Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  That first trip to London, a formative experience for many a northerner, rattle in hand, full of wonder and optimism, is beautifully and memorably captured in an evocative short film of the 1970s. Late on a winter's Saturday evening, passengers disembark from a coach onto a darkened backstreet in Newcastle. Waiting relatives greet warmly; one welcomes a teenage boy cheerily. 'Four-nil at the Arsenal, what about that?' The boy walks on, hands in pockets, surly and uncommunicative. The relative tries again. 'Four-nil away to the Arsenal... You must be delighted.' The boy turns sourly and replies, 'Aye, but I had a packet of crisps a dog would have curled his lip at.'

  All right, it wasn't an early effort by Peter Greenaway but an advert for leading Geordie snack comestible Tudor crisps, but it rang true. London would promise much to the provincial -excitement, glamour, sophistication - but this would turn out to be a chimera. Realising this, we'd return home soberly to regale school and work mates with news of London - much as we might have done in the Middle Ages - and they would listen, appalled, to our tales of people who didn't chat at bus stops, overpriced beer and crisps that canines would demur at.

  My second trip to London was in the late 1970s when I went with the other precocious teenagers from Mr Spruce's first-year history of art 'A' level group from St John Rigby College. A few months' acquaintance with Modigliani and Rothko had made me quite the young bohemian and I stowed an illicit pack of Gauloises Disque Bleus in my clean underwear, one of the most vile cigarettes ever invented and must-have accessory of the seventies poseur. Armed with these, how could I fail to pull pale, winsome young women in the Tate cafe? That's if I could make them out through the noxious blue-green fug.

  We stayed in Onslow Gardens, Kensington, and dined out in a variety of styles and cuisines. On the first night we went to the International House of Pancakes – oversold rather by its title, I always think – but on the second night, emboldened by our new familiarity with London, we went to a real Italian restaurant and ordered penne arrabiata and a carafe of the house red and chatted loudly about Fauvism and Matisse. I felt like James Bond or at the very least Brian Sewell. Later, though, we reverted to type by 'accidentally' setting off the sprinkler system in the hotel. Next day, Mr Spruce gave us a very public dressing down rich in expletives at Green Park Tube station.

  Ah, the Tube. Before we first visit London, every northerner secretly fears the Tube; it sounds like something out of Quatermass and the Pit and the map at first glance looks like a Piet Mondrian or an autopsy diagram of one of a cow's four stomachs. Then we slowly become acclimatised to it and eventually we come to pride ourselves on our knowledge of it, wearing it as a badge of honour in a way no Londoner ever would. It's our version of The Knowledge, the arcane lore of the London cabbie: 'Royal College of Art, mate, no problem. Bakerloo to Embankment, across the footbridge, five stops to High Street Ken, stand in the rear carriage, the exit's right in front of you, lovely cappuccino at the cafe by the florist's. Tell Carlo I sent you...'

  The Tube map, done in his spare time in 1931 by London Transport employee Harry Beck, is justly famous as a brilliant design concept. Beck grasped that since the railway ran mostly underground, the actual physical locations of the stations were irrelevant in knowing how to get to one station from another; only the topology of the railway mattered. London Transport didn't think it would catch on. Now, it's way more than a traveller's tool. It's iconic. You can buy posters and T-shirts featuring it and there's a very funny non-game based around it called Mornington Crescent (tune in to I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, the funniest programme on the radio). It's even been turned into a rather sweet piece of art by Simon Patterson called 'The Great Bear'.

  The Tube itself is quite brilliant in what it does, i.e. transporting people cheaply and efficiently from one bit of London to another. It's unsurpassed as a marriage of form and function. But for all the licensed buskers playing jazz guitar arrangements of Mozart and the poems on the underground and the tarted-up stations, it remains the unloveliest thing ever. Off-peak, it's soulless; at rush hour it's a fetid and dehumanising journey into hell which, as Jean-Paul Sartre nearly said, is other people's armpits. Last night's garlic and the thin hiss of an iPod wafts gentiy down the metal tube between the serried ranks of tired, anxious commuters seething with resentment at the relaxed laughter, radiant youth and gigantic wardrobe-sized rucksacks of the Italian teenagers standing by the doors.

