Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It

by Craig Taylor

  When we reached the village, I called my brother and he told me, ‘Get a train to Waterloo Station, someone will come and pick you up.’ I found a hotel and I went to the reception. I said, I want to get the train to London. She said, you can’t go from here, you have to go to Peterborough by taxi and catch a train there. I still had some euros but I don’t have change, so I found a taxi and gave him forty euros and said, please take me to Peterborough. I don’t want change for it. In Peterborough, I bought ticket to Waterloo Station, and when I got there one of my brother’s friends came and picked me up in front of the McDonald’s.

  I was so dirty, smelly and my beard was grown and I was much skinnier. And I was so exhausted, you know. And of course I was scared. But I couldn’t believe it: I am in London.

  When I came here I was nothing. Still I’m nothing but now I’ve got a personality. I’ve got documents in my pocket. I’ve got bank account, which I never had in my own country. I live in a nice flat. I don’t have perfect things, but I’m very very grateful. And always I will tell to people, London is something different than other parts of Europe. Here is a place where they give you two wings to go higher than other people. When I compare myself with my friends in Iran, I’m much much higher than them. I had lots of trouble, lots of problems till I get here, but now I’m happy. It was worth all the struggle, it was worth it to get to this position now where I am. If I had to decide again, I would come to London again.

  GETTING AROUND

  EMMA CLARKE

  Voice of the London Underground

  I started off doing some very highbrow stuff for the BBC – poetry and prose reading, you know, dramatic stuff. Then I kind of blurred my way into comedy. My dad saw an ad in the local paper about a studio near us that recorded commercials. It never occurred to me that anyone actually had a job doing voice-over. It seemed like a really silly thing to do for a living. It didn’t seem like a proper job, but he said I should go and send them a tape, so I did and they invited me in for a voice test. I was terrible. Shocking. Because when you read radio ads you have to speak in such an upsy-downsy way; nobody normal speaks like that and I just couldn’t get over my embarrassment at first.

  So I went away and I listened to commercial radio and transcribed the ads and practised them to find my own style, my own voice. I learned the different conventions of a voice-over artist: a certain way you do lists, a certain way you do price product commercials, and so on. You know, say it’s about a garden centre and they’ve got a Christmas special on – you’d say candles, potted plants, and so on. [She slips into her dramatic voice – it is crisper than the other voices in the pub.]

  You have to know how to do the light and shade and give each product a different bit of zing. You don’t want items to run together. It’s not about the words, it’s about the client’s marketing objectives. Instead of blasting through a list of words it’s really the marketer saying, ‘Here’s the range of products we have on offer. Look at our marvellous range.’ But you have to imply that in the inflection and tempo you use. You really learn what’s in your vocal kitbag and you explore your own voice.

  I practised for two years. In the meantime I ran a theatre company which specialized in writing and performing training playlets for businesses and services. There was heavy stuff we did about anti-aggression and violence, dealing with people who were dying in their families. Hospitals and doctors giving bad news to patients, lots of very difficult interpersonal stuff. That was my job.

  Outside of that I was practising voicing, because it’s a highly stylized way of speaking and to be a really good voice-over you need to know when thirty seconds is up, when twenty seconds is up. You need to develop your internal stopwatch to a tenth of a second, a hundredth of a second in some cases. You have to know the timing. I went back after two years and said, could I try again? They listened and then they started giving me work. It developed, more came in, and I had to give up my theatre company.

  A few years ago, London Underground approached a production house I worked for and asked them for recommendations. This production house suggested three men and three women, including me. London Underground took it very seriously and they tried out these different voices in focus groups, over an eighteen-month period. I think there were about six lines we did for the test: ‘Mind the gap’; ‘The next station is …’ They gave each voice a code name; mine was Marilyn. Anyway it was a rigorous selection process, and I’m not sure what qualities they perceived from my voice, but they chose mine. I’ve often wondered if they’d called me Brenda or Ethel whether the punters would have chosen me.

  I was in a pasta restaurant in Barnes in south-west London when I got the call. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, you’re taking the piss. To be honest, it had been going on for so long I thought they’d given it to someone else – but no, they were still testing and testing. I kept it quiet. I’m not a person to go, ‘Guess what I’ve got!’ I just wanted it to occur when it occurred. More months passed because they couldn’t decide on the scripts. They really cared about getting it right. The first session we did took about an hour and a half to record the station names and ‘Please don’t leave your bags unattended’ and basic safety messages, ‘Move along the carriage’ and stuff. Because there isn’t a huge amount to record. Once you’ve said ‘The next station is Oxford Circus’ – you know, how many ways can you say it? They did ask for variations on Marylebone. They couldn’t decide how to pronounce Marylebone, whether it was MAR-le-bone, Mary-le-bone, Mary-lee-bone, or, most bizarrely, Mary-la-bon. So I had to voice all alternatives. I think they chose Mary-le-bone.

