XII Twelve

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XIITWELVE

Night HauntsReis Reffold & Eoin Tunstead

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XIITWELVE

Night HauntsReis Reffold & Eoin Tunstead

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“When a man is tired of London, he

is tired of life; for there is in London all that

life can afford.”

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“When a man is tired of London, he

is tired of life; for there is in London all that

life can afford.”Samuel Johnson

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Chapter IChapter IIChapter IIIChapter IVChapter VChapter VIChapter VIIChapter VIIIChapter IXChapter XChapter XIChapter XII

IntroductionWorks

Media

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Introduction.

My initial response to the Night Haunts text was one of highlighting the unnoticed, and bringing to the fore the issues within the lives of Londoners who live on a totally different plane to myself. But once i studied the text further and began to extract more acute ideas, the main occuring theme i found was that of London as a cycle, in particualr a cleansing one. Whether it is the emptying of the rubbish, the scrubbing of the office, or even the nursing of the human mind, i found this ever-present rotary representation of London. The minds of the people within London, and the streets and building themselves are saturated and stuffed daily with litter, memories, problems, heartaches, and dirt. Only to be left stagnating until the night time, when we wait for, and expect all of our issues, mental and physical to be cleansed, defragmented and put back into the correct place, ready to be ransacked and tainted repeatedly the next day. This feeling of an almost monotonous repetition i tried to carry through to my interpre-tation of the book where possible, through things that were constant, re-cycled, or felt elongated and recurrent. For example the cleaning of a table top to reveal a message, but never getting it clean enough, the long winded process of uncovering a book locked in a safe. Or a toilet hurredly giving and taking away what you are trying to read.

Reis Reffold

“

”After the exciting start to the Night Haunts project, with the briefing in the Prospect of Whitby on the Thames caused an instantaneous flurry of thought and ideas. In the early stages of initial thought, the broadness of the project is the usual trying task of narrowing yourself down, but not closing yourself off, but balancing the open brief with the one strict guideline using the entire contents kept reigning the ideas in, and rapidly jotting them all down in succession. I firstly was thinking of a typographic angle steering my work, due to the nature of the brief, but following conversations with the class and tutors. I almost u-turned and headed down a entirely new route, my first thoughts were of a re-discovery of the Thames, walking past all the sites and small finds, it reminds you how little you tend to look around when living in London. So fixed telescopes, like the ones you find on the beach, or on the Eiffel Tower, sprung to mind. It was a simple way to draw in people to interact with the story and discover things they have lived alongside for years. With the amalgamation of the telescope, and the handheld view-master device, in which you place the circular disk containing 35mm slides with images. Was the perfect way to transform the onlookers horizon into a landscape of type, tell-ing the story of Night Haunts with London’s Thames as its backdrop. Similar ideas followed with thoughts to film the book being narrated.

Eoin Tunstead

”

“

Our collaboration came about after repeatedly bouncing our ideas of one another for feedback. We kept doing so until our ideas inevitabley began to collide. We began to be influenced by each others input, developing a fine line betwen stealing, and expanding on, each others thoughts. Eventually, in the interest of all the ideas that we had become so attatched to we decided to carry out our developments together and this led to the collaborative project we entitled ‘XII Twelve.’ We both had our own themes which we had

uncovered and both felt each chapter deserved seperate treatment. This was largely due to the fact we found such diveristy between each chapter and the use of one single method or medium to try and represent these varying ideas would be a hinderance to the eclectic nature of Sandhu’s writing. Another reason for the seperation of the chapters was the pure volume of ideas we felt we were creating. We didn’t want to choose a tangent and make it all fit, we wanted to run with various ideas and see where they fitted themselves. We took it upon ourselves to work as if it were a design studio. Encompassing different skills in order to accomplish what we had earlier envisaged.

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Newsprint brainstorms became an ever present in our constant organisation of ideas. Between scribbling ideas and making lists, every few hours or couple of days we seemed to be constructing new and edited plans of action. As we had so much going on we found the need to regularly list and document where we were going, and how long it was taking us to get there.

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Wor

ks.

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The introdcution to Sandhu’s book is more or less a brief history of the invention of ‘night.’ It is a short timeline of common events and emotions that were present

through the develpoment of London’s new found life in darkness. This first chapter is presented rather romantically, and feels like both an extract from a seperate novel, as well as the introduction that it is. The idea to produce a film to represent this chapter came from the romantic writing and the strong link to story telling; the mentions of other writers such as Shakespeare and Morton show this new exploration of the night, as well as the fascination with it, that is clearly shared by Sandhu today. The original idea was focused more on the sense of exploration. We looked initially to take the reader away from the pages and explore the book via the streets of London they are reading about. Through film, they would follow, or watch, a character walking the streets of London, the words of the book being both played over the film, and appearing from the characters mouth and scuttering away as they ventured into the pages physically. Connecting the sense of story telling and the essence of exploration. However, as we read and studied the book, it’s point became more apparent, and we

were introduced to new characters in every chapter. This is where we started to focus the idea less on exploration in an obvious way, but more on story telling. With each chapter taking the reader somewhere new, we felt the exploring should be for within the book itself. Leaving the introduction to be simply something to intrigue, and in a way bewilder the viewer/reader; much like we though Sandhu was trying to achieve in his romantic opening. We simplifed the idea to a monochrome, close focus film of nothing but a mouth, talking but silent. This achieved, we thought, both the enticement and intriguing bewilderment of an introduction. The mouth itself becomes almost bewitching, it is as interesting and fascinating to the person looking at it as the London night was to those who were first to dwell within it. We included text frames in the style of old silent movies, allowing us to eradicate the sound of a human voice, and focus the viewers attention as to what it could all mean. This combination of silent mouth and static text draws the viewer in, and allows them to create their own character out of the two parts. You start to imagine a voice, and the person behind it; which means in a way, that you are exploring the text, and inventing the people within the book, before you’ve even met them.

Chapter I: An appetite for stories

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The original tests for a narrated film: featuring sliding, animated text, accompanying a walking figure through the streets of London.

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Avian Police, they look, search, observe, and watch over us. They carry out the role of an every-day Police officer, but they do it from the skies, with a perfect

vantage point across the entirity of a city. Police officers have been doing the same for a long time, only from the ground. Our idea for this chapter was to somehow represent this unwavering duty of a Police officer: to look for things. Our initial ideas were as simple - and we thought obvious - as remote control helicopters. Discarding these, we once again went for simplicity, We went with the thought ‘what are people looking for?’ and ‘where are they looking for it?’ regard-ing the Polive but more importantly when it comes to this project, this book. The second question we answered quickly, we are looking for something within the book. And then the first question answered itself. Within a book, in the simplest form there are nothing but words. We had previously had an idea for our own version of ‘Google’ or ‘Ask Jeeves.’ There infront of us was the idea, a ‘search engine.’

The equivalent of the Avian Police’s helicop-ters. Throughout our work for this project we developed a bit of a victorian theme, and the search engine idea was initially a victorian gentleman named Alfred who would look for things. Alfred was an old character we had thought up before this project and he seemed to almost fit the bill. Through our devlopment ‘Alfred’ soon became ‘Bobby.’ We felt that the ‘Bobby’ search engine allowed the user to become an avian police officer, or victorian police man themselves, physically searching the text through the means of torch light. We really liked the simple imagery of the glowing text, and the grey on black colour scheme as we felt it encompassed the feel of the city at night from the sky. The white text reminded us of heat camera images from ‘police, cam-era, action’ programmes, or an old policeman torch running across a brick wall by the bank of a canal.

Chapter II: The panoptic sublime

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The original ‘Alfred’ who eventually made way for ‘Bobby.’

The original thinking behind the ‘Bobby’ search engine idea was ‘Alfred.’ A victorian themed version of ‘Ask Jeeves.’ Alfred himself was a character designed for a personal project for Tangent Studios. But he soon inspired the creation of Bobby as we developed him, incorporating the role of an avian policeman, but with the obvious restrictions of a Victorian police officer.

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We looked to reflect the role of the Avian Police using simple imagery, such as the glow of a torch.

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“The man whocan dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world. “

Oscar Wilde

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“The man whocan dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world. “

London as a repetitive cycle was the starting point for our perception of this chapter. The idea that Londoners make a mess, daily and recurrently. This mess is then

consistently scooped up and discarded of, commonly by people who didn’t contribute to making the mess, as they were sleeping after being up all night clearing it up. It is not always clear where day stops and night begins, and as London progresses further and further towards a twenty four hour city this line blurs further. Obviously London is far cleaner now then it was in the very distant past, but where is the time to clean the city going to come from if we spend longer dirtying it. The inspiration behind the table idea is that of our dirt, our obsession with making it outweighing our desire to clean it up, leading to it therefore obscuring certain aspects of life. In our interpretation of this we developed an idea consisting of a custom built table with the chapter spread across the top, encased in perspex and covered, partially, not

fully in iron filings. The half emptiness of the perspex enclosure there to represent London being not totally condemnded to filth. The iron filings act as a nuisance as you try to rid them from your sight with your magnet filled sponge to read the chapter beneath them. It is ofcourse possible to still read the text, but you will sooner or later have to move the iron filings again to continue your reading of it. This is our way of creating the monotonous and repetitive daily cycle of the accumulation and removal of Londons mess. The idea originally began as a table top piece that would be laid out, smeared with dirt, and then cleaned. but the encasing of a permanent feature we felt better fitted the idea of London as a permanent (the table) but its contents changing (the iron filings). It also allowed us to flirt more with our focus on the victorian era. Which was developing more and more as we looked to create more individual objects that had a collectors, or nostalgic feel to them.

