Traders at the London Metal Exchange.
An invisible bridge spans the Thames at Blackfriars. Victorian pilings jut from the river, the railway they once supported long gone. Dangling above them on this cold day, helicopters surveilled thousands of strikers and supporters processing loudly through central London. It was Nov. 30, 2011, and two million public-sector workers were on strike.
Mary Ezekiel, staff nurse at University College London Hospital, itemized the baleful effects that pension cuts — the cause of the day’s action — will have. She flattened down her T-shirt. Many British tchotchkes are emblazoned with the cloying World War II propaganda slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On.” “Get Angry,” Ezekiel’s shirt demanded instead, “and Fight Back.” “All the speakers have been amazing,” she said. “That’s what I feel positive about. I just hope that it reaches Mr. Cameron” — she said the prime minister’s name disdainfully — “in his mansion.”
Cameron first denounced the day’s action, then dismissed it. For the Right, strikes are both devilish and pathetic, have both terrible and absolutely no effects.
“The perils of marching!” a young woman said with a laugh, pushing banners out of her face. “Lashed by flags!” She was surrounded by bobbing cloth and cardboard. The logo of the Society of Radiographers wobbled near placards of the Worker-communist Party of Iran. Under a huge pink triangle, a young Ugandan man called Abbey said, “We are helping gay asylum seekers from over the world, especially Uganda, Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal.” He was there to support the workers. It’s all linked, he explained. Cuts to social spending, soaring university tuition fees, scapegoating.
There’s strife beyond the public sector. Several days after the strike, electricians working for the construction company Balfour Beatty walked out in protest against aggressive new contracts. People are fighting to stand still, whatever line of work they’re in.
Stratford, East London, is being reconfigured on a biblical scale. It’s December, and from the acres of mud and blue wrapping of the Olympic Park juts the city’s new monument, the ArcelorMittal Orbit, by the artists Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond, a vast sculpture of knotting girders like a snarled Gaian hernia. Its name is a corporate grandiosity on the part of its donor, Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in Britain. Near it is the stadium, its post-Olympic future a question mark, with bickerings and legal shenanigans ongoing. There’s Zaha Hadid’s aquatic center, its celebrated lines ruined by temporary seating.
At the southern end of the development site, the walkway is on the path of an old sewer. Oh, London, you drama queen. You didn’t have to do that. We watch from the route of effluent.
The Olympics are slated to cost taxpayers $14.7 billion. In this time of “austerity,” youth clubs and libraries are being shut down as expendable fripperies; this expenditure, though, is not negotiable. The uprisen young of London, participants in extraordinary riots that shook the country last summer, do the math. “Because you want to host the Olympics, yeah,” one participant told researchers, “so your country can look better and be there, we should suffer.”
This is a city where buoyed-up audiences yell advice to young boxers in Bethnal Green’s York Hall, where tidal crowds of football fans commune in raucous rude chants, where fans adopt local heroes to receive Olympic cheers. It’s not sport that troubles those troubled by the city’s priorities.
Mike Marqusee, writer and activist, has been an East London local and a sports fan for decades. American by birth, he nonetheless not only understands and loves cricket, of all things, but even wrote a book about it. He’s excited to see the track and field when it arrives up the road from him in July. Still, he was, and remains, opposed to the coming of the Olympics. “For the reasons that’ve all been confirmed,” he says. “These mega-events in general are bad for the communities where they take place, they do not provide long-term employment, they are very exploitative of the area.”
Stratford sightseers are funneled into prescribed walkways; going off-piste is vigorously discouraged. The “access routes,” the enormous structures are neurotically planned and policed. For the area to be other than a charnel ground of Ozymandian skeletons in 30 years, it will have to develop like a living thing. That means beyond the planners’, beyond any, preparations.
Kathryn Firth, chief of design at the Olympic Park Legacy Company, the public body responsible for long-term planning of the park, laughs quietly at that. “You really hit the nail on the head,” she told me. “I’ll be honest; it’s a constant struggle. Not surprisingly, the planning-decisions team who essentially is the arbiter of our planning application wants comfort and certainty in the future, then you’re kind of going, Well, but the future lies a long way out, and we need to be a little bit light on our feet.” Is it easy? “No, you’re right, planning is very constrained, and it’s a kind of blunt tool to do something where you want places that are like those grittier, more diverse places.”
