Echo Two

A boy was murdered near where I live recently. The spot where he fell has become a temporary shrine with flowers and graffiti. On the weekend a group of kids had started hanging out there (they hadn't been there during the week), there were talking nosily and shouting out to passers-by while another kid aimlessly (and dangerously) cycled around the streets surrounding it.

I realised that the kid on the cycle was spotting and the group at the spot were showing themselves on their ground.

There was a surreal quality to it. There in the middle of a regular Saturday of building, trading and shopping. There on the streets with their Jaguars and Aston Martins. There was a boy caught up in his own drama of patrolling the streets where one of his group had fallen.

The lines of the territory are invisible to people like me, as the article I linked to says the area consists of people of all different classes and wealth overlapping in the same metres of territory. The Bemerton estate at the centre of it, a mess ever since I've been here.

This kind of violence is mostly class-based and isolated geographically. I might get robbed but I'm isolated from the threat of being killed because of who I am and where I spend my time.

The article is wrong at least in talking about the reconstruction of Kings Cross. Caledonia Road has been that way ever since it was created to connect Kings Cross and Archway, initially through marshy farmland. To the east the planned streets, to the west the land between the road and the railway, the road itself evolving into the necessary neutral zone between the two where shared needs meet.

London, and Islington in particular, feels unique in having these social layers sharing the same geography, every other city I've ever been to links boundaries to geography, streets serve as borders. Here in a crowded city we're all creating our own psychogeography in the same physical space.

This is a popular history book about a relatively small chunk of London that is now famous for its numerous jewellers and purveyors of engagement and wedding rings. The story reaches back to the medieval period and as ever the amount of fidelity modern London has with the layout of its ancient forbearer is amazing. Hatton Garden still essentially follows the bounds of the Fleet river and the monastic estate that lay beside it.

The book traces how precious metalworking and the diamond trade came to end up in Hatton Garden and how in recent years it has declined, perhaps terminally. While there is a lot of emphasis on the Jewish refuges and their community (partly because Lichenstein is a descendant of some of those refugees), there is also an excellent review of the Italian community that bequeathed the Italian church that lies on Clerkenwell Road.

It is also good at charting the way that areas rise and fall, alternating between putrid slaughter houses, crime-ridden rookeries and fine houses and rising rents that force out the craftsmen that give the area its modern reputation. It is a good picture of a city in constant motion, always changing and becoming something new.

See also the Guardian's review