Market Forces

I’m writing the first draft of this sitting in the car with the rain lashing down outside. I’m in the car park of a junior school in Bethnal Green whilst Beck struggles through the torrents to Columbia Road flower market. All of this is a little odd for two reasons. Firstly, I rarely write anything anywhere other than at home, but I’m trying to snatch what few moments I can have with Beck before she flies out to Poland at the end of the week. Secondly, to be completely honest I probably shouldn’t be writing anything other than fiction this weekend as there’s a deadline looming, hence why she‘s getting wet and I‘m writing this. It’s a good job I’ve taken to carrying a notebook around with me and in the gaps between seconds I can scribble a couple of words down. It makes a handy excuse.

Nearby is Old Spitalfields Market’s, originally built on an ancient market site back in 1886 as a fruit and veg compliment to the meat based Smithfields a mile or so down the road. Both buildings have beautifully arched glass roofs, wide open at the base with the ceiling supported by ornate iron pillars. Spitalfields is significantly smaller (if you go to Smithfields late at night you can actually drive straight through - a handy shortcut at times) and is now surrounded by permanent shop space hosting designer furniture, cafes, bars, the odd art space, etc, etc.

It’s interesting because the market forms a border between the East End and the City. To the West you have Bishopsgate and Liverpool Street with the London offices of Royal Bank of Scotland, ABN Amro and most of the other world’s financial institutions. Money that’s serviced by aluminium framed champagne bars, endless branches of the same coffee shops and top end strip joints. On the Eastern side you have the Ten Bells, a pub notoriously linked with some of Jack The Ripper’s victims, the shell of the Old Truman Brewery closed since 1988 after three hundred and twenty two years of brewing and the Golden Heart where when she was at Goldsmiths Beck watched a group of female Undergraduates first piss in the basin then tear it off the wall after a private view at a gallery. Oh, and there’s the low end strip joints too.

Things are changing. Or rather, they already have. It’s too late.

Despite a valiant community struggle nearly fifty percent of Spitalfields has been torn down - right in front of the offices for the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings too. New glass fronted shopping units are cropping up, trendy semi-chain restaurants with names like Giraffe and Leon are opening for business. Tracey Emin still lurks in the area (I often saw her striding out as I drove slowly through the traffic along Commercial Street on the way home from the M1) but she’s hardly a struggling artist these days. Back in the early summer she chartered a private jet to fly her to Venice as she installed the Biennale. Many of those who lived in the area through the grim days of the seventies and eighties have either been pushed further East, out to Hackney and Dalston, or they’re waiting for retirement sitting on a rather nice nest egg as property prices soar way beyond the quality of the structures.

Location, location, location indeed.

Beck thinks that the artists have all moved to Shoreditch, but I’m not so sure. I think they've bee pushed even further forward. If you go out around Old Street or the Hackney Road on a Friday night then you’ll see city boys looking to rough it, for that urban chic vibe, or so-called creative-types who never actually do any work because they’re so far gone and anyway their bohemian lifestyle is funded by Daddy’s share options.

Everyone’s a fake in some way.

The face of most cities is changing. Partly it’s because of the economic climate, partly it’s thanks to a reversal of the dash to the suburbs made by previous generations and partly it’s through deliberate attempts to regenerate. It scrubs itself up, but in doing so it seems to lose a little bit of itself at the same time.

And perhaps people do exactly the same. Don’t we all subconsciously begin to adapt to those around us?

When I was younger I didn’t care what I looked like. I had big, long hair, usually dark clothes, chunky doc martin boots and a grey trench coat. It was almost a negative look, one conjured out of my own mind rather than consciously following others. At some point when I was at University I cut all my hair off because I had decided I looked like a berk and when I started to work in London, surrounded by young people with money to splash, I became interested in fashion. I mean, not ridiculously so, but I bought more shirts than I’d ever had before and started looking for interesting details on jeans and trainers. I was even prepared to pay more than seven quid for a t-shirt.

As I moved on to a smaller company, where I was the youngest employee by a decade, I became more interested in suits. Mine got a little more expensive, I investigated different cuts of jacket. I began to think about what I wore and, more importantly, whether I was happy with what it said it about me. I secretly began to quite fancy a tailor-made suit, but knew that I couldn’t afford one.

