London's Overthrow Read online

  ‘I do think there is something very particular about here.’ Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of Kids Company, one of the best-known figures in British child welfare. She leans her head on her hand, arranges her trademark, flowing, vivid clothes. ‘I have a hunch. Which is that the British are very ashamed of vulnerability. So what happens is whereas another culture might look back on their childhood and say “God, I was so cute, I thought clouds were cotton wool”, the British will look back and say “God, I was so stupid, I thought clouds were cotton wool”.’

  Catastrophe generates the beasts it needs. In London, in the UK, the term ‘feral youth’ is absolutely routine. Media and politicians deploy it without much controversy. As if such a spiteful, shocking, bestialising phrase does not disgrace every mouth from which it spills. Its utterance is not a diagnosis, but a symptom.

  28 NOVEMBER. OF London’s dead landscapes, there are few like the Heygate Estate, ruin on a Martin scale. A dizzying sprawl of concrete in Southwark, a raised town, great corridored blocks, walkways over communal gardens. Slabs of buildingness. It’s all but empty. It’s to be demolished. Even were it not stuffed with asbestos, that would take a long time.

  Laura Oldfield Ford leads the way. Don’t call her a psychogeographer. Many do, and she abjures it. The term’s travelled a long way from its origins as a radical French research program to reconfigure urban space. It cross-fertilised with the tradition of London visionary writing, tangled up with urban invocation. Now it’s a local cliché. A lazy label for hip decay tourism.

  Ford, not twee, frequents wreckage. An excoriating critic of neoliberalism and its banalisation of space, she reconfigures her long London walks into raging, celebrated post-punk art. ‘I wanted to take the term psychogeography but I wanted it to be about the radicalism of it, not this kind of ... leylines and all that,’ she withers. Past the graves of shops, the long, long-shuttered front of what was once The Institute of Traditional Karate-Do and Performing Arts. You could follow her with your eyes closed, so loud are her steps.

  Through lagoons of drifting late autumn leaves in the shadow of the Heygate enormities. In a very few places is proof of life. A nicknack and net curtains in a window, a car below. Someone’s maintaining a small vegetable garden. There’s graffiti, but not so much as you might think.

  In a clearing between benches and the remains of a playground, young men conclave. It’s startling to see anyone after so long alone. It’s an affront not to have the whole world to ourselves. But then they set off. In ragged line. They accelerate, vaulting, along walls, bouncing one by one from brick detail to concrete outcrop, up onto low roofs, over and under flaking painted barriers, watched by pigeons.

  They’re training in parkour, another French import. Psychogeography of the limbs, filtered through Kung-Fu movies. No number of ads, music videos, station idents featuring roof-bounding like this can make it boring, can alter the fact that watching the parkouristes lurch in ways architects never intended along the buildings’ innards is quite beautiful. There’s salvage. A tough ruin ballet.

  IT’S A WONDER it was so easy to get inside. Buildings of London are jagged for protection, their defences as various as any animal adaptations. Archaeologies of wire. It’s the relict ancestor of razorwire that proliferates, brambles made of rust, on backstreet lock-ups. Walltops from Greenwich to Wembley, Ealing to Walthamstow are dorsal ridges of shards in old cement – bottleglass, crockery, bust-up mirror. Seven years misfortunes weaponised against intrusion. They sprout like werewolf hair. As if, in defence of property, the city sloughs off brick and is a beast beneath. A rare apocalypse, among London’s many.

  In South Kensington, the bricks of the Natural History Museum are already animaled, in profusion. Big-headed fish coil around Thames-side lamp-posts. In Hackney are benches with iron camel side-slats. Inaccurate dinosaurs guard one end of Crystal Palace park, sphinxes the other. The lions of Trafalgar Square are sedate, with whole feet. They’re in denial.

  The Horniman Museum, Forest Hill. Amid its anthropological la-las, its live fish, its art, is a chamber of questionable taxidermy in eccentric taxonomy. Dingy things. Half-bat skeletons flying out of their own skins. A cabinet of dog heads, a starburst of skulls and morose faces. In the centre, point zero of the canine explosion, is a tatty wolf. Its expression has no name. It stares out, its face as horrified as Martin’s lion, as angry as the riot dogs of Greece.

