Published in Huck Magazine, May 2019. Original article link / Archived story link.

Raves and resistance: the hidden history of Kings Cross

The Disappearing City

One of the most rapidly developing parts of the city, Kings Cross has a proud record of political activism. But if you dig a little under the surface, you’ll find much is still there.

King’s Cross was once the epicentre of the second Summer of Love, but there’s nothing about it to hint at that these days: take a walk across the newly regenerated Granary Square and you’ll find a clean, upmarket development with kids playing in fountains and young professionals hanging out on fake grass. But during one fabled summer in 1988, rave culture was coming up in that same spot, with giant warehouses full of happy, sweaty people dancing to acid house until the morning. 

“The queue to get in is enormous but you can hear this baseline, it’s throbbing and it’s like the walls are shaking,” Natalie Wade says in the Kings X Clubland documentary, describing the first time she blagged her way into a King’s Cross rave when she was 15. “You get in and there’s this enormous room in front of you, it’s so loud and it’s heaving with bodies and light and movement. For a moment you feel like you’ve walked into a cult, as everyone understands what’s going on but you… It’s one of the memorable sensory experiences I’ve ever had in my life.”  

The regeneration of King’s Cross is one of the biggest in London, covering 67 acres of the area behind King’s Cross and St Pancras stations known as the railway lands. Starting in 2007 and set to complete in 2023, it’s already a remarkable transformation of what was mostly ex-industrial brownfield land. For such a central piece of London, the Cross was surprisingly derelict and wild. 

Little about the new King’s Cross reveals that the area used to have a reputation for drugs, sex work, and homelessness. Coal Drops Yard (which once held 15,000 tons of coal for a fuel-hungry city) is now home to cool, pricey retail – the kind that appeals to ageing, well-moneyed millennials – with gender-neutral toilets and space to lounge. At the Granary Building (once storing Lincolnshire wheat for London’s bakers), Caravan serves excellent avocado toast with a choice of sourdough, grain, or gluten free bread. 

This new branding of Coal Drops Yard looks far better than the standard corporate fare (think face tattoos and hotdogs with toothpaste), but it’s really not very long ago that the Cross had a counter-culture that really couldn’t be used to sell upmarket soap. For better or worse, the old King’s Cross had an edgy, rebellious energy; it was so run down, and in parts so downright scary, that people would meet by the station to walk in groups over to The Bell, the legendary LGBTQ hub on Pentonville Road. 

The regeneration of the railway lands will create at least 50 new buildings, 20 new streets, 10 new public spaces and 1,900 new homes, and see to the refurbishment of 20 historic buildings and structures. But it’s had a significant gentrification effect on the rest of neighbourhood, a patch of inner London that’s always been pretty grotty. (In fact, a renaming was considered as the regeneration efforts began, because who would want to live in King’s Cross?) But while the people who can afford the new flats inside the once-rusting gasholders might never have come here back in the day, the Cross has always had a community of locals who call it home. 

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King’s Cross used to be called Battlebridge, named for a battle that may or may not have involved Queen Boudicca and the bridge over the river Fleet, and it was in a sorry state. This is why, as new housing was being built in the 1820s, developers got their way and changed the name – it’s “King’s Cross” because King George IV had just assumed the crown, historian Andrew Whitehead tells me. 

There was certainly nothing regal about the area back then. In his book Curious King’s Cross, Whitehead describes it as “a huge mound of horse bones, a smallpox hospital and a few pockets of dilapidated housing.” Consequently, the Cross was cheap, and attracted an interesting set of characters. 

“A lot of left wing organisations have had their national offices in the area. There’s also a real tradition of radicalism and occupations,” says Whitehead, listing off events in the late 1970s and early 80s: the occupation of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital to prevent its closure; the occupation of Camden Town Hall to protest poor housing; and the sex workers’ occupation of Holy Cross Church (just around the corner from Argyle Square, at the time London’s premier red light area) in protest of police harassment.   

“The Communist party was once strong in the area,” says Whitehead, adding that the red flag used to fly from St Pancras Town Hall on May Day. “And The Bell was a gay activist pub. A lot of the solidary meetings for the miners’ strike were held there.” The Bell is gone now (the Big Chill bar is in its spot), but the alliance between Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners (LGSM) and the strikers in South Wales became a turning point for gay rights by fostering ties with the trade unions. 

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Today, nowhere else in King’s Cross embodies the spirit of activism more than Housmans, the “radical booksellers” at the bottom of Caledonian Road. The windows are full of posters: the Anarchist Festival, Justice for Grenfell, the Karl Marx Walking Tour, and you can still buy a t-shirt from the 1984 ‘Pits and Perverts’ LGSM fundraising event. Albert Beale, one of the building’s trustees, meets me by the door, walking me through a maze of room with books stacked floor to ceiling before finding a place to sit.

The building is owned by Peace News Trustees, a non-profit which also oversees the publication Peace News. An engaging storyteller, Beale’s mind is an encyclopedia of the history of the area – he’s been associated with Peace House since 1972. 

“The rest of the building is let out to other worthy progressive groups,” he says, explaining that the building has never been afraid of controversy, housing the Gay Liberation Front in the days before full decriminalisation: “Others might think, ‘Oh, dodgy issue!’ But we’re just, ‘Great, come on in.’” Current residents are War Resisters International, Network for Peace, Forces Watch (which scrutinises military recruitment), and anti-sweatshop outfit No Sweat. Switchboard – a lifeline for the LGBTQ community – started out operating from Peace House in 1974 (it’s based just up the road now). 

The (subsidised) rental income keeps the building running, but the reason why Housmans has been able to resist the many attempts by developers to convert the block is because they actually own the property and refuse to sell. “The politics behind what we’re doing isn’t just about changing the world on a big scale, but also being rooted in the community you find yourself in,” says Beale. “The local folks didn’t want local shops and pubs knocked down to build an office tower, so we weren’t going to go along with that.”

Those who’ve been around the Cross for a long time have always known the railway lands would be done up – it’s always just been a matter of time. (“They kept some of the old buildings, and the things they built are not as ugly as they could be, I’ll give you that,” says Beale.) But during the early regeneration debate, the hope among locals was for the development to be more squarely focused on the needs of this not-so-leafy part of Islington and Camden: “We [wanted to have] a secondary school there, parks, social housing, a health centre, and all those things that are needed in a grotty inner city area,” says Beale. 

The short version is that the publicly owned railway lands ended up being sold off, and while the councils have some say, the estate is now privately owned by the King’s Cross Central Limited Partnership (consisting of property developers Argent and a pension fund called AustralianSuper). While the public has access, the creep of pseudo-public space is a London-wide concern. As Beale puts it: “If I went down to Granary Square and gave out a leaflet saying, ‘This should be public land’, the security guards would ask me to leave.”

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In his play King’s Cross (REMIX), live artist Tom Marshman shares collected stories from London’s LGBTQ communities in the 1980s. Originally from Bristol, he was drawn to the area after hearing the song “King’s Cross” by the Pet Shop Boys, which speaks about coming into London and hoping for the streets to be paved with gold. “But King’s Cross was so grotty,” he remembers. “It was a seedy place where if you were a young gay man you might be walking into a world where you could become a sex worker.” 

Marshman adds that, for many, King’s Cross was “hedonistic and full of parties, and people being very expressive and exploring their sexuality”. But his show is also a story about the devastating impact of HIV and Aids on the gay community. The Cross used to be dark – literally, as there wasn’t much street lighting – and this would engender certain behaviours. 

“We lived in a squat,” says Ramón Salgado-Touzón in Elly Clarke’s King’s Cross oral history project Queer Encounters. “We would score drugs, get a few punters first to get the money for the drugs.” 

Salgado-Touzón describes a kebab shop (there’s a Five Guys in that spot now) where pimps would gather outside: “We were all avoiding that area, because you could just tell, you didn’t want to look directly into their eyes as there was that feeling of threat.” But Salgado-Touzón still has fond memories of the Cross: “It was my favourite place because there was always something happening there. There was always some excitement or risk. It was a dangerous place. I’m surprised I’m alive from the things I’ve done.” 

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To hear the truly euphoric stories about King’s Cross, ask a raver who discovered Bagley’s in the mid-late 80s – chances are their eyes will light up. “It was so free,” Anne Marie Garbutt says in the Kings X Clubland documentary. “If you went to go to the toilet it’d take you an hour, as you were just chatting to people on the way there, on the way back. You certainly didn’t want to [leave the floor] when your favourite tune came on, as it might not come back on again that night, or that morning – it went on from 4am to 2pm on a Sunday afternoon.”  

