House-husbands scan the harvested packets while they wait, and wait, to put in their orders. Communal tables shudder with the fragmented phone-traffic of intercontinental breakfast meetings.
‘So. I’ll do my own publishing thing. Hoxton, yes. Absolutely. If I can source the right size of desk.’
‘We’ve got very positive news about the price increase. Our French distributor tells us we are free to talk about branded products. We also talked a bit about almonds.’
‘It’s relatively difficult to fix a price definition ceiling on the competition. Plus margins of course.’
‘Before college the other kids were getting rucksacks and walking around the Third fucking World. I went straight to Wall Street.’
‘There are no zeros in banking. You work for us, you stay on it thirty-nine hours straight.’
At Danbury Street, on the flank of Islington, my key is refused: three times. A passing Boris initiate explains that if there are cycles left among the empty slots, it means they don’t work. They are waiting on the trailer.
When I am denied again at Macclesfield Road, I ring in. It seems that because Shoreditch Park is out of order the return of my bike hasn’t registered, and therefore no other docking station will accept my custom. Meanwhile the clock is ticking on my tariff. I’ve signed up and paid for two weeks, managed five minutes on a Boris bike, and walked for several hours. My intended Barclays circuit had become just another futile foot slog between docking stations. Please don’t call it cyclogeography.
Chadwell Street: 18 slots, 0 bikes. River Street: 11 slots, 1 bike. Percy Street: 23 slots, 2 bikes. Guildford Street: 23 slots, 7 bikes. Margery Street: 19 slots, 1 bike. St John Street: 17 slots, 1 bike. Finsbury Library: 29 slots, 5 bikes.
And then, success, West Smithfield Rotunda, right outside St Bartholomew’s Hospital: 25 slots, 24 bikes.
Are Barclays’ clients superstitious about mounting up in such close proximity to a blood-soaked establishment; the place where Dr Watson met Sherlock Holmes for the first time, when the great detective was busy beating a corpse? And where the Benedict Cumberbatch TV reboot appeared to take a suicide plunge from the roof? Maybe the doctors had their own bikes. And patients who survived operations and who were tipped out on the street in a state of post-traumatic shock were too weak to pedal home.
Internet reviews of the hospital were the usual blend of peevish and gushing: five star to no star. ‘We are on an exciting journey to improve the quality of our service.’ St Bartholomew’s, just now, is particularly keen to solicit body parts from black and ethnic minority communities. ‘Our daily mission is bringing excellence to life. To meet our ambition of excellence, it’s crucial to recognise where we’ve come from and where we’re headed.’
When I eventually found a station prepared to take my key, I enjoyed the weight and solemnity of the Boris bike. I decided to combine, on a day of snow showers, the song cycle and the bicycle. I made a meandering progress through the City of London, docking and redocking, as I searched out the hidden sites for the ‘Surround Me’ installations by Susan Philipsz. With minimal traffic and few humans, the bike came into its own. Philipsz’s unaccompanied voice was a thrilling and melancholy confirmation of my mood.
Labyrinthine alleys I explored on foot were closed to me. I found that Boris bikes were a burden on icy steps. But that illusion of freedom, the way the machine could be dumped when you tired of it, the simplicity of the gears, was seductive. I signed up for a year’s membership. I became a positive affirmation statistic. And then I forgot the whole business and returned to walking as usual, without the requirement of planning my journeys from one Barclays’ oasis to the next. The brand faded, changed colour from blue to red, and shifted sponsorship to Santander. But the creeping colonisation of selected outer zones continued. You could tell just where you stood in the property market by measuring your proximity to an Overground station and a rack of Santander bicycles.
Certain cyclists of independent spirit, poets, philosophers, sociologists of the road, found their way to my door, to dispute my thesis: that there had to be something intrinsically wrong with any policy advocated by an agreement between local and national politicians. I was impressed by the height, demeanour, and name of Jürgen Ghebrezgiabiher, a man in uxorious love with his machine, which was an extension of his personality in the way described by Flann O’Brien. Jürgen translated impossible poets (myself included) and researched urbanists who converted their bicycles into delivery vehicles for bread or books or people. He wrote about his sadness at being forced out of London by economic necessity. He pedalled away, listening to the click of the ‘prayer wheel of the cycle’. A monkish European scholar returning to the monastery of a Leipzig bike shop, puncture repairs and spindly poems.