  IT USED TO be startling to see a fox in London – impossible not to feel the city had slipped into a fable. Now you spot them on any late-night jog. They make their eerie noise and stink up London with musk. In 2011, one of these agents of animal chaos infiltrated the Shard – 32 London Bridge, the city’s unfinished tallest building – and climbed a thousand feet above the streets to live on builder’s scraps.

  At dusk and dawn, green bolts shoot low as flocks of parakeets – ‘feral’ here no insult – set about bird business. Walking at dawn in the mud of Wormwood Scrubs common, by the prison of the same name, we approach a screaming copse. Incredible flocks of these nonnatives preen and screechingly bicker, overlooking the glow of waking London, the shafts of Hammersmith Hospital.

  David Lindo is the Urban Birder, a writer and broadcaster, well-known in the British bird world. To him, these parakeets are bullies, worse than a distraction. He eyes them with dislike.

  ‘See these are black-headed gulls,’ he says, looking in another direction. ‘Actually that one’s a common gull. The common gull,’ he says, ‘is not common at all.’

  A young lesser black-backed gull. A female blackbird. A magpie. Lindo reminisces about the waxwings brought in by last year’s snow. But he is indulgent of the non-specialist’s fascination with the unlikely parakeets. We wait. They fly in waves, low, hook-billed, hungry into the dawn, and he leads the way into the unbirded trees.

  Guano devastation. Limey spatters ruin the winter vegetation like the aftermath of some epochal paintball war.

  ‘They nest in holes,’ Lindo says. ‘There’s anecdotal evidence that they oust our native hole-nesters, like starlings, stock doves and nuthatches. And’ – he pauses grimly – ‘there’s a shortage of holes in Britain as it is.’

  FOR ALL OF US. Everyone knows there’s a catastrophe, that few can afford to live in their own city. It was not always so.

  ‘The big difference from the American system is that in Britain what we call council housing is publicly owned and provides general-need housing.’ Eileen Short is chair of Defend Council Housing. ‘It’s not welfare housing, it’s housing as a right, and this was the model that was used to clear the slums and provide the housing in the crisis years after the First and the Second World Wars, so that across London ... good quality spacious housing of its day was built, which now means that lower-paid and average-paid workers and the elderly and parents and so on can live in some of the most expensive areas of London.’ All those streets with both many-coloured Christmas lights and white. ‘In Britain even thirty years ago, 30 per cent of the population lived in council housing. And it has a proud and treasured part to play in life for ordinary people.’

  But that stock has been depleted for years. Houses taken from the pool were left unreplaced, at rates accelerating fast under Thatcher’s right-to-buy schemes from the 1980s. New Labour did nothing to reverse this. The shortage is severe. Rents are rocketing, house prices, stagnating gently or not, are utterly prohibitive. Everyone knows this. Now the government is capping housing benefits, and the Chartered Institute of Housing warns that 800,000 households across the country are likely to be priced out of their own communities as a result. Rough sleeping is up.

  The trends are obvious, the results predictable. ‘What we think is likely to happen,’ says Bharat Mehta, Chief Executive of Trust for London, whose job is to investigate London poverty, ‘is that there’ll be a movement of people from inner to outer London’.

  There is a new turn. This is not neglect. Westminster Council, one of London’s richest, moots a ‘Civil Contract’.
An obligation to the unemployed in its public housing to perform unpaid community work – to call it ‘voluntary’ in this context would be Orwellian. ‘It is a legitimate question,’ says Councillor Colin Barrow at the London Policy Conference, ‘who will be given the privilege of being able to move into Westminster because they would like to live there at the expense of the taxpayer who has to live in Hornchurch’ – a considerably less chichi northeastern suburb. No longer a right, public housing is to be a privilege, policed by gatekeepers.

  In Paris, cheap housing is pushed out of sight of the boulevards, to the banlieues, the impoverished, underserved, tense suburbs. With its history of public housing, London has always been far more of a medley, incomes jostling together. Now the poor are to be pushed centrifugally, faster and faster. The banlieuefication of London is underway.

