On the Other Side of Town

I wandered around Chelsea yesterday, a deliberate attempt to see another London. And I couldn't help but think of Tourism, a novel by a 'British Asian' man called Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal. I'd never heard of it but saw it on one of the bulging bookcases in the room I'm occupying and couldn't resist it. Have I ever mentioned the first requirement for house-sitting? Packed bookshelves! Preferably packed with books you want to read! Part of the reason I'm loving my stay in London so much are the bookshelves here.... my cool-Britannia cousins (and I don't mean that in a snarky way -- they embody the best things about Brits of a certain generation) have these wonderfully laden bookshelves that I get to come home to everyday! Ahem... Tourism then caught my eye: I'm not sure I like the novel but it's acutely observed. And it prompted me to visit Chelsea and Sloane Square and the King's Road, all such popular haunts of 'posh birds' that they are mocked in British novel after British novel... to quote almost at random, from the last novel I read: 'That night he became enamoured of the upper classes. ...heading back toward the studio on King's Road her father had impulsively bought for her one weekend, he fell in love with Chelsea's solemn Georgian terraces and resposeful, well-fed squares. Here, Doug could see, life was lived on the grand scale.' (This is from The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe but that's almost irrelevant). But this mocking is particularly charged in Tourism which at least takes a stab at racism in the upper echelons of British society, even the supposedly post-everything millenial one.

You'd be amazed by the number of dessicated old ladies wandering into stores along the King's Road and Knightsbridge. Or perhaps not. I mean, that's where one expects the rich to shop in London, isn't it? But to have that expectation so very obviously met means that it can't be mocked all that easily. All that is left to say is that there are clearly very rich people living (or at least shopping) in London; that the vast majority of them are white and that I truly did feel like a tourist in that neighbourhood, in a way that I haven't felt in any other part of London that I've wandered around in. I saw a couple of Filipino women, obviously nannies pushing kids along in prams, some cabs being driven by Asian men (but not many since this is not the land of cheap mini-cabs: this is where customers are chauffered in style or have Black Cabs hailed for them by doormen) and there were a black construction workers working on the endless repairs being made to 'London's Victorian Water Mains'; other than that, there was yours truly wandering along. It's an odd feeling to be so consciousness of my browness; I suppose it's a necessary reminder that not all of London is as approachable as the places I've been hanging around in.

Tomorrow, I'm checking out a couple of the markets here in the East End! Something tells me that will be less... segregated.