Jürgen sent me an email recommending a film by Cynthia Beatt called The Invisible Frame, in which Tilda Swinton – who else? – rides along the vanished Berlin Wall. ‘She’s definitely not a cyclist,’ Jürgen reported. ‘Saddle too low. But there is a floating walker’s air about her. There are long passages that seem to have been reeled on spools of film that come undone again.’
Jon Day, academic and author, was another initiate who taught me how to respect the warrior qualities of couriers who drove themselves to the point of ‘annihilating exhaustion’ by their fugue-like sprints across London.
‘By night I dreamt of half-remembered topographies,’ Day wrote in Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier. ‘Hypnogogic jerks, those juddery twitches that occur on the edges of deep sleep, were smoothed out into circular pedal-strokes of the legs.’ Every grain and flaw, every minute particular of the road is mapped on the consciousness of the cyclist. The streets of the City, Holborn, Clerkenwell, Bloomsbury, Soho, become a virtual velodrome to the fixed-gear bikes of the courier. The career is short-lived, an intense and exposed negotiation with place.
‘I have known more couriers to have committed suicide than to have died on the road,’ Day said. He had discovered a way of hiding in full sight, becoming part of the slipstream. ‘It was the perfect way of bearing witness.’ Day traced the burning fuse of the London riots of 2011 from the saddle. But his own future was uncertain. After the age of forty, many couriers become controllers or cabbies.
Before Jon remounted to continue his researches by interrogating the land artist and committed cyclist, Richard Long, I recommended a favourite ride, in the wake of the artist/photographer Nigel Henderson, down the elevated track of the Northern Sewage Outfall to Beckton Alp. Day was game. It might give him a paragraph for his book.‘I climbed the weaving path that winds up the hill to its highest point and clambered through a gap… where a couple were kissing in the shadow of a fence across which several large crosses of St George had been painted. They didn’t welcome the intrusion, and so I slipped away, back along the pipe, back into the city.’
After the scandal of Boris Johnson’s Brexit miscalculation and his public penance as a Foreign Secretary doomed for a certain term to walk the night, while his foul crimes are burnt and purged by the barbs of disgusted European counterparts, London expected better from the latest incumbent, the diminutive and sure-footed Sadiq Khan. The new mayor followed tradition by instantly setting himself up against his own party boss and his immediate predecessor. He was a smiling audition for the opposition leadership that should fall vacant within a couple of years.
As Mayor Johnson cancelled Ken Livingstone’s grand project of a bridge at Beckton linking the two sections of the suburban highway, the North and South Circular roads, so Sadiq gestured at kicking the wretched Garden Bridge into development limbo. A futile gesture? Nothing stands in the path of the vision of Joanna Lumley, London’s twenty-fourth most influential person (according to a poll in the Evening Standard). Then, having perfected the art of making unobjectionable proposals and quietly forgetting them, he reconsidered. He also gave the green light for ‘Barcelona-on-Thames’ at Barking Riverside, a development pitch to trump the shattered communiti
es of New Labour’s Thames Gateway and the spiked Estuary airport of Boris Johnson.
The next gambit was the cycle rebrand. As Boris bullied his name on to the blue Barclays’ bikes, so Khan decided to personalise the red Santander fleet. He came up with the wheeze of commissioning a set of the ‘most comfortable and manoeuvrable’ machines. Smaller wheels, lower frame, new gear hub: much better suited to the twenty-first-century metropolitan (of slighter size). An £80 million contract has been signed with Serco to maintain and distribute a generation of ‘Sadiq cycles’. They will be made in Stratford-upon-Avon. All the boxes have been ticked.
The potter Grayson Perry, who is everywhere now, the articulate and engaging ambassador for the arts in London, told ES Magazine that his ‘biggest extravagance’ was a £15,000 dress in brocade silk with big ceramic buttons. Asked what he collected, he replied: ‘Bicycles. I still have my specialised M2 Stuntjumper which I won in a mountain bike race in the late 1990s.’
