The hotel is nearly built. It is squeezed into a space occupied by an old supermarket along the strangely wide boulevard. This road, Chalton Street, is the main street of a speculative development from the 1790s that rapidly lost its intended upper-middle-class professional residents, as a result of the Napoleonic Wars and a crisis in the local brick making trade. Those upper middle classes who were to be attracted then and yet did not come are intended now to arrive finally, for the area sits at the heart of what is called the Knowledge Quarter. This is an instrument for development, a vehicle pushing an area of deprivation towards smart city status, making of it a crucible of digital capitalism, or, as it gets called by some a potential new Silicon Valley, or Palo Alto.¹ This #NewPaloAlto is a concoction of the local venture capitalist, Saul Klein, founder of Local Globe/Latitude/Solar/Basecamp, known collectively as Phoenix Court, an investor hub situated in the old Trades Council building on Phoenix Road, a road that links St Pancras International railway station with Euston railway station, cutting through an area dense with social housing, intermingled with and sometimes repurposed as student accommodation, private rentals and pockets of owner-occupiers. Phoenix Court, this club for free marketeers, founded as a family firm in 1999 by the purveyors of companies such as Wonga, a debt extortion agency, and LoveFilm, postal delivery of DVDs, amongst other ‘disruptors’, exists today in a bright blue building with a cotton-cloud ceiling, under which are scattered rainbow chairs strewn on a vibrant yellow flooring. On the outside, on wooden hoardings that hide electrical installations and serve as storage, are jolly abstract murals that make reference to the Fleet River. The river is canalised nearby. Prior to its siphoning through a pipe, it served health-giving wells and spas, as much as it transmitted cholera and other diseases as it flowed past the Smallpox Hospital, or rather silted up and flooded the area now and again. From this brightly coloured building, Phoenix Court, the name of the social housing council block that sits atop it, they dream up, through one-way mirrored windows, a prospective Silicon Valley on the spot of a once hustling, unregulated market called The Brill. This is the face of new capitalism, with its apparent commitment to ethnic and cultural diversity in the entrepreneurial sector, when the fads and fashions flow that way and everyone else is doing #Blackout Tuesday. Phoenix Court bills itself as a progressive hub for venture capitalists, which deliberately sited itself in Somers Town ‘one of London’s most underserved areas, intentionally chosen to keep a societal lens on their work’.[EU: VC podcast, 12 March 2025, https://www.eu.vc/p/local-globes-emma-phillips-on-backing] Here they incubate dreams of pixels and Clouds. Their deities are called Angel investors. They make unicorns. This language is delightful and obscuring, serving as a veil to draw over profound speculative transformations. From here they advance the aims of the ‘Knowledge Quarter’ – a consortium of business and institutions of which they form a part – along a necklace of sites that used to be used for unions or welfare or homes or working-class recreation. The local knowledge economy began when the new British Library landed here, ejected from Bloomsbury as out of character for the area and more suited to a former market goods yards site that used to distribute dairy and fish across London. Newton’s arse is shown to the residents who were, back then, when it was first built and for the following two decades, decisively not invited in. Now they are to be enticed in to community events in a converted café on the large plaza. The British Library, with its brainwork, was joined by the Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical research centre. Soon there will be a massive, commercially oriented tower at the back of the British Library. Mitsui Fudosan UK are planning a £1.1 billion skyscraper to overshadow the area, in order to forward what they call commercial science, innovation and the knowledge industry. And, as part of this upscaling, the library will expand its business support services for entrepreneurs. So much knowledge, what they call knowledge, amassing along one street, Ossulston Street. From here, financialisation shapes the landscape and our bodies, brains and our inner beings.

The venture capitalists of Phoenix Court pre-seed and seed start-ups, encouraging digital initiatives to burst through and create new markets for fintech, digital payment systems and financial assistants designed for, as they put it, Gen Z online or competing firms for second-hand car buying online. Every aspect of your soul can be mined. A recent startup funded through LocalGlobe is HiBob, the HR platform that powers productivity, engagement and retention. It is typical of the offer. Life is rationalised through digitalisation, or rather work disciplining practices are augmented. The branch called Latitude pushes on those forms that have bitten their way already into the market. The names follow formats, misspellings, contractions, short forms. YuLife is, so it says, ‘Insurance that inspires life’.

