Category Archives: London

Like a demented seagull: how hate mail changed my life

Posted on May 27, 2010 | 8 comments

This is a letter I received several years ago. It begins ‘Dearest Peter, why don’t you just go and drown in your own shit’, goes on in a similar vein for six impeccably crafted pages before signing off ‘U.R.A. Deadman’. It was written by a mad man and it changed my life.

At the time, I prided myself on writing savage, pithy reviews for Time Out (rechristened Slime Out by the writer). I was vicious and splenetic, with the self-righteous confidence of a 20-year-old who believes they have invented authenticity and everybody else is a fool and a fraud. I verbally annihilated such high-profile targets as Toploader’s second album, anybody who ever appeared on Channel 5, ‘Grumpy Old Men’, Lord Robert Winston and Vigo Mortensen’s chin. 

Mr U Deadman (possibly not his real name) had noted my work and enraged by a particularly malicious piece I had written deriding the ridiculous sport of rugby union (clue: the section was titled ‘Rant’), decided it was time for payback. And how.

Much of what he wrote was plain wrong. The man was unbalanced, a bit racist and rather scary. He had extraordinary recall of past Time Out writers, many of whom I had never heard of, whose supposed sins (and, more worryingly, physical appearances) he would discuss at length. 

He also had a wicked turn of phrase. The key paragraph was the following, a rhetorical question that inadvertently changed everything. He asked me:

‘Are you looking forward to your retirement, to the day when you can look back over your working life and think “I slagged people off. That’s what I did with my life. I spent years – in fact, decades – SLAGGING PEOPLE OFF… screaming relentlessly like a demented SEAGULL. I was Slime Out’s top hatchet man in 2003. No-one else could touch me. Not even Lewis”?’

(The latter is a reference to the internationally respected music critic John Lewis, who was also a bit of a meanie back in the day.)

At the time, I laughed it off as the witterings of a deranged sociopath – albeit one with lovely script and excellent phrasing – but it also made me think. Yes, I could be funny, I could wind people up, but really what was the point? At around the same time I proudly showed my girlfriend a furious review I’d written about some vacuous celeb-loaded TV show about dancing and she wasn’t just unimpressed, she looked at me as if I had crapped in her handbag. Being cruel, I realised belatedly, wasn’t nice, or cool, or clever. Well, it was clever, but not in a nice or cool way.

I should have known this already, after the Jason Lee incident at the Sunday Times, when a throwaway comment about a haircut in my TV column was appropriated by ‘Baddiel and Skinner’s Fantasy Football’ with unfortunate repercussions for the career of an innocent pineapple.

So I changed. I stopped reviewing terrible films, only wrote about albums I liked and threw my TV set in the canal. I started to spend more time thinking about the things I enjoyed and wanted to recommend, and less time thinking about funny ways to slag off things I thought were crap.

I probably became more boring and less memorable as a writer, because there are few things more intoxicating than a really wicked piece of invective (pace Brooker), but I think it made me a better writer. I definitely became a happier person. And I still  have no desire to be the sort of person who uses their privileged space in magazines, newspapers and websites to wind-up readers and make asinine generalisations, even if that is the easy way to get noticed (pace a list far too long to mention).

The mysterious mad letter writer continued to treat Time Out to his acidic thoughts, occasionally in the form of epics like the above but usually as mellower postcards, mainly focused on music. He barely mentioned me again, although Lewis got it in the neck a couple of times, and rightly so.

He stopped writing to Time Out completely about a year ago and I often wondered what happened to him. Did he merely cancel his subscription like so many others (to drive off an obsessive, that is impressive), did he get some new, better,  medication, or did something tragic befall him, not entirely unlikely given his clearly troubled mind?

I hope he is okay. I hope he is a happy. And I’ll always keep his letter to remind me of what I never want to become.

Update: Slime Out: The Sequel.