  Not even the most sentimental of Cockneys can ever have grown moist-eyed thinking of it. Unlike the Glasgow sleeper, no one could write a stirring John Buchan-style romantic thriller around it. They tried with Sliding Doors and it was unspeakable.

  No one can ever be part of the queue traipsing up those steps at the Central Line at Tottenham Court Road looking blank-eyed at the adverts for Chicago and cut-price electrical stores without feeling part of some grim forced march or ritual sacrifice. The Goodge Street lifts – there are four of them and they wouldn't look out of place in an industrial-sized abattoir – always feel like a dispiriting social experiment into how rude, panic-stricken and dehumanised the average commuter can become. Glassy-eyed with fatigue and the fear that they may have to wait ten seconds for the next one, they charge in, crushing old ladies and tiny Japanese schoolgirls underfoot. Maybe they're all really keen to get out of London.

  Periodically, different bits of London become fashionable. It was Camden back in the heady, buzzy Britpop boom of the mid 1990s when gaggles of trendy Japanese girls would go to the Good Mixer pub in search of Damon Albarn and find only three members of Menswear and a pool table. For the last few years, it has been the East End. Shoreditch, Hoxton and Hackney are three conceptual entities jostling to occupy the same physical space with residents of the area altering their addresses in line with current fashion. At the time of writing, Hoxton is winning and is the 'manor' de la mode. That said, Hackney is 'edgier'. If you crave the kudos of living somewhere 'edgy', i.e. with a high burglary rate and a good chance of getting mugged at a bus stop by a fifteen-year-old crackhead, you'll say you live in Hackney. 'Edginess' is another notion we northerners find hard to understand and rather laughable. Having often grown up in dangerous parts of hard towns rather than, say, Cheltenham, we're in no hurry to move back to such places, however good it is for our street cred.

  I'm actually writing these words in Old Shoreditch station. It isn't a station any more, of course, but a rather chichi coffee bar where I'm playing with the froth of my vanilla latte. I think the man at the next table is the lead singer of a minor indie band on their third or fourth album. I catch a trailing strand of conversation from the table to my left. 'I'm, like, saving up like crazy cos I want to spend four months in South America.' It is all a very Shoreditch scenario.

  The tiny alleys and spidery streets around ultra-fashionable Hoxton Square are crowded with Vietnamese kitchens, margarita bars and happening clubs whose flyers boast DJ sets by Gilles Peterson and all-night 'crunk' and 'grime'. It would seem next to impossible to buy anything useful, like a pair of pliers or an umbrella, but day or night you will never want for a plate of sushi or a twelve-inch dubplate. The older generation of taxi drivers will tell you that before its gentrification, this was a bad neighbourhood, a notorious den of rogues, a thieves' kitchen. At three quid for a milky coffee, I reckon it still is.

  The East End, the quintessential London, is more conceptual than actual. Successive waves of Luftwaffe bombers, town planners, developers and immigrants have altered the shape and make-up of the area for ever but Cockney mythology and iconography hold some things very dear. They get all maudlin and tearful about some stuff while northerners view them with a mixture of boredom, mirth and hostility.

  Chelsea Pensioners and Pearly Kings, for instance. What is it about London that even the old codgers and market traders have to ponce about in ridiculous costumes doing what can only be described as 'showing off'. Northerners – and I say this fully cognisant of exception-proving rule breakers like Liam Gallagher and Freddie Starr – are general
ly inoculated against showing off by slaps administered in childhood. 'Showing off, like 'showing us up', commits the cardinal sin of drawing attention to yourself. Pearly Kings and Queens: really, what is all that about? They are market traders, the people who sell you knock-off batteries and pressure cookers and snide versions of Nike tracksuits. Chelsea pensioners at least have served their country in the military; that's how they get the dubious honour of a three-quarter-length scarlet tunic and a stupid hat.

