by Mark Steel
And the Thames is a barrier that divides London more and more the longer you live there. You come to realise that there’s a deep misunderstanding between the north and the south sides of the river, and you feel it most acutely if you live in the south, because North Londoners seem to feel it’s an imposition to cross the river at all. ‘I suppose we could come down your way for a change,’ they say tentatively, in the uncertain tone you might use when considering selling your house and moving onto a boat, or joining a swingers’ club.
Even if they agree, you then face the horror, when you describe how to get there, as they come to terms with the fact that the underground hardly bothers with South London. ‘Get a what? A train?’ you hear them gasping, as if you’ve suggested they ride on a llama, and then you await the phone call when they say, ‘We’ve looked at the map, and it’s much further to your place than we realised, so it’s probably easier if you came to us.’
A North Londoner honestly said to me once, ‘To be truthful, Mark, I’m more likely to go to Paris than come down your way, as that’s just one train straight through with no mucking about.’
From the South London perspective, I know that if I have to go to Waterloo it feels like nipping round the corner, but The Strand, which is the same distance plus the length of Waterloo Bridge, feels like having to go all the sodding way into town. Greenwich seems like over the road, but the Isle of Dogs, just four hundred yards further through a foot tunnel, is another world, and if I had a friend who moved from Greenwich to the other side we’d probably lose touch, sending a Christmas card every second year in which we’d agree to sort out a weekend together at some point but never managing it, like when the person who lives three doors away moves to Quebec.
Part of the difficulty is that London is so huge. Getting across it is a trench war, a slog in which you learn to appreciate every few yards you advance. Distances have different meanings within the capital: eight miles from Tooting to Hammersmith is the same as forty miles in Gloucestershire.
This must add to the parochial nature of London as a series of villages. No one refers to the Evening Standard as a local paper, because the local paper is the one that deals with your particular bit of London. Most boroughs have their own theatre and their own festivals, their own town centres, and if someone from Wood Green was told by local gangsters, ‘Never show your face round these parts again,’ that wouldn’t extend as far as Walthamstow, surely, as that’s pretty much accepted as a different manor.
One way of understanding Londoners’ lack of identification with the city is to consider who might be mentioned as being associated with the city. If you ask someone in Leicester which prominent people came from the place, they might mention Joe Orton or Gary Lineker, and everyone in Wellingborough tells you that Thom Yorke of Radiohead comes from there. But what would a Londoner say? Not many would boast, ‘You know the Queen? She lives here.’ And whereas it might cause a stir in Aylesbury if their town was mentioned in passing by a character in Waterloo Road, Londoners don’t get excited at every reference in the media, ringing each other frantically to say, ‘Did you see that episode of World’s Strictest Parents tonight? Well, guess where one of the kids was from? He was from London.’
Similarly, there’s not a thrill because of someone’s visit to London. In Derby or Bolton, if someone you were interested in was coming to the theatre or playing at a music venue, you’d buy tickets as soon as they went on sale. But in London, if Jesus announced He’d come back and was performing some miracles on Wednesday night at Tufnell Park, you’d think, ‘Oh, I’m not going all the way up there. Anyway, He’s bound to be around again before long.’
If I go somewhere really north, like Finchley, I get that uneasy feeling you have when you’re six and you go further than you’re allowed from your parents on the beach, fascinated by what’s this far away, but increasingly worried that you’re being silly now, and won’t ever be able to get back. I don’t get this in Orkney, just Finchley.
To make the city even more mysterious, we know the names of these other areas because they’re on the underground system. There must be a place called Theydon Bois, and one called Colindale, but not only have I never been to them, I’ve never met anyone who has, or who’s ever mentioned them, or read anything about them, and it’s quite possible they’re not really there, but are just fake names created as part of an elaborate tax dodge.
So to follow the quirks of Londoners you can’t probe the history and personalities of London. You have to break the city down as locally as you can. The contradiction here is that London has become possibly the most global city in the world. More areas of more countries are represented as communities in London than in any other city, including New York.
