I live in a council block which, despite an apparent egalitarian upbringing, took a while to get used to, especially its trademark smell of forty years worth of ciggie smoke and cat pee that now impossibly infiltrates the concrete. But my little council block is a mirror of this city. There is a Somali family upstairs, a single mum and a pensioner downstairs. B. & M. across the landing have been here forty years and J., who I swap morning coffee, haberdashery and cherry tomatos with, lives below them. S. on the bottom floor lives with his wife and three young kids in the same space I do. There’s a quiet man on the top floor who’s name I don’t know.From the window I see red roof tiles, chimney pots and the Heathrow flight path. The neighbours across the way have a roof terrace with a gentrifying water feature and a Buddha bust among the pot plants. In the street there are three dry cleaners, a chemist, an off-license, two corner stores without corners, a restaurant, a pizza take-away and a greasy spoon. I think they are all owned by one man who parks his Porsche outside the greasy spoon each day.
My neighbourhood is wedged between Holland Park, Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush with its rapidly rising mega-mall. Cross one street to the right and I’m in Holland Park; one stop from Kensington and some of the most expensive real estate in the city. Cross another street and I’m in social housing estates, high rises and dross-scapes. My block, street, neighbourhood reeks of the juxtapositions of wealth and cat piss; the contradictions of a global city marked by the ebb and flow of human movement. The heritage of Caribbean to Iranian to Somali to Punjabi to Arabic all embedded in faded, painted over, signage.
London is a dense city, shifting its identity from one street to the next, and you need all your senses to navigate across it. You need to bend with the buffeting of rush hour commuters and high street shoppers. You need to hear how close the buses and taxis are to your cycle lane.
You need to smell the sweet apple tobacco in shishas to know when you’re on Edgeware Road. You need to make sense of the flicker of hoardings, departures and arrivals boards. You need to remember to never confuse a Scot for an Englishperson even if they have an English accent (although I'm not sure why someone at a Buddhist retreat would be so worried about identity). At another time, so relieved to get a call centre in ‘England’ I expressed my gratitude to the operator who then pointed out he was in Wales. Identity politics is virulent in this United Kingdom.Unexpected things happen in this city. Oblivious, on the bridge from Embankment tube station to Southbank, headphones on, two couples tango, silently, deeply, intently and completely engrossed in the movement of a toe, a hand, a neck. A silent disco also involves headphones plus two DJs. Unexpectedly, I realise that dancing is actually a very communal, visual act and if your dancing partner suddenly switches to the other channel with a completely different beat then you experience instant arrhythmia. It’s also very difficult to snog someone when you’re both wearing industrial sized head sets.
Only in London would World Wide Knit in Public Day coincide with International Naked Cycle Day AND the Queen’s Birthday. Only in London could I row across the top of a building into the sunset. This ‘demented playground’, this ‘wanton happening’ created by the Austrian art collective Gelitin (Psycho Buildings, Hayward Gallery, London, July 2008). Only in London would I get a ticket for cycling in Holland Park by the Parks Police. What anti-social behaviour are they expecting in Holland Park that they need two parks police on patrol one superb summer’s morning – someone popping their champagne cork too loudly? Or worse, putting their champagne in the wrong glass? Unexpectedly, far from the madding crowd of Kensington and Chelsea, in the middle of the dross industrial landscapes of north London are a series of canals lined by wild flowers, herons, cyclists, joggers, fish, plastic bags and barges.And you need all your senses to make sense of things like Piccadilly Circus with faux New York Times Square neon signs now surrounding the statue of Eros, and where Macdonald’s proudly announced ‘Coming soon: a new sign from MacDonalds’ (22 July 08). Is that a piece of post-modern simulacra I see before me?
I spend quite a few days engaging in psycho-geography, or putting it another way, wandering around the city. It’s for research, okay! For example, Saturday mornings I cycle to Borough Market through Hyde Park, past Buckingham Palace, Westminster and the London Eye, then into back streets along Southbank until hitting the cobble stones behind Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.
And somehow I know all these places from every nursery rhyme, post card, BBC serial shown on the ABC that I’ve absorbed since the time I could read, or be propped up in front of the television. Borough Market has become the end goal because it has some of the best food in London although the best brownies EVER are to be found at East Dulwich Deli (because a girl cannot live by bread alone, even when it’s hand made by artisans and sold at Borough Market). The best greasy spoon in the world is E. Pellici in Bethnal Green. Not for the faint hearted or light weight. Disengage all sense when you enter and allow your senses to take over.
