by Craig Taylor
Sometimes that upsets me. I’m notorious for my tidying; friends who are visiting might move pictures to see if I notice, or open cupboards to see if they’re just as tidy inside. It’s very tempting to try to tidy a city. It would defeat me, of course, because the constraints and pressures are too great. When I see something that’s not in the right place, something that’s broken as I walk around the City, it does upset me. On the other hand, I have to tell myself that’s evidence of the life and strength of the place. Things are being broken and brushed against and need to be changed.
It’s difficult to see what one is doing as a very, very, very small part of a very long process and realize the impact you’re having is very small in terms of the continuum of the life of the place, but a place is (a) so much more important, and (b) so much stronger than any individual, or committee or organization can be. Planning cannot create excellence in terms of building and design. We are in a position where we can sometimes make mediocrity out of awfulness – and across London, the planning system sees an awful lot of awfulness.
The problem with planning is that it teaches you to ask questions and it’s much easier to come up with new questions than it is to actually come up with definitive answers, and the more you interrogate the question the less likely it is there is going to be a definitive answer, which is why I come back to saying I don’t think we should be planning London, we should be managing it. Because planning does require you to come to a definitive answer, have a definitive course of action and then to implement something, whereas managing means watching it on a day-by-day basis and just nudging it and helping it. It’s like being responsible for 4,000 years of history but only 2,000 have happened so far.
I always wanted to come here. I come from Swansea, which was described by Dylan Thomas as an ‘ugly, lovely town’. But I’m not an outsider, I am one of the indigenous people – my Celtic forebears camped here in London on the banks of the river Walbrook, the Walbrook stream, roughly where the Mansion House is now, over two thousand years ago. We were overwhelmed by waves of immigrants, the Romans, the English and various others that have swept through. It’s the amalgam of those layers of tribes that have come in and claimed citizenship of London that make it the city it is.
I see it as my role to help that fire to burn brightly, help that process to be even richer. It may sound a bit highfalutin but that’s how I feel. As an indigenous British person, as a Celt, I’m very proud that people from all over the world have wanted to come to this country, and particularly this part of the country, to make London a world city as opposed to simply a Celtic one. My personal commitment is that deep and that passionate. Then that’s what you’d expect from a Welshman – an English word meaning ‘foreigner’, which is a bit of a cheek.
Now when you come to something like the City, on the one hand it is a village. Villages thrive on gossip and gossip makes money. It doesn’t matter if it’s a well in the Sahara or a pub in the City, people are not just going there for refreshment, they’re going there for gossip and that’s their primary motivation, in terms of adding pleasure to their lives. The practical thing of getting a refreshment or getting water is very boring. It’s the gossip that encourages people to go to those locations, and when it’s a business location, a business village, that gossip is worth money in the sense that people can actually think up things to do, deals to do, based on the information they pick up only face to face, which they would never get done on the telephone or on the Internet. The juicy stuff. That’s been going on for hundreds of years. If you walk into the little alleyways and backways of the City you’ll find that to this day. The City has always thrived on its alleyways, its narrow spaces, its pubs and restaurants, and people would disappear into that rabbit warren whenever they got the chance for the sort of informal business that never happens in the office.
I’m told it’s now the fashion to end a relationship by text. It certainly isn’t possible to start one by text. It’s the same with business. If you’ve heard something and you want to check it out, you probably want to talk to somebody you trust face to face. You might want to relax them first with a beer. You might want to reassure them. If it’s somebody you don’t know very well you’ll certainly want to talk to them where you can look into their eyes before you trust them with your bit of information. You could call it chatting, discussion, but I like the word ‘gossip’ because it indicates there’s a lot of stuff there that wouldn’t be communicated in any other way. The French can’t gossip properly because they’re sitting at tables. They do gossip but you only hear family gossip or the gossip of your friends. The joy of the English pub is that you’re standing up, often quite closely packed, and you overhear things. And in a business centre that can be very valuable.
Especially when you have a city like London where three hundred languages are spoken by schoolchildren every day. You have this great cultural mix, all these different ideas and cultures coming into central London. People standing in bars, standing in queues for a bus, or whatever it might be, being close together and overhearing each other’s languages and each other’s conversations and ideas … It might simply be a pattern of words you overhear or a sentence totally out of its context which triggers a thought in your mind. It’s not overhearing someone say such and such a company is going bankrupt and rushing back to your office and selling your shares. I’m not talking about anything as obvious as insider trading. I’m talking about people brushing together and someone hearing someone saying a phrase in another language or hearing a phrase in their own language that doesn’t make sense, that puzzles them. Because you’re so close to people you’re more aware of the life around you and there’s more of this friction of interaction and as a result you are more stimulated by it.
