Goodge Street

A politics of formulas, reading from the same script, here and there a word has faded, or been erased and a new one fitted in; but it’s a schema. Faces are airbrushed from the record.

There is a sub-text of the embrace of loneliness, the strange day dreams that so many conjure up but express to no one. Not so much a collective unconsciousness as the possibility of a shared consciousness that is not expressed. Everyone crowds into the same tunnel trying to escape this time and space.

At the corner of Ridgmount Gardens and Torrington Place looking at the buildings from a different century; as if time can be neatly sawn up like planks. Red brick with white stone and grand entrances and solid black painted doors; arches, voussoirs and keystones. Architectural forms appear from a different millennium, replication of the work of ancient carpenters and masons of stone.

The playfulness of the early years of the 20th century extinguished by the extreme violence of the First World War.

A small camera on a strap, in my hand a notebook and pen.

In the central part of London, as if I am inside a globe of the city, at the molten core, in a heat proof capsule; that’s where I live, and can press a button and the capsule will move at great speed from the centre to the outer layer and break through the solid crust of the London streets; at exactly the spot where I want to be.

And yet the atmosphere and the people I seek are gone. It is another time and place I wish for and that remains an impossibility.

Many unknown forces flow through the city. They are invisible and seductive, there are as many traps as there are opportunities. Jobs are promised; but not to be advertised on the billboards that surround the zones where capital accumulates.

The Gaza peace and protest camp is well built. On this London street it offers better accommodation than that provided to the thousands and thousands of Palestinians who have been displaced as their homes, shops, restaurants, schools, hospitals, play centres, cinemas, libraries and every other brick and building has been reduced to rubble.

The thousands of dead are lain in mass graves.

And then the mass graves are bombed and bombed again.

The people who support this can say and do what they like.

Prisoners held without trial or charges, prisoners raped, children used as target practice, Israeli politicians calling for the death of Palestinians. A foul mouth works to humiliate international peace protestors; they are designated as terrorists.

Members of the Israeli armed forces who have engaged in war crimes and the massacres of civilians walk the London streets, laughing, joking, a mass murder consciousness, evil intent, cancerous beliefs.

Politicians embrace each other far from the stench of death.

Somewhere in Israel there is an airbase and at the airbase are planes that are programmed to fire rockets and missiles at the peace camp. Right here in London. They watch and listen, calculating the altitude and speed, factoring in adjustments for weather variations. How will the heatwave affect the fire storm that’s planned? When can we go and bomb the London peace camp?

A Mercedes car stops in the street and the driver gets out and opens the boot. He leaves it open as he adjusts his tie in the side mirror.

Outside a cafe an idiot is talking on a mobile phone and keeps saying, ‘put a kilo in your bag, put a kilo in your bag’.

I study the paint chart in the window of Heals. A woman stops to let me set the frame. She smiles as she then walks past.

When the Blitz started in London the authorities were reluctant to allow the civilian population to use the underground as shelters from the bombs, fearing that ‘they may never come up again’.

The gates of Goodge Street station were locked until local people, partially organised by members of the Communist Party, arrived with bolt cutters and hack saws and removed the chains.

As if from nowhere the empty street begins to fill with people; one, then another, now a trickle of people, now a stream.

These people are too early to be shopping; few shops are open. These are the shop worker class on their way to work.

They are walking to Selfridges and John Lewis and into the place where they stand all day, one of the 50,000 people who work in and around Oxford Street.

If they were concentrated in a single factory their potential power would be obvious.

In the window of a cafe a picture of a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun are advertised as a special offer of £4.99. There are two workers in the shop. They both look at me in a 20 – 20 vision sort of way. I look from one to the other and ask who is going to serve me.

They smile at exactly the same time with the standard smile of the service worker. The woman steps forward; it will be her.

I ask for the coffee and cinnamon bun offer but I’m told the bun isn’t included. I settle for a pain au raison. It seems a less complicated option.

It’s enjoyable to be sitting outside in the London day. The cool of the early morning. Ways of seeing in real time.

At 09.07, deep underground, a giant switch is flicked and the level of the background noise noticeably increases. Ancient doors open and more people enter the streets from alley ways, and emerge from under tarpaulins, and the doors of cellars are lifted up with ancient hands and those that slept there crawl into the daylight.

A message tells me that the SD card in the camera has run out of memory. I go through pictures considering what to delete starting with the oldest. There are night scenes in Paddington.

I was doing field research for a Radical Walk Praed Street and the Liberty Tree. I was still working then. These are in a dark evening after work in the winter of 2024.

I remember this evening well; but not the day.

I can produce a memory but it is a composite of office light, London fading into the night sky, the lights of the City in the distance, the great mass of glass and steel towers lit up with electric light and red warning signals to aircraft and helicopters. Office life in that January. A number of us knew we were soon to be made redundant but when?

Walking past rows of desks. Packets of biscuits and sweets, a plate of cakes on the tops of cupboards. Trade journals, marketing for a campaign now gone, plastic containers full of screen wipes. Walking through the office, distractions with people about work issues and gossip and personal updates.

A great deal has been written about alienation but little directly by the workers themselves. It is something all workers experience but lack a technical language to express. The workers need more time for study.

It is the sense of the body being drained of life-energy, of being drenched in the environment of work, of having to work on projects and processes which feel as if they have no purpose. The totality of the white light. Looking over the top of the dual monitors and noticing that the whole office was silent apart from the clicking of keyboards.

