luka

Well-known member
yes i've identified a lot of activity around our estate that i hadnt really noticed before lockdown - meetups and dropoffs

Not only are the fewer people on the street meaning less interference for pattern recognition, we are also outdoors far more often, and curious, alert, watchful, not going anywhere in particular.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Still a fair bit of very visible street dealing in shoreditch and soho and Camden and Brixton, and very slightly less visible everywhere else with major foot traffic. Stand around Stratford train station or somewhere like it for an hour and you'll start to pick up the patterns and see the strategems in use
Yeah I'm sure. Whenever I've been around that type of trade in the last few years, I was struck by how easy it was and how unlikely to attract police attention. Phones, texts, in and out of a car constantly in motion etc.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
You never know!
I can but dream. That Soho seems largely gone now though. Before pandemic I think there were still some walk up "models" but Soho seems to have turned into a restaurant zone. Totally driven by tourist money so fuck knows what'll happen to it.
 
I do wonder what shifts the old office districts will take as they are inevitably repurposed for housing when corporate rents dissipate. The WFH shift is really going to change a lot of things and so will the retail dying off

Where's that London can die thread. Anything is possible
 

sufi

lala
any job that can wfh can be off shored to somewhere cheaper
weed supply will soon be the only trade
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I can but dream. That Soho seems largely gone now though. Before pandemic I think there were still some walk up "models" but Soho seems to have turned into a restaurant zone. Totally driven by tourist money so fuck knows what'll happen to it.
Love that story with Panu when he had a modelling job in Soho and he sees that doorway says "Models" with an arrow and he thinks "I'm a model, that must be where I go" and just wandered in....
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I can but dream. That Soho seems largely gone now though. Before pandemic I think there were still some walk up "models" but Soho seems to have turned into a restaurant zone. Totally driven by tourist money so fuck knows what'll happen to it.
Not wishing to romanticise a way of life that I'm sure is often pretty sordid and grim, but it does seem sad that that whole area has been sanitised in that way. And it's not as if all those girls have suddenly ceased to exist or found well-paid, secure "normal" jobs, either. I expect probably the luckier/prettier/more stable ones have moved on to doing webcam stuff while the others are probably just working somewhere grottier and more dangerous.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Love that story with Panu when he had a modelling job in Soho and he sees that doorway says "Models" with an arrow and he thinks "I'm a model, that must be where I go" and just wandered in....
So did the madam offer him a job, or merely offer him a 'job?
 
any job that can wfh can be off shored to somewhere cheaper
weed supply will soon be the only trade

I know a few people who had whole offices that were outsourced to India but brought back after the outsourcing ran out because it was harder to ensure accountability/quality

Whether that works with wfh I don't know but I could easily believe reduced office attendance forever going forward. We are not even considering full site attendance till at least Feb
 

luka

Well-known member
there's no doubt cities will look very different by the time this is over. we've talked about it a bit in that stray thoughts thread and on the no more going back to the office thread.
 

luka

Well-known member
all part of the larger business of dematerialisation and the way the internet is transforming geography. this particular, now vanishing mode of economic organisation will leave behind its ruins in the same way heavy industy did. i keep fantasising about squatting the shard.
 
I am thinking more of places like the Greenwich Centre down on the peninsula rather than the "iconic" buildings. There will always be the need for central London face to face, though it will dwindle

But the "regional" counterparts, I think they will really struggle to be justified. Great expense to fill the boroughs with useless glass relics
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I love the idea of these sort of half-empty semi-functional cities like in Dhalgren (reminds me of what you say about squatting the shard cos there is some family living in this almost empty tower block I think) or In The County of Last Things or Lost River

 
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luka

Well-known member
there was a lot of squatting warehouses for a while after a smiliar kind of economic shift left them defunct. raves. art studios etc. we'll move into the offices soon.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I remember an article a year or two back about a residential building in the US in which they had sold a few flats and then recession had hit (so maybe it was more like twelve years ago) and so no-one else bought and those who had couldn't sell and you had these huge apartment blocks with hundreds of flats in which only twenty were occupied and all these dark corridors and stuff... maybe one doorman, an empty swimming pool etc
 
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