My London Bridge Intervention..

"Et nous avons des nuits plus belles que vos jours" Jean Racine

First of all, i want to apologies to my comrades for my delay. I was meant to post my intervention on the blog days ago. The intervention was supposed to take place as a photographic essay that was supposed to provide the material for a poster. The very first night that I went to London Bridge I have realised that very few people pay attention to poster, sometimes I merely reckon new ads, despite all the effort by advertisers. I also realised that I am not a good photographer and that the best way for me to capture the essence of the 24/7 could be talking to, or better listening to, the people that take part of this form of ‘spectacle’. I have thus decided to go there for five nights, ask questions to workers there or even random people and take notes. The public aspect of my portion of intervention, rather than be the poster that could go unnoticed, would be the maieutic effect that I hope my questions have brought to those that I’ve talked to. I have taken notes of names, age, profession of the 24 persons interviewed and from these notes I hope to be able to deliver in this blog my analysis of the 24/7. I have decided not to report all the interviews to avoid repetitions and interviews that did not provide enough material to be discussed. On this blog post I will report my first day of interviews and another one whose interviews I’ve found particularly interesting. However, I will refer to more interviews in my conclusions. Not all the interviews were successful and I doubt that the maieutic effect of questioning the 24/7 has been brought to all those that I’ve talked with. Despite that I guess I can claim my intervention as successful considering that for a moment or two I’ve shifted someone’s conscience. What is always unconsciously left on the backside of our life has been brought to light. It is difficult to declare if this can pave the way for a much more conscious understanding of the conditions of someone’s life. 

The first night, Monday, around 5:30, I tried to hang around the Shard lower lever. The security guard told me that I wasn’t allowed to be there. I tried to ask him questions about night shifts and the constant light of London Bridge (a major point of the Jonathan Crary’s book). He refused to answer any questions. Then I moved outside the King’s Hospital. Three guys asked me for a lighter and we started to talk. John (23), Marco (20) and Kate (29) are baristas in one of the Nero Cafe. Two of them, Marco and Kate, are migrants. As I have asked their opinions about such early shifts, John said that he finds them “fine” now but the first two months of very early shifts were “devastating”. I asked their opinion about who was responsible for such early shift and Kate told me that it might be a strategy conceived by their employer to push its profits up. None of them saw the 24/7 life of London Bridge as the result of the bio-political effect of contemporary capitalism. As I timidly suggested that early shifts might be caused by our current economic structure, the two migrants told me that “people stay up all night everywhere in the world”. John did not add anything and they went to reach their work place. Then, I went outside London Bridge Station, on Tooley Street, and I met a couple of cops making their rounds. I approached them indirectly, I asked an information first (how to get to the Tower Bridge) and I hoped to be able to engage in a conversation but their behaviour was intimidating and I aborted the interview (I took notes of the interviews on my Moleskine and i thought that doing so was not advisable in front of cops but maybe that was a mistake). Then i went to a 24/7 off licence store. The guy, Amid 46, is a migrant from North Africa. I bought a bottle of milk and I asked him about his business. Was being open at 6 o’clock in the morning a rational decisions? How many customers roughly per night? I told me he did not own the store and if he could decide he would rather be closed at night to rest. As he told me, the middle of the night is not the best time to sell goods and often customers are drunk. He claims that this and other factors make his night shifts strongly stressful. I suggested that his store’s opening hours might be caused by the current economic structure and he did not deny this. As a matter of fact, he noticed that in his country the 24/7 concept does not exist. As he put it, “people sleep at night”. After this interview, I went back to London Bridge Station and I reached the queue of taxis outside the main exit of the station. I asked for a cigarette to one of the taxi drivers. He was reading a sport newspaper and he did not seemed bored   with my questions. I asked him if it was reasonable to wait at 6:15 for a customer in the middle of a closed station. He made me notice that taxis serve the hotels in the Shard as well. I asked him if his cycle of sleep was stressed. He said that it is not hard to “adjust” to such job. I noticed the verb adjust - the idea that the man should adapt himself to the working conditions and not the other way around - and I told him if he would rather have a job tailored on his natural cycle of sleep. He answered me mentioning his mortgage. After this last interview I decided that an hour walking around London Bridge Station was not enough to explore the 24/7 dimension and that it required further enquiries. 

