The truth about Crouch End
Twenty years ago my life, like, changed for ever.
On 5 October, I’ve been in London for exactly twenty years. Two whole decades. I can’t believe it – not just that so much time has elapsed, but that I’m still here. I managed to make it work, just about.
I took my time getting here. Flirted with the idea so many times. I thought about going to university in London, but all advice I read was overwhelmingly negative – it would be expensive, and unsafe, said the overcautious shrews who’d penned the student guide, with no guarantee of accommodation. I considered moving after graduation too, but chose Edinburgh instead. Eventually, I gave in when I was 26, admitting that if I really wanted to be the version of myself I had in my head, I would have to come to London and try.
I first came to London when I was nine years old, on a school trip. I remember the tables and the red upholstery on the InterCity train – only my second trip on a train, ever – and feeling small but important. We stayed in a cheap hotel in Kensington somewhere, one of those stucco dives with condemnable net curtains and a broken, buzzing bulb illuminating only half the grimy sign. We did the usual tourist stuff: the Tower, a boat trip, the theatre, the museums, but I wasn’t interested in any of that, not really. I preferred being led through the bustling streets by our teachers in typical cavalier fashion – no hi-vis vests or linking arms or even an umbrella poking up into the sky to follow. The noise and dirt, the pongs from restaurants and cafés, being almost slammed to the floor by grownups barging to wherever they needed to be which, I knew, was bound to be far more important and exciting than anywhere I’d be going. I was thrilled to ride on the Circle line, squished among commuters, and even found it exciting to be stuck in traffic on a sightseeing bus as we approached Tower Bridge, delighted as its bascules lifted to let a boat through. The cogs whirred in the bridge and my brain, and as my pupils slowly contracted to their original state, I had a feeling I wasn’t done with London yet.
It would be over ten years before I’d see London again, by now a grownup of sorts and at university in the south of England. Two friends and I rode on an NUS-organised coach to protest (fruitlessly, as it turned out) against tuition fees and the abolition of student grants. Once we’d done as much placard waving as our puny arms would allow, we slunk off to roam central London. We took it in hungrily, like condemned men licking the plate of their last meal. We got the Tube one stop, constantly, because we didn't know how it fit together, but also because the Tube was exciting, stupidly. We had lunch in the Pret on the corner of Long Acre. Still woefully unsophisticated – the only thing I knew how to cook other than toast was a bolognese – I bought an egg sandwich and a small bottle of freshly squeezed lemonade with bits in (long discontinued) and sat gazing out of the window in wonderment, as if I were standing at the very top of the world and about to dive into the blue with no parachute. It was the most basic thing any Londoner would do at least a hundred times a year, which made it all the more glamorous. I craved that mixture of the ordinary and the exotic. To live a mundane life in London, I thought, could never be boring. I was in love. (I was also an idiot, but we are who we are.)
This was a habit of mine. Still is, in a way. Falling hard for cities I barely knew. It didn't matter where, so long as it was very different from where I’d grown up, a place I’d never felt happy or like I could be myself – whatever that meant, I still had no idea who I was. I’d never belonged there, not really, so I searched for that acceptance every place I went. I tire quickly of being a visitor, I want to blend in, know the streets and what’s round every corner. I’m that man who goes on holiday and imagines they could live there; I start scoping out supermarkets, gyms, and bars where I could be a regular. Most of my life has been spent wondering what it would be like to be someone else, somewhere else, chasing my own ghosts in parallel universes. I almost moved to Barcelona in 2010 after only two visits. London, though, felt different. Back in 1995, in the Long Acre Pret, I slowly brushed crumbs off my shirtfront (I remember exactly what I was wearing but it’s not important), and made it my business to fulfil my destiny. For years I held on to that empty lemonade bottle, my little reminder of being just like everybody else in one of the world’s hugest cities. It sounds odd, or like I had some kind of emotional problem or perhaps an undiagnosed tumour, but it was… oh I don’t know, a talisman to get me to the end game. I'd never stood out, avoided being centre of attention. I was always a speck, a smudge in the background of a crowded canvas. Sometimes this has felt like a defect, but in London it was an advantage. Melting into the background, anonymity as a superpower, among the tallest buildings and the brightest skies that had lured people from every corner of the planet.
