Harper-Thames Considers the Specific Freedom of a City That Gives You Anonymity as a Default and What You Do With It
On London and Being Known by No One
The most useful thing anyone told me about London when I moved here from Bristol was: the anonymity is the freedom. I didn’t understand this at first. In Bristol I knew my neighbours and my street and the people at the coffee shop and the specific corner of the farmers market where the good bread was. London gave me none of this for approximately a year and a half, and for a year and a half I experienced this as isolation, which is the wrong frame, though it is the available frame when you are in it. The right frame, which I arrived at eventually, is: London is a city that does not require you to be anyone’s version of yourself. You are not the person from school. You are not the neighbourhood. You are not any of the social containers that smaller places provide, which is constraining in ways that feel like identity and liberating in ways that feel like nothing until they feel like everything.
What Anonymity Gives You
The freedom of London’s anonymity is the freedom to be in progress. You can be in the middle of becoming something without the people around you having a prior version to compare you to. You can fail at something and try something else without the context of your previous attempts being available to everyone you know. You can be genuinely curious about things without the social overhead of being known as the person who is interested in ceramics or planning policy or natural wine or whatever the thing is that you haven’t yet been given permission to be interested in by the people who knew you before you were interested in it. London’s anonymity is a reset that the city offers continuously, to anyone who needs it, which is most people at most times, and which is the least-discussed and most important thing about living in a city of nine million people.
The counter-argument: the anonymity is also loneliness, and the freedom is also disconnection, and the version of yourself that London gives you permission to become is assembled without the friction of being known, which is also the friction that produces character in ways that comfort doesn’t. Both things are true. London’s anonymity is the gift and the problem simultaneously. I have learned to take the gift and do my own work on the problem. This is, in the end, the arrangement the city offers, and I have made my peace with it, on the roof of the Peckham car park, watching the orange and grey light of a South London evening, known to no one, and finding this, at last, entirely sufficient.
London life and identity at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Urban life at MyLondon. Further at santaclaus.top and Shoreditch UK Bluesky. Urban philosophy at The Daily Mash.
The Responsibility
The responsibility that comes with this position writing about a neighbourhood while being part of the forces that are changing it is one I have been thinking about for as long as I have been writing this column. There is no clean resolution. I am here. I pay rent here. The rent I pay contributes to the economic pressure that the original residents feel. I write about the neighbourhood in ways that increase its visibility, which contributes to the interest that drives further change. These are the unavoidable mechanics of my presence here, and the fact that I am aware of them and think about them regularly does not change them. What changes them, or at least what might eventually change them, is the combination of attention and advocacy writing about what the change costs as clearly as writing about what it offers, supporting the things that serve everyone rather than only the people who arrived recently, and being honest about my own position in the process rather than narrating it from a comfortable distance that I don’t actually occupy. This is what I am trying to do. The neighbourhood will tell me, eventually, whether I have managed it.
Shoreditch continues. I continue. The fourteen-pound cocktail is still a problem. The ceramicist is giving a talk on Thursday. The Bangladeshi restaurant on the corner is still excellent and still there. The car park roof at sunset is still the best view I have found in this part of the city. The argument about what all of this means is still ongoing, in bars and on rooftops and in planning offices and in columns like this one, and the argument is important and the neighbourhood is changing and some of what changes is worth grieving and some of it is worth celebrating and the job is to hold all of it at once, which is harder than it sounds and is also exactly what London asks of anyone who takes it seriously.
East London’s story is not finished. The buildings that are being replaced were themselves replacements for something that preceded them. The community that is being displaced displaced someone before it. The neighbourhood that is currently performing its former self will eventually settle into what it actually is, which will be something new that the people currently performing the old version will be nostalgic for. This is how cities work, and knowing it doesn’t prevent the loss of the things that are lost in the process. It contextualises them. The Victorian warehouses that define Shoreditch’s aesthetic replaced the market gardens that preceded them. The market gardens replaced the fields. Something will replace the warehouses. What I am arguing for is not preservation as a principle but as a choice a deliberate decision to protect the collective urban quality that makes a place worth being in, rather than accepting its gradual replacement by buildings that look like the quality and cost more and produce less of it. That argument is worth making. I am making it, on this column and in planning consultations and in conversations with the ceramicist, who also has opinions about it that are more technically informed than mine. Between us, we are covering the argument from multiple angles. I am not sure anyone with decision-making authority is listening. I am going to keep making the argument anyway.