Chapter III: Aborigines & unfortunates

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This is the original mock up idea for the iron filings table top. This stage came after the initial idea to merely dirty a table obscuring text, and to then wipe it clean. But was before the decision to make a permanent table feature to fully portray the rotary, cycle side of the idea, and just as importantly, the unachievability of the cleaning of the table.

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We had a look at victorian tables, as well as wood colours and tones, we were most drawn to the tall, thin tables, with spindled legs and a nar-row top. Not only did the shape allow an attractive frame for laying text but it also gave the feel of a purpose built table, not merely our idea atop of an existing pieceof furniture.

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, vendiat utpat aliquat, velent nibh etuerit aliqui te dolore vent landc

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The night cleaners of London don’t think of themselves as cleaners. They’re sure, or at least they fervently hope, that stooping for a living while the rest of the city sleeps is just a temporary phase. The majority are from Africa. Memories of butchered relatives and hazardous exoduses are lodged raw in their minds. But

they also harbour lofty ambitions of becoming retail champs and shipping magnates. In their few off-hours they watch CNN and pore over the international finance pages of the broadsheets hoping to glean information that they can use when they return to Africa to set up small import-export businesses. Few succeed.The London that they see is a negative universe of public assaults and of swaggering, feral kids. An ungodly realm of out-of-towners on the lash, out-of-control girls spewing obscenities and undercooked kebabs. A mental asylum where the pursuit of idiot plea-sures has become, unknown to most of the people who live there, a fatal addiction. They dream of another place, an over-the-rainbow utopia which, more often than not, turns out to be...

“Dubai. It is so lovely in Dubai. I have never myself been. But a friend of mine tells me they have 300-acre ski resorts there. Yes, imagine! And beautiful man-made lights. And the grass is good too. Very green. A military place, you say? Certainly. Perhaps they should have martial law in England. The laws are too soft here.”

Each cleaner is an underpaid, under-liveried King Canute trying to push back the tide of over-consumption to which the city is prey. They talk with disbelief at the six tonnes of waste that the West End hotels produce each day of the week. They can rattle down a largely deserted street in their refuse trucks and know, according to which micro-section of the London borough they’re in, how overflowing the pavements will be by 1 or 3am.Pleasure, far from being spontaneous and unpredictable, is easily calibrated. The end of each month is the worst time: Londoners are pay-check flush, waving wads of £20 notes or flashing their credit cards, celebrating their temporary liquidity by pissing and upchucking everywhere. The cleaners, present at a party from which they feel estranged, shake their heads at such ritualised abandon. The city’s night-life seems to them to be a collective insanity. They see party goers as nocturnal creatures, reckless beasts who slip into the city under cover of darkness to cause mayhem.Cleaners strive to make early-commute Londoners think that there has been an over-night snowstorm. Every day should be a new day, a tabula rasa rather than a palimpsest. They try to abolish all traces of the previous day. If the city is a text, then cleaners do their best to erase the jottings and doodles that have been inscribed on it.They operate in the aftermath. After the gold rush. They are instant archaeologists, rap-id-response stoopers for syringes, fag ends, gig stubs, demonstration placards. They’re also alive to the present and future immiseration of the city, gazing impotently at an anti-spectacle of ragged trolls snouting through bins for half-smoked cigarettes and half-eaten burgers; homeless guys clambering into the bottle-recycling skips to sleep; crazies launching themselves head-first at brick walls. It’s left to them to mop up after suicidees jump from high rises or deranged junkies hurl infant children from balconies. A hard-ened lot, not prone to sentiment, few can stop themselves holding back tears when they recall the first time they arrived on such a scene and were confronted with dispersed chunks of blood, bones and crushed cloth.Refuse collectors are exterior designers. Over time they cultivate a keen sense of what is an appropriate beauty for the dishevelled streets they roam. Some weeds they’ll let go on the grounds that they give a pleasantly verdant feel to pavements. Coke cans on junction boxes are intolerable though. “We see things in a way that other Londoners don’t,” one

Clapham collector tells me. “We look at recesses, at the edges of things and under things too. When there’s a busy junction and there are railings to stop people crossing the road very often you’ll find immediately below the railings a build up of dust and detritus with a hard crust on it. It’s because a sweeper hasn’t attended to it; we have to run a shovel down the side. Sometimes, when I’m on holiday - like when I was in Florida with my wife - I said to her ‘Look at the filth on the streets!’

“You need to be able to smile on a nightshift. So people know you wish them well and so that they wish you well. And of course you have a laugh sometimes; like when you see some guy go into pub and emerge four hours later, with a girl on his arm, or tripping and totally bladdered. Or when you see people who have lost their keys shinning up to get into their flats. But for the most part we become the street, the blank architecture. We’re there in the same way as a lamp post is there. We’re just part of the furniture.”Aborigines. That’s what Papa, one of the cleaners at Tottenham Court Road station, calls the tens of thousands of commuters who skelter past him as he sweeps the Underground floors. He suspects they may belong to another civilisation. Racing, frowning, dashing - always in flight to some profoundly important destination. Even the girls with scanty dresses or the mascara-clad boys out to pout at Nag Nag Nag seem to be in a rush. Their speed makes them, in his eyes, insubstantial. Hollowed men and women. “They are ghosts,” he announces, “Dead spirits.”But Papa is no reverse snob. He knows and feels all too acutely the pain of his fellow workers: “We are The Unfortunates.” They are students whose money has run out, fam-ily men with dodgy visas trying to support their wives and children back in Ghana, un-skilled guys trying to make a go of things in the city. They’re all too poor to travel to work by tube - the private company that employs them doesn’t offer discount tickets - so they arrive on bus. During the winter, it’s common for them not to see any daylight at all: they return home from their night shifts at 7.30am, fall asleep until 4pm, only to return to work in darkness.

The cleaners can’t afford not to be disciplined. They apply method and rigour into get-ting through the night. The thought of it stretching on endlessly is painful, so in their minds they lay it on a chopping board and slice it into sensible portions, navigable spin cycles of thirty or sixty or ninety minutes. They regard litter not as a sign of the city’s opulence or as an assertion of its teeming liveliness, but as evidence of Londoners’ lack of focus and proportion. They watch with bemusement and sometimes disgust as young men and, most horrifically in their eyes, young women totter the platforms in a holler-ing, pissed-up blur. Who, they wonder, are really the lowly ones: us diligents trying to save up for a two-bedroom semi in Southwark, or these cackling short-skirts who cannot even keep their breasts hidden?This temporary pan-African community clings together for comfort. Its members - from Togo, Nigeria and Ghana - can be found in areas marked ‘No Entry’, in rooms little big-ger than broom cupboards, knocking back one water-dispenser beaker after another to combat the sweltering conditions caused by faulty heating. They listen and add to under-ground information networks, many of them comprised of gossip masquerading as fact, about fresh passport scams, family-benefit concessions the government has introduced, new contractors who offer cleaning recruits an extra week’s holiday each year. They heap good tidings on their colleagues who found a tenner or picked up a mobile phone near one of the tracks. Football, particularly their adoration for Arsenal’s Thierry Henry (“He is like an emperor”), also unites them.Mostly, though, it is a low-simmer sadness that they have in common. Some are get-

ting old, beyond the age when they could imagine another more lustrous future ahead of them. They feel that those few Londoners who notice them presume they are illiter-ate and not worthy of respect. Night time, they know, is for lying down, not for bending down to pick up other peoples’ trash. The past-midnight subway, often as noisy as the African market towns from which they hail, on account of the cross-roar of computer technicians, escalator repairers and track workers, can also fall silent suddenly. And it’s then that they begin to hear noises; to spot, fleeing away from them into a distant tunnel, the ghosts of their former selves.

“I think London would collapse if the cleaners would go on strike for just one day. If they were radical the whole of London would be a mess. ‘They’ means not just the men that clean the Underground, but the streets and the toilets too. Without them you’d see one big mess.”