Until the party ended for good on New Year’s Day 2008, King’s Cross was the perfect spot for a rave. The club was called Bagley’s because the warehouse – the Eastern Coal Drops where Barrafina restaurant is now – used to be owned by glass bottle manufacturer Bagley, Wild and Company. The building was used as a location for music videos and fashion shoots in the early ’80s, and in the first few years the raves were unofficial, illegal events. As it grew, a licence was secured to admit 2,500 people, although as many as 3-4,000 might have been in there at its peak. 

“It was a perfect storm. It really blew up – this whole new underground scene,” Debby Lee, who started working at Bagley’s in the 80s as a young promoter, tells me. “It came as a breath of fresh air. The whole scene was very raw. It was in the middle of King’s Cross and it felt dangerous, and it was this dirty old warehouse.” 

Bagley’s (later Canvas), alongside The Cross and The Key, became a unifying hub where clubbers would gather after the West End had closed for the night, no matter what music or scene they were usually into. “You have to consider the political backdrop of the time, with Margaret Thatcher – that whole idea of everyone having to go and work in the city and drive flash cars,” says Lee. “It was a rebellion against this glossy, shiny life that we were being sold as kids.” 

In the midst of this new youth culture was also a new drug culture – you can’t help but wonder if one of the reasons everyone remembers it as one big love fest is because of all the ecstasy. Lee says the police mostly left them alone, in part because they didn’t understand rave culture but also because they were busy dealing with street crime: “A few kids having a party was really the last of their worries, so it was a bit of a Wild West… It was a loving atmosphere where everyone got along, and it broke down a lot of cultural barriers.” 

It got tricker once the scene got really big, says Lee – a separate economy emerged for drugs, and this started to attract less savoury characters looking to take advantage. “We had a few incidents, but we were never really exposed to the serious gangland issues,” says Lee, adding they never had to call the police. But, she stresses, it’s not like there was a strategy – everyone were learning on their feet, figuring out how to handle the drug culture while keeping people safe: “We were kids too.” 

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As regeneration schemes go, the general consensus seems to be that King’s Cross is a pretty decent one – while some have more concerns than others, everyone I spoke to concluded that it’s really not bad. Pancras Square (between the station and the canal) is a hub of corporate new builds, housing Google, Louis Vuitton and Universal Music, but there’s also a fair amount of new affordable housing: out of a total 1,900, there were supposed to be 750 affordable homes, 500 of which are available for social rent (although this has since come down to 637). The sustainability report from the King’s Cross Central Limited Partnership speaks to a desire to be “a lasting place for people and a community with a long-term future”, with promises of sports areas open to the public, a job centre, a leisure centre with a pool, a library, a school for deaf kids, an on-site low-carbon power plant and a zero-waste-to-landfill programme, to name some.

One thing that’s notably absent from the plans is a dancefloor – for an area so central to the UK’s clubbing heritage this feels like an omission. Ian Freshwater, Project Director at Argent and head of the Regeneration team at the King’s Cross Central Limited Partnership, says a potential club venue is still in the mix – the site isn’t done yet. “The place has changed and it’s is more residential now, but we aspire to deliver King’s Cross as a piece of the city,” Freshwater tells me. 

Argent spent five years consulting with locals on what the future King’s Cross should look like, receiving over 4,000 responses. Common concerns were accessibility, jobs, good public spaces, and feeling safe. “We’ve always had an emphasis on people – those in the local area, those who’ll come to work here, the students at Central St Martins [now located in the Granary Building], the visitors who step off the Eurostar,” says Freshwater. “We want to ensure this is a livable, recognisable, accessible part of London.” 

For some, the regeneration of King’s Cross has become an opportunity to thrive. Word on the Water, the floating bookshop, was about to close down when it found a home there: “Getting mooring in the Granary Square complex about three years ago saved the business from closing,” says Paddy Screech, owner of the book barge alongside Jon Privett and Stephane Chaudat. The charming 100-year-old Dutch barge, which sells new and old books and hosts poetry slams and live music on the roof, is busy on the day I’m visiting, with people browsing and sitting down to read inside by the fireplace. But for the six years before landing at King’s Cross the barge had been a operating without a base, and the requirement to relocate every two weeks was catastrophic for business. 

Following a social media campaign, Screech says they were approached by the Canal & River Trust which asked them to pick a spot. “Once we got to Granary Square, they understood it would be good for both us,” says Screech. He thinks it’s a good fit – the barge wouldn’t want to be “a little gnat in the middle of an exclusive corporate wilderness”. 

Screech says the owners of the King’s Cross estate have been “mindful of their responsibility to make the area available to people to come and enjoy. … [They’ve] taken a historic thing and made something new and nice happen, in a way that respects the history and takes it in a new direction.”

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For a long time, the King’s Cross railway lands were a forgotten afterthought – raves were possible because there was nothing much going on in the old warehouses, and there were no neighbours to complain about noise. While the area is no longer derelict, 40 per cent of the redevelopment is open space – and there’s also still a little bit of that old wilderness left. 

While Gasholder Park is a cute way to preserve one of the beloved gasometers, there are better places to connect with nature in the city. The Calthorpe Project is a community garden on Gray’s Inn Road, opening in 1984 following a successful campaign by locals against an office development. The Skip Garden & Kitchen, located at the top of Cubitt Park, is a scrappy DIY element in an otherwise glossy environment. Run by education charity Global Generation, which works with young locals, the café is surrounded by wildflowers, herbs and vegetables, beehives and chicken coops. As the name suggests, everything is planted within skips so it can be easily transported, and the structures are mostly made from materials reclaimed from the surrounding construction. 

Open, unstructured space doesn’t stay that way for long in the city, and certainly not in a spot as central as King’s Cross. The rave scene was always on borrowed time – Bagley’s had a six-month running lease – and since the construction began 12 years ago, temporary elements have come and go. As construction around Cubitt Park is close to completion, the Skip Garden will be moving soon, but this is part of the point – it was always supposed to be temporary. 

The natural swimming hole that existed in Cubitt Park for 17 months in 2015-16 was never permanent either. The pond was designed by Ooze Architects and artist Marjetica Potrč as part arts installation, part local swimming club – the water in the chemical-free pond was purified through a process using the surrounding wetland. I went for a swim there four years ago when the surrounding area was a full-on construction zone, remembering it as an enchanting, impossible place that felt like it shouldn’t quite exist. A campaign to save the pond was unsuccessful; Ian Freshwater at Argent, who oversaw the pond, tells me that although it was much loved it was expensive to run – it required lifeguards to be on duty and you had to pay to get in. The open parkland that replaced it, he says, is more inclusive. 

But for a moment, the pond was a piece of urban magic – the fact that it was temporary made it all the more so. Swimming slow laps amidst the plants, King’s Cross transforming around me, I remember thinking how London is so crowded and it always feels like every square inch has a purpose, but when you stop and look closer that’s really not the case – there’s a lot left of London that’s delightfully devoid of ambition. 

The Cross is a lot cleaner now, but there are still pockets left where nothing has changed. This is usually not just a happy accident, but the result of campaigns to keep it that way. Over on Northdown Street is the King Charles I, a local pub which four years ago was saved when 15 regulars bandied together to buy it. The book barge is already an asset to the area: “I think there’s something fundamental about bookshops that creates community, and it’s not even geographical,” says Paddy Screech. “That’s been the real learning experience for us – a couple of old semi-tramps living on boats – we’ve found ourselves at the heart of a large community of people.” 

A wander further up the towpath will reveal Camley Street Natural Park, squeezed between the canal and the tracks leading into St Pancras – it’s a former coal drop that was slowly reclaimed by nature, and a campaign by locals and the London Wildlife Trust charity in 1983 successfully secured its future as a nature reserve. 

Up past the King’s Cross development, beyond York Way, the railway lands are still unpolished and wild – a bit grotty and useless, but ripe with possibilities for the future. London will never stop evolving, but in between all the rush we need these spaces that lack ambition – because they give the city space to dream. 

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King’s Cross (REMIX is back in London at the end of May, then goes to Leeds and Bristol.

‘The Disappearing City’ is a series about the changing urban landscapes of London. Previous instalments: The last days of Hackney Wick; the hidden history of Eel Pie Island; and Greek Street, the last great, shit street in Soho.

 

Lionheart Magazine issue 11 – November 2019. 

