Brightening the Dark
Film critic, professor, and writer
Sukhdev Sandhu seeks to
illuminate
London's night - and the cast of characters who exist on
its stage - in his art project Night Haunts, an engaging collection
of sights, sounds, and stories from England's capital.
. Photographs by Alistair Thain.
A sleep disorder and jet lag trouble writer Sukhdev Sandhu. They're
difficult maladies for anyone but particularly pesky for a man
charged with documenting London's night. For almost two years,
Sandhu has set his alarm for the wee hours and entered the city's
darkness to explore it from the sky, from underground, and from a
host of nooks and crannies, all in service of Night Haunts, his art
project. Tonight he intends to take me on a nocturnal walk through
his neighborhood, the East End, a historical place of refuge for
centuries of immigrants - Irish, European Jews, and, most recently,
Bangladeshi, which has earned the area the nickname of Banglatown.
But this evening Sandhu has misjudged the night, his subject of
choice. As he nears me, he shakes his head, apologizes, and admits
he forgot that night arrives later than 8:30 p.m. in the summer. He
blames jet lag.
As an assistant professor of English literature at New York
University and the chief film critic for London's Daily Telegraph,
Sandhu, 35, spends a great deal of time ping-ponging between the
city that doesn't sleep and the city that used to sleep but now
merely naps. Wearing jeans, a green shirt, a navy pinstripe jacket,
and a five o'clock shadow, Sandhu stands near a trinity of
important landmarks, and each serves as a testament to the area's
allure.
Across the street sits Spitalfields, one of London's oldest
markets; it has transitioned into a hipster hot spot that attracts
weekend crowds who are in search of fashionable creations by young
designers. Opposite the market is Ten Bells, a pub famous for a
patron who staggered out and into the hands of Jack the Ripper.
Most nights, East End residents watch gaggles of tourists being led
by theatrical tour guides who dispense history, theory, and lore.
(Occasionally, residents treat the huddled visitors to their own
reenactments of Ripper crimes; these are done in jest from
second-story windows.) At the center resides Christ Church, a
Nicholas Hawksmoor-designed building that was completed in 1729 and
commissioned to serve as a formidable representative of the Church
of England in an area once teeming with Protestant Huguenots who
had fled Catholic
France because of persecution. Tall and blockish,
with an imposing porch and steeple, the church appears otherworldly
and at odds with its surroundings.
"Lots of neomystics, visionaries, and psychogeographers - most
famously Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair - have written about the
Hawksmoor church," Sandhu says, as we begin our walk at the foot of
the church's steps after the sun sets. "It looked beyond Christian,
as if it had been winched to the East End from a far-off planet."
Taking quick steps, Sandhu talks about the hoboes who used to camp
on the church grounds and build roaring fires in the winter, and
then he points to the sky and speaks about other landmarks that vie
for skyline space and proffer a collection of competing imagery -
Islamic minarets, brew-house chimneys, St. Paul's Cathedral, and
the Erotic Gherkin, Londoners' nickname for the pickle-shaped
building by architect Lord
Norman Foster.
Part historian, part reporter, part sociologist, Sandhu speaks as
quickly as he walks and dispenses a torrent of observations and
information. We walk by the hospital that treated the Elephant Man;
pass the work of a graffiti artist sought by
Wired magazine and the
New York Times; stroll through the courtyard of the Friends of
Yiddish, the world's oldest reading group (way before Oprah's, says
Sandhu), which once boasted 2,000 members and includes eight
members today; and visit the former storefront of a Mr. Katz, who
supposedly sold 298 different varieties of string until he died in
the late 1990s. "No one ever bought anything, but he was there
every day at 8:30 a.m.," Sandhu says.
Whatever his eyes light upon - the building, the sign, the
spray-painted art - prompts a story or a reference to a book, a
movie, or a historical fact. Sandhu mourns the loss of a building
or a landmark as if it were a family member. Like Gene Kelly in
that famous scene from Singin' in the Rain (minus the yellow
slicker and the downpour), he zigzags through the streets, which
seem to energize him as he bustles from one touchstone to the next.
"I'm not interested in nightclubs or the buzzing 24/7 city that
city boosters are always raving about," he says. "I want to uncover
different, more scuffed textures; lower rhythms; dowdier
individuals. The buildings and streets that I grew up with are
disappearing fast. My project is, in its small way, a kind of
salvage operation, trying to spotlight and honor the people who
create this city's infrastructure and make all the fun
possible."
When Sandhu began work on Night Haunts, an art experience that is
delivered through a website (www.nighthaunts.org.uk), he imagined a
series of larks and adventures as he set out to chronicle those
spaces even Londoners rarely contemplate, much less visit: the
sewer system with its workers, the night sky with the avian police,
a convent where a sect of nuns prays every night for the souls of
Londoners. Although it took time to earn people's trust (dispensing
with the enormous sound equipment helped), the adventures arrived.
