Why we love London’s dirt

I am, admittedly, feeling the after-effects of Sam Byers’s repulsive and yet magnificent London novel, Come Join Our Disease — just out in paperback and a fun thing to read on the Tube. It’s about a woman, Maya, who rebels against society’s constant injunctions towards wellness and productivity and decides to ‘lean into’ illness and decay instead. Her epiphany comes on a commuter train when she is moved to stick her finger into the space between two train seats and lick off the accumulated grime. ‘London came upon my senses like a glorious illness,’ she says. ‘You know you are there, I’ve always thought, even before you’ve seen anything of the city. It has its own atmospheric signature, its own distinct patina of grime. My lungs, my skin, sensitised by the retreat, welcome this sense of return.’ What she tastes is: ‘Life! Teeming life!’

While I’m not tempted to follow Maya’s lead and start uploading the contents of my toilet bowl to Instagram, the book has made me appreciate the ‘distinct patina’ of London again. There’s a reason London’s 21st-century soundtrack is called ‘grime’. And that ‘Waterloo Sunset’, the most beautiful of all London songs, begins with the word: ‘Dirty’. Most capitals paint their offices of state white. Downing Street is black. Why? Well, the bricks were originally yellow but they became so besmirched over the years they turned black. Everyone preferred them that way so that’s how they are.

Indeed, visitors have marvelled at our squalor for centuries. Look up any ‘Why is London so dirty’ thread on the Q&A site Quora and try not to beam with pride (and also howl at the racism of some answers). London’s dirtiness has traditionally been a great source of ingenuity and invention. It was the Great Stink of 1858 (excrement piling up in the Thames) that inspired the greatest feat of Victorian engineering: Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer. And up until the mid-19th century, too, London’s waste was a great source of treasure. Charles Dickens describes London’s great dust heaps in his last novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864), huge, man-made mountains of rubbish that provided livelihoods for thousands, and a fortune for his character, Noddy Boffin. As historian Lee Jackson writes in his book Dirty Old London, almost everything Londoners threw away could be repurposed: ashes and cinders were turned into bricks; food waste became fertiliser; dead cats made pretty fur stoles.

Since then, London’s cleanliness levels have fluctuated as industries have risen and fallen. However, I’d trace the most recent wave of cleanliness back to the late 1990s, when our lovely old power stations started being repurposed as clean, white art galleries — and London really started selling itself as an international centre of business and finance. This became especially noticeable around the 2012 Olympics: old stone buildings were scrubbed clean, undesirables were moved on and luxxy new apartments started popping up everywhere. More recently, the filtered-fashions of the influencer age have introduced levels of fastidiousness that wouldn’t have lasted very long in the seamier, grimier London of not-so-long ago. And yet it’s surely no coincidence that during its great sanitisation effort, London has become the favoured ‘laundromat’ of autocrats, criminals and plunderers the world over, a place to turn ‘dirty money’ into gleaming Belgravia property portfolios. The more benignly hygienic London has appeared on its surface, the harder it has worked to scrub out its secrets.

Meanwhile, we throw away more and more. It’s just that our rubbish has become a sort of global every-rubbish. In his book Londoners (2011), the writer Craig Taylor interviewed a street-sweeper named Joe, who identified the most common item of London litter as… the McDonald’s cup. ‘That’s all you find everywhere. That’s the biggest item, McDonald’s cups, chip cartons, burgers… Anything with a logo, it’s the big M most of the time.’ I suspect the same would be true in New York, Munich, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow.

Dirt is, in the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s famous description, ‘matter out of place’. ‘Dirty’ is more often than not a moral judgement as much as a physical description; and immigrants, women, the working class, homosexuals and gender non-conforming people are more than likely to be on the wrong end of those judgements. And yet what we consider dirty rarely stays the same.

While the pandemic has brought on a hygienic hyper-vigilance, isolation has also made us crave the opposite. Bodies. Sweat. Intimacy. Messiness. According to the New York trend forecaster Sean Monahan (he’s the one who coined the term ‘normcore’) we are in the process of a ‘vibe shift’, a once-in-a-quinquennium event that will see everything that was fashionable five minutes ago become deeply unfashionable five seconds from now. The way Monahan sees it, the ‘vibe’ since the political upheavals of 2016 has been defined by an alliance of ‘woke’ politics and streetwear. Clean-eating. Clean-thinking. Removing every last speck of smirch from your limited-edition Dior x Adidas sneakers with a wet wipe and every last unclean thought from your social media feeds.

The era we are moving towards, he reckons, is one of ‘messy hair and messy make-up’, decadence, anti-productivity and a strong death-drive. Balenciaga has been selling £1,300 hoodies full of moth holes; ‘the haute mess’ is, according to Elle magazine, the look du jour, scuffed, slovenly, maybe just a tiny bit stinky. If so, it is a vibe shift that really ought to play to London’s squalid strengths. An early harbinger is the much-discussed Instagram account @IndieSleaze, which fetishises a ‘decadent’ near-London past of Trash, the Libertines playing in someone’s filthy flat, unflattering flash photography and everyone looking rather gorgeously wasted. You can almost feel the stranger’s breath on your cheek. Is that a whiff of toilet? Lovely.

And the thing about dirt is, it’s honest. It’s our truth. And it’s what we have in common. As Maya reflects, as she breathes in all her fellow commuters in Come Join Our Disease: ‘I wanted, quite suddenly, for all of us to smell together, eat together, sweat together. It bothered me that we were wearing clothes.’ The urge is not sexual, she reflects. ‘It was a craving for a different kind of contact, a recognition that all the things that repelled us about each other were all the things we had in common.’