On balance 

I wanted to get more serious about my work, and be more deliberate about where I’m going with it. I started spending a lot of time thinking about work – what do I want to do? Because before you can go there, you need to know where “there” is, you know? I loved spending those long, meandering hours pondering the question. It was so satisfying, and I made some real professional progress. And then I realise I hadn’t seen my friends in months. 

I wanted to be closer to my friends, spending more time talking to them in the week. It was great: I spent hours chatting with people, talking about ideas and solving problems, enjoying their company in ways I hadn’t done since I was at university. And then I realised I was spending hours of my workday on my phone. 

I wanted to get into shape, and I started doing flowy, fast yoga several times a week. It was incredible: I felt strong, and energetic, and happy. But then I realised that all that yoga was threatening to interfere with my sex life; the studio was nowhere near my house meaning I ended up going out all sweaty, so fit from all the yoga and yet so untouchable. 

I wanted to start eating better, having proper food for lunch and making a real dinner for the evening – food should be an exploration! It was a relief: there was always good, healthy food in the house, and I felt so much better for eating so deliberately, both physically and mentally. And then I realised that food, with the endless planning, shopping and cooking, had become a part time job. 

There’s always something to do better, but there’s only so many hours in the day. What I’m craving more of right now is thinking time – just space to sit with the thoughts in my head and see where they go. But balance eludes me – I’m always the person on the Tube who’s got their notebook or laptop out, taking advantage of the extra half hour to get things done. If I’m already in that “work” headspace, why not keep going? There’s a time to rest and a time to get things done, and I’ve come to realise that for me, the two simply don’t mix. 

I’ve worked for myself for eight years, which has given me a lot of time to think about work-life balance. I’ve experimented widely: keeping standard office hours, working when I feel like it, wearing proper clothes, wearing leggings, working in cafés, working in bed – I’ve tried it all. Some things worked better than others and I still go through phases for what I prefer, but no matter the details I know that the only way for me is to do one thing at a time – I resent changing my focus. This is the opposite of balance, but I’ve realised that anything that’s worth doing will fuck up your life. Fall in love, invest in work, travel somewhere great, help someone who’s in crisis – it will dominate you. The best moments in life are the ones that overwhelm you.

Right now I’m focusing squarely on work. I’ve gone through periods where I’ve focused on travel, mental health, relationships – it took me such a long time to get here, where I’m able to put my full force behind work. But all that faffing about means I’ve had plenty of time to sort out the details: I know what I like, and what it takes for me to be able to do good work. Now I wake up and read in bed for 90 minutes with coffee before I do anything else. I make sure to have food in the house and eat the same thing for lunch every day – something nice but simple, so I don’t have to think about it. I schedule time with people I want to see. I wash my hair every other day, after doing yoga at home, before I go out. I make sure I get some. And in the middle of all that there’s a block of time – about six hours – when I put my headphones on and play house music, and I do the work. No breaks, just pure focus. 

Except sometimes. I met my friend Matt for lunch the other day, after a meeting in the city. We had some Thai food – do you have somewhere to be, he asked me, and to my surprise I found that I didn’t. When our coffee cups were empty we sat there for at least another hour. I’d been so busy lately I’ve barely had time to make it to the post office, let alone take a long lunch. But that day I did, and afterwards I walked in the sun from Shoreditch to the Thames, which was muddy and vast and open and lets you breathe in the middle of this mad rush of a city. I did no work at all that afternoon. I just stood on the bridge, looking out at the water, thinking how wonderful it is to get to live like this – to have this charmed life that has no balance at all.

Published in BL Magazine, July 2019 (original article p58-61).

The case for making a digital will

When writing a will that determines who gets the house and who gets the good china, take a moment to also consider what should happen also to your digital assets after the final curtain.

We all know you can’t take it with you – but for a lot of our digital assets, there’s no set procedure for how to pass it on to someone else. While the law has provisions for what to do with money even if there’s no will, chances are that your digital assets will be left to languish if you don’t leave instructions.

When we say “digital assets” we’re not talking about things like online bank accounts, as those funds can be inherited like any other financial assets. We’re talking about things like a library of digital photos that reside behind a computer password, sitting in a data centre owned by Google or Microsoft. It’s a music collection worth thousands of pounds on Apple’s iTunes. It’s a library of books on an Amazon Kindle, a gambling account, a Bitcoin wallet, frequent flier miles, a personal website, an Instagram account which makes money from advertising, or a Facebook account that’s just for friends and family. 

Only 13% of us have made plans for their social media accounts after death, according to the Digital Legacy Association, and only 2.3% have made plans for our purchased digital assets. But the technology companies that often hold our digital assets won’t just pass on the data to a spouse or parent without clear instruction – to them, user privacy is paramount. Earlier this year, Rachel Thompson successfully requested that a UK court compel Apple to give her access to her late husband’s iPhone, so that she could download his 2,000 family photos for the sake of their young daughter Matilda. Tech companies have usually complied with court orders like this, but as a digitally minded population starts to age, this will become an increasingly common problem and we can’t all go to court. 

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A tangible asset can be passed down in a will under the law regardless of whether it has value. People assume the same will be true for digital assets, but it’s not. “This is an emerging area of law,” says Gary Rycroft, Partner at Joseph A Jones & Co in Lancaster and Chair of the digital assets working group at the Law Society. Commenting on the Thompson case, Rycroft says: “The point Apple is making is that they’re [holding] data for someone who they have a contractual arrangement with. They don’t want to breach that contract without having either express permission of the person, or a court order.”

Rycroft doesn’t think we’ll all end up in court over this, as long as we catch on to the fact that we need to leave instructions: “Making a will is key. Make it clear what you want, and then Apple or whoever will know that they have your blessing to pass on your digital assets to [your nominated person],” says Rycroft. Several digital services now have procedures to formalise this process: Google’s Inactive Account Manager and Facebook’s Legacy Settings page both let you nominate a trusted contact to handle the account should you pass away.

But the nature of ownership is changing. While one photo storage service will let users rent storage space and retain ownership, others will not – anything you upload to Facebook becomes theirs, for example. And anything that you buy on iTunes isn’t actually yours, but just something you have the right to access – and that right dies with you. 

Donna Withers, Head of Probate and Wills at Bedell Cristin in Jersey, says that the matter of digital assets is so new that clients who come to see her don’t often have a good grasp on it. “It’s something that we bring up with people whenever they’re making their ordinary wills. We will ask them what [online] accounts they have,” says Withers. Like most modern day will and probate lawyers, Withers finds herself having to tell people about what is and isn’t possible to cover in a standard will. The fate of people’s digital assets will come down to the terms and conditions of the service in question, and it can vary widely: air miles or flight status will vanish when the user dies, for example. Instagram will memorialise or close down an account upon receipt of a death certificate, while Twitter only offers the option to delete. With Bitcoin, there’s only one password and if that is lost, the money is too – that’s what happened earlier this year when $190 million in cryptocurrency was permanently lost following the death of the person who held the key. 

A simple solution to all this is to write down all your online accounts and passwords, alongside instructions for what you want to happen to your email account or Facebook. “But that goes against digital advice that you should never write down your password. Not to mention that you could be in breach of the terms of your contract,” says Withers. As a lawyer she cannot recommend this course of action, but she says it’s common for people to leave sealed envelopes alongside their wills to be handed over after death. 

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There will be as many as 2 billion dead Facebook accounts by the end of the century, according to the Oxford Internet Institute. Some people like the idea of living on in digital form, whereas others find it distasteful – leaving behind instructions will likely be reassuring both for you and your family. But a will governing the fate of digital assets may not be legally binding, as people are ultimately bound by the individual user contracts with the companies that issued the service. The Digital Legacy Association has templates for a “social media will”, noting that this is a “statement of preferences” and not something that can be enforceable in court. 

Elisabeth Ferrara, a Legal Assistant who specialises in wills and probate at Viberts on Jersey, recommends always printing wills and adding physical signatures and two witnesses, even for assets that exist in digital form – the law has yet to recognise a digital signature. 

Ferrara also points out there’s a difference between digital assets and digital presence, and you can only leave provisions in your will for the former. While you can argue that a social media account has value, the problem is that the user is probably still bound by the provider’s terms and conditions.  “In Jersey we have [two] types of assets: immovable estate is property and land, […] and movable assets which tends to be pretty much everything that isn’t land.” This broad definition is helpful, as a social media account which earns advertising, for example, could count as a movable asset under the law. “The nature of assets is changing with the growth of electronic assets,” says Ferrara, pointing to how we’re actually renting a lot of the things we may think we own. But if the law changes to bring that ownership back into our hands, Ferrara says that the broad definition of movable assets under Jersey law means the jurisdiction should be reasonably well set up to respond to it. “But [currently], it is it is very much up to the company to decide what’s going to happen [to your data] after death.” 