London’s cleaners don’t exist. Those sleeping take their work for granted. Even those who do see them scuttling across roads in their overalls and starchy, non-flammable uniforms tend to look straight through them. Night time is all about glamour these days,

its promise and its most heady realisation. But there’s nothing glamorous about clean-ers. They may as well be dead. They certainly appear to be only half-alive. In they creak, pushing distractedly at the revolving doors of the sleek corporate towers where they labour. They’re sweat-glazed from rushing across town. Some have had to cut the last few minutes of their evening law classes in order to clock on promptly; others have come from launderette or corner-store jobs; others have been on the phone for hours desper-ately trying to get someone to look after their sick kids for them. They’re exhausted by the time they arrive. By the time they finish, they’re utterly spent.London’s cleaners don’t exist. Some, employed by violently penny-pinching sub-sub-contractors, are illegal migrants whose names are not to be found on any official fi-nancial records. They have no recourse to the law if parts of the salaries are randomly docked, or if they get hurt because of shoddy safety equipment, or if they are sexually harassed. So they keep their heads down, their lips tightly shut. Always, even though they’re doing jobs no one else wants, lifting up to 750 bins on each floor, they feel as if they are interlopers. Those filing into the HSBC building near Canary Wharf have their bags checked as they go in and as they leave. Their movements are tracked and moni-tored by banks of cameras which are operated by a control centre in the basement.Late-working office staff do not look at them though. In shared lifts, they peer at their feet or suddenly feel an urge to start Blackberrying colleagues. Night time, even in AC’d corporate spaces, brings them into unexpected contact with the kinds of civilians their work insulates them from during daytime. They feel tarnished, a little afraid, awkward. Some, the cleaners are convinced, regard them as no better than the rubbish they pick

up or hoover. They rarely smile, or say hello, or seem to have any inkling that the green-dungareed men and women beside them were once small businessmen themselves, as-piring politicians chased out of their home countries by blood-lusting guerrillas, junior schoolteachers who taught orphaned children to read books.The cleaners themselves do look around, even more slyly than the cameras tailing them. The younger ones comb the open-plan offices for desks under which, much to the annoy-ance of their supervisors, they can squat and yellow-highlight passages from structural engineering textbooks. Others peer at the photographs that line the walls and show what the building looked like at different stages of the construction process. They wonder: do the CEOs here - those who earn £2680 rather than £5 an hour, those who are driven in by chauffeurs rather than slash-seated public transport, those who have vintage wines and DVDs in their offices and who will receive golden handshakes when they leave - do these captains of industry regard us as part of that process? Will anyone commemorate the work we do? We the pensionless ones. We who are not even entitled to sick pay.And then, sometimes, as dawn is rising, the cleaners take a break from crumb-picking and mousetrap-shifting. Their night’s work is almost over. The offices are as clean as the hills and golf courses of the foreign kingdoms to which they dream of migrating. They stand up tall, proud of the reformations they have wrought. Just for a minute or two, they allow themselves the luxury of imagining that they are the shirt-tucked, chauffeur-driven Masters of the Universe who lord it over the snooty pen-pushers and keyboard-dabbers whose garbage they have spent the last seven hours collecting. “Clear out your desks and leave!” they fantasise of declaring.They wander over to the windows. Light is flooding in, and they feel their spirits rise. They crack a few jokes, whip out their flashy mobile phones (“Hey! Mr Nana from Gha-na! Say cheese!”), and take snaps of each other. Then they’ll look out over the strange multinational island outside: the helipads; the Millennium Dome; the River Thames speckled with private boats; the top of Canary Wharf. They know it’s a republic in which they work, but do not live. They know they are but temporary guests.Still, for a moment or two, they are struck by the hard, lunar beauty of it all. There, in the distance, is what’s left of last night’s full moon; it reminds them of nights long ago, thousands of miles away, nights when they kissed their lovers and made solemn prom-ises to always be true, nights when they looked up at and vowed that life would one day be different. They focus their viewfinders and take a photo of a bridge on the horizon. Where does it go? It’s a question that nags them all day.

NIGHT CLEANERS


they also harbour lofty ambitions of becoming retail champs and shipping magnates. In their few off-hours they watch CNN and pore over the international finance pages of the broadsheets hoping to glean information that they can use when they return to Africa to set up small import-export businesses. Few succeed.

The London that they see is a negative universe of public assaults and of swaggering, feral kids. An ungodly realm of out-of-towners on the lash, out-of-control girls spewing obscenities and undercooked kebabs. A mental asylum where the pursuit of idiot plea-sures has become, unknown to most of the people who live there, a fatal addiction. They dream of another place, an over-the-rainbow utopia which, more often than not, turns out to be...


Each cleaner is an underpaid, under-liveried King Canute trying to push back the tide of over-consumption to which the city is prey. They talk with disbelief at the six tonnes of waste that the West End hotels produce each day of the week. They can rattle down a largely deserted street in their refuse trucks and know, according to which micro-section of the London borough they’re in, how overflowing the pavements will be by 1 or 3am.Pleasure, far from being spontaneous and unpredictable, is easily calibrated. The end of each month is the worst time: Londoners are pay-check flush, waving wads of £20 notes or flashing their credit cards, celebrating their temporary liquidity by pissing and upchucking everywhere. The cleaners, present at a party from which they feel estranged, shake their heads at such ritualised abandon. The city’s night-life seems to them to be a collective insanity. They see party goers as nocturnal creatures, reckless beasts who slip into the city under cover of darkness to cause mayhem.

Cleaners strive to make early-commute Londoners think that there has been an over-night snowstorm. Every day should be a new day, a tabula rasa rather than a palimpsest. They try to abolish all traces of the previous day. If the city is a text, then cleaners do their best to erase the jottings and doodles that have been inscribed on it.They operate in the aftermath. After the gold rush. They are instant archaeologists, rap-id-response stoopers for syringes, fag ends, gig stubs, demonstration placards. They’re also alive to the present and future immiseration of the city, gazing impotently at an anti-spectacle of ragged trolls snouting through bins for half-smoked cigarettes and half-eaten burgers; homeless guys clambering into the bottle-recycling skips to sleep; crazies launching themselves head-first at brick walls. It’s left to them to mop up after suicidees jump from high rises or deranged junkies hurl infant children from balconies. A hard-ened lot, not prone to sentiment, few can stop themselves holding back tears when they recall the first time they arrived on such a scene and were confronted with dispersed chunks of blood, bones and crushed cloth.

Refuse collectors are exterior designers. Over time they cultivate a keen sense of what is an appropriate beauty for the dishevelled streets they roam. Some weeds they’ll let go on the grounds that they give a pleasantly verdant feel to pavements. Coke cans on junction boxes are intolerable though. “We see things in a way that other Londoners don’t,” one Clapham collector tells me. “We look at recesses, at the edges of things and under things too. When there’s a busy junction and there are railings to stop people crossing the road very often you’ll find immediately below the railings a build up of dust and detritus with a hard crust on it. It’s because a sweeper hasn’t attended to it; we have to run a shovel down the side. Sometimes, when I’m on holiday - like when I was in Florida with my wife - I said to her ‘Look at the filth on the streets!’

“You need to be able to smile on a nightshift. So people know you wish them well and so that they wish you well. And of course you have a laugh sometimes; like when you see some guy go into pub and emerge four hours later, with a girl on his arm, or tripping and totally bladdered. Or when you see people who have lost their keys shinning up to get into their flats. But for the most part we become the street, the blank architecture. We’re there in the same way as a lamp post is there. We’re just part of the furniture.”Aborigines. That’s what Papa, one of the cleaners at Tottenham Court Road station, calls the tens of thousands of commuters who skelter past him as he sweeps the Underground floors. He suspects they may belong to another civilisation. Racing, frowning, dashing - always in flight to some profoundly important destination. Even the girls with scanty dresses or the mascara-clad boys out to pout at Nag Nag Nag seem to be in a rush. Their speed makes them, in his eyes, insubstantial. Hollowed men and women. “They are ghosts,” he announces, “Dead spirits.”But Papa is no reverse snob. He knows and feels all too acutely the pain of his fellow workers: “We are The Unfortunates.” They are students whose money has run out, fam-ily men with dodgy visas trying to support their wives and children back in Ghana, un-skilled guys trying to make a go of things in the city. They’re all too poor to travel to work by tube - the private company that employs them doesn’t offer discount tickets - so they arrive on bus. During the winter, it’s common for them not to see any daylight at all: they return home from their night shifts at 7.30am, fall asleep until 4pm, only to return to work in darkness.

The cleaners can’t afford not to be disciplined. They apply method and rigour into get-ting through the night. The thought of it stretching on endlessly is painful, so in their minds they lay it on a chopping board and slice it into sensible portions, navigable spin cycles of thirty or sixty or ninety minutes. They regard litter not as a sign of the city’s opulence or as an assertion of its teeming liveliness, but as evidence of Londoners’ lack of focus and proportion. They watch with bemusement and sometimes disgust as young men and, most horrifically in their eyes, young women totter the platforms in a holler-ing, pissed-up blur. Who, they wonder, are really the lowly ones: us diligents trying to save up for a two-bedroom semi in Southwark, or these cackling short-skirts who cannot even keep their breasts hidden?This temporary pan-African community clings together for comfort. Its members - from Togo, Nigeria and Ghana - can be found in areas marked ‘No Entry’, in rooms little big-ger than broom cupboards, knocking back one water-dispenser beaker after another to combat the sweltering conditions caused by faulty heating. They listen and add to under-ground information networks, many of them comprised of gossip masquerading as fact, about fresh passport scams, family-benefit concessions the government has introduced, new contractors who offer cleaning recruits an extra week’s holiday each year. They heap

good tidings on their colleagues who found a tenner or picked up a mobile phone near one of the tracks. Football, particularly their adoration for Arsenal’s Thierry Henry (“He is like an emperor”), also unites them.Mostly, though, it is a low-simmer sadness that they have in common. Some are get-ting old, beyond the age when they could imagine another more lustrous future ahead of them. They feel that those few Londoners who notice them presume they are illiter-ate and not worthy of respect. Night time, they know, is for lying down, not for bending down to pick up other peoples’ trash. The past-midnight subway, often as noisy as the African market towns from which they hail, on account of the cross-roar of computer technicians, escalator repairers and track workers, can also fall silent suddenly. And it’s then that they begin to hear noises; to spot, fleeing away from them into a distant tunnel, the ghosts of their former selves.


London’s cleaners don’t exist. Those sleeping take their work for granted. Even those who do see them scuttling across roads in their overalls and starchy, non-flammable uniforms tend to look straight through them. Night time is all about glamour these days, its promise and its most heady realisation. But there’s nothing glamorous about clean-

ers. They may as well be dead. They certainly appear to be only half-alive. In they creak, pushing distractedly at the revolving doors of the sleek corporate towers where they labour. They’re sweat-glazed from rushing across town. Some have had to cut the last few minutes of their evening law classes in order to clock on promptly; others have come from launderette or corner-store jobs; others have been on the phone for hours desper-ately trying to get someone to look after their sick kids for them. They’re exhausted by the time they arrive. By the time they finish, they’re utterly spent.London’s cleaners don’t exist. Some, employed by violently penny-pinching sub-sub-contractors, are illegal migrants whose names are not to be found on any official fi-nancial records. They have no recourse to the law if parts of the salaries are randomly docked, or if they get hurt because of shoddy safety equipment, or if they are sexually harassed. So they keep their heads down, their lips tightly shut. Always, even though they’re doing jobs no one else wants, lifting up to 750 bins on each floor, they feel as if they are interlopers. Those filing into the HSBC building near Canary Wharf have their bags checked as they go in and as they leave. Their movements are tracked and moni-tored by banks of cameras which are operated by a control centre in the basement.Late-working office staff do not look at them though. In shared lifts, they peer at their feet or suddenly feel an urge to start Blackberrying colleagues. Night time, even in AC’d

corporate spaces, brings them into unexpected contact with the kinds of civilians their work insulates them from during daytime. They feel tarnished, a little afraid, awkward. Some, the cleaners are convinced, regard them as no better than the rubbish they pick up or hoover. They rarely smile, or say hello, or seem to have any inkling that the green-dungareed men and women beside them were once small businessmen themselves, as-piring politicians chased out of their home countries by blood-lusting guerrillas, junior schoolteachers who taught orphaned children to read books.

The cleaners themselves do look around, even more slyly than the cameras tailing them. The younger ones comb the open-plan offices for desks under which, much to the annoy-ance of their supervisors, they can squat and yellow-highlight passages from structural engineering textbooks. Others peer at the photographs that line the walls and show what the building looked like at different stages of the construction process. They wonder: do the CEOs here - those who earn £2680 rather than £5 an hour, those who are driven in by chauffeurs rather than slash-seated public transport, those who have vintage wines and DVDs in their offices and who will receive golden handshakes when they leave - do these captains of industry regard us as part of that process? Will anyone commemorate the work we do? We the pensionless ones. We who are not even entitled to sick pay.And then, sometimes, as dawn is rising, the cleaners take a break from crumb-picking and mousetrap-shifting. Their night’s work is almost over. The offices are as clean as the hills and golf courses of the foreign kingdoms to which they dream of migrating. They stand up tall, proud of the reformations they have wrought. Just for a minute or two, they allow themselves the luxury of imagining that they are the shirt-tucked, chauffeur-driven Masters of the Universe who lord it over the snooty pen-pushers and keyboard-dabbers whose garbage they have spent the last seven hours collecting. “Clear out your desks and leave!” they fantasise of declaring.

They wander over to the windows. Light is flooding in, and they feel their spirits rise. They crack a few jokes, whip out their flashy mobile phones (“Hey! Mr Nana from Gha-na! Say cheese!”), and take snaps of each other. Then they’ll look out over the strange multinational island outside: the helipads; the Millennium Dome; the River Thames speckled with private boats; the top of Canary Wharf. They know it’s a republic in which they work, but do not live. They know they are but temporary guests.Still, for a moment or two, they are struck by the hard, lunar beauty of it all. There, in the distance, is what’s left of last night’s full moon; it reminds them of nights long ago, thousands of miles away, nights when they kissed their lovers and made solemn prom-ises to always be true, nights when they looked up at and vowed that life would one day be different. They focus their viewfinders and take a photo of a bridge on the horizon. Where does it go? It’s a question that nags them all day.

NIGHT CLEANERS



The London that they see is a negative universe of public assaults and of swaggering, feral kids. An ungodly realm of out-of-towners on the lash, out-of-control girls spewing obscenities and undercooked kebabs. A mental asylum where the pursuit of idiot plea-sures has become, unknown to most of the people who live there, a fatal addiction. They dream of another place, an over-the-rainbow utopia which, more often than not, turns out to be...



Cleaners strive to make early-commute Londoners think that there has been an over-night snowstorm. Every day should be a new day, a tabula rasa rather than a palimpsest. They try to abolish all traces of the previous day. If the city is a text, then cleaners do their best to erase the jottings and doodles that have been inscribed on it.They operate in the aftermath. After the gold rush. They are instant archaeologists, rap-id-response stoopers for syringes, fag ends, gig stubs, demonstration placards. They’re also alive to the present and future immiseration of the city, gazing impotently at an anti-spectacle of ragged trolls snouting through bins for half-smoked cigarettes and half-eaten burgers; homeless guys clambering into the bottle-recycling skips to sleep; crazies launching themselves head-first at brick walls. It’s left to them to mop up after suicidees jump from high rises or deranged junkies hurl infant children from balconies. A hard-ened lot, not prone to sentiment, few can stop themselves holding back tears when they recall the first time they arrived on such a scene and were confronted with dispersed chunks of blood, bones and crushed cloth.

Refuse collectors are exterior designers. Over time they cultivate a keen sense of what is an appropriate beauty for the dishevelled streets they roam. Some weeds they’ll let go on the grounds that they give a pleasantly verdant feel to pavements. Coke cans on junction boxes are intolerable though. “We see things in a way that other Londoners don’t,” one Clapham collector tells me. “We look at recesses, at the edges of things and under things too. When there’s a busy junction and there are railings to stop people crossing the road very often you’ll find immediately below the railings a build up of dust and detritus with a hard crust on it. It’s because a sweeper hasn’t attended to it; we have to run a shovel down the side. Sometimes, when I’m on holiday - like when I was in Florida with my wife - I said to her ‘Look at the filth on the streets!’

“You need to be able to smile on a nightshift. So people know you wish them well and so that they wish you well. And of course you have a laugh sometimes; like when you see some guy go into pub and emerge four hours later, with a girl on his arm, or tripping and totally bladdered. Or when you see people who have lost their keys shinning up to get into their flats. But for the most part we become the street, the blank architecture. We’re there in the same way as a lamp post is there. We’re just part of the furniture.”Aborigines. That’s what Papa, one of the cleaners at Tottenham Court Road station, calls the tens of thousands of commuters who skelter past him as he sweeps the Underground floors. He suspects they may belong to another civilisation. Racing, frowning, dashing - always in flight to some profoundly important destination. Even the girls with scanty dresses or the mascara-clad boys out to pout at Nag Nag Nag seem to be in a rush. Their speed makes them, in his eyes, insubstantial. Hollowed men and women. “They are ghosts,” he announces, “Dead spirits.”

But Papa is no reverse snob. He knows and feels all too acutely the pain of his fellow workers: “We are The Unfortunates.” They are students whose money has run out, fam-ily men with dodgy visas trying to support their wives and children back in Ghana, un-skilled guys trying to make a go of things in the city. They’re all too poor to travel to work by tube - the private company that employs them doesn’t offer discount tickets - so they arrive on bus. During the winter, it’s common for them not to see any daylight at all: they return home from their night shifts at 7.30am, fall asleep until 4pm, only to return to work in darkness.

The cleaners can’t afford not to be disciplined. They apply method and rigour into get-ting through the night. The thought of it stretching on endlessly is painful, so in their minds they lay it on a chopping board and slice it into sensible portions, navigable spin cycles of thirty or sixty or ninety minutes. They regard litter not as a sign of the city’s opulence or as an assertion of its teeming liveliness, but as evidence of Londoners’ lack of focus and proportion. They watch with bemusement and sometimes disgust as young men and, most horrifically in their eyes, young women totter the platforms in a holler-ing, pissed-up blur. Who, they wonder, are really the lowly ones: us diligents trying to save up for a two-bedroom semi in Southwark, or these cackling short-skirts who cannot even keep their breasts hidden?

This temporary pan-African community clings together for comfort. Its members - from Togo, Nigeria and Ghana - can be found in areas marked ‘No Entry’, in rooms little big-ger than broom cupboards, knocking back one water-dispenser beaker after another to combat the sweltering conditions caused by faulty heating. They listen and add to under-ground information networks, many of them comprised of gossip masquerading as fact,

about fresh passport scams, family-benefit concessions the government has introduced, new contractors who offer cleaning recruits an extra week’s holiday each year. They heap good tidings on their colleagues who found a tenner or picked up a mobile phone near one of the tracks. Football, particularly their adoration for Arsenal’s Thierry Henry (“He is like an emperor”), also unites them.

