by Craig Taylor
The principle is that it’s very important for London, it’s very important for us, it will transform the whole of London. I mean, the basic reason is that the government doesn’t have the money. So what do you do, if the government says we cannot afford to build transport, but you know that London needs transport, you need transport, because the City Corp is contributing a similar amount of money – I think £200 million, and another £100 million from businesses. Because the City, the Square Mile, is in as much need of transport as we are – not for today, because today we have plenty of transport, with the upgrade of the DLR and the upgrade of the Jubilee Line we have all the transport we need for the next three or four or five years. But then development will stall and the same thing will happen in the City if the City wants to grow.
The Tower of London, that is the dividing line. William the Conqueror created the Tower: to the west was money and pleasure, and to the east was poverty, and it is still here. It tells the story of London, that for so long all this area had no transport. When we started building Canary Wharf in 1987, the Jubilee Line didn’t exist, and the DLR was just one line here and a bit of line going to the Isle of Dogs. That was the whole transport. How could it be that a city as rich as London has the whole eastern part of the town with no transport? How could you expect all these people to go to work? I mean it was a reservoir of cheap labour, but you didn’t even give them the opportunity to be slaves.
Today Canary Wharf is 15 million feet and there’s another 10 million feet to go. So it’s two and a half times the size that we looked at the first time. Canary Wharf is the most important thing to happen to London in the past hundred years, and probably Crossrail is going to be the next one. It has an extension that goes to London Bridge which makes a big difference, it starts creating the network of transport. We designed the Jubilee Line in such a way that it intersects with every other line. It is just two steps to come to Canary Wharf. Crossrail will change London for ever, because a lot of the companies in Canary Wharf or in the City would like to use a lot of the manpower coming from the east. They are more economical, not having to pay the rents of Kensington, Chelsea and Mayfair. And those areas have different salary expectations. So the labour force coming from the east is cheaper. The east of London will become the dormitory of London, because what London is missing is the Queens and the Brooklyn of New York. You don’t have a place where the nurses and the teachers and the policemen and the firefighters can live very close to the city. If they all have to travel two or three hours to get to work, how productive are they and how tired are they by the time they get home? So the east of London is going to be where all these things happen.
The system is at breaking point, it hasn’t been improved in the past 50–60 years. You have to go back sixty years to look at the last Tube that was built in London. Besides the Jubliee Line, and the improvements on the DLR and now Thameslink, and the East London Line, everything is very old. And you have to improve it, you have to build new stuff because the old stuff will go down, it will cease to perform. It’s not only that Crossrail will create employment, not only that it will have a substantial investment return, which will be very good. It’s ‘what will it do for London?’ And that’s enormous.
My opinion is that the task of every government that comes to power is to maintain London as a financial centre. One day you have it, next day you don’t. When you lose it, you lose it very quick. London should always be one of the major financial centres of the world, because of the language, because of the infrastructure in terms of lawyers and accountants and financial institutions, and because it’s the crossroads for Asia, Africa and the Arab peninsula. It’s in the right place, in the right language, with the right infrastructure, the right people. In all the studies that CBI or London First makes, London comes first with the exception of two things – transport and cost of housing. So you have to fix that.
The day when foreign companies tell you that the biggest problem London has is transport, it will take you twenty years to fix it. You cannot act quickly. What is the plan, where does London want to be in five years and in ten years? It’s true that everybody is worried about the finances today. But if you look at the long term, where do you want to be? If you look at Brazil, it took them twenty years to try to fix the economy and today they are getting the benefit of it. But you cannot do it overnight. You have to look at the future and you have to prepare for the future, because when the future comes you don’t have time to fix it.
When we did Canary Wharf, we came from New York and we knew exactly what the likes of Amex or Merrill Lynch or Dow Jones or Nomura or Oppenheim will need. So we applied what we learnt in New York to infrastructure and everything else. Nobody believed. Everybody said Olympia Europe are crazy to do it and nobody wanted to bet on it. But it succeeded, and it will succeed in time as things develop, and it will link with the city. One day it will be forgotten as Canary Wharf. It will simply be part of London.
LIVING AND DYING
ALISON CATHCART
Superintendent Registrar, City of Westminster
As I enter the Old Marylebone Town Hall, a bride carefully negotiates the front steps while holding a bouquet of pink roses in her left hand and a bag from Office, the shoe shop, in her right. The photographer, edging backwards towards the kerb, has time to wait until the whole group is off the steps. Men in shiny suits surround her – a bride trying her best to look serene as buses roll down Marylebone Road. Inside, in an office down the hall from the board that displays wedding notices, Cathcart sits at her desk wearing a smart, conservative black suit.
Everyone, from princes and princesses right through to the guy who sweeps the streets, gets married here. Westminster is such a varied borough, it stretches out to Bayswater and Paddington, we cover Mayfair and Belgravia, so we have a huge spectrum of wealth or poverty, all coming to use our facilities. I even married a member of the Royal Family a couple of years ago. We had another chap who was a distant cousin of the Queen, but he looked just like Prince Charles, he even spoke like him, it was uncanny.