Group Insurance like no other. Employee benefits, well-being, engagement and global rewards in one platform that your people really love – and use everyday.²

Life is a game and there are winners. Other apps – or are they companies or apps as companies or companies as apps – have sleek elemental names, maybe poised between natural, elemental form and valuable, extractable commodities, like Copper co, which deals in custody, prime services and collateral management for digital assets. They bring in investors for Breedr, a modern-sounding contraction that drags the cow into markets and datafication:

Breedr is an app on your phone that connects to a secure trading network on the cloud. Data collated through the app about live weight gain, feed, health and parentage is used to make predictions about the animal’s performance and optimum date of sale for peak-profit for the farmer. The app creates a digital profile for each animal that can be matched with a contract and traded online, meaning producers have an assured sale and buyers can easily source prime beef to order.³

There is Bricklane, a propfintech company that buys up thousands of homes that are expected to financially outperform comparable alternatives in those areas and it will seek to grow income and capital values through active asset management and refurbishment. Its name, Bricklane, sits between a real-world place, Brick Lane, one subject to speculation, gentrification, a contested space, and an abstraction, the brick lane that could be any house anywhere, as long as the valuation is under and the potentials are over and above expectation.

Converse AI brings ‘customer success for the messaging generation’. Fizzback offers: ‘Real-time customer feedback & customer experience management’. Goodlord simplifies lettings and maximises revenue. Humanloop builds large impactful products with large language models. Robinhood ‘makes trading more intuitive, more affordable and more inclusive’. Yonder reimagines the modern credit card. Some profit off art sales, some off women’s health. They are targeted at mobility and logistics. Plug and Play infrastructure for embedded finance. The universal Api for commerce platforms. Supply chains are strengthened and speeded up. Accounts payable are made efficient. Venn from Tel Aviv claims to reinvent the concept of neighbourhood:

Our community of young urbanites has grown to New York and Berlin and Venn aims to be up and running in 100 cities worldwide by 2030. We’re revolutionizing urban development with an approach rooted in SROI — the social return on investment, because we don’t just measure our success in apartments rented, stores opened, and revenue streaming in. Our mission is to build real communities that create the neighborhood of their dreams, which is why we’re so proud that 98% of our community members report feeling socially supported in times of need, and our research has found that our members report a 33% drop in loneliness after just six months with Venn.⁴

Solar, the arm that partners ‘for the journey from the private to the public markets, and beyond’,⁵ backs M-KOPA, a company that uses the term ‘underbanked’ to create a marketplace, being a financial platform that harnesses digital micropayments to indebt millions of people in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa.

Through digital application, the whole world becomes financialised, datarised and tradeable. But to make it happen, a place is needed, a location, a locality for that globality. In that place people come together and strategise and make deals. Bit by bit the world is parcelled up and made accessible through apps. These venture capitalists have long histories and have been doing this stuff incrementally for a while, before they came to Somers Town. The brother of the founder of LocalGlobe/Latitude, Jonathan Klein, set up Getty Images, in 1995, and Getty Images captured the rights to all the images floating around the world, privatising the imagosphere. Getty Images, who bought up Shutterstock in January 2025, are notorious for claiming copyright, watermarking and selling images that are in the public domain – and for charging creators to use their own images whose rights have somehow become alienated through third party sales. The stock image companies engage in the enclosure of the image world. Their practice now pivots to AI image generation out of their own amassed photographic stock.

Jonathan Klein’s venture capitalist brother at Phoenix Court invests in firms that enclose our bodies in Meditech apps, our homes, lives, emotions, grief, death in technical applications. He wants also to digitise, make smart his adopted home where his offices beam half-hearted historical-eco murals into the surroundings that are increasingly marked by private capital. Next door is a new luxury offshore owned tower block, where international students pay £4000 a month in rent and chuck out valuable stuff to the glee of the Senegalese caretaker who finds them pleasant enough, but gapes at the wealth and picks up the discards which, if he cannot use, he can sometimes pass on to business contacts in Senegal or Gambia. These new, temporary residents face the other way from Somers Town in the apartment block named Grand Central. Their building is named in homage to a railway station in a faraway city, as well as to a privatised rail franchise operating out of nearby Kings Cross. These temporary residents in their New York-bound train imaginary soar above the once public park, sold by the council for a song.⁶ The park is now a surveillance zone, and the lofty residents’ interface with the surroundings are mediated through a constant supply of Deliveroos and private taxis, managed by a low wage receptionist or concierge. The venture capitalist next door has the ear of government. Appointed an OBE, he was granted a Non-Executive Director at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology in April 2023. He advises the UK Prime Minister on science and technology issues. He is operative on Camden’s Economic Renewal Commission. The consultants from the now paused but still area-defining High Speed 2 project at Euston lecture residents at neighbourhood forums on the prioritizing of smart jobs in a high-tech development zone and residents ask bewilderedly, ‘what if I want to be a nurse?’

