Maybe it’s because I’m not a Londoner

By Geraint D’Arcy

There are no locations in London. No areas, no places. London does not really exist. It used to long ago, and as recently as the last century too, but now it has passed across to a new reality where viscous dimensions slide over each other in conscious memory. In the minds of people who live and work in London it of course exists, but only as an existential sphere of influence around individuals. If they can see it, it exists, if someone nearby sees something different from another angle that too exists. We perceive London as sentient creatures; the creatures that pass in the spaces we do not see are ignorant of human endeavours and do not perceive London as we do. Take an old rubbish skip in a side alley off Drury Lane: the space behind the skip against the wall does not exist for weeks at a time; until someone looks at it, actively seeks out what is behind there by hunkering down on hands and knees or by shifting the whole thing grating along slabs of concrete grittily slick with future compost. A homeless guy breaks off the wooden boards under the fly-posters and sees that the inside of the derelict building is filled with pigeons, it has not existed for years, when he uncovers this lost space it is reborn.

Schrödinger’s London: an observation experiment gone wrong; London is the perfect example of the tree falling in the forest and no one is around to hear it fall. In London, the tree is the observation of reality: even though the city is crowded, no one notices as London slips and slides in and out of existence. Maybe it’s because I’m not a Londoner, but I do. Even as I write this and months later you read it, you will deny the validity of my statements, because you never stop to look at London, the way you would look at a lover’s face or a poem. London hides its face in visual semantics.

Tourists cannot see this city properly, they have no fixed template to refer to, no trig-point of sense; they cannot discern from the reality and the non-reality, when something is not where they think it should be they keep bumbling along until they find it suddenly and then they have arrived and everything is normal.

That does not explain the phenomenon nearly well enough. Take for example the first time you ever visited London, say when you were a child ? I’m not talking about natives or commuters, they are different, and I will come to them later ? your parent or teacher and your friends or brothers and sisters being dragged, tired legged, around a strange place of similar and different buildings through thick air that makes your bogies go black and crusty. It was this first time that you experienced the reality slip that is London, from a diminished view of less than four feet high. Unconsciously absorbing the responsible anxiety of the adults around you, blindly following them around, childishly confident in their knowledge of this strange place. You wind and wend and twist your way past the same buildings like a badly animated cartoon until your parent, teacher or guardian hoists you up and shows you a large open space with a gigantic pillar and too many pigeons. At anyone time on the foot heavy journey you will have seen the open space, albeit much smaller, the pigeons, as dirty and cloying as ever, and the pillar with the man on top of it sometimes. You had seen all of these things on your journey but your guiding adult had not. You were never more than a few feet from your destination yet you have been on an epic journey through the streets of London as if it were a vast and differing place. The blisters from your new Velcro shoes are testament to the distance you have been reluctantly dragged just to be pestered by the birds and to stare at a statue that is too far away. Now try and recall the journey back to the car or to the train and know now that it took considerably less time to return than it took to get there.

Now I ask you to remember the first time you went to London without accompaniment. The first Tube ride into the centre of London, getting off at Russell square or Monument and taking the stairs instead of the lift and one thousand steps later with the end not near in sight thinking this had been a mistake; or realising you needed Bank and after a mile of winding subterranean tunnels and steps knowing you are getting more and more lost. The relief as you battle against the sudden stuffy and unrefreshing breeze, a gale of fetid London breath, into the lobby of the underground station only to be faced with more tiled, crowded and overly warm chambers leading en masse towards what you hope is an exit. Being swept along and out into the open air of London in a street you do not recognise, even when compared to your A to Z it matches none of the street names and still you are swept by a slowly dissipating crowd down side streets and alleys. Commuters in suits, expensive shoes, sharp edged cases and un-dead eyes: myopic on the tube carriage, hyperopic in the crush. You struggle with your map book, a three hundred page large scale epic, trying not to look like a tourist despite being one; you desperately search for a culvert or pool in the flow of the river pedestrian. Somewhere you can beach and privately check your co-ordinates against the inadequate address and directions you had prepared before leaving for your train. The place that you stop, your cove of calm, will never exist again. It was there but for the grace of London, and once it had served its purpose (as the one break you will get for free all day) it will vanish and you will be back into the flow and on toward your destination. You have not noticed that the city has recognised you and accommodated you for a brief moment; you are not meant to, but you are meant to repay the favour by not noticing the warp and weft of the city. When it frays you are in a contract, signed by the acceptance of that brief respite, to blame yourself and not the city for losing your way. Because the city is not ready to allow you to perceive your very near destination, it throws up other pathways and labyrinthine turns and distractions until it is ready. If you had taken with you a compass, then you would know that the orientation of the city changes regularly, that turning left and left again will not necessarily lead you to the road you departed from two turns ago. London forbids compasses and dislikes being mapped, citing the ancient lore that looking like a tourist may get you mugged.

People who were born in London and grew up there or who have worked in the City for a long while will never know or accept the truth. That is because, for them London is never wrong. London is a constant and logical thing for the natives, and this does not surprise me at all, they do not look at London because they are London. Have you ever noticed when abroad that someone from London will love it completely and yearn to be back there if kept away for too long? That they will talk about London as if it were a thing to be had in common with a stranger, as if it were something they were inextricably part of? This is because they are. London does not exist outside of these people’s heads. As a collective, Londoners hold all the knowledge of London in themselves. It exists as a mass hallucinatory consciousness built on once real foundations of stone and architecture. When Londoners feel good about themselves everything is good, the Tubes and trains run, the stock exchange improves, interest rates stay the same, house prices creep up and life seems good and steady. When these things go wrong, that is when the city dwellers are down. The balance of consciousness against reality is delicate and can be affected severely by many things sending the city into chaos. That is why London created commuters: to steady the balance, London resides in the commuters too. London is held in the Id of thousands of commuting office workers who blindly tramp and sigh their way across Westminster Bridge until where they support the reality of London from their pointless desks in their oppressive uncreative lives. London feeds them and clothes them, puts money in their mortgages and drugs in their noses; they in return act as emotional buffers for the city. These minds know only the parts of London that they see. They accept them as the reality of unquestioning life and hurry to and from their roles blinkered and impersonal, around them trees fall and crash as loudly as they can with nobody around to see.

Accompanying the greyest of grey as they sidle into the city to support its appetite for corporeality, I wonder slowly in and out of the crowds watching the city split and reform around the gaps of people’s minds. I laugh to myself quietly as people avoid my look on the tube as we trundle and squeal through the underside of something that is not there. Each station is right next to the next one; in the dark, London belches dirty air and heat, rattling our carriages for its amusement before we emerge just metres away from the space we left in a place unrecognisable every time you visit. London plays its game of blind man’s buff; spinning you round and making you emerge mole-like onto another unfamiliar street for you to shuffle about on until London gives you its bearings. I walk down the street frayed trainers, jeans and duffle coat; I look about at the buildings and the people. No one notices me, no one mugs me, because real tourists don’t look at things in London, they move from site to site and see what they are expected to see and they stick out like tits on a frog. London, when it wants to be, is full of incredible and beautiful buildings and places that people do not want to see. I have visited many places that other people cannot see and do not acknowledge, they appear all the time in the gaps. If you are quick you can slip in and visit before London reforms about you. Of course when you leave, you will be no where near where you started, but you know now that that is just a matter of perspective.

The End