In this country you can’t marry outside unless you’re Jewish or Quaker. It’s legislation that goes back to 1837, when civil registration began and registrar offices were established. Prior to that, it was the church or the registry office. And prior to all of that there were what we call clandestine marriages where prostitutes were marrying wealthy young men having got them drunk. They’d wake up the next day and they didn’t even know they’d been through a wedding. Of course they had all sorts of inheritance rights and so forth, so to tidy up that sort of corruption weddings have to take place in approved premises or licensed-for-worship buildings, between the hours of eight and six, during daylight.
We are still using fountain pens and ink for registering marriages. Marriages are still written in registers and the format is exactly the same as it was in 1837. There’s special ink provided to us by Her Majesty’s Government, it’s got special content in it that goes darker with age. A lot of inks fade over time, but this is called blue-black, it starts off blue and it goes black over time. If you get it on your clothes you haven’t a hope of getting it out. You have to be really careful that you don’t get it on a bride’s dress. Sometimes people get a fountain pen, they’re not used to using it, they can’t get it to work and they’ll go shake it, and of course the ink goes everywhere. Over the years they have tried to create biros with this specialist ink, but they’ve just never been able to develop it. So we are still using fountain pens. And we have a hotline to Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
Before 1995 you had to marry in your district of residence: if you lived in Westminster you married here, if you lived in Lambeth you married in Lambeth. It was quite restrictive. You could only get married in a church or a registry office, or a religious building that was licensed. And there wasn’t much in the way of customizing ceremonies, the wording was very brief, it was all a bit perfunctory. And then in 1995 it all changed with the advent of the Approved Premise
s Act, so other venues could be licensed.
We started off with about thirty venues in Westminster. We thought we’d have to up our game here, we can’t go out to Claridge’s and do a ten-minute ceremony that we would have done in the registry office. So we had to look at all the options that we were offering couples in terms of choices and how to customize ceremonies, how to turn it into more of an event. We had to invest in uniforms for our staff, because if you’re going out to a place like that you have to look presentable – not that people weren’t, but it was all about the image and you’re representing Westminster.
That was a huge change, and we’re now at a point where we’ve got 130 venues and the list is growing. Claridge’s is one of the most booked venues. There’s a choice of rooms there, there’s the ballroom and the drawing room and the French salon, if you’ve got loads of money. I’ve seen weddings there decked out with flowers and it’s just pure romance. Or they’ve got smaller rooms up on the sixth floor for those who still want to say they got married at Claridge’s but … you know what I mean. It’s just got that sense of history about it. The Savoy, to be able to walk into venues like that. Or the Ritz – I’m a regular at the Ritz. The doorman knows me. That’s a real buzz, to walk into places like that, that you would ordinarily never go to in your normal working life.
It should always be a seemly and dignified venue. I probably have turned down one or two just because they were really awful places. We do loads of weddings at London Zoo, in a nice little building near the Reptile House, actually. You can tell a Zoo wedding’s going to be a certain type of person.
Civil partnerships was another major change. I would never have dreamt that we would have same-sex ceremonies when I first started out. And in fact some members of staff, not here but in other services, dropped out because they couldn’t handle it. It was a step too far for some. Civil partnerships started in 2005. We hadn’t a clue how that was going to be in terms of numbers, we just didn’t know. We probably have done the most in the country. We did loads in the first year, there was such a huge backlog. A lot were older couples who had waited years for the legislation to change. They were in their seventies, had been together forty years, you know, they were together since before it became legal. So the very first day of civil partnerships was really emotional. We did twenty ceremonies that day, starting at eight o’clock in the morning right through to half past five in the evening. It was draining – draining in a nice way, because we were part of something really special.
It gets quite complex because of all the nationalities, all the permutations, divorce documents, you’ve got to give a lot of information to people to make sure that they’ve got it right, before the actual day. It’s not just about the hearts and the flowers and the catering and the car and this, that and the other. I mean, the legal bit is crucial – we’re responsible for giving the right information, but the couple has a responsibility to take that on board and make sure that they know what they are doing as well. And it’s quite complicated, depending on nationality, immigration status, marital status and so on. And whether they are coming from abroad, because we get a lot of people coming from abroad to get married here.
There is also the whole sham marriages thing, where they are clearly marrying to circumvent immigration. You can tell straight away. It’s body language, it’s not speaking the same language, it’s some cultures that just wouldn’t go together ordinarily, like Eastern European and Pakistanis. They don’t have to say anything. You just watch how they interact with each other. I can’t put my finger on it, I can’t spell it out, but you know when it isn’t a genuine marriage.
We are required to report to the Home Office if we have our suspicions. But we don’t stop the wedding. If they are already married and we know that, or they are under age, or they haven’t got the mental capacity or whatever, then you’ve got powers to stop the wedding. But if they haven’t committed any outward offence then it’s difficult. Because it’s not a crime to not marry for love, is it?