  ‘WILLESDEN SALVAGE’, A sign says. That sounds hopeful. Then: ‘We have moved’. November, fog comes down, thick as the fumes above London’s Overthrow. You realise how little you know the cityscape you love: as the mist evanesces, you don’t know what will emerge, if those towers you can suddenly see were there before, or if London grows by congealing smoke.

  There is building, just endlessly not of public housing. The city’s showcase architecture is elemental. The 30 St Mary Axe building – the Gherkin – less than a decade old, is established in the skyline. The spine of the Shard soars above London accumulating glass as if it’s in solution, growing crystals. Number 20 Fenchurch Street – the Walkie Talkie – rises by now above-ground. It’s too early to be sure how such leviathan construction will submit to the city.

  Some will be ugly. That might not be the worst sin: that London can metabolise. Centre Point, stubby tower at the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, is ugly, and, if grudgingly, rather loved. But London’s growing fake public space abjures the backstreet-and-alleyway gestalt of the city. It and its planners have little room for any urban contingency where railway bridges cut low over streets, on their own business, at angles that make no sense from below, forming strange obliques and acutes with the houses they meet.

  The question is whether these new glass boxes of large size can, over time, submit, surrender, become part of the city. This is something that Canary Wharf, the Docklands financial district begun in the late ’80s, every day a thuggish and hideous middle finger flipped glass-and-steel at the poor of the East End, every night a Moloch’s urinal dripping sallow light down on the Isle of Dogs, has never done and will never do.

  FIND A HOLE, force your parakeet way in. In the City, moments from Bunhill Fields, the dissenters’ graveyard where Blake and Bunyan lie, near posh ziggurats of the Barbican estate, is Sun Street. There an empty bank, the UBS building, has been taken over by occupier allies of the St Paul’s tent city. They declare it the Bank of Ideas.

  ‘A Public Repossession’. The doorkeepers, serious young counterculturalists, vigorously enforce a no-alcohol policy. You’re there for a cabaret, slam poetry in what was once an open-plan workspace.

  The officeness of the reconfigured rooms is astonishing. Now they contain sleeping bags, placards, chatty gatherings. Sleeping People! a sign warns on one door. A graffitied figure pokes his head through the false ceiling, passes written comment. Downstairs, children play around their parents as the General Assembly discusses the website. Firefighters politely discuss safety with the new locals.

  You ascend an unlit stairwell, very slowly, waiting for the shout, but no one tells you you’re not allowed. It’s startlingly exhilarating. You’re beginning to get it. This is why the psychic economy of squatting, its rejigging of the mind, can end up as important to many squatters as the prosaic financial economy.

  Miles south. New Cross. Past a zone of cheap shops and blistered signs, railways and alleyways, a boarded-up backstreet terraced house. You wouldn’t think anyone would answer a knock on this.

  But inside, Saul’s house is warm and lit, it’s clean, if a little rough at the edges, there’s food in the fridge, the toilet flushes. It vibes like nothing so much as a student flat. Housemates drift in and out. Ali, a gently-spoken Palestinian refugee, stops for tea and chats about his two years in the notorious Harmandsworth detention centre. What is his status now? ‘I have no status.’

  Saul’s hows and whys of squatting. He nods intently and runs through it. He’s done it for years.

  Find your place – boards on windows and doors a tell – safely gain entry, sort out wires, do the plumbing, smooth relations with locals and landlords.

  Squat well. ‘It’s annoying when people squat badly and it ... creates a bad reputation for everyone.’

  The why? Property costs at first, of course, but it goes beyond that now. ‘Squatting can be seen as just dropping out of mainstream society; avoiding rent, bills, a career, mortgages, responsiblity ... but it can also be understood in its positive aspect.’ A culture, a collective. ‘As providing or creating space where other types of relationships are possible ... based on trust, sharing, freedom’.

  ‘Sometimes’, Saul adds, and he manages to make it seem not forlorn, but good humoured, ‘it even happens.’

