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 just had my school books in my bag, that’s all it was. Just college books, my refill pad, pens and stuff like that. To get pulled out and searched like that, it’s embarrassing. Everyone else is just going past, looking at you thinking, oh my god, what’s he done? It made me feel like everybody is going to look at me like that now. And they didn’t really handle it well, they did it out in the open.

  We’re in a youth centre in Hounslow. Tall, and hunched over his chair, he pulls on the collar of his T-shirt, which is emblazoned with a couple of stylized skulls.

  *

  I’ve always felt like I belong here. I was born in London and this is where I’ve been raised and this is my home town as much as it is anyone else’s home town, you know. I mean like it’s really weird because in Birmingham, when I go there to visit my cousins, if you tell them you’re from London they’re like, oh my god, he’s from London! Yo! He’s from London! To them, someone from London is a big thing. He’s from London, he’s all busy and stuff, man. Like, whoa, he’s from London. For them to know someone from London it’s like a big thing. Yeah, I know someone from London. They can tell it to their friends.

  It’s not like when people say that, I’m from some place and you’re like, hold on, where’s that? You know, when you say, I’m from London people know where it is, people know how it is, people know how busy it is, what the lifestyle’s like and it’s just acknowledged by everyone. It’s amazing how just telling someone where you’re from can spark a conversation and they just want to get to know more.

  The funny thing about that day I got stopped and searched is that I got stopped and searched again on the way back home. Yeah, I got searched for terrorism on the way to college and then on the way back too. Years before, someone got stabbed in my college. So for extra security reasons they had a metal detector to go through before you touched your Oyster card in the Tube station. Well that day when I was going home, I had left my USB in my pocket. And the actual USB part is metal and the cover is metal as well, so when I went through, it beeped.

  They took me aside, searched my bag, and asked me questions, like have you been searched before? I said, yeah – this morning. They just looked at me: are you being serious? So I showed them my receipt. They were like, twice in one day. You’re a lucky one, aren’t you? I’m like, yeah, you could say that. And then they let me go.

  DAVID OBIRI, JEREMY RANGA AND KESHAV GUPTA

  Barristers

  They’ve gathered after work around a dinner table in front of a Thai green curry. Top buttons are undone. They’re young; no one is dashing home to a family.

  OBIRI: I got my first wig at Ede & Ravenscroft, the only place to go.

  RANGA: Well, there’s two. But you only get one wig, is the point.

  GUPTA: I suppose it’s the place, isn’t it.

  OBIRI: Yes. It’s in Chancery Lane. You go and write down your name in a book.

  RANGA: I’ve never understood that, because you can get your wig elsewhere. It’s only there they’ve got the book and everything.

  OBIRI: But the most eminent judges, Law Lords, barristers, they’ll be in there. It’s Who’s Who in there.

  RANGA: There used to be a tradition of keeping your wig immaculate to be handed down generation on generation. Juniors come in now and the idea is if you’re going to be in court, stamp on your wig, make it break a little bit, because you want to look like you’re not a newbie. You want to look like you’ve been around the block.

  OBIRI: I didn’t do that. It was way too bloody expensive to desecrate it.

  RANGA: You know what you call a new barrister? A white wig. Because it’s pristine and so is the barrister.

  OBIRI: It’s what Rumpole calls them.

  GUPTA: There’s also the traditional wig tins, aren’t there? That was something that was quite coveted. One of the greatest things, I think, is to have your name on the board outside Chambers, so when you get taken on as a tenant finally your name appears. And then you’ve got the whole hierarchy, Silks at the top and it’s all by call and then right at the top, if you get Silk early, you get bumped up to the QCs at the top. And apart from that, having your name on a wig tin was quite a cool thing.

  OBIRI: Well, I like it.

  GUPTA: Have you got a wig tin? It’s like £150 for a piece of tin. I think the cool thing to do is to have like a biscuit tin.

  OBIRI: Some people are really naff, they just keep the cardboard box.

  GUPTA: I don’t put mine in a tin at all, I just leave it out, you know, because it gets a little bit misshapen. I know where I am with that.

