Londoners at Home:: The Way We Live Now

By Milan Svanderlik

A number of lives captured at a particular time creates a record that enables us to see just how the circumstances of Londoners are changing and evolving, though perhaps for the luckiest or unluckiest few, nothing ever seems to change very much.

In addition to addressing the question, 'WHERE do we live?', perhaps the most obvious dimension of Londoners at Home, the project goes on to consider, through 64 topics, 'WHO do we live with?', 'WHAT do we do?', 'WHENCE did we come?', and 'HOW are we different?' and a wide variety of sitters has contributed to the substantial commentary that now offers extensive and illuminating answers to these existential questions.   However, Londoners at Home always aimed to comprise wholly non-judgmental observations of some of the denizens of our vast, capital city and the accumulated images and stories have, as was originally hoped, built into a fascinating tableau of the way we Londoners live now, in the second decade of the 21st century.

The Photographer, Milan Svanderlik, is a veteran observer of the extraordinary diversity and beauty of nature, people and life in general.   Londoners at Home:  The Way We Live Now is the final part of a major project, The London Trilogy.   Part I, 100 Faces of London, was exhibited in central London in 2012, with Part II, Outsiders in London, following in 2015.

Gerald Stuart Burnett was born to émigré Scottish parents in a small Cheshire market town.   Graduating from the University of Stirling, he went on to the University of Nottingham before pursuing a long career in the Education Service.   Gerald's project role has been primarily as editor, painstakingly reworking the text of each 'story' into its current form.

• Language: English
• Publisher: epubli
• Release date: Dec 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9783750260238

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Imprint

LONDONERS AT HOME

The Way We Live Now

Copyright © 2019 Milan Svanderlik, London, UK

Published by: epubli GmbH, Berlin

www.epubli.de

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ISBN 978-3-750260-23-8

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

title-page

The Project

For the unfortunate few, such temporary shelter as they can find on the streets may serve as their only home, while the more favoured amongst the indigent may be able to ‘sofa-surf’, doss on the floors of friends, or find a space in a commune or a squat.   Well-to-do singletons may relax in en-suite bedrooms in some of the posh, new, communal-living ‘collectives’ located in the leafy suburbs, while their less fortunate peers have to make do with more humdrum flat-shares and lodgings in less salubrious parts of town.   Some elderly and disabled Londoners’ lives are confined to sheltered accommodation, where there is support and supervision at hand;  some live in nursing homes or homes for old folks;  while others manage to carry on living in their own homes, dependent on carers or surrounded with the panoply of essential equipment that keeps daily life manageable.  

A tent may serve as a makeshift temporary home for some Londoners, while others thrive on impermanence and are delighted to live in houseboats or narrowboats or caravans - even converted garages, garden sheds and tree houses provide other Londoners with roofs over their heads.  

There are doubtless lots, lots more varieties of ‘London habitats’ but the above descriptions are intended to give a flavour of the great variety of dwellings that this project has encompassed - an open invitation was extended to anyone who cared to suggest such other abodes as the photographer might not even have contemplated. 

In addition to addressing the question, ‘Where do we live?’, perhaps the most obvious but nonetheless fascinating dimension of Londoners at Home: The Way We Live Now, the project goes on to consider, ‘Who do we live with?’, ‘What do we do?’, ‘Whence did we come?’, and ‘How are we different?’ and a wide variety of sitters has contributed to the substantial commentary that now offers extensive and illuminating answers to these existential questions.  

In addition to reflecting the huge change that has taken place over the last quarter century with regard to the relationships between the people with whom Londoners share their living (and sometimes sleeping) quarters, the project also encompasses the increasing trend of residents who pursue professional, business or other work-related activities from their homes;  it looks into the huge impact of immigration into the capital and the origins of the largest groups of migrants, the multifarious contributions they have made to the life of the city and how, in turn, London has itself impacted upon the lives of its most recent arrivals (including how Brexit might affect them);  and, it focusses upon the domestic existence of some Londoners who, for one reason or another, are palpably different from everyone else. 

Under these broad groupings, Londoners at Home: The Way We Live Now, like Milan’s earlier large-scale photographic projects, has been allowed to grow organically, and its final shape has in large part been determined by those sitters who have come forward.   Once again, sitters were relied upon to recommend other sitters and to stimulate interest in the project by publicising it amongst their families, their friends, their work colleagues and their communities, and we offer thanks to everyone for this vital and invaluable assistance.

As was the case with its predecessors, Londoners at Home: The Way We Live Now, has been a completely non-commercial, artistic project that has grown and evolved on its own, dedicated website;  if we are fortunate and succeed in acquiring funding and a suitable gallery space (the Crypt Gallery at St Martin-in-the-Fields is no longer available for this type of activity) it will culminate with another public exhibition too.   All the sitters have been volunteers - no-one has been paid a fee to take part - but every participant should be seen as a unique and valued contributor to what has proved to be a truly revealing kaleidoscope of London life.

Londoners at Home: The Way We Live Now, always aimed to comprise wholly non-judgmental observations of some of the denizens of our vast, capital city;  the project started towards the end of 2016 and was completed at the end of 2018. These accumulated images and observations have, as was originally hoped, built into a fascinating tableau of the way we Londoners live now, in the second decade of the 21st century.

The Authors

milan

Milan Svanderlik was born in 1948, in Northern Bohemia, and was educated partly in the former states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and partly in the UK. He has lived and worked in Croatia, in Switzerland and for over 40 years in London. A veteran observer of the extraordinary diversity and beauty of nature, people, and life in general, Milan studied Botany abroad and Photography in London – combining both these interests, he has exhibited plant photographs in London’s Photographers’ Gallery. In addition to portraiture and plant studies, Milan’s photographic work encompasses travel photography, landscape, still life and photo-reportage.