Her thoughtful honesty is refreshing. Mostly what we get in London is unending rah-rah from official channels. At the London Policy Conference, a high-powered talking shop in December for urbanologists, politicians and academics in the Brutalist concrete art zone of London’s Southbank Center, Mayor Boris Johnson chortlingly describes those skeptical of the Games as “the gloomadon poppers!” Johnson is crush-heckled: someone in the audience bleats that we all love him. The mayor is a ninja of bumptiousness, a man with a genius for working rooms full of the easily pleased. “The many gloomsters!” he beams, still on Olympic theme.
The Games’ security plans grow ever more dystopian and surreal. There will be snipers in helicopters; jets; warships in the Thames; more British troops on duty in London than in Afghanistan.
“They won’t do it,” Marqusee says, “but what would have been nice is if they’d made these the Austerity Games in a nice way. Just get rid of everything else, it’s not appropriate, it’s just going to be the sports, and we’ll enjoy it, everyone’ll go half-cost, no big hotels.” With the pleasure of the Londoner by choice, he continues: “And you know, this is London! No, we’re not going to compete with Beijing, we’re not that kind of place anyway, we’re not an authoritarian state that can get 10,000 people to march up and down. But why not be, you know, just who we are? Get some local kids out to do some hip-hop or whatever.”
The video for “Unorthodox,” by the London rapper Wretch 32, takes place in the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham, North London. It’s an area of extraordinary ethnic diversity and local pride, and one troubled by unemployment, poverty, poor housing. In the video, it’s startlingly beautiful. “I kind of want to turn it on its head,” says Ben Newman, the director, of the cliché. “I know a lot of people film and represent those areas in a negative way.” Instead, the mixed-up area captured in the stairwells is a good, boisterous London dream, and true.
There’s another Tottenham, equally true, an image on endless repeat last summer. A conflagration, the charcoal shell of a local landmark, a well-known carpet shop. It was near here that a riot started Aug. 6, in response to the fatal shooting of a young local man, Mark Duggan, by the police, under heavily contested circumstances, and to the police’s subsequent dealings with his family. This was the first of a series of disturbances that spread over successive nights around London and the United Kingdom. Britons saw loop after loop of images of buildings on fire, smashed glass, streets in raucous refusal. Youths taking TVs, clothes, carpets, food from broken-open shops, sometimes with dizzy exuberance, sometimes with what looked like thoughtful care.
The aftermath was one of panicked reaction. Courts became runnels for judicial cruelty, dispensing sentences vastly more severe than anything usual for similar crimes. The government’s watchdog announced that the police might use live ammunition against those setting fires — some were teenagers — in future.
In December, in an effort to make sense of the extraordinary events, The Guardian and the London School of Economics released “Reading the Riots,” a joint report on the events. What they discovered, through extensive research and interviews, was that what motivated many of those on the streets was resentment of the police and a deep sense of injustice.
Eyes roll with the duh.
Self-evident or not, this does not convince everyone. Theresa May, the Conservative Home Secretary, blames instead “sheer criminality.” It’s singalong for the Right. They know this tune: It was played after the Brixton riots of 1981 and 1985, Tottenham 1985, after every riot in London, or anywhere, since forever. While May’s denunciation of the obvious continues, her own department quietly gets on with examining the police’s stop-and-search powers, a cause of huge resentment among young Londoners, which — when do such powers not? — disproportionately affect minorities.
“Feeling powerless, for me, is a very dangerous thing that we’ve seen in the riots,” says Symeon Brown at the London Policy Conference. Brown’s a young man from Tottenham himself, a youth activist, a researcher who worked on the Guardian report. Giving himself the voice of one of those involved in the riots, he explains that that night there came “that sense that for once in my life I had power.”
In Britain between 1998 and 2009, there were at least 333 deaths in police custody, 87 of them after restraint by officers. Not a single officer was convicted. Of all the more and less unsubtle ways young Londoners — those not from Chelsea, from Bloomsbury; those not rich — are told that they are not terribly important, none are as overt or as cruel as this.
