Lowri Griffiths on Morning Buses, Corner Shops That Have Everything, and the Specific Dignity of a City Getting On With It

There is a specific quality to the Holloway Road at seven in the morning that I have been trying to articulate for approximately ten years and that keeps evading the kind of language that would make sense in a context outside of the Holloway Road at seven in the morning. It is busy in a purposeful way. Not the artificial busyness of somewhere that has been designed to look busy, like the Southbank on a Sunday or the market section of any high street where the estate agent wants you to see ‘a vibrant local commercial scene.’ The Holloway Road at seven is busy because the people on it have somewhere to be and are going there with the focused efficiency of people who have been doing this for years and have resolved, through repetition, exactly how long everything takes.

The 43 bus stop outside the McDonald’s collects people who are going to jobs that keep the city running. NHS workers from the Whittington. Cleaners from the office blocks in the City. Delivery drivers starting shifts. School support staff. The specific invisible workforce of London’s maintenance that the city requires and does not celebrate and whose daily commute does not appear in lifestyle journalism because lifestyle journalism is written by and for a different commuter.

The Corner Shop That Has Everything

The Holloway Road contains, within approximately four hundred metres, two Turkish supermarkets of the kind that stock ingredients for cuisines that no single cook would need simultaneously but that together represent the full culinary scope of the neighbourhood’s actual population, a West African grocery whose dried fish section I once tried and failed to fully inventory, a Polish food shop whose pickled cabbage is the best I have encountered in any direction from Zone 2, and a corner shop run by a family from Kerala whose produce section is better than the Waitrose three stops south on the Victoria line and costs approximately half the price. None of these shops is in Time Out London. All of them are better than most things that are.

I live near the Holloway Road. I walk it at seven in the morning with the purposeful crowd and feel, every time, the specific satisfaction of being somewhere that is doing something real. Not performing London. Just being it. More of this, and less of the Southbank on a Sunday, and you understand what the city actually is. More from me at The London Prat.

SOURCE: http://prat.UK