I wrote this in September 2005 somewhere else, and just came across it again. I may repost other things as I rediscover them.
Last night I had access to an unneeded Travelcard so I decided to go into town. The first place I went was Borders on Oxford Street, where I drank Starbulks coffee and read stuff I’d really like to buy but don’t have the money to (like the first two chapters of I Am Alive And You Are Dead, and the entirety of Superman: Red Son). It got to 10:00pm and the coffee shop shut, so moved downstairs to read in one of their armchairs. At 10:30, having finished what I was reading I decided, for lack of better things to do, to go for a walk through the West End. I took Wardour Street down through Soho to Shaftesbury Avenue, and Rupert Street through Chinatown to Coventry Street, where I stood and watched people passing by for a cople of minutes before wandering around the Trocadero for a bit.
I originally had a bunch of prose in mind for this point but I’m going to skip it in order to focus on what happens in a moment.
From there it was down Haymarket and then Pall Mall to avoid the inevitable drunken revellers of Trafalgar Square, and Waterloo Place down to the Mall, where I stopped at the ICA to pick up some flyers for forthcoming events. I figured then I would head down to the river, so I started walking down Horse Guards Road, past St. James’ Park.
This is where it gets interesting.
I stopped at one point to take a look at the Admiralty, a grand old pile of some historic military interest. It has a big parade ground out front, where every year they do this big military pageant to celebrate the Queen’s whatnot or something. Here’s a picture of it at daytime. It’s changed a little bit since that picture was taken; the posts with chains are gone, and now there are only some low bollards along the edge of the site. (For scale, here’s a satellite photo of the building and parade ground.)
It was pretty dark, and completely deserted. I guess there’s not much need for lights there on a Friday night. However, the moon was out and the whole area was illuminated by moonlight, and looked quite nice. I had been standing there for a minute or two, squinting at things – I didn’t have my glasses with me – when I became aware of a flashlight being shined at me out of the corner of my eye. Turning, I was greeted with the instruction “You there. Take your hands out of your pockets.”
Surprised, I did so. Then as the realisation set in that only Authority Figures say things like that, I decided it would be a good idea to put them up as well. “You can put them down, this isn’t America,” the voice replied. Bemused, I did. A moment later the voice’s owner appeared – a policeman. Carrying a very large machine-gun. I started getting a funny feeling.
From here on is a record of the conversation as well as I can remember it.
Policeman: What are you doing here?
Me: I’m having a walk around London.
Policeman: Where do you live?
Me: Leytonstone. East London.
Policeman: Is that where you came from tonight?
Me: No, I was at Borders on Oxford Street, then I walked here after it closed.
Policeman: What were you doing there?
At this point I realised that I was actually being questioned for real, and I was in for the ride. A sense of disbelief settled on me, as if I was dreaming.
Me: Drinking coffee and reading books.
Policeman: When did it close?
Me: It actually closes at eleven, but the coffee shop closes at ten and I started walking at ten thirty.
Policeman: Where did you walk?
Me: I went through Soho to the West End and then down to the ICA, and then here.
Policeman: Where are you going to go next?
Me: I was on my way down to the river. From there I’ll head back into town and catch a night bus.
Policeman: What bus is that?
Me: The N8.
Policeman: Do you have anything on you you shouldn’t have?
Me: No, just a lot of wanky art leaflets.
Policeman (producing a notebook): What’s your name?
Me: —-.
Policeman (writing): And your address?
Me: Blah blah blah London E11.
Policeman: Do you have any criminal record?
Me: No, I don’t.
He got on the radio. “Delta Twenty-Two, Ranger Two. Can you do a name check for me please.” He gave them my name.
Ranger Two: Are you registered?
Me: Yes, I am. If by that you mean the Electoral Register.
He nodded. “Can you do a photo check, please,” he asked the radio, and gave them my address. (Presumably they found the record of when I’ve called the police myself from this address.) “No, but we have him at this address,” said the radio. “Thanks, over,” said Ranger Two.
Ranger Two: How tall would you say you are?
Me: Five ten.
Ranger Two: What colour’s your hair?
Me: Light brown. Blue eyes.
Ranger Two: Do you have any ID on you?
Me: Not really… only a bank card, I think.
I got my wallet out and handed him my HSBC debit card.
Me: Oh, there is my video shop ID card, that has a photo, but I don’t know if that counts.
I handed it to him. He squinted at it and inspected the back where it says “Scratch Removal now available! only £3 per DVD!”
Ranger Two: I’m asking you these questions under the terms of the Terrorism Act. I’m going to call one of my colleagues, who is going to search you. This is because you’re far from home – not that that’s a crime – and because of the nature of this area.
He added the bit in about it not being a crime before I had a chance to ask him if it is, in fact, a crime to be far from home. I guess he must be used to people asking him that. Although I don’t consider being in central London “far from home” when I happen to live in east London.
Ranger Two: Do you know where you are?
Me: Apart from a vague notion of being near St. James’ Park, not really.
Ranger Two: Well, this is the Admiralty, and over there is Downing Street.
Me: Ah, of course. Right.
Ranger Two: You’re entitled to a record of this search. I can’t fill one in for you now [he gestured around him and indicated the gun], but you can ask for it at any police station.
We stood around and waited for a few minutes for someone else to turn up. Other voices on the radio discussed a drunken man stumbling around Grosvenor Square. “He’s going around again, he’s going to get hit by a car if he keeps this up,” commented somebody, with a hint of amusement. Eventually a car turned up at the edge of the parade ground and turned a spotlight on us. “Can you turn that off, it’s not helping,” grumbled Ranger Two into the radio to the other policeman.
Two policemen came over to us from the car. One of them started putting on a pair of blue plastic gloves. The other stood and watched with amusement. I think it was a slow night.
Gloves: Do you have anything on you that might hurt us, or yourself, or the people we’re here for?
Me: No.
Gloves instructed me to remove my jacket; he laid it on the car bonnet.
Gloves: Spread your arms and legs; don’t move.
He searched me, thoroughly investigating my pockets. Squinted at the screen of my phone to make sure that it was a phone, not a bombophone. Went through the contents of my jacket.
Gloves: What am I going to find in here?
Me: My wallet and keys, and a bunch of leaflets.
Gloves (squinting at an ICA brochure): What is the nature of this literature?
What a shame I didn’t have my copy of the Qur’an with me, huh.
Me: Art, music, film. That sort of thing. It’s from the ICA, over there.
Gloves: Okay. You can take this stuff back.
Ranger Two: Where are you going to go now?
Me: Down to the river then up to find a night bus.
Ranger Two: Good. I’d suggest you leave this area as quickly as possible.
And that was it. I walked off down Horse Guards Road, and a couple of minutes later there was no sign to show it had ever happened. For the whole duration of the questioning, I hadn’t been able take it seriously. It just seemed too bizarre. I’d been answering the questions confidently, with only the faintest touch of good humour; Ranger Two had been serious but understanding, as if he knew I knew he was doing it as a formality. It was very strange.
From there I crossed Westminster Bridge, walked along the South Bank and came back across the Millennium Bridge. It was deserted, and I took the opportunity to sit down in the middle of it for a moment. From St. Paul’s I caught a night bus home.
Welcome to 21st century London, I guess.
transcribed from a place mat
Being in the general vicinity and needing to kill some time, I decided to take a look at the Westfield London shopping center, which opened with a vast amount of publicity some eighteen months ago in Shepherd’s Bush. As I write this I am still in it, ensconced in a booth at a restaurant on one of the upper floors, looking down into the central arena of this wing of the structure.
Westfield is an unsettling experience despite, and in fact because of, the non-threatening image that it carefully attempts to project. Following the tradition of mall design that has evolved through the last half-century, Westfield London’s architects have sought to enclose space in the least obtrusive fashion they could devise. They have attempted to give shoppers the feeling of being outside even though they are in; and to give them the impression of being free to roam and roost, like chickens in a barn. In reality, the shopper is funnelled through a long and witless parade of prefabricated brand stores that bear no relation to the virtual landscape which has been created for them. Slotting into their allotted cuboidal spaces, each store bears a frontage that sets it apart from its neighbors in some fashion, yet is not distinctive enough to alienate it from its clone-siblings somewhere out there in the retail universe.