Row upon row of people working on reports, writing emails, creating graphs and charts, completing entries into financial databases, project plans, making presentations, closing their eyes to try and shut out some earlier humiliation inflicted by one of those managers who should never have been given any sort of authority over people.

The very experience of this sort of labour process and the impact on the hand, heart, head and humours. We need a writing proletariat but there is a lack of training, skills and time. It comes out here and there but not in enough density and volume. Which is not to say that there does not exist a vast amount of thinking about this in people’s heads.

And then I found a small set of photographs of the English countryside on a misty day. I am not sure where these are. I can check the date from the image metadata but I don’t want to do this. I want the mystery of that day to remain.

It seems a different England and yet not so long ago; before the global right and the Nazi trillionaire stepped up their poison campaign. And then they will build abattoirs for the slaughter and incinerators for the burning of the corpses.

They didn’t look like the sort of photographs I would take. As if someone had used my camera while I slept in a corner of those fields. As if other eyes had shown me their view and this was how they saw England on that misty day. The poetry of another person; that most precious gift of all.

It was difficult to delete any of these photos. They held that elusive quality of fascination. They are memories of journeys yet unfinished, a small archive of that time, records pointing to a future that might have been, movement through other dimensions.

I might as well buy another SD card. But when I went to John Lewis I was told they don’t have them in stock, that there is a global shortage due to war, the prices have risen significantly and there is no indication when this might change.

Memories from the night before surface.

I had been watching short films made by Paralightworx. Set during the Second World War they depict the experiences of German soldiers, Russian soldiers, partisans, civilians. There are powerful anti-war currents running through them.

My dad fought in the Germany during the Second World War as a Ukrainian conscript. He fought in the Battle of Brody which was the first time phosphorus bombs were used. He told me that he was surrounded by fire but somehow managed to keep moving. When he was found half alive; or half dead, all his clothes had been burned off.

He told me about playing chess with a German general.

And one day he said, ‘It was the twenty first of January 1943. I stepped forward and said, ‘why are boys sent to the front and the generals stay behind’.

‘I thought they were going to shoot me’, he said. And then added, ‘but that night, the general shot himself’.

He was only just eighteen.

These vignettes have been with me for a long time. And yet I find them very difficult to write.

I was thinking this all through as I sat outside the cafe in Goodge Street and drank coffee.

London is becoming louder; the background noise of a million cars and ten million feet marching along the pavement, taking the bearers of labour power to meet the boss that is capital.

Labour power in all its forms. Capital in all its forms.

Here is a narrow alley way ending in a deep pool of water.

A hand just below the surface of the water. The dead fingers move as seaweed in the sea, first forwards and then backwards. A reptile hisses from the darkness, razor teeth inside metal jaws snap at my feet.

The old warehouses and workshops look unused but inside the secret state is manufacturing small toys that conceal explosives; to be scattered in the playgrounds of the schools.

A Marxism of the everyday commodity-image-objects is still only partially written.

A building worker sits on the pavement talking to someone, perhaps in Bucharest. He is covered in dust and smokes a hand rolled cigarette.

The Spaghetti House has closed after 70 years. There is talk of viable alternatives; perhaps in politics as in commerce.

A strange dynamic rattles as the imperial, economic and political power of the ‘United Kingdom’ falls further behind in world terms, the nationalism intensifies, always looking backwards to a fantasy past.

The tower was originally known as the Museum Radio Tower. It was opened in 1965 by the prime minister, Harold Wilson. It was a symbol of great technical and scientific advances. It played a key role in the development of electronic communications.

Then it became the Post Office Tower and then the BT Tower.

It was sold by BT to MCR Hotels in 2024 for £275m.

Mr Salah lived round here. He originally came from India and one day he told me the experience of partition which he experienced as a child.

Caught in the swirl of surfaces, billions of data points are being processed every second. A war in which billions of data points battle against billions of alternative data points.

The field marshals of capital have great wealth and power. They are costly to maintain.

The bill for their actions is paid for in human lives.

Asymmetrical political opposition could include the city as a collage, a collaboration; co-existence.

There is a large piece of cardboard in the road which might be dangerous to cyclists and motorbikes. I pick it up by one corner and put it on the pavement where it won’t get blown into the road again.

Is it possible to conjure up an image of a workers’ revolution from below?

The atomisation of production and the production of alienation both atomise and alienate the workers. How are such things over come?

Asymmetrical political opposition could include acts of solidarity, conviviality, democracy and free debate.

Capital is resilient but unstable and creates weird dreams inside a million gold mines. The existence of capital is bound up with destructive power, such power, none control.

Time stopped. A memory of Dave S— in these streets. He had a tattoo on his back of a multi-headed beast. An opium dream one summer evening.

All the plaster on his council flat in Peckham had been removed, leaving the brick work exposed. On hooks hung motorcycle chains and parts of engines. His neighbour had fought in the Algerian war of independence. He injected red lead.

His ghost walked past this shop.

The origins of capital are multi-faceted and multi-dimensional. It cannot be reduced to one determinant; such as money relations in the English countryside. That seems so box-like; inside this box is an idea and nothing else can get into the box to change it.

I had been listening to David Bowie’s album Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Did he see the flowers in the window when he walked along Goodge Street?

All is hyper-real.

Five years; is that all we’ve got?

Pushing through the market square.