willc.me

As I look round London I’m filled with despair. What used to be the cultural capital of the world, edgy, exciting and vibrant has now become a parody of itself.

East London, which at the turn of the Millennium was a hive of artistic and fashion activity is now filled with fashion and art students trying to emulate the lifestyles of those trailblazers. They say that East London is cool, but people who move to a cool area are trying to be cool and therefore aren’t cool at all. They’ve diluted and watered it to nothingness.

It isn’t much better at the other end of the spectrum either. The West End club scene is a shadow of its former post recession glory. The decadence has been replaced my scrabbling anxiety and targets. There simply isn’t the amount of money there used to be in the capital to sustain all of them.

It seems that the next area to have all the impoverished residents displaced by high property prices is South London. Musicians and wannabe’s flood there in droves. But the spark is lacking.

Maybe I’m being to hard on my beloved home city. Maybe everywhere is like this during a recession. Drab and uninteresting with carbon copy people and parties everywhere you look. Or maybe people just need new saviors who will bring about a new renaissance. Or move somewhere where there is a tangible tang of excitement.

At 5am, upstairs in the dimly lit confines of Jet Black, I staggered away from the table clutching a bottle of Dom Perignon. I was reeling from the ludicrous concoction of liquors and bubbles swirling in my stomach. And as I looked at a scantily clad girl gyrating on a swing to the music from Edward Scissor Hands I couldn’t help but love Jet Black.

Jet Black is a place for naughtiness and hedonism. It’s open till 9am but managed to retain a sense of class. Maybe an oxymoronic statement seeing that they’re teamed up with the Fuel Girls.

As the DJ’s bang out music the girls swing, breath fire and dance on every surface. Their outfits may as well be non-existent and most look like they’ve taken style tips from a hooker that’s been gang banged by a rugby team. Ripped fishnets and all.

Looking down from the VIP level at the crowd swaying below you can’t help but feel a certain sense of Jet Black being some sort of macabre circus. All the participants are massively hammered and out for more.

Working in the West End clubs I’m pretty used to all things described here but something about Jet Black is both beautiful and shocking, sexy but degrading. The Fuel girls stand on the bar breathing fire and moving the flaming torches over their bodies. Another uses what appears to be an obscenely large heavy machine gun to shower the crowd in snow.

If you’re out and about and want to continue when the normal clubs shut then Jet Black is a very viable option. Just gotta try not to overdo it, that’s all.

Central London is a very different city in day and night. By day, hordes of shuffling, huddled, zombie-like commuters and office workers hurry around. By night they are replaced by loud and normally drunken people. And some clever soul in 1998 decided the best way to ferry them around the busy streets way by rickshaw, or as they call them pedicabs.

Pedicabs were sold to the London people as an emission free answer to drink driving and transport woes. And at first it seemed like a good idea. It was fun when you saw one go past with some admirably dressed theater goers tittering in the back. However, like all things that are “good” or more accurately profitable, they spread. And now they’ve spread and strangled the city like a disease.

For all the things they are good for, like being emission free (or trendy), they are far outweighed by negative points. It means that after 8 in the evening, every street you walk down has some foreign student hassling you for money and honking horns from their gaudy chariots. It’s made infinitely worse when they aren’t asking you for money, as it means that they invariably have some screaming northern chavs whooping in the back.

Their “driver’s code of conduct” obviously doesn’t bind them to the roads and you frequently find them on the pavement or on pedestrianised streets. Supporters point out that there has never been a serious collision involving a pedicab but this doesn’t take into account the daily incidences of people being clipped and not reporting it through anger, lack of care from the authorities or lack of licensing.

It’s not much better as a driver of any other vehicles sharing the road. Rickshaws go slow looking for customers and have zero acceleration. Add to the fact that there are hundreds of them it means that Friday and Saturday night traffic grinds to a halt.

As far as I see it this has to be a fad. The only noteworthy incident that was seized upon was the rape of a woman by one of the drivers. There is a general strained apathy towards the pedicab by Londoners but this will all change when the first one gets taken out by a big vehicle at speed.

For lets face it. If one of those were hit by a bus traveling at speed then passenger and driver alike is screwed. And then the press will damn then and the spineless politicians will bend to the media will and outlaw them. Please let it be soon.

