by Craig Taylor
The sad thing about it is that people now are actually getting used to it. They haven’t got no choice. I see the effect of that on people’s bodies. From not being able to sleep from rashes, old injuries coming back a lot quicker, breathing difficulties, anxiety, niggling stuff, they’re never clear from any niggles – there’s always something going on, there’s always something that’s not going right. People come in and they think they just need training. But actually, training’s just a small part of it. What you really need is, you know, eight hours sleep, and to eat properly, maybe to do a little bit of meditation, or even to go and see a shrink.
I think London itself, whatever that is, I think there’s a big old cog out there and it just drags you in. Staying healthy does help in the short term but it’s a bit like, you come in, I realign you, we do gait assessment for your running. We strengthen your shoulders, we tell you not to sit like that, you do this, this, this and this. And you know what, for a week you’re all right, but as soon as you start getting stressed your shoulders start going up, the alignment all comes out. So you’re not a losing battle but you are sort of trapped. It’s like a big old circle. You’re not really fixing it, cos the only way you can really fix it is by taking them out from the job, putting them somewhere else, cos it’s no good me fixing you and then the next day you’re just back doing that. I think we all get trapped in London life.
SMARTIE
Londoner
Talk to Smartie, I’m told. Just talk to Smartie, he’ll tell you about London. When I finally meet him, he bounds up to the station at Buckhurst Hill. He’s short with short dark hair, energetic, up early for someone who’s been driving a taxi around the city all night. You’d usually never get me up this early, he says. What is it, eleven? He inspects the day. He is wearing a special pair of shoes with Bjorn Borg’s signature on the side, and he’s already talking before we sit down at a table in the back of a Costa Coffee.
I was born in Islington in North London, but back then it was a poor area and my mum and dad wanted to get me out because they felt it was rough. So we moved into East London, to Leyton. I suppose my most vivid memories of childhood are being brought up in Leyton because there was lots of kids. The area then was built up with mostly Irish, Scottish, English and Italians, really, and a few West Indians. It was safe then to play on the streets and that’s what we did and that’s where, I suppose, I got my instinct to be streetwise. I was in a gang. We were on the streets. We never harmed anybody, but we would get up to mischief, we’d run around the streets, we’d do knock-down ginger, car alarms and we were fanatical about football. So many hours of the afternoons and the days were spent up playing football, idolizing George Best and copying what we saw in the World Cup.
In the 1970s, there wasn’t any men’s shops, it’s not like today where you can go into Selfridges or Harvey Nichols and Harrods and buy designer clothes for men. Men then had to go to places like army surplus stores to buy clothes. There wasn’t many designer boutiques. There’d be a few sort of individually run sports shops, and from that a lot of people my age have an obsession with trainers. I’ve got a collection of about fifty pairs of trainers, predominantly Adidas, all the trainers that we wore in the Seventies and Eighties – most of them I still wear. I mean the trainers I have on today have got Bjorn Borg’s signature on them. They’re approximately thirty years old. Everything that I’ve got on here is about thirty years old. This tracksuit’s about twenty-five, thirty years old. Probably early Eighties. Back in the early Eighties this would have cost £125. That was serious money then and the retail now for something like this on eBay or in a vintage store, you’d be looking at probably £600–£800 for the tracksuit. So I have an obsession.
If we look at the late Seventies in London, there were still bombed-out warehouses from the Second World War. I remember travelling down the river at that time. Everything south of London Bridge, where Butler’s Wharf is, round Tooley Street, where London Bridge Station is, that was all derelict. All around the South Bank was derelict. It looked like a bomb had hit it. They were derelict buildings and in them derelict buildings you’d get squatters, junkies, mostly heroin, because heroin was massive then. They would live in them type of buildings and it was a no-go zone. If you went over there you would probably get mugged or robbed or raped. It was like a city of delinquents, really.
There would be warehouses with big craters in them where the walls had fallen down, crumbling. If you were on a tourist boat going down there they wouldn’t want to take you any further than bloody London Bridge. They didn’t even want to go down to Tower Bridge. The area north of the river was built up with mostly horrible 1960s-type buildings, not very pretty to look at. But the other side was completely derelict. It was a depressing place. We wanted to strive for better.
You have to remember that England was still the poor man of Europe. We had decimalization, where the currency was put down. We had the Labour government that had brought us all the strikes and the Winter of Discontent and I think a lot of the turn came when we had the new government. The Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, it was the start of a new era, an era of optimism really, I think, and that’s where the change came. Because of Margaret Thatcher, even if you were from a working-class background or an Essex boy, you felt you could be somebody. I think that’s really what drove a lot of people to become entrepreneurs, to have a go at business, to have the balls to do it. And from that, people wanted luxury a bit more. They wanted to wear some of these new fashions.
