Talking Mounds, Piazzas and London lit with novelist, Will Wiles
Part one of our conversation with the author, journalist and psycho(geography) killer
We got to know Will Wiles when he became a regular contributor to Londonist in the very early days. His writing on architecture and design has appeared in a variety of magazines (he was deputy editor of ICON magazine) and he’s also the author of four novels. His first, Care of Wooden Floors, won a Betty Trask Award, and his second, The Way Inn, was shortlisted for The Encore Award. In 2019 he published his ‘London novel’, Plume, a story of technology, psychogeography and gentrification that David Baddiel described as “Kafka, if Kafka had spent more time in British hotels and pubs”. The Last Blade Priest, a fantasy novel, will be published by Angry Robot in June 2022.
This is the first part of our chat, which includes the inevitable discussion about the Marble Arch Mound as well as the history of Oxford Street’s pedestrianisation and just how much involvement Will had in the demise of the psychogeography genre. In the second part (which will be published in a couple of weeks) we talk about tall buildings, sky pools, kebab fiction and his new novel.
We have to start with the Marble Arch Mound. I assume you’ve been keeping up with this?
Oh yes! We haven’t been able to see it yet. We tried to go and see it on Wednesday and it wasn’t open yet. I mean they closed it again, and there were lots of people working on it. So maybe it will be redeemed somewhat by the time they reopen it. I will say, I went along with an open mind, and I like MVRDV [the architects behind the project].
There’s two separate phenomena, aren’t there: One is when something’s genuinely crap and something good comes out of it because everyone has a great deal of fun. They can even become quite successful on their own terms…
… The ‘so bad it’s fun’ phenomenon?
Exactly. Take the Millennium Dome. That was quite a successful paying attraction in the end. People tend to forget that. Despite having been much denigrated. I mean maybe it was a bit rubbishy and naff in places, but it still performed okay as an attraction.
But then there’s the much more toxic online phenomenon, which I don’t think is specifically English or British (but which we do seem to have a bit of a speciality in), which is tearing something down just for the pleasure of tearing it down.
So I was curious to see which of those it was: whether it was deservingly being roasted or whether it was undeservingly being roasted. Because I was feeling a bit sorry for it after a day [of seeing it criticised online]! Although I’ll admit the prospect of Westminster Council falling flat on their face is quite fun.
What’s hard for a lot of people to grasp is the reasoning behind it. What’s the central idea? Where is the joy or the charm in this temporary mound of earth?
Well, London has quite a long tradition of temporary things that are good. The Serpentine Pavilion for example. But with the Mound there’s a lot of other things going on.
First of all there’s the situation of the giant roundabout. Marble Arch roundabout is this unpleasant place full of lost tourists, and people who don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s very hard to imagine anyone going there on purpose, because it is practically a motorway junction. It’s a very inhospitable environment.
Decades of successive administrations have made tweaks towards making it more habitable by putting in sunken gardens, and the underpasses, and works of sculpture including that interesting horse’s head that's been there for a while. But it’s never really, fundamentally, resolved the problem of four lanes of traffic in constant motion around it.
And that’s the problem with the whole business of enticing people back into the centre. Because one thing about the centre of London at the moment (I’m talking about Oxford and Regent Street) is they’re actually pretty pleasant and more pleasant than they’ve been for a long time, precisely because they don’t have a lot of people on them.
I walked the whole length of Regent Street a couple of weeks ago during the good weather and I was thinking “Well, this is very nice indeed!”. You can imagine this as a sort of decent, classy shopping district in a European city, which is what it should be.
But to do that permanently you need to dramatically reduce the amount of traffic going through it and perhaps not make everything dependent on tourism. But this is where they have comprehensively, historically failed for decades. They have failed to come up with a low traffic proposal for these streets.
And they continue to fail with this ‘piazza’ proposal for Oxford Circus. That may do something to tidy up Regent Street by reducing the amount of traffic going through it. But fundamentally these interventions are all about trying to reconcile the desirability of the place with motor traffic, and it just doesn’t work.
Exchanging a junction for through traffic isn’t going to calm traffic at all, it’s just going to result in a continuous line of it.
P.S. If you subscribe you’ll get part two of this interview delivered direct to your inbox (because that’s how email works)…
Ok, let’s quickly talk about the Oxford Circus Piazza plans. You’re not a fan?
Those renderings actually made me quite cross, I think they were some of the most dishonest renderings I’ve ever seen. Absolutely covered in fraudulent window boxes to make everything look a little bit softer and greener.
There are legitimate logistical problems with pedestrianising Oxford Street. For example, you’d have to turn somewhere into a sort of bus station to turn buses around if you can’t run them through. But nevertheless, it is the obvious intervention to make a vast area of West End London much more pleasant and habitable, and it has been for a long time.
People were talking about this before I moved into London in the ‘90s, so it’s been at least 30 or 40 years that it’s been proposed. And I think one of the biggest disappointments of Sadiq Khan’s first term is his scuttling away from that plan.
