Walk To Work

Stepping out of St Pancras station, I stopped and lit a cigarette. It was damp and cold, with a light drizzle falling and wetting Pancras Street, which the headlights from the black cabs picking up and dropping off fares at the Eurostar reflected off of through the haze of diesel fumes.

It was 8:00 am and the height of rush hour. People streamed urgently out of the station into the gloomy light of London in December. A man wearing a kilt leaned against the red bricks of the station to steady himself, drinking from a can of strong lager and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

I joined the hurrying crowd heading towards Euston Road, walking briskly so as not to be mistaken for a tourist by the other commuters, and muttered harshly about. I looked up at the clock tower, dark and gothic against the grey sky, and puffed my cigarette before soon arriving at Euston Road, where I dodged harassed looking tourists dragging suitcases.

Before it was St. Pancras Station, this part of London was once a huge graveyard where the poor were buried in shallow graves. Much later, the area became one of London’s seedier red-light districts, with its cheap rent flats, hotels, and prostitutes. It was also the place to buy heroin and peruse bookshops that sold illegal French, German, and Spanish pornography.

But times had changed, and this part of London was now a high-rent district, with Google having recently purchased a derelict tract of land behind King’s Cross station, backing onto Regent’s Canal, for a billion dollars for the construction of their European headquarters—this was before Brexit.

I waited to cross Euston Road as motorcycles, mopeds, and taxis sped past, minicab drivers and delivery drivers honked impatiently at one another, and American tourists stood looking around, bewildered at which way the traffic was coming or going.

The lights changed, and I hurried across the road, continuing on my way and passing a corner shop where men were unloading sacks of onions. It seemed to me that there were too many sacks of onions, but the men continued to unload more.

I passed a café where people were walking out with paper cups of coffee and sandwiches wrapped in paper bags, and I could smell salty bacon cooking.

Euston Road is a charmless road, which, after leaving the gothic grandeur of the station, seemed soulless and utilitarian, with a parade of faux-brutalist office buildings and the nondescript exterior of Euston Station.

The only variation from the poured concrete is the giant caryatids propping up the roof of St Pancras New Church: statues of towering Greek women, modelled on those found at the Erechtheum and the Tower of the Winds at the Acropolis in Athens.

The faces of the statues have looked out over Euston Road since 1822, when the church was finished, witnessing its humble beginnings as a tract constructed to connect Paddington in the west to Islington in the east, used to herd cattle to Smithfields meat market and slaughter.

Now, the Greeks looked down, their faces caked with diesel soot and streaked with pigeon droppings that looked as though they had cried them, watching office workers ducking into grey office buildings, taxis and vans racing past, and commuters hurrying to work in the rain.

I continued onwards, arriving at the chaotic corner of Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road, where cars and motorbikes lined up at red traffic lights, waiting to zoom off north, south, east, or west. I turned and headed south. Tottenham Court Road was once London’s heartland of consumer electronics and gadgets. The iPhone did away with all the camera and computer stores, which were replaced by strip clubs, chain cafés, and shops.

I passed Goodge Street underground station, where a small stall was set up selling fruit. There were trays of plump, shiny cherries from somewhere in Africa or South America, and I noticed the elaborate handwritten sign that said, “Black Cherries, £3 per lb.” I stopped and bought a pound of cherries, which I put in my bag, and continued on my way.

I cut across, leaving the bustle and dreariness of Tottenham Court Road for the refinement of Charlotte Street and Fitzrovia, where I stopped at an overpriced café that sold a flat white coffee I adored. I stood with the others, waiting to place my order, and stared at the display of cakes. There was a Red Velvet cake; the dark crimson contrasted against the bright, creamy iced filling and topping. The cake looked like a work of art, so perfectly and precisely constructed.

The woman working the cash register, Spanish, with curly shoulder length jet-black hair, shouted out Next, and I shuffled forward and I ordered my small paper cup filled with barely three mouthfuls of strong, milky coffee, paid £5.00, and shuffled away to wait with the others for my drink to be made.

I noticed, as I waited, that all the men, including me, were dressed almost identically. We all wore dark blue jeans, brown lace-up boots, and navy-blue pea coats. We all had a messenger bag hanging from one shoulder and all wore stubble beards.

I wondered if the Spanish woman working the cash register thought that this was odd—an almost endless stream of almost identically dressed men coming in and ordering the same drink—but our uniformity didn’t seem to bother her, or us.

I left the café and headed south, past more overpriced cafés, pubs, and restaurants, heading into Adland.

The labyrinth of streets and roads running off and around Charlotte Street were, at the time, the epicentre of London’s, and Europe’s, and quite a bit of the rest of the world’s, advertising industry, and the proprietors of the overpriced cafés, pubs, and restaurants had grown fat off the advertising executives’ who ruled Adland’s expense accounts.

The pubs of Fitzrovia were packed most lunchtimes and after 5 pm every day, as the workers from Adland drank lager they had happily paid £5 a pint for. In the summer, crowds of drinkers would spill out onto the street, smoking fags, drinking, and talking shop. I remember speaking to a woman from China, who told me the first time she had seen this, she thought it was a street protest and panicked, not wanting to get involved in anti-regime unrest.

I came to Percy Street, lit a cigarette, and drank one of my three mouthfuls of coffee, strolling to the corner and back to Tottenham Court Road. I stood and watched a man placing postcards advertising escorts and erotic massage services in a phone box on the corner. One of the cards promised “All Services and Uniforms Available.” The man worked diligently placing each card so that it didn’t block the card beside or behind it. The man’s neatness, and care he applied to his work impressed me all the more, as I knew that almost as soon as he put these cards up, they were to be torn down by a street cleaner, and I wondered if the man knew this was the fate of his careful work.

A man came up to me and asked gruffly for a cigarette. I gave him one, and he gruffly asked for a light. I asked him plainly if he wanted me to smoke it for him as well, and he told me to fuck off and walked away.

I finished my cigarette in the drizzle, gulped back the two remaining mouthfuls of my coffee in one, turned, and headed into my glass-faced office, and up to the fourth floor.