The fashion that became the fashion of London came from Liverpool. Liverpool were the most successful English football team that we had at that period and what was happening in the late Seventies and early Eighties, the fans were travelling to Europe to watch Liverpool in these European Cup – it would be called the Champions League now – matches. I think Liverpool won the European Cup three times, and its fans were basically stealing the clothes from shops in Europe: Sergio Tacchini, Fila, Adidas trainers. Adidas trainers you couldn’t buy in this country, and this is where the obsession started. They were then bringing back the fashions and they were wearing them on the football terraces. Then other rival teams, say West Ham, would go to play Liverpool at Anfield. West Ham had a lot of National Front following, they were very antiblack at that period, and they would turn up like skinheads. They would have MA1 green flying jackets, American flying jackets with the orange lining on, like sort of quilted puffa jackets. They would have red Harrington jackets on, which were skinhead jackets. If you wore a red Harrington you were seen as being National Front at that period. Their hair would be cut very short. They would wear Dr Martens lace-up boots up to here, very military, and super-tight orange tab Levis or maybe 501s, or tight Wrangler jeans.
When they came up to confront Liverpool and their hooligan element, they got there and what they were met with was a group of hooligans that were dressed like girls! They would be wearing flecked hair, would look like it had been blow-dried. Hair covering one of the eyes, like short hair with a step in the back so the hair was graduated. The casuals that they would have met on the terraces were dressed in sportswear, expensive sportswear. Jeans that were detailed, where they’d be frayed at the bottom, specially frayed, slit at the bottom so they parted over the shoe. Super-skintight, bleached Lois jeans, probably the most iconic jean from the era, worn with Adidas Samba trainers, which were black trainers with a big white bit round the front. You can still get them to this day. It’s the biggest-selling Adidas trainer ever and that would be worn with either a Fila Terrinda tracksuit top or a Benetton rugby top. We followed some of the most iconic figures of this period. Bjorn Borg for style, Jimmy Connors wore Cerruti 1881 and of course the legendary John McEnroe. I mean most of us boys could relate to him because he was angry, he was confused and he just said what he thought.
The fans would be divided by the terracing, but you could clearly see what the others were wearing. And they’d never seen nothing like it. It blew them away. We want
that! Don’t they look cool. Because I think what it was, it was a form of modism really. It was a different form of modism where if you took a lot of these football supporters, they were probably mods beforehand so they always were into style. Fashion and style is very an English thing. Individualism, looking a part of a group, but a small group, keeping a secret, not advertising the fact you were wearing a style. You could tell somebody by what they were wearing. You could be sitting on the bus, over the other side of the bus, and I knew you were the same as me. But I wouldn’t have to speak to you. Whereas now everybody looks the same. If I saw a man out there with Adidas trainers, he’s just a man wearing Adidas trainers. It was different then. It was different because you had to be wearing those, you had to be a part of it to know about it, and this look went unnoticed by the powers that be for years. It was only really when The Face magazine did an article about football casuals in about 1983 that it became a phenomenon. It blew up. It went into the papers like the Sun, there’s this underground look that’s been brewing from say ’78, ’79, ’80, all the way through, it took five years, this was underground and it was about labels.
Most people back when I was young would have bought their clothes from market stalls. You could be selling jeans on your stall, another man might be selling sportswear and you didn’t have shops. When I say there was barely any men’s shops, there was barely any men’s shops. I remember driving my mum and dad mad wanting a Fred Perry polo shirt because they became the big thing and there wasn’t no Fred Perry stores, you had to go to an army surplus store where you’d buy tents. An Army & Navy store they used to be called. I remember wanting Dr Martens, again, going to the Army & Navy store. As we moved from the late Seventies to the early Eighties they’d started a few little boutiques – saw the gap in the market. But these shops would have been run individually by individual people. They weren’t the sort of mass stores you get now. They’d be somebody who probably thought, you know, there’s a market for this. There’s a need for this and, you know, I think there was a lot of continental style coming as we hit the Eighties too. Continental fashion was seen as luxurious.
Every community that’s died in London, and I think this is a very important fact, has died because the market culture died. The markets were the hub. If you go to Shepherd’s Bush now, they had a great street market there around Shepherd’s Bush just off Goldhawk Road and once the market dies it kills real Londoners. It kills the real working-class element of London.
When I left school I left with no qualifications but it didn’t mean I couldn’t work in a bank because, you know what, I’d just make up the qualifications. It didn’t matter because nobody checked. Do I believe I can do the job? Yes, I do believe I can do the job. I made up a CV, put as many qualifications down as I thought I’d need to get a job in a bank and off I went. I went into the insurance market, because it was all about common sense and most of these banks, even though they had graduates in the front offices, a lot of them had barrow boys because barrow boys were streetwise. They could add up very quickly because a lot of them played darts, dominoes, any games that made you add up. If you look at the trading floor where I worked, the futures market, most of the traders in the pit environment were barrow boys. They were people that came from market stalls who were rough and ready, edgy, who were streetwise, who could add numbers easily. So I went into the pit to sell an order of 100 lots for the clients – buy 20, buy 15, buy 6, I’m now down 41, buy 8, I’m now down 49, buy another 17, I’ve now done 66. 34 more to do on the order. They could add up quickly because a lot of them worked on market stalls and if you worked on the market stall you would take the money on a Saturday afternoon, well that’s a fiver love, that’s £6, that’s £11, that’s another £4. They were ideal to trade for these banks in the pit because they were aggressive. They weren’t like somebody who went to Oxford or Cambridge or who were wrapped up in cotton wool, who were in a shell, who had never seen anybody, who had never met anyone rough, who had never met anyone black. The ones who had gone to a private school, they’d only mixed with people that were like themselves, they’d never seen, you know, people fighting or being beaten up for liking the wrong music. They weren’t exposed to anything so they were in a shell. They weren’t the ideal ones to be aggressive in these trading pits. So this is why a lot of these East End-type people went into the trading pit.
