Status Updates From London Made Us: A Memoir of...

“London can contain so many contradictions, because there are so many Londons.”

London today as also “crushingly corporate, uber-Google.”

Today’s London is “much less rigidly class conscious and deferential than before, yet much more painfully divided between haves and have-nots.”

Over 500 British volunteers died fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Large number of Jews, many immigrants whose families had fled pogroms in Eastern Europe or the Nazis.

Neat point about rave culture at clubbing as “mass entertainment and big bucks business,” in essence representative of cultural neoliberalization (and in his view, the hollowing out of the character of the city).

The city as a whole”constant interplay of fleeting transactions…perpetual motion.”

If Jazz is the sound of New York and chanson is Paris, then the rhythms of the Caribbean have resounded around, and been incorporated into, the rhythm of our city since the HMT Empire Windrush first blew into dock.”

“Cities are designed to defeat darkness”

“Wherever you look in our city, there are reverberations of a violent past and occasional an explosive, horribly flammable present.”

He does seem to imply the transition from LSE as Marxist student center is tied to neoliberal transition. Also uses the neighborhood of Stoke Newington to explain this: from radical center, where the Angry Brigades, IRA, Basque ETAs, etc. plotted to a relatively quiet upper middle class urban neighborhood. Can either see it as a story of depoliticization or of urban palimpsest.

LSE has such a deep history of left-wing student activism going back to Fabian roots and, as he’s now explaining, strong into the 1970s - partly why he chose it for school. This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, it seems much more depoliticized. I wonder if this is connected to the neoliberal revolution in Britain.

Neat source on the Grunwick strike, he talks loads in this chapter about industrial action and everyday rowdiness in 70s London.

Very interesting point about the omnipresence of WWII growing up in 1960s Britain, in the material culture, in the music and attitudes, the memories and outlooks of the people. And especially the physical environment, remnants of bombed buildings/lots. War damage/legacy of wartime production shaped the city. Even back to damage from WWI zeppelin raids, still visible in damage to the Cleopatra’s Needle monument.

The metropolis as “unknowable…uncontainable…spreading out in all dimensions and directions.”