When all the world and the Scala film club were young – we’re talking 1978-ish – the St Pancras hotel was an abandoned shell and Kings Cross was, famously, the nocturnal playground of sex workers and people trading in class As.
Non-ironically horrid, Kings Cross wasn’t safe and it was exciting. That’s the trade off in a city. Safety for somnolence.
Cut to 2024. Have you been to Zürich lately? Or Switzerland more generally? I mean, lovely place and all that, but to paraphrase Mark Twain what will you do with the rest of the weekend?
So there’s been quite a flap lately about ’24 hour London’ and everyone got chippy with the Mayor and his Night Tsar. (Clearly, the Mayor should appoint a Night Tzara…) It was a display of political unity in England, a rare thing these days. Everyone could agree, though: post pandemic and post Brexit, central London isn’t all that after 10pm.
Except it’s not really true, is it? In fact you can get a coffee a few minutes from the robot cleaning the floor, under the King’s ever-watchful eye. (A shocking thought occurs: does ermine cause cancer?) The Starbucks inside St Pancras is open after midnight for Eurostar passengers. They take all the tables and chairs in, which isn’t very cosmopolitan, but you can get a beverage and sit down in the main concourse by the doors if you really want to. What do you lot expect at 2am on a Monday? Curbsides lined with cocktail umbrellas? Existentialist street philosophers accosting you with their treaties on the Gaza conflict and the creeping militarisation of Deleuze and Gattari’s post-structuralist theories of striated space? It’s not 2011, mate. Trot on.
Sadiq Khan seems to have done a PR push, in time for the clocks going back, too early. It’s still chilly and no one’s milling around the usual spaces in the middle of London. It will pick up in the summer, probably. There’s a hot take! The Mayor of London said something somewhat precipitously but Amy Lamé isn’t Satan personified. Don’t trip over our soap box on the way out.
Meanwhile, the knives are out for Soho House, owners of various bespoke watering holes which constitute what’s left of night life in cities around the world. Here’s another hot take for you. Soho House have always come across as a collection of nice people, in our tertiary dealings with them. They own the Electric in Notting Hill, keeping the oldest cinema in the UK – that’s been in continuous operation since 1916, the year of the Cabaret Voltaire, oddly enough – warm, lit and water tight. A big deal, including because the slightly older Electric Cinema in Birmingham closed down this month and may face demolition.
So that’s Soho House safeguarding a vital community asset, in our book. If they’ve relieved the global media and banking elites of their money to do it, good for them. Can’t last, though, can it? The truly rich and powerful who own most things, now, don’t want bespoke drinking lounges where you can immediately get a table in a wood-panelled room full of busted leather armchairs, sitting next to a rando probably called Micah or Dan.
They lizard people want crap haircuts. They want to be rock stars, but whatever kind of rock star Johnny Depp is, with gigs localised to their man cave. They want to wear flannel farmer’s shirts and jogging pants. Deck shoes and no socks. They’re already number one. Why should they have to prove it to losers like you and me? Aspiration is over. Branding and slogans are not your cheat code to economic survival. War is war. Pop is pop. Finis.
Changing and changeless as London canal water, the city is the place where the very wealthy make and warehouse their money. The countryside or Cyprus, or a desert, is where they live their best, their most authentic, lives. Being foreign secretary or running a hedge fund is just the day job, man. What they’re really passionate about is organic farming. Cheesemaking. Fish pies that cost a tenner. Go on, impulse buy food. Treat yourself, peasant. Breathe the air. Smell the flowers. Because pretty soon you’ll need to swipe a QR code to do that as well. It’s the same feudalism as before but in a slightly different ‘too posh to fail’ package.
Equally, creatives will get fed up, rile against it all, become successful. Sell out. The cycle of inoculating a system that deserves to fail against fundamental change is also endlessly self-replicating. In each iteration, things get a little better. By any metric you choose, human lives are getting better all the time. That’s because of Science. The role of all Culture and Art is to give Scientists something to do when they aren’t staring into microscopes or examining data sets. It has no other function.
The planet isn’t dying, the planet isn’t alive, but we are so we should enjoy ourselves while we can.*
A cycle of forgetting also seems to be a cycle that repeats every century, just beyond the present limit of human lives and of individual memory. If you take Greil Marcus’s argument at face value, a process that began in 1916 with Dada and Surrealism could be said to have ended with 2016’s Brexit, in the city that spawned Punk in the 1970s, because there’s nowhere for three kids to play three chords in front of a crowd. Punk is a fridge magnet. We digress–
* Footnote: if Nature could talk it would sound like this maniac.
