London's Overthrow

by China Miéville

  Author Iain Sinclair has written this walk before. He’s an old hand at this scholarly, sceptical tour. He watches the city change shape from under an unlikely baseball cap, with polite dislike.

  The Olympics are slated to cost taxpayers £9.3bn. In this time of ‘austerity’, youth clubs and libraries are expendable fripperies; this expenditure, though, is not negotiable. The uprisen young of London, participants in extraordinary riots that shook the country last summer, do the maths. ‘Because you want to host the Olympics, yeah,’ one participant told researchers, ‘so your country can look better and be there, we should suffer’.

  This is a city where buoyed-up audiences yell advice to young boxers in Bethnal Green’s York Hall, where tidal crowds of football fans commune in scabrous chants, where fans adopt local heroes to receive those Olympic cheers. It’s not sport that troubles those troubled by the city’s priorities.

  Mike Marqusee, writer and activist, has been an East London local and a sports fan for decades. American by birth, he nonetheless not only understands and loves cricket, of all things, but even wrote a book about it. He’s excited to see the athletics when they arrive up the road from him in July. Still, he was, and remains, opposed to the coming of the Olympics. ‘For the reasons that’ve all been confirmed. These mega-events in general are bad for the communities where they take place, they do not provide long-term employment, they are very exploitative of the area in which they take place. The priorities become the development for the games.’

  On the ‘Greenway’, Sinclair mourns the lost. The unplanned London. Allotments; scrub; pokey businesses and local houses. Stratford animals, with the edgeland in which they thrived. ‘I love that.’ He gestures at a construction sign, reads its claim sardonically. ‘“Improving the image of construction.” Improving the image of destruction.’

  We’re shunted on a sight-seeing route, down pedestrian runnels. ‘You can’t go off-piste. Very much not.’

  The paths, the enormous structures are neurotically planned and policed. For the area to be other than a charnel ground of Ozymandian skeletons in thirty years, it’ll have to develop like a living thing. That means beyond the planners’, beyond any, preparations.

  The representative of the Olympic Park Legacy Company laughs quietly down the phone at that. ‘Yes. You really hit the nail on the head. I’ll be honest, it’s a constant struggle. Not surprisingly, the planning decisions team who essentially are the arbiters of our planning applications wants comfort and certainty, then you’re kind of going, well, the future lies a long way out, and we need to be a little light on our feet. Is it easy? No, you’re right, planning is very constrained, and it’s a kind of blunt tool to do something where, you want places that are like those grittier, more diverse places’.

  Her thoughtful honesty is refreshing. Mostly what we get in London is unending rah-rah from official channels. Two weeks after Sinclair’s morose sewage pilgrimage, at the London Policy Conference, a high-powered talking shop for urbanologists, politicians and academics in the brutalist concrete art zone of London’s South Bank Centre, Mayor Boris Johnson chortlingly describes those sceptical of the Games as ‘the gloomadon poppers!’ Johnson is crush-heckled: someone in the audience bleats that we all love him. The mayor is a ninja of bumptiousness, a man with a genius for working rooms full of the easily pleased. ‘The many gloomsters!’ he beams, still on Olympic theme.

  The Games’ security plans grow ever more dystopian and surreal. There will be snipers in helicopters; jets; warships in the Thames; more troops on duty in London than in Afghanistan.

  ‘They won’t do it,’ Marqusee says, ‘but what would have been nice is if they’d made these the austerity games in a nice way. Just get rid of everything else, it’s not appropriate, it’s just going to be the sports, and we’ll enjoy it, everyone’ll go half-cost, no big hotels ... and you know, this is London!’ He says that with the pleasure of the Londoner by choice. ‘No, we’re not going to compete with Beijing, we’re not that kind of place anyway, we’re not an authoritarian state that can get 10,000 people to march up and down. But why not, you know, just be who we are? Get some local kids out to do some hip hop or whatever.’

  The Olympic Park recedes. Sinclair leads on toward the Stratford Station with its new soulectomied shopping centre Westfield. Past the Abbey Mills Pumping Station, built deliberately, in strange Victorian homage, to be ‘a cathedral of sewage’. At Abbey Creek, at last the coiffed zone ends. A scrubside cloacal sump, a quag of runoff reefed astonishingly with discarded tires and once-sunk supermarket trolleys, revealed by low tide.

