PsychoGeography #19: Panic on the streets of London

The impact of civil disturbance on the built environment is a source of pure joy for even the most conformist of salarymen and women. An external threat to a city, whether in the form of armies of lovelorn Greeks, Nazi bombardiers, or even DIY suicide bombers, serves to shore up the great bulwark of temporal power; but when the citizenry themselves loft bricks into the state apartments and take torches to the bureaucracy, then only the most hardened of hearts can remain unmoved.

The impact of civil disturbance on the built environment is a source of pure joy for even the most conformist of salarymen and women. An external threat to a city, whether in the form of armies of lovelorn Greeks, Nazi bombardiers, or even DIY suicide bombers, serves to shore up the great bulwark of temporal power; but when the citizenry themselves loft bricks into the state apartments and take torches to the bureaucracy, then only the most hardened of hearts can remain unmoved.

Most ancient cities are constructed around a citadel, within which the powers-that-be can retreat in times of riot, taking with them their idols and their gods. However, in the modern era these Kremlins have been replaced with broad boulevards, too wide for barricades, and allowing a clear line of fire for artillery. An important part of urban renewal has always been securing lines of retreat for despots and demagogues. Don't be fooled by all that tommyrot about affordable housing; look at Paris for Christ's sake.

London owes its status as the seat of the oldest extant representative government in the world as much to its riot-friendly squares and torturous roadways as it does to any real democracy. The London mob has always revelled in its ability to strike total fear into the apparatchiks, whether Royalists, Parliamentarians, or New Labourites. Each age of London has had the mob it deserves, from muscular apprentices running amok in the City, to face-metal sporting anti-capitalists (a curiously oxymoronic allegiance) fitting the statue of Winnie with a turf toupee. Last year's massive anti-war rallies turned Hyde Park into some occidental version of the Kumbha Mela, as untold thousands of provincial liberals gathered on the banks of the Serpentine to worship the general secretaries of schismatic unions. Crowds and mobs dislocate urban space, rendering the familiar outlandish and transmogrifying innocent pieces of street furniture into potentially lethal weapons. My God! You wail internally, I'm about to be kebabed on a litter bin by a straining phalanx of vegetarians!

The most exciting événement I've ever been caught up in was the Poll Tax Riot of March 1990. Somewhat perversely - and apolitically - I'd taken the Tube into town to see a movie. I can't remember which movie it was, but I do recall that it was set in a desert, and I was looking forward to swapping breezy springtime London for a baking and sable expanse. Instead I popped out of the intestines of the city to discover the West End in full flatulence. I was emerging on to the Charing Cross Road at exactly the time when the Metropolitan Police had lost control of the rioters in Trafalgar Square and were retreating in an orderly fashion in the direction of Cambridge Circus. So measured and theatrical was the riot that I had time to appreciate the way the police formed up into small shielded testudos, lost ground, broke, then reformed, as bottles and bricks crashed down on Plexiglas.

The rioters had got hold of scaffolding poles - which I thought a tad outré - and were doing their best to skewer the constabulary, but despite what was a quite desperate situation, the mounted police - presumably frightened out of their wits - were marshalling the crowds in the side streets in inimitable fashion. One reined his mount in front of me and said: "Would you terribly mind moving back a little bit, sir?"

Meanwhile, in the Angus Steakhouse, international citizens of the salad bar were munching their sirloins and sitting so placidly on their rumps that I felt the Last Trump might not disturb them. The police rallied outside the Porcupine pub on the opposite side of the road, and the drinkers who'd come out to see the action stepped casually to one side, incapable of apprehending the irony that they were standing, glasses in hand, while others were throwing them.

It was then that I saw the tall, shaven-headed hipster who only two days previously had cut my hair in a trendy hairdresser's in a basement on Berwick Street Market. Resplendent in a leather car coat, he and a couple of pals had created their own mini-barricade out of some plastic milk crates, and were crouched behind it snapping the action through phallic telephoto lenses.

It seemed so just, so very cusp-of-the-1990s, this club-culture civil disturbance with its ecstatic voyeurs, masked class warriors and amiable plods. In due course, the whole remorseless farrago moved on up to Tottenham Court Road, where it dissipated in the shattered after-images of plate glass, and the city resumed its normal state of pathological disregard.