We do encourage people to customize their ceremony. On the whole most people are fairly traditional, but occasionally you get something quirky, just as a bit of fun. I’ve had the Match of the Day theme played on a harp at a wedding, a concession to the groom. Recently my colleague came to me and said, would you do this ceremony, I think the bride was promising to do something with the groom’s dirty underpants or something. I thought, no, that’s not appropriate and we said no to that. Or there are readings that I cringe at every now and again. There’s one, what is it, John Cooper Clarke, ‘I wanna be your vacuum cleaner.’ It goes on in that sort of vein … The problem is, when you’re conducting a wedding, the bride and groom are facing you, the guests are facing you and you’ve got the person giving the reading facing out, so all eyes are on you and the person giving the reading. So you have to have this blank expression, and if you think something is cringeworthy you can’t show your emotion. Or sometimes you’ll have somebody who’s been invited to give a reading and they don’t have the skill to do it. That can be embarrassing. I can remember doing a wedding once where they had a family friend who was asked to sing, and she was out of tune and it went on and on and on, and again I had this bland look on my face because I couldn’t show any emotion other than interest. So you have to be a bit of an actress.
I’ve had objections lodged before weddings but not on the actual day. Maybe that’s something that’s going to hit me, maybe it’s around the corner, on the horizon, who knows? But I have never come across it. You get lots of people going ‘Ahem, ahem’ and all that, the usual jokes and the coughers, but not a proper legitimate objection on the day itself. I think I’d probably have a heart attack if it was real.
As I leave, I see an older man out on the steps with a hoover, cleaning up the confetti. He does the job a few times a day and says he can’t talk now because he’s missed a little down on the third step. He stretches the hoover and sucks up the clovers and the hearts.
ALEX BLAKE
Eyewitness
It was the Saturday before Christmas. I was living in Chalk Farm and I was going to meet some friends in South London, in Vauxhall, at a restaurant in Bonnington Square. Someone was having a birthday party there, fuck knows why.
I suppose I was 24, so you’d have a couple before you went out, d’you know what I mean? I was with two very good friends of mine at the time. One of whom I was living with and the other was a much closer, older friend of mine who was living in South London, but he’d come up that afternoon and we’d mucked around doing something and then I’m pretty sure we’d been to the pub near me up in Kentish Town and had a couple of pints.
We got on the Tube at Kentish Town to go down to Waterloo, or somewhere south, to get across to Vauxhall. So we did one stop to Camden Town and we were changing to get the Charing Cross rather than the Bank branch. It was the Saturday night before Christmas, it was eight o’clock at night, and it was chocka. Everyone was out, the Tube station was packed, all the way down the Tube platform was five-deep with people. Everyone had had a few drinks, Santa hats are out and the girls are in high heels. It’s the Saturday night before Christmas and it’s London and it’s Camden. We were standing fairly close to where the train enters the platform, probably a carriage and a half’s length. So not right at the end of the platform, but pretty close to it – I think we’d pushed all the way down to get some space; and we were standing there waiting for the train. As the train came into the platform I saw the front of the train coming in and it was coming in quickly, not abnormally quickly, but it was coming in quickly. The train came in from the right-hand side and then behind me, to my left-hand side, I heard a scream. A scream of determination and defiance. It wasn’t bloodcurdling, but it was arresting. Not terror. Not surprise. It was … absolute determination is the best way I can put it. Out of the corner of my eye, coming from the back end of the platform – we were more or less at the front of the five-deep lot of people, we were quite close to the front and this girl
came out of the edge of my vision, ran across the side of my vision and jumped off the edge of the platform right in the front of this oncoming train. She basically disintegrated on impact, is the bluntest way I can put it. I mean she disappeared. She became flesh and bone and blood instantly, absolutely instantly. God knows what it did to that Tube driver, because she landed right on top of him, more or less. The only thing between her and him would have been the glass. So she sort of popped, she exploded, do you know what I mean? And I didn’t have any sense of anyone being covered in it. It didn’t land on anyone or anything, because the train kept on going.
The immediate reaction was pandemonium at our end of the platform. I think it took a few seconds for it to get down to the other end of the platform. But the three of us just all turned and looked at each other, said, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ and ran for the exit. But that was exactly what everybody else was doing. So I don’t remember getting off the platform, but I do remember charging up the escalators to get out, up to Camden High Street. We were all really shocked. We jumped in a cab and carried on our journey, trying to work out what the fuck had just happened. The images that stay with me are the image of the train coming in, pretty quick, but not outrageously, and then this scream and then this person just running. I’ve always imagined she was probably quite an attractive girl, long blonde hair, but had been living on the streets for a while. She had a kind of down-at-heel look, with grotty jeans and a kind of dirty puffa jacket and trainers. She had a pallid complexion and blonde hair, but she might have been quite pretty once upon a time. And I just remember her screaming and running and jumping and then literally disintegrating.