Standing so straight on a raised dais, in so immaculate a uniform that he looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the Metropolitan Police Service’s new commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, tells the conference in an avuncular voice about his plan for “total policing.” He is enthusiastic but nebulous. Details are vague. He enthuses about large forces zooming into small areas and clamping down on minor infractions. He mentions uninsured vehicles.
Helen Shaw, co-director of Inquest, an organization dedicated to the investigation of contentious deaths in official custody, has a different understanding. She suspects that total policing will mean “a much more aggressive police presence, a stance that’s more aggressive, and more about fear.” Indeed, Hogan-Howe says he wants “to put fear into the heart of criminals.” Shaw is more stark: “We think we’ll see more deaths.”
The police have not had a good couple of years. Constituencies not traditionally antipathetic have been shocked by its fervent enthusiasm for “kettling,” corralling demonstrators tightly without charge, food, water or release, for hours. The brutal policing of student protests on Dec. 9, 2010, left one young man, Alfie Meadows, in the hospital with brain injuries. At that same protest, the police hauled Jody McIntyre, a 20-year-old with cerebral palsy, from his wheelchair, dragging him across the ground. At a demonstration on April 1 the previous year, an unresisting and uninvolved newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, was hit by the police and died shortly after. And then Mark Duggan, about whom each rumor initially leaked — that he shot first, that he shot at all — was shown one by one to be untrue.
Two boys get on a bus from northwest London heading to the center. They swagger upstairs, lounge on the front seats, turn their phones into inadequate speakers and drawl along with the Notorious B.I.G.: “Every Saturday ‘Rap Attack,’ Mr. Magic, Marley Marl/I let my tape rock till my tape popped.” Like they know what tape is.
You want to see how much London hates its young — some of them; “Let’s be honest,” says the writer Owen Jones, “they’re not talking about Etonians” — watch them play music on public transport. Everyday silliness, adolescent thoughtlessness are treated like social collapse. Of which there’s a fair bit going around, true, but does it really inhere in this?
“On the one hand you have this patronizing attitude toward young people, coddling them,” says Saleha Ali, 25, the volunteer coordinator at WORLDwrite, an education charity in Hackney. “And on the other hand you have heavy-handed regulation, so there’s a hysteria about young people getting really drunk, going out and all these kinds of things, it’s just like panic, Oh, my God, what are we creating, a generation of monsters?”
Tinny music raises disproportionate ire. Travelers shift and glare as 14-year-olds give themselves soundtracks, as if they’re boxers. Not all, but a fair few of the older passengers look wrathful.
Who cares? You’re getting off in five minutes, he’s 14 and trying it on a bit and boisterous to fill the city with music.
In 1998, Tony Blair ushered into being ASBOs, antisocial-behavior orders. Sharp laws, the better for society, like Cronus, like a traumatized hamster, to eat its children. These startling civil orders criminalize legal behavior, individually, tailor-making offenses. A 17-year-old was banned from swearing. Another was told he could go to jail if he dropped his trousers. A 19-year-old was barred by law from playing football in the street.
“I do think that there is something very particular about here,” says Camila Batmanghelidjh. The founder and director of the advocacy organization Kids Company, Batmanghelidjh is one of the best-known figures in British child welfare. “I have a hunch. Which is that the British are very ashamed of vulnerability. So what happens is whereas another culture might look back on their childhood and say, ‘God, I was so cute, I thought clouds were cotton wool,’ the British will look back and say, ‘I was so stupid, I thought clouds were cotton wool.’ ”
It used to be startling to see a fox in London — impossible not to feel that the city had slipped into a fable. Now you spot them on any late-night jog. In 2011, one of these agents of animal chaos infiltrated the Shard — at 32 London Bridge, the city’s unfinished tallest building — and climbed a thousand feet above the streets to live on builders’ scraps.
At dusk and dawn, green bolts shoot low, as flocks of feral parakeets set about bird business. Walking at dawn in the mud of Wormwood Scrubs, a rough, wild common next to the prison of the same name, we approach a screaming copse. Incredible flocks of these nonnatives preen and screechingly bicker, overlooking the glow of waking London.
David Lindo is the Urban Birder, a writer and broadcaster, well known in the British bird world. To him, these parakeets are bullies, worse than a distraction. He eyes them with dislike.
