Books & Poetry

Nights in London. It’s such an evocative phrase. It makes the pulse quicken, the imagination unfurl. Back in the day, some time between the end of the nineteenth century and WWII, the very idea of night-time in London – a thrillingly haunted, half-fictional, half-reality zone full of romance, horror and illicit adventures – inspired countless urban adventurers to go out traipsing the city’s gas-lit streets. The capital was a heart of darkness they wanted to penetrate. They strode, sometimes in camouflage, to Limehouse and to Shadwell where they hoped to find exotic scenes of working-class suffering and Chinese-run opium dens. Feature continues

These night walkers, or noctambulists, saw London as a theatre. They thought that its most vivid and picturesque characters emerged during the evening. They celebrated its fearsome barmaids, performing tramps, neckerchief-wearing stowaways from Ceylon and North Africa. Of course, they were probably guilty of patronising their subjects, and also of encouraging tourists from all over the world to arrive via double-decker buses to gawp at the funny, ragged-clothed natives, but their books and exposés brought to centre stage lives and communities that would otherwise have been seen as marginal and worthless.

What would today’s noctambulists see and hear? If they were drifting through the boroughs of Tower Hamlets or Southwark, chances are they’d find military helicopters roaring a couple of thousand feet above them. The avian police go out each night to chase runaway thieves, monitor potential suicides and to patrol crime hot spots. When they see gangs of teenage kids hanging around, looking lairy and threatening, they make the equivalent of a handbrake turn in the air. This means that the blades cut the air harder. The noise acts as a deterrent, a kind of sonic crime-prevention device.

The pilots have great views, not least of the multi-coloured line of pollution that hangs above the city, but they don’t and can’t see everything. This fallibility is exploited by the legions of taggers and graffiti artists who are on the ground staking out train stations and bridges and car parks that they plan to decorate overnight. Some will climb to the top of high-rise buildings and dangle over the edge of their roofs in order to sign their names. The aerosol happy-slappers and one-man flash mobs of the graf fraternity get their greatest buzz the morning after. As dawn rises, and the city wakes up, they crack open a lager and take snaps of their artwork to show their mates.

Graffers put a lot of time and effort into what they do. It’s fun, but it’s also work. And that’s what night-time in London is really about. Behind the feelgood clichés about the 24/7 city and all the PR puff about the latest lounge bar to open, there lies a huge and largely invisible stratum of men and women, many of them newly arrived from Africa and Eastern Europe, whose labour helps prop up the lifestyles of good-time gadfly-clubbers.