100 Faces of London, the first part of Milan’s recent major artistic endeavour, The London Trilogy, comprised portraits of 100 Londoners, celebrating the extraordinary diversity of people who live and work in the capital. This highly successful project culminated in a five-week exhibition of all 100 portraits at The Gallery in the Crypt, St Martin-in-the-Fields, in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics. Seen by several thousands of Londoners and tourists alike, the exhibition was well received.

The exhibition of part two of The London Trilogy, Outsiders in London, Are you one, too? was also held at The Gallery in the Crypt from 23rd March to 8th May 2015. Over seven weeks, the exhibition was seen by over 8,000 visitors - with strong links to its predecessor, it too emphasised the extraordinary diversity amongst Londoners, this time with a more explicit socio-political slant

gerald

Gerald Stuart Burnett BA(Hons) MPhil FRSPH was born a long time ago to émigré Scottish parents in a small Cheshire market town. Educated at Sandbach School, he patriotically graduated from the University of Stirling, before undertaking postgraduate studies at the University of Nottingham. Following a long, journeyman career in the Education Service, he concluded his full-time employment in a senior post at one of London’s larger FE colleges. Despite having spent much of his career ‘writing’ for one purpose or another, it has been a novelty for Gerald to undertake what has been primarily an editing role: following transcription of the interviews conducted by Milan Svanderlik, he has painstakingly reworked the text of each ‘life story’ into its current form. Editorial supervision of all other written aspects of the project has also been his responsibility, so Gerald freely admits that any imperfections that remain must be down to him alone.

WHERE do we live?

LIVING ON THE WATER

Justine Armatage and Charlie Finke (with Valentine, the dog)

Justine and Charlie are both accomplished musicians and describe their longitudinal existence on a narrowboat, on the River Lea, as part of a community of ‘off-grid’ people. Inevitably, certain types of people tend to be drawn to the watery lifestyle - environmentalists, a surprising number of LGBT people, sometime travellers, and lots of other folks who don’t quite relish mainstream living in the little boxes of the new nappy-valley estates, or who simply want to be closer to nature and to the water. Perhaps above everything else, the astronomical cost of London housing has contributed to the ever-increasing number of people who choose, or who are forced, to take to life on the water; many of these people simply cannot afford to buy conventional homes. It is estimated that over 15,000 people now live, all the year round, on the UK’s numerous narrowboats and the numbers are rising.

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Photograph: Justine Armatage on the left, Charlie Finke on the right, and Valentine in the basket. (Photography: 13th November 2016)

The full story:

Instead of living in a flat the size of a shoe box, Justine Armatage and Charlie Finke live on a narrowboat, moored in north east London’s Lea Valley. Having photographed them in late November 2016, I returned about a year later to interview them at length. Wishing to know a little more about Justine, I took the liberty of asking her first about her background: Milan, yes, you can call me a true Londoner. I was born in Barnet, in north London. My father was a jazz drummer and my mother was a teacher. They split up when I was still young and, while my brother and I lived modestly with our mother in a council flat, Mum made sure that I still had my piano lessons and my ballet classes - something of a middle-class thing going on there, I suppose. Justine smiles.

Justine went to a local primary school in Harrow, from where she progressed to secondary school, though the time she spent there was not entirely fruitful. Justine continued: Once I was a teenager, I just gave up on school; all I wanted was to be a punk and to join a band. Of course, by that time, I had acquired quite solid, classical musical foundations, both in piano and violin, but then other music started to occupy a bigger part of my life. At the age of 15, I joined a horrible punk band; I just wanted to make a racket, to churn out lots of angry noise. I loved it. We all loved it - this was the age to do it, the time when we all wanted to be punks.

Justine has a well-deserved reputation for projecting an image of herself that is always considered yet always original. She continued: The punk trend influenced me a great deal: I often had my hair an extraordinary colour and wore vintage mixed with charity shop clothes which made me stand out. While my father proved pretty phlegmatic about my being in a band, I always knew that my mother would have much preferred me to go on to music college and become a classical musician. Unfortunately, I felt strongly otherwise.

I asked Justine how she had progressed from that point and she burst into laughter: Milan, I don’t think I progressed at all! I am still in the same boat, if you’ll pardon the pun. If she didn’t progress, Justine certainly moved on, becoming a member of a succession of bands until she began to get bored with it all; at that point, she returned to classical music. She attended college and arranged private tuition in classical piano from a concert pianist, in return for which, she taught his young son. She also did a number of temporary jobs, including a stint as an art school model, but came to realise that she both enjoyed, and was quite good at, teaching. So, from her early ‘20s, she has taught piano; indeed, she continues to do so, right up to the present. Then, when I was about 30, Charlie came for piano lessons and, as they say, the rest is history.

I then asked Charlie if he would tell me something about himself, about the years before he decided to spend his life in the same boat with Justine. Unlike Justine, you could have called me a country boy - perhaps not any longer, but I was born in a small village in the Midlands. There were two of us children, me and my older sister, and looking back on our childhood, I especially enjoyed all the fun and freedom we had in the many open spaces around us - I think fondly about those days even now. I suppose you could have called my parents ‘aspirational’: my mother was a teacher but my father considered himself to be just a bit posher than he actually was. He had indeed gone to a minor public school and at one time, he certainly considered himself to be better than anyone else. But sadly, he wasn’t particularly successful professionally and worked mostly as a door-to-door salesman. Consequently, I went to the very ordinary, local comprehensive. I asked Charlie how well he’d done at school: Badly, Milan, but having said that, I did enjoy some of it, especially the English and Art. Unfortunately, it was the sort of school where you had to be either academic or good at fighting, and if you weren’t one or the other, you didn’t get much respect. There was plenty of bullying, unless you were clever and cheeky, and that was me. Together with a few kindred spirits, I used to cause trouble in class, and through that mechanism, we were able to manipulate our popularity - it proved to be an effective way of not getting beaten up, but it was not the best place to be as a teenager.