  The north-south divide is not just geographical and cultural, it's temperamental. Northerners are often referred to from a southern perspective as dour, perhaps because we don't see the heartwarming side of the Kray Twins or because our fishmongers don't dress in rhinestones and throw parades. We secretly treasure this opinion of us and have even turned it into a cultural emblem, be it Les Dawson's bleak, grotesque humour, Joy Division looking miserable in long overcoats on a Hulme flyover or Alan Bennett's self-mocking melancholia. Take chimney sweeps. A northern Victorian chimney sweep would, very sensibly, feel that life had dealt him a poor hand and as he forced another urchin up the flue he'd probably utter a grim aphorism and hawk up some phlegm. Compare this with the London chimney sweep as portrayed by Dick Van Dyke, always grinning, tap-dancing and singing about how lucky he is to know 'Maori Parpens'.

  Nothing about the Cockney proletariat sets our teeth on edge more than their 'cheeriness'. A few years back, I went to see My Fair Lady starring Martine McCutcheon at the National Theatre. Pretty good it was too. But halfway through, something really quite dreadful happened. The scene changed from Park Lane to what was unmistakably some theatre director's notion of a 'cheery' down-at-heel street scene in Lambeth or the Isle of Dogs. Slatternly women in shawls shrieked horribly as 'cheery' costermongers pinched them on the bum. Scamps and scallywags ran about nicking apples from barrows; chestnuts were sold and the contents of chamber pots flung about. Fear and apprehension began to grip me as it does when you hear the whine of the dentist's drill or the opening music to Last of the Summer Wine. But in this case, it was the fast-approaching whine and clatter of Dennis Waterman and a troop of choreographed 'geezers'. The clatter was the sound of the dustbin lids they had attached to their feet as they stomped and hoofed around. The whine was the awful version – I'm not sure there is a good one – of 'Get Me To The Church On Time'. When Dennis and co. got to the bit about 'having a whopper' and actually hooked their thumbs behind their lapels, that inexplicable Cockney gesture of, well, 'cheeriness', I could feel the blood drain from my face. I turned and was gratified to see that the journalist Tom Sutcliffe sitting next to me, a Yorkshireman, was similarly ashen and stricken. It took four or five strong drinks at the interval before I could be persuaded back in for the second half. At heart, northerners feel the Cockney lower orders shouldn't be so happy with their pathetic lot but organising a whelk stall strike and staging a violent revolution, whatever the Queen Mum might think.

  We don't really get the Londoner's much-vaunted love of the royal family. I have never heard a northerner say 'Ma'am' except as a joke. We were really not that devoted to the Queen Mother. We never called her the Queen Mum and we didn't automatically say 'Gawd bless her' after mentioning her name, the way Catholics involuntarily nod after uttering the word Jesus. My dad used to say she was a game old thing but I think that was because she used to grin a lot and liked the odd Gordon's or twelve. True, though, the north did get as delirious with grief as anywhere in the semi-mystical passion over Diana's death. At the time, I saw a young man in a New Order T-shirt weeping openly over a newspaper in Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens. But I'm not sure we can draw any conclusions from that very strange episode in the nation's history. Think again of the scenario: a beautiful dead blonde princess being driven in a cortege of black cars along a deserted motorway while grieving subjects throw flowers, escorting her to her final resting place on a wooded island. It's closer to Le Morte d'Arthur than modern Britain.

  A few hardy and devoted souls – harsher commentators may say 'nutters' – get up at dawn to take a coach down from Preston to stand in The Mall in a thin drizzle waving a plastic Union Jack on one of the Queen's birthdays but they are the exception rather than the rule. Why is this? Well, the royal family live smack in the middle of London, of course, and we see them as a world away from life in the north (although there's a persistent rumour that the Queen has a weekend place in the Forest of Bowland). Also, the north is awash with Irish immigrants, trade unionists, children of coal miners, factory workers and the like, a more generally leftist and anti-establishment stew than, say, the population of Woking.

