The Occupy Tour: an anti-capitalist tour of The City of London

Finally I have got round to taking The Occupy Tour, a tour that is based upon the financial crisis and London's role within the historical development and current state of global capitalism. If that sounds like a lot of digest, you're right it is, but it all boils down to an anti-capitalism tour, more or less, and one that proved to be very well attended too.

The tour started on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, the site that the Occupy protesters took after being prevented from occupying the London Stock Exchange back in 2011. I remember standing on these same steps back then and listening to the geographer David Harvey speaking to a large crowd on the relation of capital to city space and how he strongly supported the Occupy initiatives that were taking place worldwide. I think his writings should be worth looking at in relation to both this tour and The Tour of Tours more generally as he does go into the contested functions of public space quite considerably. This tour began not with a reading from Harvey, however, but instead with a reading from the letters of St Paul about possessions and money, a reading that addressed, rather aptly, the church's compromised role in finally supporting the eviction of the protesters.

The tour made its way from point to point taking shelter whenever possible from the rain. It should not be a shock in London to have to deal with a bit of rain when on a tour, but it has been a particularly damp time recently and I have the feeling I been enduring one sodden tour after another of late. Between stops we were encouraged to play "Spot the Tax Dodger". Predictably enough Starbucks was on the list and so too was Boots who, we were told, have assigned their corporate headquarters to a post office box in Switzerland, a move detailed in the UK Uncut campaign. 

We stopped outside many buildings that belonged to the different people and institutions who, we were told, were in their own ways responsible for the crisis. Our two guides took it in turns to explain the roles each of these different institutions played such as here describing the evolution of the Lord Mayor of London's office. This was quite interesting but what gave the tour an extra twist were the responses of the people inside the buildings. Here, we had someone opening the door and asking the tour to move away. We did... about 10 meters to the right, so that we were now assembled in front of another of their doors. The man then banged futilely on this other door from the inside to show his displeasure, but the street belonged to the crowd so the quotes from then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2006 and 2007 on the wisdom of light touch regulation of financial services, kept on flowing.

We came to the headquarters of the Rothschild family's businesses in London and heard how they built their empire, in part, through acting as the financier of national war bonds. Their present status is less important, we were told, as they had relaxed into being merely super wealthy and producing hyper-expensive wine in their vineyards in France. Now I think of it, I was once shown a large number of bottles of their wine whilst taking a truly surreal tour around the Reignwood Wine collection in Beijing. I might have to repeat that wine tour this spring when I will again be in Beijing so I can cover it here on the blog.

Once again we came across disapproving security guards speaking into their radios and not quite knowing what to do with us. Finally a colleague of his emerged and said, "No photographs, private property." It was the best he could come up with, a symbolic way of saying, "We don't like you, you are not welcome."  

They used a lot of laminated A3 pictures to illustrate their stories, such as this one on the founding of the stock exchange. I'm quite familiar with this use of cards having seen it on many other tours but the one thing that was more novel and which I rather liked was their hats. The rest of their clothing was relatively normal and would not attract much attention but their hats gave the whole tour a theatrical, not to say sartorial, lift. Top hats function as historical references that reminded me of the Victorian and Georgian eras, which was quite appropriate with this tour in which the past and present constantly intermingled. This mixing of time frames was, in fact, both the tours strength and weakness. It allowed them to make connections and explain how we got here, however, it was at the same time so scattered that it was impossible to extract a clear argument or thread from the tour, which instead felt like a catalogue of annoying and unjust things about the City of London.

The two of them performed well as a double act; here they are talking about Monty Norman the Nazi sympathising Governor of The Bank of England. What's more, they didn't just rely upon each other, they also brought members of the audience into their act by asking them to answer questions, translate phrases and even sing songs. Compared to the last time I took a tour with two guides who were at crossed purposes, this was a very harmonious duo. 

The tour came to The Guildhall, a site already known to me from The Machiavelli Reinterpreted Tour and here they made a gently provocative gesture through writing on the wall of The Guildhall in chalk. This diagram explains the medieval system of representation in The City of London which today ensures the mayor remains a person appointed by the banks.