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Posted in Journalism, London

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Museum of London reopening

Posted on May 24, 2010 | 2 comments

My review of the Museum of London reopening appeared in yesterday’s Independent On Sunday. The museum has refurbished its entire collection from the Great Fire to the present day, something that necessitated closing down the lower-ground floor of the museum for four years. I’ve been on site at a number of times during the refurbishment, so had a good idea of what was intended, but was still hugely impressed (and, in a strange way, rather relieved as so many things can go wrong with these things) by the final result.

The museum now has a great blend of the old and new, with some genuinely impressive modern interactive but also loads of good old-fashioned things in cases. Check it out when it opens to the public on Friday May 28 (it is opening till 9pm on the first day). 

I suppose that a museum ideally wants the visitor feel they’ve ‘got it’ after just one visit, but not ‘got it’ so much that they won’t come back . They don’t want people to be so overwhelmed by information they can’t see what story the museum is telling, but they equally don’t want them to feel they’ve absorbed it all in one go, seen everything there is to see and so never bother returning. The Museum of London, I think, pulls off this delicate balancing act, while also being lots of fun, which is something every good museum wants and needs to be. 

Museum nerds might note that they also manage to subtly highlight a couple of their less appreciated areas of expertise – the excellent costume collection, which gets two strong displays – and their outstanding collection of oral history, which is used to tell the story of the Blitz.

I am particularly interested in oral history. These first-hand recollections from largely ordinary Londoners could be vitally important to future historians, and the museum continues to expand its collection at an impressive rate. One thing I firmly believe is that everybody has a fascinating story to tell, they just don’t always realise what it is about their lives that makes them unique and therefore interesting. Most people are too self-conscious when they write, so oral history is the best way to break down this barrier and capture those stories before they disappear forever.

Finally (and no, I’m not on the payroll), the museum also has a very good (and free) new iPhone app. Check it out here.

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Posted in Exhibitions, History, Journalism, London, Museums

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The invasion begins!

Posted on May 21, 2010 | 2 comments

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Posted in Herne Hill, London, Uncategorized

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Magnificent Maps at the British Library

Posted on May 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

The British Library currently has an excellent new exhibition about maps called Magnificent Maps. I reviewed it for New Statesman (get me), and tried to focus on the sort of political aspects of the maps on display that would appeal to the generally Labour-supporting readers of the New Statesman, seeking any sort of diversion from the electoral massacre they had recently witnessed.

Diamond Geezer also took inspiration from contemporary politics with his review. He wins, I think.

The highlight of the exhibition for many Londoners will undoubtedly be Stephen Walter’s incredible idiosyncratic The Island, which you can study in detail here. This is a very personal and witty look at London by an artist. I particularly like the rather condescending but still satisfying comment he puts next to Herne Hill – ‘If I lived south of the river it would be here’. What finer praise could a North Londoner offer?

If you like maps a lot, you should also check out the hand-drawn gallery at Londonist. A little bird tells me that these may soon get a museum exhibition of their very own.

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Posted in Art, Exhibitions, Herne Hill, Journalism, London, Maps, Museums, Politics

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Exotic animals of London No 1: the humped toucan

Posted on May 17, 2010 | 3 comments

I waited all day, but I didn’t see one.

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Posted in London, Uncategorized

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On the buses again

Posted on May 13, 2010 | 4 comments

My free Time Out travelcard has run out. This is the one thing I have been dreading since I left the magazine. No more cheeky one-stop tube hops, no more quick bus rides up the hill because I’m feeling lazy. I’ll even have to reacquaint myself with the actual cost of bus and tube fares, plebeian knowledge I have long disregarded. From now on, every journey on public transport has to be justified. My feet are in for a hell of a beating.

I was the same last time I was freelancer, when I first become heavily involved with the London bus. Time-rich and cash-poor, I could afford to take meandering bus trips across London rather than more expensive and direct journeys by tube, and came to appreciate the London bus in all its magnificence. A few years later, armed with a Time Out travelcard and newly installed as features writer, I attended a brainstorming meeting with the editor, who wanted some new ideas for the Big Smoke section. He picked up a copy of Time Out Manchester (a collectors’ item as it was the only issue they produced) and showed me a column called Bus Bingo, in which the writer took a random Mancunian bus every week. Nice concept, I said in one of those ‘monkey tennis’ moments familiar to any journalist, but how about I, er, take every bus in London in numerical order? And so a column was born.

