Why I love cities

He clicked slides into the projector, introducing each one before they played in short little flashes.

At the train station one morning I saw a couple peel and eat half a dozen hard boiled eggs, passing between their pile of luggage and the nearby bin to discard old scales of shell. A few steps behind them, I stood with my back to a brick wall.

On another recent journey on the top deck of a bus, I saw a man sitting on the seat behind the opening to the stairs, with a book open on his knees, headphones on, forehead pressed to the handrail, totally folded in on himself, reading the words on the page an inch from his face.

Yesterday, on an overground train, I saw a man bedecked in splendor; a Professor Spock tie, a bright white shirt, a velvet blazer, monk shoes and a black beret atop his long white straggly hair. So magnificent was he I had to text my friends about it. I was thrilled to tell them that, as he happened to walk ahead of me out of the station, he headed straight for Poundland.

Sometimes I wonder about the country. Sometimes I consider that moving to the wilderness would be a great tonic for the soul; feeling perhaps that London is too loud and too busy and too exhausting. And then I see someone wearing a Professor Spock tie on the train and I remember why I love cities.

Sometimes I feel like running away, and then, squidged tightly on a standing-room-only bus, I watch as we stop to wait for a five year old. I watch as this child giggles it’s way on board and a woman seated just across the way from me smiles.

Many years ago I was in Scotland to volunteer at a film festival with some friends, during which I attended a screening at an old bath house of short street scenes made on Super 8 by a filmmaker called Jaap Pieters - the ‘eye of Amsterdam’. He was an old man with very long white hair and an enormous white beard, wearing a blush pink blazer that was a little big for him around the shoulders. He clicked slides into the projector, introducing each one before they played in short little flashes. The only one I remember was filmed from an apartment window over a street with tram lines running through it. The protagonist of the film was a stranger, a man who for the entire run time of the film, only a few minutes, repeatedly picked up and dropped empty beer cans, picked them up and dropped them again. I remember it vaguely of course, but I seem to recall the cans multiplying as if they were reproducing before our eyes.

Another Dutch filmmaker, Ed van der Elsken, mostly known as a photographer, captured street scenes in Amsterdam in a similar vein. I first discovered them on a trip to Paris with my mum to celebrate finishing my A levels. The Jeu de Paume in the Tuileries Gardens was showing an exhibition of his work. It included his photographs from Paris in the 1950s, 1970s Amsterdam and what felt like glorious hours of old film footage from travels in Japan. At eighteen or around that age, this was wondrous and thrilling. It was in fact so wondrous and thrilling that now as it approaches a decade since I first saw them, still I covet them.

There was a film made about Jaap Pieters by someone called Barbara den Uyl. A website promoting a talk that was held at the Eye Film Museum about it says that he sees his job as capturing the ‘beauty of existence’ and ‘the jagged edges of life’ – ‘a great talent for life, who in his own words “lives in another world than where the world is”.’

Pieters films are sometimes described as voyeuristic. Of course the thought of being a voyeur seems rather seedy but I suppose that is what I’m doing when I make notes about people I see on the train. And it’s certainly what the filmmaker was doing with his camera positioned in his apartment window.

It reminds me of a story that my family sometimes tell. My uncle, the one who I never met, who to me exists in some distant world of vignette, had police run up to his apartment door when the telescope he had set up in this window was reported as a gun. I can’t remember why it was that he had a telescope in his window. Perhaps he was watching the stars. Or perhaps, like me and like Jaap and Ed, he was gawping at passers by.

And then I am reminded of another family story too. When my grandfather was staying in a hotel overlooking Red Square in Moscow and at the commencement of a military parade two KGB agents stormed into his room to prevent him interfering.

As a teenager, on family holidays, my time was spent taking photographs. I took short video clips that I imagined would one day form part of a film. I took hundreds, sometimes thousands of photographs, of the people we saw, the buildings, the landscapes, the food. I remember comments being made about how content I was just to watch. How I didn’t care to take part in the activities and would rather sit snapping hundreds of photographs.

This habit came into its own when we visited cities. Paving. Statues. Metro signs. Parking meters. Grates. Drains. Crosswalks. Shop fronts. But of course it was the people most of all, or was it really the buildings, and the promise they held behind their walls.

Having grown up in a peaceful English backwater, cities, especially European ones with a certain unfamiliarity were a dream. They made me imagine all the many lives I could choose to live. I could go and live in France, learn French, eat bread. I could swan around Florence in linen and look at art.

I sit now, in my flat above a dry cleaners in South London, and I wonder whether I have done justice to this dream. I know now of course that I was dealing in clichéd inaccuracies, that the visions I had of these myriad lives were fanciful and could never stand up to the financial realities of an arts education. But I am always wondering whether I am doing justice to myself, to my opportunities, my freedoms. I am one of the luckiest people on earth and still I live only an hour from home.

Regardless of whether I am in Paris or Rome or a short walk from Peckham Rye, I still see cities how I was taught to when I was young. I still see the people and the trains and the towers and bridges and bikes as pointers to something vaguely magical. I thank Ed and Jaap for that.

Somehow I find that these two artists, both similar in many ways, shape the way I see. For without them, why would I have noted seeing a couple eating hard boiled eggs? Without them cities would be so much harder to understand. So I thank them. I thank these two Dutchmen for making me love cities.

All photos my own from Antwerp 2017