  But more than the Cockney's devotion to the royals, there is another London love affair we northerners find baffling and irritating. It is why, when I read this by Richard Littlejohn, writing in The Spectator in February 2006, I almost choked on my overpriced London panini:

  I'm always amused by the quaint expressions used to excuse criminality in certain communities. For instance, Scousers have the term 'scally' to describe someone who makes a career out of petty theft. 'He's a scally, our kid is. Nothing serious, just a bit of robbing.' This week I stumbled across a new one from Wales. 'Hobbling' is the word they use to describe the practice of working while simultaneously claiming unemployment or incapacity benefit. To hobble: a colloquialism meaning to commit fraud.

  Now, while one should never expect common sense or humanity from the pen of Richard Littlejohn, least of all in the pages of The Spectator, this really does take the flipping biscuit. You will note that the certain communities of which he sniffily speaks are considerably, demonstrably, defiantly north of London. The reason this strikes me as the most diabolical liberty, guv, is that when it comes to glamorising the criminal classes, no one can beat the Cockneys.

  Only yesterday, I saw a briefly fashionable young actor (his name escapes me but he was in Layer Cake or Lock Stock or Snatch or some other tedious bit of gangster porn) extolling his love for West Ham on some sports show, and proudly claiming, 'The East End – home of hardcore naughty people!'

  Hardcore naughty people, geezers, wide boys, hard men, rogues, ducking and diving, a bit tasty, well handy; if anyone has cornered the market in euphemisms for scum it is the Londoner. For instance, it is apparently quite acceptable in the boozers and parlours of Stepney and Poplar for a grown man, when asked of his livelihood, to reply, 'Oh, bit of this, bit of that, bobbin' and weavin', you know.' In Halifax and Huyton, we call this 'being unemployed' or 'skiving' or perhaps even 'thievery'.

  I have met people from London who genuinely like Vinnie Jones, actually think he's a 'diamond geezer'. No one north of the Blue Boar services has ever suffered from this particular insanity. The northern view of such 'geezers' is best illustrated by a character in that fine Geordie institution, Viz. In this particular strip, the central protagonist is a fat, ugly, balding man in a sheepskin jacket, festooned with tacky gold jewellery. He's a swaggering bigot who speaks in rhyming slang, boasts of his criminal connections and bears an uncanny resemblance to former EastEnder Mike Reid. In each edition, he beats his wife and is disloyal to his friends while declaring his love of family, kiddies and country. He is called, with admirable succinctness and wit, 'Cockney Wanker'.

  This Cockney cult of the criminal, though, reaches its zenith (or nadir maybe) in the veneration of two dead brothers, the enduring nature of which found me one winter's day in 2006 making my way gingerly through the shabby streets of Bethnal Green looking for Britain's most notorious pub.

  If you were to find yourself at a loose end and thirsty on the Whitechapel Road, you could do worse than drop into the Blind Beggar, but I doubt it would detain you long. It's a reasonable enough pub with a couple of half-decent bitters and some rather old-fashioned 'hot pub fayre'. There are two cats called Pip and Molly that slink about looking proprietorial and the staff are friendly enough. But none of this is why the Blind Beggar is a tourist destination for the more morbid sightseer.

  No, this is the pub where, in the summ
er of 1966, while Scott Walker in his honeyed baritone sang 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore', Ronnie Kray took out his Mauser and shot fellow crook George Cornell in the head at point blank range. Cornell had allegedly called him, unwisely I think, 'a fat poof. The Krays were infamous local gangsters who have become as iconic in London mythology as the Queen Mum (Gawd bless her), beefeaters and Arthur Daley. The Krays, we are told, loved their mum, were always smart and polite and hardly ever killed anyone really except a few low-life of their own ilk. You may get a different view of the matter if you ask one of the many East End pub landlords, bookies, cafe proprietors and shopkeepers who, according to John Pearson's The Profession of Violence, all enjoyed the dubious and costly benefits of the Krays' 'protection'. But don't ask them over a pint in the Blind Beggar. They may not be especially forthcoming. The pub is actually known locally to some as The Tardis as apparently 50,000 people were there on the fateful night. Naturally none of them saw anything, guv. When Ronnie Kray died in 1998, the East End came to a standstill, plumed horses pulled the hearse through streets thronged with mourners and Barbara Windsor (predictably) and Morrissey (disappointingly) sent flowers.