by Craig Taylor
Logically there shouldn’t be any fish in there, if you think of all the changes that have gone on in London since industrialization – the face of London, the landscape, everything. You go down to Waterloo Bridge and look over when the tide comes out. There’s gonna be fish on that side and you just wouldn’t believe it, but there are. The water’s so filthy and muddy and dirty and everywhere you look there are barges and traffic fumes and there’s oil on the roads and every time it rains all that gets washed into the river. You know, it’s a dirty place isn’t it, any city. But to be honest, there’s always something – pollution, cormorants, over-fishing, natural diseases – there’s always something that the fish population has to battle against. And I like to think that nature will always come through, see it out as it were. I think most anglers will have faith in nature. I’m fairly optimistic. I think that’s the nature of the angler, to be optimistic.
MIKEY THOMPKINS
Beekeeper
We are standing on the roof of the Royal Festival Hall, not far from a small beehive tucked away from the wind curling off the river. It’s called the Royal Festival Hive and is shaped like the building.
People say to me, how can they have anything to forage on, we’re in the middle of the South Bank? And you say, if you look quite closely there’s Temple Gardens and there’s lots of houses with green areas, and then you start to notice lots of undeveloped areas which are quite overgrown and you start to see how you might make connections across the green sites but also how a bee might be able to make those connections as well. If you look at it on a map and you think from the bees’ point of view, there’s quite a lot of productive spaces. Green Park, St James’s Park, it’s quite nice for them on the Embankment. There’s loads of greenery for them. Trees are very good for bees because their surface area’s enormous. Fan it out, it’s huge. An area of a tree is probably as big as this rooftop in terms of forage for a bee, so a flowering tree is pretty important. And there’s lots and lots of flowering trees. I don’t know what London planes are like. But there’s lime trees, there’s all kinds of trees around that are productive at different times of the year.
There’s also a big question about what do we do with all this rooftop space? There is a huge resource up there. Where I am in East London, there’s not a lot of ground space. There’s less ground space for me, but suddenly, you know, you start to see lots and lots of productive spaces. [He points across the Thames.]
But I also think that we shouldn’t see cities as just a space in which things come into. It’s a space in which we can be productive and quite creative. I have beehives in the shape of the Royal Festival Hall, a scale model. There’s all types of creativity in there, but I don’t think it’s just bees, generally producing things in the city is a really important thing. Anything that helps the ecosystem is really really important and bees are one of the best things we’ve got for the ecosystem. They’re also a good indicator of how well an ecosystem is performing. If you can put a beehive in the middle of the South Bank and you can get lots of honey off it, that means that around here there are lots of things that the bees can forage on, so it’s a good indicator of what’s happening in a city as well. I also think that it’s good to educate people about the interconnections between food and cities and spaces and the environment.
I suppose because you make connections between where this food comes from and the environment around you, you make a direct connection between the way that this city’s put together and its potential productive ability. And you start to think, okay, you watch park-keepers going round with lawnmowers cutting down dandelions and you go, no, stop, stop! There is a big thing with beekeepers about saying, you know we need some wild areas in big cities where bees can forage. We need a different relationship. A city’s very much about the controlled, the designed, and the stuff that bees like is the messy stuff at the edge. The stuff that grows out of walls perhaps or the stuff that we just leave alone, so you start to have a different relationship to the stuff that grows around you.
CHRISTINA OAKLEY HARRINGTON
Wiccan priestess
My dad’s from Kent and my grandmother is from Edinburgh. I spent a fair bit of time in London as a child, but my father, who had a PhD in geology and was a geochemist, decided in about 1965 that he wanted to join the United Nations third-world development programme. He was posted first to Korea, and then to Japan, and then for a three-year stint to Liberia. So my idea of what religion is was shaped by the religion I experienced, which is tribal religion. I didn’t go to church.
In my late teens we repatriated to the West and I was sent to upstate New York to go to high school. God save us, it was a little town outside Albany, a massive culture shock for me. I couldn’t play the game, couldn’t do it; it was as if I was a different species somehow. It didn’t work very well. Then someone gave me a book on paganism and it was like, oh, this is it! He was this short, half-Jewish, half-Irish guy who had been adopted as a small orphan by some Native American Indians and he’d just come off the reservation. And I thought I had a weird upbringing: his parents had been killed in a car crash, he’d hitchhiked at 12 across the country, been adopted by the poor folks on the reservation, and just returned to where his birth parents were from. I was very normal compared to him. He said, you should look up this thing called Wicca, and gave me a book called Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler. I read it, read it all night long.
She sips from a Diet Coke as we sit in her shop in Covent Garden surrounded by books on spirituality, esotericism, anthropology and religion. Occasionally customers come in to browse but the shop is nearly closed, as an amateur dramatics society is holding auditions in the basement. A version of the Heinrich Heine quote at the front of the shop reads: ‘Wherever they burn books, they also end up burning people.’
