From then on, estate agents’ boards began to sprout from the basements, and builders and interior decorators swarmed round the square, carrying whole walls away from inside houses, pointing the brickwork, painting the fronts, taking long speculative lunch hours in the pub, while Nigel and Pamela, Jeremy and Nicola made flying spot-checks in their Renaults and Citroëns. The leaves on the trees grew greener; old absentee landlords suddenly started to take an unprecedented interest in the lives of their tenants, shaking their heads gloomily at the absence of bathrooms and the damp patches and the jags of falling plaster, and suggesting that the tenant would be better off by far in a spick council flat in Finsbury Park. For every signboard advertising ‘Vacant Possession’ there had been a flyting game, alternately wheedling and vicious. Some landlords locked their tenants out of their lavatories; some hired thugs in pinstripe suits; some reported their own properties to the council as being unfit for habitation; many offered straight cash bribes – the going rate for eviction was £200, a large sum to tenants but one that was a fraction of the rising monthly value of the property. (In three years, a typical house on the terrace rose in price from £4,000 to £26,000.) The tenants were winkled out; most of them were innocent of their rights, and those who tried to stay were subjected to long, elaborately mounted campaigns of harassment. Alongside the builders’ skips on the pavement, there were handcarts and aged minivans, with a transistor radio squawking pop tunes on top of the roped-together pile of tacky furniture. The local barber told me about the girl-graduates who came to sweet-talk him out of his flat, flashing their miniskirts and going on about vinyl bathrooms and ‘conveniences’. He had already lost most of his customers, since the council was tearing down several acres of neighbouring streets to make way for glass-and-concrete apartment blocks.
It rained eviction notices, but the agents and landlords kept the slaughter out of sight of the prospective buyers, who were all people of principle, staunch Labour voters, dedicated lovers of the working class. They wanted the shawled Greek widows, the clowning blacks on the pavement outside the pub, the wise and melancholy Irish and the Cockney wits; they liked the square because it was real, and they found colour and charm where the landlords saw only dreck. And, as the tenants drifted unwillingly away, they left their familiars; lean mongrels and starved cats, who roistered in the alleys and kept the square at night alive with eldritch shrieks and desolated love-moans. There was an old lady with a ruined pram who collected rags and discarded clothes; her business thrived, and she trundled a mountain of furs gone to verdigris and mothballs, and charred demob suits, and plastic basketwork hats with bunches of artificial cherries of an unlikely colour.
I was adopted by an abandoned cat, lean and black as an old curate, with a voice that was uncannily guttural with thirst and hunger. It tottered uncertainly about my flat, took a snobbish shine to the central heating, and bedded down gracelessly, like an evacuee. Pets are forbidden in many council flats, and the ones left behind in the square led a life of ingratiating atavism, battened on to the new wave of middle-class immigrants, and developed sophisticated cravings for cream and chicken livers. They were the real permanent residents of the square, these animals for whom the rest of London, and the wheels of changing social fortune, were not even rumours. The landlord could tear the cat’s owner away from the place he had lived in as long as he could remember; but the cat stayed, like the name on the disconnected bell, and the dead-pigeon smell in the front-area – mortal remains, of the kind preserved in old photographs . . . things which survive, but only just long enough for the collector of local colour to record them.
The people went, to Finsbury Park, the darker reaches of Holloway Road, and brazen GLC estates on the Essex border. The people who came in (a disproportionately small number since a single middle-class couple and their baby can displace anything up to a dozen sitting tenants) were from Kensington, or the northern outer suburbs, or the Home Counties; and they settled avidly on the land, taking over its shops and pubs, getting up little campaigns to preserve this and demolish that, starting playgroups, and giving small intense dinner parties for other new pioneers. They took tutorials in local gossip from their chars, and talked knowledgeably about ‘Ron’ and ‘Cliff’ and ‘Mrs H.’ and ‘Big Ted’, as if the square and its history were their birthright.