There was this brief momentum behind it, but these things come up against the monumental bolus of corruption and stupidity that is Westminster Council and just die! I mean if any council deserves to be taken into special measures and put under direct control of the GLA it would be Westminster. It’s not fit for purpose. They’re in charge of vitally important areas of central London, and they have no interest in actually making them facilities for London.
Do you think that's part of the problem with the Mound? There’s no clear purpose or thoughtfulness to it?
I can understand a temporary attraction to get people thinking “Oh, I should go into the centre again”. Because although a lot of life has returned to London’s neighbourhoods, the West End is still very quiet, and that’s down to a lack of tourists and people staying local.
But ultimately you have to ask ‘Why a hill?’. And I suppose their answer was ‘Why not?’. But then you create more problems. One of which is that its setting is against Hyde Park, so you've got a backdrop of very established trees to put it in stark contrast. If you put the Mound in Somerset House or somewhere where it had a backdrop of architecture, that would give it a different feel altogether. But it doesn't have that advantage. The other thing is it’s visibly unfinished. It doesn't have the flowering shrubberies and lushness that appeared in the renderings, it's just a sedum layer.
People have talked about its angularity, comparing it to Minecraft and so on. I didn’t mind the angularity! I think that has the potential to be quite charming, to give a kind of articulation to the form. Make it almost abstract, you know? That seems like an MVRDV feature rather than a bug. But you do need to have this planting on it, otherwise it's just a sort of bare nub.
Can we talk about psychogeography for a second? Because you got asked a lot about this when Plume came out, but in the past few years the genre really seems to have disappeared, at least it’s not as pervasive as it once was. I guess I want to ask you, ‘Did you kill psychogeography’?
I certainly can’t claim credit for killing it. I think I might have been the one who identified the stench coming from its apartment. The one that alerted the emergency services that maybe it wasn’t doing too well.
It was already receiving a great deal of very intelligent (much more intelligent than me, I have to say) critique as a somewhat irrelevant bourgeois phenomenon from people like Owen Hatherley, so I can’t claim credit for that.
But I should say that my criticism came from a very loving place. It was a love of the stuff that led me to expose myself to a great deal of it over the course of about 25 years, and then also develop a sense of it perhaps coming to the end of its road. But yeah, you’re right, it does seem to have tailed off. I think its practitioners have all gotten older and left London and there is not a huge influx of new people wanting to do what they do.
But there are people who write very evocatively about modern London as a place and a lived experience. For some reason I’m thinking of those London Rental Opportunity of the Week columns that Joel Golby writes for Vice (above). I often think they have some of the best insights on the city. And there’s also been a run of novels about kind of reinhabiting London. Joe Dunthorne’s Adulterants was one, set during the London riots. Not a psychogeographical novel, but a really interesting slice of London life.
And there have been other more recent novels in very similar territory. Sam Riviere and Matthew Turner are both doing things in a similar Ballardian, ominous territory. Rebecca Watson wrote a very good novel called Little Scratch, which is a literal sort of psychogeography really.
It's a stream of consciousness: what the protagonist is thinking as she goes about her day going from her flat to an office and back. As such, it’s a quite vivid description of commuting and going out in the evening and going out for lunch in the office and so on. It's visceral. It really feels realistic and accurate and I think it’s quite an extraordinarily alive depiction of life in London, which deserves to be much more highly praised. I was very disappointed it wasn't on the Booker long list. It’s kind of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine but for modern London.
So, yes, there is there is some work in the psychogeographical mould going on, but it’s blazing a new trail away from the people who were doing it in the ‘90s and 2000s.
Come back in a couple of weeks for part two of our interview with Will. In the meantime you can follow him on Twitter and sign up to his newsletter.
A quick bit of housekeeping
Next week, we’ll be taking a quick summer break. After four months and more than fifty issues (!) we’re going to take a few days off to recharge our batteries and think about what’s next for LiB. There’ll be a Weekend Roundup this Saturday and then the next time you hear from us will be Wednesday 18th.
In the meantime, if you want to get in touch and give us any feedback on how we’re doing and what you’d like to see more (or less) of, then our inbox is always open.
And the rest…
As you might have noticed by now, this week’s tube strike was called off. Although “strikes are still planned to run over four days from Tuesday 24 August, should continuing talks at Acas fail to reach a resolution.”
On Monday a 71-year-old vicar from Oxford sewed his lips together outside News UK’s offices in London Bridge, as a protest against the suppression of climate science in Rupert Murdoch's media outlets. The reverend created a YouTube video explaining the reasons behind the protest and recording himself sewing his lips together (it goes without saying that this video contains images that you might find disturbing).
Rishi Sunak really really wants young City workers to go back into their offices. The chancellor told LinkedIn News that his career would have suffered if he had done the “first bit of my career over Teams and Zoom.”
This guy made a Jeremy Corbyn jam auction video on TikTok (we don’t have the space to explain that right now). The Mail Online asked if they could use it. He said no. Guess what the Mail did…
Another video which you might want to watch through your fingers: George King (who was jailed for six months for climbing The Shard a couple of years ago), freeclimbed the 36-storey Stratosphere building in Stratford yesterday:
