I lived in London during my undergraduate years from 2003-2006 and again from 2011-2012 while working at the EBRD. I have visited many times in between these points and of course ever since, as we still have many friends and family in town.
I just realized that the category “London” on this blog has some substantive posts put up mainly in 2013. They resulted from me wandering about interesting parts of town and taking notes on the blog, a process with which I had become accustomed to in Tokyo — one may call it reflective serendipity. I also took a walk down memory lane in 2017, reflecting primarily on my alma mater SOAS.
And yet, did I ever truly know the city?
I went on a somewhat different, literary trip down memory lane last week while I read the fabulous Night Haunts by Sukhdev Sandhu. In 12 poetic chapters, he portrays Londoners and their night-time occupations, from graffiti artists to Thames bargers, from workers in the sewers to foxhunters, from minicab drivers to Samaritans answering distress calls.
It’s a beautiful and haunting meditation on a rarely appreciated side of the capital. When we think of night-time in the big city, we often focus on a form of premediated and profit seeking “night-life”, primarily as a cultural phenomenon. In his book, Sandhu reclaims the night on behalf of some of its more interesting and darker characters. They inhabit a different world from ours.
By now, Night Haunts has historical value, too, given that it was written almost 20 years ago, around the time I lived in the UK. Some of the “night tribes” have disappeared amid the ongoing modernization of the city as well as technological change. There are no more Thames bargers, and minicabs, too, have disappeared.
As I lived in this London, I thought I’d have something to reminisce about reading this book. However, most of the worlds Sandhu portrays were alien to me back then. It feels ghostlike reading this now. It is a beautiful mediation on space and time. Times long gone but also times still missed each night, sleeping in one’s bed.