Places make the best lovers. You can trust a place more than you can trust a person as a lover. A place is more dependable and it has so much depth and stimulation and provides you with the opportunity to realize yourself. The place reflects you, provides you with stimulation, the ability to realize potential. If it’s a good place it makes you feel stronger, makes you cleverer and more powerful. I did a walk with someone from the centre of the City to Soho, just taking a beeline, and on that walk ended up going into the Temple Church in the middle of the Temples so I was back in the twelfth century after already having gone into the Black Friar pub, an Arts and Crafts pub, and walking through the centre of Covent Garden and ending up in a Chinese restaurant having dim sum. Now there are not many people who can give you that much stimulation, but being with a person and having the ability to have that friend, London, as a companion throughout gives you a wonderful extra dimension to anything you do. I think of London as a partner. I’m in love with London and always have been.
London’s greatest attribute is that it has the best free sex in the world. That’s why the youngsters come to London. I read an article on the lively underside of Dubai, but it’s all paid sex. It might be a centre for prostitution in a way that you might find in Amsterdam or the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. Any major city will provide those sorts of services, but London is full of young people from around the world looking to go to bed with other young people from all over the world. Why the hell would they pay for it? And that is, if you like, something you will only find in a city as vibrant as London and New York. There’s nowhere else on the planet that can offer that range of ‘opportunity’. Youngsters having gone to great lengths to come to London to work, to experience its vitality at the start of their career, will have to find a job to pay for the experience and they luckily arrive at a time when they’re not just at their most sexually active but at their most intellectually active.
That’s London’s benefit and that, if you like, is a further acceleration of a process we’ve seen over the centuries where people have come to settle here. We now have a period where people aren’t necessarily coming to settle here. They’re coming to experience this wonderful place and move on quite rapidly. What I want to try and do is get across
the way I see London as a very large, very complex organism.
You won’t be surprised when I tell you that I don’t believe London can be planned. It’s too complicated. It’s far too important to risk planning it in the way many smaller cities and communities are planned. You can’t do a Milton Keynes on it. You can’t pull out a sheet of paper and say how London should work. London already does work. It works in a way none of us understand. It’s so complex, so multilayered, so interrelated with places around the world and activities within itself. You have to look at how you can manage London, not plan it. How you can treat it, if you like, as an exercise in gardening, look at which plants are thriving and which aren’t. Weed out new plants and try new species, encourage those that are doing well. Sometimes try to corral them so they don’t do a Japanese knotweed and take over the whole garden. But at the same time recognize the local climate and ecology and work with it rather than against it.
That’s not something planners have done over the generations. They have laid out things like the Barbican Estate with pedestrians on one level, vehicles on another, abstract conceits that follow long-lost historical grids rather than the neighbouring street pattern, and not surprisingly they have confused people and created very arid areas. Paternoster Square is another example – all rectilinear, with the buildings laid out on abstract spaces, and it never did well. It was the first project I was faced with when I came to London in 1968 from university. We were divided into groups and the area I was given was Paternoster Square. Little did I know that over thirty years later I’d still be working away at the project. What we now have is a Paternoster Square with attractive spaces at ground level, with facilities that people use and modern office accommodation, all done in way that’s harmonious to the setting of the Cathedral and fits in with the grain of the city. But it took a great deal of effort, twenty or thirty years, to unpick the bad planning.
People are earthy. We like to think we’re terribly sophisticated. We commute into central London to do intricate, complex technical tasks but we’re fuelled by the same desires as our ancestors were thousands of years ago. We have the same basic urges and I think we need to be aware of that when we’re looking at the places we inhabit. We need to make provision for those urges and make sure London is not just a sterile working environment or worse still a mixed-use, family-friendly, nondescript boring town like so many other places on the planet.
DAVY JONES
Street photographer
London always goes on about being this financial powerhouse, which I’m sure it is – but then the City of London’s rubbish, really. You know, for a financial powerhouse, it suffers from the same rubbish architecture, rubbish streets, haphazard chaos. The people you see on the streets of the City of London aren’t really the very wealthy ones. You’ll never see them on the streets of the City of London, because they don’t go out in the street: they have flunkies to do everything for them and they travel everywhere by car or taxi. So the only people you see out on the streets are kind of careworn. The funny thing is, everybody’s dressed the same in the City. Men are all in dark blue, grey or black – even brown’s not really allowed – while the women are allowed a flash of colour, but there’s a cheapness to a lot of the clothing. The people on the streets of the City of London look quite harassed, more than the rest of London really. They look put-upon. You occasionally see one of the rich ones and you can tell them straightaway. They have a general air of fragrance, of being freshly laundered. They smell of money because everything about them is manicured and cared-for and expensive. Whereas most of the ordinary workers are in cheap suits that don’t fit them, that are a bit worn, a bit shiny in places.
He is sitting in Soho Square without a coat on, thanks to the late-morning sun. A man with a guitar strums chords nearby as we talk. When clouds block the sun, shadows move across the square and up the walls of the buildings.
