The Deadly Double

The joys of commuter life.

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. 

So is CW, as some suspect, just another victim of the dreadful pandemic of home working? Or is there something else driving companies out? Either way, I thought as I surveyed my surroundings, I can see why they’re keen to leave.

The revolving doors of the businesses that remain here – Morgan Stanley, J.P Morgan and European Bank – swallowed up their employees mercilessly, making it impossible to net a single early morning interviewee. The golden gates shut to me, I decided it was best to return later that night when the working day would be over, and inhibitions hopefully looser. 

When I returned that same evening post-work drinks were in full effect. In a bar with lampshades that were purposefully being swung from side-to-side by bar staff determined to create an entertaining atmosphere, I set upon my targets. I was sure to find a Claphamite somewhere among the throng. But first, an assessment of the general mood among punters.

Despite my initial dislike of the place, older sentient suits wearers seemed to hold less disdain for the vibes basin that is Canary Wharf. ‘When I came here it was a barren wasteland and 9/11 was happening,’ one grey-haired man recalled, not specifying if the two were in any way interconnected. ‘But now it’s vibrant and exciting,’ he reassured me, despite the caveat that ‘it doesn’t have the soul of the City, yet.’ I looked around the bar, waiting for soul, vibrance, excitement. They didn’t come. The other glowing reviews of the neighbourhood did not inspire any of the three either. ‘Reliable power, reliable internet, reliable hot water,’ said another, determinedly, ‘I can’t complain.’ 

Is it the general ambience of the area that inspires such displays of steadfast resignation, then? Or, were these people depressed already and drawn in unison, moth-like, to the only geographical place as miserable on the outside as they felt on the inside? And what about the ‘deadly doublers’ that I saw disembark from the station this morning? 

When I tracked down the first specimen, whose identity I shall preserve to grant him what’s left of his dignity, it became imminently clear that he had already started to be ground down by the experience. The effects clearly taking their wearsome toll, he, among others I spoke to who commuted in from Clapham, complained about the journey, the housing in south London and the ‘extortionate prices’. One told me he liked Clapham but found Canary Wharf ‘nice but soulless’, working there as a necessity for his career, not necessarily out of choice. His colleague, on the other hand, was not convinced. He rubbished his workmate’s living choices, claiming he’d got it entirely the wrong way round: ‘Canary Wharf is full of fun, Clapham is full of fucking idiots.’

Canary Wharf’s idea of ‘fun’ – man-sized yellow rubber ducks and neon signs aggressively encouraging us to reconnect with our inner child – are everywhere. A post-COVID innovation, with the aim of improving after work footfall, one sign outside a local joint read: ‘Childhood is BACK. For adults ONLY,’ another: ‘Eat. Drink. Shoot? Dance. Play.’ Apparently it wasn’t always like this. The stalwarts here, the ones who have been around since the 90s, remember it more barren. Fewer pubs, no restaurants, even worse than it is now, a couple of them told me. Maybe, less was more, I mused, but forced fun, it seemed, was very much on the docket in the present day. However, not everyone was aboard the funmobile just yet.

‘Perhaps you should seek a more ethical profession than journalism’, sniffed a man who worked at Barclays, who did not think much of the philosophy of this magazine when I politely approached him. Mr Barclays thought even less of my ‘preconceived notions’ of men in finance as unlikeable. He put his children to bed – every single night. ‘Write that down’, he said. ‘Father seeks praise for looking after his own children,’ I wrote.

His colleagues invariably looked down my top and called my handshake weak. ‘Extremely limp’, said one. They worked in something to do with financial services and got offended when I implied they might make a lot of money. ‘Simply untrue,’ said the one wearing a TAG Heuer on his expert-at-hand-shaking wrist. Another asked if I felt safe here ‘as a woman’.

I was worn down by then, dreaming fondly of Clapham’s green and bountiful Common – a sentence I never thought I’d write. I sank my final drink of the night as one youngish banker told me the pub we were in, The Parlour, is his ‘north star’. Did he live in Clapham? No, he said. He lives here, in the Wharf. ‘Convenient,’ another Wharf doubler added. ‘Easy. Less stress.’ Does he like it there? ‘No. I hated it at first. But you get used to it.’ 

After all this, it seems, my hypothesis was wrong. The most depressing life in London is not living in Clapham and working in Canary Wharf. There’s a worse life. A bleaker existence. A deadlier double. Living in Canary Wharf and working there to boot. On the DLR on the way home I counted my lucky stars that I don’t do either.