Just like you’re not supposed to log into an online service as someone else, writing down your online passwords and putting them somewhere safe is technically not allowed. But that may not be something that most people consider to be very fair – if you’ve paid for the music, shouldn’t it be yours to do with as you please? And if you give your spouse your computer password, is that really a crime? Gary Rycroft expects the law might change to reflect the fact that people don’t find this fair: “In the States there’s been much more activity in terms of law reform, [arguing] we should be able to pass these [assets] on.” Rycroft thinks the UK will follow suit: “There’s increasing awareness by consumers and there [will be] a backlash eventually.” 

Until then, the service providers will in likelihood become better at dealing with the fact that customers die – and hopefully start prompting us to fill in the legacy information rather than hiding the form deep down in the settings. And while it’s technically not allowed, many of us will ultimately be leaving a list of passwords somewhere safe, with instructions to our loved ones to download our assets or close up accounts, without needing to go through the formalities.

An extended version of the story published in Broadly by Vice on 16th January 2019.

If your doctor told you to take two paracetamol before coming in for a small medical procedure, what would you expect? As I went in for my first hysteroscopy—a procedure that examines the inside of the uterus with a small camera to explore heavy or unexpected bleeding, pelvic pain, fibroids, polyps, fertility issues, or diagnoses uterine cancer—I figured it might be like a smear test, or maybe an IUD fitting. The hospital leaflet I was given prior to the procedure told me to expect period-like cramping. I took some paracetamol with codeine to be safe, and laid back with my feet in stirrups.

As the doctor inserted the scope through my cervix I felt my uterus fill with cold water. I thought, this feels strange, but ok. But then the pain started and it was no longer ok. I hyperventilated as I clamped down on the nurse’s hand. Soon I was unable to keep quiet, moaning in pain, and as the biopsy was taken I felt a stabbing electric pain spread from my insides and across my entire body. I shouted out, “Fucking hell!” Afterwards, as I was panting and sweating, the nurse asked me pointedly: “Did you forget to take any paracetamol?”

The nurse’s reaction left me thinking maybe I was unusual. Was I being a wimp? It’s hard to feel bold with water running down your legs as they hand you a sanitary towel the size of your shoe. But in the days and months that followed I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. Why wasn’t I given pain relief? But what happened to me is not unusual, and in fact, many women’s experience of hysteroscopy is far worse than mine.

“I was hit with this indescribable pain, like a nerve pain but twenty times over. It took my breath away. I wasn’t able to talk, I couldn’t shout out. My legs were twitching, I started to feel sick and I felt hot all over,” says Lorraine (66) from Leicester, who prefers not to give her surname as she might pursue legal action. “I told the doctor afterwards that if childbirth was a 10 on the pain scale, but that was a 15 to 20. He did not seem at all concerned or bothered.” Lorraine’s counsellor has since diagnosed her with PTSD from her experience: “I’m having nightmares, and actually seeing things in the day. I keep seeing this man,” she says, referring to the doctor.

Pain, it seems, is a routine part of hysteroscopy. The dentist will give you a shot before starting to drill—pain relief is available and common. So why does the NHS continue to send women to have their wombs poked and prodded on paracetamol? And why, when women are in obvious pain, do doctors ignore them?

*

NHS guidelines state that the pain levels accompanying hysteroscopies vary: some women feel “no or only mild pain,” but for others it can be “severe”. In a case like Lorraine’s, the guidelines say the procedure should be stopped and options for pain relief discussed, with options including gas and air, stronger pain medication, conscious sedation, or a up to and including a general anaesthetic.

The current guidelines from the British Society for Gynaecological Endoscopy’s (BSGE), the body overseeing hysteroscopy, does acknowledge that it “can be associated with significant pain.” Consultant Gynaecologist Justin Clark, Vice President of the BSGE, told me that hysteroscopies used to be done under general anaesthesia until the early part of this century, when technological advances meant the scope had become small enough to avoid needing to dilate the cervix. “But [the move to outpatient hysteroscopy] has also been driven by patients—by expectations of immediacy of care and getting a timely diagnosis,” says Clark. For women who find the procedure tolerable, this may well be a better choice: “People recognise that admission to hospital can have disadvantages, such as hospital-acquired infections and the risk of anaesthesia.”

Asked about the lack of concern women report about their pain, Clark is not unsympathetic: “A minority will have a very unpleasant experience, and if we could identify those women in advance that would be advantageous [so they can be given general anesthesia right away].” Revised guidelines from the BSGE are due in 2020, but a patient leaflet that addresses pain in a far more realistic way was issued on 19th December. The Campaign Against Painful Hysteroscopy, which has collected a well of women’s stories, has created a community via their Facebook page and it’s in no small part thanks to their work, supported by sympathetic voices within the BSGE and MPs, that more attention now seems to be paid to pain management.

Clark stressed to me that patient comfort is of the utmost concern for the BSGE, and their newest leaflet is certainly an improvement in ensuring women are fully informed. But the problem is that this information around pain management, and advice on how to mitigate it, is often not communicated to patients by their treating physicians, or mentioned in the leaflet that accompanies their appointment letter. While the option of a general anaesthetic is sometimes mentioned, the leaflets are individual to each hospital and often do not reflect the nuanced guidelines of the BSGE. Most women will simply be given a given a leaflet that makes light of any potential pain and go in trusting that two paracetamol and a stiff upper lip is all that’s required. Clark acknowledges this variation may mean not all women get the full picture: “It’s incumbent on hospitals to make sure their information leaflet is valid, and that they speak to the patient in a clear way.” Most women will trust that their doctors are telling them what they need to know, and not go looking for horror stories on the internet.  

Even women who ask directly about the pain ahead of time report that it’s underplayed by doctors, who tell them that most people “tolerate” the procedure well. “When I asked it if would be painful, the doctor and the assistants smiled at each other and told me women get this done all the time,” says Valentina (34) from London, who prefers not to give her last name as she still needs to go back to complete the procedure after it was too painful to endure without sedation. “I wasn’t given the option to make an informed decision.” This attitude from doctors seems typical: “I was told there would be minimal pain like having a smear, and as I’d had children it wouldn’t be a problem. [The doctor said] a local anaesthetic injection into the neck of the womb would be more painful than the procedure, and would prolong the appointment. I decided to grit my teeth and get on with it,” says Liz Vining (65) from Swansea. She describes her experience as barbaric: “I couldn’t believe what had happened to me in the 21st century. 18 months on I still get tearful remembering it.”

The number of women who report their hysteroscopy to be very painful varies, but a is around 20-30 percent. A 2014 study, whose findings are in line with similar studies, found that 20 percent of women described the pain as “intolerable”, 46 percent said “moderate” and 34 percent said “mild”. The pain is usually worse for women who’ve not given vaginal birth, or who’ve gone through menopause. Clark at the BSGE told me that a study of 1,600 outpatient hysteroscopy patients, soon to be published in the British Medical Journal, found that most women tolerate the procedure well: “The acceptability rates are high, over 90 percent. The pain scores [out of ten] are in the region of three to four.”

But it is important to note that this study was just for diagnostic hysteroscopy—entering the uterus with a camera and looking around—and did not include any biopsies or polyp removals. While talking to Clark I realised that the “looking around” part of my hysteroscopy was indeed a three or a four out of ten, but spiked to a nine only during the biopsy. This distinction during clinical research may explain why so many doctors tell patients that hysteroscopy is “tolerable”, but when I was in the stirrups I experienced it as a single event. Consequently, I felt like the doctors had not been truthful about the prospect of pain. Clark conceded this point: “I agree the biopsy is far more uncomfortable that a well-conducted hysteroscopy.”

Consultant Gynaecologist Edward Morris, Vice President of Clinical Quality for BSGE’s umbrella organisation Royal College Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), told me that it’s been important to them to listen to women’s experiences ahead of the new guidelines in 2020: “We are aware of some women reporting that they did not feel well informed about the procedure and their options.” Morris told me that women should discuss concerns about pain with their doctors, as an outpatient procedure (without proper pain relief) isn’t right for everyone: “[For example] if she faints during periods because of pain, if she has experienced severe pain during previous vaginal examinations, if she has previous traumatic experience, or if she prefers not to have this examination while awake”. A 2014 study also found that pain may be worse for women who’ve not given vaginal birth or who’ve gone through menopause.

