If irony – of a kind – is the layering of comedy and tragedy, there are some places in London where it becomes fully three-dimensional.
I arrived early, because Monopoly Lifesized tickets come by email with a stern warning about lateness. As I walked toward Tottenham Court Road, I passed the furniture store, Heal’s – beds costing £10,089 – and the myriad of tents outside it – £40 from Argos – a few doors down, and considered the changing and recurring fortunes of this patch of London.
Not to invoke the nineties, but the greatest club I ever went to was in the abandoned basement of 101 Great Russell Street, around the corner from where I now strolled, at the start of that decade. It opened around 3am, ran till lunchtime and everybody seemed to be there. A few years later, I learned scuba-diving – the theoretical side of it – in a shop below a pornographic bookstore on Tottenham Street. The instructor, who had numerous business interests, later took me on a debt-collecting mission to The Capricorn, a nearby Goodge Street club-cum-brothel made briefly famous in 2008, when Ronnie Wood left his second wife for a 20-year-old Kazakh woman he’d met there. It was raided and closed a year later, after the police discovered (and this is a direct quote) that ‘shady dealings were blatantly going on’. Clubs and affordable shelter collided at Tottenham Court Road’s YMCA, the world’s first. Not only could you stay there but its basement hosted such seminal club nights as Raw, and Shoom. As of last week, the building has been closed and will be replaced by a windowless hotel. While that might prove to be the area’s most egregious recent development, its most absurd goes on…
If irony – of a kind – is the layering of comedy and tragedy, there are some places in the capital where it becomes fully three-dimensional. This strip, in its post-pandemic incarnation, sees the city’s richest and poorest juxtaposed in a manner suggesting a school project about inequality returned to its author for being too on the nose.
In the two centuries since John Harris Heal, of Heal’s, moved his premises there, Tottenham Court Road has emerged as the centre of London’s high-end, retail furniture trade. It has taken less than ten years and an innovation in pop-up tent technology to make it the hub of London’s homeless, too. This is less a shift than a regression. Even in Heal’s heyday, his shop was on the edge of The Rookery, an overpopulated slum described by author Peter Ackroyd as ‘the worst living conditions in all of London’s history’. The construction of New Oxford Street in 1847 was, in part, an attempt to plan away the problem.
But the area is given toward aiding those who are down on their luck, speaking geographically. Its defining structure, Centre Point, proved such an affront to the homeless crisis in the 1960s that the country’s most prominent shelter group shares its name in sardonic honour. Further along, the Soup Kitchen, operating from 79 Tottenham Court Road, has been operating since 1986 and, besides meals, offers access to solicitors, GPs and its own mental health clinic. It would seem a sensible place to be near if one were in need.
Beyond the dartboard which hung on the wall beside the area’s largest tented encampment (recently removed and fenced-off) is the major A&E department at University College Hospital, and an abundance of adjoining properties all largely unoccupied at night, full of service alleyways, heating outlets and generous overhanging spaces. Then, of course, there is the relative safety that comes in numbers.
Between the beds and tents sits the twist in the tale of Tottenham Court Road, for it is here, at number 213, that you can briefly escape the lurid streetside morality play for a game of a different sort: Monopoly Lifesized.
For many Londoners, playing at owning property is as close as they will get to doing so. For the 12,000 reckoned to be sleeping rough in the city, the dice have already rolled. Who then, is paying upwards of £50 (the price of two Monopoly boards) to ‘go lifesized’?
Today, it’s me, and a team on a work outing that I am unceremoniously assigned to, despite my status as a solo player. A staff member in a vivid waistcoat insists on photographing me holding a huge dice and a massive £500 note. These images will be available to buy on my way out, I am assured. ‘In a few years this won’t even buy you a pint,’ I quip, holding the money, to show that I am here to make scathing social commentary rather than have fun. ‘It won’t even buy you a pint now!’ He shouts back.
The outing and I march upstairs and meet ‘the tokens’. These are young people who will guide us through the game; they are in bright costumes, with a token from the game (car, dog etc.) attached to their heads. ‘Let’s go lifesized!’ yells the loudest, loudly. We cheer and follow, because group psychology is a profound thing. I came as a cynic but within minutes, I just want to win.
‘The board’ is a vast laminated chamber with the Monopoly board as the floor. It feels like it can be hosed down if needs be. The lead token, who is also our team’s token, calls for quiet because she is ‘getting a message from Mr Monopoly’. She holds her ear, Noel Edmonds-style, nods and then informs us that we are all getting extra money to play with. As in a genuine economy, our lives in the game will be subject to the whims of faceless capital. We are assigned roles. I am the team’s estate agent, which means I have to slap magnetic ‘SOLD’ signs on any property we acquire.
Within the game proper is a series of escape rooms off the main board. I am deployed tactically – to great effect, I must say – despite having spent my adult life avoiding this kind of thing. Again, like life, the wider rules are quite incomprehensible, but this is no matter as the tokens step even the clumsiest speculator through the game. Despite the wholesale competitive regression, everyone is smiling. At least until we buy a hotel on Park Lane which, as in the boardgame, brings everyone else to ruin – and foreshadows what would happen to the YMCA.
We are declared the winners, but there are no prizes save the glory and although I have, I feel, been instrumental in our victory, I’m asked to step aside when the time comes for the workmates to be photographed. I am briefly hurt, but I regain my composure in time to purchase a souvenir ‘Go to Jail’ coaster, and flee. Back on Tottenham Court Road the tents and their tenants are just as I left them. I look at the beds I can’t afford and the people I am afraid of becoming, then do what we do in the cities: I turn around and walk away.
