell me that before? So I ended up taking them to Liverpool Street Station in the end, an hour and a half later. They paid me my miserable fucking £14 and then I went and ate like I’ve never eaten before in my life. I had two burgers, two portions of chips, two bottles of Lucozade and a chocolate bar. I ate like a p
ig. I’ve never been so hungry in my life.
It was an all-night cafe, twenty-four hours, populated by cab drivers and night owls, and I just sat there and hogged myself. The rickshaw was just a sight. It was parked, two wheels up in the air on the side of the kerb, abandoned in my wild haste for food.
I got not even a quarter of the money I was owed for that ride, but I felt that I was doing something that I was enjoying, not some bullshit that had been driving me insane the year before. It was tiring, it was exhausting, but I felt every bone in my body. I felt my muscles like I never had before and I felt alive.
After three months of rickshaw-riding I had legs like rocks. They were so big that when I tightened my muscles I could see every contour. It was quite nice actually, having these big, powerful legs. You have to develop very quickly an awareness of yourself and the vehicle that you’re riding. You get a fairly instantaneous idea of the proportions of the rickshaw and you really need that if you’re navigating through traffic. A good rickshaw-rider will be able to navigate successfully through congested traffic, you know, deftly negotiating his or her way through a pile-up without scratching the rickshaw or a car. Through tiny spaces. That’s very important. It’s part of rickshaw-riding. And you develop an eye for people. You’re always on the lookout for people, much like a vulture is, I guess. And you get an awareness of what people want.
Great big hordes of men really late night in Soho want a brothel or they want a strip club, they rarely want anything else. They are all fairly young, from the ages of, say, 22 to 32. They all dress with white shirts, or chequered shirts with running lines of blue, and they usually wear navy blue trousers and they’ve all got short spiky hairdos, they’re predominantly white and they always look lost.
Guys who want strip clubs will huddle together in a group on the corner of a street looking in every direction. Guys who want brothels will be pretty much the same, except a tad more desperate, they’ll walk up and down the street looking in each direction. It’s a feeling that you pick up. I don’t know if I get it right or not, but nine times out of ten, if I pull up to a group of guys and they fit this description, they’re going to want a strip club. Guys who want brothels tend to walk in fast small batches, usually only two of them. Then you get nightclub-goers. Nightclub-goers always dress a bit more funkily and they’re both men and women, so if you see a group, say there’s about eight of them, half girls half guys, that are dressed like they want to party, they want to party. So you ride up to them and you take them somewhere nice. And then you get people that just want to eat out, they want a restaurant, they want a late-opening bar, they want a late-opening place to eat, they want falafel and chips; if they don’t want falafel and chips they want kebab and chips, they want a place they can buy cigarettes, they want a place they can buy cocaine, they want a place they can buy you name it. Where can we buy late-night alcohol? Where can we buy cigarettes?
Where can we do this? Where can we do that? Where can we get a minicab? Where can we get a taxicab? I know all these places. As a rickshaw-rider you have to if you want to make money. So we take people that want minicabs to a minicab office, we take people who want taxicabs to a taxicab if they’re available. We know where they come in at night empty.
And there’s always a lot of people that are desperate to get something off their chest. You get people that want to confess their sexual deviances to you. You get people that want you to participate in their sexual deviances. You get all kinds of people with all kinds of fetishes. I’ve been propositioned numerous times by an enormous amount of people. People that want me to participate in group orgies: come back with us to our hotel, we’ll make it worth your while. You know, women and men. I took three gay guys to their apartment over Chelsea Bridge. They said, come up, come up, we’ll give you champagne, you can snort as much coke as you want. I said, no thank you. I saw them again – it was incredible, the same three guys one year later, the same ride to their apartment over Chelsea Bridge: come up, come up, come up, we’ll give you champagne, give you cocaine, anything you want. No thank you, gentlemen. I had a ride with a good-looking black girl, halfway round the trip she told me I was kind of cute, she ruffled my hair, said, why don’t we pull up in a nice quiet place.