I moved to London in 1989 and never looked back. The minute I got off the airplane I thought, oh, it’s going to be okay. I was looking for a coven of witches to take me in to adopt me, and that took about four or five months. How does one do that? You pray, basically. You talk to the nature spirits of the place and say please help me find them, because it’s all word of mouth, it’s never ever written down. You want people who are in the old initiatory tradition instead of just what I call spam books, you know, like 101 Spells for Teenagers Today, that kind of thing. These were the days of fanzines, little pagan magazines, and there were small adverts in the back of them. You would chase them and follow them and then go to something called ‘pub moots’ and you’d quietly be identified. You’d go a few times and say quietly you’re looking for a coven, looking for initiation. You wouldn’t know who they were but they’d be looking at you. If they liked you they might invite you for tea and you’d have to work out that that’s what they were.
Then you have to ask for initiation. It can never be offered. You need to be sincere, you need to be discreet, you need to be persistent but not too pushy. They’re looking for people who want a vocation and it’s a mystery tradition, a secret society. You have to have a calling for it. They’re looking for people who are going to be doing this in their seventies if they’re in their twenties, thirties, forties now. You also have to think, if you’re going to train someone in witchcraft, and they’re going to be in a coven with you, you may be spending up to twenty years with them.
With me it went really fast – four months to find a coven. I met someone who said, ‘You’ve got the mark of Cain on you.’ [Laughs.] ‘You’ve got the calling.’ And I did. The night I read that book, I knew what I was. This is what I am. This is what I’ll be till the day I die. This is what I’ve always been. I just have a name for it now.
Witches in the city, I suppose like in most things, are more likely to be single, more likely to be a bit bohemian. There are more gay witches in the cities than in the suburbs but that’s just because people of alternate sexualities tend to feel more at home in cities. And witches who live in cities, I think they love people more. It sounds funny. That’s the th
ing about living in London. You just have to like the excitement of lots of people. That’s why you’re here. Those in the countryside or suburbs tend to be more introspective as people.
It would be terrible to be a pagan and not be within walking distance of the British Museum. I mean, how do people do that? A lot of the witches in London are research-inclined, so a lot of them wangle tickets to the British Library. That’s a great magical act – wangling your British Library ticket. [Whispers] You get some people who should never have them. I don’t know how they manage it. Fake letterhead? There’s the reason there’s a three-hour queue for books.
There’s a connection between magic and people researching magic, whether it’s Greek or Roman or magical grimoires or ancient manuscripts of magical or angelic texts. In Victorian England that was done and in Edwardian England that was done, so there was this long tradition of consulting the books at the British Library. Joe Bloggs lives in his mum’s bedsit in Brick Lane, left school at 16, but he wants his British Library ticket because he wants to sit in the reading room and have magical books delivered to his desk just like MacGregor Mathers, the founder of the Order of the Golden Dawn, used to do.
Waterloo Bridge is also fabulous for witches. The view is beautiful: you get Westminster and the City, and all those Celtic bent swords and offerings that had been thrown in there from Romano-Celtic times and then the pilgrim badges thrown in off the bridges and the remains of spells that we throw over the edge. Let’s say you make something on a wax talisman, you do something on wax or you do a bundle of herbs and burn a candle or do something. Usually at the end of a spell, which will be at the end of the lunar month, you’ll have the bits left over. The work is done but you’ve got the physical remains and they have to be got rid of. The craft of the witches has always been to bury it or put it into running water. You don’t want to see something that was powerful get covered in dust or have your earrings left on the corner of it or spill tea over it and you don’t really want to put it in the rubbish either. It’s a bit too special for the rubbish.
So I just do it on Waterloo Bridge on the way to work, just chuck it over the edge. Of course there are commuters going by, there are the buses behind you, and there’s the traffic warden, yeah. You just have to have a quiet moment, lean over the edge, say thank you to the river, and let it go. It’s a lovely and precious moment.
FEEDING THE CITY
ADAM BYATT
Chef
It’s warm in the restaurant he runs, Trinity, where the late-afternoon crowd is thinning to the sound of small spoons on saucers. Outside, the wind whips across Clapham Common. The cooks are busy cutting pork belly and rattling cutlery. The copper-bottomed saucepans glow under the fluorescents. He has close-cropped hair and tattoos on the pads of his hands, below the pinkies, a J on his right for his son Jack and an R for his daughter Rosie on the left. He drinks coffee with plenty of sugar lowered into each cup. As we talk he is approached throughout the afternoon – an employee taking home two pheasants; his lawyer with post-lunch congratulations; a cook with news of the gnocchi – and like chopping vegetables, he deals with each before sliding the results to the side. He moves his hands about – the tattoos flash, J and R, R and J.