Mostly, though, it is a low-simmer sadness that they have in common. Some are get-ting old, beyond the age when they could imagine another more lustrous future ahead of them. They feel that those few Londoners who notice them presume they are illiter-ate and not worthy of respect. Night time, they know, is for lying down, not for bending down to pick up other peoples’ trash. The past-midnight subway, often as noisy as the African market towns from which they hail, on account of the cross-roar of computer technicians, escalator repairers and track workers, can also fall silent suddenly. And it’s then that they begin to hear noises; to spot, fleeing away from them into a distant tunnel, the ghosts of their former selves.

“I think London would collapse if the cleaners would go on strike for just one day. If they were radical the whole of London would be a mess. ‘They’ means not just the men that clean the Underground, but the streets and the toilets too. Without them you’d see one

big mess.”London’s cleaners don’t exist. Those sleeping take their work for granted. Even those who do see them scuttling across roads in their overalls and starchy, non-flammable uniforms tend to look straight through them. Night time is all about glamour these days, its promise and its most heady realisation. But there’s nothing glamorous about clean-ers. They may as well be dead. They certainly appear to be only half-alive. In they creak, pushing distractedly at the revolving doors of the sleek corporate towers where they labour. They’re sweat-glazed from rushing across town. Some have had to cut the last few minutes of their evening law classes in order to clock on promptly; others have come from launderette or corner-store jobs; others have been on the phone for hours desper-ately trying to get someone to look after their sick kids for them. They’re exhausted by the time they arrive. By the time they finish, they’re utterly spent.

London’s cleaners don’t exist. Some, employed by violently penny-pinching sub-sub-contractors, are illegal migrants whose names are not to be found on any official fi-nancial records. They have no recourse to the law if parts of the salaries are randomly docked, or if they get hurt because of shoddy safety equipment, or if they are sexually harassed. So they keep their heads down, their lips tightly shut. Always, even though they’re doing jobs no one else wants, lifting up to 750 bins on each floor, they feel as if

they are interlopers. Those filing into the HSBC building near Canary Wharf have their bags checked as they go in and as they leave. Their movements are tracked and moni-tored by banks of cameras which are operated by a control centre in the basement.Late-working office staff do not look at them though. In shared lifts, they peer at their feet or suddenly feel an urge to start Blackberrying colleagues. Night time, even in AC’d corporate spaces, brings them into unexpected contact with the kinds of civilians their work insulates them from during daytime. They feel tarnished, a little afraid, awkward. Some, the cleaners are convinced, regard them as no better than the rubbish they pick up or hoover. They rarely smile, or say hello, or seem to have any inkling that the green-dungareed men and women beside them were once small businessmen themselves, as-piring politicians chased out of their home countries by blood-lusting guerrillas, junior schoolteachers who taught orphaned children to read books.

The cleaners themselves do look around, even more slyly than the cameras tailing them. The younger ones comb the open-plan offices for desks under which, much to the annoy-ance of their supervisors, they can squat and yellow-highlight passages from structural engineering textbooks. Others peer at the photographs that line the walls and show what the building looked like at different stages of the construction process. They wonder: do the CEOs here - those who earn £2680 rather than £5 an hour, those who are driven in by chauffeurs rather than slash-seated public transport, those who have vintage wines and DVDs in their offices and who will receive golden handshakes when they leave - do these captains of industry regard us as part of that process? Will anyone commemorate the work we do? We the pensionless ones. We who are not even entitled to sick pay.And then, sometimes, as dawn is rising, the cleaners take a break from crumb-picking and mousetrap-shifting. Their night’s work is almost over. The offices are as clean as the hills and golf courses of the foreign kingdoms to which they dream of migrating. They stand up tall, proud of the reformations they have wrought. Just for a minute or two, they allow themselves the luxury of imagining that they are the shirt-tucked, chauffeur-driven Masters of the Universe who lord it over the snooty pen-pushers and keyboard-dabbers whose garbage they have spent the last seven hours collecting. “Clear out your desks and leave!” they fantasise of declaring.

They wander over to the windows. Light is flooding in, and they feel their spirits rise. They crack a few jokes, whip out their flashy mobile phones (“Hey! Mr Nana from Gha-na! Say cheese!”), and take snaps of each other. Then they’ll look out over the strange multinational island outside: the helipads; the Millennium Dome; the River Thames speckled with private boats; the top of Canary Wharf. They know it’s a republic in which they work, but do not live. They know they are but temporary guests.

Still, for a moment or two, they are struck by the hard, lunar beauty of it all. There, in the distance, is what’s left of last night’s full moon; it reminds them of nights long ago, thousands of miles away, nights when they kissed their lovers and made solemn prom-ises to always be true, nights when they looked up at and vowed that life would one day be different. They focus their viewfinders and take a photo of a bridge on the horizon. Where does it go? It’s a question that nags them all day.

NIGHT CLEANERS



The London that they see is a negative universe of public assaults and of swaggering, feral kids. An ungodly realm of out-of-towners on the lash, out-of-control girls spewing obscenities and undercooked kebabs. A mental asylum where the pursuit of idiot pleasures has become, unknown to most of the people who live there, a fatal addiction. They dream of another place, an over-the-rainbow utopia which, more often than not, turns out to be...



Cleaners strive to make early-commute Londoners think that there has been an overnight snowstorm. Every day should be a new day, a tabula rasa rather than a palimpsest. They try to abolish all traces of the previous day. If the city is a text, then cleaners do their best to erase the jottings and doodles that have been inscribed on it.They operate in the aftermath. After the gold rush. They are instant archaeologists, rapid-response stoopers for syringes, fag ends, gig stubs, demonstration placards.

They’re also alive to the present and future immiseration of the city, gazing impotently at an anti-spectacle of ragged trolls snouting through bins for half-smoked cigarettes and half-eaten burgers; homeless guys clambering into the bottle-recycling skips to sleep; crazies launching themselves head-first at brick walls. It’s left to them to mop up after suicidees jump from high rises or deranged junkies hurl infant children from balconies. A hardened lot, not prone to sentiment, few can stop themselves holding back tears when they recall the first time they arrived on such a scene and were confronted with dispersed chunks of blood, bones and crushed cloth. Refuse collectors are exterior designers. Over time they cultivate a keen sense of what is an appropriate beauty for

the dishevelled streets they roam. Some weeds they’ll let go on the grounds that they give a pleasantly verdant feel to pavements. Coke cans on junction boxes are intolerable though. “We see things in a way that other Londoners don’t,” one Clapham collector tells me. “We look at recesses, at the edges of things and under things too. When there’s a busy junction and there are railings to stop people crossing the road very often you’ll find immediately below the railings a build up of dust and detritus with a hard crust on it. It’s because a sweeper hasn’t attended to it; we have to run a shovel down the side. Sometimes, when I’m on holiday - like when I was in Florida with my wife - I said to her ‘Look at the filth on the streets!’


But Papa is no reverse snob. He knows and feels all too acutely the pain of his fellow workers: “We are The Unfortunates.” They are students whose money has run out, family men with dodgy visas trying to support their wives and children back in Ghana, unskilled guys trying to make a go of things in the city. They’re all too poor to travel to work by tube - the private company that employs them doesn’t offer discount tickets - so they arrive on bus. During the winter, it’s common for them not to see any daylight at all: they return home from their night shifts at 7.30am, fall asleep until 4pm, only to return to work in darkness.

The cleaners can’t afford not to be disciplined. They apply method and rigour into getting through the night. The thought of it stretching on endlessly is painful, so in their minds they lay it on a chopping board and slice it into sensible portions, navigable spin cycles of thirty or sixty or ninety minutes. They regard litter not as a sign of the city’s opulence or as an assertion of its teeming liveliness, but as evidence of Londoners’ lack of focus and proportion. They watch with bemusement and sometimes disgust as young men and, most horrifically in their eyes, young women totter the platforms in a hollering, pissed-up blur. Who, they wonder, are really the lowly ones: us diligents trying to save up for a two-bedroom semi in Southwark, or these cackling short-skirts who cannot even keep their breasts hidden?

This temporary pan-African community clings together for comfort. Its members - from Togo, Nigeria and Ghana - can be found in areas marked ‘No Entry’, in rooms little bigger than broom cupboards, knocking back one water-dispenser beaker after another to combat the sweltering conditions caused by faulty heating. They listen and add to underground information networks, many of them comprised of gossip masquerading as fact, about fresh passport scams, family-benefit concessions the government has

introduced, new contractors who offer cleaning recruits an extra week’s holiday each year. They heap good tidings on their colleagues who found a tenner or picked up a mobile phone near one of the tracks. Football, particularly their adoration for Arsenal’s Thierry Henry (“He is like an emperor”), also unites them.

Mostly, though, it is a low-simmer sadness that they have in common. Some are getting old, beyond the age when they could imagine another more lustrous future ahead of them. They feel that those few Londoners who notice them presume they are illiterate and not worthy of respect. Night time, they know, is for lying down, not for bending down to pick up other peoples’ trash. The past-midnight subway, often as noisy as the African market towns from which they hail, on account of the cross-roar of computer technicians, escalator repairers and track workers, can also fall silent suddenly. And it’s then that they begin to hear noises; to spot, fleeing away from them into a distant tunnel, the ghosts of their former selves.