  RANGA: There’s a story about a senior member of the Bar, a Silk, who went off one day and his wife just thought she’d surprise him and had his wig cleaned and refurbished. He said, it took me twenty years to get my wig looking like that!

  GUPTA: There’s a guy in Chambers who is what they call the Old Bar. He’s about thirty years called, or I think forty years called, anyway his wig is just in bits, it’s yellow, it’s misshapen, and the back of the wig, the thing they call the rat’s tail, one side of it’s completely severed, so it hangs down there. He didn’t take Silk, so his gown is in tatters. There’s rips through it and it’s in a total and utter state. I was against him once and he just looked amazing. I thought, shit. I saw him wearing this and I put on my new gown, my new wig and I just thought …

  OBIRI: I smell his newness.

  GUPTA: I just look like I don’t know what I’m doing and the judge is never going to listen to me.

  RANGA: That is one thing I’ll say about the wig, you put it on and you feel like an advocate. You have a bit more confidence in your submissions.

  GUPTA: Yes. You put on a wig and gown and suddenly you get into the character of an orator.

  RANGA: This is the other thing: nowadays more and more you get these sort of administrative hearings at county courts and they’ll say, right, we’re going to do it by telephone. So you get BT to set up a three-way thing and you’ve got your opponent from another Chambers, the judge and you, and you’re there at your desk and you might be in your civvies sitting there and you’ve just come in, done a little bit of prep and all of a sudden you’re speaking to a judge and there’s this level of formality, and it doesn’t feel right.

  GUPTA: I remember somebody when I was doing a mini pupillage, like a sort of work experience, I remember this white guy saying there’s an advantage if you ever come to the Bar, and I was like, why’s that? He said, you’ll look really cool in a wig. I still remember that. I hadn’t gone to university yet. I’d just finished my A levels and this guy, a young criminal barrister, said to the clerk, don’t black and Asian guys look so cool in their wigs? Yeah, they do. I’ve always thought about that.

  OBIRI: It’s like that bit in Men in Black when Will Smith puts on someone’s stuff and just turns and goes, the difference between me and you is I make this look good.

  OBIRI: When I first came to the Bar people would split London up into the different juries you’d get. So for instance if someone was running a racially aggravated offence prosecution, and the jury acquitted and that happened to be an East London jury, they’d say: yeah, oh yeah, an East London jury, they’re never going to convict somebody of a racially aggravated Public Order Act offence. Or about a Knightsbridge jury, they’d say: black kid – robbery – yeah, guilty. I just remember thinking, whoa, I’d never thought of London that way. I overheard in Chambers someone saying, racially aggravated Public Order Act offence acquitted within, you know, half an hour, and it was like yeah: East London jury.

  GUPTA: I went to a conference today and it came up on two or three occasions, amongst the speakers, a judge who sits at Woolwich Crown Court was criticized in the Court of Appeal for his case-management style, which boiled down to this: he would not allow the prosecution to bring cases where he felt a jury would never convict. There were a string of cases that my colleague in Chambers actually had to appeal, all racially aggravated Public Order Act offences and the judge had sa
id, I’m not going to allow you to prosecute these because I know for a fact that a Woolwich jury will never convict on a racially aggravated offence.

  OBIRI: So how would you divide London up? I mean, you know London courts better than I do.

  GUPTA: Snaresbrook’s good for handling stolen goods and a little bit of violence, they’ll let you off. But kiddie fiddling, you’re dead, all right? And if you go to Inner London, which is round Elephant and Castle, they don’t mind a bit of drugs, a bit of violence, bit of gang-related stuff, kidnapping, you’ll probably be okay. But then if you go to Blackfriars and their jury is drawn from Kensington and Chelsea, robberies they’re probably not that cool with but they’ll probably let off a sex offender on a rape. Date rape, they’ll probably let you off, okay? Then you’ve got Southwark, that’s frauds. Southwark, they usually draw people from the City. So you’ve got a run on a fraud at Southwark. But you’re probably not going to get away with all the standard stuff like violence and drugs. But sex, again, date rape, you might get off. And then you go further south, you’ve got Croydon – drugs, you’re never going to get off because they’re right on the Gatwick corridor and they hate the concept that people are bringing drugs into the country up their streets effectively. It’s the same as Isleworth, which is West London – drugs, you’re never going to get off, but a bit of theft, dishonesty offences, mortgage fraud? You’re probably going to be okay. But the one thing you won’t get off on at any of those is false IDs and immigration offences, because it’s right on their doorstep and they all work at Heathrow and Gatwick. Harrow, ugh, Harrow jury, you’ll get off on sex, you’ll get off on drugs, you’ll get off on most things actually.