A chilling fact is that hospitals have actually been financially incentivised to perform outpatient hysteroscopies on women. In 2013, the NHS doubled the rates that hospitals would be paid to perform hysteroscopies as an outpatient procedure, and lowered the rates paid for anaesthetised hysteroscopies. The procedure used to be commonly performed under general anaesthetic, until a shift around 2001 in part due to the influence of NHS’s National Clinical Director for Cancer Sean Duffy. In 2001, in response to comments about outpatient hysteroscopy research, Duffy wrote in the British Medical Journal that while a “small proportion of patients do, undeniably, experience considerable pain”, he concluded that for most patients the “minimal discomfort” is worth the convenience of having an outpatient procedure. “Too much emphasis is put on the issue of pain surrounding outpatient hysteroscopy,” wrote Duffy. “A small proportion of patients do, undeniably, experience considerable pain, but most patients do not, and they trade off the minimal discomfort they experience with the convenience and interaction of outpatient hysteroscopy.”

When MP Lyn Brown spoke in Parliament on 11th December she said the NHS’s Best Practice Tariff system encourages quick-and-easy hysteroscopies in a way that prioritises savings over women’s dignity and humanity. Brown said: “The national target is for the risky outpatient hysteroscopies to increase to 70 percent of the total, up from 59 percent. The Department for Health is not working to reduce pain and trauma for women—it is incentivising hysteroscopies without effective pain relief and is taking our choices away.”

*

Historically, women’s pain is taken less seriously by doctors. One 2001 study found that some doctors believe women have a “natural capacity to endure pain” due to the stresses of childbirth. Deb Drinkwater (56) from Salford says her hysteroscopy took away her dignity, as it left her screaming, crying, and losing consciousness. Drinkwater had previously had a bowel screening, a similar exploration of the back passage where patients are routinely offered sedation (Clark at the BSGE said that colonoscopies and gastrointestinal endoscopies, where the scope goes down the throat, are sedated because the tube goes further into the body and “around bends”). Based on her experiences with both procedures, Drinkwater says she can’t help but wonder if there’s a gender bias: “Colonoscopy is something that both men and women do.”

Drinkwater says she’s really not a wuss: “I know what pain is. I’m not an anxious patient.” But after her hysteroscopy, as she was struggling to stand, she made a nervous joke to the student nurse: “I said, I hope I hadn’t put her off nursing by being in such a state. She said to me, no lie: ‘Don’t worry about it, the woman before you screamed the whole way through it.’”

NHS England performed almost 39,000 “unspecified diagnostic” hysteroscopies last year, and the number is set to rise. 75 percent of women do find having a hysteroscopy bearable, but for the remaining 25 percent who don’t, their experience would be vastly improved if everyone knew in advance they could ask for sedation. If nothing else, being met with understanding when they experience pain—and an awareness that they’re not weak nor even unusual if they require pain medication—would go a long way. Katy Wheatley (46) from Leicester initially felt shame and blamed herself for not being able to get through her hysteroscopy, even when the pain sent her into clinical shock. “But when I look back at it—they must have seen it so many times. No one in the room reacted when I went into shock. You could tell it was routine for them—that in this room, this is what happens to women.”

Published in Oh Comely magazine, February 2019. 

Everything and its opposite

There’s so much want in Kathryn Joseph’s music. It’s right there in the title of her new album, “From when I wake the want is” – that feeling that sits there, under the eyes, under the tongue, and there’s nothing you can do except watch as the ache turns into a pleasure. At least that’s how sensations float together in Joseph’s music: “I think you need that sore part to make anything that’s beautiful.”

This is a heartbreak album, but unless I knew that Joseph wrote it in response to lost love I don’t think I would have been able to tell. Joseph leaves such a wide open space in her soundscapes that it could be about anything, as long as you’re willing to meet here there. The title reminds me of that quote by Poe: “Sometimes, I’m terrified of my heart, of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants; the way it stops and starts.” I’m fascinated by the idea that there’s you and then there’s your heart, or your want – and that your want isn’t necessarily looking out for your best interests.

Joseph’s music seems to come from a place outside of her control: “Songs start off as noises, then I fit the words into it. I don’t really understand it.” The music swells behind the sparse yet sharp lyrics, delivered in Joseph’s sometimes brittle, sometimes cottony, voice. But there’s no self-pity there, as she sings it almost matter-of-factly: “How do I get rid of all this fucking love?” The song soars, creating a sense of floating as the soreness transcends into something almost comforting. You know when you’re experiencing something so intense that it flips over into its opposite? Like when you eat something so extremely sweet that it starts to taste acidic?

I’d been thinking about this for a while, long before I heard Joseph’s song – “From when I wake the want is” was released in August 2018. When I call Joseph at home in Glasgow, a few days after she opened for Neko Case in London, I don’t expect her to necessarily understand what I’m on about, but of course she does: “I am obsessed with the feeling that I am everything and its opposite at all times. It’s what I find almost disturbing about myself. I think my songs are that too.”

The new album follows on from Joseph’s 2015 debut, which won the prestigious Scottish SAY Award. But nothing about her story suggests she was expecting this success, or even really courting it. At 43, you could call Joseph a late bloomer, except that she’s always been making music – just, you know, for herself. “I’d been a waitress since my twenties,” Joseph tells me, describing her new life of making a living from music as something she just didn’t think she’d ever reach. She hated doing the things you need to do in order to get your music out, as it made her feel out of control. And her life before was good: “I loved my job, and I loved that it gave me a safe routine that was good for me. Then I could write however I was feeling it, and it didn’t matter how often I was doing it.” So going pro, if you will, was not ever something she actually planned to do, but then she moved to Glasgow and her neighbour happened to be Marcus Mackay, now her producer. Still, everything about Joseph’s journey has been a hide and seek experience – she recorded the first album without any expectations, and had it not been for the initiative of Claire Mackay, who runs the Hits the Fan label with Marcus, it never would have seen the light of day: “I was so paranoid about it, thinking it wasn’t anything that anyone would be interested in hearing,” she says. “I would never have done anything with it.”

I pause for a moment. I can see the appeal of keeping the thing you’re passionate about “untainted” by keeping it separate from any money-making ventures. But still, most people would be tempted to at least try? Joseph thinks about it. She loved her previous job and the people she was working with – she really liked her life, you know? She tries to explain: “I’ve lived in really beautiful places in Scotland … it made sense to me. It made me feel…” She stops, starts again. “I went to university when I was much younger, and my sister got really ill so I didn’t last long. I remember feeling, ‘I need to feel okay every day.’” This shift in thinking made it hard for Joseph to do things she didn’t like in the hopes of future rewards: “I still don’t feel like I’ve got that ability. Everything I feel is very immediate, and what I react to is very immediate. I’m not into long-term planning.”

Releasing the albums has been a far better experience than she expected, though. “The world has turned out to be a lot nicer than I thought it was going to be!” She laughs. “I love that this is my job now. I love getting to do it.” And it came at the right moment too – Joseph was actually offered a record deal when she was in her 20s, but felt very much out of her depth at the time: “I’m just so glad I waited until I was absolutely sure how the songs should sound and be.”

One of the most delightful things about Joseph’s lyrics is how frank they are – the words are sparse, but all the more effective for it. It’s a surprise at first, to hear these gorgeous, swoony songs liberally sprinkled with the word “fuck”. And not just as a swear word either – these lyrics are pretty sexual at times, describing one of the most fundamental wants. The tenderness of Joseph’s delivery means the songs can carry it, and of course, the weight of age and experience behind these lyrics makes them beautiful, whereas singing about fucking might have just been crude at 22. “I love that word. I use it a lot in real life as well. But I’m aware that I don’t want to use it in front of my child.” Joseph laughs – her daughter is seven years old. “But that’s the thing about being human I love best – I think sex is one of the most beautiful things we get to do as humans. Playing live and fucking are the only times when I don’t think about myself.”

Kathryn Joseph’s album “From when I wake the want is” is out now on Rock Action.

 

BL Magazine, January 2019. Original article p54-57.

Sharing the spoils: The case for the four-day workweek

Automation leads to improved efficiency – but who benefits? Until now, the spoils of technological advancement has gone straight to the business bottom line, as staff keep working the same hours no matter how much time is “saved” by technology.

We were supposed to be working 15 hours a week by now, predicted the economist John Maynard Keynes – in 1930 he anticipated that technological advancements in “progressive countries” would mean we’d be enjoying more leisure. But it hasn’t happen, even as data is now automatically input, documents effortlessly shared across devices, reports instantly assembled, and hardware spontaneously alerts us when it needs attention. In spite of warnings that automation will put people out work, Britons put in some of the longest hours in Europe – we rack up £32 billion worth of unpaid overtime, according to a Trades Union Congress (TUC) survey from September.