However, I wasn’t just a troublemaker, I was also a keen cyclist in my teens; at every opportunity, I used to cycle off to the nearest town, which happened to be Northampton. I observed life and people; I spent ages looking at records, listening to music, and dreaming of having a nice stereo of my own. This is how I spent my Saturdays, days that helped me stay a bit more in touch with the world. The kids in the town simply looked so cool - compared to them, I must have seemed a provincial farmer’s boy. So once I reached the grand old age of 17, I moved out of the village and rented accommodation in the town. It was there where I went to college and did the Art Foundation Course, supporting myself by continuing with my job on a farm.

Having done well on his Foundation Course, there was only one obvious choice for Charlie - head south to London and enrol on a degree course at a reputable college of art; he chose Hornsey, well-known for its progressive and experimental approach to art and design education. I did well there, especially in the area of painting, life drawing and landscape, though once again I was going against the grain - almost everyone else was so deeply into conceptual stuff, my work seemed almost iconoclastic! Mind you, I did branch out into abstraction later on.

Charlie continues: Coming down south, being in London, felt like walking on air. Every night I was out; something incredible appeared to happen almost every day; and I tried to see as many bands as possible. London really was the place to be. The BBC’s John Peel proved to be a great influence on Charlie’s development as a future musician. Absolutely everyone of my generation would listen to his wonderfully eclectic selection of music. As a northerner, he wasn’t the least bit ‘London-centric’ and played requests from people from all over the country. He introduced me to many different genres of music, as well as a great range of artists; he didn’t merely play bands from all over the world, he played bands from the Midlands too. These were often bands that I already knew, bands that I reckoned were good, bands that I wanted to be like. I also saw what was the increasingly well-established route into pop music through art college; everyone who was cool had taken that path.

I asked Charlie how he’d actually come to be a musician, and later on, a singer: "Well, a few of us in College decided to give it a go. We bought instruments and taught ourselves how to play. I started off with the base guitar, which I bought in London, the cheapest one in the shop. But we were keen and quite soon, we were able to start rehearsing together and I felt instantly liberated. We called our band, Hinnies and we performed extensively - we even got taken on as a support band for Blur, during one of their European tours. With the benefit of hindsight, I’d have to admit we were rubbish, but at the time, it was undoubtedly an exciting period in my life. Between 1990 and 1993, the Hinnies even managed to release three records."

"While I think I did quite well, I was never entirely satisfied with the music I wrote end performed. And in the end, it all came crashing down simply because we weren’t really very talented - we were just enjoying ourselves. However, those three years gave me a taste for music and for performing. Later, I switched to a proper, ‘fuck-off’, post-punk, rock band called, Penthouse. I was their lead singer and during seven or eight years, we toured the world and made three albums. While we didn’t make a single penny out of it, we had a great time and I made lots of friends and many contacts. I learned to have great respect for all those artists who are living on the edge, and I realised that this was the place to be. This was also the time when I met Justine.

Justine and Charlie are both accomplished musicians and, having each been members of successful touring bands in the past, they have for 10 years now had a band of their own, The Cesarians, and the band not only tours in the UK but also in Belgium, Italy, France, Germany, and Austria - it’s especially welcomed by discerning fans in Switzerland. Charlie says, with a smile: What we play is very much alternative pop, with jazz and classical influences, so we do have quite a broad appeal and we always try to maintain a strong sense of individuality. Both of them are wonderfully stylish too, with attire that references punk, alternative, and classical influences while remaining firmly grounded and delightfully unpretentious. They have lived on the water for over 10 years together, now sharing the boat with their dog, Valentine, and cat, Elvis, who proved a bit camera-shy on the day of the photo-shoot.

On visiting Justine and Charlie, the first thing that would strike you is that living on a narrowboat is, as the name itself rather implies, very much a longitudinal existence, although a surprising range of home comforts seem to have been fitted in through the use of the most ingenious design solutions, despite the confines of the long, narrow interior. They have even managed to fit in a piano and live music can often be heard emanating from their windows, windows that are no more than an oar’s length away from the canoes and rowing boats that frequently go swooshing past.

Like all the folk whose boats are moored along the same stretch of river, Justine and Charlie belong to a community of ‘off-grid people’, that is, people who generate their own electricity through the photovoltaic cells on their roof. And what is immediately apparent is that ‘off-grid’ is exactly what this great community is. Inevitably, certain types of people tend to be drawn to the watery lifestyle - environmentalists, a surprising number of LGBT people, sometime travellers, and lots of other folks who don’t quite cherish mainstream living in the little boxes of the new nappy-valley estates, or who simply want to be closer to nature and to the water. Justine adds: By now, our neighbours are well accustomed to seeing us walking along the towpath in our somewhat outré performance attire, as we head off for a gig. They are a well-established part of this unorthodox world which, like a colourful, bohemian ribbon, lines the banks of London’s River Lea.

Perhaps above everything else, the astronomical cost of London housing has contributed to the ever-increasing number of people who choose, or who are forced, to take to life on the water; many of these people simply cannot afford to buy conventional homes. It is estimated that over 15,000 people now live, all the year round, on the UK’s numerous narrowboats and the numbers are rising. Not many years back, Justine says, there were only a few of us on this bank; now, the line of boats stretches far out of sight.

