Deptford: 2

Versions of the rag market remain in the UK. These markets invariably occupy transitional zones, the sites of old beast markets or side streets next to elevated railways. On the whole shopping here has become unfashionable, the preserve of the latest wave of immigrants and the fag-end of the English working class.

Most of aspirant middle England can think of nothing more horrible than rootling through piles of used junk, getting their hands dirty in the detritus of history. It's as if in a democracy like ours, everybody is in such a hurry to buy their way up the capitalist ladder that the prospect of buying recycled goods is like taking a backwards step. Everything has to be new, you have to prove you can afford to spend in the big-brand shops.

In Argentina the carrier bags from the poshest shops are salable commodities in working class districts.

Middle England has a fetish for choice and shopping behind clean glass, for tills and uniforms, price tags, false sales, carrier bags, one-click shopping and editor’s recommendations. The chaotic display and uncertain pricing of the system at a market like Deptford are not so easy to assimilate as this, which is why the discerning anarchist prefers to shop like this, as a spike to the horrors of the modern mall experience with its signal overloads and pharmaceutical cleanliness.

Deptford is also full of ghosts and allusions.

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Shopping in Deptford at times calls up images from the developing world press-pack, those images you remember of mixed people hurriedly picking over mounds of waste. And so it is here too, but now we have bargain hunting rather than desperate subsistence.

If like me you come to Deptford to hang out and soak up the atmosphere at London’s most colourful market it’s sometimes worth remembering that there are desperations not far beneath the surface. Sorry to be a killjoy, i say to myself, but this curious spectacle observed from the comfort of the middle class can make your laughter just a little uneasy.

The tramp in the suit is caught after putting on pair of second-hand trainers and leaving his filthy boots behind in their place. The woman stealing the lacy second-hand underwear receives a vicious and racist public dressing down from the bulldog female stall holder.

People shop here because they get a microwave cheaper than anywhere else in London, not because they might stumble across an old bit of art-junk or an interesting bit of furniture.

The market traders here can be brutal or rather have been brutalised by years of dealing with people from a raft of different cultures, all of whom are trying to steal from them. International social codes all go into the one melting pot, worlds of language and taste and bartering and theft all out there on this Deptford square for all the world to see.

The rag traders themselves take on the role of police here - curiously, you never see Old Bill in these parts. To keep order they have been forced to adopt a kind of East End brutality which cuts through social barriers. There is very little space for politesse here (to put it mildly).

The traders have endured years of bad weather and the endless lugging of garden furniture, fishing tackle, kitchen sinks, voltometers, umbrellas, a surprising number of 16mm cine projectors and hundreds and hundreds of ladies shoes daily from the back of their lorries onto the floor, before having to put a lot of it back on the lorries again later in the afternoon.

Wells Tower says there's a whole strata of jobs based on 'picking shit up and putting shit down'.

Here is the history of dirt or rather the dirt of history, the surface muck forming on ourselves as we conspicuously add goods to our lives. It is a history not only of peoples’ desires but of the fashion of their desires. It is a map therefore of universal taste, built in junk.

It is a sobering reminder of how easily we buy into the ‘next big thing’ and how quickly the next big thing becomes the next new scrap. In Deptford VHS players rest on mini-disk players, Walkmans on ATARIs, glass-fibre next to boron, things always changing from metal into plastic, everything becoming more convenient and disposable and mostly worse in quality. Here it is proven how obsessesed we are with technology and how quickly technology becomes obsolete.

For sale at Deptford, at prices which demean the consumer efforts which went into buying all this gear in the first place, is the stuff which floats to the surface when we take our personality away, ‘What portions of me be / Assignable’, in Emily Dickinson’s cool phrasing.

This is a nice way of dressing up the simple fact that for sale here is the stuff we leave behind when we die. Deptford then is an inherently morbid venue.

Seeing tables strewn with the stuff people saved for, that people went into debt for; that people bought one another for Christmas and collected and treasured: this is a warning and a reminder of how viciously quickly time turns us over and scavenges us in the form of bargain hunters from one of South London’s most deprived wards.

The Deptford experience is a spike to the modern idyllic of having whatever you want, whenever you want it. Here you never get anything you want when you want it.

Deptford: 1

‘Deptford builders were well aware of London’s classical […] design idioms, and their failure to engage with them fully was not the process of misapprehension. Neither ‘imitating’ nor ‘fools’ they were simply uninterested in boarding the classical bandwagon.’

Articulating British classicism: Barbara Arciszewska, Elizabeth McKellar

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An unhealthy white guy I somhow recognise, his ponytail matting into a dreadlock, sits examining an empty but still steaming electric kettle. He has that special pallour reserved for people who work all year on outdoors markets in the northern hemisphere and my eye is drawn fataly to the unspeakable bulge protruding from the top of the back of his trousers. In front of him on the table are two tins of sweetcorn and a torn up packet of Rizla. He is advising the owner of the take-away: ‘I think you’re gonna need a new kettle mate’.

A man then walks in swinging a serrated knife and industrial grater hanging with shreds of chicken skin: he is nothing to do with the restaurant. He sits at the same table as the guy with the sweetcorn.

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Every time I go into Deptford I find out something about myself as an Englishman.

Today I’m dressed decently in battered tweed jacket and brown loafers, having decided that if I can ever get away with wearing this sort of garb it’s in Deptford. I only mention what I’m wearing because it affects what I feel during the following encounter.

