The last time I was here I didn’t own a smart phone. It was also the day before the Brexit Referendum, and before Pandemic-anxiety began to deeply mediate how we negotiated urban space.
But right now, I can’t yet touch base in this urban endlessness due to the disorientation caused by fighting off the intruding smart phone, with its addicting ‘Other’ space, that is slicing through, in a way that I haven’t really noticed until now, because I begin to realise how much London is an alternate reality that I’ve yet to bring my smart-phone into.
London smells…of itself. Unlike the post industrial landscapes of South/West Yorks, for example, which no longer smell of anything; sterilised into the nothingness of badly planned “Barrat-style” estates, and the once smelly soot from the mines and mills sand blasted off the old stones.
I’m disoriented in the early moments of this day, until I get into my stride. Always walking – got to walk in the city. Got to walk and walk, always wanting to walk more, sucked ever more deeply into it’s alternate world.
Within which this urban-ness that you just don’t get anywhere else in this country, extends indefinitely. Later on, in a semi-dream state, drifting off to John Foxx’s My Lost City, London cuts loose, an alternate reality to, and no longer the dominant place, of Britain. The red buses and London planes and intensiveness become politely welcoming to the rest of the country like a friend who just does things differently.
I find it hard not to love the city. Inspite of the power it wields, the power it sucks from the rest of the country. Despite my inability to live here….and the deep envy over the ‘unfinished project’ of urban Modernity elsewhere. I find hard to let go, as flawed as it may now have proven to be. I see traces in Leeds, lost on those quite Sunday evenings, in the west of the centre, when the streets are dead and no longer amidst work-status stress; But I can no longer see it in Sheffield, where its once big plans to make the “Hallamshire utopia” have faded out amidst bland student flats and an oppressively bland weekend culture.
…and all this exists here, of course it does! And I’m not a proper urban detective. But London has real, proper urban infrastructure, and because everywhere else is thwarted by the mute misery of suburban nothingness, and the weekend wreckage it does to our provincial town centres, you can suspend belief here. It doesn’t really exist here, either, only as an image, etched into the place you could never live because you couldn’t deal with the pace and pressure; the fact that most here are never not working; working to exist. But I’ve seen it; ‘the city’ and I’m ok, right now.
John B Ledger 