After a short, dormant period, The Cesarians are active once again and performing, with their European fans keenly awaiting their return. But a crust has always to be earned: while not creating music, Justine gives piano lessons and Charlie goes labouring, though he says optimistically: Every time we write a new song, we are totally confident that this will be the one, the one that gives us our break. And every time we think that this is the one that will make our fortune, I dream of never again having to pick up my bag of carpenter’s tools and head off to a windswept building-site somewhere. I carry on in the hope that, one day, someone will hear our latest song and go ‘WOW’, and all our past work will then be rediscovered too and that will be seen as equally good. Milan, I have no shame and no regrets but I do continue to be a little surprised at my own level of optimism; still, one day … Charlie laughs before continuing contemplatively: I do wonder sometimes if perhaps I wouldn’t be writing the sort of songs I write if we didn’t live the kind of life we do. I suppose I must be the eternal optimist. Mind you, if there’s something that does keep me awake at night, something that even I can’t be optimistic about, it’s Brexit and the fear that should we actually, finally part company with the EU, Britain could find itself increasingly abandoned, forgotten in the stagnant backwaters of Europe.

Interview date: 13th November 2016

Text edited: 25th November 2016

Text re-edited: 25th January 2018

WHERE do we live?

LIVING IN A HOME FOR THE ELDERLY

Diana Athill OBE

Diana Athill OBE lived past her 101st birthday at a home for the elderly in Highgate where, living comfortably herself, she raised quite forcefully the desperate state of social care for the great majority of England’s old folk who are denied the same standard of accommodation and care. Local authorities have seen their funding drastically reduced at a time when the demand for the provision of care for the elderly is rising exponentially and private providers are demanding significant increases in fees. This is what some would call the inevitable clash between market forces and the public interest, right in the middle of which are our unfortunate senior citizens, caught at exactly the time when they are most frail and in greatest need of well-funded, expert and humane care. In the case of domiciliary care, which is crucial in enabling the elderly to stay in their own homes, 95% of such care was directly provided by local authorities as recently as 1993; by 2012, this had fallen to just 11%. Nearly all these services have been privatised, largely taken over by private companies, and mostly operated for profit; if and when such profits can no longer be realised, the care service is simply terminated and vital provision is further diminished.

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Photograph: Diana Athill OBE in her private room at the Mary Fielding Guild, Highgate Village (Photography: 8th February 2017)

The full story:

Diana Athill OBE, at the age of 99, kindly accepted my invitation and allowed me to photograph her in the residential home for the active elderly, where she lives in Highgate. Understandably, she is now quite frail but her mind is as alive and sharp as ever. Having been a well-known literary editor, with her own publishing house at one stage, she has worked with some of the most significant writers of the 20th century. She has worked for the BBC too and, in her own right, is a successful novelist and memoirist. Diana has lived a long, fulfilled, independent and exciting life; she has never married but has never lived in solitude by choice; she has never had children but has been able to maintain a dynamic and successful writing career right into her nineties - indeed, her most recent volume, A Florence Diary, was only published in the Autumn of 2016, when she was already 98.

Diana now lives in a pleasant building, surrounded by a fine garden, in London’s Highgate Village; it is the property of the Mary Feilding Guild, a charity established in 1877 and one that prides itself on offering the elderly an independent life in a safe environment, with some provision of personal care, as required. The Guild encourages residents to maintain their outside interests and respects their privacy, while seeking to promote companionship and a sense of community - vibrant social, cultural and creative engagement is what the Guild seeks for its residents. During the photo shoot, Diana observed: I love living here: I am able to continue to be active and still know that if I need any help, such help is available; all the staff are so kind and good to me. I also made many delightful friends here, almost at once - people from so many diverse professional and cultural backgrounds. One is never alone unless one chooses to be.

Diana’s decision to move into what she thought of as an ‘old people’s home’ was never easy. In her recent memoir, Alive, Alive Oh!, she writes: Few events in my life have been decided by me. How I was educated, where I have lived, why I am not married, how I have earned my living: all these crucial things happened to me rather than were made to happen by me. Of course an individual’s nature determines to some extent what happens, but moments at which a person just says, ‘I shall now do X,’ and does it are rare - or so it has been in my life. Perhaps my decision to move into a home for old people is not quite the only one, but it is certainly the biggest.

Diana writes touchingly about how difficult it is to face the day when you must move out of a fine home, lovingly created over the years and filled with memories and beautiful possessions; above all, she speaks of the wrench of leaving behind hundreds of books and paintings, to move into a single room that can only accommodate a few personal possessions - some books and a few pictures. But her memoir is not steeped in regret; she accepts that her move was not only sensible but also necessary and, all things considered, she is happy in her new home. Significantly, she writes: Newspaper stories about nasty happenings in homes for old people, when untrained, probably underpaid and obviously ill-chosen staff have bullied and manhandled helpless residents, have been shocking, but no more so to us, who are residents in such a home, than to outsiders. Being old ourselves, we naturally feel for the victims, but apart from that, such stories have nothing to do with us. Our home - and no doubt the same could be said of many others - is one in which such happenings are unthinkable. Basically, this is because ours is not one of the many run for profit.

Diana Athill touched upon what is a crucial issue in what we in Britain now tend to call ‘Social Care for the Elderly’. Since 1979, there has been a substantial shift in this sector, where the provision of residential care, either by local authorities or the NHS, has been reduced from nearly 65% to 6% (as at 2012). In the case of domiciliary care, 95% of which was directly provided by local authorities as recently as 1993, by 2012, this had fallen to just 11%. All these services have been privatised, largely taken over by private companies, and mostly operated for profit. And this sea change has been characterised by a growing role for big ‘care companies’, with fifty or more homes, to the detriment of small, family-run businesses - five large chains now account for 20% of provision and this figure is expected to rise.

