Inner City Pressure. Dan Hancox
each MC to the other. As menacing as they both look when they’re screaming at each other, the scrap is underscored by grime’s quintessential, frequently comic tendency to the melodramatic. When the scuffle starts, it could almost be a scene from EastEnders – appropriately, given the location. When the music cuts out abruptly, amid the clamour of raised voices and bravado we hear ‘step outside!’, ‘leave it, man’.
Three years later, Carl ‘Crazy Titch’ Dobson was sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in the murder of 21-year-old Richard Holmes, a crime that supposedly originated in a disrespectful grime lyric. In that Deja Vu show, Crazy Titch is captivating, going a hundred miles an hour on the mic, arms pumping, grinning ear to ear, wiping the sweat from his brow with his T-shirt. It’s not a stretch to suppose that the gleeful, reckless energy he displays on the mic came from the same place as his manic, unhinged tendencies.
There’s no blue plaque on the building commemorating this pivotal evening in the history of British music, because there is no building left at all. In 2003 Deja Vu was on the edge of an industrial estate, in a scrappy, marshy part of Stratford that was about to be wiped off the map – grime’s machine gun snares and adolescent yelps were among the final, spluttering cries of the informal city. The pirate studio only lasted a few months there before moving on again, and the block that housed it was soon bulldozed to make way for the mannered and manicured London 2012 site, and the £486-million Olympic stadium.
Dizzee was back in the same spot that summer, nine years after his fight with Crazy Titch, to perform his number-one hit ‘Bonkers’ at the £27m London 2012 opening ceremony, to an estimated global TV audience of 900 million people. He wore a specially embroidered E3 baseball jacket, honouring the east London postcode that will forever be synonymous with grime.
‘Forget all this, man, forget all this,’ one MC is heard saying after the fight breaks out, attempting to subdue the rising temperature. He meant they should forget the beef – and soon enough, they did. But as this hyper-local rhythm began to reverberate beyond the narrow radius of the pirate transmitters, a great deal more was forgotten with it.
Canary Wharf and Limehouse, 2002
ONE
I’m from where Reggie Kray got rich as fuck
East London, who am I to mess tradition up?
Jellied eels, pie and mash, two pints of that Pride on tap
Polo top, pair of Stans, flat cap and a Burberry mac
Back when Lethal Bizzle was Lethal B
This is how we used to dun the dance in East
We used to spit 16s till they called police
Probably somewhere in a party or a dark shebeen
Kano, ‘This Is England’
In the Museum of London Docklands, five minutes from One Canada Square and the shimmering glass totems of Canary Wharf, among the exhibits on slave owners and sailors’ rebellions, tall ships and frost fairs, hangs a painting of the river made in 1883 by William Lionel Wyllie. It shows barge workers shovelling coal in the shadow of a clutter of trade ships, the river alive with noise, fumes and activity – the painting is titled: Toil, Glitter, Grime and Wealth on a Flowing Tide.
It’s easy now to forget that London was, for most of its 2,000-odd years of life, not just a working city, not just an industrial city, but specifically, a port city. The world’s dry dock; the shoving-off point for innocent expeditions and brutal subjugation. And as the title of Wyllie’s painting suggests, port cities have a few consistent attributes: one is transience, a constant clamour of people leaving and arriving, drifting in and out with the tides. Another is inequality – rags and riches, a halo of insalubrious low-level criminality, insobriety and dirt hovering around the glittering cargo – or a halo of enriching gold around the squalor and decadence, depending on which way around you look at it. Either way, one travels with the other, one lives with the other. A hundred and twenty years later, Wyllie’s namesake would use some cheap computer software and a microphone to document the same toil, glitter, grime and wealth flowing through twenty-first-century London, at 140 beats per minute.
Some cities are divided between distinct geographical binaries. North and south. The centre and the suburbs. Uptown and downtown. The shanty towns and the gated communities. London is not easily disentangled: it weaves its divisions into a fine mesh, like the netting that stops pigeons gathering underneath railway bridges. The council tower blocks are mingled in with the multimillion-pound mansions. The greasy-spoon caff that’s been there since the seventies stands next door to the refurbished gastropub charging £15 for a Sunday roast. The grandiose seventeenth-century church faces down the night-time den of iniquity.
When widespread rioting erupted across London and several other English cities in August 2011, the writer James Meek reflected on an incident that he’d witnessed a few years before in one of Hackney’s most prominent new bouji enclaves, Broadway Market – when a group of 30 tooled-up black teenagers, chasing two enemies with a hand gun, suddenly entered (and quickly departed from) the lives of the white middle-class people sipping wine at the outdoor tables. ‘It is as if the council-owned tower blocks and estates behind, around and in-between the gentrified patches, where less well-off and poor people live, belong to some other dimension,’ he wrote. ‘Loving the cultural diversity of London as a spectator-inhabitant is not the same as mingling with it. The yuppies don’t go to the white working-class pubs, and the white working class don’t go to the yuppie pubs … this isn’t mixing. It’s the ingredients for something – nobody knows what – laid out side by side and not being mixed, not touching.’1
London was in an unsettled temper at the start of the new millennium. It had survived the much-feared but unknowable threat of the Millennium Bug, but suffered the embarrassment of the Millennium Dome, and the damp squib of a Millennium Eve ‘river of fire’ on the Thames that was supposed to be visible from space, and wasn’t even visible from the Embankment. The clock ticked over from 1999 to 2000, planes did not fall out of the sky, and the world didn’t end – but some more slow-burn changes were starting to take shape. In May, the British capital acquired an elected Mayor for the first time in its history: Ken Livingstone shook off the contempt of Prime Minister Tony Blair, resigned from the Labour Party, and ran as an independent against the Conservative Steve Norris, and the candidate from his own party, Frank Dobson – beating both comfortably. London had a new City Hall, and a maverick left-winger and newt obsessive in the Mayor’s chair.
Two days after Livingstone’s victory, to the annoyance of maturing dance music sophisticates everywhere, Oxide and Neutrino’s frantic ‘Bound 4 Da Reload’ – with a chorus built around the theme tune from TV hospital drama Casualty, sampling a silly line from gangster flick Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and peppered with gunshot noises – entered the charts straight at number one, flicking a V-sign at the music establishment. The UK garage scene which the two young south Londoners had emerged from had previously prized refinement, romance, aspiration and an urbane multiculturalism above all else. But clean lines, shiny shoes and champagne were being replaced with something much darker, and murkier – just as the city itself was about to start moving in the opposite direction. A new sound was about to muddy the waters of UK garage’s infinity pool, just as the new Labour government, indeed the New Labour government, were hatching grand plans to drastically smarten up the inner city forever.
In the late 2010s, we tend to look at the cranes going up around London and assume they sprouted from the city’s chalky soil, or we gaze wearily upon the prettified glass towers of luxury flats, the pop-ups and the hipster cereal cafes and assume they landed out of the clear blue sky. But urban change is not like the weather, and gentrification is not organic, inevitable or natural.