But it was by no means a complete takeover; people still repaired old cars from front rooms along the square, and on the unreclaimed east side, the houses seemed to actually swell with an influx of the displaced and the very poor. This part of London responds like a needle-gauge to disturbances across the world, and the expulsion of Asians from Kenya showed up on the square in a sprinkling of faces who looked bitterly unaccustomed to such want and cold, and were determined to move out before they got bogged down in the rising damp and learned to shiver with fortitude before the popping gas fire with half its plaster columns cracked or gone. On the far side, the sunny side, of the square, these unluckier migrants could see a future of a sort; a future of Japanese lampshades, House and Garden, French baby cars, white paint, asparagus tips, Earl Grey tea and stripped-pine stereo systems – the reward of success is the freedom to choose a style of elegant austerity. It is hard to guess how such conspicuous rejection of the obvious fruits of wealth must have looked to the Asians, who had so recently been forcibly deprived of their money and its attendant powers. (‘How much do you have now?’ asked a radio interviewer of an expelled Asian businessman at Heathrow. ‘Two hundred shillings,’ said the man, speaking carefully, talking of the contents of his wallet like Monopoly money.) They wandered glumly about in second-hand overcoats, glazedly detached from their own dereliction. When stray dogs snuffled at their feet, they kicked them, delicately and surreptitiously, in their bellies.
Both groups of immigrants were innocent of the improvised network of rules which had been evolved around the square. The smart young things trespassed casually, arrogantly, secure in the conviction that the future of the square lay in their hands. The Asians were shy, beadily knowing, and usually wrong. Both groups made themselves unpopular.
On the nearby block of shops there were two opposite, nearly identical, grocery stores – one run by a Greek Cypriot, and one by a family of African Asians who had come over some years before. Each shop had its band of regular customers. The Cypriot was liked by the West Indian and Irish women, and kept their local foods in stock. (I tried to buy a loaf of bread there once. It looked ordinary enough. An Irish lady made me put it back. ‘You wouldn’t want to be eating that, it’s blackie bread. You go black overnight, if you eat that. Black as sin and too long and big for your girlfriend too—’ The shop was full of West Indians at the time; I was the dupe and outsider, not they. They joined in, threatening me with elephantine potency and body-hair if I touched their wonder bread. Alas, I didn’t.) The shop opposite was mainly patronised by the respectable Cockney working class; it was full of notices about not asking for credit as a refusal might offend, and piled high with cans of petfood. It was the chief gossip centre of the quarter, and sent calendars and cards at Christmas to its regulars. Jokes were the main currency of both shops; facetious insults, usually of a bawdily intimate or racial kind, which buzzed back and forth over the racks of breakfast cereals. These jokes kept insiders in and outsiders out; they reflected – harmlessly would not be strong enough, cathartically would give them too importantly theatrical a function – the tensions in the composition of the quarter. But the immigrants could never get them quite right.
Both the Asians and the young pioneers wandered promiscuously into both shops. Once there they laughed too loudly or not loudly enough at the ritual jokes; they asked for foods which the shop they were in did not stock. When they tried to initiate jokes themselves they were too elaborate, too humorous – for humour was not the point at all – and they were received with wary tolerance. Had they been able to joke about their own peculiar tastes for white paint and thrifty ecologism it might have been different; but they presumed
to a matey all-men-are-equal tone – and the visible untruth of that ploy was all too clear to their auditors, whose own lives were day-to-day struggles with a dramatic inequality (and that made harsher by the presence of these well-heeled young couples), hard-bitten compromises with the other people in the quarter who were their territorial competitors, if not their enemies.
The local pub was carefully demarcated into symbolic territories. The public bar was the West Indian province, with a smattering of white girls of catholic tastes and inclinations. The saloon was for the Irish. There was one black, in a shiny felt hat, who ambled leggily round the saloon bar picking up empty glasses; and in the Caribbean bar of the pub there was a solitary, contemplative Irishman. These two hostages strengthened the division. In the public bar, the juke box hammered out reggae records; in the saloon on Friday nights Bridie the Singing Saxophonist carolled about the Mountains of Mourne and the Rose of Tralee through an amplifying system which made her sound like Frankenstein’s monster.