Sandhu has been chased by the police while following a graffiti
artist on his nocturnal renderings; he's lost his cell phone while
chronicling an exorcism in a former prison; and he has even been
shot, when a bullet meant for vermin bounced and hit him in the
hand. And he's gotten his subjects to open up to him; he says four
or five a.m. is generally when comfort and trust take over and
people feel at ease enough to leak their stories.
Each adventure becomes one of the Night Haunts episodes, essayistic
journal entries that explore one venue, topic, or theme; he
estimates each entry takes about 140 hours of work. Once written,
the text is passed to Ian Budden of Mind Unit, a design agency
specializing in websites, and he creates the visual ideas and
motifs for the text. Budden also manipulates the words so that they
appear at variable speeds on the screen. "We wanted to make the
reading experience more subtle and immersive than on most websites
and to make clear that the whole thing isn't seen as just a piece
of sociology or newspaper reporting," Sandhu says. The site also
offers a sonic element, created by sound artist Scanner, who
provides audio loops - either found or recorded specially for the
project. "Our ears are more acute at night," Sandhu says. "Sound
becomes more pregnant with possibility."
The site has earned a substantial following for an arty endeavor
with a mere monthly update. By the end of the year, more than
30,000 people will have visited, and
Artangel, the internationally
renowned art organization that commissioned the project, intends to
publish a book based on the site in early 2007. Time Out London
named it a Website of the Week; the Daily Telegraph and Radio 3 are
serializing the project; and Sandhu receives countless invitations
to speak and to participate in various TV, radio, and documentary
projects. There's even talk of turning it into a kind of opera in
Sweden in 2008.
"I wait as impatiently as a child promised a birthday treat for
each episode to be published," says Christopher Cook, critic and
cultural historian for
BBC Radio. "What it's captured wonderfully
so far is the true Urban Other, the city that lives at night - a
kind of distorted mirror image of the city that's bathed in
shadows. What he's searching for is the contemporary equivalent of
film noir, so there's a deeply romantic feel to the work."
For Sandhu, London's history makes its nights different than any
other city's. "Gaslight London, for good or for bad, was always a
thing of great fascination to travelers," he says. "Jekyll and
Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Fu Manchu - these real and
fictional characters were magnets for tourists as early as the
1880s." The city's structure also plays a role, and Sandhu
considers his home more of a collection of microvillages than a
unified capital. "The alleyways and small streets are easy to get
lost in. They seem like traps - especially at nighttime," he says.
"So the city's topography, combined with its ancientness - the
ghosts of great plagues, fires, and wars that have all flared up
here - give nighttime a particular gravity and weight. So does the
fact that transport is so terrible and expensive. It means that the
nocturnal city still hasn't been colonized by the pleasure
principle to the extent that it has been in New York,
Sydney, and
many European cities."
Like all of Artangel's projects, Night Haunts began with a series
of conversations between the project creator (in this case,
Sandhu); the group's codirectors, James Lingwood and Michael
Morris; and Cathy Haynes, head of Artangel's Nights of London
program. "Artangel's basic remit is to find ways of encouraging
some of the most brilliant and original artists working today to
kind of step out and into different kinds of public spotlights and
realize their dream project," says Lingwood. "They are not projects
that sit easily within a more conventional gallery space or theater
space. Artangel's place in London is to try and offer artists with
very distinctive voices a very distinctive place for that work to
be made."
That philosophy has yielded some marvelous results. Since 1991,
four artists who worked on Artangel projects have gone on to win
the Turner Prize, an annual award given to a British visual artist
under the age of 50 and one of the
United Kingdom's most-publicized
prizes. Artangel worked with filmmaker Matthew Barney on the first
of the Cremaster films; Jeremy Deller on The Battle of Orgreave, a
critically acclaimed remake of a famous miners' strike; and Rachel
Whiteread on House, a public sculpture of a Victorian terraced
house in London's East End.
"Artangel crept up on us all like a thief in the night. Suddenly,
they were robbing us of all our old and familiar ideas about what
art in public spaces could be," Cook says. "I don't think it's an
exaggeration to say that a project like Francis Alÿs's Seven Walks
[which explored the everyday rituals and habits of the metropolis]
last year helps to change the way you feel London. In some ways, it
also makes you remap the city, compelling you to look again at
familiar spaces and leading you off in all manner of undiscovered
corners."
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.
After more than three hours of walking, I look at my watch and realize the tube station closed a long time ago. It’s 1:30 a.m. We return to that UFO of a church. Sandhu hails a black cab, and I plop into the backseat and ask the driver to take me home by the river. I stare out the window and watch the empty sidewalks and streetlamps whirl past. The cab driver asks what I do in my spare time. He shares that he owns a telescope and enjoys looking at the stars and the moon on his off nights. “But there’s just too much light,” he says. “It’s hardly dark at all. You can’t see what you used to.” I know, I say, I know.