London Rules E-Book

Dylan Jones

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 126

Beschreibung

We are constantly being told that 1966, the very first iteration of Swinging London, was the time when the city was at its cultural, most fashionable height. And if not 1966, then it's the punk '70s or the Britpop '90s when London was meant to be most fun. Not so, argues GQ's Dylan Jones. Not only is London the greatest, most dynamic and diverse city in the world - it's never been better than it is now. Comparison may be the thief of joy, and it might be invidious to square London off against New York, Milan or Paris - which is heavier, a tonne of feathers or a tonne of gold? - but right now there is no other city in the world like it. It is already the greatest city of the twenty-first century, the one true global cultural megalopolis, the one true cocksure city-state, and we need to shout about it from the top of every tall building in town.

Leseprobe

PROVOCATIONS

LONDON RULES

SO GET OVER IT

DYLAN JONES

SERIES EDITOR:YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN

Ben Okri wrote a poem for Boris Johnson at City Hall, when he was the mayor of London, and he said cities are:

The magic centres of the world;

The world’s dreaming places;

where the great music of humanity lives

The harmonisation of different histories,

cultures, geniuses. And dreams…

And right now, London is the greatest magic centre of them all…

Contents

Title PageIntroductionPart I:The making of our supercityPart II:London rocksPart III:London the city stateDramatis PersonaeAcknowledgementsCopyright

Introduction

LONDON IS THE most dynamic city in the world today. Sure, it has always been an international hub, always at the centre of things, but it has never sizzled like it sizzles today. In the twenty-first century, London has become the most powerful, the most dynamic, the most culturally focused city state on earth. No other city comes close. Not New York. Not Paris. Not Shanghai. Not Hong Kong.

It is all about London.

Other cities in the UK make grand claims and have their devotees and their champions, but Manchester, Edinburgh, Leeds etc. pale before the might, sight, sounds, churn and fire of London. And those who disagree are just expressing the politics of envy. Our grand city is the heart, soul, muscle and brain of Britain, the principal reason for its greatness.

And it’s never been as great as it is today.

London has been my home for my entire adult life, since I moved here from High Wycombe in the sticky summer of 1977, when I was just seventeen, during what was already being cynically talked about as the second iteration of Swinging London – the caveat being that this was the Summer of Hate rather than the Summer of Love. In 1977, I was Dick Whittington, desperate to escape the grim orthodoxy of High Wycombe and eager to throw myself into whatever was waiting for me just fifty miles away. I was leaving a Secondary Modern education for the bright lights of Chelsea – a foundation course at Chelsea School of Art – and I found it impossible to contain my excitement. London was not only the hotbed of punk, it was the crucible of everything I held dear: art, music, fashion … art school, transgression. And I wasn’t going to find much of that in High Wycombe. Seeing the likes of the Damned, the Jam and Generation X (I was stuck outside on the pavement the night the Sex Pistols played) at the town’s infamous Nag’s Head pub (it shared a promoter with the 100 Club in Oxford Street), had only whetted my appetite.

So, when I finally arrived, I honestly felt as though I was in a dream, even though culturally the city felt like it was exploding. For me that summer was largely spent walking up and down the King’s Road looking like one of the Ramones, peering expectantly in shop windows and trying to keep out of fights.

I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to call myself a Londoner, not having been born within the sounds of any bells in the city, let alone the ones in Bow (I was born in transit in Ely Hospital), but it is most certainly my home. I know it better than any other city in the world.

And let me tell you, it’s better than yours.

London is already the greatest city of the twenty-first century, the one true global, cultural megalopolis, the one true cocksure city state, and we need to shout about it from the top of every tall building in town. The closer the social historian, cultural bellwether or hack gets to their own times, the more difficult it is for them to be sure that they have grasped what is essential about their period. This is largely a matter of vantage point, as some features of the pattern may not yet even be visible. But, trust me, having lived in the city for forty years, I know what I say to be true. Indisputably so.