London’s cleaners don’t exist. Those sleeping take their work for granted. Even those who do see them scuttling across roads in their overalls and starchy, non-flammable uniforms tend to look straight through them. Night time is all about glamour these days, its promise and its most heady realisation. But there’s nothing glamorous about cleaners. They may as well be dead. They certainly appear to be only half-alive. In they creak, pushing distractedly at the revolving doors of the sleek corporate towers where they labour. They’re sweat-glazed from rushing across town. Some have had to cut the last few minutes of their evening law classes in order to clock on promptly; others have come from launderette or corner-store jobs; others have been on the phone for hours desperately trying to get someone to look after their sick kids for them. They’re exhausted by the time they arrive. By the time they finish, they’re utterly spent.

London’s cleaners don’t exist. Some, employed by violently penny-pinching sub-sub-contractors, are illegal migrants whose names are not to be found on any official financial records. They have no recourse to the law if parts of the salaries are randomly docked, or if they get hurt because of shoddy safety equipment, or if they are sexually harassed. So they keep their heads down, their lips tightly shut. Always, even though they’re doing jobs no one else wants, lifting up to 750 bins on each floor, they feel as if they are interlopers. Those filing into the HSBC building near Canary Wharf have

their bags checked as they go in and as they leave. Their movements are tracked and monitored by banks of cameras which are operated by a control centre in the basement.Late-working office staff do not look at them though. In shared lifts, they peer at their feet or suddenly feel an urge to start Blackberrying colleagues. Night time, even in AC’d corporate spaces, brings them into unexpected contact with the kinds of civilians their work insulates them from during daytime. They feel tarnished, a little afraid, awkward. Some, the cleaners are convinced, regard them as no better than the rubbish they pick up or hoover. They rarely smile, or say hello, or seem to have any inkling that the green-dungareed men and women beside them were once small businessmen themselves, aspiring politicians chased out of their home countries by blood-lusting guerrillas, junior schoolteachers who taught orphaned children to read books.

The cleaners themselves do look around, even more slyly than the cameras tailing them. The younger ones comb the open-plan offices for desks under which, much to the annoyance of their supervisors, they can squat and yellow-highlight passages from structural engineering textbooks. Others peer at the photographs that line the walls and show what the building looked like at different stages of the construction process. They wonder: do the CEOs here - those who earn £2680 rather than £5 an hour, those who are driven in by chauffeurs rather than slash-seated public transport, those who have vintage wines and DVDs in their offices and who will receive golden handshakes when they leave - do these captains of industry regard us as part of that process? Will anyone commemorate the work we do? We the pensionless ones. We who are not even entitled to sick pay.

And then, sometimes, as dawn is rising, the cleaners take a break from crumb-picking and mousetrap-shifting. Their night’s work is almost over. The offices are as clean as the hills and golf courses of the foreign kingdoms to which they dream of migrating. They stand up tall, proud of the reformations they have wrought. Just for a minute or two, they allow themselves the luxury of imagining that they are the shirt-tucked, chauffeur-driven Masters of the Universe who lord it over the snooty pen-pushers and keyboard-dabbers whose garbage they have spent the last seven hours collecting. “Clear out your desks and leave!” they fantasise of declaring.

They wander over to the windows. Light is flooding in, and they feel their spirits rise. They crack a few jokes, whip out their flashy mobile phones (“Hey! Mr Nana from Ghana! Say cheese!”), and take snaps of each other. Then they’ll look out over the strange multinational island outside: the helipads; the Millennium Dome; the River Thames speckled with private boats; the top of Canary Wharf. They know it’s a republic in which they work, but do not live. They know they are but temporary guests.Still, for a moment or two, they are struck by the hard, lunar beauty of it all. There, in the distance, is what’s left of last night’s full moon; it reminds them of nights long ago, thousands of miles away, nights when they kissed their lovers and made solemn promises to always be true, nights when they looked up at and vowed that life would one day be different. They focus their viewfinders and take a photo of a bridge on the horizon. Where does it go? It’s a question that nags them all day.

NIGHT CLEANERS






















NIGHT CLEANERS





















They wander over to the windows. Light is flooding in, and they feel their spirits rise. They crack a few jokes, whip out their flashy mobile phones (“Hey! Mr Nana from Ghana! Say cheese!”), and take snaps of each other. Then they’ll look out over the strange multinational island outside: the helipads; the Millennium Dome; the River Thames speckled with private boats; the top of Canary Wharf. They know it’s a republic in which they work, but do not live. They know they are but temporary guests.

Still, for a moment or two, they are struck by the hard, lunar beauty of it all. There, in the distance, is what’s left of last night’s full moon; it reminds them of nights long ago, thousands of miles away, nights when they kissed their lovers and made solemn promises to always be true, nights when they looked up at and vowed that life would one day be different. They focus their viewfinders and take a photo of a bridge on the horizon. Where does it go? It’s a question that nags them all day.

NIGHT CLEANERS






















NIGHT CLEANERS






















NIGHT CLEANERS

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40 41

The night cleaners of London don’t think of themselves as cleaners. They’re sure, or at least they fervently hope, that stooping for a living while the rest of the city sleeps is just a temporary phase. The majority are from Africa. Memories of butchered relatives and hazardous exoduses are lodged raw

in their minds. But they also harbour lofty ambitions of becoming retail champs and shipping magnates. In their few off-hours they watch CNN and pore over the international finance pages of the broadsheets hoping to glean information that they can use when they return to Africa to set up small import-export businesses. Few succeed.















London’s cleaners don’t exist. Some, employed by violently penny-pinching sub-sub-contractors, are illegal migrants whose names are not to be found on any official financial records. They have no recourse to the law if parts of the salaries are randomly docked, or if they get hurt because of shoddy safety equipment, or if they are sexually harassed. So they keep their heads down, their lips tightly shut. Always, even though they’re doing jobs no one else wants, lifting up to 750 bins on each floor, they feel as

if they are interlopers. Those filing into the HSBC building near Canary Wharf have their bags checked as they go in and as they leave. Their movements are tracked and monitored by banks of cameras which are operated by a control centre in the basement.Late-working office staff do not look at them though. In shared lifts, they peer at their feet or suddenly feel an urge to start Blackberrying colleagues. Night time, even in AC’d corporate spaces, brings them into unexpected contact with the kinds of civilians their work insulates them from during daytime. They feel tarnished, a little afraid, awkward. Some, the cleaners are convinced, regard them as no better than the rubbish they pick up or hoover. They rarely smile, or say hello, or seem to have any inkling that the green-dungareed men and women beside them were once small businessmen themselves, aspiring politicians chased out of their home countries by blood-lusting guerrillas, junior schoolteachers who taught orphaned children to read books.




NIGHT CLEANERS

The night cleaners of London don’t think of themselves as cleaners. They’re sure, or at least they fervently hope, that stooping for a living while the rest of the city sleeps is just a temporary phase. The majority are from Africa. Memories of butchered relatives and hazardous exoduses are lodged raw

in their minds. But they also harbour lofty ambitions of becoming retail champs and shipping magnates. In their few off-hours they watch CNN and pore over the international finance pages of the broadsheets hoping to glean information that they can use when they return to Africa to set up small import-export businesses. Few succeed.















London’s cleaners don’t exist. Some, employed by violently penny-pinching sub-sub-contractors, are illegal migrants whose names are not to be found on any official financial records. They have no recourse to the law if parts of the salaries are randomly docked, or if they get hurt because of shoddy safety equipment, or if they are sexually harassed. So they keep their heads down, their lips tightly shut. Always, even though they’re doing jobs no one else wants, lifting up to 750 bins on each floor, they feel as

if they are interlopers. Those filing into the HSBC building near Canary Wharf have their bags checked as they go in and as they leave. Their movements are tracked and monitored by banks of cameras which are operated by a control centre in the basement.Late-working office staff do not look at them though. In shared lifts, they peer at their feet or suddenly feel an urge to start Blackberrying colleagues. Night time, even in AC’d corporate spaces, brings them into unexpected contact with the kinds of civilians their work insulates them from during daytime. They feel tarnished, a little afraid, awkward. Some, the cleaners are convinced, regard them as no better than the rubbish they pick up or hoover. They rarely smile, or say hello, or seem to have any inkling that the green-dungareed men and women beside them were once small businessmen themselves, aspiring politicians chased out of their home countries by blood-lusting guerrillas, junior schoolteachers who taught orphaned children to read books.




