Londonward

It’s funny. The day-to-day routine completely obscures the fact that I actually live in a city with millions and millions of people. I don’t think twice about taking a red double-decker. I buy bacon and chicken salad sandwiches like anyone else. It just doesn’t feel like oh-my-god-London. It really hasn’t, except on occasion.

One of those occasions was this weekend. I did a bunch of tourist things on Sunday, and was pretty happy with all I got done in just one day. Spitalfields market was great to start off with. Some of the stalls there had incredibly good-looking food.

A one-hour bus drive across the deserted City, through the West End and to Marble Arch took me (finally) to Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. Sadly, I was disappointed with the speakers. A man was talking about the Iraq war and was being heckled to death by the audience. Another one I listened to wanted us to not believe anything he was trying to say. He was an all-right speaker, but went off on massive tangents that made his argument about things being exactly the way they should be kind of incoherent.

I can see why Londoners love their big green space, but I fail to see why a tourist would come and see it except for Speaker’s Corner (which admittedly is an institution) or for an event that is happening in the park. Really, it’s just a big open space with a man-made lake, if I’m being brutally honest. Once the weather improves, I’d love to go walking around there, but that’s really because I’ve grown a bit claustrophobic in Victorian houses and the concrete jungle.

My hankering for dinosaurs was the next thing to be dealt with. A bus down Park Lane and through Knightsbridge was the quickest way (excluding walking) to get to the Natural History Museum, but we overshot the intended stop and had to walk through some Kensington streets to get to Gloucester road. It was amazing how quickly the hum of the city died away. Those quiet streets, lined with expensive cars, with well-dressed children heading past us to parties with their parents was a world away from the hustle and bustle of Oxford Street, let alone parts of South London I’m familiar with. It really was strange how we all share the same city - the hotshot super-rich of Kensington, the mother-of-six on the bus down in Brixton, the poor student on a Sunday trip catching up on tourist attractions. London is extremely stratified, segregated and status-conscious, but at the same time it does have qualities that everyone shares and connects to.

The Diplodocus that greets you upon entry into the Museum was impressive to say the least. I’m going to have to go see the other dinosaurs some other time, as the exhibit was understandably crowded, it being Sunday afternoon and all. Interestingly, a lot of the parents who had brought their children were well under thirty, making me feel a bit old.

Trying to buy groceries near South Kensington station was funny. The Tesco was tiny and stocked pretty much only the “Finest” range, in incredibly small packets. Not a value range product in sight, with obviously no market for them.

It’s 4am and I can’t sleep. It’s relatively quiet for once, and I can actually hear birdsong.

Britain produced one of the arguably finest pieces of 20th Century prose, George Orwell’s 1984. The British are known elsewhere in Europe as fiercely resistant to all compulsory government monitoring, ID cards and other ways of “invading the privacy” of the ordinary citizen. Measures proposed by the government are often derided as “big brother” tactics.

It’s a small wonder then to see the extent that Big Brother is watching all of us and is making it known and accepted. Public service announcements and advertisements (which are worthy of a dedicated post themselves) tell us how we are being watched and how we will be caught should we do something illegal.

According to some source I’ve seen quoted a few times, a Londoner will be on camera some 300 times every day. For security reasons, most London buses are fitted with extensive CCTV systems. Some buses even cycle through the camera feeds on a public monitor on the top deck, probably as an illustration of the (very good) quality of the images. Signs on the buses tell passengers to “smile! You’re on camera!” and how defacement or assault will be caught on tape.

Some ads are not so positive, but instead verge on real Big Brother territory. Signs at train stations yell out “Everyday people are caught every day”. One poster telling passengers about the perils of benefit fraud declared that “We know where you pick up cash-in-hand work. We regularly get tip-offs about where people are committing benefit fraud. We’re on to you.” If that isn’t creepy stalker type with a “We’re watching you” attitude, I don’t know what is.

Five inches of snow brought most of England to a standstill last week, but Universities kept going. It took a flooded electricity substation to close the entirety of the Strand and Aldwych, along with the LSE and the King’s College Strand Campus. People were milling aimlessly on the street, with hastily written paper signs on doors saying “School closed for 12/2/07 due to power cut”. It took a man with a megaphone on the steps of the Old Building to get the stunned people to start walking away. I cursed that I didn’t have a camera on me right then, because the scene was pretty surreal. The LSE Students’ Union website urged everyone reading it this morning to go back to bed, as there was “absolutely no reason to travel to campus today”.

A friend of mine was supposed to show a visiting friend the school pubs today. I guess we’ll have to go somewhere else.