In the Nineties, apprenticeships were a big thing and I went to a jobs open day with my mum. They were all in this hall, the Ford Motor Company and Barclays Bank and queues of these students lining up, and there was the Savoy Education Trust in the corner with no one. So I dragged my mum there and I said, I want to be a cook. They said, okay, we’ve got an apprenticeship at Claridge’s or at the Savoy. And my mum said to me, the Queen eats at Claridge’s, Adam. So I said, okay, I want to work at Claridge’s. That was it. On Monday, I turned up at Claridge’s and I had the very worst day of my whole life.
I was streetwise, cocky, not off the rails but close to it. So I walked into the chef’s office and he said to me, okay, you need to go and get changed. Go into the changing room at the end there, ask for a guy called John – he will give you a jacket. Unbeknownst to me there were eighty-seven cooks at Claridge’s on that day, in that brigade, I was number eighty-eight, yeah, and I walked into the changing room and said, hello, mate, you’ve got a jacket for me. And he said, okay, number one, I’m not your fucking mate and number two, if I don’t get that jacket back tomorrow morning pressed and ironed, I’ll kill you. And my day just deteriorated from thereon in. I was taken into the back room, given six boxes of spinach, told to pick the stems off of it, then shown how to blanch it in boiling water, refresh it in ice, and then blend it in a machine to make a creamed spinach dish for a banquet. By the time I’d blended it and passed all the fibres out through a fine sieve I was absolutely covered in green spinach on this guy’s jacket which said his name and Senior Sous Chef, Claridge’s. So everybody, all day long, had this little five foot two, cocky little Essex boy and they were just ripping into him about being the senior sous chef at Claridge’s. Ripping me to pieces. I finished that job at 5.30 and they told me to clean up, which took me another hour and a half.
I’d started at 9.30, and by then I was like a wreck. I’d never stood on my feet that long in my life. They let me go eventually at eight o’clock and I got home at nine o’clock and just burst into tears. I laid on the sofa and I said to my dad, I can’t do that. It’s horrible. I hate it. I didn’t like the Tube journey. I travelled in from Essex, I was living with my parents. And my dad said, well, you must do what makes you happy, but this is an opportunity and if you don’t go back tomorrow you will never go back and that’s something you need to make a thought of. I didn’t know what to do. I set my alarm for the next day and I woke up and I thought, I’m going back. There are junctions in your life and that was one of those junctions for me. I went back and I stayed at Claridge’s for the next four and a half years.
That was twenty years ago, and I’ve cooked ever since.
Growing up in Essex, going up West was for Christmas lights and to see a play with your nan every five years. Going Up West was a really special thing. But suddenly there I was every single day of my working life. When I’d come home, everybody would ask, what’s it like? Like it’s this land that’s fucking ten miles across the road! Go and have a look. They were frightened to go there. There’s too many people there. It’s too crazy. You get stabbed, you get killed, come on! And they become very insular in that world, they get very insular. My wife and I were really against that. She worked in the City and I worked in Mayfair and we were just like, this is stupid. We were being exposed to fantastic bars, great clubs, new fashion, we can be individuals here. Where we’d come from, it was very you will buy a Ford Mondeo, you will live in a two-bedroom terrace, you will have two kids, maybe six, and a dog, you know, you will claim benefit if you can, and all that. We just thought, no, that’s not right.
But the fact is, I never saw much of the West End. I saw the cars and walked past the shops but to be honest I didn’t really notice that. I would walk down Bond Street simply to get from A to B, but I wasn’t looking in the shop windows, I was looking out for my sandwich guy to make my sandwich and not trip me up. I guess you walk past all the Bentleys but I didn’t really care about that. It was just all about my egg sandwich. It was the only thing that was going to get me through the day. Later, when I worked at The Square, lunch was a double espresso and a mini Mars Bar. That was my lunch for the first year and a half of my life there, and dinner was a meat pie and baked beans. Every single day. So if you worked four days in a row, what you ate was: four double espressos, four mini Mars Bars, four meat pies and a tin of baked beans. You’re serving truffles and lobster and foie gras and John Dory and turbot, you know. It’s warped. It’s properly warped. And that’s why my guys sit down and have dinner together. Proper dinner, every single day.
I’ve seen food in London go through three or four different stages. When I first started twenty-one years ago, it was classic, classic, classic, classic food all the way down the road. Remember I’ve only ever dealt
with haute cuisine, as it were, or the higher end of it. I’ve never really dealt in the middle market or part-bought brasserie food. I’ve never really done it. But it started out as very classic: sole veronique and beef wellington, these things that everybody would know as really posh food. Certainly not food I grew up on. Then it became a newer version of classic food: less preparations, less techniques, more simplicity on the plate and more influence directly bought in from the likes of Italy, Spain, Portugal, yeah? People like Simon Hopkinson took that classic food and pared it down and made it viable for a restaurant by removing the unwanted cream, by introducing lightness and interest and intrigue from other countries. And then there were the innovators that pushed it forward a little bit and put a saffron vinaigrette with it and did something more interesting with it, and that era is what I loved. I loved that era.