NIGHT CLEANERS

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“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,

nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Dr Seuss

42 43

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,

nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

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When you hear Samaritans you immediately think telephone, therefore we felt it impossible to ignore this iconic means of

communication and the relationship between the caller and the listener. Although Audio book is a readily available means of ‘reading’ a book, our idea attempted to further the availability of the text; making it available anywhere via telephone, with no need to store or carry the text with you in any form. As well as this, to highlight the fascinating transaction between two people that occurs when someone rings the samaritans. Sandhu talks in his book about a lot of callers ringing up and maintaining complete silence as the samaritan volunteers sit and wait. We looked to achieve the same effect as this in that when you call up, you are greeted with

the immediate beginning of the chapters, no introduction means you have to listen in order to understand. Although in the real experience of calling samaritans you would not be greeted like this, the idea is to both silence the caller but to also create the illusion of a help line, as if guidance is being given to you, and the chapter itself is advice to be listened to. The fact this is a non physical idea allowed us to play with some imagery for posters, looking at the samaritans iconic green, or toying with the ideas of moon shapes. The posters all come in pairs to represent the relationship between the caller and the listener, in particular the poster feature the green circle continues the project’s cycle theme: when you have the two halves, you then have the whole, the wheel. It also hints at the idea of somebody else helping make you feel whole again.

Chapter IV: An atlas of suffering

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020 8133 7603

Night Haunts, by Sukhdev Sandhu. Chapter IV. An Atlas of Suffering: Samaritans

020 8133 7603


Giamet iusto dolore te modit vent praesti siscilit wismolo bortisi tio odio

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020 8133 7603


020 8133 7603


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020 8133 7603

Night Haunts, by Sukhdev Sandhu. Chapter IV. An Atlas of Suffering: Samaritans Night Haunts, by Sukhdev Sandhu. Chapter IV. An Atlas of Suffering: Samaritans

020 8133 7603

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020 8133 7603


020 8133 7603

50 51

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For this chapter we actually had to look at something more obvious before we found something we liked. We discussed and lookied into various ideas, heat sensitive

lemon water and u.v ink, inks that react to sunlight. Eventually we were almost looking for things we thought would be cliche and ended up finding something we were far happier with then anything we invented trying to be clever. The idea was simple, to exorcise the book. We treated the chapter itself as a negative aspect of the book. We had previously been toying with the idea of having the text appear, or glow, but looking at it more obviously, we decided it had to infact be removed. We were inspired by simple paper animations such as Sesame streets alphabet animations. Creating the feel of the book actually being excorcised was quite a difficult task, uknowingly diving into the task we had laid before use we began shooting and animating the book without any plan or direction after an hour

we had next to nothing of any real worth, and were just getting very frustrated with the idea and eachother. So we stopped sat down and began the proccess properly, we started with researching other paper stop motions, or book animations, like the sesame street alphabet like I mentioned before. Following this we began to storyboard or ideas, eventually coming up with a final storyboard timeline which is displayed on the following pages, we thought the idea being some what obvious at first would be a problem, or too cliché to come out any good. But after a while shooting our way through the storyboard, the abstractness of what we were filming and the actions we were making the book perform, and the sculpting of the paper the outcome expanded upon itself in front of us, the filming proccess nearly took 4 hours, of maticulous slight adjustments and movements, cuts, and the odd bit of fire. It was all worth it, as we are really pleased with the result.

Chapter V: The war against terrors

We used all manner of techniques to create the ullusion of life within the pages.

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54 55



56 57

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Physically scribing the words from the book onto the bowl of a toilet was on a very small scale like affiliating with the flushers in the book. There was the smallest

possible sense of understanding gained from being face down in a toilet bowl for three hours. Stepping into someone elses shoes, no matter how large or little is another theme that began to cccur within this project. This newly developed theme coincided well with the existing ones, particularly London as a cycle and the idea of commuication and revealing the truth ot unheard. The idea behind the Flushers chapter was to get a sort of imaginery correspondance between the user/reader, and the flushers. You send questions down the toilet via a flush, and answers appear back. This continues back and forth, playing on the ideal of revealing a hidden side to a story from beneath the street and up from the sewers. With the creation of this conversation going on between the the pages of the chapter, using the toilet

as the communication device sending correspondence via the flush. The speed of the moving images shows the conversation going on, the stages in the chapter have different transition lengths in response two how we felt the pages felt, as if they were two people talking to eachother, if one was reasonable or if the other one was retorting at the others statement. This show’s again how temporary or fleeting our thought as city dwellers truly is, before reading this book I would never think about what ever goes down this toilet may be at some point passing by some unfortanate soul unblocking a heap of crap in a tunnel somewhere beneath the streets outside my house. This interconnecting feeling of something reaching right up inside where you live, and then travelling for hundreds of miles through thousands of others homes, all connected remotley, yet completely dissconnected watched over by the Flushers. How would a conversation feel like with some one inside your toilet? It would be like a “Flushback”.

Chapter VI: A partial burial

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It is very difficult to judge the difficulty of writing upon a toilet bowl until it is physically tried. It prooved very difficult. By revesing some pur-posefully recorded footage we were able to develop the effect of words not only being flushed away, but bein sent back up, from below.

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It took hours to copy the text from book to bowl, recording it all using our innovative tripod.w

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Our initial idea for the minicabs chapter was to infact focus on black cabs. We felt as though this chapter was aimed at specific people from inside

the book. It spoke about mini cab drivers as feeling like victims, of snobby black cab drivers, drunkern groups of men and women, teenagers, you name it. We interviewed a mini cab driver or two over the weeks we were researching and developing and all of the mini cab drivers said the same thing. This is where we decided in the begenning to perhaps make posters and advertise them in the flip down seats of black cabs. However we were a little worried about whether the message would be understood, visible, or getting to the right people. We developed the idea into who else might need to hear this story. Who else would be interested. We downloaded the forms required to become a cab driver in London and started blocking out the application sections with sections form the chapter in the book. This soon became a total re-design of the application forms to incorporate the entire chapter. It easily steered itself into this design as we expanded our thoughts, with research into the tfl and the Mayor of Londons’ mini-cab rape campaign, we downloaded reems and reems

of various forms, for appyling for different liscence types, different types of cars, all sorts of area licsences, times and prices. Within the chapter its not hard to pick up that Sukhdev sympathises with the mini-cab drivers a great deal, tearing into the party goers of London no end. So it’s hard to really grasp onto what he’s trying to say, is he documenting what he’s experiancing or is he picking sides and telling everyone to give mini-cab drivers a break. But unlike how the cars themselves are describe within the chapter as the black cabs have barriers for protection, and the mini-cabs are ungaurded. There is a greater barrier between the mini-cab driver and the passenger than that of a black cabbie, I often find on a trip home late at night the smallest attempt at conversation is silenced rapidly by the driver of the mini-cab, where as a black cabbie 80% will talk your ear off pleasently all the way home. I think we tried to convey this message of, burocracy and red tape, the barriers of emotion, language and racial conflicts, by creating these application forms. They cover up the information, they hide the questions and the answers, they tell you a story from the surface, but you don’t really know what should be there, what was underneath?

Chapter VII: Strange antennae

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MAYOR OF LONDON

CHR/007

Application Form for a London Private Hire Vehicle Operator’s licence Minicabs “The Georgian night was sustained by port,” declared HV Morton back in 1926. "The Victorian by champagne: this is the age of Clicquot." These days, nights in London are sustained by vodka and Red Bull. By reheated chunks of battered fish and greasy slabs of ketchup-laden shish kebab.

Who says so? The capital's mini-cab drivers; they're the ones who are forced to tissue and hose down the retched-up contents of those meals from their back seats. Like every motorist in London, each one is happy to rehearse a litany of complaints: speed bumps, congestion charges.

PLEASE NOTE: The drug dealers whose white powder turns the West End into a winter:: Wonderland every night. (PHV/101) However, their biggest gripe is (PHV/103)

o is always against the teenagers and kidults who vomit and kebabify their cars.Mini-cab drivers may hate many aspects of London.

(see Section C)

But they could never hate it as much as London appears to hate them. Passengers yell and curse at them. The Mayor's Transport for London office pastes

(PHV/108)

Guidance

the city's billboards with posters portraying them as rapists. Swashbuckling blockbusters at cinemas from Piccadilly to Staines are preceded with public information films that depict them as predators of the night, taxi terrorists. Then there are the black-cab drivers: the self-designated custodians of the city's soul blame mini-cab operators for undercutting prices, careering through streets haphazardly, and for opting out of the strict metropolitan

disciplinary codes to (PHV/102) which they themselves dedicated years of their lives. tfl.gov.uk/.tph General Information Mini cabs, and there are 45,000 licensed ones, may lack the regal, authoritative stature of black cabs, but it is they who sustain the contemporary London night. Without them, clubbers, partygoers and shift-workers would rely wholly on an erratic and seemingly non-existent night-bus system. Their offices are often found in cheaply-rented basements or at the top of flights of wilting lino'd

. Stairs. The smoke coming from the waiting drivers can be peasouper-dense and gives rise to the impression that these are dark dens, kindred mal-spirits of the language schools, pawn shops and

Please return completed forms to: Operator Licensing London Taxi and Private Hire Palestra, 4th Floor Green Zone 197 Blackfriars Rd London SE1 8NJ

LTPH use only

PHO/

SUKHDEV SANDHU

Night Haunts

A Journey Through The London Night

Ipsusto euis er se consequisis nos euisl ex et aliquip susciduisci etue duis aci exerci

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! !now in his forties, speaks of the night that he took a passenger, whose wife had just given birth at Whitechapel Hospital, back home to Forest Gate. The driver kept glancing at his rear-view mirror, convinced that he had seen the pock-faced man in the back seat before.