From a small spot in a small place, large reworkings of the world are not just dreamt up, but financed. This financialisation comes to suffuse worlds and bodies and minds. Locally it is aligning the area more and more into that one it conjured up, of Palo Alto, bristling with digital platform capitalism, networked with local and national government. Another name the venture capitalists float for the area is New City of London, everything a hashtag for social media, a snappy name, a concept title. Is it that the fleshy, grounded people of that old named place Somers Town – named after the aristocrat who possessed the land – now stand in the way of something bigger, better, shinier. People joke, heavy heartedly, that the area, Somers Town, is being renamed East Euston, King Cross West, or obliteratively Euston-St Pancras, as is the name of the Crossrail 2 station, which is perhaps never to be built but soon to be excavated under the whole of the area. But ‘New Palo Alto’ is pushed by a force that has the digital means of production and reproduction and can change everything, at least in Google Maps, and so it becomes true, like in some new fairyland mirror reflection, in which what the King says is the new reality.⁷ Those stuck or landed or placed here watch on as land is enclosed by HS2, TFL The Crick biomedical Centre, the British Library, UCL, Moorfields. So many institutions of knowledge and aspiration and mind and body-fixing nibble away at the centrally placed area. It feels as if a new clearance is underway, as the looming luxe-tower block at Brill Place consumes even more of the lacking green space of the gardenless families, as the new flat whiters googlemap through the greened trails of the estates, a mobile instantiation of the networks they run for themselves. And those who dream of pixels bring all too material pollution into being – Local Globe brought Cazoo, an online used car dealing company, to Chalton Street in Somers Town, and they sit next to the RMT Union’s headquarters. Cazoo became, in 2020, during the pandemic, when other options for car buying were closed. It was the fastest-ever British company to become a unicorn, a billion-dollar company, despite never making a profit. Instead losses accrued and it collapsed in May 2024, bought up now by another firm, Motors, for another round of speculation, still here in Somers Town, of all places, where hardly anyone has a car.⁸

Here in Somers Town nothing seems to happen without the buy-in of private capital. Furthermore, the council’s area plan reserves first claim on any vacated building or space to members of the Knowledge Quarter. The Community Investment Programme was funded by the luxury tower block – it helped to pay for the rebuilding of a primary school and a youth club and some social housing, whose rents are apparently less affordable than the old stock. The cost to the local community is space, air and sky. The air has not been clean, though, for a long time, given the proximity of three mainline railway stations, the quadrangle of perimeter roads and the endless building sites. It was at least air. The muck produced by the building of HS2, if it ever comes to make whole that which has been smashed, is to be ameliorated by deafening ventilation units and pollution filters. This, together with the noise of construction work (75 decibels of banging and humming), means that authorities recommended a couple of decades of closed windows in the area.⁹ Little air at all inside them, as it would only exacerbate the rife asthma.¹⁰

What applications could reinfuse clouds and angels and unicorns and you and Brick Lane and good lords and knowledge and regeneration and value with other meanings? What arcane knowledge could set itself against the Knowledge Quarter and countermand it? There is a weird frame existing in the area to flood its past with histories that might still spike memory, and so the present. 

The North end of Somers Town was built by intoxicators, the Brewers Company Estate, and this is reflected in the street names which are associated with the livery company or the school it endowed: Aldenham, Charrington, Platt, Medburn, Brewer, Barclay, Stanmore, Watford and Elstree. Somers Town once was awash with beer. Intoxication can come in other ways, as it did in the northern corner of Somers Town. It was here in the mid-1970s that the squatters moved in. In the 1960s, houses were boarded up across Camden. Developers purchased chunks of Georgian and late Regency terraces, in order to demolish them for new private estates. The council had plans for new social housing too. Camden Council bought the writer Doris Lessing, for example, out of her home at 60 Charrington Street, under a compulsory purchase order. Some houses were compulsorily purchased as part of schemes to widen roads, but then work did not begin. The dwellings decayed, caught in a limbo between renovation and demolition – as was the case with the houses in North Somers Town, on Charrington Street, Platt Street, Penryn Street and Medburn Street. These once attractive mid-19th century houses were by now old unmodernised stock. One squatter there was the poet Aidan Andrew Dunn, who scoped out the mysteries and strangeness in this area in various works and combined with other angels. On the roof of his squat, one evening, he saw Arthur Rimbaud, the poet who, in 1872, lived not far away on Royal College Street, with his lover Paul Verlaine. The words of Rimbaud were, he said, etched on the sky. Rimbaud was encouraging the latter-day poet to descend into the hell of King’s Cross to find an earthly paradise.