When I arrived, aged 26, with my then-boyfriend in a hired van, and unpacked our few belongings in the mildly tatty flat we’d share with two (straight) men we barely knew, I had no idea what was going to happen. And I wasn’t remotely worried about it, for possibly the last time ever. We’d travelled overnight, so my boyfriend and his dad (who had driven the hire van) snoozed in the flat for a couple of hours, but I was too wired. I had to see what was out there. Dazed and slightly high with tiredness, my body’s alarm system tingling all over begging me to sleep, I pulled on a light jacket – it was warm – and went onto the street. It was fairly quiet, residential, on a hill, lined with 1950s private apartment blocks, a Tube station at one end, with… I wasn’t sure what, at the other. I turned left, downhill, no idea what was coming next. I used to have a habit of looking down at my feet when I walked. A confidence thing, maybe. I didn't do that now. My head was whipping back and forth like a Centre Court umpire. I didn't want to miss a thing.
I will never forget the feeling. I can almost feel it now, as I type, if I close my eyes for a second. Desperate to race to the bottom of the road to see what awaited me, but wanting to eke it out too. Life, in that moment, was that last bite of a chocolate bar you don’t want to end. My heart raced as I turned right and found myself in what you might call a town centre. It was villagey, almost. It looked more affluent than I was expecting – although I suppose the tree-lined avenue I’d just descended should’ve been a clue. I remember, so clearly I can almost feel my footsteps on the pavement, being wowed by it all. It was a Saturday afternoon, and people were out shopping, and boozing, and dining, and soothing mewling babies, and kissing their hellos and goodbyes. There was a butcher, several bakers, restaurants with huge windows open onto the street. Shops selling expensive kitchenware, clothes I would never be able to afford, umpteen gift and card shops. A couple of chicken shops, a chippy, coffee places – RIP Manhattan Coffee – greengrocers, pubs, posh off-licences. All of it, just there; it had always been there, getting on with it, before I showed up. And now it was mine. I’ve never felt so much like a bumpkin, but all the same utterly thrilled to be so out of it, like Mary Ann Singleton at the start of Tales of the City. So much to learn, and embrace. Eventually, I realised this was Crouch End, somewhere I’d vaguely heard of, but knew absolutely nothing about (least of all its reputation as a haven for centrist media darlings). I lived here now. This was home. This place I’d never known about until about an hour ago, was my bit of London. I was so excited. YES.
I realise how provincial I sound. The 2002 version of me would be horrified to read this, probably, and would ask me why I wasn’t just happy to blend in and shut up. I don’t care, though. I’m still not ready to take it for granted. I know London isn’t for everyone. There are millions happy to live elsewhere, in towns where they were born. They’re lucky! There are millions who already left London to find better parts of the UK. There are plenty of others who’d love to live here, but can’t afford it, or can’t escape. There are people stuck here, desperate to leave. It’s not always paradise. Living here with no money isn’t easy – I’ve done it before and, the way things are going, I will do it again, sooner than I’d like. Sometimes, too, its hugeness can make you feel insignificant. There’s certainly too much focus on London at the expense of other great towns and cities. I get that. But there’s so much life here. Breathe in for five seconds and you’re inhaling untold worlds.
I still have great affection for Crouch End – and indeed almost every place in London I’ve lived – but I left after just a year and never lived in north London since, bizarrely; so much for my romantic attachment. But I still get that buzz sometimes, that Crouch End feeling. It happens randomly, but is most common in autumn or spring, the gentler, transitional seasons easing us into the extremes. It’s usually sunny, a bit crisp, and I’ll be walking, maybe only down to the shop, or perhaps along a beautiful street in part of the city I barely know, or past a grubby boozer where a tired barman halfheartedly vapes at the door. There’s the tingling, and the smile that spreads over may face, and the pull at my heart that reminds me how glad I am to live here. And how lucky. I’ve been mugged, seen a bomb go off, have been the subject of several physical and verbal homophobic attacks, and had some truly awful, miserable moments where everything has felt insurmountable but – and this will sound weird, but stay with me – I’ve never felt as safe, or as strong, anywhere else as I do in London. To wake up here every morning is like getting to pass GO! on Monopoly. Although I’d certainly like it a whole lot better if there was £200 waiting for me every day too.
London is so many things to different people, and some of those things are wonderful and some of them are terrible. But it is home. And I'm glad I came.
Causing a promotion
I am appearing at two literary festivals this week! I know!
First up, on Thursday 6th, I'm at Henley for Book Club Thursday with Mike Gayle and Clare Pooley. You can join us in person or online. I will be as bawdy as polite society allows.
Then, on Saturday 8th, I'll be up in Carlisle at Borderlines Book Festival, for an event called A Romcom with Bark and Bite – just me this time. Nervous? Ha! No! (Yes, a little.) Again, it's both an in-person and a virtual scenario, so take your pick, but do, do pick.
You know about the books, don't you? Sure. Just google 'Justin Myers books' and pick your favourite retailer.
All my book and festival stuff gets announced on Instagram or Twitter. Follow me there for occasional pics and always very nice, if slightly overwrought, captions. I also wang on about what I'm reading or watching.