Pay day so I’m on a trip out of London to the coast. The sky is grey, the way I like it. I’ve been making film of the Thames in grey mist, monochrome, still, noir-esque. Croydon has a look of a mid-American city with tall buildings, straight roads, everything bland. I could live there and imagine I’m not in the UK. That would only work, though, if there weren’t any people around to reinforce where we are. Racist, homophobic bigoted fascist people, fearful of anyone different. There are so many of them.
For a brief moment I could indulge myself in the fantasy notion that the south of England is uninhabited, like in numerous post-apocalyptic made for tv film dramas. I’m at the very back of a twelve carriage train. I look down the length of the train and see no one else. The suburban houses below the embankment show no signs of normal human or other activity. Garden ornaments and children’s toys are still, simply left scattered when everyone fled. The station serving the capital’s second most important airport is as deserted as those serving the dormitory settlements. Pigeons have adopted platform awnings as their territory. Trains are parked up in sidings, the rails are acquiring thin coats of bright orange rust. Expensive infrastructure going to waste. There’s a brand new very expensive railway line which runs across London in deep tunnels. No one has travelled on it yet though. If media speculation is to be believed future cities will not function as they used to, people won’t need to travel in or out daily, so these intensive commuter transport systems may be over-specified, obsolete, left to “managed decline”. The 15 minute city is a concept that keeps surfacing. A bight utopian future where everything we need is within walking distance. It sounds nice, so obviously the conspiracists are likening it to dark communism, and claiming it’s all “part of the plan”. Entertaining old loonies, they are.
We’re approaching the first ridge of hill, the north ridge of the South Downs. The hills form a shield separating the London urban spread from the ancient lands of coastal Sussex. The hills protect the capital from the sea, but also, one could imagine keeps the metropolitan plebs away from the mystic magic of the coast and flat fields.
New York is apparently “a ghost town” according to a man who read a journalistic essay on youtube last evening. It was, of course, a subjective point of view, but it seemed plausible. Businesses moving out to cheaper premises, restaurants closed, office people working from home and moving out to dull bland other American cities. Does America have towns? It must do, of course it does, but one never hears them referred to. Perhaps they look exactly the same as their cities with wide 10 lane roads and huge retail sheds, so no one can tell the difference. Do aspirational money-driven Americans live in cities and look down on town-dwellers? Are town-dwellers all low paid waitresses in 1950s style diners with formica tables and red checked aprons? Is there a town – city class divide there? Does it matter?
It seems like the same emptying, “decanting” of cities could happen to London, too, but more slowly, in a typical English slow half-hearted denialist way, to a backdrop of flag waving, hero worshipping, fascist turnips. Fools. I’d like it to happen quickly and decisively, maybe through revolution. The centre could be a giant traffic free village, an economic microclimate. Creatives could be encouraged to reside and reinvent, live in redundant department stores, but not to be the advance guard to gentrification.
Realistically smaller more remote places tend to be the places more likely to become these idyllic creative alternative existence hubs. I’d be happy to relocate to somewhere remote with dramatic landscape, but I don’t know if I could break away from London people and re-establish myself. I might be too old.
I’m in a pub in The Lains. Slightly dark, basic, wooden, flickering lights, I like it. It reminds me of the Big Red up the Holloway Road. I haven’t been there in a long time. I assume the Holloway Road is still there and the same. A feature of ADHD is the tendency to forget about things if they can’t be seen. I should go there and look one day. There is eclectic music playing. I’m okay with music at the moment, although I’m not always able to listen to a lot of it. Silence or ambient sound are calming. There is never actually real complete silence, is there? I could happily have a new life in Brighton, running a record / book shop / bar / gallery / screen room. When will things happen?
There is a walking route marked on the floor with tape. It takes a quirky diagonal turn for no obvious reason. Like life.
Andrew Stevenson 