Barely London (part one)
Exodus and erasure; the rise of 'Upper London'; waking up the West End; the aftermath of the zeitgeist; the old Foyles obstacle course; stares down to nowhere; a gelding and an execution...
A New Blank Page
Wandering the central byways and arterial roads of the anodyne dystopia that is London ‘the brand’ is a deflating experience for someone like myself, who remembers vividly how much individual personality infused the inner city during the early 1990s. In the era immediately predating the mass uptake of mobile phones and the Internet, it felt like the streets were still defined by the people who lived and worked there, and not by the airbrushed concept art of corporate entities who greased or otherwise brute-forced their way in, and then promptly erased any crumb of social-historical significance that was either problematic, or didn’t quite gel with the curated vision they had in mind. The Undercroft, arguably the spiritual home of skateboarding in the UK, survived, but it was one hell of a fight. More recently, Smithfield Meat Market and Billingsgate Fish Market, both of which can trace their lineage to medieval times, have been unceremoniously punted several miles downriver to a new site at Dagenham. With the departure of Smithfield, which is currently situated a cobblestone’s throw from St Paul’s Cathedral, goes the nocturnal ecosystem that flourished around the traders. I have fond memories of it. When I was sleeping rough in the Capital, I used to lay my head down among the shards of weathered stone, at the foot of the bell tower of St Sepulchre Without Newgate, which is just up the road.
Stand back from the City at some high vantage point. I recommend the brick viewing platform at Addington Hill, on the fringes of South London, from where you can absorb the full panorama of the Capital clinging to looping meanders of the river along a great section of the Thames Valley. Look beyond the Eiffel tower-esque scaffolds of the television transmission stations, that appear to be converging on territory currently held and defended by the London Shard. Allow your gaze to penetrate deeper, over and above those outlying glimpses of redbrick suburbs, huddled down among the trees. A thicketing of the gaps in the skyline is currently underway; the colonisation of upper London; ‘luxury’ high-rises whose ubiquitous blank architecture is attractive only to property developers hoping to optimise their profits. At street level, you could be anywhere in the United Kingdom, staring up into the close-packed ranks of Juliet balconies that look more like rows of jail cells, where no-one will ever be serenaded. It’s an M&Ms World world. Like the candy, it has an artificial taste in the mouth and leaves you feeling slightly sick.
On Saturdays, the West End doesn’t really raise its head from the pillow before eleven. I walked the length of Charing Cross Road, through thin morning crowds, with a mind full of ghosts; snatches of conversations that I overheard and turned into memories; glimpses of faces I saw only for a second and then never again; drifting down from an upper window, some very loud sex between a couple who, if they still walk among us, are a good two-decades older.
At the Oxford Street end of Charing Cross Road, there used to be several large book chains - a branch of Waterstones and, nearly opposite, a BOOKS etc that was later transformed into a Borders, where I once chanced upon the late Elizabeth Wurtzel - one of those authors who was unfortunate to catch the zeitgeist with her memoir Prozac Nation and then spent the remainder of her literary career languishing in the doldrums. She died from breast cancer at the age of 52. It was an odd time for a book signing - around midday. Wurtzel was sitting alone at a table - either in preparation for a promotional event, or in the aftermath of one. The young woman talking to her was debating out loud (mostly to herself) whether she liked her most recent book.
Opposite the junction with Old Compton Street, there was a labyrinthine, ground-floor-only incarnation of Blackwells, incorporating a large, slightly raised section that catered to the needs of medical students. Further along, you would find the smaller independent second-hand and antiquarian bookshops, and the Silver Moon Women’s Bookshop. On a whim, I put my head around the door one morning and spoke to one of the founders - Jane Cholmeley.