Londoners manage to find quite a bit to grumble about. But nothing more so than the perpetual roadworks that we have to endure. I had a coffee meeting the other day in South Kensington and we sat outside a cafe. It was like viewing the building of the pyramids, just not as efficient. But why does it seem that every road has works on it?

Well apparently, the amount of works are increasing. Not surprising as the city gets older and people demand more to be put underground in the form of fibre optic cables and more power. According to Transport For London (TFL) there was a 4% increase in August alone.

In Westminster, there used to be 20,000 roadwork sites a year and now it’s up to 28,000. So what is to blame? Well, Thames Water apparently. They’re doing a massive project to replace all the Victorian water mains so this involves digging up literally every street.

But it’s not just them, TFL are to blame too. This is the time when they have to start commissioning work in order to spend the rest of their budget. If they don’t spend it all, it’ll get slashed and if you’re a worthless bureaucrat, that’s the last thing you want to happen. It’s akin to having your dick chopped off.

On my dad’s street, he was enraged to find a portaloo outside his house. They were replacing the pavement on the street which he’s on the corner of. Hardly anyone uses it and there was no damage so he called them up to find out why he had to deal with the smell of Polish shit wafting through his window in the morning.

The pen pusher at the other end of the line said that it was a category 1 project. Meaning the lowest of importance and that work was being done because there were too many roadworks on the bigger streets. That makes sense. Why only have roadworks on the big roads when you could congest all the roads.

But it’s not just the fact that there are so many. It’s also the case that they work so slowly. In the course of the meeting, we watched two builders meander over to where two paving stones needed to be laid in a hole that was already cut for it. There was a pile of sand and even to our untrained eye it was obvious that they needed to put the sand in the hole and use the suction machine they had to drop the stones in place.

But no. They walked over and gawped at the hole for 5 minutes. Then they crawled to the sand with shovels and started filling the hole. Very, very slowly. What should have taken 10 minutes took 45. It’s the managers fault. They need to stimulate the workforce. Maybe with cattle prods.

Perhaps with the rising unemployment we should start a volunteer service where anyone can work on the works to speed them up. That would help though I doubt health and safety would be down with it.

It’s often been said that London and New York are like twins. Both are eclectic cultural melting pots and both scream talent and creativity. Unfortunately we also were both bombed in 9/11 and 7/7. The last two weeks have seen the fringes of Carnaby Street be tuned into a little slice of the big apple, where you can get the tastes, sights, sounds and shopping of New York.

The last 2 months has seen a sort of foreign exchange program of designers happen between the two cities. Two pop up shops have popped up in the Newburgh Quarter off Carnaby Street. They contain 30 independent boutique designers from New York’s ultra trendy Lower East Side.

In August we sent over a load of the designers from the Newburgh Quarter to the Lower East Side. They included Beyond the Valley, Blaqua, Chateau Roux, Concrete, Cowshed, The Face, Fred Perry, The Great Frog, Hurwundeki, Joie, Peckham Rye, Social Suicide, Savage,  Twenty8Twelve, and Van den Berg.

Now, until 1st of November we have Adrienne’s, By Robert James, Earnest Sewn, Hairy Mary’s Vintage & Design, In God We Trust, Kaight, Reed Space, Shut Skateboards, Still Life, Wendy Mink Jewelry and Zarin Fabric Warehouse.

There are also events going on:

Sunday 18^th October

New York style Block Party – 2-5pm
New York style block party with guerrilla catwalk show
Vote for your favourite LES (Lower East Side, not lesbian) look as styled by a guest NYC stylist, for your chance to win the outfit
Live LES entertainment
A Taste of New York street vendors
Hail the ‘Wish You Were Here’ New York cab for a free ride to the Newburgh Quarter

Saturday 31^st October

New York Halloween Closing Party – From 6pm
New York Halloween Street Party
Prizes for best in show outfits
Pumpkin Carving Contest
Live music from LES DJ’s and in-store entertainment

This comes at a time when New York and London are seemingly ever closer. We’ve had a replica of Central Perk to celebrate the launch of the Friends something or other (aren’t people over that yet?). We also had the Telectroscope designed by artist Paul St George that linked New York and London by what appeared to be a giant telescope.

So if you’re looking to get your winter wardrobe together, why not go to the Newburgh Quarter to stock up on New York’s latest designs. And that Halloween party doesn’t sound too bad either!