The latter-day poet was stranded within an occultic triangle, inside the boundaries made by, at one point, a pre-Christian Celtic shrine on the site of St Pancras Old Church, thought to be the first Christian church in Britain, at another, the Golden Dawn’s Inner Temple – the oratory of the esoteric Second Order once located at 62 Oakley Square, the headquarters of the order’s active magicians, who performed there rites to make immanent the New Age of the Aeon of the Child, and, thirdly, by Rimbaud and Verlaine’s home on 8 Royal College Street. This suggests an evocative mystical geography, one William Blake had divined. Somers Town, where anarchist William Godwin resided, was eulogised in Blake’s Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–20):

Among the little meadows green.

Pancras & Kentish-town repose

Among her golden pillars high:

Among her golden arches which

Shine upon the starry sky.¹¹

Among this golden architecture – another century’s ‘golden arches’ – under those sparkling stars, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft had approached William Godwin and there they walked together, became friends, criticized each other’s writings, and then lived experimentally and had a child.

If we are standing gazing on the site of the former Polygon Buildings, where Wollstonecraft died as a result of infection from a bodged birthing of her daughter, who would become Mary Shelley, we can turn 180 degrees to look upon the Francis Crick Biomedical Centre, the  looming building that is accused of Frankensteinian science experimentation and gains no trust from the anti-vaxxers, anti-state rebels in the area. Eleven years ago, when the Francis Crick Biomedical Institute was gradually growing, stealing land earmarked for social housing and blocking out the skies, a construction worker, Richard Laco died, hit by a one tonne concrete staircase that had fallen out of its hoist on a building site where, despite repeated requests the union had been barred from entering.¹² The massive building firm Laing O’Rourke, who subcontracted the installation of staircases and other large structures to CMF Ltd., told Unite officials that they had to balance the demands of the union with its ‘corporate objective’ to finish the £650million Francis Crick Institute on time. It is tiring in Somers Town dealing with fighting the encroachments, the fast and slow violence, the new presences, with their psychic and physical weight. And to keep the recent ghosts company, and help the locals’ cause, it might be necessary to enlist the spirits of the past, revolutionary wraiths whose spirit infuses and enthuses ours. Or shakes hands metaphorically with the local personages of the RMT, Unison, Unite, the NEU, UCU, GMB, and who ever else exists in the necromantic union circle around the place.

It behoves us to speak of a poor man, who did not live to see much progress for the working classes, but who played a role in organising them towards self-defence. John Arnott was the General Secretary of the National Charter Association, the Chartists, an organisation he joined shortly after its formation in 1840 and which called for the vote for all men, abolition of the property qualification required to be an MP, regular elections, and the like, all this as a start towards fair and proper representation. John Arnott, a shoemaker, lived in Sutters Buildings with his wife and six children, just where the Francis Crick biomedical centre looms today and he was a member of the Somers Town branch of the Metropolitan Delegate Council. At some point he moved to Middlesex Place, now Purchese Street. He was a poet, his poems always sung to existing song melodies. He wrote one poem to celebrate a workers’ land scheme. Here some lines, in which one might sense the presence of Somers Town, as well as a trajectory leading out of it or a utopian horizon:

Come and leave the murky gloom

The narrow crowded street;

The bustle, noise, the smoke and din:

To breathe the air that’s sweet.

We’ll leave the gorgeous palaces,

To those miscalled great;

To send a day of pleasure on

The People’s First Estate!¹³

This was a man, known widely as the Somers Town Chartist rhymer, who took the stage at meetings in the locality and nationwide, in order to demand, in the movement’s words, ‘the Charter and no surrender’. But John Arnott was a poor man and he could not attain the fame other Chartists gained by lecturing and touring. And the movement fell apart anyway, but Arnott fell apart too, sick and reduced to begging in central London. He managed, though, to compose a poem in 1867 for a Great Reform demonstration.