It seemed popular. I don’t go to many parties, but when I did I was frequently introduced as ‘the bloke who was doing the buses for Time Out‘. And people would regale me with tales of terrible bus trips, or rhapsodise about their favourite routes. (Thinking about it, this could be one of the reasons why I don’t get invited to many parties.) People wrote to the mag saying they were collecting each column, or complaining if I gave a favoured bus an unfair review. Plus it got me out the office.

But all good things and all that. We got a new editor, who in our first meeting asked me how long the bus column would go on for. ‘Well,’ I told him, ‘there are at least 500 routes in London, and that’s before you consider night buses and the ones with number prefixs. And I’m only on No 60.’

He looked aghast, the facial expression of a man who had spent a decade taking taxis on an Emap expense account and fully endorsed the old Tory maxim that anybody who took the bus was a loser. He couldn’t understand why anybody would want to travel by bus, let alone write about it, let alone read about it.

The nail in the coffin came when I, perhaps inadvisably given the prevailing mood, commissioned a full-page piece interviewing three other people I had discovered who were also taking buses in numerical order, a pensioner, an artist and a blogger, who I dubbed ‘Buskateers’, a word that has inexplicably failed to make it into the Oxford English Dictionary.

And so the column was scrapped before I got a chance to fruitily ponder the 69, or settle scores on my old school route of the 127.

London wept, and then went back to reading about 50 Essential Hidden East London Cheap Eat Sex Markets For The Summer. And now I’m back on the buses, although not in numerical order and only if it is too far to walk.

(For more bus appreciation, these three pensioners are taking One Bus At A Time, while Ben at Route 1 To 499 pledges to take every bus in London, albeit in no particular order.)

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Posted in Journalism, London, Transport

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London disaster porn, or how I learnt to stop worrying and love the flood

Posted on April 21, 2010 | 10 comments

I bought this book the other day. How could I not? Everything from the cover to the title to the name of the author screams ‘BUY ME!’, and so I did.

The Big Wave: The Day London Collapsed is, as you might have guessed, about a tsunami that destroys London. Here is a choice paragraph:

Somewhere twenty or so feet below us, under uncountable tons of debris, was the street we had once known as Haymarket; the grey hill to our right was largely the remains of Canada House; the ravine in front would be Sussex Place and beyond that – at the moment not visible – would be the National Gallery. The city we knew had been buried, the streets engulfed by debris, wiped out of existence. I stared at the grey and broken landscape attempting to absorb the scale of the disaster. It was too much. It was too big.

Hot stuff, huh?

And it got me thinking. Not about the danger of a seismic episode taking place ten miles off the Thames Estuary, sending shock waves through the city, felling major landmarks and preempting a giant tidal wave that turns the entire London basin into a corpse-riddled swamp, but about authors who love destroying London.

Will Self’s The Book Of Dave, Richard Jeffries’s After London and JG Ballard’s The Drowned World all take place in a London destroyed by flood (interestingly, Conrad Voss Bark’s The Big Wave is the only book I own that actually describes the flood taking place), and all are marked by a relish in seeing the city brought low. It’s all very Biblical.

‘The deserted and utterly extinct city of London was under his foot,’ writes Jeffries in After London, an almost unreadable Victorian novel. ‘He had penetrated into the midst of that dreadful place…’ We never find out what has destroyed London other than some sort of catastrophic flood, but Jeffries carefully draws an entirely new, almost medieval, world, which he clearly prefers to the Victorian one he has demolished. It’s a bit like John Christopher’s Prince In Waiting trilogy, only nowhere near as good.

Ballard’s dense and difficult 1963 novel The Drowned World is little better. Again, after catastrophic flooding, London has been replaced by a fetid swamp, something that Ballard seems remarkably sanguine about, as this spot of dialogue makes clear.

