Through The Wall Of Money

My Monday night schedule has been disrupted for some time, but things are settling down again and for the first time in about three months, I am back to regular Monday night games. In the meantime, however, the group has changed pubs, after the Horse and Groom in Great Portland Street fell off a cliff in terms of service (and its prices rocketed - death spiral time, I fear, like so many Western governments but on a smaller and less damaging canvas). We are now meeting in a pub close to Tower Bridge, and this means that I'm travelling by a different route - a number 48 to London Bridge followed by a walk along Tooley Street, rather than a 55 to Oxford Street.

A London bus. A 48 bus, no less.

The routes are identical up to the junction of Hackney Road and Shoreditch High Street, but the change in landscape thereafter is striking. Whereas the 55 heads along Old Street towards Bloomsbury's groves of academe and the retail hell of Oxford Street, the 48 strikes off south through the heart of the Central Business District. In doing so, it subjects anyone who has been on board from the beginning to a brutal culture shock. Essentially, as the 55 heads down Bishopsgate, it passes through a wall of money into an entirely different world.

Lea Bridge Road, Leyton/Walthamstow, looking down to the railway bridge at Bakers Arms.

Note the proliferation of "To Let" signs in this retail area.

Of course, there was always a contrast even before the change of route. The areas traversed by the 55 towards the end of its journey are significantly more well-heeled than tatty Walthamstow or horrible Clapton. I have often commented on what I call the "isoprat" which appears as one crosses Shoreditch High Street - black and Asian faces, mothers with children, other regular denizens of outer East London begin to disappear, to be replaced by twenty-somethings with skinny jeans, messenger bags and "edgy" haircuts. Subsequently that bus passes through affluent and stately Bloomsbury, but this is imperial era old money, assimilated, normalised, no longer shocking. The West End beyond , whatever its reputation as a flagship for retail abandon, is actually quite shabby. Dissonance is avoided.

 Bloomsbury Square Gardens. The 55 runs along the street
in the background. Affluent, then, but civilised.

But the City, into which the 48 trundles after the left turn in Shorefitch, is different, once one has, ahem, penetrated beyond the curtain of bars and table dancing venues [1] as Shoreditch High Street blends into Bishopsgate. As the bus progresses beyond Liverpool Street station, it enters the heartland of corporate money, restlessly churning, constantly striving to impose itself, to expel the everyday or overwhelm it with architectural bombast. Glass. Light. Height. Power. But the most aggressive expression of this occurs after the bus has stopped at grotty old London Bridge Station, with its cobbled together feel and melange of Victorian and 70s low-grade architecture. To walk down Tooley Street with the gargantuan spike of The Shard at one's back, is to run the gauntlet of corporate gigantism which is "More London".

"Riverside" [2] at "More London": More London than what?

Having so recently left the squalor of Bakers' Arms, I feel like a peasant viewing his first two-storey building. This place, which sits behind and upriver of City Hall, smells of money, and not - unlike Bloomsbury Square - in a pleasant way. Architecture like this is intended to cow, to overawe, to crush opposition, its gigantism operating as both propaganda and threat. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated, or flee. Its scope, tellingly, eclipses the relatively svelte City Hall "egg" which lurks, shamefaced, at one edge of the complex. Money (real power) eclipses democracy (illusory power).

What More London contains.

It is no surprise that this totalitarian [3] construct is the work of Foster & Partners. Norman Foster - Baron Foster of Thames Bank, no less - is a great architect but his work, as ever, serves power. He is a psychopomp of the cult of neo-liberal self-glorification. (He's not the only one, of course - one need only glance behind at The Shard to see the work of another celebrant at this altar, Renzo Piano [4])

Perhaps more surprisingly this cathedral of corporate might also plays host to the London headquarters of the Equality & Human Rights Commission - though one might also note that their Manchester office lies in that satellite temple of consumerism, the Arndale Centre. This may give some clue as to what model of equality, under their ridiculous leader, Trevor Phillips, they actually seek - equality in the face of richesse, an equality of the subclass, equal rights to consume and obey - while enriching the quango careerists.

Oh dear, I seem to have reached the end of this rant without finding an excuse to drag in Ricardo Bofill along with the other architects I have traduced[5]. He has done no work in Britain, you see ;)

Notes
[1] The Rainbow "Sports Bar", The White Horse.... There are such establishments on the 55 route too, and Hackney Road is nailed in place by strip joints at each end - pubs with obscured windows, doors arranged so that it's never possible to see inside. Soho may have been cleaned up a bit, but the business has just moved elsewhere, spreading out into the wider city.
[2] It was clearly impossible for the big name architect to avoid the riverine nomenclature. Richard Rogers's wife already had (until very recently) her River Cafe in Hammersmith, of course. 
[3] I'm using that loaded and often misused word deliberately - architecture of this kind wishes you to see nothing else but itself. It is a human creation, but it is not a human experience.
[4]  "The serenity of his best buildings can almost make you believe that we live in a civilized world." - Nicolai Ouroussof. That's the point - it's called camouflage.
[5] I don't hate the work of these architects. On the contrary, I think it is the fact that I admire their ability which makes me uneasy about the uses to which they often put it. Perhaps one might make the same judgments retropsectively about, say, Brunelleschi or Vanbrugh but, as in Bloomsbury (see above), their work has become normalised by the passage of time.