On Thursday night, at 4:30 (I have tried different hours in different days to explore different layers of 24/7 population) it was hard to find someone around the station. It took me almost 30 minutes to see someone. I saw two guys delivering products at the big Tesco on Tooley street and I approached them. Seeing them busy with their job, I realised that only the excuse of a project for the university could help me to get their attention for few minutes. I always tried not to mention our project to get someone’s attention in order to avoid the cliques that we mentioned in our discussions - such as the middle-class student that approaches working-class people and sees them through an exotic gaze. However, the importance of my project was not able to obtain more than a couple of minutes with them. They were both in their late thirties (37 and 39). John and Nate, despite being almost the oldest I’ve interviewed and despite the fact that their were doing a job that require a lot of physical work, did not complain about their job. They did not particularly enjoy it but they did not see the disruption of their sleep cycle as damaging. After few minutes another truck delivered similar items to the Mark and Spencer’s store next to Tesco. I was surprised by the similarities and I approached the driver as two other men were delivering their stuff. As an excuse to approach him I asked him for the usual cigarette - maybe it is worth to mention that I don’t smoke - and that was enough to start a brief conversation. I was glad that I did not have to mention my university project. I guess people tend to give formal answers when are collocate within the boundaries of formal discussion. However, I told to the driver, Clag (34), that few minutes ago the same scene - a truck delivering goods to a store - has just happened and that the two scenes share so many resemblances. He answered me telling that we all part of the “rat race” and that he finds his job tiring. I asked if the fact that his job is fatiguing comes from the fact that it is repetitive or that it implies night shifts. He told me that working during the night does not bother him and that maybe it helps, in the sense that during the night the city sleeps and it is “beautiful”; it distracts him for the tediousness of his job. As usual I suggested him that his working conditions might be caused by our current economic system and that melting daytime and nighttime might be dangerous for him. He told me that people have always worked during the night. I did not replicate to this faux assumption and walked aways looking for another interview. I think it is worth to mention something that I thought after this interview. Despite the fact that the questions were meant to disruptive the 24/7 mode of life imposed over the truck driver, his reference to the beauty of the night made me think. Since our collective promenade in Canary Wharf days ago, I have been reflecting about something that I’ve found in 24/7, one of the texts that we’ve adopted for our project. The book, by Jonathan Crary, mentions the difference between sleep as the natural act and the sleep-mode, a term that refers to a low power mode for electronic devices in order to save electronic energy. What shocked me of our visit to Canary Wharf was the application of the sleep-mode over an entire area. Seeing the sleep-mode at its fullest surprised me. The strongest memories of the visit is the constant noise of the air conditioning system. The noise disrupts one of the key features of natural nighttime. Night-time has always had an oneiric aspect, that interlinks rest and our imagination, collective or singular that it might be. When the truck driver referred to the beauty of the sleeping city - not so sleeping as we acknowledged - I was surprised. His words are in contradiction with what I experienced in Canary Wharf. This contradiction goes further than differences in taste or architecture. The swarming life of the 24/7 city kills the oneiric moment where rest (a feature still present in the sleep-mode of contemporary urban spaces) meets our imagination. Hence, I reflected that maybe what the driver saw was just the city resting. In the era of commercialisation of everything, from culture to imagination (Bauman might provide some theoretical background about this process), I guess the general idea of sleep is just linked to resting. The element of imagination is removed in favour of ‘simply resting’. As Crary describes the tendencies of the US population - the average american sleep blabla hours less than previous generation but the market of drugs has exploded in recent years -, I think it is worth to mention the commodification of imagination to explore how sleep has changed in our contemporary age. After the interview with the  truck driver, I wandered around the London Bridge for 15 minutes thinking about this relation between sleep and dreaming. This time I was approached by an homeless woman, visibly drunk. I tried to interview here to see how the constant light - a feature that I feel I should have explored more - could damage the lives of those that sleep rough. Despite her state of drunkenness, she answered some of my questions. She suggested that the permanent lights of many stores and buildings did not damage her sleep. She also said that she likes the fact that the street are “always busy”. I guess she might have liked the distractions of people walking around here, but I am not sure. After this interview I saw a bus driver waiting to start her shift at one of the bus stop on the London Bridge. I asked her a simple information about a night bus and we started to chat. I asked her about her route, her job and how much damaging it was. She also mentioned the beauty of the city at night, in reference to the skyline and the absence of traffic. She, Celine, stressed that night shifts are stressful due to drunk people shouting while boarding but she did not see it a significant “problem”. She mentioned her status of single mother. According to her, being a single mother and working night shifts are not conciliable but she was doing her best to provide for her daughter. At this stage I advanced my usual suggestion that instead of blaming the management of TFL she could blame the current economic system, the real responsible for dissolution of night-time. She did not immediately agreed but in the end she convened that the economic system in power is accountable for the ubiquitous 24/7 problem. She also added that there are bankers that work late nigh shifts but they are paid more than her and they have all the means they need to live a happy life. She did not notice that bankers that are part of the 24/7 cycle are victims in a similar fashion to her.

Many other interviews took place but these two days, my realisation that this was the best way to disrupt someone’s passive acceptance of the 24/7 life and my reflection of the loss of the oneiric characteristic of nighttime, were the ones that particularly hit me. I do hope that the above-reported consideration might help yourselves to interrogate your notion of 24/7, both in terms of impact of the 24/7 on your life and in terms of strategies to resist. I guess wishing you a nap is the best thing one you could do.