East-West Read online

  It is along this stretch of the line, in the shadow of the City, that the flotsam and jetsam of affluence are to be found. Here, even around Bond Street, the local Tory Party is trying to encourage new members to join. In an area of high population turnover its website insists: ‘Our team reflects the diversity of our local community. There are people from six different countries among our younger and older members.’73 Six is a remarkably low figure given the diversity all around them, but it is interesting that they mention it nevertheless.

  Just five minutes to the east the same political party website (in April 2011) led with details of a fight for access to a Housing Association home: ‘Labour Councillor Forces Young Family to Leave Home’.74 It is worth noting how, by Bond Street and Oxford Circus, a majority of local residents vote Conservative, whereas by Tottenham Court Road and Holborn, the vote is mainly for Labour.

  Source: See http://www.londonmapper.org.uk/features/inequality-in-london/

  There is a fault line running through this part of the heart of London. A fault line that has grown more perilous in recent decades as the people on the ground either side of the line have been pushing in opposing directions. When a riot occurs, when protesters occupy shops, when there is trouble in town, the social earthquake now more often than not finds one of its foci near here. But, just like earthquakes, although where trouble occurs tends to be predictable, precisely when trouble will next occur – when the tension will next cause the ground to shift – nobody knows.

  Chancery Lane, 4.00 p.m.

  ‘It’s funny,’ he said as they came out of the tube. ‘Although Chancery Lane is the boundary of the City, this tube stop, the one given its name, is outside the old walls. It’s not easy to spot the point where you cross over from the Borough of Camden. You wouldn’t know you are in “the City” unless you looked carefully for the signs, the livery, and the street furniture changing. Cross this line,’ he said, making a point of stepping theatrically over the kerb as they entered Furnival Street from the north, ‘and you leave democracy and enter another place. We don’t get to vote here. There is no MP for us residents of the City of London.’ They walked past three security cameras on a pole in the street and the older man gestured towards them as if this were further proof. His younger companion was interested, but not that interested.

  ‘My part of the old City is called Farringdon Without, or it could be a detached part of Farringdon Within,’ he pontificated. ‘Someone moved the boundaries about ten years ago. I’ve never really got to the bottom of it; anyway here we are. And … this is where I live,’ he announced, opening the door for the man he had chatted up over lunch.

  He still looked good at 60, kept himself fit, probably fitter than the younger man. Maybe it was because he was black that people found it hard to gauge his age; most assumed he was in his forties. They often didn’t guess that by shaving his head he disguised how little hair he had left.

  ‘What do you mean you leave democracy?’ the younger man asked.

  It was just dawning on him that this was the flat of someone a little older and a lot more prosperous than he had assumed from their chat in the wine bar. Was it because the older man wasn’t white that he had judged the chap to be a social class below the one he clearly was so solidly in? This was a no-expense-spared apartment.

  ‘The City of London: a unique authority,’ the older man quoted. ‘That’s what it says on our website.75 What that means, what’s unique, is that people here do not get to vote for who represents them. But what is really funny is that we pretend they do. My job is to work as a kind of public relations officer for the City. We call the men with power “councillors”, but they are not voted into office like other councillors. We call our sheriffs “elected”, but we don’t say who gets to elect them. It’s really a benign dictatorship here. But it works. No one complains. There is just so much money within and most people outside just don’t know that government here is less democratic than almost anywhere else in Europe.’76

  ‘So why are you here, then? Surely you don’t fit in,’ the younger man asked, a bit abruptly. What he really wanted to ask was why hadn’t he let on that he was loaded a little earlier?

  ‘They need me,’ the older man replied. ‘I help them feel less guilty. Secretly they are feeling more and more guilt with every year that passes. People used to be impressed by them, but that is going. Now they are becoming the bogeymen – old white unelected bigots who order in their private police force to attack legitimate protesters, all that kind of thing. They need diversions. I’m one of their diversions: I’m what they call their “corporate responsibility”. I show they care, but – to be honest – they don’t really give a damn.’77

  ‘So why are you helping them?’ the young man asked, a bit more unsure again of his new companion.

  ‘I get the flat,’ was the simple reply. ‘You don’t think I own this place, do you? It comes with the job. I get to live in London town. I get to be at the heart of it all. I’ll get a pension –’ he saw the younger man’s eyebrows rise and wished he hadn’t mentioned the pension – ‘and maybe one day I’ll write a book about all the corruption and hypocrisy that go on here, from another country, somewhere warmer.’

  His younger companion looked more impressed. A pity he’d signed that non-disclosure agreement: it read like the Official Secrets Act. Would they stop his pension if he wrote that book?

  St Paul’s, 4.30 p.m.

  She always did well outside the cathedral. They charged so much for people to go in that a few pennies for an old woman with a shopping basket on wheels was not going to hurt.

  She looked much older than her 63 years, more haggard. That was hardly surprising. If she got enough from begging she could pay to stay in the ‘youth’ hostel. At 63 and as ‘vulnerable’, she had a right to be housed by the council, but she was frightened of the estate they would put her on.