When the World Cup is on, you can watch any team you choose with people from that country. I’ve watched Japan play in a room full of paper lanterns, with a promise of free sake if Japan scored, with everyone alarmingly polite, lowering their voice as they came in, as if arriving late for a lecture. It would have seemed reasonable if the lights had gone down and someone had announced: ‘We are honoured today to see the first viewing of Nagisa Oshima’s powerful production Japan v Cameroon, the opening segment of a trilogy that undertakes to reveal the inner truth behind playing two up front with a five-man midfield, and has taken forty-five years to make. Thank you.’
I’ve watched Ghana in a Ghanaian pub, with maybe three hundred Ghanaians dancing to drummers throughout, and a woman in a dazzling yellow African dress who screamed across the room when Ghana weren’t awarded a free kick she felt they deserved, ‘That referee is a wicked wicked man.’
The area of New Malden contains, for reasons no one’s sure of, the biggest South Korean community outside South Korea. I watched their matches in the midst of a huge crowd of South Koreans in a pub garden, while a man in a multi-coloured silk robe banged a thick metal gong that looked like the sort of brass pot you see in the kitchens of stately homes, as if he was either an angry butler signalling that dinner was bloody well ready, or the drummer in a Buddhist Iron Maiden.
In Battersea I spent an evening with a crowd of Serbs watching their team play Australia, and met Nims, draped in a giant Serbian flag, who had the Cockneyest accent I’ve ever heard. ‘My ol’ man came from south of fackin’ Belgrade,’ he told me, ‘and made the best fackin’ slivovic in the whole of yer fackin’ Balkans.’ At one point he said possibly my favourite ever Cockney Serb sentence: ‘You gotta admit, Mark, that Tito, he was a fackin’ diamond.’
The nearest record shop to me is Jamaican. The staff have an endearing habit of taking five minutes to respond to any request, and one day when I asked for a record from the top shelf, the assistant looked up at the shelf, looked at the stepladder next to it, repeated this process three times, then said, ‘It too high,’ and sent me on my way. The nearest café to me is where the Portuguese of the area go to watch Portuguese television, which has regular weather and traffic reports they study intently, presumably so they’re aware that if they have to pop down to Brixton later, it’s best to avoid the ring road south of Lisbon.
My children have friends who are Turkish and Brazilian and Afghani, eat food that’s Thai and Greek, have conversed with Hare Krishnas, Hasidic Jews and Sikhs. By the age of nine they might have experienced an array of cultures and customs that a hundred years ago would have been available only to a missionary or an explorer.
What unifies London is its extreme lack of unity. It’s comprehensively diverse, and the more international an area becomes, the more that mix is not just tolerated but celebrated. The areas of greatest hostility to settlers tend to be on the outside edges, where it’s happened the least. These are the parts left isolated, where one estate can be the size of a small town, where industry has declined and the residents feel under siege. The most obvious scapegoats are the Kurds, or the Poles, or whichever group has most recently been housed nearby. Logic disappears, and they retreat into cries such as ‘The country will soon be run by Is
lam,’ whereas in fact it’s probably unlikely that anyone will ever visit a Dorset tea shop and be told, ‘No scones this afternoon, love, it’s Ramadan.’ Or turn on the radio to hear a call to prayers followed by a voice saying, ‘Good morning, this is Radio Sussex.’
One of the many tragedies of this situation is that those affected are deprived of the joy of this localised global network. For example, my son once introduced me to a new friend, saying, ‘This is Ernest, he’s Polish. Don’t worry, I don’t miss any opportunity to remind him that his lot had to be saved by us in the war.’
I said, ‘What?
He said, ‘Every day I remind him that his country would have been stuffed without us in the Second World War.’
I said, ‘Listen, you know the aeroplane battle at the start of the war, over Kent, that meant Hitler had no chance of invading.’
‘Oh, right, the Battle of Britain.’
‘Yes, the Battle of Britain. Well, do you know where one fifth of the pilots on the Allied side came from? They came from Poland.’