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Art? Vandalism? Skill? Nuisance? There appears to be a constant argument when it comes to graffiti and that was the inspiration for this piece.

Whether it’s graffiti artist throwing work up, and councils washing it down, or both police crack-downs and international competitions, it divides opinion. The chapter talks a lot about a constant battle, particularly between graffiti artists and the police of local council. One side will think of a way to stop or hinder the graffiti artist, and the other will come back with an answer, many of them see it as a challenge, a balancing act. Therefore the idea for this chapter is simple, the chapter has been laser cut into a box full of characters and words and it is for the viewer to physically

manage the relationship between one side of the argument and the other. Is the task to perfectly and evenly distribute the small words to create a harmonious resolution? Is it to fill one side, outweighting the opposition? Or is it simply to close the lid and leave it all lie. The scales are hidden in a box designed to look like it has been repeatedly painted and scrubbed clean to show this ongoing conflict between the painter and the cleaner. The box hides all of the words, and the scales themselves, as the battle is ongoing but not visible, you don’t see the graffiti artist spraying his work, as much as you don’t see the councils new measures for preventing graffiti. It is a behind closed doors, or more, a behind each others back friction that is constantly tipping its balance.

Chapter VIII: Fugitive texts

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The exterior of the box is designed to bear the signs of the repeated battle over the right to paint on anything.

The contents are concealed, this is because the argument is not often a face to face one. It is one of putting more paint on then they can get off. It is all inside the city, hidden and ongoing but like the graffiti artists themselves, you see their work, not them.

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“Anybody depending on somebody else’s gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.”

Zora Neale Hurston

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“Anybody depending on somebody else’s gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.”

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Fox’s were here first. And then we expanded our city and now it appears they are ‘turning up’ out of nowhere. Sandhu’s chapter on urban fox hunters suggests it is

our own faught for our infestation of foxs bexause it is infact us, who has infested their habitat. The original inspirationf or this piece was Asger Jorn and his book ‘Memoires.’ We really liked the idea that his book would erode and wear down others around it, so we turned this idea on itself and set about creating abook that would destroy itself over time. Aesthetically the colour of the sandpaper created a perfect link to the fox’s coat. The sandpaper iteself representing our own creation (our cities) inviting our own problems. The idea developed into a pack of sandpaper, canvas backed sanpaper featuring the chapter in sheets, which wear away at each other and can also now be used sepearately. The commercial packagain is designed to hint at a man made problem whilst all that materials inside are more or less natural: canvas, sand, paper etc. The fox sandpaper represents, our inner city mentality that until the problem comes to your door it’s not really a problem, we are very quick to offer up our opinions when it

comes to such subjects, wether we a for or against the culling of foxes in London. But if the problem was affecting ourselves directily I would assume that 90% of residents would opt for the quick fix, and extract the animals by any means possible, either through killing them or having them moved. Either way is not a qaulm to the house owner as long as the foxes are gone. And that is shown in the sandpaper, the packaging and what it represents, our response to a problem the instant purchase of a product to remedy our issue, going to B&Q to smooth out those few pieces defect wood around the house. Hiring a fox-hunter to rid the flower beds of London homes of the invading foxes. This peice full of metaphorical links, clearly the largest and core of the concept, is the sandpaper face down on top of the facing page of text. Just like that piece of sandpaper clearing up the loose edges around the house, clearing away the marking of dirt and decay, the fox hunter is roaming the city wiping clean our cities surfaces of the fox. As you move through the fox book the pages cling and rub against eachother slowly eating away at the printed text, untill the pages a wiped clean of the Fox-Hunter chapter.

Chapter IX: Contagion set free

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The sandpaper sheets and their sleeve. The sleeve was inspired by your average D.I.Y shop sandpaper packaginf and fits nicely with the matching imagery of the sandpaper itself. The box itself is also easily worn by the sandpaper suggesting that it is others who will be affected,

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Page numbers and a book like layout keep the back side of the sandpaper functional as a text designed to be read. Tnd the canvas material, as well as rhe hollow text (only the stroke is black) is designed to recieve ample wear and show it visibly whilst not completely dissapearing.

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The original, conventional book form sandpaper book. With a plan cover it is very similar looking to Asger Jorn’s book and didn’t suggest as to what was inside which we didn’t like. The text here is also visibly wearing but rather untidylily due to the paper weight and texture.

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The lantern idea is rather simple. In the victorian era barge’s were required to have navigation lights to let others know which way they were heading. And in the book

Sandhu interviews a barger and he talks all aboout his disliking of the introduction of technology. This got us thinking about tech-nology and what would have been thought of the introdution of ligthts in the 1800’s. We ran with the idea of using colour as a visual example of change. Not just this chapter, but the entire book is loosley based on navigation around the city and the use of lights between the years. And on the river would have been one of the strangest experiances to travel down through London night to do during

Victorian times, so to hear the Barger tell sto-ries of how still when the fogs sitting low on the water you can’t see more than a few feet in front of the boat. Its tell’s us how impor-tant the evolution of light and signalling has been to our capital, with the Thames being at the heart of Londons growth, our lantern represents the fundamentals of travelling along the river through the city. And transfers the feeling of the workers who have spent their lives working the Thames and how they feel about its proggression and development, with bitter thoughts of over modernisation of the docklands and banks, we feel the lantern shows exactly what Sukhdev was telling us about the Thames.

Chapter X: Ale always tastes good

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Printing on glass proved very difficult. Each pane had to be cleaned and not touched again until after ink had touched the surface. The text had also to be printed backwards on the inside of the pane in order for it to be readable when the candle light shonw through. It was important for us to use a real candle light and not electric to maintain some realism to our technology, old fashioned ways argument.

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Within the sleep technicians chapter, I kept on feeling a sense of intimacy and intricacy to the subject. From the personal lives

of these people being put on show to the technicians, why can’t these people sleep? Trying to help these wayward sleepers find some comfort. Then the technicians from the outside looking in at these “consumers” providing a service, keeping yourself separated from the customer must be coming trying at times. So this direction of thought is the way we went about coming up with ideas for this chapter, trying to replicate this series of colliding emotions from the separate parties, the actions that were being performed and the conversations being had. We tried to extract the essence of the narrative and transfer that into a physical interaction representing all these parts of the story. We noticed how the technicians and Sukhdev talked a great deal about the distractions that keep us awake at night, or the things we occupy ourselves with when we cant sleep. TV being a prominent

component of the capitals sleep disruption, so this is where the “star-viewer” 35mm viewer emerged from a series of prior ideas, including creating a series of VCR tapes, and the creation of circular “view-master” slides. The small 35mm viewer looks just like a small TV a perfect representation for the distracting device talked about so much in the chapter. The second part of the piece being the 35mm slides containing the chapter, these slides came about before the small TV viewer, as we thought that theres something so personal about negative film, or slides. Especially in nowadays, film is rarely used so when you do handle or view slides, or negatives, there old memories or childhood photos. When you look through a series of someone else slides, the physicality and the light passing through the image, creates a nostalgic and haunting feeling, as if this moment is stuck in time or your peering into someones life, almost as if you have some sort of spyglass to a parallel universe, and we thought this told the story of the relationship between Sukhdev, the Technicians, and the sleepless patients.

Chapter XI: Elliptical night

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All 69 slides were hand removed and replaced with text from the chapter. Coated in spray varnish to create a cloudy effect.

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Keep the Saith. This idea for the chapter about the Nuns of Tyburn revolves around a small bible like book on which the chapter is printed. However,

it is the long winded and elongated process of physically reaching the book that is what makes the idea interesting. Inspired by the ideas of chastity, sacred devotion to God, and being confined to a single place for nearly all of the weeks in a year. The tall post represents a divide between you, the person, and the contents of the safe. You have to observe through a specifc and purpose built construct, at a perfect perspecive, to

receive your goal, or your reward of the book. This idea of perspective was one of the first responses we had to the text as a whole. We battled to develop it into something effective, it began with the idea of having simply text on a wall, or lamp-post that was ledgible only through a similar bincoulared pillar. We then heightened the level of interaction and added other stages to the process. The pillar’s appearance itself, we hope relates with our continuing victorian feel, in a sort of fictional, Sherlock Holmes way, it stands, towering, like an odd, brilliant invention.

Chapter XII: Midnight pilgrims

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The original cardboard mock up for the Nuns pillar, using the same binoculars, and the same width and depth dimension. We opted to make the pillar much larger as we wanted it to act as a physical barrier, and also look and feel like an imposing force, almost like another person, giving to the user a sense of restriction, and to the pillar it self an air of strength or power.

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The first mock up of the Nun book. Including a noose page divider.

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Altering the appearance of the safe.

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Here is show

n the hours of work that w

ent into creating the wooden colum

n to incase the binoculars for the Nuns’ piece.

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Media

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Business cards printed on acetate.

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Our framed icon poster design screen printed. We used this design a lot as it had a victorian feel, it encompassed all of our pieces and left a litle bit to the imagination.

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Home page screen shot from our Night Haunts project website.

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www.twelve-vii.co.uk

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