  Call it apocalypse tourism, but we stare at it a lot longer than we do at the twisted tower.

  ‘I KIND OF see a beauty in all that architecture’. Tottenham, north London, is an area of extraordinary ethnic diversity and local pride, and one troubled by unemployment, poverty, poor housing. In the video for Unorthodox by London rapper Wretch 32, filmed in the area’s Broadwater Farm Estate – notorious for riots in 1985 – it’s startlingly beautiful. ‘I kind of want to turn it on its head,’ says Ben Newman, the director, of the cliché. ‘I know a lot of people film and represent those areas in a negative way.’ Instead, the mixed-up area captured in the stairwells is a good, boisterous London dream, and true.

  There’s another Tottenham, equally true. Jonathan Martin prophesies: ‘London shall be all in flames’. It’s scribbled below the lion. Who’s mad now? There was an image on endless repeat last summer. A conflagration, the charcoal shell of a local landmark, a well-known carpet shop. This was the first of a series of disturbances that spread over successive nights around London and the country. Britons saw loop after loop of images of buildings on fire, smashed glass, streets in raucous refusal. Youths taking TVs, clothes, carpets, food from broken-open shops, sometimes with dizzy exuberance, sometimes with what looked like thoughtful care.

  The aftermath is panicked reaction. Courts became runnels for judicial cruelty, sentences twice, three times anything usual for similar crimes. The government’s watchdog announces that police might use live ammunition against those setting fires – some were teenagers – in future.

  14 December. In an effort to make sense of the extraordinary events, the Guardian newspaper and the London School of Economics release ‘Reading the Riots’, a joint report on what happened. What they have discovered, through extensive research and interviews, is that what motivated many of those on the streets was resentment of police, and a deep sense of injustice.

  Eyes roll with the duh.

  Self-evident or not, this does not convince everyone. Theresa May, the Conservative Home Secretary, blames instead ‘sheer criminality’. It’s singalong for the Right. They know this tune: it was played after the Brixton riots of 1981 and 1985, Tottenham 1985, after every riot in London, or anywhere, since forever. While May’s denunciation and denial of the obvious continues, her own department quietly gets on with examining the police’s stop-and-search powers, a cause of huge resentment among young Londoners, which – when do such powers not? – disproportionately affect minorities.

  ‘Feeling powerless, for me, is a very dangerous thing, that we’ve seen in the riots,’ says Symeon Brown at the London Policy Conference. Brown’s a young man from Tottenham himself, a youth activist, a researcher who worked on the Guardian report. During the disturbances, he explains, giving himself the voice of one of those involved, came ‘that sense that for once in my life I had power’.

  The words echo astonishingly across years, one riot to another. Dambudzo Marechera, Zimbabwean poete maudit, wrote ‘Smash, Grab, Run’ about his experiences in Brixton in the 1980s.

  And just this once in my black British life

  Exploded the atoms in me into atoms of power

  There is a key and concrete factor not mentioned at the conference. A name is missing, a name that recurs in interviews with the riots’ participants, in tweets from the upsurging streets themselves.

  Mark Duggan. The young man shot dead
by the Metropolitan Police on 4 August 2011.

  ‘We’ve been saying in meetings ever since the beginning of this year that there was a ... powerful change of anger out there in the community. It wasn’t difficult to pick it up, you could just go to public meetings.’ Helen Shaw is co-director of Inquest, an organisation dedicated to the investigation of contentious deaths in official custody. She sounds like someone sad to be right. ‘So I suppose the surprise is the police claiming they didn’t have a sense of how angry people were.’

  Mark Duggan’s family were denied information. Misinformation about their dead son was leaked. 6 August. A demonstration supporting the family outside Tottenham Police Station. The key moment that occurred when the police intervene, which many who were present say was the spark for everything that followed, is immortalised on YouTube. Its rage-capitalled title is its own misspelt explanation: ‘16 YEAROLD GIRL ATTACKED BY TOTTENHAM RIOT POLICE WHICH STARTED THE RIOTS!’

