while foreign visitors found London exciting, they wished that we offered a more exuberant welcome. Sure.

Were not Hawaii, waiting with garlands. So London is rude, and the keen social observer will find different sub-trends in incivility. Naked aggression from White Van Man is one thing, but indifference is also a great London speciality. To shop in Kensington Market or at Worlds End in the 1980s, through the appointmentonly boutique Voyage in the Nineties to, more recently, Abercrombie & Fitch, was and is to enter the world of the studiously ignored. Ditto those nightclubs whose sole purpose has been to keep lesser people away. Pretty well all of Londons legendary nightspots from the Gargoyle and Colony to the Wag and Taboo have been temples of unpleasantness, to the point where rudeness becomes a brand value. The London publican has often been rude and proud. The most infamous was Norman Balon of the Coach and Horses in Soho, with his legend, written on matchboxes, Londons rudest landlord a pathetic exaltation that struck a low London chord. Nor does London just enjoy native rudeness. People actually went to the Wong Kei in

DIALLING IN
By Samantha Shannon

RUDENESS IN A CITY LIKE LONDON HAS PURPOSE. WHENEVER I HEAR BLANDISHMENTS SUCH AS, CAN I HELP YOU GUYS?, A PART OF ME FEARS FOR OUR FUTURE
Chinatown, a triple-decker restaurant, to enjoy imported Chinese rudeness. Surliness comes in the London air, often hovering below the radar, often undirected and looking for a focus. Step up a level and it turns into road rage, cycle rage or just generic rage. London does that pretty well, too. Yet things have started to change. International standards of hospitality have encroached upon London. The newer operative actively enquires, Is everything OK for you guys? In certain supermarkets, bum-fluffed assistants say, Is there anything else I can help you with today? It feels bogus.Others have started to notice.The writer Joe Queenan recently wrote for The Wall Street Journal, My wife and I recently took a short trip to her native England. As soon as we arrived we were struck by an epidemic of civility that had erupted in London. Politeness is precious, and I wouldnt want to laud the unpleasant and disrespectful as somehow expressing the true voice of the city. Something dies in the heart when someone is meaninglessly discourteous. It really can ruin your day. But perhaps rudeness in a city like London has purpose. It eliminates lesser interactions, inoculates against real anger and even ensures spatial and clan integrity. It establishes difference, expresses dynamism its the grit that makes the urban pearl. Plus, it could be psychic necessity. As Friedrich Engels put it in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845, Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city. So whenever I hear blandishments such as, Can I help you guys?, a part of me fears for our future.
Oliver Bennett is a writer and contributing editor to Town

first discovered Seven Dials when I started a two-week stint at a literary agency in July 2011. I was 19 years old at the time, fresh out of my first year at university, eager to get some book-related work experience under my belt. When the agent sent me the address, it didnt ring any bells. Number 55 Monmouth Street could have been anywhere. A lifelong Londoner, Id walked past the living statues and unusual shops of Covent Garden many times but Id never heard of this small, star-shaped junction where seven streets converge. Despite their rich history and distinctive layout, the Dials are easy to miss. A pillar acts as their lynchpin, fixed with six blue sundials. The pillar itself is the final dial. At its base, strangers cluster together to sip coffee, work on laptops or read. They pay no heed to the cars, bikes and black cabs that swing wildly around them. If you take a right down a dim, gated passage, youll stumble into the New Age enclave of Neals Yard, where brightly painted shops sell mood beads, health foods and natural remedies. On its website, this junction district is acclaimed as Covent Gardens only village. Yet village a word that evokes rustic tranquility doesnt quite capture what youve found here: a treasure-box of boutiques, vintage trinkets and fashionable eateries in the window-shopping empire of WC2, touched with the theatrical trappings common to the West End. This is a new breed of village, tucked away from the Kodak lodestones on its doorstep. A pause in the hammering heartbeat of the capital. Rewind the clock by two centuries or so and you will find yourself in a very different Seven Dials. It is a hotbed of mob violence and poverty in Victorian London, populated by prostitutes, beggars and thieves. Its shopkeepers and costermongers trade in all manner of questionable wares, from lovebirds and fruit to rags and bones. Irish and English tenants bump heads, their squabbles fuelled by a ceaseless flow of gin. In 1835, Dickens described this seedy tangle of passages as a complicated part of London. The Diallers, as they are called, are a violent, boorish people; Dickens observes that the carpet-beater extends his professional pursuits to his wife. It is a far cry from the rose-tinted vision of the architect, Thomas Neale known as Golden Neale who designed Seven Dials in the 1690s with the intention of making it as exclusive a haunt as Covent Garden. When I started working in Seven Dials, I knew nothing whatsoever about it. I had no idea that it had a history of revolution. I had no idea that in 1848, it had been a central location in a planned Chartist uprising. All I knew was that this place was special. It was different. During my first few lunch breaks I would head out and explore the seven streets. During one drive, I passed a shop offering psychic readings. Inside, among other wares, were tarot cards and crystal balls. I didnt stay for long, but within a few minutes I had

