Mind the Gap

The city and the country

[When I last visited The Great Wen briefly in 2024 the city had already morphed like a Transformer. I walked across Tower Bridge and took this photo of the City under a glowering sky; belly of the beast with cranes building more more more as the megalopolis metastasises. The autumn tide was high and the Tower of London even more diminished by the temples of Mammon.]


Life Out of Balance

Growing up in isolated villages and a small town in the East of England, as I entered adolescence the perceived constrictions began to get me down, despite being free as a bird to explore the woods and fields and travel as far as my bicycle could take me, I felt the pull of London.  Ignorant of this irony I did what so many had done before and moved to the capital when my then-girlfriend achieved a placing at University. We found accommodation in a housing co-operative and settled into a new and exciting world and the anonymity afforded by the megalopolis. We were free! Free of provincial concerns, free from a place where everyone knew each other and each other’s business and background. Reinvention; a tabula rasa. It was certainly liberating and the cultural opportunities were a cornucopia but as the years rolled by I began to feel a degree of dislocation. I met my new partner, we had children together, and this occupied my thoughts and activities along with a growing anomie. I haunted the green spaces of the city, still unsure of the reason for my discontent. We went on holidays abroad, to France but mostly Spain, stayed in the Andalusian countryside with my parents who lived off-grid, explored the culture and learned the language at a basic level. Back in London the office work was grinding and the march of finance transformed the city; the rise of the Yuppie and Loadsamoney, the redevelopment of a capital still marked by flattened bomb sites courtesy of the Luftwaffe. I don’t suppose Americans or Canadians, for example, can take in the impact of a sustained bombing campaign on the psyche of a city; my mum, a Tottenham girl who served in the WAAF, would tell me of whole streets razed, of limbs in trees and on pavements the morning after a raid. 

Holidays to Dorset and Norfolk and the breathtaking beauty of the English landscape outwith the built environment played on my mind. Still, I stayed, close to the sound of the bells of St Stephen’s tower - now Elizabeth Tower - but beginning to dream of church bells ringing across the villages of Suffolk. I sat in The Scala in King’s Cross, now long gone like so many nodes of culture, when I was on the dole, looking for meaningful work - good luck with that - and watched Koyaanisqatsi twice but still didn’t get the pull and the message. 

One person’s misfortune is another’s opportunity. The developers moved in and the architects built on the ruins. The Isle of Dogs became Canary Wharf, a towering centre for the new capitalism unleased by the deregulation of the financial services by the Tory government. The City grew and advanced and, like all cities, sucked in the bounty of the surrounding area and the entire world into its engine because a megacity cannot be self-supporting; it’s a kind of parasite feeding off the energy of the population and the imports brought from the surrounding country and from abroad. The adundance is staggering; want some obscure ingredient to cook Chicken Kung Po? The city has it. Want asparagus in winter? The city will provide. Want obscure vinyl, books, gewgaws, tangible artifacts of culture aplenty? Wander the Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and the seeker will find.

Alone

By their nature cities provide anonymity and a cocaine-rush of freedom, a sense that you can be anyone and anything, a fever dream where you are the hero of your own story and the crowds on the street are mere NPCs. Like a cocaine comedown this mirage breaks down in the chill grey Monday morning on the Tube to work, squashed next to millions of straphangers just like you, flinching as tourist backpacks block the aisles and disembodied voices warn you to “mind the gap”. Alone in a crowd of other strangers, earpods fixed and lit by screens like ghosts, trying to avoid the eyes of passers-by, alone within collective dreams of wealth and escape; yes, escape. Brian shouting “you’re all individuals’’ and the crowd shouting back in affirmation. 

There is a condition called “Paris syndrome” which strikes Japanese tourists visiting the French capital. パリ症候群 is an acute culture shock brought on by the discrepancy of dreamy expectation when confronted by reality. The visitor expects artists in Montmartre, poets high on absinthe, lithe ladies high-kicking the cancan, flâneurs and boulevardiers, Ernest Hemingway in congress with Josephine Baker in some quaint petit zinc, Jim Morrison wandering the Quartier Latin. The city provides this, maintains the illusion, but as a simulacrum of long-gone spontaneity, a theme-park Disnification. A number of Japanese tourists in psychiatric breakdown are repatriated from the French capital every year as a result of their romantic expectations clashing with the reality of modern Paris. The only cure is a return to Japan.

The city lives and feeds on dreams. Lewis Mumford in The City in History (1961) wrote “In the transfer of authority to the city, the villager doubtless lost in no little degree his powers of self-government, and his feeling of being entirely at home in an environment in which every human being, almost every animal, every patch of land and flow of water, was thoroughly known to him. Yet to the extent that the villager submitted to the new forces at work in the city and even identified his own life with them, he was rewarded with a prosperity and a security he had never before enjoyed. […] Men in cities could become as exalted as gods released from inhibiting conformities and a paralysing sense of their own pettiness. Reinforced by the visible presence of great numbers of their own kind…the kings and governors and their subjects joined in a relentless collective assault on every part of the environment: now form-giving, now expressionist and exhibitionistic, now purely destructive.” 