  In Britain between 1998 and 2009, there were at least 333 deaths in police custody, eighty-seven of them after restraint by officers. Not a single officer has ever been convicted for a single one. Of all the more and less unsubtle ways young Londoners – those not Made In Chelsea, those not rich – are told that they are not terribly important, none are so overt or cruel as this.

  Sitting so straight on a raised dais, in so immaculate a uniform, that he looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the Metropolitan Police’s new commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, tells the conference in an avuncular voice nothing about Mark Duggan’s death. He talks, rather, enthusiastically if nebulously, about his plan for ‘Total Policing’. He enthuses about large forces zooming into small areas and clamping down on minor infractions. He mentions uninsured vehicles.

  Helen Shaw has a different understanding. She suspects Total Policing will mean ‘a much more aggressive police presence, a stance that’s more aggressive, and more about fear’. Indeed, Hogan-Howe says he wants ‘to put fear into the hearts of criminals’. Shaw is more stark. ‘We think we’ll see more deaths.’

  Constituencies not traditionally antipathetic to the police have been shocked by its fervent enthusiasm for ‘kettling’, corralling demonstrators tightly without charge, food, water or release, for hours. Officer Mark Kennedy is exposed as a mole among nonviolent ecological activists, becomes emblematic of an extraordinary and illegal campaign of infiltration and sexual deceit. The brutal policing of student protests on 9 December 2010 left one young man, Alfie Meadows, in hospital with brain injuries. At that same protest, police hauled Jody McIntyre, a twenty-year-old with cerebral palsy, from his wheelchair, dragging him across the ground. At a demonstration on 1 April 2009, an unresisting and uninvolved newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, was hit by the police and died shortly after. And there is Mark Duggan, about whom each rumour initially leaked – that he shot first, that he shot at all – is proved one by one to be untrue.

  The attacks on McIntyre and Tomlinson were watched, recorded, by the gaze of cellphone cameras. Collecting notes from a troubled culture. Police seem still not quite to grasp that these little machines preserve more than nocturnal melancholy.

  THE RIOTS HAD a soundtrack.

  In 1995, insolently young south Londoners Eddie Otchere and Andrew Green, as James T. Kirk and Two Fingers, published Junglist, a brilliant neglected text of London gnosis, backstreet Modernism, a strange riff on being young in the city and in thrall to the dance music of the time. Jungle, deep structured by beats, full of industrial blarings like the mating calls of old factories. London music conducted by aliens.

  Sixteen years, generations and crossbreeds later, two descendant musics tussle for hegemony – dubstep and grime. The former is all wobbling bass, looped fuzzed samples, tight drums. It’s viralled fast into commercial cliché and star turns, uninteresting but for a few leftfield experimenters, like the ‘post-dubstep’ melancholy of London genius Burial. Tracks for those nightwalks.

  Grime is the bratty, bolshy sibling. The riot music. Born out of London’s pirate radio scene, shouty vocals over frenetic beats. Indelibly London, saturated with the localism of the city itself. In grime, representing your area, sometimes down to your street, is key. Not overtly political music, for the most part, it is, though, to the horror of splenetic politicians, an angry one.

  30 November. Shoreditch. We’re south of the White Cube gallery, in old streets embedded in folk song. Working-class once, now arts-gentrified, wedged full of subtle-fonted bar-signs, boutiques and hangouts. Downstairs at the club East Village, it’s the launch of Rival’s EP, Lord Rivz.

  The music goes like an adrenalised heart. All the movements in the thundering dark hall, dancing, nodding, twitching in place, are stiff-limbed. Tune segues into tune that flaunts its discordance, its jerking rhythm: it’s ornery, a kind of anti-dance music, demanding you move but making you work to work it. There’s no aggro, not among the dancers, despite all the screwfaces, wincing like they hurt, making some noise when they hear classic tracks. And then the MCs step up, and there’s a surge for the decks. ‘Music,’ Dan Hancox shouts, ‘to storm the Treasury to.’

  That’s the kind of joke can get a person closed down. Hancox is a writer on politics, on grime, on youth. We’re buffeted by what they called the soundtrack to the riots. Music of this austerity moment.