Nowadays, London might not be the biggest in the world (Tokyo and Yokohama can claim that crown), yet this powerful and distinctive city is as full of architectural riches as it’s ever been. Slip on your Oculus Rift and take a virtual sweep around London, shooting up into the summer sky from the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square (the site of a succession of specially commissioned art installations), and then zooming past – deep breath – the Serpentine pavilion, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Tower Bridge, White Cube Bermondsey, Shoreditch House, Fortnum & Mason, Terminal 5, the BT (Post Office) Tower, the Shard, the Cheesegrater, the Gherkin, the Barbican, the Roundhouse, the Royal Albert Hall, Abbey Road Studios, Battersea Power Station, Richard Serra’s ‘Fulcrum’ (60ft of monolithic steel), Canary Wharf, Lord’s Cricket Ground, the Tate Modern, City Hall, the London Aquatics Centre and west London’s Trellick Tower. The decor and architecture of important London buildings once seemed to represent a conscious desire to be part of an imaginary immemorial London, whereas these days every new building wants to look like the future, encouraging a nostalgia for an age yet to come. As the city gets bigger, so it seems to be raising the bar. As Anthony Sampson said in Anatomy of Britain, back in pre-swinging 1962, ‘Bigness has strengthened the lure of London.’

Ah, the building, the investment. London is the world’s leading city for foreign direct investment. In 2014, London brought in more international investment and created more jobs than any other city in the world according to IBM’s annual Global Location Trends. For an almost unbelievable seventh year in a row, the city topped the IBM list, attracting 235 foreign investment projects from companies relocating or expanding overseas. These investments generated 11,300 jobs for the city, more than the number of jobs for Paris, Barcelona and Amsterdam combined. London is also the third busiest city for film-making in the world, running just behind Los Angeles and New York. There is now more filming taking place in London than ever before, using our studios and, more importantly, the wash of the city as background.

Many people suffer a transmogrification when they reach the metropolis, reinventing themselves in a way that simply isn’t possible in the provinces. Of course anyone can reinvent themselves when they arrive in a big city – just look at how Bob Dylan and Joe Strummer, two of the most powerful icons in the rock canon, jhuzzed up and downgraded their backgrounds when they hit town – but London seems to actively encourage it. New York applauds anyone who arrives and makes a success of themselves, whereas London inspires people to amplify their personalities. Those already here will take great delight in knocking them down a peg or two, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t encouraged.

The city is again full of the ‘London Lights’, the artists, scientists, writers, architects, musicians and engineers who, like their forebears in the first half of the nineteenth century, through their genius and courage, luck and misfortune, anger and charm, moved mountains to put London at the cutting edge of cultural change. Back then it was Charles Babbage creating his calculating machines, John Martin devising a new system of clean water supply, John J. E. Mayall and Antoine Claudet perfecting the daguerreotype, and Michael Faraday harnessing electricity.

These days it is the likes of industrial designer Thomas Heatherwick, particle physicist Brian Cox, artist Damien Hirst, designer and film-maker Tom Ford, digerati queen Kathryn Parsons, Arts Council Chair Peter Bazalgette, e-tail guru José Neves and theatrical impresario Sonia Friedman who are shaking up their respective industries. However, while there were only dozens of creatives in London 200 years ago, today there are thousands.

London life is nowadays a lifestyle, a kaleidoscopic polyphonic theme park across thirty-three boroughs and nine travel zones that house grand hotels, dive cocktail bars, world-renowned design galleries, bohemian indie clubs, family-owned bistros, esoteric independent retailers, theatres, gentrified trophy parks, state-funded public art and reclaimed open spaces, a cavalcade of consumerism and participatory art. Unlike Italy there is no equivalent to Milan, meaning London is the UK’s fashion and media hub; unlike the US there is no equivalent to Washington, meaning London is our political capital; unlike the US again there is no equivalent to Los Angeles, meaning we are the entertainment hub; and unlike Germany there is no equivalent to Frankfurt, meaning London is our centre of finance. Everything is here. Ken Livingstone always used to say that the reason London overtook Frankfurt as the financial capital of the world is simple: have you ever been stuck in Frankfurt on a Friday night?1