It’s a place that people like us could work because we were fast, we were good with figures and we could release all our aggression. It was like the Manchester United or Chelsea of working in the City. I mean, if you’re young you want to earn fast money. The two go hand in hand. So you ain’t going to work as an accountant, are you? You want to go where the action is and this place had a thousand good-looking girls in it. There was 3,500 people in the life market under the age of 35. 2,500 men and 1,000 girls, so it was the place to work. Everyone wanted to work there. No one wanted to do anything else in the City.
The look would have been very City, but even then I was individual. All my suits were handmade. I used to get all my suits made by a tailor who used to make stuff for Paul Weller and The Jam, so all my suits were cut mod. He was a tailor in Leyton and when The Jam, before they were famous and they didn’t have the money to use some of the high-class tailors of Savile Row, they used to go to this tailor to get their suits made. If you look at a lot of all the old LP covers of The Jam, especially Paul Weller who’s such an icon, all those clothes were made by the tailor that I used to use.
I was meeting different people, mostly discreet Arabic customers and Russians. Anybody who had money, basically. I worked in a bank off Harley Street and they used to give me all these cheques to pay in at various bank accounts. They were probably laundering money. I was running envelopes and bank cheques all around London. I did that for approximately a year. It was great because I was always out around London, so what I used to do was just skive off. They used to give me the cheques to pay in but I used to just disappear to places like Berwick Street Market in Soho, which was a great street market, or I’d go to Camden Market to look at vintage or Kensington … I wouldn’t come back. They’d say, take these cheques. We’ll see you in the afternoon. So I’d do the banking in about an hour and then I’d have two or three hours to myself.
They couldn’t contact me because there was no mobile phones, so I just used to disappear and come back in the afternoon after going to feed my addiction for knowledge. I just wanted to embrace and experience London in all its different forms. Being art, but mostly fashion and music. I used to just go to places to look at what people was wearing. To see what was going to be the next big thing. I would go to places which at the time people would think, that’s a bit far out. Going to Camden in the early Eighties … normal people who were from different boroughs in London, especially Essex, would think, Christ, that’s way out. Them people are crazy up there. Where it’s the norm now. Well, I’d go there to see what they’d be wearing. I’d see what I could take from that. You’d ape people, and you’d twist it the way you’d want to twist it. I still have things from that period hanging in my wardrobe. I don’t wear them, but I can’t bring myself to sell them.
It’s all a part of finding your identity and it all stems back to young men, and young girls because there were soul girls too in the Seventies and Eighties, being in such a depressing place and wanting to find their own identity. I suppose you’d call it the urban decay of the 1970s, 1980s London, a city which was crumbling but had formed a root. It had got as far as it could crumble. The London of today is built on the core of that period. A film you could watch from that period is The Long Good Friday, about the IRA and the Docklands. It stars Bob Hoskins, he’s a London gangster who wants to redevelop the Docklands. One of his men has a beef with the IRA, killed somebody who’s Irish. Now if you watch that film, it’s a fantastic film. It vividly shows you London in the late Seventies, early Eighties. It’s all filmed along the Docklands. It shows you the burnt-out warehouses and his vision as a gangs
ter, he wants to redevelop the Docklands. It tells you how bad it was here in London because it’s nothing like how it is now. And you’ll see all the Docklands in that period, all burnt-out, all derelict. Everything today is built on that.
PART II
CONTINUING YOUR JOURNEY
PETER REES
City Planning Officer, City of London
His office in the City of London is sparsely furnished. A magazine with an image of Chicago on the cover has been placed near his desk, isolated and aligned. He’s dressed in a crisp white shirt.
People always say to me, ‘What’s London going to be like when it’s finished?’ I say, well, dead – a finished city is a dead city. The cities that come closest to being finished are places like Milton Keynes or Canberra or central Washington DC. They are the new, heavily planned, single-period cities, and they always have problems because they don’t start out organic. A city like London, which is an amalgam of villages, which has just evolved, is much stronger because it can carry on evolving. Paris had no option but to build Île-de-France because they couldn’t incorporate large modern buildings in central Paris, not high-rise ones, without ruining what was Paris, this planned Beaux Arts city. London is lucky in the sense it doesn’t have that. We’re lucky Christopher Wren wasn’t allowed to replan the city after the Great Fire of 1666. If he had, it wouldn’t be a world financial centre today because it would be like Paris, it would be fixed, composed, precious.