He turned straight to his mate and said, ‘See, you were nicking our jobs even back then.’
Now, who wouldn’t want to live in a city like that?
Outer London *
It upsets me when Croydon is derided as ugly. That’s not because it isn’t ugly. It is indeed achingly ugly. But it isn’t naturally like that. It’s ugly like a beautiful woman who got to sixty and decided to have a series of botox operations, each of which went frighteningly wrong, deciding each time to cover it up with another one that made things worse, until she was hardly recognisable, but if you looked carefully there were odd speckles of her old self shining through, reminding the world of what she’d have been like if she’d remained natural, although this wasn’t easy to spot as she now has a dual carriageway down the middle of her face; that sort of ugly.
It’s hard for a town not to be ugly once it’s cut in two by an area it’s impossible to walk on or across or over or round. I once went to Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, and while the palm trees alongside the High Street are seductively Mediterranean, you can’t help noticing that the middle of the city is blockaded by the military, behind which is half a mile of abandoned territory uninhabitable since the war in 1973 except for lines of sinister Greek soldiers followed by sinister Turkish soldiers and barbed wire and sandbags. But it’s still easier to get from one side to the other than it is in fucking Croydon.
The shopping side of the town became the Whitgift Centre, a principality of predictability on two floors that I’ve been in on probably 2,000 occasions but still have no idea which way I’m facing as soon as I’m inside. So it was decided that what the place needed was another shopping centre, almost as big and almost identical, right next door, and then a third one about fifty yards from the second one. If Croydon’s town planners had gone to Haiti after the earthquake they’d have said, ‘Sod clean water and a Red Cross tent, what this place needs is a replica of the Whitgift shopping centre.’
Each of these shopping centres has a team of security guards who patrol the area with the internationally recognised slow, deliberate gait of a guard, whether in a suburban shopping mall or Treblinka. And it must be possible that one day each of the Croydon shopping centres will develop into its own state, with stamps and an army and an entry in the Eurovision Song Contest.
This layout makes the whole centre unnavigable in any mode of transport, including a tank. The road system to accommodate all this is an elaborate maze that takes the experienced visitor three or four circuits before finding the escape route, which involves creeping through a series of back streets past the car park where lorries deliver stuff to the back of a warehouse by giant metal bins, so you feel as if you’re in the car at the start of the Naked Gun films, and will soon be driving through a wedding reception and a women’s changing room before emerging onto Wellesley Road, past the office blocks scattered as if grown from office-block seeds blown randomly by the wind, and out towards Purley.
And yet within this whirlpool are spots of a different land that must once have existed: a parish church with a garden looking lonely but defiant opposite Debenhams; a reggae record shop that bedunks and badooms as far as W.H. Smith; a fruit stall where the salesman’s minimalist patter involves him holding up an orange and crying, ‘Fifty fifty fifty fifty fifty fifty fifty!’ without ever specifying whether he means 50p an orange or fifty oranges for £1 or fifty tons of oranges for £1 million or 50 per cent off an orange if you also buy something else for 40.
There’s the shell of Beanos, a second-hand record shop that stretched across three floors, with rare sleeves on the walls and a constant beat of something you’d never heard before but had to find out what it was sizzling towards the Whitgift. Every trip I made to Croydon ended up in Beanos, because after the Whitgift Centre I felt I’d earned it. A visit was impossible to complete quickly. If I went in assuring myself I’d be out in ten minutes, because after all I did have to catch a plane to go to a relative’s wedding, I’d end up ringing Chicago two hours later to say I was really sorry but I wouldn’t be coming, as something had popped up, while thinking, ‘Which should I play first out of the new OutKast and this rare Ray Charles?’
