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Total London
Personal travel essay about the corner of London I lived at and felt at home in.
I had always wanted London whole, like a lover. Now, with two days to go, I tried to reassure myself: I would always have London, and not just the memory, because the almost three years I spent in London had been a defining point imprinted in my persona.
I had wanted London whole since I was 17 in 1988 and the most radical music-driven movement since the sixties exploded in London. At the time, in the early heady days of Acid House with its promise of a cultural revolution – a revolution based on hedonism (which, I believed, was the starting point of intellectual liberation) and chaos (which marked the shift from the conservative linear way of seeing of the past to the new whimsical creativity of chaos) – London was, for me, like the bright pool of light on the horizon. But only a dim scattering of London’s transformative light reached me in Malta, where I lived, and I had to wait many years before I moved to London.
Now, with two days to go, in the sunny autumn morning, in the surreal hum of silence before the morning rush hour, I found myself – after I had dropped my sexy friend at work – standing in front of St Paul’s Cathedral. I was still giddy from the previous night’s sex – with my friend, not an accident, but a premeditated and shameless sexual marathon – but this would be my last frolic with clubs and hedonism for a while. It was like the end of an era. I had had almost three years of intense clubbing (including many weekend binges – Fridays to Sundays, four or five consecutive clubs), and it had been enough for my idealism about the rave-revolution to turn into jaded alienation and then burnout: you can only sustain intense clubbing for two years and still keep your sanity intact.
Studying the great edifice looming before me, one of the most brilliantly confident architectural set-pieces I had ever seen, it occurred to me that I had never been inside St Paul’s Cathedral. What I set to do now was climb its hundreds of worn, old steps to the viewing balcony at the lantern. I spent two hours up there, marvelling at, and naming, the features around me. The vastness of London, from this lofty view, was immediately palpable. To the northeast I could make out Centrepoint on Oxford Street, and the BT transmission tower, and the humpback hillock of Primrose Hill, and near the horizon, the fluffy trees and greenery of Hampstead Park. The Thames wound below me in its bluish-cream body, the ripples on its surface quivering; I noted Parliament House and Westminster Cathedral to the west, the Tower of London and the new Greater London Authority glass building to the east. Further east the metallic stout of Canary Tower, Britain’s tallest building, was shrouded in the haze of morning mist; and the Millennium Dome looked like a broken and gigantic eggshell. To the south – the squalid, prefabricated apartment blocks of Elephant & Castle and of Loughborough Junction (all sixteen of them, with their slim shape, enclosed like ships, twenty stories high), the lone bell-tower of Brixton Town Hall, and, on the horizon, the spindly transmitting tower at Crystal Palace – these features were more familiar, because I had lived, at one time or another, in their shadow. And I felt an immense satisfaction at my ability to name the salient features in this panorama. For in the details lies the intimacy.
Life in London is supposed to be lonely and rootless, and it is supposed to be transient – tens of thousands of people moving through unceremoniously. But I didn’t recognise the purity of these exhortations. My exit was ritualistic, with farewell gatherings, and last-minute pub waffles. For me, although London had been desolate and rootless at times, and a constant struggle to outmanoeuvre or circumvent the expenses and bills ganging up against me, my memories were fond and long-lasting. London taught me sophistication and cynicism, and it was the milieu that launched my writing career (as Paul Theroux put it, London is every English writer’s spiritual home). In London I could count some of my best friends.
Which wasn’t bad, considering I hadn’t known anyone when I arrived. When I moved to London, more than two years before, I had found a place in Tulse Hill. It was a default choice. I took the first room I found because I didn’t know anything about London, so I had no preferences and prejudices. And it was an unremarkable nowhere, south of Brixton, a depressed area of council tenements inhabited by immigrants and general dropouts at the bottom pile of the socio-economic hierarchy.
In the first weeks I became a curtain twitcher. The object of my curiosity was the large house at the back whose front door and ground-floor windows were barricaded by a metal grille, and whose occupants, I counted thirteen, hung out in the street all day. They spent their time cavorting and fighting and sulking, or revving stolen cars up and down the street, and I watched them tirelessly. I watched them pester and bully passers-by, particularly white women, with borrowed witticisms and racist slurs and desirous moans. I watched them hollering at each other. What I liked best was their women – their big smiles and snarly voices, their wry rebellion and no-bluff existentialism, their loose morals and tight clothes. In the mornings I woke up fantasising about black women. But I never knew more than what I reveal here about those people – who were they? Refugees? Junkies? What was their history and why had they ended in that condition?
