London: After a Fashion

242 Pages·2007·3.13 MB·English

by  Alistair O'Neill

London
— after a Fashion
AlistairO’Neill

london
after a fashion

london
after a fashion
alistair o’neill
reaktion books
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2007
Copyright © Alistair O’Neill, 2007
Supported by
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
O’Neill, Alistair
London: after a fashion
1. Fashion – England – London – History – 19th century
2. Fashion – England – London – History – 20th century
3. London (England) – Social life and customs - 19th century
4. London (England) – Social life and customs – 20th century
I. Title
391.’009421’09034
ISBN–13: 978 1 86189 315 4
ISBN–10: 1 86189 315 9
contents
introduction
7
chapter one
27
chapter two
51
chapter three
73
chapter four
101
chapter five
127
chapter six
155
chapter seven
177
chapter eight
199
references 222
bibliography 227
acknowledgements 233
photo acknowledgements 234
index 235
From Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans’s film Finisterre,2003.
introduction
7
In November 2003 the British pop band Saint Etienne hosted a
double-bill screening at the Barbican Cinema in London of their
short filmFinisterre (also the name of their recently released
album), and its point of inspiration, the rarely seen documentary
of 1967, The London Nobody Knows, directed by Norman
Cohen. The documentary had a precedent in Geoffrey Fletcher’s
travel guideThe London Nobody Knows (1962), a collection
of calligraphic illustrations and written anecdotes about the
capital formed from his earlier regular column intheDaily
Telegraph. Seen from a historical distance, as is the case for
many of Saint Etienne’s inspirations, the film adaptation
suggested to the pop band not only a bygone vision of the
capital, but one that challenged many common-held
assumptions about the representation of the city at certain
points of transition. As a band member, Bob Stanley, noted:
Carnaby chicks and chaps, the 1967 we have been led to
remember, are shockingly juxtaposed with feral meths drinkers,
filthy shoeless kids, squalid Victoriana. CamdenTown still
resembles the world of Walter Sickert. There is romance and
adventure, but mostly there is malnourishment. London looks
like a shithole.1
8 This is a vision ofLondon rendered incoherent by virtue ofits extreme
juxtapositions. It challenges our view ofa late 1960s London vibrant with
youth and colour in the shopping district ofCarnaby Street. Instead, we
are given a handful ofworn and austere fragments shot under a grey
skyline for us to cast our eyes over. Camden Town is yet to become a
shopping area for the second-hand and sub-cultural. Instead, it shows
the scars ofits music-hall days and, indeed, its murders from the turn
ofthe twentieth century; and these historical references collide with the
modern-day grime ofthe area.
This historical medley echoes both the cinematic metaphor of
montage and Walter Benjamin’s idea ofunderstanding the city through
montage. More than any other writer, Benjamin remains central to a
contemporary understanding ofthe modern city in cultural and histor-
ical terms, and his rendering ofthe city suggests that the arrangement
ofthese historical picture-scenes in the topography ofthe metropolis
inevitably relay something ofthe present.
This is something that M. Christine Boyer crystallized in her book
The City of Collective Memory, where ‘each fragment becomes a static
tableau ofthe city, representing contrasting views made more explicit
by their proximity to each other . . . yet each conveys some nuance of
contemporary times’.2This conveying ofthe contemporary is also illus-
trated by the film Finisterre, which transposed the earlier documentary’s
visual sense ofhistorical discontinuity across the fabric ofcontempor-
ary London. So, instead ofmourning the loss ofVictorian oyster rooms
and Edwardian public conveniences, it wanted to raise awareness about
the plight ofthe post-war Italian cafés, such as The New Piccadilly on
Denman Street, near Piccadilly Circus, that were the setting for the begin-
nings ofBritish pop culture in the 1950s.
These films are tinged with the attitudes towards the past oftheir
day. Both focus on what has been lost and what has survived. But where-
as Fletcher and Cohen bemoaned the onslaught of office-block mod-
ernism and glass curtain walls, Saint Etienne film the post-war housing
blocks of Farringdon with the loving attention of those interested in
the reawakened potential ofmodernism as a choice for inner-city living
at the beginning ofthe twenty-first century. What these very different