London offers everywhere to shop, and nowhere to sit down. I went shopping with my girlfriend the other day, and to rest our tired feet I thought it would be nice to have a drink in a nearby pub. (I am eighteen, in case you're worried). Pubs have a cultural status far beyond their role as dens of iniquity: if people just wanted to get pissed they wouldn't pay double the price for a drink in a pub than they would from a supermarket. Pubs are the nearest thing we have to a truly public sphere. And this one in particular looked a very attractive place to sit down and have a drink. Unfortunately I had forgotten my travel documents and dental records.
We were asked for I.D (which doesn't happen everywhere), which I didn't have on me. I said I'd just have a lemonade instead. (The sitting down was my priority, anyway). We were asked to leave.
"Sorry, guys," said the twenty-something bar lady "just the rules".
(She was only following orders).
What is the point of these measures? Yes, I should have brought some I.D, but that's not the point. I had agreed not to drink anything alcoholic, and we were still chucked out. Are they worried simply being around alcohol will corrupt me in some profound way? (The same way in which just seeing a copy of a naughty magazine will awaken sexual energies in an adolescent the average 14-year-old can't muster on their own).
Teenagers, it is well known, develop far healthier drinking habits when forced out of the public sphere and the influence of well behaved adults, and preferably into the company of other adolescents, in a park, with access to an air-gun.
We then had to move on, and settled instead for a horrible identikit coffee chain; and the difference between your average pub and the sort of establishment that sells mocha-choca-locha-venti-sized-frappa-mappa-chinos for £15, is immense. The size of a shoe box, this particular venue was about to burst with shopping-laden caffeine addicts and staffed by just one trainee barista with a poor grasp of English. The individual character of one of these cafes is the same as any other cafe in the chain, as they're constructed out of Ikea flat-packs, and the flies on the wall suggested wood rot. This is not public space. The whole experience was thoroughly unpleasant.
The point is that we've built a city which is actively hostile to us; in which the principle goal of urban space is to buy stuff and never stop to enjoy the surroundings. You may think you're part of a great sprawling urban centre of life and culture, but would that still be true if your Oyster card wasn't topped up regularly? Even if I'd been allowed in that pub my right to stay there would be based on my ability to pay.
The Marxist academic David Harvey, a great exponent of the 'right to the city', wrote the following in the New Left Review:
"The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city....The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is...one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights."
At the moment I don't want to change the social relations of the city, or revolutionize urban life: I just want somewhere to sit down.
No comments:
Post a Comment