I could also end up like that, my condition was equally melancholic. At the time I was broke and unconfident, and every trip outside my house was meticulously planned after poring pedantically over a street map. My explorations were tentative, a kind of widening arc whose axis was my bedroom. I discovered Brixton 2km up the road, and in Brixton I stumbled on the Dogstar. Free entry, a roster of fringe dance music, its decor slightly rough and sleazy - the Dogstar was welcoming to a lone wanderer like me, someone who didn’t have friends. And there were blacks in the Dogstar, which was a boon, as by that time I yearned for a black girlfriend.
After a few nights, in fact, a black woman noticed me. Her name was Pearl, she was 38 years old, and she had glitter on her forehead. We were both slightly drunk, and the flirtation that led to our kiss was so mutual and willing that I didn’t even have to think about it. When the club shut, we staggered to a Jamaican take-away, and we had a patty, which was piquant, drenched in oil, and had more dough that filling. We went back to her place, and then, without having given much thought to what was expected of me, I found us naked in the bedroom, at different ends of the bed, and it occurred to me that in my impetuousness I had forgotten to consider whether I really wanted sex with this person. Later, before we went to sleep, she rasped angrily: “You’ve wasted my time. I could have found someone else.” I liked her innate fury and bluntness, and months later, when I became a familiar face in the neighbourhood, Pearl became a friend. Never again did we mention the awkwardness of our first night.
The wider the arcs of my explorations, and the more I saw of London, the more I liked Brixton where I lived. At the time, what I noticed was its street carnival. The Jamaicans hanging in street corners with their calls of “Ganja?” when I walked past. The music blaring from the Black Music Stores. The food market on Electric Avenue bristling with exotic produce. The seething nightlife – several major clubs, smaller insider clubs, illegal parties in squatted buildings, pubs with their door ajar after legal opening hours.
The designer bars in Soho (central London) seemed intellectually deprived, and I found the showy sex joints brash and pitiful. I didn’t want to mix with youth in their early twenties who took the train into London on Saturday nights from the Home Counties, or the tourists with their heady show of excitement, attracted to the neon signs and the bright, gaudy lights of central London, like insects lured unconscionably to light. Or the ones who went to the superclubs – Home, Ministry of Sound, Fabric. The London I liked was the shadowy London, the London where tourists didn’t dare or bother. Few tourists ventured to south London, and it seemed to me that south London had a deeper and more immutable soul. Brixton seemed less susceptible to the fickleness of fashion and property speculation. It was forgotten and bypassed…
Then I lost my room, and it took me five despondent weeks to find another room in Brixton, this time closer to Brixton’s centre. The area had become popular; like me, other media types sought the street carnival and the street grime and the decadent nightlife; and we had to compete with the immigrants who flocked to Brixton’s relatively cheap housing tenements. Even after five weeks I hadn’t found a room in Brixton, but close enough: in Loughborough Junction, ten minutes walk from The Dogstar at my brisk pace.
“In Loughborough Junction, they have guns,” someone warned me, and this was someone who had lived in Brixton for fifteen years. Loughborough Junction had decay, and the sixteen prefabricated apartment blocks that looked like something you’d expect in 1960s East Berlin – uniform, drab, desolate, violent, high-density living, chicken boxes hastily and cheaply put up to accommodate immigrants. But the house I moved into, sharing with two female housemates, had soul and history. It was an old Victorian house and it had a back-garden, and it was large (in the living room we once threw a party for fifty). An artist had lived in it and transformed it into her den of eccentricities: the engravings and stone sculptures and mirrors and mock goat (fashioned from plaster over a metal frame) in the garden; the maroon-red bathroom with its old, metal-framed, curvaceous mirror; the fancy pink designs flowing through the hallway, and the geometric friezes elsewhere; the voodoo-fantasy painting of a robed soul in the living room. And it was cheap by London standards.
But when a friend came to visit, she felt uncomfortable with the walk home, and took a taxi. Weeks later my Australian cousin visited; she called me from Brixton’s tube station, and waited there for me to pick her up. As a bystander, she was fair game for touts – she was offered recycled train tickets, cannabis, incense, magazines, books, a jacket… She said to me: “When I got out of the train station, I thought: ‘Oh my God! Where have I arrived?’” This reaction might be expected from someone coming from Perth, a provincial, white, orderly, law-abiding sort of place, but what about the people who lived in richer parts of London and dreaded Brixton? Given that thirty percent of Brixtonians were black, how much of the fear is the result of subconscious racism?
The crime, the worst of it, the shootings and the stabbings, mainly involves drug gangs fighting territorial wars. The rest is opportunistic crime triggered by misery, the junkies who resort to burglaries and muggings and scams, and the sordid beggars – a walk through Brixton could be like running the gauntlet of the desperate and the persistent. There were times on blustery winter weeknights after midnight when I felt slight shivers of fear at the prospect of walking down the bleak street, a ten-minute walk.