  It’s exhausting, being smacked around by east London beats. We break from the club, stand outside near the smokers and enjoy the cold air. Hancox’s excitement ebbs. ‘It dampens the spirits a bit,’ he says. ‘It’s about a third full?’

  About a third, yes. There’s been a sustained campaign against grime from all establishment sides. Hancox mutters about form 696. The Met uses this notorious risk-assessment paperwork in deciding to allow – or not to allow – musical events. Until 2008, almost unbelievably, its original wording ferreted ingenuously, ‘Is there a particular ethnic group attending? If “yes” please state group.’

  Outrage. The wording changed, the targeting remained.

  It was hard for Hancox to track down a night to go to at all.

  THE GRIME CREWS are right; each part has its own specificity. It wouldn’t be the worst sin to call it ‘soul’. Camden nostalgic for itself, giant nipple rings and boots on its shops like discards from a punk god. Chelsea riverside. Drab towerblocks in Silvertown by the sugar factory. Façades echo Deco, variably magnificent: Kilburn’s Gaumont State; the Hoover building in Perivale; East Finchley Tube. There are skateparks under the concrete sky of the Westway and the big sky of south London: ‘Brixton Beach’, those graffitied concrete dunes. Each is irreducible, each a gallimaufry, and each clines into its neighbour zones. Topography patchworks – seventeenth-century noses up through building-years to horrible modern brick the colour of mustard, 80s, 90s and noughties jostling with the centuries-old stones.

  Someone’s left a sofa under a hoarding at Dudden Hill, overlooking the railway cut. You could spectate the city. Keep your phone out, and not to talk. London’s preening.

  15 DECEMBER. TWO boys get on a 98 bus, heading from northwest London to the centre. They swagger upstairs, lounge on the front seats, turn their phones into inadequate speakers and drawl along. ‘Every Saturday Rap Attack, Mr Magic, Marley Marl, I let my tape rock ’til my tape popped’. Like they know what tape is.

  You want to see how much London hates its young – some of them: ‘Let’s be honest,’ says the writer Owen Jones, ‘they’re not talking about Etonians’ – watch them play music on public transport. Everyday silliness, adolescent thoughtlessness are treated like social collapse. Of which there’s a fair bit going around, true, but does it really inhere in this?

  ‘On the one hand you have this patronising attitude towards young people, coddling them and everything,’ says Saleha Ali, twenty-five, volunteer coordinator at WORLDwrite, an education charity in Hackney. ‘And on the other hand you have heavy-handed regulation, so there’s a hysteria about young people getting really drunk, going out, and all these kinds of things, it’s just
like panic, oh my God, what are we creating, a generation of monsters?’

  Quotidian teen truculence is as suspect as violence. Which does happen too, of course.

  The night Hackney rioted, there were images local resident, journalist and photographer transplanted from Paris, Valeria Costa-Kostritsky, had to record. She was out, like hundreds of others, among her neighbours. And it was all fine until a young man reached like an older brother around her neck, took her camera by the strap, punched the slight young woman repeatedly and hard in the face when she tried to stop him.

  ‘Immediately, on that day, you see lots of people on Facebook saying horrible things about the rioters. Mostly saying “scum”.’ Certainly, being so savagely attacked, she remembers, ‘gave me an insight into how uncool violence is, how scary it is’. She laughs, self-deprecating about her assault-satori. ‘But it would never occur to me to, because of that, to call a group of people scum. To me that’s crossing a line. Something I don’t do. People are people.’ Her disgust is audible. ‘Even if they do something, you know, not nice to you, they are people.’

  Tinny music on a bus raises disproportionate ire. Travellers shift and glare as fourteen-year-olds give themselves soundtracks, like they’re boxers. Not all, but a fair few of the older passengers look wrathful.

  Who cares? You’re getting off in five minutes, he’s fourteen and trying it on a bit and boisterous to fill the city with music.

  In 1998, Tony Blair ushered into being ASBOs, Antisocial Behaviour Orders. Sharp laws, the better for society, like Cronus, like a traumatised hamster, to eat its children. These startling civil orders criminalise legal behaviour, individually, tailor-making offences. A seventeen-year-old is banned from swearing. Another told he could go to jail if he drops his trousers. A nineteen-year-old barred by law from playing football in the street.