Praed Street & the Liberty Tree

Walking through the revolving doors of a identikit London office block (the basic components are concrete, glass and steel, rearranged in a small number of patterns), out into the cold, wet and dark winter evening. I turned the collar of my coat up against the wind.

The wind seemed out of place in the neon lights, sickly icing spread thickly on the consumer pretence. What was wind doing in a place like this? But the wind was sharp, and cold enough. A glance from someone; do I know that person? I’m not sure, it was momentary, but I thought about that glance for some time afterwards. It stayed with me as the train shook its way through the underground tunnels burrowed deep beneath the city.

I noticed the young woman in a clothes shop. She was just standing still. Either bored or lost in thoughts or both. Long boring moments between customers. It’s not your time. You are paid to stand on that spot in the shop until the next customer appears.

We’re deep in space, it’s cold in deep space, a vacuum. It’s dark and hopeless. But inside the shop the light floods out onto the pavement and the make-belief music is thumping out another desperate make-believe song. The shop worker’s presence seemed far away; she had an aura of being something other than a shop worker-assistant. She’s dreaming of a radical and egalitarian change.

On the crossrail train to Paddington I started to complete the crossword in the evening newspaper. At Liverpool Street a tall woman with long hair got on with a baby in a pram.

‘Would you like a seat?’ I asked

‘Well, if you’re sure’, she said demurely, ‘It would mean I could look at the baby’.

As babies go, this was a remarkably sweet one. Bright sparkly eyes and dark hair and a face full of interest and fascination with everything around it. Perhaps just a few weeks old? Already with masses of character.

As its mother sat down, I noticed the thick-soled black loafers she was wearing. Global city fashion in 2024. To be found in London, New York, Paris, Lagos, Mumbai, Tokyo and everywhere in between. I formed the impression that this woman was a city-professional person, lawyer, banker, underwriter at Lloyds insurance, something like that.

I wondered if perhaps she had taken her baby into the office to show her colleagues. That can be great entertainment. Babies have probably caused more disruption in city offices in the past decades than strike actions (which are almost non-existent in the square mile). The entrance of a baby blows away the corporate fog and life and sunshine floods in between the rows of monitors and keyboards and the exhausted looking people at their desks. Even the most hard-boiled project managers have been known to leave their Gantt charts and spreadsheets and financial calculations for a moment or two to coo and chirrup as the baby is lifted from its pram as it has its first, unofficial, introduction to corporate life.

I look into the pram again. That little baby is holding its mum’s hand very tightly.

Across the transport networks, expensive, unreliable and overcrowded, the same inane messages blast out every minute or two. ‘If you see something that doesn’t look right….see it! say it! sorted!’ I was watching Al Jazeera news, live from Gaza. A row of apartment blocks were being hit by missiles fired by Israeli jets. The sound of the screaming woosh of the high explosive rockets and then the crump as they hit the ‘target’, a flash of deep fire red and choking black smoke. This is repeated until all the housing has been destroyed. Tiny figures – real people – are running and screaming, scattering in all directions.

This doesn’t look right to me. Who do I call? I check for an international helpline for the prevention of atrocities against innocent civilians, but the number is unobtainable. I try again but a distant pre-recorded voice repeats, ‘sorry, the number you have called is not available, please hang up’. Everyone can see what’s going on, everyone is talking about it, but nothing is being sorted. Day after day after day the carnage continues. The Spectacle is an endless replication of images; and now updated to include repetitive meaningless slogans and state sponsered announcements.

Out into the cold, black, wet night of Paddington.

I am slowly making a mental of the Praed Street area. At the western edge where it merges into Craven Street I decide – for no good reason – that this is the landscape of counter-revolution. It feels defeated. I get a sense here of decades of prostitution, grim violence and drug and alcohol destruction. A landscape for the destruction of bodies with venereal disease and the crushing of souls expectations which could not be realised. A few coins. It’s enough for the next glass of gin, the next fix, the next escapade in hell. A half torn advert with a phone number.

There is a topography of an earlier age around the station and on the other side of Praed Street. Of mews buildings with spaces for carriages and horses and living quarters for domestic servants. Lenin wrote a great deal about political struggle; about classes and parties and theory and strategy and tactics. But he doesn’t cover everything and there is an absence of the sociology of the working class in much of what he writes.

There is always a lot of secret integration going on and the histories of sex and sexual relations in the mid-nineteenth century are parts of hidden histories which also act as forces for change. I wonder what really went on in these mews buildings, and within the stucco mansions of Notting Hill and the Bayswater Road?

St Mary’s hospital is run down and an article in the Financial Times describes how parts of it have become quite decrepit. A ward closed down, leaks of water into the pharmacy, crumbling infrastructure. Staff struggling in a building that is now longer fit for purpose. It’s easy to create juxtaposition with the offices of Paddington Basin. They are all sleek and shiny with the latest equipment and all the gimmicks to encourage the office proletariat to return to their desks, where they will find comfort, roof gardens, well stocked canteens and much more. Hospitals and offices. Interesting reflections on the general organisation of society and how owns what and controls what and how and why.

One of the buildings that makes up St Mary’s Hospital is Imperial College’s Medical School. This will be part of an ecology of scientists and laboratories researching cures for cancer and all the other diseases and virus and genetic mutations that devastate life. One of the tasks of revolutionary communism, should there be a seizure of power from the capitalists, will be to ensure that funding for hospitals, clinics, dentists, medical research is expanded on a tremendous scale.