But Brixton is full of wonderful, exotic sights. Down my street, at the crossroads, I could have been in Kingston, Jamaica. On summer evenings groups of blacks rigged two speakers to a van stereo, opened beers and smoked joints, got a fire going in a drum cut in half lengthways, and put lamb chops to roast on the grille. This is a run-down grubby area of small industry, where Jamaican mechanics and panel beaters and furniture makers ran their outfits from the cavernous halls underneath the elevated train line. There were always fires going in oil drums by the roadside, which is how the businesses dealt with their rubbish. Cars were abandoned there, and the Jamaicans stripped them down and salvaged whatever they could reuse, leaving the gutted frames for the police to remove. The Jamaican young men liked to flaunt their cars, and they hung out in idle groups, yakking and smoking pot, and ever tinkering with their cars to make them more flashy. A little way off in Millbrook Road there is a row of several three-storey Victorian houses, with elegant and merry facades, and they were all squatted. The occupants were artists and DJs and film-makers, mostly South Americans, including an extended group of Venezuelans – and all of these became my friends, and there were house parties to attend every week.
Shopping in the Brixton Market became a ritual. I was surrounded by delicacies from all over the world – olives and goat’s cheese and octopus from the Mediterranean, fish fry and tofu from the Far East, flying fish and plantain from the West Indies, skinned goats festooned to hooks and gawking pigs’ heads from Africa, prickly pear and okra and halal meats from the Middle East – and I started experimenting with fusion cuisine. After the weekly shopping at the market, I would pause to have a juice at the Poetry Café on Coldharbour Lane, where I would peruse the newspapers and watch the African beauty saloons across the road building elaborate hairstyles and crafting perfect fingernails.
In the evenings I went out to the insider’s pubs, starting with the Prince Albert where the successful media posse hung out, then going on to The Windmill, a late-night, dim refuge that served the cheapest beer in London, and later, if I had any energy left, I popped into the Dogstar on the way home. Weekends I went to illegal parties, where I could listen to the experimental electronic music that would be mainstream music in a year or two. There were two public squats at the time, the politically active (and subversive, according to the police) The Button Factory (the building had been a button factory), and The Voice, a large two-storey building that had been an office block.
The people behind these squats were among those who had moved to Brixton during and after its riots. The Brixton Riots of the 1980s marked the peak of Brixton’s militancy, when the district was the first to arise against the greed and individualism and violence of the Margaret Thatcher years. Another issue, peculiar to Brixton but also the result of Thatcher’s policies of intolerance and veiled racism, had been the overbearing police discrimination and brutality. Anger of both blacks and whites coalesced, and Brixtonians revolted. The rioters defended the frontline (where Coldharbour Lane meets Atlantic Avenue) with torched cars and molotov cocktails, and Brixton blazed. And when, in the aftermath, many residents fled, the vacant buildings attracted a new wave of migrants like air into a vacuum: artists, writers, political activists, and plain dropouts who squatted empty properties. These formed arts collectives, green co-operatives, and championed the emerging Acid House scene in illegal rave parties. In 1991 the CoolTan Arts Collective was set up in a squat, offering a roof for outside artists, an alternative café, courses in anything from philosophy to photography, jazz bands every night, and raves on weekends.
By the time I arrived in the late nineties, the radicalism had subsided to a more genteel bohemia. The original activists, who had aged together like members of an extended family, now mingled with younger and more fashionable media types. Alabama 3 (one of their songs, Woke Up this Morning, was the theme song of the TV series The Sopranos) were the new embodiment of Brixton’s public face – funky, irreverent, sardonic, wry, radical, eloquently subversive, and modest celebrities – and the most-respected artists whose formative years were the direct legacy of the political milieu of the 1980s. In the end, however, what endeared me to Brixton wasn’t the exoticism or the carnival alone – these are simply background noises – but the sense of community I found, an ever-evolving community where, after a year, I felt I belonged.
Eventually, when I finished the book I was writing, I asked, Now what? I didn’t have any other major writing projects, and I didn’t want to go back to some odd and banal job. If I wanted to write about travel, I had to find places to write about. Things rapidly fell into place. A new girlfriend – a filmmaker who lived in the squats of Millbrook Road – was planning the classical backpacking tour through Asia and Australia, and I decided to join her. Now, eighteen months later, I am writing this in Australia, and very soon I’ll start the overland journey back to London. It won’t be the same as before, partly because my expectations are different now and partly because London evolves rapidly. I don’t even want London whole any more – it’s enough to explore just one constituent part, because in this vast and restless city, there is always a new area and a new movement left to explore.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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