“See, these are black-headed gulls,” he says, looking in another direction. He points out a young lesser black-backed gull, a female blackbird, a magpie. Lindo reminisces about the waxwings brought in by last year’s snow. But he is indulgent of the nonspecialist’s fascination with the unlikely parakeets. They fly low, hook-billed, hungry into the dawn, and he leads the way into the unbirded trees.
Guano devastation. Limey spatters ruin the winter vegetation like the aftermath of some epochal paintball war.
“They nest in holes,” Lindo says. “There’s anecdotal evidence that they oust our native hole-nesters, like starlings, stock doves and nuthatches. And” — he pauses grimly — “there’s a shortage of holes in Britain as it is.”
For all of us. Everyone knows there’s a catastrophe unfolding, that few can afford to live in their own city. It was not always so.
“The big difference from the American system is that in Britain what we call council housing is publicly owned and provides general-need housing,” says Eileen Short, chairwoman of Defend Council Housing. “It’s not welfare housing; it’s housing as a right, and this was the model that was used to clear the slums and provide the housing in the crisis years after the First and the Second World Wars.” Across London, that means “good quality spacious housing of its day was built, which now means that lower-paid and average-paid workers and the elderly and parents and so on can live in some of the most expensive areas of London.” Rich areas of this city have long been unusually mixed. “In Britain even 30 years ago, 30 percent of the population lived in council housing. And it has a proud and treasured part to play in life for ordinary people.”
But that stock has been depleted for years. Houses taken from the pool were left unreplaced, at rates accelerating fast under Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme from the 1980s. New Labor did little to reverse this. The shortage is severe. Rents are rocketing, house prices, stagnating gently or not, are utterly prohibitive. Everyone knows this. Now the government is capping housing benefits, which the Chartered Institute of Housing warns is likely to price 800,000 households across the country out of their own communities. Rough sleeping is up.
The trends are obvious, the results predictable. “What we think is likely to happen,” says Bharat Mehta, chief executive of Trust for London, whose job it is to investigate London poverty, “is that there’ll be a movement of people from inner to outer London.”
In Paris, cheap housing is pushed out of sight of the boulevards, to the banlieues, the impoverished, underserved, tense suburbs. With its history of public housing, London has always been far more of a medley, incomes jostling together across the city. Now the poor are to be pushed centrifugally, faster and faster. The banlieuefication of London is under way.
There is building, just endlessly not of public housing. The city’s showcase architecture is elemental. The 30 St. Mary Axe building — the Gherkin — less than a decade old, is established in the skyline. The spine of the Shard soars over South London accumulating glass as if it’s in solution, growing crystals. No. 20 Fenchurch Street — the Walkie-Talkie — rises by now aboveground. It’s too early to be sure how such leviathan construction will submit to the city.
Some will be ugly. That might not be the worst sin: that, London can metabolize. Centre Point, stubby tower at the junction of Oxford and Tottenham Court Road, is ugly and, if grudgingly, rather loved. But London’s growing fake public space, corporate-owned stretches that pretend to be piazzas and streets but lock down and exclude citizens as Occupy movements and other irritations necessitate, abjures the backstreet-and-alleyway gestalt of the city. It and its planners have little room for any urban contingency, places where railway bridges cut low over streets, on their own business, at angles that make no sense from below, forming strange obliques and acutes with the houses they meet.
The question is whether London’s new glass boxes of large size can, over time, submit, surrender, become part of the city. This is something that Canary Wharf, the Docklands financial district begun in the late ’80s, every day a thuggish and hideous middle-finger-flipped glass-and-steel at the poor of the East End, every night a Moloch’s urinal dripping sallow light on the Isle of Dogs, has never done and will never do.
