Roblog

The Economist with a gushing tour of the newly redeveloped King’s Cross:

“Some complain that this sleek King’s Cross is a betrayal of its grotty past. Far better to see the district as a sign of a city building its future. If a resurgent Britain finds itself at a technological frontier, it will be thanks to the likes of DeepMind plying their trade in the place where prostitutes once did theirs. If Britain is only to maintain its current trajectory of relative decline, then the success of King’s Cross is still necessary: selling off Victorian gasworks and charging foreign students £28,570 per year in tuition fees is a good living.”

It brought to mind Nik Cohn’s excellent Yes We Have No, a 1998 travelogue around what he called “the republic”; the rag-tag social underbelly of travellers, freaks, hippies, new-age druids, Elvis impersonators, and others that had opted out of the British mainstream. It centres on King’s Cross in its 1990s guise, before everything that the Economist gets so excited about, when it was home to squats and delapidation but also a thriving counterculture. Two competing visions of a world; one that won, and one that lost.