These tiny monuments suggest that there was once a different order, the way a town in Wyoming might retain an enclave of people descended from Cherokees. Croydon’s subsequent problems may stem from the way those in charge of the town seem to have an ambition for it to become a second London. The council and the local paper campaign for city status, and there are often announcements of massive new business parks and vast complexes of offices, with an artist’s impression in the Croydon Advertiser of somewhere slightly grander than Seattle, with lifts going up the outsides of conical structures connected by spirally walkways. But none of these things have ever begun to happen. They might as well announce, ‘Plans revealed for Croydon’s mid-air shopping bonanza’, with an artist’s impression of a replica of the Whitgift Centre run by talking chipmunks on a cloud.
These projects are usually heralded as aiming to ‘create a shopping paradise to rival Oxford Street’, or to ‘provide a major European retail destination’, as baffling as if Ipswich announced it was turning the park into a space station to rival the one outside the earth’s atmosphere.
But outside the central wasteland life has survived. London’s biggest Indian festival, or mela, is in Croydon. The origins of dubstep are in Croydon. There’s a Kurdish centre, a Zairean church, Afghan cricketers, regular protests to save libraries at which pensioners are photographed with home-made placards for the local paper, an annual Hare Krishna festival, there’s laughter and love and a windmill that has open days, an area called Croydon Airport although there hasn’t been an airport there for sixty years, and a hospital called the Mayday that everyone lovingly calls the Maydie. There was an old homeless West Indian man who became famous for sitting in the underpass playing his home-made double bass, which looked as if it was built from plywood and cable stolen from a building site but somehow sounded authentic.
Crystal Palace Football Club attracts astounding loyalty, although the fans almost always expect to suffer and feel slightly uneasy when we don’t. (The Palace fans’ website can be the most charmingly self-deprecating document you’ll ever read. For example, on the morning of one vital match someone wrote, ‘How are everyone’s bowels this morning?’ After a variety of honest replies one fan answered, ‘I’m fine. I had a perfectly normal crap at half past seven. The only thing is I didn’t wake up until ten past eight.’)
Croydon was also home to the most impressively dedicated Stalinists in the country. When the Communist Party of Great Britain took the decision to become mildly critical of the Soviet Union, for tricks such as invading Czechoslovakia, the Croydon group saw this as a betrayal. So in the 1970s they set up the New Communist Party, and their mission to turn Britain Communist without the wishy-washy compromised semi-Stalinism of the normal Communist Party began in Croydon. This might seem
an over-ambitious project, but it was shortly after this that the grey office blocks and the dual carriageway in the centre of town were built, so it looks as if their hard-line Stalinism won influence on the town planning committee at least. All they needed was labour camps and a couple of Olympic gymnasts and they were almost there.
Despite the pretensions of those who govern Croydon, it’s a small town, and you know it’s a small town because when a bit of the Whitgift Centre appears on Peep Show, which was filmed in Croydon, everyone in Croydon says, ‘Look there’s the Whitgift Centre there’s the Whitgift Centre there’s HMV I wonder if we’ll see someone we know.’
It’s a small town because when I told a neighbour there was an article about me in the Guardian she got very excited until she realised she’d misunderstood and said, ‘Oh, I thought you meant the Croydon Guardian. I’ve not heard of that one you’re on about.’
So, Croydon stands as one of the places the developers have worked tirelessly to destroy but have not managed to. And one of the finest views anywhere in London must be from the roof of the multi-storey car park at the Whitgift Centre. All of the western half of London is laid out, the Wembley arch, Heathrow Airport and a proud green gas thingy that beams from Southall, almost winking at Croydon as a tower from a fellow town that either is or isn’t part of London, but can’t be sure.
London is such a complex mechanism that there are places you might see every day of your life and never know where they are. Though you can see one from the other, there must be thousands of people in each place who are barely aware of the other. Southall, for the outsider, is also a celebration of difference, because it’s comprehensively Indian.
Southall’s green gas tower, it turns out, has a huge ‘LH’ with an arrow on the top, to assure pilots which way is Heathrow, after one lost concentration and landed his passengers at RAF Northolt by mistake, after which I suppose he made an announcement to the passengers that went, ‘Honestly, what am I like? I don’t know whether I’m coming or going today, I really don’t.’