At some point, London started to become a bit more boastful. It started trying to get impressive buildings in the City, and that has affected the light in the City. London is mostly low-rise, two or three storeys, whereas the City was traditionally higher. And because it is partly medieval, there are narrow streets, so it can be quite dark on the streets. With the new buildings coming on, on sunny days they act like big mirrors and reflect light into these streets that didn’t really get a lot of light before. It is a kind of bluey-green light because of that tinted glass that they use. Usually it’s a bit cold because there’s not really many red-tinted windows. But it is a very concentrated beam, so it looks very dramatic.
As it begins to rain, we take cover under the awning of a cheap chicken restaurant on Greek Street. He stands, smoking, looking around. Sometimes, he says, a person pulling a hood over their head makes a beautiful image in London.
Sometimes I get lost in daydreams looking at people and thinking, what’s their life like? What goes on with them? Do we have any similar viewpoints? Is there any common ground? Do we all live in our own little worlds? It’s almost instinctive when you’re shooting, and the thing is, it passes really quickly so then you’ve moved on. It’s only when you’re looking back later, when you come to the edit, that you think, Jesus, what was going on there? At the time you just see it as an instant. There’s something that triggers juxtaposition, expression, stance. It could be an argument. Women for some reason are always quite keen to have arguments in public and you can tell that men aren’t. They might want to talk about it later, privately, where a woman wants to get it out straight away. It would be quite interesting to try and do a series on it because you can tell by body language that the man’s uncomfortable with discussing this in public while the woman is focused on the issue and oblivious to everything else.
You have to concentrate hard, but any five minutes in London you can find stuff going on. There are always moments of small drama. I love women and men arguing in the street, kids running away from parents and their panic, especially in the city, when kids make a dart and the parent’s just lost and doesn’t know if they’re going to be run over or something. There’s that moment of panic. Kids fighting in the street is also quite good.
But you do notice in London there’s fewer and fewer children on the streets. You don’t see them playing on the streets in the same way they used to. I’ve still seen them in Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle, Manchester or Belfast; in those cities you still see gangs of kids roaming, looking for amusement, either torturing themselves or torturing other people. Hitting people with sticks or something, throwing rocks at cars and all that. But in London you don’t.
Shoreditch still has quite a lot of street life and of course the fashions and the clothes are different. It tends to be louder and have more distinctive outfits. It’s less tightly controlled and there is less putting on a face. In a way there’s more individuality. I don’t want to mythologize poverty but there’s more individual expression in a cheap clothing sort of way, there is a kind of individualism. Whereas West London, any wealthy area – North London as well – it’s more tightly controlled. Sometimes those areas feel a bit like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the Midwich Cuckoos or something because there’s thousands of women dressing out of a Boden catalogue. It’s all quite rigid and it’s much more controlled and much more putting on a face to the world. That can be interesting from a photographer’s point of view because there’s a blankness that goes on. They display less emotion. There’s less body language. In the poor areas there’s a bit more flamboyance and some people might find it vulgar but there’s more expression in a way. It’s just more open in that sense. Street life in Brixton’s always better: you get corner shops where there’s some Jamaican guy running it and there’s about eight of his mates in there all the time. They’ve got music playing and they’re playing dominoes and having a drink and so they’re having a kind of little party in the shop while he’s working, which is a lot more interesting than going into Sainsbury’s and a lot of the other chains.
You can always rel
y on something happening, it’s just whether you can get it or not on various streets. I’ve done shots in New York as well, it’s easier there because you can predict where things are going to go and where people are going. It’s more haphazard in London, more higgledy-piggledy, so you don’t get those dramatic moments that central planning can create. Obviously London has a couple of those but even when you think about it, Buckingham Palace is shit really. You know what I mean? As a spectacle it’s rubbish. It’s quite a boring building with a roundabout in front.
Paris is largely more planned than London, so it has a more dramatic, impressive structure inherently. I like the chaos and haphazardness of London. You can’t rely on the inherent drama of a planned city in London. You have to look for other things and usually it’s in the people. London is distinctively London, but at the same time it looks like a lot of other places. London, shitty storefronts everywhere. You do notice how uncared-for it is and how shitty London is. Bill Bryson has written about street cleaning, how in Paris they spend £21 per head on street cleaning whereas London spends about, I don’t know, I think it’s £3 or £6. It shows. There’s rubbish everywhere. London is generally uncared-for, the pavements, the roads, like the way they’re patched up in a really careless fashion so there’s never any attempt to even them off or even make them match up. There are an incredible number of street signs in London that aren’t straight. Some have been knocked in, fair enough, but nobody ever replaces them. And sometimes they don’t even put them in straight. You realize that when you’re photographing them because afterwards when you’re looking at the photo you’re aware of the vertical and you realize they’re all slightly out. You think, do they not try and put them in straight? Do they just not bother?