And people resent working so much. 81% want to work less, the TUC found, and out of those, about half would love to have a four-day workweek. The TUC has thrown its weight behind this idea, calling it a way to ensure productivity gains are distributed fairly. “Bosses and shareholders must not be allowed to hoover up all the gains from new tech for themselves. Working people deserve their fair share,” TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said in a statement. “If productivity gains from new technology are even half as good as promised, then the country can afford to make working lives better.”

But working four days per week – while being paid the same as before – would it actually work?

Initial reports suggest a four-day week may lead to improved productivity, even with fewer hours in the office. When researchers at Auckland University of Technology tracked a four-day workweek initiative at a 240-people-strong trust and estates company, they found that staff were less stressed and reported more motivation and commitment to their work, which in turn resulted in better performance. This makes sense: 12.5 million UK work days were lost last year because of work-related stress, depression or anxiety, according to the Health and Safety Executive, and the single biggest cause was workload.

The four-day workweek isn’t just some futuristic pipe dream. The fact that this idea has been floated at this point in time is no coincidence: we are finally at a point in technological advancement where it might actually be possible. There are already several businesses in the UK who’ve implemented a four-day workweek. The companies BL spoke did have the altruistic goal of sharing the spoils of technological advancement, but they also genuinely believed it serves the business financially.  

For NautoGuide, a digital mapping company in Swindon with five employees, the decision to move to a four-day week in September was motivated out of a desire to have more time to work on strategic goals. “We had a project that we really wanted to deliver long term as an investment, but we never got round to it because we were always firefighting,” says Dave Barter, CEO and Founder of NautoGuide. The company realised the answer wasn’t to have more resources or to be more efficient, but to have more time to think. “When you’re all in the office you never [take that thinking time], because the phone rings, email comes in, and people want things. The only way we could see to achieve that was by taking ourselves out the office.”

The staff at NautoGuide now work regular hours Monday to Thursday, and Barter thinks it’s fostered an appreciation that this is a place where you get rewarded for your good work right now, rather than maybe someday. “I think there’s also a benefit to being seen as having an open and forward-thinking culture, as [clients] see that and understand it will translate to our work too,” says Barter.

Rich Leigh is the Director and Founder of Radioactive PR, a dozen-people-strong public relations company in Gloucester. “I’ve got incredibly happy staff,” says Leigh, who started the four-day workweek initiative six months ago. The company is making more money than ever before, although the initiative has made a difference to the margins as Leigh has had to hire sooner than he probably would have otherwise needed as he doesn’t want to “squeeze five days into four”. The initiative has made the company an attractive place to work, Leigh says: “We get so many CVs. Inevitably we’ll be finding the very best people.”

Becky Simms, CEO and Founder of Reflect Digital, a marketing agency in Kent with a staff of 55, has also found that business has been good since moving to a four-day workweek in October: “We’ve closed the most business and had the most revenue.” The initiative was inspired by a desire for staff to be their best in the office, says Simms – agency work is high pressure: “You’re really worn out by the time you reach the weekend. [The four-day week] was inspired by that buzz you get after three day weekend. Now we can have that time to relax, but still really work hard while we’re in the office.”

*

While these early day experimentations with the four-day workweek are promising, it is very early days – it is hard to say for sure just how this change will affect companies’ bottom line. But while people on the Channel Islands put in just as many long hours, corporations in finance, professional services, and tourism industries may be less inclined to opt for less time in the office as a means of passing on the benefits of automation, at least for now.

The Channel Islands are “not as advanced as the UK in terms of digital transformation, says Pierre Jehan, Client Services Director of Resolution IT, an IT outsourcing specialist in Guernsey. Pointing to the 2,000 vacancies in the Guernsey finance sector alone, Jehan says it’s clear that automation has a role to play in closing this gap: “But with the shortages that they have, employers may be reluctant to offer a day per week off.”

But employees on the Channel Islands are still seeing other benefits of automation and digital transformation passed on to them, with opportunities for remote working and flexible hours: “Automation can also make workers’ lives more enjoyable by taking mundane tasks away and making them more efficient, and letting them concentrate on the nicer things in their jobs.” Jehan strongly believes in rewarding the people who create the savings – if a department comes up with new methods for saving hours, they should directly benefit from it. “Companies, in whatever sector, should empower staff to use these technologies in order to become more efficient and innovative through digital transformation. And in the same breath, they should reward their staff for doing so.”

While agreeing that Channel Island companies should be looking to robotic process automation or AI to help fill the worker shortages, Justin Bellinger, Chief Digital Officer of Channel Islands telecommunications supplier Sure thinks there are fundamental issues that needs addressing before the four-day workweek will make it onto the agenda. This will include tutoring and retraining: “We need to work out what machines can do that will benefit our businesses. What do I want my people doing it instead of manual input? The answer will be more interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence – things that will add value beyond the basic grind.”

This has already started happening on the Channel Islands, says Bellinger, pointing to the fund insurance and trust sectors: “As we come under ever-increasing regulatory scrutiny in the financial services sector, I firmly believe that regulators will start to automate compliance. … We’ve already started to see that in the gaming industry.”

The proponents of the four day workweek have an uphill battle ahead to convince business leaders that more time away from the desk could actually mean better overall job performance. “But how long that person has spent at their desk is a false way of looking at productivity. We’re not working at cotton mills anymore,” says Bellinger. Most people can only focus for five or six hours per day before fatigue sets in and quality starts to decline; when a Swedish retirement home ran a six-hour workday experiment in 2016, they found that nurses were less stressed, got sick less often, and had more energy to spend on quality interactions with their patients. It’s a fallacy to think that keeping people at work automatically means getting more out of them.” Research backs this up – most people can only focus for five or six hours per day before fatigue sets in, so it’s a fallacy to think that keeping people in the office automatically means getting more out of them.

For Rich Leigh, the change to a four-day workweek has had the benefit of positioning his company as forward-looking and innovative. “We’ve had clients come to us as a direct result of this, saying they we like the fact that we don’t just talk the talk, but walk the walk too.” Ultimately, Leigh cares about ensuring his staff are happy: “These are people you spend the majority of your life with. Why wouldn’t you want to give them the best time that you can?”

Published in Lionheart Magazine, the ‘Bright’ issue, in November 2018. 

Hotel

“Stay as long as you like,” he said as he headed out the door. “Take anything you want from the minibar.” That’s quite the offer, isn’t it. It was already late in the morning, but the moment was irresistible: I was in a hotel robe, the sun was filtering into the perfectly air conditioned room, and the sounds of the world were muffled by thick glass and even thicker carpet. It was a moment that seemed to exist outside of time.

Staying in a hotel in the city where you live may well be the ultimate indulgence. I didn’t need to be in that room – I live in London and my house was just a couple of miles away. But from the top floor of a hotel you can actually see across this flat city, as it sprawls on and on. Try as you might, but you’ll never be able to get a proper view of London – the place defies clarity. But we keep trying: Faced with an open view from a hill, or a floor-to-ceiling window in a tall building, we can’t help but stop for a long, slow while and look.

Dwarfed by thick white cotton, I crouched down by the minibar and contemplated a Coca Cola and some salted almonds. This is the breakfast of Joan Didion, a heroine of the in-between moment if there ever was one. Didion would get up in the morning, have her Coke, and get to work. Drinking soda for breakfast is not classy – for that you want black coffee and probably some kind of French pastry. But Joan Didion is one of those people who’s so razor sharp in her elegance that anything she does becomes classy by association. Didion would spend a lot of time in hotel rooms too, bringing with her a typewriter and a mohair shawl along with cigarettes and bourbon.  

I’m not usually one for morning soda, but the moment seemed to call for it. I mean, the minibar Coke came in a glass bottle. Apparently it really does taste better from glass than from plastic, and it’s not something I’m imagining. The sharp sweetness is enhanced further by the heaviness of the bottle in the hand, and the way the fat glass lip feels against your mouth. It’s such a treat: Haven’t we all been trained from childhood to never, ever touch the minibar? It’s wildly expensive compared to the shop just a block away. But if you think about the experience, it’s actually a bargain. For a mere £4, you get to drink a mini bar Coke in a oversized robe in blissful quiet, luxuriating over the view of your own city as the day is just starting.

BL Magazine, Sept-Oct 2018. Original article p44-46. 