Now things have come back full circle. I haven’t had a haircut since August and my locks are beginning to cover my ears and curl up at the back. I can no longer be bothered meticulously shaving everyday. While Beck was away I grew a two week beard, but I shave a little more frequently now as she doesn’t like kissing me when I’m spikey. My clothes are, in the main, falling apart. Aside from the previously mentioned jeans the soles of my trainers are coming off and one of my favourite jumpers has a bleach stain down the front from where I was cleaning up some dog crap we accidentally walked in.

Is it deliberate or is a little part of my brain just thinking that this is what I should look like. Like a character from a Sartre novel? Or from Zola’s The Masterpiece?

It’s not just me, either. Beck has been known to announce that it’s important for an artist to dress with a certain style and when she works in schools she’ll dress much differently to how she will in the studio. She calls it “smarty” fashion. She’s not a teacher, she’s an artist, but she needs to have an authority with the kids. How does she look both smart and artistic? Only smartys have the answer.

She tells me that in Banff there were two “dance nights”. For the first she changed into smart shoes and a pretty top. For the second she went along in her fleece and hiking books, far more suitable for the snow flecked Rockies. She’d never be able to go out like that in London, it can take a little while but perhaps we begin to reflect our surroundings and so perhaps wholesale tearing up whole areas is not the solution.

Back in the East End some areas are stubbornly holding on. Brick Lane, indeed Columbia Road and, in particular, Petticoat Lane markets are still serving their more traditional base. There’s pirate DVDs, dodgy leather goods, mobile phones unlocked, fags with Arabic script down the side, a sewing machine and obviously stolen bikes and other, legal, items. On Sunday I saw something I thought only existed in 1930s New York caricatures: A guy standing in the rain burning wooden planks in an old metal barrel swigging from a can of Red Stripe at ten o’clock in the morning.

Meanwhile in the partially redeveloped Spitalfields Market people were wandering around slurping iced Starbucks crap, wearing their smartly dry cleaned winter coats looking to buy a piece of “young designer” clothing or jewellery. Okay, but is it just me or do at least half the stalls sell the same tatty-cool clothes and coral jewellery? There’s a diminishing number of second hand record and book sellers, the little food stalls of curry, stir fry, goulash, baked spuds and pancakes have been completely expunged and in their place are prefabricated glass boxes just dumped in the middle of the market hall. These are all still available for rent to someone who thinks it’s a good idea to try and run a business on a site that only gets busy on Sundays.

The twenty-first century is winning the race by a country mile.

I overheard someone saying that it was a good thing to have places like Spitalfields. Is it? Is it really a good thing that there is somewhere that we can buy a olive stuffed piece of focaccia at £3.50 a slice? Okay, so it’s nice (I’m pretty partial myself), especially for those who can afford it, but is it actually an actively good thing, or does it just offer luxuries for some at the expense of the many?

It’s a hard one. Who am I to say what should be done to improve inner city areas with my middle-class white-boy credentials? For as areas are regenerated and cleaned up it is undeniable that crime figures typically go down, property prices rise and why would some lefty-sub-literati have the right to say that this is a mistake?

But it seems to me that everyone just gets moved on a few miles? That, rather than going “great a Pizza Express, now I have no need to deal drugs I can be a waiter instead,” people all get dumped in the few remaining areas where the problems just get worse. Picking up the litter and inviting a Subway franchise in does not get to the underlying problems of society, it just brushes them under the sideboard for a few years.

For anyone who thinks this is an exaggeration, on Monday the lunchtime BBC London news (yes, okay most people won’t have seen this, but I spend virtually all day in the house) ran a brief story about how fifteen of Brick Lane’s famous curry houses have closed down in recent months due to soaring rent prices. Regeneration is pushing the Bangladeshi community, who have lived there for decades, out. The area may be tidier, there be less petty street crime, it may be safer to walk around at night, but how many people will have lost their livelihoods in order for this to happen and what are their choices now?

There are no easy answers to this, but I think it’s important to ask the question. Feel free to argue amongst yourselves.