Island in a City of Cranes

Several years ago I had a look at Adox CMS 20, a slow-speed lith film. I began the roll in Milan and ended it in Shoreditch, where it ran out. Shoreditch and its mental environs are of course infamous for being trendy sixteen years ago, but trendy in an ironic way. Back then I mingled tangentially with some of its people. They meant no harm. Can you mingle tangentially? That's a bad phrase, I'll have to rewrite that bit. It will be swept away, everything will be swept away, but for now it remains. Enjoy it while it is still there.

I remember a fanzine called Shoreditch Twat, which mocked the culture of Shoreditch whilst simultaneously being part of the very culture that it mocked, which is ironic if you think about it.

Nowadays Shoreditch is a kind of digital hub, although as with all of the rest of London it's a thin shell lying on top of property. It's just up the road from Liverpool Street station, and the developers are on their way, as they have always been and will be. It was fields a long time ago, one day it will be a thin later of concrete dust underneath something else.

My pet theory is that Future London will be just a lot of solid concrete blocks. Not functioning buildings with doors and windows and water pipes, but solid concrete blocks. Already large chunks of London are unoccupied. The buildings are owned as investment vehicles rather than dwellings or businesses. Why not simply build empty shells instead? Hollow concrete shells with no doors or windows, just metal bars inside to stop the walls from collapsing inwards, to stop people from breaking in and squatting. They would be gigantic blocks of currency.

No-one would be harmed, because no-one lives in London anyway. There are precious few remaining businesses, and they could easily migrate to the internet. Without people, London could be simplified immensely; there would still be access roads so that investors can monitor their property portfolio, but there would be no need for cables or sewage, no need for restaurants or public transport, no need for petrol stations or drains. In my dream Future London will resemble an early 3D video game, just solid blocks in a grid pattern separated by unmarked pathways.

London is divided lengthwise, widthwise, horizontally and vertically, by class and location and ethnicity and every which way. Men are forced by tradition to use the outside of the pavement; women are not permitted to stand up on the bus; the other four genders must wear special socks. Shoreditch is in North London, but it feels like a mutant outpost of South London.

The stereotype is that North London is hard and harsh, full of tourists and businesses and Clive Owen barking into a mobile phone, whereas South London is a throwback to the Victorian age, with old men and their whippets eating jellied eels, and there are no tube stations and everywhere there is a field with people drinking beer as if in an Ocean Colour Scene video. Yorkshire is in South London.

South London is kept safe from North London by the River Thames, which marks its northern and western borders and envelopes it in a big cosy hug.

Shoreditch is an amalgam of the two ideas. It has buildings and businesses, but there isn't a tube station; it has young middle-class white people, and sometimes they do eat jellied eels, but in an ironic way. I wandered for a while, taking artfully composed snapshots with my vintage 1960s Olympus Pen FT half-frame film camera, acting out of the part of an urban hipster whilst being uncomfortably aware that no matter how much I dressed or acted the part, I would never be one of them.

For the hipsters, Shoreditch is a rite of passage, a gap year holiday before going back to the real world of contracts and working hours arrangements. For them it was part of their trajectory, for me it was akin to the hidden island in the first level of Goldeneye on the N64, distant and shrouded in fog, and when you visit there are no items.

The cranes approach to sweep it away; they are right next door, and if they don't destroy it, the sunshine, wind, rain and weeds will.

I turned away and walked off to the Tate Modern, which has a garden that resembles a vision of the future from a sci-fi film of the 1970s. Triangles were invented in the 1960s - it wasn't until computers came along that people could make three-sided polygons - and they still looked very modern in the 1970s.

No doubt once the plants have grown there will be a riot of colour, or alternatively the great weight of the plants will cause the scaffolding to collapse. Time will tell.

From 2000 to 2012 the turbine hall had thirteen major installations, all sponsored by Unilever; people remember Shibboleth (the big crack), Embankment (the big boxes), and Weather Report (the big sun), to a lesser extent How It Is (the big dark box). All paid for by sales of Pot Noodle. None of them have been disasters and no-one has died as a result of them - at least one person has died at the Tate Modern, falling from a balcony - but there's always a first time.

Adox CMS 20

Off to Milan again, beacuse it's important to be aggressive and attack without hesitation or mercy. Let's have a look at Adox CMS 20. It's a film I haven't ever shot before. One of those lith films that was designed to reproduce black-and-white artwork, but at a pinch you can use it for everyday scenes. The packaging is maddeningly vague, so I shot at ISO 20 and developed in the usual way. It seemed to work.

Italy has an interesting attitude to women.

I used my half-frame Olympus Pen FT, because I wanted to stretch out the film. I only had one roll, and no way to test it in advance. CMS 20 has very little grain, and even with half-frame negatives the images I developed are sharp. If it was faster and less contrasty it would be super.

Is it still being made? I'm not sure. I always get Adox and Agfa mixed up. Agfa is dead; Adox is still going. I have no idea if it makes its own film, or repackages stuff it finds in warehouses. Adox targets a tiny niche of black and white thrillseekers who crave unusual films, and it would be a shame if it vanished.

Obviously the film copes with airport X-rays, because I left a half-finished roll in the camera on the way back to the UK. The rest of this post was shot in Shoreditch, infamous hipster capital of London and thus the UK.

Not long ago a gang of ne'er-do-wells smashed the windows of a local estate agent and threw paint at Cereal Killer, a cafe that sells cereal and has a boring frontage, so I didn't photograph it.

They appear to have ignored the frozen yoghurt cafe just across the road and all the other signs of hipsterism. It was a protest against gentrification, but that's silly. Shoreditch was a hipster mecca fifteen years ago, when I lived in London; the people I knew who worked in nearby Hoxton didn't actually live there. Real people haven't lived there for decades. Shoreditch is just like Notting Hill and Brick Lane. Real people don't live there.

Like London's Chinatown, Shoreditch is essentially a street with people walking back and forth, plus a couple of streets coming off it. How do you get there? If you alight at Liverpool Street station and turn right you end up in The City, where deals are made; if you turn left and walk onwards for ten minutes you end up in Shoreditch. Historically Shoreditch was thus full of people who worked in The City during the week, who had money to spare on the weekend on rare groove records that they bought from Shoreditch to take home to the suburbs and put in their Ikea Expedit shelving units.

That economic model is essentially gone nowadays. No-one can afford records, or space to put them. The record shops are more valuable as investment properties than shops, so they've all closed. And not just because of online sales - even before Amazon, the record shops of Shoreditch were menaced by the likes of HMV and Our Price. Britain is now a post-retail, property investment economy. If that entails a certain amount of stagnation, why not? It worked for Switzerland. Let the rest of the world have warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed. We have the cuckoo clock.