On the health impact of business trips, and how employers need to take more responsibility

To have the life of a business hotshot, putting in a couple of hours for meetings before lounging at the pool for the rest of the day – nice work if you can get it, right? But of course you can’t, because this version of business travel doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever actually did. Any lingering luxuries afforded to work travel disappeared with the 2008 credit crunch, and economy flights and tight turnarounds have been the norm ever since. “The guys here take the mickey out of me when I’m going to Dubai, asking if I’m going to the swim-up bar,” says Trevor Norman, Director of Funds and Islamic Finance at VG in Jersey. “But it’s not all fun – business trips are work.”

Seven million business trips are taken every year by UK residents, according to the Office of National Statistics, a number that’s typically risen by 2.8% per year since 1980. A survey by Bristol Airport found that those who travel with their jobs typically head out eight times a year. But frequent business travel can have serious negative effects on health – mental as well as physical. Because there’s a lot going on when you’re travelling for work: you have to get to the airport on time and pass through security, and maybe the plane is late. Trying to sleep in an economy seat is never fun, and you land late at night and maybe there’s only junk food available. You have a few drinks – it’s been a long day – and you skip the gym before crashing into bed for some restless sleep while fighting your body clock. Tomorrow is a day of back-to-back meetings.

There’s a proven link between a high number of days spent on the road and a risk of long-term health issues like heart attacks and strokes. But a study published last December in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine suggests it may be causing some more immediate problems too. People who travel a lot for work are more likely to see their mental health suffering, by having trouble sleeping, being sedentary, smoking, and drinking more alcohol. Anxiety and depression also spiked for those who found themselves frequently on the road.

While most of us probably travel less than 14 times per month – the frequency which the study identified as being particularly harmful – the negative effects can be felt at more moderate levels too. A World Bank study found that the business travellers among its staff were three times as likely to file psychological insurance claims. Health risk appraisal surveys at large corporations routinely show that international business travel is associated not just with poor health, but that it also makes it harder to keep up with the pace of work. This means it’s not just an individual’s problem, but a corporate concern.

“The opportunity to travel is often touted by companies as a benefit in their recruitment of talent, but the accumulating evidence linking extensive business travel to chronic disease health risks needs to be factored into the cost-benefit analysis of the practice,” Dr Andrew Rundle, lead study author and Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University in New York, wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “Employees simply need to be aware that business travel can predispose them to making poorer health decisions.”

*

Dr Bob Gallagher, who heads up occupational health at Queens Road Medical Practice in Guernsey, says that companies are getting better at taking responsibility for their employees’ well-being while on the road. The issue should be considered as part of a company’s risk assessment: “Work travel can cause problems that can make people unwell, or it can make pre-existing mental or physical health conditions worse – or both, as these things are often linked,” says Gallagher. At his practice, Gallagher meets people who travel “an awful lot”, sometimes for weeks at a time. “It’s rare to meet someone who travels often for work who says it’s something they enjoy doing,” says Gallagher – for most people it’s something they have to do for the job and it can be a source of stress.

Common ill effects of work travel include heartburn, acid indigestion, digestion problems, and trouble sleeping, says Gallagher. “If you are below par because you haven’t slept, you’re a bit hungover, you’ve eaten too much food, you haven’t exercised, are you performing at your best? Probably not.” While some of this is down to the individual, companies are starting to realise that it’s their responsibility too. “Organisations need to look at this. They shouldn’t cram the day full of meetings so people can’t have some rest. Make sure people have a bit more time,” says Gallagher.

Ensuring employees don’t return from a mad-dash business trip too tired to drive home from the airport is also a matter for companies’ duty of care, says Andrew Perolls, Director of Business Travel Direct, a travel management company. “Companies have to be more careful about how they look after staff.” This also means ensuring staff aren’t staying in hotels in unsafe parts of town, considering things like access to medical facilities, and also, ensuring the company knows exactly where everyone is in case of a natural or political event.

While Perolls can testify to the fact that the life of the work traveller has sped up – going on a one-day business trip to the US is not unheard of – he also thinks this might be improving. “What people are prepared to put up with is changing,” says Perolls, adding that staff are increasingly bristling at being told to fly budget airlines at the crack of dawn. Especially the millennial generation, who’re now in their 30s, are more attuned to work-life balance: “We know that in specialist professions, they may even look at the travel policy before deciding to join a company if the job involves a lot of travel.”  

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Letting employees choose where to stay (within a budget) is one way to keep people happy – that way they can pick a hotel with a gym, or something in walking distance of good food options. Allowing people to fly out the night before will also prevent stress, as well as ensuring there’s downtime between meetings. Giving people a leisure day or two at the end of their trip is a good way to ensure the trip is a positive event, says Perolls: “It’s a shame going all the way to Bangkok only to see the airport.”

Ensuring you don’t have to run through airport security is always a great start to any trip, but ultimately, travel is an exercise in unpredictability. “Stress can be defined as a perceived lack of control, which is common when travelling,” says David Brudö, co-founder and CEO of Remente, a mental health app that aims to promote wellbeing through planning. Brudö explains how he recently used Remente to plan a trip to Japan, from booking flights and choosing restaurants to scheduling in his meditation sessions on the plane. “When you’re travelling you’re a bit disconnected from the outside world, but this means you actually have some time to take care of yourself. A plane is a great place to just sit and meditate, read a book, and invest in yourself,” says Brudö. Remente also works with businesses looking to improve employee wellbeing: “We see that the more balanced people are, the more productive they are. That’s something businesses are increasingly realising.”

It’s hard to get around the need for business travel – video conferencing is constantly improving, but it’s not a substitute for a handshake. But a stressed organisation is not a smart organisation, and it’s clear that companies are realising that taking care of people is ultimately a sound business decision; Deloitte found that 88% of UK businesses are working towards improving work-life balance for staff. That also means helping people stay healthy on the road, by booking the hotel with the nice gym, or providing resources for meditation or cognitive behavioural therapy. Ultimately, it also means picking the people who enjoy travel to go on trips, while letting those who’d rather not stay home.

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The lifetime flier

Trevor Norman took 90 flights last year, having gone on 18 business trips from his home in Jersey. “I’m constantly travelling,” says Norman, Director of Funds and Islamic Finance at VG, a Jersey-based independent provider of fiduciary and administrative solutions. “My father was BA staff so my mother flew with me even while pregnant. I’ve flown all my life, literally!” He laughs. “I was lucky enough to fly to all sorts of places before people were really travelling. That’s carried on in my business career.”

Norman’s BA record shows he’s flown almost 600,000 miles. He’s got the routine down pat: “In our spare room I have travel drawers with all the bits I need. I have a bag of electrical leads that I just drop in my case. It’s almost instinctive by now.” As he usually flies to the UK first, Normal likes to get that leg done the day before, as he’s done with risking still sitting in traffic on the M25 as his plane boards. “Also, I always allow time between meetings, for something to eat and a comfort break. … I try and relax as much as I can no the plane, have a snooze and try and arrive fresh. I can sleep just about anywhere and don’t tend to suffer much with jetlag – I’m lucky that way.”

Missing home used to be more of a problem when the children were young. “That was stressful for my wife,” says Norman. Although now that the kids have left home, his wife often comes with him on trips, which makes for a lovely time for them both. “I enjoy the travel to see different places and learn about different cultures. I try and see the positive side of it.”

OnOffice Magazine cover story, August 2018. Original article (PDF).

Station to Station: How Crossrail is changing London’s neighbourhoods

Any new building will change the face of a block. If the structure is significant enough it can even change an entire neighbourhood, like how the Shard propelled the entire London Bridge area into becoming a glitzy business piece of the City. But once in a rare while there’s an infrastructure project that has the chance to transform an entire city.

When this happens, it’s not just about the buildings or the trains that run underfoot – it’s about creating opportunities that will stand the test of time. What kind of legacy do we want to leave for the future? For the people who move through the city on a daily basis, the open spaces and the green habitats around the buildings may well mark the difference between a city that’s merely functional, and a place to love.

Londoners have watched the construction of Crossrail happen around them for nine years now, eagerly anticipating the opening of the Elizabeth line at the end of this year. £14.8 billion has been spent to create a railway that will carry 200 million passengers a year. This is the largest construction project currently taking place in Europe, building 57 kilometres of new track to create a 118 kilometre-long railway set to bring 1.5 million people within 45 minutes of the capital.  

But the train is only half the story. Ten brand new stations have been built along the line, and another 30 have been refurbished. Far beyond that – the surrounding areas have been profoundly influenced by this new lifeline. The presence of this major new transport link has inspired buildings, passages, and squares that will be part of daily life in the city for generations.

