Sandhu, who calls himself a particularist, was born in West London
but grew up in a small town called
Gloucester, near the Welsh
border. He collects greasy-spoon menus and plans to take a road
trip to
Poland because he heard the population may diminish by 17
percent over the next few decades, a curiosity he wants to see for
himself. For his next book, he intends to explore how the Singer
sewing machine changed the world, an interest fueled by the East
End, where, starting in the 1880s, the sweatshop system employed
poor immigrants who worked in their cramped homes for the
tailored-garment industries. The book will also serve as a vehicle
to explore the history of his parents, who worked in the garment
industry but never wanted to talk about the experience.
When he sees evidence of the East End's past on our walk, it
quickens his pace. He delights in old signs that carry outdated
phone numbers and wrong prefixes. He talks about light pollution
and the politics of light (how urban hipsters move into dodgy areas
for the feel of living on the edge but then complain about the lack
of street lights).
When we enter a street that extends beyond the hoots of horns and
traffic and the shouts of ambling youth, he stops to consume the
silence. "You get these pockets of silence, which are both alluring
and magical for me," he says, looking up to the sky. "I want to
find the stars. I want to find the moon. I want to find the silence
in the city, because normally it's blaring and jarring."
We walk past council flats, and Sandhu speaks about the countless
workers who reside behind the netting curtains and who likely sew
on buttons for 25 pence an hour. Those workers, the ones toiling
just beyond the darkness while the city sleeps, stay with Sandhu
after he writes an episode. He remembers the immigrants who keep
the gleaming metropolis running and who act as a kind of informal
radar system to the mainstream city as they clean the office spaces
and ferry merrymakers home and tend to the city's sewers. "I've
been struck by how many people, no matter how badly paid or onerous
their jobs, no matter how grim their living conditions, are still
alive to beauty and to enchantment," he says, remembering cleaners
in
London's docklands who showed him their cell-phone photos of
dawn over the
Thames.