Back on to Praed Street. Tacky tourist traps with over priced moulded plastic. A fantastic range of shapes; red double decker buses, black London taxis, a gold painted Big Ben. Just the thing to take home as a memento of an winter’s night. A lot goes on in these shops and the ones that line up opposite the hospital.

Praed Street is an old London street and consequently it looks unorganised, unplanned, neglected. Ripe for monumental destruction and a great rebuilding. Yes, a rebuilding in concrete, glass and steel, much higher up, away from the human scale that presents itself for now. Unorganised, unplanned; keywords with mutliple meanings. Keywords too can be bought, by the rich and money powerful.

It is a product of an earlier phase of speculative development in London. Smaller volumes of capital were involved, less financialisation, life had not been commodified to the extent that it is now. Capital has grown into a much bigger monster in the past one hundred years or so. Even in the past thirty years it has become more insistent in filling all the gaps, in becoming more bloated, in seeping into the small holes where the counter-culture thought it might survive.

The expansion of industrial production in China, India, Nigeria, Vietnam and many other places has created a much greater mass of surplus value. Surplus value must become capital otherwise the whole beast will die. Capital cannot stand still, it cannot stop to catch its breath. It must charge on, chopping down forests, digging ever deeper mines, drilling in virgin soil for oil wells, building more and ever bigger ships and office blocks.

Paddington basin has become another node of capital accumulation, soaking up several billion pounds in development and investment money. This is the intensification of capital’s expansion. Billions of pounds of investment requires ever higher and greater returns. Where are all these billions going to come from, and what happens if the billions of returns on investment fail to materialise? Will rents and mortgages and service charges be enough?

Praed Street itself seems a long way from those sorts of calculations. It’s tatty and worn-out in places and frayed at the edges. But it’s still liveable and if the commoditisation and financialisation and monetisation could be stripped away it will do for a for more decades yet to come. I go into one of the shops and start talking to the young man who sits behind the counter. The conversation floats around without much depth until he tells me he’s from Iraq. Or rather, I ask him. In the right context and done in a certain way there is nothing wrong with such a question. It can open up big chapters in the history of the world and its current state.

He’s from Iraq and is working and studying in London. He goes back to Iraq on a regular basis to help with the family business. This constant shuffling of people on the global stage is part of the creation of world views.

‘What’s it like?’ I ask. This may reveal a picture of a different part of the world

‘Some parts are ok, but some of it is dangerous. That’s why people want to come to England. Under Saddam, business was good, but you had to be careful what you said. You couldn’t criticise him. They would kill you. Now, business is harder. Everything is imported, from Turkey, Iran. It’s a rich country, so much petrol in the ground’. He sweeps his hand towards the floor as an illustration.

He then explains how he lives in England.

‘One room. I have to share the kitchen and bathroom with everyone else in the house. And how much do you think that costs me in rent?’ he asks.

‘Nine hundred pounds?’ I suggest

‘One thousand’, he repeats it, ‘a thousand pounds’

‘And if I earn two thousand, two hundred, something like that, I still have to spend a thousand on rent’.

Although he spends half his income on one room, he is smartly dressed in a global urban-cool way and has well cut hair and beard.

And now the war drums are beating louder across the Middle East. Democracy thwarted by the CIA, straight-line borders drawn with wooden rulers in the foreign office of the British state, billions of dollars of arms handed over to American proxies in the region, dictators and religious bigots in command and with control. Everywhere corruption, lies, more lies and more corruption, secret police forces, torture chambers and disappearances.

It seems impossible that it could ever change. Here too revolutionary communism can hold out a fragile manifesto; that the oil workers of the region, lorry drivers, seafarers, construction workers, teachers, medical staff, shop workers, agricultural labourers, network engineers and manufacturing workers might develop a common, class-based interest, a human bond, against the tyranny, against autocracy, and for the planting of the Liberty Tree. That they might find the pages of this secret manifesto, pasted on the walls at night, blowing through the streets when the policemen sleep, lying scattered on the seats of the early morning trains and buses. It has one word that might be the burning spark that falls upon the combustable material of workers discontentment, organise.

Micky’s Fish and Chips is popular and lively. Three men are standing next to a large black Range Rover. They have put their portions of fish and chips on the bonnet and opened out the paper wrappings. They help themselves by breaking off pieces of battered fish and a chip or two at a time. It smells delicious. A small thin man walks past dressed all in black. A mid-length black rain coat, thin black trousers, pointed black shoes. He looks as if he might be part of the revolutionary communist opposition to the government of Pakistan. He has the fragile manifesto in his pocket.

It was good to sit down on the Hammersmith and City Line to Kings Cross. The woman sitting opposite me with the turquoise suitcase smiled at me and then returned to her phone. She was all wrapped up in a big white woollen coat and her legs dangled down to the floor of the carriage, finished off with rust coloured suede boots.

An elderly man got on and raised his eyebrows in my direction as he sat down, wisps of white hair sticking out from under his chocolate brown hat. His left hand kept shaking. His ice-cold blue eyes stared into the distance. He was looking for utopia.

The next day I did some research on Paddington Basin. An article from the Financial Times quoted a sales manager from Kay & Co, a London estate agent.

‘It doesn’t feel like old London’, he said, ‘there’s almost a Dubai feel to it’.

But that too will change if the Liberty Tree can be planted once again.

The Radical Walk, ‘Praed Street & the Liberty Tree’ is on Thursday 18 April, 6pm – 8pm
Full details and booking