You’ll always be hankering back to the version of the city that you first encountered when you were young. For me this is the London of the mid-to-late noughties – not because the city was all that better back then, but because I was so open to it, and all that first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world. Anything could happen, and because I was so inexperienced, everything was new and exciting.
Those times have embedded themselves into the city, like a neural map that exists on top of the physical one – I can still tap into those feelings when I go back to the places where it happened. I think this is why it feels so strange when the city changes. I feel the disconnect when I walk through a previously very previously gritty alley to get the train at the newly shiny Tottenham Court Road station, and when I pass the now-doormanned Shoreditch cocktail bar that used to be a pub where in summer, they would open up the wall of windows and we could lounge on the fold-down benches. Every time I pass under Waterloo Bridge I think about how the seating outside the BFI bar used to be these rough-and-ready benches where we'd sit and drink Blue Moon with orange slices, before getting one for the road in a plastic cup to finish as we walked along the river.
I've been thinking a lot about London as a setting for my life lately. I moved here at the tender age of 23, and in the years that followed I spent a lot of time mucking about, being single and dating for the first time, and shall we say, "learning a lot” about myself. Whenever I get nostalgic for this time, I wonder if I'm rewriting history as I also remember how aimless I felt, and how unsettling it was a lot of the time. I had so many underwhelming jobs, so many crappy flatshares, so many confusing relationships, and an ever-present sense that I should be doing … something.
I spent my first years in London on what I called an "ambition break". The job I picked up after moving to the city after uni was supposed to be temporary, but I ended up staying for three years. I was a press cutter, a profession that doesn't exist in London anymore – we worked from 11pm to 7am for 14 nights straight before we got 14 days off, which if it wasn’t illegal it probably should be. At first I stayed because it was easy and I enjoyed boozing with my colleagues, and then I overstayed because the constant resetting of my body clock meant I was always a little loopy.
During those years I spent a lot of time at the big Borders bookshop on Tottenham Court Road, hanging out there until it closed at 11pm. I have no idea why it was open that late as it was pretty abandoned, but it was nice to have a late night venue that didn't revolve around alcohol, when my jetlag meant I'd only been awake for a few hours. Borders wasn't a particularly great bookshop, but that was never really the point – it was more about having a familiar yet unremarkable place to go. Borders was a liminal space between night and day, between sleeping and wakefulness. It was the perfect place for that moment in my life, when I had so much freedom that I felt dizzy.
In retrospect I’m actually pretty pleased with how my 20s went – I f*cked around and found out, and mostly enjoyed myself because I knew there was plenty of time. There really was! And even at the time, I was completely in love with the sense of exploration, which put even the hard bits into perspective – I was really into that whole "I'm out here doing it on my own" feeling. My jobs may have been crappy but I was paying my own way, and I could basically do anything I wanted.
Borders closed with the 2008 credit crunch, and got replaced by a TK Maxx. I was pretty salty about it, but the city is full of places that hold similar liminal feelings for me – the Southbank Centre, an airport Wetherspoon's, the Overground line we now call the Mildmay, a well-placed Pret, and the length of Hackney Road. I'm always adding to my neural map of the city, even as it changes around me. I still find myself sinking into the gravity of a moment, and I’m pretty sure I'll always keep feeling like I'm just about to figure things out, any day now. And let me tell you, I can’t wait until tomorrow, because I get better looking every day.
Readings
For this month's article recommendations from around the internet, head over to Reading List, Spring! edition.