  RANGA: Harrow juries are good juries. For a defence.

  OBIRI: Generally, generally.

  GUPTA: Because they’re an understanding demographic.

  OBIRI: Why?

  RANGA: I don’t know why. Maybe they’re more understanding, but to get an acquittal you need someone who’s strong and liberal on a jury, and I can’t say that Harrow necessarily represents strong and liberal to me. It’s a very heavily Asian demographic.

  OBIRI: If I’m defending a black person or an Asian person I’m heartened by black or Asian faces on the jury.

  RANGA: Yeah, me too.

  OBIRI: Massively so. In fact I’ve almost got to the stage where I’ll look as the jury come in and I go, I’m defending a black man, there are two young black men on the jury … yes.

  RANGA: Yeah. I’d agree with that as well.

  OBIRI: They’re probably young Tories or something. Fresh from the Tory Party Conference.

  RANGA: But the reality is, you know, it really depends on the facts of the case and the literacy of the jury. Sometimes there are cases that are very difficult to follow, maybe lost on a not very bright jury because they get bored and they’ll just listen to what the judge tells them to do and convict or acquit accordingly. But sometimes the facts just don’t add up to the offence.

  OBIRI: And you never know. You never know.

  RANGA: And also that demographic, going back to what David was saying, are going to be less likely to wholeheartedly believe what a policeman’s saying or automatically accept the validity of a testimony.

  OBIRI: E very juror’s got prejudices, you know, whatever it is. I’ve sat on a jury, I’ve got my Guardian/Observer-reading, liberal, lefty prejudices. It’s a prejudice, though. That’s what I’ve brought to the table and there’s a guy with the opposite, you know. We all have our prejudices. And juries have that, but I think you can find areas where there’s going to be more of a preponderance of a certain kind of prejudice, so that’s why I was saying in East London if you’re prosecuting a guy for a racially aggravated Public Order Act offence where he’s shouting, you fucking … or whatever, they’re going to be less likely to convict a guy for that because they’ll go, whoa.

  GUPTA: I do that every Saturday night.

  OBIRI: It’s East London. They’re white, they’re working class or lower middle class or whatever …

  RANGA: They probably see it all the time.

  OBIRI: They know these people. They’re going out with these people.

  RANGA: They go and watch the footie with them.

  OBIRI: They have something or they’ve come from this origin and it reflects the tensions in parts of East London. They are the disenfranchised white middle class or whatever, so they’re thinking, we’re not going to convict a guy for shouting racist abuse in public. Good lord. What’s the world come to when we’re criminalizing that? But you go to another jury in London where there’s a make-up of ethnic minorities and whatever, and they’re going to go, good lord, we can’t have this. We can’t have this in London.

  RANGA: The worst part is when the jury’s gone out to deliberate, you’re waiting for them to come back, and you hear a tannoy saying: come to court whatever. You don’t know whether the jury are back or whether the jury are asking a question or some other thing. So you go back and then you hear from the Clerk that there’s a verdict. They won’t tell you what the verdict is, just that there’s a verdict. And you sit there and you wait and you feel horrible. You feel tense and your heart’s racing and you have no idea and you think, like you’re getting exam results, it’s going to be the worst, it’s going to be the worst, it’s going to be the worst … And then you know. You know because they have to gather together in a room just before they come into court, and when the door opens that lets them into the court. Some will be chatting and you can hear the murmuring of their banter and the bubble of their chat. If you hear that, you know they’re going to acquit. Juries that convict are really quiet, absolutely silent. They file in. Somebody said to me years ago, when they take their seats, if the jury looks over into the dock at the defendant, they’re not going to convict him. They’re going to acquit him, because you will never be able to look in the eye someone you’re about to convict when you’re on a jury. You will not want to. But then I realize before then by whether they’re talking or not and if you hear silence you know. I was in court on Friday and the jury came back after four days of deliberations and I sat there. I was prosecuting but looking after a jury so I wasn’t that bound up in the case, but having waited for four days.