  We went line by line, because the different lines in the London Underground are owned by different parts of the organization and they needed a sense of continuity, an audio through-line. I have a fondness for all of the names, I really do. I suppose I especially like ‘Piccadilly Circus.’ I like the rhythm of it: ‘Piccadilly Circus.’ My favourite is ‘Theydon Bois’ (thay-don bo-is). That was great. ‘Mind the gap’ was straightforward, though we tried it several ways. I felt I didn’t want it to sound too scary, didn’t want people to think I was some sort of awful dominatrix wearing thigh-high PVC boots. Because there’s a balance between warning somebody of a potential danger and scaring the living daylights out of them.

  It was all done in Received Pronunciation – no London accent. It was about clarity, about encouraging the people who would hear the announcements to understand it straight off and have no doubt. I think they’re right to have done it the way they did. I love regional accents, but their concern was that foreign visitors might not understand a regional accent as well as they might Received Pronunciation, so it was a safer bet to go with RP. But I don’t talk in RP normally. If I use this accent for my work I’d never get booked because very rarely do people want this accent. They only want my normal Northern accent if it’s playing the part of a person giving a testimonial about an earthy, down-to-earth product. You know, like fence primer. It’s becoming more fashionable to use regional accents in national campaigns. A Northern accent would be rustic, trustworthy, no-nonsense. A cockney accent would be cheeky, wide-boy.

  I also recorded all sorts of fail-safe announcements for all the Tube lines, so if there was a technical problem they’d be ready. ‘This train will not stop at …’ God, you know, I was very conscious when I read those lines not to sound like I was gloating, or like I sounded smug. It is important to sound clear and empathetic, authoritative and somehow nurturing at the same time. You can do that. It’s subtle but when you hear it – when you paint with that many shades – you hear it straightaway. Like if I was to say ‘The next station is Oxford Circus,’ [she stiffens, her jaw tightens, and the resulting sound is hollow with a brittle almost nasty edge], it’s crisp and clear but not a lot of soul in there. But if I was to say it again this way [her face softens, her eyes grow larger for a moment; the sound is now warmth and honey], it’s welcoming, it’s embracing. It is a difference in tone, in consonantal attack.
There’s all sorts of things you can do. Like with the plosives – p-uh, b-uh, t-uh, g-uh – you attack them. When you need to sound crisper you’re straight on them. Whereas if you’re doing a softer read you blur them. And the way you use the resonators in your head. For a crisp, clear, corporate-sounding version you use the resonators in the top of your head. Whereas you use theeese kind of sounds when it’s warmer. If you’re going to do it properly you need to know all this stuff and put the voice in the right place.

  So I tried to do it as welcomingly as I could. I did think, actually, in what circumstances would people hear my voice? How would they be feeling when they heard my voice. Would they be glad to be in London? Would they be scared to be in London? What will people be experiencing when they hear my voice? What will they be coming from or heading towards? It’s quite a weird thing. I’ve done hospital radio and it’s weird to think people would have listened to my voice as they were dying. It’s a very strange feeling. You invisibly accompany people. You’re the soundtrack to their lives when you’re a voice-over artist. When people are on hold I think, god, they’re going to be really pissed off with my voice. That was a concern with the Underground. I really hope people aren’t too irritated. I’m sure they will be. When they’ve had a hard day, when the Tube’s late, when it might have had a technical malfunction and it’s me telling them over and over again that they’ll get there soon.

  It’s funny, because when I got the call from London Underground I was at the restaurant with a guy I was seeing at the time and he said, ‘God, I’ll hear you everywhere.’ He wasn’t saying it happily. We split up after that. He has since told me he is haunted. It is scary: you’re having a bad day and you get on the Tube and there’s the voice. Poor guy.

  NICKY DORRAS

  Taxi driver

  London taxi drivers are renowned for their encyclopaedic knowledge of the city’s messy tangle of streets and byways. Since 1865, they have been required to take the famously difficult Knowledge of London exam, informally known as ‘the Knowledge’, in order to operate a black cab. I meet one off-duty driver sitting in a faded Bugs Bunny jumper at a cafe near Great Portland Street station. His London cabbie badge is attached to a keychain which is attached to another chain hanging around his neck.

  ‘Everything’s happened to Nicky,’ he says. ‘Inland Revenue review, licence nearly taken away, firemen cutting me out of the cab when I was hit by a lorry up on Baker Street.’ The pain in his neck and arm abates over the weekend but reappears once he’s back on Monday, so he’s down to three days a week.

  Years ago he used to own two racing dogs. They raced at the track where the Brent Cross shopping centre now stands. He sat next to his father’s friends in the stands – they thought of themselves as the last of the Jewish gangsters, peeling pound notes from a stack the size of a football. London was slow back then, he says, London was dingy. About the only flashes of colour were the bibs of the dogs as they exploded down the track.