  She was here at 4.30 because she didn’t have enough for the hostel. The hostel would have let her in at 2.00, but she didn’t have the money. She would almost certainly be sleeping in the shelter tonight and it opened much later. She liked it in the hostel, all the young people around. If she didn’t get another few pounds she would have to go to the shelter, which wasn’t as nice. But then people didn’t think she was nice. If the youth hostel was booked up she’d have to sleep in the shelter even if she got enough money. It was so confusing. She got confused a lot, repeated herself a lot. But her long-term memory was good, even her memory from a few weeks ago was good. It was just having a conversation and remembering what she had to do today that she found hard.

  For example, she’d been begging here exactly a month ago. She thought she’d been asked if she could move on by a BBC camera crew, but she hadn’t been. They had said something about filming for the 300th anniversary of the building of the cathedral, about how £40 million had recently been spent smartening it up, about how it was ‘now looking certainly as clean and as brilliant as it was 300 years ago when Christopher Wren built it’.78 They sounded as if they were reading out a script.

  She wondered if they had made people like her move away back then, so as not to spoil how the building looked. She guessed they had. Some things do change, but people never complain enough, she thought.

  Different people treated her in different ways. The haughty grumpy old ladies who volunteered to police the tourists within St Paul’s tended to look as if they were holding their noses as they walked past her. This was when she was having a rest by the side entrance.

  ‘Not very Christian,’ she would mutter, but then this wasn’t really a very Christian building, it was a tourist attraction and maybe something a bit worse than that, she thought. Once, early in the morning when it was quite empty, one of the younger security guards had asked her if she’d ever been inside. She’d said she hadn’t. He had told her that he spent hours sitting high up in the dome, making sure tourists walked round the right way. He’d taken her in to see the inside for a few minutes, before th
e haughty ladies arrived. It was full of statues of dead soldiers and their horses, of admirals and generals, of people who had started wars and killed thousands.

  ‘What’s this got to do with God?’ she’d asked.

  ‘Search me,’ he’d said. ‘But sitting up there eight hours a day pays my rent and pays for the Oyster card – if little else. I meditate sometimes and think about Allah.’ He was laughing, as he carried on: ‘Everyone’s here for the money: you begging, me sitting, the tourists buying their experiences, the clergy selling peace-of-mind to sinners.’

  Last Tuesday she was sitting outside and saw someone she recognized coming in, a woman who had been a Member of Parliament when she was a teenager, Shirley Williams. She asked Shirley what was happening.

  ‘We’re debating the Robin Hood Tax,’ the former MP answered.

  ‘What good will that do?’ she asked Shirley. ‘All that debate, it doesn’t change anything. No one will take any notice. You want to make more of a fuss. That’s what your mum did. She wrote a book, didn’t she, against war, against all that this place stands for? She made a fuss. That’s how we got the NHS and everything: making a fuss. If you don’t make a fuss we’ll lose it all!’

  The former MP walked off wondering why so many very elderly people appeared to remember her best for her mother’s book, not for the Social Democrats.79

  Bank, 5.00 p.m.

  ‘I don’t know what they are complaining about!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m 66 and I have years of energy left in me. People should only retire when they can afford to, when they have saved enough. All these namby-pamby shirkers wanting to stop working at 60 and take those government pensions that my taxes pay for, it has to be stopped!’

  He was on a roll. She tried to get him off it.

  ‘But you are unusual, dear. You’ve always had so much energy and drive. Some people just want a rest by their seventh decade, to slow down a bit.’ She was thinking wistfully of their home on the Med near Nice. It was always so warm there. People were so much calmer; she could see why they lived longer in France. She had failed to change the subject. She should have mentioned more details about how good, how hard-working he was. She poured the tea. They always had tea at 5.00 on Saturdays. Always left it to brew for the correct amount of time and always put the milk in afterwards.80

  ‘Is it because our china dates from the nineteenth century that it is safe to put the milk in afterwards?’ she asked, successfully deflecting his attention on to his enormous knowledge of antique porcelain trivia and his constant need to show off.

  ‘From the 1760s I think you’ll find,’ he said. And then he spoke of what happened to be on his mind at that time and she just had to catch on ‘…and did you know that the Central Line at Bank station curves so sharply that if you stand at one end of the platform you cannot see someone standing at the far end? Always a bit dangerous in case a chap should be thinking of jumping!’ he added, a little tastelessly, quickly correcting himself with a further dose of trivia.

  ‘It is all because of the land ownership above the line,’ he said. ‘The company involved, a private company mind, was allowed to build the Central Line beneath the streets for free. They especially wanted to avoid heading anywhere like here. Our ward, Queenhithe, is a residential ward, you know. Very complex land rights. It all dates back to the Roman dock –’ He was just getting in his stride and was about to lecture her further.81

  ‘But the Central Line runs north of St Paul’s Cathedral,’ she said. She was very thankful she had got him off the subject of other people being shirkers, but she really didn’t want to get on to his favorite topic: the City and its place in the ancient order of things. ‘It’s the Circle Line that runs under us,’ she explained.