It all went away so quickly, like the last grains of sand draining through the neck of an hourglass. I have slowly awakened to the lie that lasting change unfolds at a gradual pace. It can happen fast; practically overnight. The Borders chain expanded rapidly in the UK. For a while they had large branches all over the place. It didn’t seem sustainable and it wasn’t. In the blink of an eye they were gone. In a way their stores, and their uniform inventories, were harbingers of the wave of corporate blandness that was poised to dilute the essence of the City. Blackwells faded away before the eye. I have a memory, that is perhaps false, of it closing while work was done on the building and then not coming back. Waterstones regrouped at a very large, flagship premises, a half mile away on Piccadilly. I quite like it, though the staff are often aloof, to the point of being rude. Foyles - the first and the last of the giants along that stretch - hopped one door down from their original location. I detest the soulless and impractical layout of their new premises, with its clenched sphincter of a mezzanine balcony that forces you to squeeze past people browsing the shelves. I remember Foyles back when they still organised their paperback fiction by publisher and you could never find anything. Heaven help you if you wanted to purchase a book from one of the specialty departments. You had to take the volume to a counter within the department, where you would be issued with a handwritten ticket that you would then take to the cash registers elsewhere in the store. This was still happening during the late 1980s and maybe even the early 1990s. To their credit, they did provide a haven within the store for Silver Moon after rising rents and the collapse of the Net Book Agreement forced Cholmeley, et al, out of their original premises. Although Silver Moon only lasted a few more years, I believe Foyles still provides sanctuary for another London institution - Ray’s Jazz Shop - which suffered a similar fate to Silver Moon. I think the last album I bought there was Chris Potter’s conceptual work of classical jazz - Imaginary Cities.
A few secondhand booksellers are still clinging to the lower reaches, along the approach to the junction with Shaftsbury Avenue. However, the days when the area was a bibliophile’s paradise are gone, I am sad to say.
Branching off from Charing Cross Road, Manette Street (originally Rose Street. A hotbed of anarchism, it was re-named after a character from the Charles Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities) narrows to a rectangular archway that passes under the straddling upper floors of a pub called The Pillars of Hercules. About halfway along, a short dead-end tributary called Orange Yard used to terminate at the entrance to the Borderline Club - a subterranean music venue where R.E.M. once played a secret gig as ‘Bingo Handjob’, and where I often saw The Walkabouts, and Low, on what I believe was their first visit to the UK, and Johnette Napolitano, both with and without Concrete Blonde. I stood six feet in front of her. Her voice, when she laid restraint to one side, was like a wind tunnel. On the stairwell leading down to the basement of the Borderline, the name of every band who had ever played at the venue was written neatly on the walls. It broke my heart when I cast an eye down Orange Yard, where the uninspiring flank of a modern office building clings to the Crossrail expansion of Tottenham Court Road Underground Station, and where there exists not a single trace of what formerly occupied and enriched that unlikely space. Just down the road on the corner, the Astoria, where I saw Nirvana play, is also gone.
The vibrant nightlife that once overflowed the boundaries of Soho has dimmed in recent decades. Prior to the area’s ongoing Disneyfication, it used to be edgy; interesting and illicit; awash with genuinely eccentric and dangerous characters, sex shows, strip joints and clip joints; a febrile nexus of seedy pornographic filth. A few ‘adult shops’ survive as a nod to the past. I chanced upon a sanitised window display of bondage gear, so neutered that it seemed to have barely any association with sex. That’s London in 2025; a gelded shadow of its former self. But I am a middle-aged man, whose minute hand is doing double-time laps around the clock face. I am, at no time, more aware of my mortality than when I revisit old haunts to find the foundations upon which I built my biography have been sold from under me; replaced by something inferior, with no past and a planned obsolescence.
Were I still young, and experiencing the city for the first time, I might perceive value in what I presently find so anaemic. The London I knew was perhaps a little too red and ruddy around the face; wearing a hint of a leer in its expression. It was cheap and unpredictable and alive with possibilities. Dull men with dead eyes, that provide a narrow and uninspiring window onto the dead ends of their imaginations, took hold of the capital by the hair, pulled its head back and slowly cut its throat. They drained the rich blood and sold it to enemies of the city without any hint of shame.