Perry used to mudlark on scrambling bikes around Beckton Alp with Jock McFadyen. But the most unlikely duo of cyclists I have ever witnessed were spotted in the sad Haggerston precinct known as the ‘Triangle’; a constantly revised retail strip lost between conflicted blocks of flats, close to where I have lived since 1968. In all those years, I don’t remember noticing a single Hasidic man on this windblown corner of hopeless commercial optimism and failed council initiatives. Now there were two, ginger-bearded, bespectacled, with cartwheel hats and long black coats. They were wobbling bravely on what I took to be their first paid Santander bike experience.
They stuck to the pavements, tilted by a cruel wind rushing around new-build railway flats as they tried to corner into Clarissa Street. The senior man, who must have been in his mid-twenties, was more confident. He surged ahead at something close to walking pace, weighing up properties, taking the measure of new territory, and hectoring his younger companion, who held back, unsure if he could manage the awful trick of dismounting. Better, he felt, to keep going at all costs, hanging on to a hat that threatened to take off in the direction of Hoxton.
The crisis arrived when they reached the canal. The older man wanted to push east. The younger didn’t fancy the proximity of water. The Bridge Academy was decanting its knots of liberated pupils. Shaven-headed artists, rehoused from the demolished flats, south of the canal, were exercising their animals. Bringing them back to piss against familiar posts. Haggerston technos were heading home, enmeshed in one-way conversations. It was like watching a pair of nervous Shetland ponies trot out on to a motorway. It was mayhem. The twin cyclists stalled, swerved, lost their connection. It looked for a moment as if they would fling their machines into the duckweed. They headed for the nearest docking station. I have yet to see an Orthodox woman on a Santander bike. Or a bicycle of any kind. In Haggerston or in Stamford Hill.
TWO SWIMMING POOLS OR, SHARDENFREUDE
‘I have howled at the foot of the glass tower.’
David Jones
Not many guests arrive at Shangri-La, the cloud-shrouded lamasery/hotel that occupies the mid-section (levels 35–52) of the London Bridge prong known as the Shard, by way of a 149 bus out of Haggerston. And on the day of a ritual Underground strike that has to be explained to bemused tourists as they squeeze through automated barriers while encumbered by caravans of luggage. The dingy old railway terminus, established long before any blue-sky copywriter thought of calling it a ‘hub’, has been struggling for months, with many services discontinued and major elements hidden behind fences, while slick corporate mouthpieces attempt to justify the station’s fortunate position as a satellite of London’s tallest building. Collateral compost. Eye candy.
Shardenfreude. It assaults you: vanity in the form of architecture. Desert stuff in the wrong place. Money laundering as applied art. Another unexplained oligarch’s museum of entropy for the riverbank. A giant dagger serving no real purpose: an exclamation point on the Google map of an abolished city once called London.
The great Cockney-Welsh poet David Jones, with his maternal lineage in Rotherhithe, abandoned a sequence called ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’ when satire stuttered in a place he called the ‘Zone’; a location somewhere between the ground where he trained for the First War trenches and our stretched metropolis. ‘I have been on my guard not to condemn the unfamiliar,’ he wrote. But the poet’s trembling fingers, searching for discourse with the angular structures of 1930s modernism, can find no answering touch.
‘I have said to the perfected steel: be my sister, and to the glassy towers: Bend your beauty to my desire.’
Trumpish towers require no plebian contact or approval. Quite the reverse. Their eros is dominance, warping the will of witnesses. And this is what is now labelled: LANDSCAPED PUBLIC REALM. Police vans, engines idling, are a perpetual presence. Sullen security operatives, worried for their continued employment, stare at us as if we were responsible for those terrible uniforms, the boredom, the pitiful wages. A railway station with a shopping concourse is an invitation to outrage. A negative space in which to be penned while you wait for the confirmation that today’s trains are never going to arrive.