  ‘And Waterloo and City,’ he interjected, not wanting to be outdone on the tube trivia. ‘And the Northern Line is just a few hundred yards away.’

  ‘I wish we could have been at the Stables this weekend,’ she said, to score a point for future use and move the subject on.

  The Stables was their third home, just south of Guildford, where the land was a little cheaper (he had said). It was where they could keep the horses, so they called it the Stables; they had five bedrooms there too.

  ‘I know,’ he said, although he didn’t really like weekends out there, not if they didn’t have company. ‘But we have to be in the City for the function tonight. That charity bash – you know, about providing more homeless shelters in the East End, so people can’t hang about here messing up the streets. It is just too bad for business. It loses the country money.’

  ‘As much as us claiming our first home is the apartment in Nice and registering as non-doms for taxation?’ she asked pointedly, thinking that a more direct rebuttal might be more effective this time.

  He ignored her, hoping she wasn’t passing through a ‘red phase’ like their daughter, brainwashed by all those Marxists. He read aloud the first line of the speech he had prepared for this evening’s dinner: ‘The harm being done to the City’s reputation by the unsightly mess is considerable.’82

  Liverpool Street, 5.30 p.m.

  ‘Ninety per cent of you are fucking illegal,’ was that what she had heard the man saying on the tube? ‘I used to live in England, now I live in the United Nations,’ he’d said.

  She had sat there quietly.83 The Asian men were going to answer him back.

  ‘We’re British. Watch what you say – keep yourself to yourself,’ they had shouted in return.

  It wasn’t looking good. She had been glad to get off.

  ‘As long as you’re fucking working and not claiming benefits,’ was the last thing she heard the racist shout. It took so little time, she thought. So little time from a politician saying something to it being shouted by some drunk thug on the tube.

  ‘I pay more taxes than you do,’ one of the Asian men had replied.

  It was sad, she thought, that he was speaking the same language really, saying he had rights because he had a job and paid taxes, not just because he had rights whatever work he did. But then, she didn’t pay taxes, not any more. She didn’t work, not now she was retired, now she was just a year short of her three score and ten.

  Liverpool Street was the nearest tube to her flat, but often she stayed on until Bethnal Green and walked back. It was a bit further, but she didn’t really like all the bustle of the mainline station, or those young people, all the women and men in flash suits, all the shiny tall buildings. It only took a few minutes to clear them, but somehow she felt better walking back from Bethnal Green, though the Green wasn’t like it used to be either.

  She’d grown up in Spitalfields, was born during the war, in early 1942, when everyone thought they were going to lose. She’d been too young to be evacuated. Now they called the place she lived Banglatown.

  Liverpool Street had been taken over by posh young bankers; Spitalfields by Bangladeshis moving in from Sylhet. She preferred them to the bankers, but she didn’t like how everything was changing so fast.

  Her family had come from Ireland, her grandad had come for work. The area had all been Jewish then; he’d told her this when she was a girl. It was like a ghetto, he had said. Like that ghetto in Warsaw.

  She had been friendly with a Jewish boy, but his family moved to north London. All the Jews had moved out; a lot of the Irish now too. She thought that it wasn’t so much a ‘United Nations’ as a set of refugee nations now. Not that the Bangladeshis had been refugees. They’d been British when they first came over. It was the British that had stopped them being British.

  She laughed to herself. Her grandad had always laughed at the British. She’d always remembered that when the National Front was marching round here, when she’d had her kids, in the 1970s. She’d never been tempted to support them. They were long gone now – her kids, not the NF, who were back. They – both her kids and the NF, who were now called the BNP – told her she should get out too, but she’d always lived here and, anyway, this was where her tenancy was.
/>   The council was making noises about wanting the flats, something to do with refurbishing the building as a homeless hostel. Money was being donated by City bankers, they said. She didn’t care. Why did they have to have her home? They said she had too many bedrooms, because she had one spare and the one she slept in.

  Chancery Lane to Liverpool Street

  The six-minute journey from Chancery Lane to Liverpool Street station takes you, underground, from one boundary of the City of London to the other. The City of London Corporation has been described as ‘the nation’s last rotten borough, in which ballots in 21 of its 25 wards are controlled by companies, whose bosses appoint the voters’.84 Within the City, statistics on the characteristics of local residents are harder to obtain than is the case outside.

  Unsurprisingly the very highest average incomes along the whole of the Central Line are recorded by people living along this part of the line, but there are also others eking out an existence on a tiny fraction of those sums.

  Gratifyingly, given the station’s name, the 2001 census revealed that the highest proportion of bankers were found to be living in the two wards that are closest to the Bank tube station. The second highest proportion (and a far greater absolute number) were found living west around Notting Hill.

  Source: See http://www.londonmapper.org.uk/features/inequality-in-london/

  Since 2001 the City of London has risen up even higher in terms of new buildings, new people and new wealth. It was here, in the Mansion House, that those successive Chancellors of the Exchequer, from Gordon Brown to George Osborne, bowed down before men like the 66-year-old banker whose wife wished she was elsewhere.