We then stood in front of Chicago University's European Campus located in Woolgate Exchange but were cleared off this spot by another zealous security guard who had a contented 'job well done' look on his face when he managed to get us to the other side of the street. I can only think that these men have a very poor understanding of public relations as these actions only heightened the sense that these institutions had something to feel ashamed of and were embarrassed by this attention. Security guards and those who manage them tend to see things differently.

Chalk was again used to good effect to produce this table showing the income of the top 1% and level of public debt in an effort to debunk the free-market theories of the Chicago School of economic thought. The apparent failure of these economic theories and policies to behave as predicted has not yet made any apparent dent on the prestigious university campus located in the heart of the financial city. I would have liked one of their economics professors to have come out of the building and defended the theories, but that was not to be. It was a Saturday after all.

We then went over to Deutsche Bank where the topic was the consolidation of debt and the financial products and instruments that were behind the collapse of sub-prime mortgages. This was made a little more entertaining by including a rap composed by a former employee of the bank on the subject of the Collateralized Debt Obligation Market.

"CDO Oh Baby" to the tune of Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice

Yo vip let's kick it!
C D O oh baby, C D O oh baby
All right, stop, collaborate and listen
Spreads are wide with a technical invasion
Home Eq Subs were trading so tightly
Until Hedge Funds Bot Protection daily and nightly
Will they stop? Yo I don't know

Turn up the Arb and let's go
To the extreme Macro Funds do damage like a vandal
Now, BBBs are trading with a new handle
Print, even if the housing bubble looms
There are never ends to real estate booms
If there is a problem, yo, we'll solve it

Check out the spreads while my structurer revolves it
C D O oh baby, C D O oh baby"

The guards looked on unimpressed as usual but did not intervene. In the background there is some of the bank's substantial art collection on show and I noted that they offer tours of their art collection, I might just have to take one to see things from that point of view. 

The last stop on the tour was the Moorgate branch of Nat West, a bank that is owned by RBS. There was a whole lot more talk about the government bailout of this bank and its unethical investments and as I was listening to this I looked around and saw the sentry box that marks the 'ring of steel' the security checkpoints installed in the 90s to tighten police control of the city's entrances and exits following IRA bombings. It was striking how it seems to more or less follow the old Roman Wall of London which, incidentally, is a tour route as well. This city within a city, or even state within a state, as some consider it, is essential to any understanding of what is going on elsewhere in the city and well beyond. The tour concluded with many thank yous, a steadfast refusal to accept money for the tour, encouragement to get involved with the issues raised and current campaigns such as that to remove the post of The City Remembracer and a final near ubiquitous gesture that I was not expecting. They said, "if you have enjoyed the tour then rate us on Trip Advisor!" It seems like this company and its website is the glue that connects people with tours in London today. 

The tour finished in the Red Lion where the bar staff kept trying to pour short pints, ie not fill up the glass completely, even though it was an over-priced generic city pub. On second thought that might precisely be why they were pouring short but that, in any case, didn't deter a significant tranche of anti-capitalists mixing and talking about the tour, about Occupy and much else besides. I've come to notice that the tours that generally finish in the pub are the ones where there is already a greater degree of connectedness between those taking it: tours around a very specific topic or political tours, like this one. The more general tourist oriented tours rarely have this social dimension. While most of the tours I've reviewed so far that have ended this way have been lefty tours, I would be shocked if this were not also the case with other groups and different political persuasions. I don't quite have it in me to test a BNP or EDL tour, if such a thing exists, but I can well imagine it finishing in a pub too.

The Critical Mass Tour

Always on the lookout for new tour experiences, I got on my bike and joined the Critical Mass Tour yesterday. It is easy to know when and where to find it: 7PM on the last Friday of the Month from under Waterloo Bridge. It has been like that for as long as I have known and I was on a Critical Mass ride quite some years ago, maybe as far back as 10 years ago. It was therefore an overdue and exciting proposition, as it offered a wildly different sort of tour to those so far covered on the blog.