On Saturday mornings, the West Indians had the pavement outside the pub to themselves, and called to the black girls coming out of the service at the shout-and-holler gospel tabernacle across the road, in their white dresses and tight curls.
‘Rosee!’
‘Mary-lyn!’
‘Gay-lee!’
‘Oh, man.’
A sardonic toast, in rum and Guinness in the sun. Before the pub opened in the morning, you could hear the singing – ‘Sweet Jes-us,’ languorous and seductive, as if the Saviour was being cajoled out of bed or bar – and the movement of the bodies inside, pile drivers in muslin, stirring and shaking in the thin walls. The Greek church, on the other side of the block of shops, was more decorous, with a subdued trickle of people in black leading pale scrubbed children. But their priest rode like a gangster in a brand-new Ford Cortina; fast, unsmiling, a pack of cigarettes open and spilling on the dashboard like a fan of playing cards.
But the pioneers went everywhere regardless. They stood on the pavement beside the West Indians, pretending they were at a garden pub in Hampstead; they slummed in the public bar, and put the occasional sixpence in the juke box; they investigated the churches; they joined the villainous Golden Star club, a black dive where you drank rum or beer in paper cups and shuffled on the tiny dance floor to records of amazing rhythmic crunch and volume. Wherever they went, they spread money and principled amity. They were interested in everybody, as temporary and ubiquitous as secret policemen. The Polish tailor who had a workshop in his front room in the block of shops grimaced at them as they went by; he, presumably, had prior experience of people who invade places armed with good intentions.
The local paper, the Islington Gazette, found its letter columns filling with protests against ‘the new Chelseaites’, with their one-way traffic schemes (in Barnsbury, a few blocks south of the square), and their cheque-book evictions. The local Labour Party began to split down the middle, between the soft-accented newcomers – all with honourable theories of workers’ control – and the old long-resident trades unionist. It seemed like the beginning of a class war. But the young couples had never conceived of themselves as a class – they had rejected the bourgeois ethic, just as they had rejected the florid display of Chelsea – and were strenuously, idealistically individualist. They didn’t see themselves in the stereotypical portraits painted by the angry correspondents in the paper; they were not like that, they cared and had scruples. How could sincere socialists be accused of class-exploitation? Or acres of white paint be construed as a vulgar exhibition of financial power? Jeremy and Nicola, Pamela and Nigel were indignant and troubled; or they took the vindictive portraits to refer to quite other people, and joined in the chorus of execration.
All round the square, more working-class streets came down. Windows were boarded up, and the London Electricity Board put LEB OFF in swathes of paint across the front doors when it disconnected each house’s supply. It looked like a sign of a plague or a primitive curse. ‘Leb off!’ As the demolition men moved in, a cloud of old brick-dust hung over the streets, and more frightened cats migrated southwards into the square. Soon after I stopped living there, Lesly Street residents refused to go; they barricaded both ends of the road and tried to sit it out as the bulldozers rumbled closer, taking down their garden walls and flattening flower borders under their tracks. The residents were supported by some rebellious social workers and one sympathetic Labour councillor, and their ‘No Go Area’ got into the national newspapers. But Lesly Street has gone too, now. It wasn’t perhaps a class war, but there has certainly been something suspiciously like a class victory.
In the converted house where I lived, privilege and choice, like a thick belt of insulation, kept the destruction of the surrounding streets to little more than an annoying noise that interfered with one’s reading. The garden in the centre of the square was replanted; the trees, now we were in a smokeless zone, looked less sorry; the careening streams of after-school kids thinned; the front area was easier to keep clean. It was regarded as a small victory for conservation that the wall at the back of the garden was kept high, so that the tenants of the new council low-rise flats would not be able to watch the sunbathing Brahmins leafing through the New York Review of Books on their breakfast patios.