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar decided on a limit of 150 as the number of family, friends, and acquaintances who could be retained in a cohesive group due to the complexity of human social systems and psychology. If the number exceeds 150 a group-network-tribe-village will not cohere and tends to dissipate or reform until it reaches another 150 optimum.That was then and this is now. 84% of British people now live in cities and a majority of humans on earth reside in urban environments.

The 15 Minute City Trap

On the C40 Knowledge Hub we read about the wonders of Carlos Moreno’s 15 Minute City concept; “Adopting a 15-minute city strategy means striving for an urban model that allows everyone, in every neighbourhood, to meet most of their daily needs within a short walk or bike ride of their home. It creates a ‘human-scale’ city composed of vibrant, people-friendly, ‘complete’ neighbourhoods, connected by quality public transport and cycling infrastructure for the longer trips that residents want or need to make. It means decentralising city life and services and injecting more life into local areas across the city.” What an idyllic dream.

Please note that Sadiq Khan, seemingly lifetime Mayor of London, is the current co-chair of the C40 council of mayors, a globalist front composed of over 100 cities working to impose restrictions on freedom of movement and install panopticon surveillance. Drive into London from the provinces and be faced with a bewildering array of parking and ULEZ restrictions with fees attached and fines for the innocent / non-compliant. Your every movement will be tracked by cameras and ANPRs and face-recognition devices. A huge experiment, coming to a town near you

This upbeat video explains the dreamy concept. Sounds good, eh? Unfortunately it’s the froth on the daydream. Look at the reality in China. Citizens tracked and traced, surveillance cameras and facial recognition, social credit scores issued for state-approved correct behaviour and marked down for anti-social dissident views. China is the model for a West in managed decline. Linked to the Net Zero project the walls are - literally - closing in. Together with the proposed introduction of Digital ID the happy shiny lure of 15-minute cities will lead to consumption restrictions (“we note you have exceeded the limit of your meat/alcohol/tobacco/flight allowance. We’re sorry but you have been fined 666 credits”) Do you want to stay within 15 minutes of home for the remainder of your life? 15 Minute Cities = lockdown forever.

Concrete City; A Stone Dream That Never Awakes

In JG Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island an architect called Robert Maitland careers off the Westway, a “brutalist, elevated fragment of the A40 trunk road”, into one of those interstitial spaces where asphalt roads conjoin. Marooned like an urban Robinson Crusoe, Maitland finds himself trapped in the green space below the cough and thrust of vehicles on the road grid above. It is a liminal space between nature and machine and the architect - who may even have designed similar non-place urban fields - finds himself trapped and alone in a city of millions. No one stops to help him. His wild gestures for assistance are met by indifference. Like all humans, his adaptability to environment is both a blessing and a curse. The Westway takes on a personality in Ballard’s cold precise prose, a “stone dream that never awakes”. The megacity glowers above all, the reptiles in the vivarium unaware of the watchers above the tank as the experiment continues. Currently, 583 tall buildings - defined as over 20 storeys - are planned for contruction according to New London Architecture’s 2024 report. The scale of these steel-framed glass-fronted future slums reduces people to ants. Those shiny pavement buttons marks the space between private and public and the spikes on street-level ledges are there to deter the homeless and weary. None of these behemoths will last more than 30 or 40 years as evidenced by demolition of the Brutalist / Modernist structures erected in the 1960s and 70s because the land on which they stand is worth more than the edifice. It’s a constant churn in service of the Machine; an inhuman monster advancing like the Hindu god Juggernaut and overseen by obscene Mammon. “That London”, city of dreams, has become a snare and a trap.

Escape

Almost everyone I know and knew who moved to The Great Wen from East Anglia, Wales, Cork, France, all the seekers who imagined the streets would be paved with gold and their dreams would come true, have left, scattered like autumn leaves to who knows where. I am now in the country in the towen, one of the last of my cohort to leave the ever-expanding megalopolis and by force of circumstance. I’m now 15 minutes on foot from rough heathland and the same to the towen centre. Stuff the enforced 15 Minute City; I already live in a natural one. I can’t change the past although I regret tarrying so long in a place which has lost its soul and exists only to advance the Machine and worship Mammon. At night I hear foxes shrieking and owls hooting; in summer months the birds chatter and pigeons coo; in winter pyes and crows caw and squirrels leap in the branches of trees.

Perhaps I should never have left my village but what has been done cannot be undone.

The Animals, We Gotta Get Out of This Place:

Trailer for Koyaanisqatsi:

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