At Tottenham Court Road, the new Crossrail station is being built a little way down from the existing station.When you stand at the Newman Street entrance of the new Rathbone Place complex you can see where the crowds will soon make their way. Built atop what was previously a Royal Mail sorting office and a car park, Rathbone Place isn’t an official Crossrail project, but as Graham Longman, Lead Project Architect at Make Architects explains, many of the choices made in this mixed use development were determined by the proximity to the station.

Now, the Fitzrovia site is home to Facebook’s London office, but the presence of the tech giant is barely noticeable when you’re sitting in the garden surrounded by trees and flowers. “It really is all about the garden,” says Longman as he gives me the tour. There are three routes into the green space – two archways covered in glazed jade ceramic tiles, and one that’s open to the sky. That’s the main Crossrail route coming from Newman Street. Make worked with the Space Syntax Laboratory to model how people would flow from the station and into the garden, which makes for a scenic shortcut to the offices and houses of Fitzrovia.

“The garden is like a found space – it’s not obvious as you walk down the street. It’s a pressure valve to Oxford Street,” Longman continues as we find a spot in the shade, behind the public water fountain. The architect says it felt important to give something back to London with this project – central London developments are often tight and this is a relatively large site: “In the 1800s there would have been a lot of garden squares being built. We’re seeing less of that in modern times, but it’s an old model,” he says. “Open, green spaces, and roof gardens and balconies, are so important for people’s states of mind. These are spaces where people can feel happy to be in them.”

Public space, in the form of open squares and green gardens, are a red thread running through many of the architectural projects that have cropped up in the wake of Crossrail. At Canary Wharf, Crossrail Place is a surprising green oasis in the midst of a strictly business area – a deliberate effect, according to Ben Scott, Partner at Foster + Partners, the architecture studio behind Crossrail Place.

“Infrastructure projects act as natural magnets, pulling people in from across the city. We believe they are also an opportunity to create vibrant public spaces and amenities for people, maximising their potential,” says Scott. “The primary planning objective of the project was to create a clear, publicly accessible building that serves both the working population of Canary Wharf and its visitors, as well as the residential neighbourhood of Poplar.”

Foster + Partners worked with Canary Wharf Group to ensure the below-ground Crossrail station and the oversite development had a unified vision. This has been the case for the entire Elizabeth line – in fact, this is the first time that a major UK rail project, complete with stations and surrounding areas, has been designed at the same time. This created a unique opportunity to ensure that the new line not only fits in, but that it actually adds to the character of the city.

For several Crossrail-related architecture projects along the line, public life sits at the centre of new developments. When placemaking practice JTP was tasked with the Dickens Yard development in Ealing in West London, there was no doubt: this was an opportunity to create a new centre for Ealing. “It lacked a town square – it has Haven Green to the north but it didn’t really have a civic open space in the centre of town,” says Ian Fenn, Partner at JTP. Dickens Yard is not directly linked to Crossrail, but a large part of the appeal for the mixed use development is the increased footfall expected from the new trainline.

Dickens Yard sits on top of a former car park, but the square at the heart faces a number of listed buildings, including Christ the Saviour church, Ealing Town Hall, and Ealing Fire Station. “A key driver for the design was to create a series of linked spaces that embraced the context of the surrounding buildings,” says Fenn. “We created a new town square that [opened up] the main entrance of the church. The image was that people would spill out of the church on wedding days and into this new realm in the heart of Ealing.”

Architects working along the Crossrail path through central London have had to work in areas with a strong sense of history that had to be respected. Daniel Moore, Partner at PLP Architecture, says their design for the building sitting atop Farringdon East Crossrail station was bounded by conservation areas on three sides, one of them being Charterhouse Square, a Grade II-listed park that’s being opened to the public as part of the development. “We quickly realised we had to be sympathetic to the local context,” says Moore. “You have to treat it with respect, as these buildings may be sitting on the site for a hundred years – it’s a Crossrail station, so there’s an element of permanence.”

Civic architecture is different – building something that’s distinctly intended to improve the lives of the people comes with a sense of added responsibility. Every architect I spoke to echoed the pride and joy that comes with being trusted with creating something that will last generations – the Crossrail stations themselves are designed to last 120 years. Buildings can find a place in people’s hearts, but a public square, or a garden where anyone can go to have a quiet moment, becomes part of the fabric of the city.

The idea of Crossrail is over 100 years old, and its current iteration – the Elizabeth line – is the result of 20 years of planning, as Head of Architecture at Crossrail, Julian Robinson explains. “When you have a project that stretches over that length of time you’re able to plan in a wider way. It presented an opportunity to take a more integrated approach.” The new station at Tottenham Court Road will introduce a public space on Dean Street; Robinson explains how the space that’s opened up around around the existing Tube station at Charing Cross Road is a result of collaboration, as London Underground has been preparing for the added footfall. “Sometimes it’s serendipity as projects are coinciding, but the reason they’re coinciding is because of the degree of planning.”   

With any major building project in an old city like London, something will invariably be lost. The Saint Giles area by Tottenham Court Road – the “grubby” end of Oxford Street – is probably the piece of London that’s seen the most change as a consequence of Crossrail. The much-loved 1927 Astoria Theatre  had to be torn down to make room, along with the Grade II-listed building at 96 Dean Street. For people who know and love an area, it can be tough to accept what’s lost. But Robinson points out that a great deal of effort has been made to ensure that Crossrail preserves London’s character, and that it will improve the area for the people who use it.

A major civic architecture project like Crossrail is really about creating something for the future. When the scaffolding comes down, the stations will be taller and wider than what we’re used to seeing on the Tube. Londoners and visitors will add the new squares and gardens to their mental maps of resting spots throughout the city. Once the Elizabeth line opens, London will continue to mould itself around its new high-speed rail link – developers will see new opportunities, architects will get more opportunities to create open air, and people will adjust their habits. Because ultimately, Crossrail is about so much more than just a train. “The railway is there for people. London is there for people,” says Robinson. “Without the people you wouldn’t have the railway, and you wouldn’t have the city.”

 

Published in Lionheart Magazine (Issue 9: Land, Water and Air) in April 2018

Strange birds

Wild parrots don’t belong in London but still, they are everywhere. I always find it a little jarring to see one – the shocking green and red typical of a parakeet is starkly out of place. It’s like we instinctively know that English birds should be brown and grey, with a hint of colour on the chest at most. The parakeets are striking outliers: they are characters of a brighter, sunnier place that’s clearly very far away from here.

I suppose your attitude to happening upon a flock of wild parrots in London will depend on who you are – will you respond to this uncanny encounter with awe, or with scepticism? They sure are adorable, darting between the trees, but seeming a wild parrot in an English park also feels like someone messed up and put the wrong bird down on the island.

I feel a bit like that myself in West London – a strange bird in a wrong place. I moved here from East London, my home of nearly a decade, for reasons that were good but ultimately not my ideal choice. I was pretty sour about it at first, but I’ve had some time to think about it and I’ve come to take a more philosophical approach to the matter: what makes a home?

The parrots made England their home by being big and bold. Now, wild parrots are actually one of the most common birds found in London, and their numbers are growing at a rapid pace as winters are getting milder. There’s more of them out West, but they’ve been spotted in all 32 boroughs. In Kensington Gardens there’s a group that’s apparently so tame they will eat out of your hand. Peckham, Brixton and Greenwich also have them living in the local parks. There’s lots of different types: Alexandrine parakeets have been seen in Lewisham, while Bromley has blue-crowned parakeets, and Amazonian orange-winged parakeets have made a home in Weybridge.

No one quite knows how London came to have wild parrots. Maybe they escaped from a film set, or from a hanger at Heathrow Airport, or were set loose when aviaries were damaged during the 1987 storms? The best story is that Jimi Hendrix once released a breeding pair of parrots on Carnaby Street in the 1960s, but like is often the case with myths like that, the truth is probably far less remarkable.

There’s a flock of feral parakeets living not far from my house, and I often see them in the trees in my garden. I enjoy their company a lot. I’ve never seen any wild parrots in East London, so the first time I spotted one out West it felt like it meant something – maybe this place would have its own charm too? London is so big, made up of all these little villages, meaning that wherever you are there will be things that you can’t find anywhere else. One of my favourite things is when someone says something smart to me that I hadn’t thought of. When that happens, it’s like my brain cracks open for a second, with the sheer thrill of it. Sometimes, places are a lot like that too.