London Calling Read Free Page A

is Chris Petit’s
Robinson
, Colin Wilson’s
Adrift in Soho,
Michael Moorcock’s
Mother London
and the Jerry Cornelius novels. Swinging London lives on in the imagination. But the scene has now shifted eastward. Recently,
     walking down Great Chapel Street in Soho, I overheard two young men talking. ‘You know,’ one of them said, ‘looking at this,
     you could easily be in Shoreditch.’ It is true; the vast acreage of the East End is now the artistic neighbourhood of London,
     though it is too spread out to have any real centre: artists have studios everywhere from Hoxton to Stoke Newington to Bow.
     They do engage with the older residents, but often their studios – where many of them live – are in semi-industrial areas
     with few people living nearby. There are scores of small galleries, but as soon as they become successful they usually move
     to the West End.
    This book concentrates on the role of London as a magnet and its clubs and pubs as energy centres. With the advent of the
     internet, Eurostar and cheap European air flights, the importance of London as a location has been reduced as people travel
     to Barcelona, Berlin, Paris and all over for shows and art fairs, keep up to date with the latest events in New York, Sydney
     and Moscow on the net, and use Skype to chat to friends working in Vancouver or Amsterdam. Globalization and cheap instant
     communications mean that no matter how outrageous and cutting edge an event might be, people all over the world can know all
     about it seconds later; a true underground is impossible now unless the participants are sworn to secrecy. For the same reason,
     though many artists and musicians use London as their theme, many more could just as easily be working out of Paris or Berlin.
     This is the twenty-first century, and things have changed.
    Before World War Two, London was the greatest city on Earth; by V E Day, 8 May 1945, it was devastated: damaged buildings
     standing in a sea of stones, bombsites overgrown with weeds, dunes of brick dust, rubble piled alongside hastily cleared streets.
     Condemned structures stood windows open to the sky, strips of wallpaper hanging in flaps, stairs leading to nowhere. More
     than a million houses had been destroyed in the blitz, leaving one in six Londoners homeless. Many buildings were occupied
     by squatters who bravely set up house between walls shocked into strange angles by the bombs, sometimes propped up by wooden
     buttresses. Cellars were flooded with stagnant, murky water bobbing with detritus and the corpses of rats, and equally dangerous
     were the emergency static water tanks, large rectangular iron cisterns placednear vulnerable buildings to counter the German incendiary bombs when the water mains were shattered: four foot deep and filled
     to the top, enough to drown a child. Sheep grazed on Hampstead Heath, there was a piggery in Hyde Park and the flowers of
     Kensington Gardens had been replaced with rows of cabbages. The city was beaten down, it was drab and monochrome, joyless.
     There was stringent rationing of even basic food and fuel, poverty was apparent everywhere from the skinny kids playing on
     the bombsites, the muttering tramps sleeping rough on the Embankment, many of them unhinged by the war, to the tired whores
     in Soho and Park Lane. But despite the greyness and the smog, some of the pre-war spirit prevailed. The old bohemian areas
     of Fitzrovia and Soho still had flickers of life in them.
    There were communities overlapping in Soho: the local people who worked in the markets, restaurants and small workshops; the
     sex workers and artists’ models, along with a few painters and writers and the bohemians and eccentrics who patronized the
     bars and clubs from mid-morning until after midnight. Soho was desperately run down and parts had been badly bombed. Ninety
     per cent of its population used the Marshall Street baths; Friday afternoon was the usual day for waiters. A first-class hot