It’s bad manners to mention the ‘C’ word in polite society but last year, if someone good-naturedly asked me where I lived, it was unavoidable.
‘Clapham,’ I’d answer. The light would drain from their eyes. It was quite accidental that I had found myself living there, as a lodger with a friend’s mum’s friend and her anxious whippet, Betty. But for four excruciating months, Clapham was where I called home.
It goes without saying that since leaving Clapham, I have felt lighter, freer and significantly less poor. You couldn’t have paid me to go back. Or so I’d thought. But I will do pretty much anything for The Fence. So, at my editor’s behest, I did what I swore I’d never do and returned to my old stomping ground, notepad in hand, in order to interrogate the ‘deadly double’.
The ‘deadly double’ is the combo that is suspected to be the most depressing professional life imaginable in London –living in Clapham and commuting to Canary Wharf for work. The theory goes that this is a painful dual infliction in the capital: living in the yuppiest neighbourhood in London while working in the most soulless part of town.
‘Loads of people do it,’ said a friend. And they recently graduated from Exeter, so they would know. ‘They all walk around Clapham Waitrose with their Durham or Exeter leavers hoodies with their surnames on the back. And in the morning they put on their suits and go to work.’
I needed to see this commuter spectacle for myself, and the only way to do so was to sleep in Clapham. I appealed to my cousin, who lives there, working as a wealth manager while adamantly claiming to be ‘not posh’. As we put together the air mattress she told me about her new running club on the Common, the preferred method of seeking out dopamine in order to deal with the unabating misery of an SW4 postcode. Running clubs, she says, are ‘the new Hinge’.
I ruminated on this the next morning as I packed onto the Northern line platform at Clapham South among hordes of AirPod wearing, claw-clipped corporate girlies and quarter-zip-fleeced men, knuckles white from clutching their morning’s copy of the FT. Everyone looked quintessentially… Clapham. By which I mean, they look moneyed, but miserable. They were off to make more money, but weren’t much going to enjoy it. They needed their running clubs. Their organic flat whites. Their lacklustre shags with each other. They barged past me for three trains, after which I suffered eight stops of sardined hell among them, standing room only. I followed this with another four stops on the Jubilee line. Finally on a tube line with WiFi, I noticed that the Canaries among us were already starting their daily grind, one corporate email at a time.
At the end of this arduous pilgrimage, we emerge into the grey mecca of Canary Wharf. Dystopian, Orwellian, bleak –yes, it is all of this. This is an area of London defined by its architectural sadism. Increasing numbers of businesses are moving away from the corporate citadel in recent months, including HSBC who are set to swap their current quasi-nautical digs, merrily termed ‘The Tower of Doom’, for more pleasant views of the turrets of St Paul’s Cathedral in coming years.