Shoppers, as they pass along the aisles of high-street brands, can take the weight off their weary feet on one of a variety of vaguely Eero Saarinen-esque semi-designer chairs. Like the information desks, signs and all other objects on a Westfield floor, these come in a range of gently curved shapes – as if they had simply washed ashore after a decade or two of being worn down on the seabed by tireless waves. While emanating a whiff of designer style and stylish enough to pass muster to the aspirational middle-class eye, the furniture is nevertheless not daring enough to lodge in the mind’s eye for much longer than the buttock-prints will last in the soft foam of the seat after the shoppers have risen. As they sit, consumers may choose to look up and ponder the smooth undulations of the Norman Foster Lite geodesic glass panel roof, lying dynamically – yet gently – like a blanket draped over a minor forest of treelike branching steel columns. The inside-out feeling presents itself once again, offering vague hints of being in some upscaled, 21st-century version of the Arabian souk, sheltered from the fierce noonday drizzle in a cool oasis of commerce.
This effect, along with the homely familiarity of the brands presented in the mall, serves to effectively decouple the visitor from any sense of locale. You could be in any one of a dozen countries, and never know which; nor would it matter. With its white-painted walls, marble floors, glass and steel panels, Westfield London is indistinguishable from any airport terminal built within the last decade. The similarity extends beyond mere appearances: Westfield is a terminal. With its inside-out, everywhere-and-nowhere nature, it is the midway point on a U-shaped journey to nowhere, beginning and ending in the shopper’s home. Like an airport in which you spend several hours waiting for a connecting flight in a country that you do not intend to visit, it offers you no exit beyond that of your scheduled journey. The outside world, for all intents and purposes, does not exist.
After spending a while circulating in the microverse of the terminal I began to suspect that had I gone far enough, I would simply have arrived back where I began, like an ant marching along a Möbius strip in an M.C. Escher print. Eventually I realized that I could draw comfort from the feeling. The notion that there was, in fact, some kind of world that Westfield was the gateway to was a terrifying prospect. I began fearing that I could accidentally trace some nameless rune with my footsteps and cause the Westfield Gateway to open into an unimaginable world, like the girl solving the puzzle box in Hellraiser.
The nowhere aesthetic is characterized by the restaurant I am in. It, like almost everything in Westfield London, comes in a limited palette of shades: white, gray, taupe, black. (After becoming used to this desaturated world, the strident colors on display on the huge screens of the movie theater lobby upstairs come as a shock. “The biggest digital screen in Europe,” booms an amplified voice as your eyes, drained of color for the past few hours, frantically gorge themselves on whatever trailer is currently on show.) The restaurant served me a hamburger and fries. It was competently-enough produced, and proffered hints of the style and quality that consumers expect from the type of modern hamburger chain restaurants which have sprung up in droves over the last decade, but wasn’t quite able to follow through on those hints. (The restaurant’s name, “Byron”, offers an equally vague hint of cultured sophistication.) The experience of the burger, like that of Westfield itself, is one of transient satisfaction that fades into a vague taupe blur in the memory.
The return leg of a shopper’s commercial vacation to Westfield London will find them emerging into the distinctly less salubrious, yet infinitely more personable, streets of Shepherd’s Bush. The Westfield complex has landed on this somewhat down-at-heel area and erected what Douglas Adams called a “Somebody Else’s Problem field” over itself. Inside Westfield, the council estates and grubby fast-food venues of Shepherd’s Bush simply cease to exist. Why worry about or even notice the real world when you’re on a visit to Nowhere Land?
It is now perfectly clear to me what is on offer in the near future in Stratford, east London, close to my own home, an area sharing the worn-down vibe of Shepherd’s Bush, where a second huge Westfield complex is under heavy construction in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics. The Westfield developers have invented the geographic memory hole, where all awareness of culture and locale is muted. Visitors to London’s Olympic Host Boroughs will be smoothly funneled away from the grit and dangers of real life in impoverished urban areas, into a steel and glass wonderland where their anxieties will be safely dulled and deadened for a few hours – until, having shot their wads into the chip and PIN terminals, they begin the journey home with their new possessions.
Charmless, characterless, and endless, Westfield is a living death.