Diasporas have sustained us. It’s a terrible cliché, multiculturalism through food, but there’s a reason it’s what Londoners reach for. Smart restaurants like St. John have rehabilitated English fodder, glorying in pork, blackberries, eulogizing offal. Fine. If you’re of a certain age and grew up here, you remember that aside from the lucky, rich or recently immigrant, we had no food. We gnawed bread like bleached plastic, cheese like soap. We yowled, a hungry people. New Londoners took pity before the rest of us succumbed to malnutrition and misery, and shared their cuisines. Indian, Jamaican, whatever — name a culinary tradition, it won’t be too far to find, near the greasy spoons keeping the faith. Each new group of incomers brings something — now Polish food has mainstreamed, and there’s dense bread in the corner shops, krufki in supermarkets. Racism, of course, endures, adapts. According to the exigencies of ideology, it casts around for one, then another first-choice hate. Jews in the 1930s, then black people, then Asians. For the past 10 years, Muslims in particular have worn the bull’s-eye. If they’re women who cover their hair, those few who veil entirely or those who chat into scarf-tucked phones, the hijab hands-free, their choice of headgear is bizarrely troublesome to those whose business it is not. The government’s official counterterror strategy includes asking university lecturers to report depressed Muslim students. Hate crimes against Muslims rise, fueled, researchers at the University of Exeter suggest, by the mainstreaming of Islamophobia among politicians and in the media. You can say shocking, scandalous things about Muslims, and opinion makers do, then push out their chins as if they’ve been brave.
Feeding on that disgrace, Britain is seeing a mutation of its “traditional” fascism into a form fixated on these new scapegoats. Emerging from groups like the British National Party and football hooliganism, the English Defense League aims its spite squarely at Muslims. It follows a familiar trajectory of intimidation; it tries to march in “Muslim” areas. But it has taken a few unusual turns, too, showing off a (very) few members of color, Jewish members, gay members. Pitching for a “liberal” fascism.
But London is London. “Their situation in London is incredibly weak,” says Martin Smith, a leader of Unite Against Fascism. “Because London’s so integrated,” he adds enthusiastically, “you can literally go from estate to estate, and it’s black, white, mums and dads, mixed, all that.
“I think with migrants,” he continues, pausing slightly, “you can get what I would call racist sentiments developing, even among blacks and Asians.” Smith knows this fight. He’s optimistic but not relaxed. These are not easy times. “There could be, I suppose — panic issues could develop around that. I wouldn’t rule that out in London. I think it would be hard, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”
London is full of ghosts — ghost walks; a city’s worth of cemeteries; ghost-advertising, scabs of paint on brick. The city invoked something, read a grimoire it shouldn’t have. Thatcher’s face recurs at every turn, not in clouds of sulfur but of exhaust, on buses bearing posters advertising Meryl Streep’s celluloid turn as our erstwhile prime minister. Cabinet reports from the aftermath of other riots across the country, 31 years ago, have been released. A policy was mooted, they suggest — the point is disputed — of “managed decline” of the troublesome areas. Leaving them to rot.
Lionel Morrison considers the past. Few people are so well poised to parse this present, of press scandals, claim and counterclaim of racism and police misbehavior, deprivation, urban uprising. A South African radical, facing the death penalty in 1956 for his struggles against apartheid — in his house there is a photograph of him with one of his co-defendants, Nelson Mandela — Morrison got out, came to London in 1960. In 1987, he became the first black president of the National Union of Journalists. In 2000 he was honored by the British government with what is bleakly, amusingly, still called an O.B.E., Order of the British Empire.
We sit in his home, between English oil portraits that must be two centuries old, and carvings and sculptures from the country of his birth. Is Morrison hopeful? An optimist?
“I’ve been thinking about it myself,” he says gravely, his voice still strongly accented after all these years. “In a sense, I’m optimist. But it hits and completely, constantly kicks at this optimism, you understand?” The “it” is everything.
“It’s like a big angry wolf having it over here. And it’s not prepared to move, and sometimes its legs will go, but slow.” He mimes the animal moving, leaving a little space, a little hole, an exit. “And people will say, ‘Ah, we’ve got it!’ And then chop, it goes again.” His hands come down, the wolf’s grasp closes.
Morrison doesn’t sound despairing. But he does sound tired. “Every time you do something and nothing goes any further, it eats at you,” he says. “It starts this bitterness.” It can break people down. Make them hopeless, or worse. When none of their efforts to improve anything work, some, he warns, will stop fighting. They will say, “Let us just wait for things to — for chaos, really, to take place.”
China Miéville is the author of several novels, including ‘‘The City and the City.’’ He lives and works in London. An expanded version of this essay will be published on March 5, 2012, on his Web sitewww.londonsoverthrow.org.
Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved
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