London was awash in leftfield culture. After Thatcher had banned illegal raves (30,000 people off their face in a field anyone?), and more than 8 people dancing round a radio, the scene moved into legal premises - indoors, at which point it completely got out of control. By the mid nineties 500,000 people were clubbing every weekend night and DJing had become the country's no. 2 leisure activity/ hobby (after shopping), with 1 million professional DJs, and university courses teaching it. This was when Ibiza was born as Brits descended on the island in droves, and DJs like Paul Oakenfold and Jon of the Pleased Wimmin (no, really) made their names. You couldnt avoid it. London/ UK was losing it's moniker of the 'Old Smoke' or the 'Dirty Old Man of Europe', from the dark days of 1980s Thatcherism, economic recession, and Empire and industrial decline.
A new theme of selling second hand clothes was opening up in gritty Notting Hill's Portobello Market, having taken up from several ethnic stalls in 1984 that would one day become the Red or Dead label, and Camden soon followed, touting a thing for 70s style - a relatively new term for that generation known as 'retro', plus cyberpunk and tribal. This was the period when Chinese tattoos, Jamaican dreads and Indian piercings became fashionable. 200,000 people every day soon packed into Camden, 500,000 a night into the sex district/ gay village/ media village/ chinatown/ theatreland that was Soho in it's heyday, and doubling on the weekends. The city was absolutely buzzing, awash with music (drum n bass for elevator music, techno in McDonalds), and flowering new styles - Techno (which sodded off to Germany as it became unpopular in the UK) became jungle, became drum n bass aswell as an arm as garage (from Detroit), then speed garage, then UK Garage, while the gay scene gave rise to nu-house, Hi-NRG, retro electro and the south coast to Big Beat (influenced by the re-rise of Hip Hop/ Trip Hop). Ambient and trance changed annually, finding new forms from Goa and later, Israel.
In 1995 Newsweek named it the world's coolest city in a cover story, 2 years later Tony Blair came to power with the Cool Britannia coinage - and the beginning of the end.
However 2 years later Newsweek also ran a following cover story on Uncool Britannia. The city peaked with the highest crime in its history since Medieval times, 5-7x that of NYC, though much lower in homicides, yet also much higher in violent crimes. Race was also a much bigger issue than today's London - ethnic divide, class and crime correlating with race, alongside the rise of the BNP (British National Party).
I remember the good years, of leaving school, changing into my Dad's chocolate Seventies suit, and taking the train into the city, then spending my day and night wandering around photographing the crazy mix of people and fashions. This was all in the days before the hipster term got coined, but it was so much more relevant then. Also before the term 'chav' was bandied around either, as they didnt really exist at the time. The working class ruled, just like in the swinging sixties. They were the ones filling the vast underground scenes, creating the new fashions and movements, and making everyone talk 'Mockney', from rich boys like James Blunt to Jamie Oliver.
It was also one of galling ugliness - the tube had hanging wires and puddles, graffiti and rubbish, as were the streets - filled with 10-30,000 homeless, and awash in an edgy feel. Waterloo was 'Tent City', there was always a mad argument or someone screaming on the buses. The police were racist, any group of of young Black men chatting on a street corner were a cause of fear.
Amazing how so much has changed. Now it's all money and chainstores, low crime and good race relations. London's lost it's edge, affordability, danger and promiscuity. Walking through the centre now is unrecogniseable to the times where speedo wearing bikers raced through Soho, when Kings Cross was littered with fat prostitutes sitting in the roads, when punks in a chef outfit would come out of a blaring side door to smoke on his tea break - in Marylebone, when Covent Garden had an underground club scene, when the East End was absolutely dead and dire, when Clerkenwell was poor and industrial.
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