I made my way to Waterloo Bridge and found quite a crowd already assembled. Many hundred cyclists gathered on all sorts of bikes, including quite a number on the so-called 'Boris Bikes': the rental bikes named after the populist conservative Mayor of London, administered by the city and sponsored by a bank that does not need promoting. It was surprising to see so many as I thought Critical Mass was for hardened cyclists only. Also, since this ride was of an indefinite duration, I thought it would be unattractive to those renting bikes by the hour. Happily, I was wrong. The protocol is you arrive anytime after 6PM to be ready to start cycling at 7PM. While cyclists gathered there was a lot of chat and some, mostly, restrained drinking: I saw a guy next to me swigging from a bottle of Captain Morgan but most contented themselves with a single beer.  

At 7PM there was a swelling of noise: horns, bells, cries and inarticulate bloke-ish guttural sounds. It was the sign; we were off! We slowly emptied the Southbank and cycled past The National Theatre on our way up to the main road. This site is for me a curious one that I can't help but read more into than was probably intended. Maybe that's simply because I was previously much more involved in these spaces through the arts than I was through tours and so I come to them with an eye that still sees them as stages. I did in fact make a short POPLAR TV video outside the National Theatre last year: National Theatre To Screen Sport.

We set off and headed North over Waterloo Bridge. This is Somerset House on the right. It was not so easy to take pictures and ride at the same time but I tried my best to juggle the two. Crossing the bridge took us into the heart of London and I had to ask myself if this  happens every Critical Mass time or whether the group sometimes heads off on a very different tact. 

We descended into a road tunnel that is usually reserved for motor vehicles. There was much excited yelling as the bikes accelerated down into the tunnel, deep into the car zone. The relationship with motor vehicles is particularly bad at the moment owing to a spate of fatal accidents in the last month. Earlier in the day there had been a mass "die in" outside Transport for London's offices in protest at their transport policy and inertia at implementing agreed to improvements to the cycling infrastructure. All of this was still very much in the air as we made our way through the city.

Once we got going and settled into a rhythm I started looking a bit more at how the ride functioned. One quality that makes it deliciously slippery is the fact that there is no designated leader or organiser. There is a webpage, which is no longer updated, and this, I can imagine, might be so that nobody may be held responsible for the Critical Mass. That said, I did notice that there were people at the front of the group who did have opinions and were were not afraid to express them. For example, we were at this point approaching Oxford Street and I heard three cyclists say between them that we should avoid that road as it would mean battling buses. They then disappeared at speed towards the front to try and have their sway and lo and behold we avoided Oxford Street. Another quality is that some people dressed up. This man is wearing an animal costume. The tricky thing with it must be the tail, I hope he managed to avoid getting his tail caught up in the spokes of his back wheel. 

Predictably enough the people who hate Critical Mass the most are the taxi drivers. This chap in particular was a nasty piece of work who drove into a stationary cyclist who was standing in front of him in order to try and clear her from the road. No excuse. Lizard brain.

This then sparked off a heated exchange with a passerby who seemed to have a lot of opinions and thought of himself as a peacemaker. To be honest I thought of him as a twit in a shiny grey suit who was covering the driver. Instinct was to take my lock and smash the drivers windscreen so he could have a taste of his own medicine but of course I was far too polite and just took pictures.

Not everyone was in such bad humour however. There was actually quite a varied response to the ride from the people in cars and those standing by the sides of the street. Some smiled and waved, others stared disapprovingly but everyone noticed: you could hardly not see 700 bikes stream past. The cyclist standing here is blocking the car from going into the mass of bikes and this was a common activity. At junctions bikes block the way so cars can't force their way into the pack and it was this job of enforcing the blockade which was the one that the more experienced 'Massers' took on more readily and which also put them potentially into conflict situations like that with the white taxi.

I saw a few people drinking beer as they cycled but most kept their hands on the handlebars or reaching to their phones to take pictures. There was however a bit of a Friday night atmosphere about the ride all the same and quite a number thought things through enough to take a supply with them. This was not just a demonstration or a ride, it was also a party.

