Oh dear.

 

“As someone who lives in a nightlife district of East London I’m tempted to say this was inevitable with the City as it is right now. After the 5 or 6 largest and most established nightclubs shut in 2007/8 we’ve returned to a kind of feral state, where two bit promoters take over poorly equipped or hazardous industrial spaces and overpack them with young, clueless punters to cover crippling rents and overheads. Well, that and make a quick buck like every other glorified barrow boy in this place, naturally…

The concomitant, deeper sociological issue is that the desperate, selfish panic that we associate with London’s daily life – especially in these years of recession – has spread to the social life of the city. People are simply desperate to eke out a morsel of joy from a in increasingly joyless gauntlet, and will stop at nothing in that pursuit, including trampling (figuratively and perhaps literally) on others.

People drink and drug and smoke themselves senseless at all opportunities and without any real motivation. When the sun finally appears in the midst of yet another dire British Summer the streets and the buses and tubes take on the character of rush hour, even at weekends. Overpriced and soullessly corporate festivals are frantically devoured by those without even a passing interest in the music on offer.

Meanwhile, the Mayor and his cronies are busy preparing the banquet of all banquets for the pleasure of our international guests, all while his own children lie starving in the basement.”

(Add in the corporatisation of leisure, gentrification of east London under the guise of regeneration, turbo-charged slapdash ‘entrepreneurship’ and the increasingly obvious disconnect between austerity rhetoric and where the money actually is. Don’t know the chap above but I’d probably buy him a pint.)