William Blake Revisited

Every year, round about the now, the BBC hosts a series of classical music concerts known as ‘The Proms’ at the Royal Albert Hall. This year’s Proms have just finished.

Rather like big cricket matches, The Proms are one of those occasions when large groups of almost exclusively middle and upper class Anglo-Saxon people still congregate in London. The Proms always end with a big finale, with lots of people crowding into the Albert Hall clutching enormous Union Jacks making complete tits of themselves.

How else would you describe an audience of 9,000, waving flags and singing along to the lyrics of Rule Britannia, without the slightest trace of irony in its collective voice?

When Britain first at Heaven's command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter, the charter of the land,
And guardian Angels sung this strain,

Rule, Britannia, Britannia rule the waves,
Britons never will be slaves!

Er, well, yes, er, OK. Now there’s an accurate summary of British history and the current global geopolitical situation if ever I’ve heard one.

To demonstrate the softer side of the crowd, tradition dictates that Rule Britannia is followed with a stirring rendition of William Blake’s Jerusalem…

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Rule Britannia always was jingoistic nonsense but Jerusalem is an altogether more thoughtful piece. Blake lived during the Industrial Revolution and was disturbed by the huge increase in the number of urban poor living horrid lives in British cities. Playing on a common belief that the Britain was created by ‘Heaven’s Command’, his poem asks ‘does anyone think that people living like shit next to horrible factories is some kind of new paradise?’.

Blake was being ironic and challenging and the question marks in the poem are key to the piece. But, perversely, Jerusalem was hijacked and became an anthem for the privileged classes of Britain. It is sung in their schools, rugby matches and nights out, and most emphatically without the question marks.

The true significance of the words passes completely over their inbred heads.

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I mention all of this because we were strolling around the annual Brick Lane festival in the East End yesterday. Brick Lane was crowded so we restricted ourselves to the surrounding side streets and housing estates.

It was fucking horrible.

There’s no need to find the words to describe it. All someone has to do is dust off some of William Blake’s old stuff, translate it into modern vernacular and they would be there; poverty, decay, alienation, substance addiction. The usual stuff.

Just as in Blake’s time, London’s underclass is growing rapidly. Only this time round it’s not country folk being drawn to the factories. The new underclass is largely foreign born and they’re far more likely to end up employed in the service sector rather than any ‘dark satanic mills’. Their living conditions are, however, certainly woeful enough to be comparable with Blake’s era.

On one street in particular I was awestruck by the sheer squalor of people selling personal items ‘yard sale’ style off the pavement. At least I think that’s what they were doing. To the uninformed observer it might have looked more like a group of tramps had emptied a series of rubbish bins onto the floor and then sat down on the mess.

My companion, another veteran connoisseur of urban decay, was also pretty impressed by the scene and commented on the sheer third worldness of it all. The third world feeling was nicely capped off by the fenced-off private sports club at one end of the street. Its car park filled with BMWs and Mercedes coupes. Poor person sitting on a pavement trying to sell old socks for a few pence on one side of the street. Chinless wanker in sports car, who probably knows Jerusalem off by heart, sitting behind a fence on the other side.

This isn’t the London I grew up in and its sucks arse.

As I’ve said before, the underclass of New Orleans we saw on TV last week is nowhere near unique. We just haven’t had big floods in any of our other cities lately. That’s all.