‘Do you know where we are, the name of this city?’ he asked.

‘Part of it used to be called London; not that it matters.’

Later, in the book’s most evocative passages, the characters walk through drained streets around Leicester Square. ‘Dying fish and marine plants expired in the centre of the roadways… they stood in the entrance to one of the huge cinemas, sea urchins and cucumbers flickering faintly across the tiled floor.’

Both these books were obvious influences for Self’s recent The Book Of Dave, which takes places on the island of Ham. This is Self’s name for the high-lying remains of Hampstead Heath, which overlook a London that has been replaced by a lagoon after, you guessed it, catastrophic flooding. Self doesn’t exhibit quite so much glee at the demise of London, although he draw a strong contrast between the idyllic, unquestioning life of those on Ham and the manic contemporary Londoners, brains overfilled with unnecessary knowledge, that we meet in flashback. One of them, the titular Dave, has been driven insane by the intensity of modern living.

So all three, in their different ways, present the London-free future as being preferable to the present. And if they are accurate predictions of the future, perhaps the following shouldn’t freak me out quite as much as it does.

Pleasant dreams!

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Posted in Books, London

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A new free newspaper for London

Posted on April 14, 2010 | 4 comments

London’s latest free newspaper will launch next month. Snipe is a fortnightly arts and listings newspaper that will be available in selected bars, restaurants, clubs and shops from May 15, with an initial print run of around 10,000 – although this is set to rise. The website launches on Friday April 15. 

Don’t worry though, London Weekly it most certainly ain’t.

Snipe‘s founder, Darren Atwater, is a Canadian and small newspaper nut with considerable editorial experience in his native Vancouver. We met up a couple of months ago and he explained that he was basing Snipe on the free community papers that are available in most US cities. This is a concept that has always impressed me. These independent enterprises survive through classified and small-business advertising and at their best can be tremendous, vital local newspapers with a real grip on what is going on in their city. In some cases, they are the glue that holds a city’s diverse scenes together, with passion and knowledge of their subjects married to a genuinely independent and non-commercial spirit. Yes, websites can cover this sort of ground – see the excellent Londonist, for example – but there is still nothing better than print for making a real, concrete imprint on a city.

I have often wondered why London has never produced an answer to a paper like the Austin Chronicle, an essential alternative newspaper that is free, useful, cool, politically engaged, culturally confident, intelligent and easy t0 find. Atwater wondered the same, and then decided to do something about it.

London has had some terrible experience with free newspapers recently, but this is something different altogether, an enterprise that all London-based lovers of arts and newspapers should get behind.

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Posted in Journalism, London

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My finest achievements No 1: Wikipedia

Posted on April 8, 2010 | 2 comments

No, I didn’t invent it, but I do now appear on it, in this entry on the No 68 bus.

Impressive huh?

Wikipedia and buses are two of my favourite things, so this pleases me greatly.

It is also far better than my previous appearance on Wiki, when I ‘used’ an entry about Longest Streets In London as the basis for a piece in Time Out. Somebody then ‘used’ my piece in Time Out as the official reference for an entry on Wiki about the Longest Streets In London, which was a classic example of why Wiki doesn’t always work, or at least it was until somebody deleted it.

If you appear somewhere on Wiki, please share it here.

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Posted in London, Transport

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Improving Standard: the return of Andrew Martin

Posted on April 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

One of the delights for me about the improving Evening Standard has been the return of old hand Andrew Martin, with his unorthodox but smart tales from the underground, now called Man On The Tube (and only intermittently available online).

This used to be called Tube Talk and was my favourite feature of the old ES magazine in the late-90s when that mag was a great supplement. Martin’s column was the chief influence behind my own bus column at Time Out, where I endeavoured to catch every London bus in numerical order and write about the journey each week.

Martin had this knack of finding fascinating weekly stories about the Tube (something Annie Mole has been doing for the last few years), and writing them up with wit and skill. He’s a fantastic writer and a real London enthusiast; it’s great to have him back.

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