  OBIRI: What was the charge?

  RANGA: Bizarrely, it was armed robbery. I got a bit caught up after waiting four or five days sort of wanting a conviction because that’s my job and then …

  OBIRI: Silence.

  RANGA … sure as anything. The jury assembled and then the Clerk opens the doors to lead them in – absolute silence. I knew from that point. They file in and as they are sitting down I look over and none of them are looking at the defendant. Yeah, double confirmation of guilt.

  OBIRI: It’s got to the stage now where I’m so alive to the fact that I’m nervous at that moment where they call the jury, that I don’t look to see whether the jury are looking at my client, I just sit there. I don’t even look. I just look down.

  RANGA: I look at the judge.

  OBIRI: I just look at the desk. If I look at the jury and see them not looking at my client I’ll know. I just sit there and I look down and I hear the foreman go: ‘Members of the Jury, have you reached a verdict upon which you are all agreed?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Members of the Jury, what is that verdict?’ ‘Count 1 …’ and you just kind of go and look at them. But the worst thing is now this person, years ago, told me this about the murmuring. I wouldn’t have known about it if somebody hadn’t told me. It sucks. It’s true. It’s so true. It’s so true.

  RANGA: You need a wig with some kind of earpiece that you can flick down. Yeah, I can imagine a barrister finally losing it and as the jury are filing in he’s going, ahh, I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!

  CHARLES HENTY

  Under-Sheriff and Secondary of London

  We’ve had a prison on this site since about 1018 – if not before, because we’ve got a Roman wall downstairs. We’ve been here a while. Generally speaking we are
dealing with Class 1 crimes, that’s homicide and terrorism. That’s our staple diet, if you like. Last year we had a record. We had seven High Court judges sitting here. So our resident judges had to go out on circuit. That shows the level of the cases that we’re dealing with and that was pretty fierce. We don’t tend to deal with anything minor here. You don’t expect to come to the Old Bailey to be done for shoplifting.

  He is an ex-military man, the youngest major ever he tells me, and he served in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and in the first Iraq War. He was married two and a half days before being sent to Iraq. His office in the Old Bailey is obsessively tidy and he sits in a chair close to the curtains covering a window looking out onto the courtyard. When he speaks about the armed security at the Old Bailey he mentions the armed guards stationed outside that window and seems vaguely worried when he pulls the curtains back and they’re not there. We walk into a security room where a scrolling screen updates what’s happening in each court. A white board lists the day’s cases, with a small sword icon employed to denote where the senior judge will be. The white board lists shorthand for the crimes – murder, murder, accounting, terrorism, murder – as well as the list of names attached. Back in the office, he pulls back the curtains again and there are security officers outside – bald and bullish and ready.

  My job is to make sure that this place runs smoothly. That everybody works together. Brand Old Bailey, as we call it. Because Joe Public comes in and sees a security officer at the front door, doesn’t differentiate between him and anybody else, whether he works for me or the court service, it’s Old Bailey. I have the usual electricians, boiler room, cleaners, security. I’ve got sixty-four security officers. Security is a very important point, obviously, at the Bailey because we have some pretty unpleasant people coming in. We’ve had the roads closed, the helicopter’s up every day. We’ve had the cells searched on a daily basis, well overnight, because at the moment we have the highest-risk defendant in the country. I’m not going to tell you who it is, but the risk on him is massive. We have about 2,500 people coming through every day and yet it’s not open to the public. So there’s an awful lot of traffic here. I play the sort of guiding managing director’s role, if you like. We’ve got to keep the courts in action. We don’t want to lose time so we start early in the morning. We start at about six every morning and we’re checking to make sure that each court is serviceable because you don’t want a flickering light. We have a police team here, our City of London police, which is great and very reassuring. That said though, my team were the first in the country to be given a High Court Security Officer’s status. In fact, today and tomorrow they’ll be working on their armlocks and all the restraint positions. They have to have those skills because some people don’t like coming here.