The off-licence which I used came down. The betting shop was served with a surprise notice of demolition. Little back-street businesses shifted or died. Every big city, even at times of desperate property-shortage, has crannies into which the feckless and the transient and some, at least, of the dispossessed, can lose themselves. No one knows exactly where everybody goes in these upheavals. Municipal housing helps some; but the unlucky have to search out those remaining areas which have not yet been picked out by the spotlight of wealth and fashion or the dimmer beam, which often accompanies it, of urban renewal. Ruinous terraces backing on to the railway tracks in Camden . . . grim apartment houses in east Holloway . . . derelict streets running alongside disused wharves and warehouses south of the river . . . There was a boy with a transistor radio and the scalp of a clipped ferret who sold me a bargain Austin Sprite; by the time the big-end went and the gearbox had exhausted the sawdust he’d added, he had gone too – his house boarded over, his business marked only by a long grease stain on the pavement. He might crop up anywhere.
But the pioneers, the new Brahmins, are there to stay; their money firmly invested, their place assured. The trees grow greener for them; they outlive cats, charladies, sitting tenants, they ride the tides of inflation and depression and mobility just as their parents did. Though they have loftier spirits than their parents, or more innocence. The square is not – will not be – as ‘real’ as it was; but it is coming to be a place of substance, which, on the economic scale of things, is perhaps more important. If the frontier spirit with which it was colonised is fading, it is being replaced by a sense of imminent history – it is growing a pedigree from scratch . . . as if the departed tenants had no more claim on it than the delivery drivers who take cars out to their new owners and put the clock back to zero. The tenants – ‘temporary people’ in the words of a lady Brahmin – will always be on the road somewhere, being passed by.
In its rehabilitation back into respectability, the Islington square was recovered as property; for the middle-class residents it was place as something to purchase and own, where for the departing tenants it had been a place to borrow, squat on, or move through. North London is dull and upright at heart; temporariness and mobility are frowned on, and the signals of their existence – cafés, restaurants, bars as meeting points rather than local pubs, take-away food stores, boutiques, bedsitter agencies – are few and dingy. Transients there live a furtive and persecuted existence, regarded as the flotsam of the city; and people hope that they will be swept back to sea on the next tide. The most evident kind of transience is the transience of failure – the shady car dealer, the inept con man, the tramp dossing in the condemned basement, the balding lodger who flits on rent day – and
it is against this that the white city of permanence, property, thrift, and cleanliness is, in large part, a fortress. The exaggerated neighbourliness of the pioneers, their attempt to turn Islington into a cosy village of gossip, play groups, and intimate dinner parties, is a way of rejecting that other city of locomotion, dirt, discontinuity and failure.
I moved from Islington to Earl’s Court, where motion and migration are the area’s most constant, most evident features. It is under the flight-path to Heathrow and the pneumatic whoosh of low-flying jets punctuates the day at five-minute intervals. Container trucks speed north and south on either side of the square where I live, and the reverberation of a tube line somewhere nearby deep in the earth makes the top storey shudder on still evenings. Everyone is going somewhere. Even the area itself seems to float in a geographical vacuum: people call it, alternately, ‘Earl’s Court’, ‘South Kensington’, ‘Chelsea’ and ‘Fulham’, as if it too locomoted about the city, responsive to its inhabitants’ self-images. But it is on the Earl’s Court Road, that ravaged fiesta, where the directionless locomotion of the nomad turns into a sufficient way of life. People there have the isolated, depthless stare of returned transatlantic yachtsmen, not sure if this is land, or where the horizon ought to be. They carry most of what they own in grubby airline bags, and are blown about by the continuous eddies and tailwinds of the passing traffic. Earl’s Court Road is a street of dreadful formica snackeries and chicken-and-chips takeaways. Its pubs have bloodstains on the lavatory walls; its pavements swirl with waste paper, and on Sunday mornings are streaked with thin, bilious vomit. Down narrow basements and tucked into alleys, there are dubious clubs where prostitutes lean in the hallways and boys with faces of corrupted cherubs smile winningly at fussy men of middle age who look like blackmail victims.
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