London Bridge station is a commuter isthmus accessed by Shardapproved tunnels as dark and soul-sucking as a labyrinth with no centre. The Minotaur is on gardening leave. There should be a tame monster, a fanged Farage, in a bluster of disgusted saloon-bar rant, like one of those hermits kept in follies by eighteenth-century landowners. The cycle sponsor JC Decaux has got his name on vast overhead screens, brighter than destination boards, pumping out a rinse of interchangeable news-porn and advertisements. Hurricanes, earthquakes, snatched children, stagnant football and UKIP resignations. BUY X-MEN: APOCALYPSE. YOUR HOME MAY BE REPOSSESSED.
The era of station hotels has passed, those convenient one-nighters at Charing Cross or Victoria before a continental adventure. Now London Bridge, like its neighbour, Guy’s Hospital, is a confused veteran tasked with living up to the occult geometry of this brash invader: Renzo Piano’s spectacular glass sail, the Qatar-funded investment silo of the Shard. Travellers seethe in a convulsive mob while they wait to be processed on inadequate platforms. To paying metronauts (£25.95 per ascent), basking on the exposed viewing deck, the people far below are so many ants. Upgrade to a £33.95 ticket and you get a glass of house champagne to add sparkle to your temporary elevation from the streets of London.
I came here that day to swim in the highest pool in Europe, fifty-two floors above the station. The surface of the infinity pond shivered with eel-flicker reflections like a Fun House mirror out of the Orson Welles film, The Lady from Shanghai. Ripple mosaics were memory transfers of recreational exercisers who were now taking their ease on couches and wetting plump lips with complimentary goblets of fruit-flavoured iced water. The pool was a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. It was less like David Hockney’s frozen Los Angeles splash than Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation, 20:50; his tank of sump oil miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. The pool at the Shard is a blue carpet across which you cannot walk without sinking. A slap of wet light leaking into a vaporous cloudscape, out there, just beyond floor-to-ceiling triple-glazed windows, across which tiny planes and large helicopters are creeping.
The silenced choppers are not so much a threat as a specialised form of surveillance: protection against base jumpers, eco abseilers and urban exploration collectives. They patrol like outriders at a royal funeral. When you are swimming at the same altitude as a helicopter, the sight offers a reassurance that represses the recollection of those rare collisions with construction cranes hidden in fog.
The circling police helicopters of late afternoon, making their rounds of Hackney’s estates and threatened public housing, are another thing. They are low and loud, blades set to maximum volume. An assertion of power. A jolt of homeopathic paranoia. They have cruised down the Lea Valley from Lippitt’s Hill Camp at High Beach, a
base right beside the poet John Clare’s Epping Forest asylum, and they’ll be back again tomorrow.
Sukhdev Sandhu, who flew with the sky cops for his book Night Haunts (2006), calls the experience ‘the panoptic sublime’. The helicopters cost half a million pounds each, a sum that pays for a lot of clatter. Sandhu reveals that ‘high-power lenses and thermal imagers allow them to… look through the windows of Canary Wharf and spot canoodling office workers from eight miles away’.
Ballard. Hitchcock. English vices. Punishment pleasures. Rear Window meets High-Rise.
Lotus-eaters of the Shard, drifting in a slow-motion ballet that seems to take effect only at forty or fifty floors above the agitated shuffle of London Bridge, are on show. And they know it. As they stare out, trying to identify specific buildings or districts, state-sanctioned voyeurs are gazing right back. The down force of the helicopter blades does not agitate the blue water. As we float in our infinity tank, we are immune to the acoustic footprints of the city, the sighs and grunts of the trains, the bone-shuddering din of the guardians in the sky.
‘They do use sound as a weapon,’ Sandhu says. But what wonders do the helicopter jockeys record to justify their hefty budget? ‘You can see everyone’s swimming pools.’
The Shangri-La pool, about the size of a cricket strip, shared that uncanny Richard Wilson gift for turning the fixed world on its head: floor as ceiling, window as wall, liquid as solid. Wilson has spoken of creating ‘a Tardis-like space, where the internal volume is greater than its physical boundaries’. The idea for 20:50 came to the artist when he was resting beside a swimming pool in the Algarve. He knew that he wanted to place the viewer ‘at the mid-point of a symmetrical visual plane’. His oil bath was promoted, from a pioneer gallery, close to London Fields, to an oak-panelled chamber in the decommissioned County Hall, across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament.
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