In the newspapers, columnists all of a sudden found themselves reminded of the South London of their youth. School nature walks on One Tree Hill. A favourite aunt in Peckham. A visit to the Horniman Museum. The taste of jam fresh from the factory in Deptford. The smell of leather clinging to the maze of little streets in Rotherhithe. Where, the opinion-writers asked rhetorically, had all this past got to? Was it possible that it was gone for ever, transmuted into a dramatic yet finite flow of capital investment? Had the city’s appetite for new construction become so overpowering that it had induced us all to gobble up our past?
It became the fashion, even among those snobs who had never set foot south of the river, to claim some connection with those lost lands. Gift shops sold old postcards of the area, antique advertisements from businesses long dead, road maps that no longer squared, in any particular, with the area they once covered. Between cushions printed with photographic renderings of wide, empty, untarmacked high roads in Brockley and Sydenham sat scale models of the Crystal Palace, the TV transmitter, the full-size plaster dinosaurs grazing in the nearby park. A flyer arriving in our postbox invited us to subscribe to a heritage project: the accurate, brick-by-brick reconstruction, in a derelict corner of Hackney, of Brockley’s demolished Rivoli Ballroom.
Such cheap nostalgia would most likely have faded and been forgotten, were we not constantly reminded of our territorial loss by changes within the Bund itself. Compared to the baffling erasures to the south, the changes wrought in the city’s old financial centre were, on paper, relatively modest. And something had needed doing. Over the few short years of its habitation, the Bund had grubbed up London’s old, war-damaged financial district and amalgamated the pieces into towers like the building-block constructions of a hyperactive child: here a brick-clad wall; there a glass curtain; over there a virtually windowless obelisk. The district’s ancient street plan had not been obliterated so much as upended. Vertical thoroughfares wove through its towering and peculiar constructions, along suspended glass tunnels, over footbridges and platforms, up escalators and moving walkways, so that navigation – already notoriously difficult for the unaccommodated visitor – had begun to tax even the people of the Bund. Some general solution was needed: a way to tie together all these pavements and public spaces.
The solution was light. Lots of light. Moonlight in particular: that cool, blue suffusion. So the Bund built artificial moons: huge fizzing lights mounted on scaffolds that reached so high they topped its tallest buildings. The Bund’s whole bizarre mass lay like an accident beneath these six unblinking eyes. Residents basked in this rational light, navigating with ease, at last, the night-time maze of their city, and celebrating, through a contented silence, their conquest of the night.
The rest of us hated these six ghastly eyes gushing electric ice, freezing the Bund in a silence that – compared to the bustle in our unaccommodated half of the city – could only suggest the silence that hangs between the detonation of a bomb and the screams of its first victim.
The Bund erected ingenious baffles so that light from the Bund would not spoil the night-time of our half of the city. Still, come nightfall, the Bund’s high towers shone in their reflected light: a bug-zapping effulgence that, according to those old enough to remember the War, brought to mind the terrible first seconds of an atomic explosion. It felt to us as if the Bund was bathing nightly in some terrible, malign radiation. Though, after all, they were only glorified street lights, and only there to help people find their way in the dark.
The uncanny and pitiless glare shed by the Bund’s urban ‘moons’ was a source of exasperated humour for a while – the stuff of acid editorials and pithy stand-up routines. The truth is, though, it unnerved us – and by ‘us’ I mean the unaccommodated majority to the west. Compared to the unbending horror of those rays, the West End’s own piecemeal illuminations – the mass effect of a thousand thousand street lamps and headlights and shop signs and God knows what – felt positively homespun.
And so it came to us that, unlike those strange, friendly folk to the east, we loved the night, and darkness was our friend. Night-time made up part of who we were. Without the night, why would it ever occur to us to gather together? Were there no night, why would lovers ever turn to each other in the dark? We didn’t want to conquer night. We wanted to make light of our own – ordinary, human-scale light – and gather around it, creating little bubbles of humanity in the dark. What were our street lamps and headlights but lanterns? What were our lamps but candles? The night was for stories, for song, for sleep. Summer was hardly over and the gift shops were filled with candles, oil burners, old-fashioned spirit lamps and huge, dim lightbulbs with ornate filaments, not lights so much as ideas of lights; gestures towards illumination. We did not want the day to last for ever, and we wondered at those who did: the ever-industrious Bund, who appeared not to need the night any more. The sleepless Bund who, we reckoned, must have lost the use of some quintessentially human part of themselves.
And thinking this, we began to rage, as surely as a chimpanzee in a zoo, confronting some simple, animatronic version of themselves, will panic and scream and tear the toy to pieces.
Who were the Bund, who did not need the night? Who were they, to buy up half our home and wipe its memory off the face of the Earth?
Capping the matter nicely came the Bund’s long-promised workings on the Moon itself. Once these became visible, I think we all very slightly lost our minds. Who were the Bund, that they were remodelling our Moon? The red-tops, casting around for some means to express their existential outrage, grew literal. And the pictures splashed across their front pages were real enough. Whatever your politics, it was undeniable: the Man who once resided in our Moon had been entirely erased.
On the Day of Atonement – which was also the day I learned I had earned an upper second from the Bartlett – someone splashed graffiti over Stella’s garden wall. The next day, Fel and I stood across the street, watching two men in blue council overalls scrub away at the mess: a boy with a shaved head and a much older man who paused every few minutes to wind a fringe of thinning hair around his scalp, only so the breeze could unwind it again.