Many of these ‘care companies’ have attracted investment from hedge funds, off-shore trusts and other financial entities that expect speedy returns and unrealistically high profit margins. To achieve these returns, the most elaborate accounting mechanisms and company organisational structures have been put in place. The properties and other fixed assets are often transferred to off-shore holding companies (these pay no UK corporation tax) with the UK-based ‘care companies’ employing the staff and providing the actual service; these companies are then saddled with such extortionate rents and maintenance charges, levied from abroad, that they only just break even - they make no profit and so pay no UK tax either. And so tight are their margins that they are consequently obliged to employ untrained or poorly trained staff, on oppressive contracts and poverty wages - such staff are often forced to adopt self-employed status and are thus denied pensions, holiday pay or sick pay.

In a highly respected report from the Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change, it is unambiguously stated: "The report illustrates the argument about debt-based financial engineering through a detailed analysis of the largest chain, Four Seasons, which is owned by Terra Firma Private Equity, and controls 23,000 beds. The chain consists of 185 companies, tiered in 15 levels through multiple jurisdictions, including tax havens, which minimises tax liability for the owners and creates an opacity which is not in the public interest. The report continues: The accounts of one upper tier holding company (Elli Investments) raise issues about what is going on. For example, media reports note £525 million of external debt; but Elli’s accounts show an additional £300 million of intra-group debt charged at 15% which more or less doubles the annual interest bill (before profit can be made) to more than £100 million."

Local authorities have seen their funding drastically reduced (by almost 40% during the last parliament, broadly speaking) while the demand for the provision of care for the elderly is rising and private providers are demanding significantly increased fees. This is what some would call the inevitable clash of market forces and the public interest, right in the middle of which are our unfortunate senior citizens, caught at exactly the time when they are most frail and in need of humane, expert and well-funded care.

In view of the increasingly parlous condition of social care for the elderly in Britain today, should we not be questioning the basis upon which this care provision is now made? Should care homes for old people, or the providers of peripatetic carers for the elderly still living at home, be supplied by big private companies whose only interest is profit and who take the most elaborate and questionable steps to ensure that the profits that they make escape UK taxation? Is it not the case that most people in the UK see the provision of health and social care as a matter for the state, to be run as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, certainly, but not to pour money into the coffers of off-shore companies? This must surely be a pressing matter for public debate and for Government to resolve in such a way as to offer adequate, decent provision for an expanding elderly population.

You might care to read some of Diana Athill’s excellent and highly-regarded books, eg:

Alive, Alive Oh!: And Other Things That Matter

Somewhere Towards the End

Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend and others

Interview date: 8th February 2017

Text edited: 13th February 2017

Update (January 2019)

We have to report the sad news that on Thursday 24th January 2019, Diana Athill passed away at the great age of 101; She will be greatly mourned by her family and by everyone who knew her.

Born: 21 December 1917; died 23 January 2019

May she rest in peace.

WHERE do we live?

SLEEPING ON THE STREETS

Buuhan

For a young man called Buuhan, the streets of London are home, just like hundreds of others in the capital who are forced to sleep rough.  Over the five years to 2018, the number of rough sleepers in Britain has doubled. Official estimates suggest that 3,600 people sleep on the nation’s streets every night but these statistics are disputed by the homelessness charities who actually work in the field and who see this figure as a significant underestimate.  One thing is certain, however: a society can always be judged by the way it treats its weakest members: its young, its old, its infirm, its insane, its convicts, and its destitute.   So what judgement would be passed on ’Global Britain’, in the Year of Our Lord 2018, the fifth richest nation in the world, when we consider the plight of those whom we have quite consciously abandoned to pass miserable lives on the streets of our greatest and wealthiest cities?

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Photograph: Buhhan under a railway arch at Waterloo (Photography: 4th April 2017)

The full story:

I have now lived in London for over 45 years and there have always been rough sleepers amongst us here in the capital. Rough sleepers are found in most of our major conurbations and you might say that they are different manifestations of society’s underbelly. Amongst those found sleeping on our streets are people who may have chosen to opt out; people who have fallen through the holes in the social safety net; people who may have spent part of their lives in prison, in the services, or in some kind of mental institution; refugees, illegal immigrants and those who are on the run from unbearable domestic relationships, or from the demons inside their own heads; people who have gambled and lost; and people whose grip on reality has been fractured through alcohol or substance abuse, who sought nirvana but ended up in a nightmare on our freezing, wet streets.

Also amongst those on the streets are the simply homeless, those who just cannot afford to pay for a bed for the night, or a roof over their heads. During the last few years, I have seen the situation in London deteriorate markedly: now there is hardly an underpass, a bus shelter, or a shop doorway that, late at night, is not populated by rough sleepers, trying to keep warm in their sleeping bags or in a nest of newspapers and cardboard boxes. Some prefer to sleep in the warmth of night buses, travelling aimlessly through the darkened streets, to-ing and fro-ing from one bus terminal to another.

Rough sleepers are certainly an integral part of London’s streetscape and though I was determined to include them in Londoners at Home: The Way We Live Now, I understood how difficult a task it would be to find a suitable, willing subject. By sheer coincidence, pure serendipity, my attention was drawn one day to an obvious assemblage of objects under one of the railway arches near Waterloo Station, close to my gym. There was a sleeping bag, neatly rolled up, two pillows, a discarded but once very expensive office swivel chair, and a sweet collection of quite clean-looking stuffed toys, including a big-eyed white cat, a Captain Hook, and a rather jolly Mickey Mouse. As it was still daylight, the owner of these possessions, and resident of this patch of sheltered pavement, was not there; however, I took my chance and returning later on that evening, with my camera, I found a young man already tucked up inside his sleeping bag, but still reading his free newspaper.