  LONDON’S ACCRETED FROM immigrant generations – Jewish, Caribbean, Bengali, Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, Irish, Polish, Roma, and endlessly on. It is saturated with decades of effort, the grind of antiracist activists remembered in the city’s matter: the Claudia Jones Organisation, the CLR James Library. In the built world – the Brick Lane Mosque, previously a synagogue, before that a church – in clothes and music, in London’s rapid slang, in the withering of hate-filled chants on football terraces, in attitudes transformed from three, two decades ago, in all the mixed friendships and love affairs, down to its deeps and to Londoners’ joy and fortune, London is the most and most successfully multicultural city in Europe.

  Diasporas have sustained us. It’s a terrible cliché, multiculturalism through food, but there’s a reason it’s what we reach for. Smart restaurants like St John have rehabilitated English fodder, glorying in pork, blackberries, eulogising offal. Fine. If you’re of a certain age and grew up here, you remember that the lucky, rich or recent immigrant families aside, we had no food. We gnawed bread like bleached plastic, cheese like soap. We yowled, a hungry people. New Londoners took pity before the rest of us succumbed to malnutrition and misery, and shared their cuisines. Indian, Jamaican, whatever – name a culinary tradition, it won’t be too far to find, near greasy spoons keeping the faith. Each new group of incomers brings something – now Polish food has mainstreamed, and there’s dense bread in the corner shops, krufki in supermarkets.

  Racism, of course, endures, adapts. According to the exigencies of ideology, casts around for one, then another first-choice hate. Jews in the 1930s, then Black people, then Asians. For the past ten years, Muslims in particular have worn the bulls-eye. If they’re women who cover their hair, those few who veil entirely or those who chat into scarf-tucked phones, the hijab hands-free, their choice of headgear is bizarrely troublesome to those whose business it is not. The government’s official counterterror strategy includes asking lecturers to report depressed Muslim students. Hate crimes against Muslims rise, fuelled, researchers at the University of Exeter suggest, by the mainstreaming of Islamophobia among politicians and in the media. You can say shocking, scandalous things about Muslims, and opinion-makers do, then push out their chins as if they’ve been brave.

  Feeding on that disgrace, Britain is seeing a mutation of its ‘traditional’ fascism into a form fixated on these new scapegoats. Emerging from groups like the British National Party and football hooliganism, the English Defence League aims its spite squarely at Muslims. It follows a familiar trajectory of intimidation: it tries to march in ‘Muslim’ areas. But it has taken a few unusual turns, too, showing off a (very) few members of colour, Jewish members, gay members. Pitching for a ‘liberal’ fascism.

  But London is London. ‘Their situation in London is incredibly weak,’ says Martin Smith, a leader of Unite Again
st Fascism. ‘Because London’s so integrated,’ he adds enthusiastically, ‘you can literally go from estate to estate and it’s black, white, mums and dads, mixed, all that.’

  ‘I think with migrants,’ he continues, pausing slightly, ‘you can get what I would call racist sentiments developing, even among Blacks, Asians.’ Smith knows this fight. He’s optimistic but not relaxed. These are not easy times. The city shakes. ‘There could be, I suppose – panic issues could develop around that. I wouldn’t rule that out in London. I think it would be hard but I wouldn’t rule it out.’

  NO WONDER MARTIN’S lion looks haunted. London’s full of ghosts – ghostwalks; a city’s worth of cemeteries; ghost advertising, scabs of paint on brick. The city invoked something, read a grimoire it shouldn’t have. Thatcher’s face recurs at every turn, not in clouds of sulfur but of exhaust, on buses bearing posters advertising Meryl Streep’s celluloid turn as our erstwhile prime minister. Cabinet reports have been released from the aftermath of other riots across the country, thirty-one years ago. A policy was mooted, they suggest – the point is disputed – of ‘managed decline’ of the troublesome areas. Leaving them to rot.

  Does the repressed return, or never go away?

  Lionel Morrison considers the past. Few people are so well poised to parse this present, of press scandals, claim and counterclaim of racism and police misbehaviour, deprivation, urban uprising. A South African radical, facing the death penalty in 1956 for his struggles against apartheid – in his house there is a photograph of him with one of his co-defendants, Nelson Mandela – Morrison got out, came to London in 1960. In 1987, he became the first Black president of the National Union of Journalists. In 2000 he was honoured by the British Government with what is, bleakly amusingly, still called an OBE, Order of the British Empire.