That was underscored by the music. This bike was trailing a sound system and it was just one of 4 or 5 that were playing different sorts of music, everything from dance music to opera. The opera in particular was unexpected and not the typical soundtrack for a demonstration.

We headed West along Piccadilly and then down into another road tunnel. There was a bit of a thing with the tunnels, enjoying the forbidden fruit. 

And then after passing near Victoria we came to Buckingham Palace and the bikes gathered around this famous monument whose name I have never bothered to learn. Many of the riders sat back and opened up those cans of beer they'd been saving, others made circles around it, this man with two skateboarders in tow. There were quite a number of young skateboarders who mostly raced around the front of the pack. I remember last time I went on a Critical Mass it also stopped at this same spot and this gets me asking, what is the geographic palette it works with? I can't imagine a mass of bikes making its way to Crystal Palace in South London, that would be too far to get home for anyone living in the North and so my guess is there must be some unwritten rules. I did in fact cycle at the front to find out how the direction was chosen and I heard people shouting "LEFT!" from time to time so I guess it is mostly self-regulating. 

I left them to it as it looked to me as if the evening was settling into a bit of a party in front of the palace.  I was wrong on that front, that's for sure. The video below was posted on youtube which more or less shows what happened after I left: the night had quite a bit more cycling still to go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7skLQ4QyXaA

My current Tour of All Tours research is centred on Shoreditch and today's tour did not go there, the nearest it got was Tower Bridge, which you can see in the video. Critical Mass could visit Shoreditch however so there is no reason why I cannot mention it as a tour that sometimes passes that way, even if it is an infrequent and irregular occurrence. It will be back East I go tomorrow however as there are still quite a number of tours still to cover in the area.

The S21 Protest Tour

Today was a long day of back to back to tours in cold drizzle. I really had the feeling I was working on a performance today and not playing at being a tourist, as it has sometimes felt.

First tour of the day was the much anticipated tour of Stuttgart 21: the most hated rail development in Europe. At least that is the impression I got listening to my guide Mark, who I met in front of the campaign tent which is parked squarely opposite the main station where S21 is focussed. I heard that the tent has been staffed 24 hours a day by volunteers for the last 3 years which is quite an achievement in itself given that Winter temperatures drop to -15°C  with 30cm of snow. For more on their opposition and alternative proposals see K21 (in German).

We started with an overview of S21 looking at the map on the side of the tent. It appears to be an attempt to bury the train tracks and create a through station and thus free up a lot of land that is presently used as train tracks and service yards. It will involve a huge amount of tunnelling that will keep the construction companies happy for years to come. In spite of preservation orders on the station and surroundings these were brushed aside in the 'public interest'. That old one. 

So this building is one next to the station that will be demolished, indeed it has already been hollowed out and is just a facade waiting to be pulled down. It was apparently a rather attractive arts space with counter-cultural tendencies. Other arts venues have also been closed as a result of S21 so it would appear to be a washing of the city centre, clearing out smaller and medium scale cultural spaces and replacing them with prime corporate development opportunities. The whole atmosphere around the station was rather gloomy to tell the truth and it was apparently a rather attractive place in the past. Now some people prefer not to come into the city centre but to stay in their suburbs on account of this.

The one building next to the station which will not be disrupted is the bank offices. Indeed the tunnelling has to accommodate their underground spaces and is therefore rather squeezed. It seems as if the number of tracks envisaged will reduce capacity rather than expand current train capacity. Still the bank is important as they may be one of the financiers who stand to profit from S21 from the interest on loans.

The work has already begun with the sides of the station having been pulled off and a deep pit dug, among other things. It appears as if the strategy from the S21 team has been to keep plans quiet and advance the work as much as possible so that when opposition is encountered they can say it's too late to stop now. Indeed a regional referendum was fought on that tactic in 2011 and they got it passed by a small majority. It reminds me rather of the London Olympics and the case made to sell it to the British public. The entire public infrastructure was at the hands of the pro-lobby along with business and sports chiefs while those against were unfunded and without access to media and power. A level playing field it was not.