As I approached, I could see from his his eyes that he was thinking, What the hell does HE want? But I took plenty of time to explain about the project and, at the end of my little presentation, asked him if he might be willing to be part of it himself. I love art too, he said, so yes, I wouldn’t mind being photographed. It was a chilly Spring night, it was starting to drizzle, and the railway arch seemed a great deal more like a wind tunnel than a shelter from the elements, but I did manage to take some photographs of this sad young chap. He even volunteered to tell me, a complete stranger, a few things about himself; of course, I listened: "My name is Buuhan and I came to London from Portsmouth. I am a theoretical physicist but things went wrong in my family and I had to leave home. But the hope of finding housing there was zero, because I don’t belong to any of the minorities who are entitled to be housed by the Council. So I came to London, where at least there are day centres where I can get some warm food and keep myself clean. I’ve been sleeping on the streets for six months now."

Alas, at the very moment when I was getting some useful background information, another rough sleeper sat down close to us and started to construct a night shelter for himself out of a large cardboard box. He looked at me and my camera, then towards Buuhan and muttered: See mate, fame at last! You’ll be eating at the Ritz next. I felt that, out of respect for Buuhan’s privacy, I could not very well continue the interview any further. But I planned to return the following night and so we parted, with me heading off to my warm, comfy bed in Chiswick, leaving him in his sleeping bag, under a damp and windy archway, keeping close to his collection of fluffy toys and the inexplicable, sleek, high-tech office chair that looked, against the ancient, dirty, bare brick walls of the railway arch, more like an alien sculpture than a piece of office furniture.

I returned during the evening of the next day; he wasn’t there, so I left a note. I returned two days later and though his possessions looked as though someone had been rifling through them, my note was still there, untouched and presumably unread - Buuhan couldn’t have seen it. He would seem not to have returned to his patch for the two days since we had spoken, leaving his fluffy friends looking abandoned and forlorn.

Some of our politicians claim repeatedly that the UK is the fifth richest nation in the entire world but behind all our prosperity, behind the unimaginable wealth of the richest few, there is a deep-seated cruelty and contempt for others that should shame every one of us. We somehow imagine, or perhaps we convince ourselves, that poverty and homelessness only happen to the feckless and the irresponsible, but how wrong this is. The post-war settlement built nobly on a pre-existing, rudimentary welfare system, recognising that if everyone made small, regular contributions to a ‘national insurance’ fund, resources would be amassed that could provide a real safety-net for anyone who was hit by accident or misfortune, lost a job or a home, became ill, or faced a rough patch in their lives and needed temporary support or an affordable dwelling - basically, the help people sometimes need to rebuild their lives.

But the tide has now turned against such ‘socialist’ or ‘collectivist’ ideals (though nobody at all seems to find fault with ‘private’ insurance) and every individual must fend for him or herself. Those who fall by the wayside in this fierce competition for life’s material blessings are seen to be at fault and are thus labelled as ‘undeserving’. We are told that the Welfare State only creates dependency, turning workers into scroungers that the country can no longer afford. Harking back to Victorian times, we have again become a country that Dickens would recognise, a cruel nation that adheres to the dogma that the strong should be allowed to prosper without constraint, while the weak must pull their socks up and tighten their belts, or else go to the wall; they should not expect other hardworking folk to support them. The full-scale dismantling of the Welfare State, largely created by the post-war Labour Government, is now in full swing and all around us the harsh climate of seemingly perpetual austerity provides an ideal environment for turning this savage dogma into practice.

This is not to say, of course, that there were no rough sleepers on London streets during the period when the Welfare State was still fully functioning. There will always be people whose choice it is to opt out of society, those who suffer some degree of mental illness but who are not ill enough to be hospitalised, individuals who, through drink or drugs, are on a destructive personal trajectory, or those who have in some way or another gambled with life and lost everything.

Some of these rough sleepers will need to be helped by one of the leading charitable organisations in the field (like The Connection at St Martin-in-the-Fields, The Passage, Thames Reach, and St Mungo’s) who do their best to give them decent meals, help them to keep themselves clean and well-groomed, and try to assist them to find a permanent home, to get back into work, and thus achieve a more stable life.

Over the past five years, the number of rough sleepers in Britain has doubled. It is officially estimated that 3,600 people sleep on the nation’s streets nightly but these statistics are disputed by the homelessness charities who are working in the field and who see this figure as a significant underestimate. Most London shopping streets have people bedding down in doorways, or by air-conditioning vents, and the better-lit underpasses are generously populated with the homeless every night.

No-one will forget the memorable statement of a former Tory minister, who described the homeless as, what you step over when you come out of the opera. Such jocularity might seem cruel or heartless but it probably contains a germ of truth, insofar as the spacious entrances, porticos, awnings and covered colonnades of our numerous West-End theatres provide good shelter at night time for the legion of sleeping baggers. The situation in the capital is now so desperate that people have actually resorted to sleeping in council recycling bins.

The principal causes of this rising trend in the numbers of rough sleepers appear to be rising rents, savage cuts in Housing Benefit, and the ever-diminishing services provided by local authorities, whose budgets have been cut by around 40% in the long period of austerity since 2010. One contributing factor, especially in London, has been the marked rise in immigration from Eastern Europe. Many of such migrants are highly skilled and have no difficulty finding work, often in London’s booming construction sector, but others, those who lack trades and who may have been already on the margins at home, come to Britain in the hope of getting a decent job (or perhaps just a job) and thus making a better life for themselves.

Sadly, not all such migrants do find work and even amongst those who do will be those who are paid so little that they cannot sustain a decent existence in one of the world’s costliest cities; they will remain desperately poor and be forced to live on the margins here too. All the talk of the tabloids, that these people are only here to milk our (supposedly) generous welfare benefits, is not sustained by the facts: these migrant workers are not entitled to any benefits.