stumbled upon the Astrology Shop, another specialist in esoterica. I picked up a coffee and wandered back to work, but the images lingered in my head. The next day, I had something that I can only describe as a cross between a daydream and a brainwave. I pictured a young woman having the same day at work that I was having a coffee in her hand, looking out of the window at Monmouth Street but she happened to be clairvoyant. That young woman was Paige Mahoney, my narrator and that word, clairvoyance, was the seed of her story. I hurried out, bought a cheap notebook, and began to craft my own vision of Seven Dials, populated by clairvoyants who lived outside the law. Given the districts propensity for reinventing itself, it was the perfect birthplace for a story about the near future. In The Bone Season, Irish-born Paige lives in a version of Seven Dials shaped by an alternative history of England. The year is 2059, and the Dials hover between Victorian gangland and futuristic leisure district. Part of a section of the citadel called I-4, the seven streets are ruled by Jaxon Hall, a clairvoyant mob boss (or mime-lord). Alcohol is forbidden; instead, non-clairvoyant Diallers gather in oxygen bars. Meanwhile, its clairvoyant denizens deal in the spirits of the dead a trade as rotten as the costermongers fruit, in the eyes of the Scion government. When she is captured, Paige longs to return to her den of thieves on Monmouth Street. Wed created a little world in Seven Dials, a world of crime and colour, she recalls. The sundial pillar becomes a symbol of Paiges freedom, a Grail she seeks throughout the book but the freedom it offers is twisted and strange, and in Seven Dials, where slums exist on stars, nothing is ever quite as it seems.
Samantha Shannons novel The Bone Season is published by

Bloomsbury priced at 12.99

LESS IS MORE
By Alan Jackson

mithfield isnt just a meat market these days, but a hub. From Farringdon station, those needing to be wellconnected and flight-available can reach both Gatwick and Luton by direct train. When Crossrail comes on stream, Heathrow will be a mere 32 minutes away and Stansted is already accessible from nearby Liverpool Street. With its stylish bars and restaurants, its renovated buildings and varied architecture, EC1/EC2 is now a destination for more than just its residents and workforce and those weekend clubbers queuing for Fabric. So far, so good, so smart. But lets walk through the central avenue of Carnivore City, pausing to admire the archived photographs. Here we can see the late Queen Mother in shantung silk chatting to workers against a backdrop of hanging carcasses, and my favourite, this one strawberry-nosed old warhorse explaining the markets workings to a group of robed (and cigarettesmoking) Commonwealth visitors. From here we cross into

a subtly different zone: West Smithfield. And threading our way past the drinker-smokers outside the Butchers Hook & Cleaver, observed by window-seated diners at Club Gascon, well stop for a moment and take in that difference. Dont be surprised if, on warmer days, those sitting on the benches close to the plaque commemorating Sir William Wallace (the Scottish patriot was killed here in August 1305) are wearing dressing gowns. Theyre patients at St Bartholomews Hospital whove stepped outside the boundary walls for some air, to watch the wider world go by, perhaps to enjoy a smoke. And if we now walk through the Henry VIII Gate and into Barts itself, we can enjoy for a while the cool sanctuary that is the Church of St Bartholomew the Less, the hospitals parish church and for me a special place within the City. The nearby Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great is the one thats on the tourist trail, thanks to its having featured in such films as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shakespeare in Love. These days it costs 4 to admire the hallowed splendour wherein Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas once stood (you may pray in the chapel for free). Yet while there is no monetary charge for entry into the similarly ancient but smaller, lighter and brighter St Barts the Less (its original stained glass was lost in the Blitz and replaced in the 1950s with airy Hugh Easton designs), the price many visitors are paying is beyond calculation. This is where those visiting sick or dying loved ones within the hospital come to pray. All are invited to inscribe their special intentions in an open book. Some entries are uplifting: With thankful heart for another year of remission. Now 19 years since diagnosis and blessed to be alive. Others implore: Please help mum with her fight against cancer. Give us more time with her. We love her so much. Or, Please pray for Ruth, a good sweet girl suffering from leukaemia and mother of two dear boys, 6 and 9. Thank you. One woman writes near daily and in a young, neat hand, graciously asking God to heal her husband as he undergoes radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Here is heartbreak scribed in red Biro. For us non-medics who, for the time being at least, are the lucky healthy ones, to spend even a few minutes in a hospital environment is an acute reality check. But you could weep as you turn the pages here. It would be voyeuristic perhaps no, certainly to repeat the more detailed and explicit of these requests for divine intercession. But even the briefest and most controlled make their aching, eloquent point: Let love work. Please keep him with me, happy, brave and strong, or, For Bud, as he travels the last of his road. Life/death was ever thus of course. But in rich and fashionable areas of town like this, the co-existence of the commercial and social business-as-usual with an altogether deeper, darker, primal Business-As-Usual seems somehow especially sharp. Every community has institutions performing a similar function, unknown by most of us or passed by until our own hour of need. And while this particular one has kept pace with societys evolution notices declare it to be a Fair Trade church and the parish to welcome us regardless of our gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation their quiet role transcends any fashion or postcode. Our deepest hopes and fears are timeless, universal.
Alan Jackson is a freelance writer

68

69