I mean, god, people with foot fetishes. A friend of mine called Andrzej, he’s a good-looking chap, a big hunky Pole, right, he takes this American tourist to Waterloo for £20. All the way over to Waterloo this American chap has got this disposable camera and he’s taking photographs of Andrzej’s feet. So they get to Waterloo, the guy gets off, the guy pays Andrzej £20. The guy says to Andrzej, you know, I think you’ve got beautiful feet, I want to buy your socks. I’ll give you £100. Andrzej, he’s a workaholic, he says, no man, I’m going to need these socks. I’m going to be working through the night. And the guy says to Andrzej, give me one sock, I’ll give you £100. So Andrzej agrees. Andrzej gives the guy a sock and the guy gives Andrzej £100. The guy’s really grateful, he takes a photograph of Andrzej and he says, I’ll be back in two weeks’ time to buy your other sock. Andrzej says, right, okay. So anyway, Andrzej comes back and tells us all about it. Two weeks later he has the same trip again, picks up the American guy, takes him to Waterloo, fare is £20, the American guy pays him £20, then he buys the other sock for £100. So Andrzej made £240 off this motherfucker and we all hate Andrzej afterwards. A couple months after this incident happened, I got an email from a rickshaw-riding friend who is working in New York. He goes, ‘Dan, you’re never going to believe what happened. I took this big fat American guy for a ride and he bought my socks for $100. And then he showed me this photograph he had in his wallet of Andrzej!’
There are a lot of lonely people and a lot of them do confide in rickshaw-riders. I’ve had a lot of passengers like that myself. There was this Indian man who always used to take a ride with me. He’d pay me £5 to ride him round and he would sit in the back completely disinterested in anything else happening around him and we’d pull up, we’d stop, he’d nod and then leave. I think he just did it for company. One time it was awful. I picked the guy up on Shaftesbury Avenue. He gave me £5, looked at me with these sad, sad eyes. The guy was a mess. Obviously he didn’t take good care of himself. I get the guy into my rickshaw and he gave me £5 to drive around. So I drive around and the guy never says a thing. He’s so quiet you can forget he’s there. Unfortunately, I did! I was riding around and riding around and I got completely lost in myself and I started thinking and I went into a bit of a daydream. And I went on this massive excursion around looking for fares and just completely forgot he was in the back. I was going, hey miss, where you going? Would you like a lift? And she was going no, no, no. And I was wondering what was going on, so I decided to give up and I decided to pull in to a cafe near to Frith Street to have a coffee. So I pull up, get off my rickshaw, go into the shop, grab a chocolate bar and the guy is still sitting in the rickshaw. Just sitting there as he always sits, not interested in anything going on around him, just slumped with his shoulders slouched forward, looking ahead, looking completely and utterly miserable.
On the weekends riders tend to finish around five o’clock in the morning. In the summertime it’s beautiful. You see the sun rise over Soho as the filth is swept off the street by roaming bands of little caterpillar machines and the street sweepers. There’s the odd pool of vomit here and there, the odd debauched-looking prostitute, the odd drug dealer. Nice and quiet, very few people about. You return to the base via the bridge if your base is in South London and it’s very nice. I’ve always enjoyed riding over Waterloo Bridge, especially at night, because looking out across the Thames from Waterloo Bridge is like looking at a gemstone that’s been sawn in half and displayed. All the lights sparkle like gems. It’s like seeing London cut open and exhibiting its gems, riding across that bridge. You feel exhausted, but satisfied. Relieved to be going home. Happy that you’ve endured the night and looking forward to some bagel on Brick Lane, some beer at the base. Watching the sun rise
over the Millennium Bridge if it hasn’t already risen. And then off by cycle to Brick Lane for the Sunday morning coffee and bagel and maybe a kip in the local park.
DANIEL SERRANO
Cruiser
Basically, the thing with being gay in London is everyone’s had sex with everyone. They say it’s a city of like eleven million, but it’s a tiny village. The whole point of me having no-strings-attached sex was that I could possibly never meet any of these people ever again, and to an extent that really worked. The majority of people I haven’t seen ever again.
I think what perhaps started as a voyage of sexual discovery became a habit and then I kind of lost a sense of what one normally does with one’s time. If I was bored and waiting for a train I’d perhaps go looking for sex. I’d be looking for sex seven days a week and often have sex with four men a night. I’ve been late for social engagements, I’ve kept friends waiting cold outside cinemas, all because I’ve been in some bush with someone. Lots of people, actually.
You have no standards when you cruise. If you were to go into bed with someone, they have to be attractive to a degree, they have to smell good and be of a certain age. All of those things go out the window in terms of cruising.
I’d finish work, I would walk down to a well-known public toilet, and I would loiter. The place would be humming, buzzy with other men who were there for exactly the same thing. At some points it would be just like a brothel. It’s not very pleasant if you think about it. I would stand next to someone and would eventually make some eye contact and then take it to an alleyway which was close by. And then I’d do the same thing again.