In London, it is estimated that, at one stage, almost half of rough sleepers were from Eastern Europe. These people face additional major problems: while the homeless charities can feed them during the day, contrary to popular belief, they are not entitled to and do not receive any state support, nor do they qualify for hostel accommodation. They cannot even access sufficient funds to pay for their journey home. A number of rough sleepers are also refugees and failed asylum seekers; these sad individuals are trapped in a no man’s land, hiding from the authorities and terrified even to seek medical attention when they need it, for fear of being arrested and forcibly deported.

Sleeping on the streets has never been safe and it can often be frightening, with rough sleepers suffering the theft of their scanty possessions, attacks from fellow rough sleepers, often over ‘territorial disputes’, and the casual violence meted out by drunks and delinquents. Every year, a number of people sleeping rough in London are murdered. Those who have nothing, and who have nothing to lose, will often steal from others who sleep rough but who might seem, perhaps through successful begging or busking, to have more than they do. And rough sleepers are often attacked gratuitously by passers by; they are insulted and abused for their predicament, told they are idle and worthless, bottles and other refuse are thrown at them, their precious sleeping bags are set on fire, and some have actually been kicked to death - they are lucky if they only get spat at or urinated on. Some authorities have been known to round up the rough sleepers in their areas and relocate them outside London, making them someone else’s problem, at least for a while.

Ironically, a proportion of rough sleepers are actually in work, though they are only just surviving. Some pick up casual work from builders looking for a cheap day’s labour, no question asked, in exchange for which they get enough cash to pay for the day’s food but nothing else, certainly not for accommodation. There was a case of two rough sleepers who worked for an agency that sold street cleaning services to local authorities: they were paid so little that the only way they got by was to return at night to sleep on the streets that they’d cleaned earlier in the day - one motive for doing a good job, perhaps? And who is going to offer a respectable job to someone ‘of no fixed abode’? Well, we can all guess who: those individuals, companies and agencies who thrive on the exploitation of an expanding urban underclass, of those who have no rights and no representation, who are willing to work for a pittance and who are seen as a disposable ‘human resource’. And through our obsession with cost-cutting, saving, and protecting the taxpayers’ purse we, as a society, connive at this exploitation, this degradation of the desperate.

When I return once more to the railway arch where Buuhan had seemed so well ensconced but a few days before, his few remaining possessions are all in a heap, his fluffy toys abandoned; soon, the council’s street cleaners will clear even this away, making space for the next al fresco resident of this windy archway - another cardboard box to shelter another broken human being. I cannot help but wonder: Was this young man who allowed me to photograph him really called ‘Buuhan’? Was he really a physicist? And did I, as a total stranger, have any right to ask him anyway? Any right to expect him to reveal more about himself? Every day since taking his picture, I have wondered what happened to him, if he is ill or has been harmed, if he has disappeared for some personal reason, and will anyone notice anyway? Now only the photograph remains of that rainy, windy night when he gazed at me observing him through my viewfinder - two totally disparate lives, that have touched at a single point.

We all pass dozens of vagrants every time we’re out and about in central London, the homeless, mostly jobless people who line our streets, though our eyes rarely meet with theirs; we look away, giving ourselves a measure of protection from the pain of seeing what would become unbearable. Even when we give, we mostly don’t look; we avert our eyes from the eyes of the miserable because to look them in the face is an embarrassment, an indictment of our own affluence, our well-fed warmth and comfort, it is simply too distressing. How did we allow this to happen? How do we permit it to go on happening? Even those who have spent much of their working lives in the noble organisations and charities that help rough sleepers to survive, perhaps even to return to mainstream society, now talk pessimistically about the future, almost as if all of their work had been in vain and the fight for a more equal society lost. But there is one thing absolutely certain: a civilisation or a country may be justly judged by the way it treats the weakest members of society - its young, its old, its infirm, its insane, its convicts, and its destitute. What then would such a judgement be of the United Kingdom in the Year of Our Lord 2017, ‘Global Britain’, the world’s fifth richest nation, when we envision the plight of those whom we have abandoned to pass miserable lives on the streets of our greatest, our richest cities?

Interview date: 4th April 2017

Text edited: 20th April 2017

WHERE do we live?

LIVING IN A TENT

Aimée Lê

For Aimée, living under canvas for nearly three years was the only realistic and affordable option while she studied for her PhD. But she was not alone: camping in the shadow of Heathrow Airport, she was a proud member of the Grow Heathrow Intentional Community, a living protest against airport expansion. Not only had she found London rents astonishingly high, in comparison with the USA, but also, when she lived in a flat here, she always had the impression that she could be evicted at any moment. And living in dorms, where there were regular inspections, she felt that there was no privacy. Wherever she’d lived in London, she’d always had the feeling of not quite belonging, a feeling that she couldn’t go outside her own four walls. There was hardly any tranquility to be found in such a busy city, either during the day or even at night. In comparison, living in her tent was calm and quiet; her tent was her own private space; you were never disturbed; you could even hang your washing out in the open air to dry; and, if need be, you could always role up the tent and just move on. In her tent, Aimée found that she could think and write in peace.

04-tent

Photograph: Aimée Lê at home, by her tent, in the shadows of Heathrow Airport. (Photography: 21st April 2017)

The full story:

One thing that keeps coming up in the stories associated with this project is the astronomical cost of housing. London is still a powerful magnet to many people, most of whom relocate to the capital in search of work - this trend has been long established. Yet never before has there been such an acute shortage of affordable accommodation. Even a graduate with a good degree, in one of the better-paid professions, will discover to his or her perturbation that the cost of renting in London can easily devour more than 60% of take-home pay. London has become one of the world’s most expensive cities to live in and it is therefore hardly surprising that numbers of single people, and occasionally families too, have been obliged to resort to what would, but a few years ago, have been seen as extreme measures for anyone in paid employment. Young people are now living under canvas on campsites around the periphery of London, or on the patches of undeveloped, post-industrial no-man’s-land that are dotted around this vast city of ours.

