What I See

I don’t know if it’s an age thing, where I’m just getting too old for the pace but life seems to feel faster and faster all the time. Maybe slowing down for a bit will change how we see things…

Sounds nice in theory, a more relaxed approach to the day. No rushing around, racing to grab a seat and running between platforms. Everything felt a little less tense and urgent. More deliberate than diegetic plodding along. Until I was herded off the train, hemmed in by folding bicycles, push chairs and oversized commuter backpacks.

Stumbling down from the train, minding the gap onto the chilly concrete platform at London Waterloo, I felt like an untethered dinghy bouncing off the rocks of river rapids as I was directed downstream by the flow of people around me. The torrent of people broke at the ticket gates, allowing the pace to calm as everyone trickled through and followed their own streams. Waterloo at lunchtime on grey Saturday in January was not a great start to my new ‘slowly does it’ mantra for the day.

However, I’d made it away from the crowd so, there was at least space to get my head above water and breathe for a moment. There wasn’t any big grand plan from this point. Get to London, our vibrant and buzzing capital city, get my camera out and find out if taking things easy would let me see the world differently for a while.

If you want to navigate around London then you are going to end up on the tube. Descending down below the city streets, into the vascular network of tunnels pumping people around the city, makes you feel like you are within the very heart of it. There is a strong sense of history in the aging stations of the older parts of the tube. As you ride the deep levels of The Northern Line dating back to 1890, passing some sections of track with such loud roars, you can’t help but imagine the sheer intensity of those old steam trains thundering down the pitch-black excavations.

The trains of today’s tube are comparatively futuristic, despite the worn and faded blue fabric of the seats, with their slightly staccato sliding doors and dismal fluorescent lighting. I almost feel nostalgic about the clunky lengths of screeching rail and the old squashed in chewing gum in that ugly seat covering. This is the same tube I’ve been riding all of my adult life. It has taken me to so many amazing places around town, usually being the first or last leg of the journey.

Climbing up from the warmth of the concealed sunken tunnels, towards the fresh cold breeze of the surface world, I am once again bottlenecked into the flow of passengers vying for position at the exit gate. Exiting the station onto the busy streets of Leicester Square, it’s the first time I’ve been outside since stepping onto my train to Waterloo. The tight compression of the packed mass transit gives way to wider streets, still walled in by buildings on all sides. The sky is more like a blue streak of highlight as you look up between the lines of roof tops and building facades.

This was where the slowing down phase would really begin. I couldn’t help but notice, as I stood off to the side of a packed pavement, everyone was in motion. Either heads down and buried in their phone screen, zipping through traffic on an e-bike or, walking with purpose of direction as they hurried along the streets to their next stop. No, I wasn’t here for that. I was there to experience more than I’ve seen in the past. To see this juxtaposition between the ominously static and historic buildings of the capital, against an ever changing scene of people moving around almost chaotically in every direction.

It felt rich with things to see, like visual treats for anyone willing to take a moment to pause and lift their heads. There is no mistaking where you are in the world. The architecture of victorian era buildings, punctuated by post modern glass fronted stores and offices. That sense of history which only comes from a city so long established and evolving. The line between road and pavement begins to blur as more and more people walk in the streets, darting between taxis and couriers.

It didn’t take long for me to relax my craned neck and begin looking at little more around at the less sensational sights. Yes, there is tourism trapping eye candy almost everywhere in this busy part of central London but something else started to draw focus. This being a Saturday morning, the scars of the Friday night before were starting to show. It hadn’t really sunk in, possibly because of the way the journey had smoothed the transition but I’d now started to notice, London was not a clean place.

Outside, sprawling out from the doorsteps of each building, loaded bags of rubbish lay strewn across the street. Plastic cups and beer bottles dotted along the ground outside every bar and restaurant. Bits of crumpled paper or plastic wrappers skipped majestically on the wind, crossing the road as if completely carefree. It was everywhere. Not just near overflowing bins but in every doorway and under every terrace canopy.

Cities like London thrive on tourism as much as domestic commerce. Each of those discarded bottles was the receipt for money spent in the service industries which gave life to the city in the evenings and on weekends.

What I wanted to know was whether people were choosing to accept this mess and noise or, were they tuning it out as a way to protect themselves from the reality of living alongside such waste? Surely people would notice an empty can rolling or a wrapper floating alongside them, propelled by the same wind that was blowing ice cold through the streets. How bad would it have to get before people stopped and noticed their impact encroaching further and further into their home town?

This was on my mind with each discarded bag of waste I passed, when I saw a bag that ground me to a halt. In the heart of the capital city of a supposed globally leading country, this wasn’t a trash bag. It was a sleeping bag. A couple of empty sleeping bags, bundled up in the corners of a covered door way. This wasn’t last night’s garbage, it was last nights home for two people who had since moved on.

These numbers are so large that they become difficult to imagine. The scale of the human cost almost disappears into the statistics. Having taken just a few hours to slow down and look around however, the image became painfully clear. This wasn’t the first signs of homelessness I had seen in the city but there was something about the way these bags lay crumpled and empty on the street. They felt like more than just an item left lying around.

It was so cold in the city that day, the high walls forming urban canyons, channeling gusts of artic air into icy blasts. Even wrapped up in a damp sleeping bag and slightly obscured by the narrowly recessed doorway, it must have been utterly freezing over night. As I moved on and wondered further around the city, there were people in similar circumstances, trying their best to find shelter and warmth. One good thing about London’s tube network is that it’s a least protected from the elements.

With few options available in the harsh conditions imposed by a big city, the tube stations have become a place where people without homes could take a little shelter and get some comparatively safe rest. It seemed at least that there was little objection to some people taking refuge in the relative safety of some of the entrances to the older and bigger stations. In the time I was in London I didn’t see any homeless people being moved along or otherwise hassled by the police. In fact the only police presence I saw was the occasional van screaming past with blues and twos in full song.

The quiet bodies, wrapped in tattered blankets and sleeping bags, weren’t any sort of nuisance. They just sat or laid out of the way, causing no interruption to the passing tourists and residents rejoining the flow of the tube network. Life carries on around these sights. People aren’t stopping to pick up the drifting garbage or, to drop a few coins for the silently resting homeless. They just carry on. The city carries on. Never slowing down long enough to notice.