London is Europe’s largest city, and the sixth richest place on the planet. It has experienced a rapid growth spurt since the ’90s, and in 2015 passed a historic population peak of 8.6 million (another million are expected to arrive by 2030). In 2014, 17.4 million internationals visited London, and it consistently has more international visitors than any other city on the planet. We also have the most languages spoken here of any world city – around 300 – and remain a magnet for global talent (around a third of the city’s population were born overseas). As an editorial in The Times put it a few years ago, ‘New York has remained a metropolitan city, a great American city with many foreigners in it. London has become a great international city.’ In the last ten years, visitors to London have increased by 43.5 per cent, with eight out of ten of those visitors saying that culture and heritage is why they come. In a way, culture has become the city’s business model. After all, it works: the British Museum gets more visitors than Belgium, we have 22 million theatre admissions a year, the O2 Arena (the tent in Kent) is the number one venue in the world, and the Tate Modern is the most visited contemporary art gallery on the planet, with twice as many visitors as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York (we have 215 museums in the city, 245 live music venues and 860 cinema screens). Not only that, but London’s creative industries generate £35 billion annually for the economy (that’s £70,000 every minute) and are 25 per cent more productive than the London economic average. The city’s cultural currency was given probably its biggest ever fillip in 2012, when the opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics didn’t so much amplify our sporting prowess as our cultural heritage, reminding the world that the city is, and always has been, a cultural powerhouse.

As a site of exchange for talent, capital, goods and services, London is the most important global hub. Arguably this has been our economic role for the last four centuries, and since the advent of international trade we have been a serious global broker, bringing together buyers and sellers, investors and entrepreneurs, whether the market was for linen, silk, tea, sugar or bondage trousers. The days when we could claim to be the workshop of the world are long gone, however, as have manufacturing industries, city docks and the Big Smoke. Meaning that, while industrial leadership has transferred to China, Korea and India, we remain the centre for innovation and experiment since we still play the same role for the world’s creative economy; as well as being a place for creative production, we also house all the important intermediaries – publishers, exhibitors, commissioners, distributors, financiers, brokers and agents. Nissan might make their cars in China, but their design headquarters are here.

The empirical evidence mounts year after year. In June 2015, MasterCard published its annual city league table, and for the fifth year out of seven, London came top, beating 131 other cities (Bangkok topped the chart in the other two years). The British playwright David Hare, who has experienced as much success on Broadway as he has in the West End, said not so long ago, ‘You turn a corner [in New York] and there is another extraordinary view, but it’s also artistically much more conservative. There is a definite feeling – in music, in theatre, in opera, especially – of being bored with the old, and yet even more terrified of the new.’ He added that he finds London ‘much more genuinely cosmopolitan’. You only have to walk the streets around Columbia Road and Shoreditch to see that London once again acknowledges the more absurdist, eccentric aspects of Britishness.

London is a more exciting city now than it’s ever been. Comparison may be the thief of joy, and it might be invidious to square London off against New York, Milan or Paris – which is heavier, a tonne of feathers or a tonne of gold? – but right now there is no other city in the world like it.

1 However, while London can easily claim to be the financial centre of Europe, New York is still the international hub of the banking world, as the competition is less and bonuses are bigger. Speak to anyone at Goldman Sachs and they’ll bemoan the fact that legislation is clogging up their sector in the UK.

Part I

The making of our supercity

‘London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.’

– PETER ACKROYD

THE ROAD WAS empty, stretching out before him like the future. There was no speed limit, so he got the E-Type up to 120mph, eating up the road in front of him. All he could hear was the car, and all he could see was the tarmac. The M1 was empty, and there was nothing else on the road.

Nothing except the policeman on the motorbike, that is, who was waving him down. He was stopped all the time because he was young, as in those days young people didn’t have cars, especially not E-Type Jags or convertible Rolls-Royces.

It was 1965, just a year before Swinging London was officially born, and Vogue had asked him to photograph Sophia Loren for the Peter Ustinov film Lady L, and so he was driving all the way up to Scarborough, where they were filming.

The policeman said someone had phoned through about the young photographer because he had been doing over 100mph, even though there was no speed limit on the M1.

‘Whose car is it?’ he asked.

‘Mine,’ said the photographer.

‘Unlikely. Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘Scarborough,’ said the photographer.

‘At three o’clock in the morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, why are you going to Scarborough?’

‘To photograph Sophia Loren.’

‘All right, sunshine, what’s your name?’

‘David Bailey…’

‘Of course it is, and I’m Napoleon bleeding Bonaparte. Now get out of the car and show me your driving licence.’