Not so long ago, campsites were mainly places where you would find teenage tourists or young students staying, at minimum expense, while exploring the city ‘on the cheap’. But not any more: large sections of these sites are now reserved for the growing numbers of so-called, ‘long-termers’ who see a tent as their home. Even here, the happy campers can expect to pay as much as £20 a week for a one person pitch - mind you, that does include services like showers and lavatories, essential if you are to turn up at work in a presentable state. Regular bus services operate from these campsites, ferrying the young commuters to and from their places of work.

To explore this topic, and to find out at first hand how it feels to make your home under canvas, I headed back to an established ‘Intentional Community’ that calls itself, Grow Heathrow; it is located in the centre of the little village of Sipson, one of the communities threatened with extirpation by the expansion of the UK’s busiest airport. The community is a group of 50 or so people who have primarily taken up residence there to oppose and obstruct the building of Heathrow’s proposed Third Runway. But the community also aims to demonstrate, by example, that carbon-neutral living in a large city is possible; they believe that it is high time to take action against our present way of life and the endless consumption that is bringing us closer and closer to environmental catastrophe.

Soon after my arrival, Luke, the community’s spokesperson that day, introduced me to a smartly dressed young woman, clutching a collection of books, a laptop and a small rucksack; she is Aimée Lê. Luke introduced her as our resident poet and perhaps the only person who wrote a PhD thesis while at Grow Heathrow. Having just returned from working at the university where she teaches, Aimée agreed to take me to see her tent, located under a tree, in a secluded spot at the very perimeter of the Grow Heathrow community. Her home seemed surprisingly small but the neat little tent, pitched off the ground on two wooden pallets, was surrounded by flowering plants. Though it lay under the shade of a large tree, it faced a brightly-lit, blossom-filled meadow where nature had been allowed to go about her business unhindered, despite the fact that the bustling Heathrow terminals were not that far away. The place was wonderfully peaceful and, somewhat surprisingly, rather than the noise of jet aircraft, mostly what one could hear was birdsong. I came here in January 2016, says Aimée, and this little tent has been my home since then.

Aimée continued her story: I was born in Michigan, in the USA, but my dad came from Vietnam. Though my mother did come from Michigan herself, her mother was born in East Prussia and was originally German-speaking. So, while I certainly see myself as an American, I am very aware of my own international ethnic roots, of the fact that my parents’ views were always the views of outsiders, and that they were perceived as outsiders themselves by other people.

As I spoke to Aimée, an artist and poet, I soon found it becoming clear that she was much more than that; she was evidently a person with very well-developed and strongly-held political views, someone with a comprehensive understanding of the world around her and how it works.

I asked about the kind of childhood she had had; laughing, she replied : You could say that I grew up in the shadow of the University of Michigan and that was pretty influential, I guess. I was mostly surrounded by people who were not only better educated than my parents but also more affluent. Though my mother worked for the local courthouse, and my father worked in computer programming, they both had distinctly left-wing political leanings - this seems rarely to be the case with recent immigrants into the USA, especially amongst those from Vietnam.

"Inevitably, growing up in the company of all those academics had a profound effect on me. I went to Dartmouth College, an east coast ‘Ivy League’ establishment, where most of the students had wealthy, well-connected backgrounds; they were a bit out of my class. Nevertheless, I graduated with a BA Honours degree in English. Given my family background, I was a politically aware person from early on and when, in 2011, the financial crisis really began to hit home in the USA, I got together with a number of other left-leaning students and set up the Occupy Dartmouth initiative. While this was a local protest movement, it echoed the aspirations of the Occupy movement elsewhere. We offered general advocacy for students and workers and did our best to encourage people to engage in a different type of political discourse."

During 2011, Aimée toured the US with Fiona Chamness, promoting a new poetry collection, Feral Citizens; the collection was published by the Red Beard Press and Aimée was listed as one of Muzzle magazine’s ’30 Writers Under 30’.

I have been in the UK since 2013, so for almost four years now. I study and work at Royal Holloway, University of London, and I’m about to complete my PhD, but I also teach poetry there, as well as literary criticism, and I do an introduction to English poetry course.

In view of these elevated academic pursuits, I asked Aimée how she had ended up living in a tent in the proposed path of the Third Runway. "I had some experience of living under canvas during my time with Occupy Dartmouth, but the tents we had there were much larger structures altogether. Having arrived to London, I shared a flat initially but I found the experience very depressing. University accommodation is hard to get and just at the worst possible moment, my lecturing time was reduced, so I just couldn’t figure out how to make enough money to pay my rent. London rents are astonishingly high in comparison with those I’ve been used to in the US. So, I simply decided to reduce the number of my possessions and join the Grow Heathrow community. Of course, my own political perspective broadly chimes with those of the people who live here, and now I’ve learned about and embraced the environmental aspects of the community too."

Aimée talks about what she sees as some of the real advantages of living in a tent: I got really depressed when I was living in London; I developed a feeling that I couldn’t go outside my own four walls, that I couldn’t enjoy any tranquility - it is such a busy city, both during the day and at night too. Living here is so quiet in comparison; you can even hang your washing out in the air to dry. When I was living in a flat, I always felt that I could be evicted at any moment, and when I lived in the dorms, there were regular inspections and I felt I had no privacy; I always had the feeling that this was not ‘my place’. By contrast, my tent is my own space. I feel I can always role it up and move on, if need be.

"At the beginning, it sometimes felt a bit scary, but I have grown to like it. I now see it as something I could easily do in the future, if I had to. Because I am in my own little private area, I am never disturbed; I can think and write in peace. But because I also live in a community, I never need to feel lonely - there are always others nearby, we meet in the common spaces, we share food, we share ideas, and we make the place work by sharing