  *

  When I started doing the Knowledge, they gave you a little book with twenty-six runs on each page. You was meant to take yourself to the first place and work out your route to get to the next place. The first run, which everybody knows, is Manor House to Gibson Square. It’s just off of Liverpool Road and Upper Street in Islington. So you worked out how you did that and then you had to learn bits and pieces that you saw on the way and around each area. In those days you had to go back in fifty-six days and they would give you tests on the first five pages. So you had like 130 runs to study in two months and if you did okay, they would say to you, come back in twenty-eight days and they would test you on anything in the first ten pages, and then twenty, and then eventually it was just a free shop. And they didn’t ask you the route that’s down there. They didn’t ask you Manor House to Gibson Square. They would ask you something close by with a different name. They might say, take me from Woodberry Down to Myddleton Square, which is just on the other side of the Angel, so it would be the same route, but slightly different. And you had to know the bits at both ends.

  I rode around on a little moped every day. Still got the marks on my arse. Some people are totally incapable of doing it, but most people can. You just have to force it in until eventually the map appears in your head and you can sort of see it. The first six months it’s like a piece of poetry and then eventually you get it and you can see other things and other routes as well so that you can cut across from one to the other. You’ve really got to give it your attention. It’s like a well. You’ve got to pump it every day. So if you’re doing The Knowledge and then you take a two-week holiday, you come back and you’ve forgotten everything you’ve done in the last six weeks.

  There were several places that were alien to me. So what I did was, I went for a test one day and I just couldn’t figure this one out at all. The guy asked me one of these places, so I went through and I picked out all these runs that I thought were a bit alien to me, mainly in south-east London, places like that, and I used to keep practising. I bought myself a tape recorder and every day I used to record them runs into the tape recorder and listen to them. Every day. I know that sounds a bit hard to believe, but it’s true. I’d memorize them, because then after you’ve done the run, you write it down in a book, all the streets, and then after I’d been doing it about six or seven months I thought, I can’t clear these ones, these ones I’m a bit unsure about. So I made a point of learning all those like a piece of poetry and doing them every day until I was confident that I could do them.

  Most people in those days used to have a partner, so if me and you were doing the Knowledge, you’d hold the book and I’d call it and you’d say, yep, yep, yep, yep, and after you’d been doing it four months, they’re fed up with you. They don’t want to hear you any more, so you have a tape recorder that doesn’t get fed up with you. As long as you put the batteries in it, it was okay.

  Some of the guys would do memory tricks. So they’d go down Harley Street and the three roads that run across, they’d remember that by Don’t Want None. It was DWN. Devonshire, Weymouth, New Cavendish Street. So you’d think, what street is that? Don’t Want None. Weymouth, there, you’ve got it.

  When I did it, I think it took me just over a year from start to finish to do, which was pretty good. Now, as I understand it, there are so many people trying to become cab drivers, that they give you the book, tell you to go away, and when you’ve learned it, come back and then they’ll start testing. So it might be a year before you do the first test.

  None of it’s W. H. Auden, I can tell you. But eventually the mists do start to clear and you can see it.

  EMILY DAVIS

  Cyclist

  Everybody has their own London and they don’t very often move outside it. So I have Hackney and Stoke Newington, Islington and Covent Garden and the West End, which I feel very much are my London. And then I have whatever parts I’m working in. Anything else is an adventure. We went to visit friends in Catford the other day, where I’d never been in my life, and we set off through the Blackwall Tunnel and realized in fact it’s no distance at all! But once you cycle round London, you take much better control of it than on the Tube or even the bus. You work out your own routes and you know exactly where you are and you know how long it’s going to take you to get from one place to another, and you’re not dependent on the vagaries of the transport system. I think there is something about controlling your own route and deciding whether you’re going to turn left or right and will I cut across the park or will I go round? All those things give you a sense of ownership that you don’t get when you’re on public transport and somebody else is delivering you to the second point.

  There are areas I probably wouldn’t go by myself late at night, including areas not far from where I live. But that’s to do with that sense of ownership when you’ve kind of mapped your city, then those mapped areas you feel somehow you’re entitled to, whereas I’m sure if I lived in some of the areas that I personally now wouldn’t go to a
t night, they would be fine for me as well. I don’t think there are areas that are particularly dangerous. I think it’s just unfamiliarity. [She stares out the window of the cafe in Holborn.]

  I find West London a strange and alien environment. It doesn’t scare me, but I just find it a world apart somehow. There’s a sharpness or something, and that isn’t really who I am. I think there’s a brittleness about it that doesn’t appeal to me. I’d rather have this clutter round me, a slightly more human and warmer energy.

  My husband and I went for a bike ride around the Olympic site the other day. I find it impossible to believe that London will be capable of achieving all the things that the Olympic committee are pretending it’s going to be able to achieve. And I don’t mean the Games themselves, necessarily. I’m sure all stops will be pulled out and the Games will be fine and they’ll be efficient and they’ll work and there’ll be a lovely opening ceremony and there’ll be a lovely closing ceremony and nothing terrible will happen. So I think all that will be okay. What I find it hard to believe is that they will be able to restore the site in the way they say they will to make it this great.