I’ve decided to come and look at the houses on the High Street as it’s a beautiful evening. Reading a book which might reveal some interesting things about the area I’m keen to check out some of the references. Ambling along I pass a group of thickly accented West Indians who set off behind me at a similar pace and I can’t help but listen in to their conversation. I note that passports are the topic of conversation, tune out temporarily but switch back in to hear:

‘Nah, nah. It took me two weeks last time I tried to get the thing done…’.

‘…Anyways, why swap a continent for a island?’

‘Why swap a continent for a island’

‘Hmmm’.

‘Slavemaster don’t tell me, forgive me, but Slavemaster don’t tell me’.

[From across the street]: ‘Hey Rasta!’

It briefly crosses my mind that I am the subject of an unprovoked anti-racist tirade and I become politely nervous. I am being paranoid of course and as I cross the street and look back, half-expecting a cutting look, the guys are shuffling on, still talking, if a little more loudly than I am used to.

It’s my reaction that I’m interested in, because for a second I feel like an alien here tonight; I have been perturbed. Deptford is the kind of place where history bubbles very close to the surface, as opposed to history in ‘Historic Blackheath’ (just up the hill) where history feels put away behind plate glass.

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It is as a place of trade that Deptford really makes its name, as a place with people on the streets, but this evening the High Street is shutting down and the place is full of idlers. People loiter in front of hairdressers or can be seen drinking strong Guinness out of bottles, hugging the shopfronts and leaving the street to lead cleanly down from the New Cross Road and away to the station and finally the river.

The rag-market square, swept clean and suspiciously empty at this time in the evening, is pregnant with potential action, bearing no relation to the chaos of tomorrow morning. Tomorrow the strewn booty of house clearances will bring multifarious hordes, all searching for something useful and cheap. Even now however it somehow feels a very live space, containing the threat of tomorrow’s action.

'Sun headlines are poetry says first woman Laureate'

On Saturday The Sun ran the front page 'MADDIE AGED 6', with a larger-than life-size artist's impression conjured by 'forensics wizards' in the States. Relating Madeline McCann immediately to her mother, the image purports to show how the girl would appear to Kate McCann on the 'second anniversary of her daughter's disappearance'.

The McCanns have been doing a round of publicity in line with this date (somehow anniversary seems like the wrong word), which we might call also a media event, so widely do the media seem to have invested in the story. Indeed this issue of The Sun is, in part, a report of the McCanns' appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show, with which the newspaper is clearly impressed. It uses stills from the TV show, close-ups of Gerry McCann looking angry and 'Maddie's mum Kate', heavily made-up and weeping, alongside the headline 'JUST LIKE MUM'.

Kate McCann and images of Kate McCann are at the centre of the Media's enjoyment of this story, and it's not only to see the woman grieving. Anne Enright has written about how the politics of Mrs McCann's beauty complicates the story of her missing daughter: in one still from Oprah she is shown clutching her husband's thigh, wearing a short skirt.

The headline 'JUST LIKE MUM' refers back to the image on the front and begins to age Madeline, growing her into Kate. The image on the front cover is disturbing, the absent girl now imagined as all-American, perfected in abduction. The look of impatience on her face as she smiles here is sad but determined. The fringe is more real than the rest of the image. The green eyes, purporting as they might to reality, are in this image only terrifying. An image cut-into the corner of the new portrait, of real Madeline aged three, is haloed and also terrifying.

Who is this girl on the cover? The Sun don't seem to know, referring to her in the space of three sentences as being 'on the brink of turning six', as having been snatched 'days before her fourth birthday', and as 'the three year old her mum last saw'. In fact, in the image she might look as old as twelve. Kate (41) is the subject of one of the three sentences and the object of another.

The photo of Madeline McCann is not the only thing on the front page of The Sun, although it takes up a good 80%. Diagonally opposite the little cut-in of real Madeline is a similar size picture of a small child with the caption: 'Baby P ... lad died from abuse'. This is not the news today however, as the headline reveals: 'Stepfather of Baby P raped tot, 2'.

The colloquial variations at work within the language here enact the casual violence required of The Sun's diction; the associations we are asked to make as we assimilate the stories on the page leaves us little doubt as to the populist theme of today's paper (circulation 3m).

The final story on the front page feeds into the theme. Over the caption 'Isolated' is a picture of a blonde girl in a medical mask lying asleep/unconscious in a hospital bed. This is 'N-Dubz girl Tulisa' (20), the lead singer of 'No 1 band N-Dubz'.

What are we to make of all this exactly? Andrew O'Hagan gets straight to a difficult point:

We could ... suggest that our tabloid media have a paedophile element to their subconscious, a child-abusing energy at the heart of their own anger. The British tabloid newspapers demonstrate this every day, with their talk of ‘our tots’ and their enthusiastic ‘revelations’ about suspected child abusers and child murderers. You can’t read the British papers without feeling polluted, not only by the stories but by the degree to which the writers and editors of those stories appear to want them to be true, even before the evidence has proved it. Beyond this, a carnival of sensationalism vies with a deadly prurience, matched by a creepy populist appeal to the ‘common decency’ of the mob. You feel that the hacks are getting off on the horrors they ascribe, getting high on the pseudo-democratic vengeance their stories might excite. ‘Here’s an ugly fact,’ [Margo] Jefferson writes. ‘The sexual abuse of children largely goes underreported. And even when it’s reported, it often goes unpunished. But here’s a sorry fact. We’re mesmerised by such crimes: they have become a form of mass culture entertainment, and a cover story for all kinds of fears.’

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n13/ohag01_.html