We visited the exhibition in the tower advertising S21 and it was a very slickly designed space. From there we had a view over the roof of the station which the protesters occupied. Over 4000 are now on trial as a result of civil disobedience actions such as these and Mark himself spent 10 days in jail for such naughtiness. In the exhibition space they played videos like this one here:

If Mark's predictions are correct the final station will look nothing like this but instead be a compromise as they will have to keep some tracks and an above ground station to deal with capacity. Time will tell. I guess time will also tell if they encounter difficulties with the water drainage which is quite a thing here and a definite unknown.

While I cannot verify any of the information my instinct from the start of my stay in Stuttgart was that this was a big swindle that is more about property development and money passing hands within a tight circle of people at the top than it is about improving the rail network. This tour has only gone to deepen that impression so while the future is not looking bright for Stuttgart I wish their campaign the best of luck.

In spite of all that my guide Mark was still able to smile and for this much more incisive tour than any of the ones I have been able to find I have to say a big thank you.

Now onto the second tour. This will be briefer as it was in many respects a much more predictable tour. It was the Stuttgart Marketing Ltd City Centre Walking Tour. The weather was still wretched but we soldiered through the city stopping at point to point to get a description of the buildings and their history.

The thing that most struck me was that this tour made an effort to make Stuttgart look as nice as possible. And it worked, more or less. The major problem with the tour however was that it was a bilingual German and English tour with 95% of the group following it in German. This meant that most of the group had to stand in shivering drizzle whilst listening to the guide repeating the information to the three of us following it in English. Unsurprisingly the German descriptions of the locations were longer and more detailed than the English ones which most of the people simply experienced as a nuisance.   

That tour finished on the market square where I also saw another tour. This was one of the costumed tours, a woman dressed as a cleaner giving a local style tour in the Swabian dialect. I had wanted to follow one of these tours but after nearly 4 hours of tours in such miserable weather, I was done.

The Stuttgart 21 Tour

Something that became quite obvious, even on the first day I was here in Stuttgart, was that there was some big construction work going on around the station. As I have listened to people and looked around more, it seems to be one of the hottest topics in the city: some people are for it and others very much against it. At the station itself they were giving away free badges like the one I collected below: 

 

And then there is the anti-Stuttgart 21 campaign which has a sign that I saw everywhere around the city, too. I heard that there were demonstrations against the work and that these attracted as many as 50,000 people at their height, completely blocking the city-centre. This was all very un-Stuttgart, apparently.

I remember the first time I came to Stuttgart a few years ago when I was here to do a show. I got off the train and walked out the front of the station to be confronted by a taxi bay and four lanes of traffic separated by a chain fence running down the middle. With some effort I dodged the traffic, found a way around the barrier, crossed the rest of the road and entered the city centre. I was working with a normal station logic and didn't stop to study that here you have to go down through subways in order to reach the city centre.

The real problem with the station, as I see it, is that it has been designed for cars. In the plans selling Stuttgart 21 to the public I saw no indication of this problem being mentioned. This is a car city I guess. As for the price, it seems to have risen sharply now the contracts have been awarded. In that respect it reminds me of the recent London Olympics which more than trebled in price once construction had begun. The whole thing looks like a great money spinner for somebody. Whether it is useful or not, however, I have absolutely no idea.

Today I took the suggested walking tour that is printed on the city map that I go from the tourist information. I followed it as precisely as I could to test my ideas of yesterday and see if I could make my tour identical to the official one in route though not in content. On my way I found the place where the coaches park and observed a group of French students drifting  towards their coach. 

The reason for taking the official tour route was to time it and see if it would work for me. The timer was set for 1 hour 30 and I completed it with 3 minutes 4 seconds to spare. This was walking slowly but not stopping to talk, as would happen on a real tour. It is therefore too long. I'll look at how I can shorten it and already have some ideas for shortcuts.