‘Ye “thousands” of the Reform League

Concentrate all your Powers

Your foes are strong your cause is just

(the front of battle cowers)

Be firm united one and all

The prize is Liberty

Tell the Tories now that they must bow

That men will soon be Free

That working men shall be esteemed

No longer vile and low

But have the vote and praise the League

As marching on we go.¹⁴

A few months after writing this protest song, Arnott was taken into the nearby St Pancras Workhouse from his then address in Equity Buildings on Ossulston Street and soon died. 

Story piles on story. In the General Strike in 1926, Stuart Purkiss and Reg Groves, Christians of the High Anglican variety, but attracted by socialist ideals, set about revolutionary organising. Purkiss worked from 1911 at the Railway Clearing House at Euston and was a union militant, involved in strikes over union recognition in 1919. Co-worker and comrade Reg Groves had got hold of a copy of Trotsky’s Where is Britain Going?  At 18 years old, he organised gatherings of strikers at the church. In 1926, during the General Strike in Britain, Purkiss chaired a meeting of the local strike committee in St Mary’s church on Polygon Road, a church that had some relation to the Thaxted Christian communist movement, which cherished plainsong, folk song, Morris dancing and pageant in the cause of workers’ liberation.¹⁵ It was out of all this that Purkiss joined the Communist Party, and he got involved in The Jogger, one of a number of rank-and-file magazines, with a critical attitude towards union bureaucracy. It was, apparently, too independent a voice. The Communist party squashed it, and expelled Purkiss. And so the spirit passes through. Reg Groves wrote a book on Chartism, But We Shall Rise Again, to loop the circles here, past, present intermingle, parallel voices, interference, combination, many voices speaking as one.¹⁶

On Cranleigh Street were the Communist renegades of the Pan-African movement, meeting, writing, propagandising through the International African Service Bureau, at the home of George Padmore. Around Padmore was a grouping which encompassed many names, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, CLR James, T Ras Makonnen, and more, all people who shaped what occurred in the second part of the twentieth century. It is a story that is worth telling, and it involves nationalism and class and the fate of some postcolonial regimes. It also occasioned a beneficial transmission of revolutionary ideas in the 1930s and 1940s from the Black radical tradition to the British trade union movement, and, most notably, the Independent Labour Party. Padmore worked to explain the links between capitalism, colonialism, fascism and war, and made his case to the benefit of all, such that parts of the movement understood the urgency of decolonisation.

How to be hopeful about resurgent militancy, about reimagining home and nation and internationalism in an area that has hosted so much, but seems on the backfoot now. How to hold onto what Walter Benjamin calls the tradition of the oppressed, which conveys something still effervescent from the past, cognisant of demands ignored, cut down, a will that does not stop demanding, does not stop organising, does not stop saying ‘no surrender’, even if that voice is a quietened one that wants to roar, and must exceed the waning annual ritual of 1 May, which is very much its minimal presence. 

There are countless other stories that could underlay the story of a place now sacrificed to fintech and new forms of speculation. The concrete poet Keith Armstrong is another who came to settle there in the 1970s. Keith Armstrong made typewriter art. One work, made in Cheltenham in 1968, shows a red and black column of letters, perhaps like the column of the Bank of England, perhaps a post-box, for where else might letters end up, or at least pass through? The column appeared to be crumbling at its base, the letters that made its solid form turning into free-floating pound signs and capital As. There is air gusting into the system or perhaps there is decay, something is falling apart.  

Armstrong was able to walk through his teenage years, but he spent a year in hospital for corrective surgery to his back at the age of 20 – once out in the world again, and now a user of crutches and, increasingly, wheelchairs, he launched himself into managing a musical group and organising concerts. He took off for London, in 1972, where he had to deal with his own homeless situation, through sleeping rough and squatting. This practical experience bolstered his interest in housing inequalities and led to stints volunteering for a phone advice service and issuing housing advice. He was part of a Camberwell-based group called the Campaign for Homeless and Rootless, which existed from 1973-6. In 1974, he was one of six coordinators of the ultimately successful ‘Defend the 14’ campaign, organised after the arrest of a group of activists, including Pat Arrowsmith, co-founder of CND, while campaigning for the withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland. They were charged with conspiring to contravene the Incitement of Disaffection Act of 1934. In this struggle, Armstrong’s interest in peace, political action, law and human rights came together.In 1975, Armstrong became a Camden Council tenant. Now secure, he continued to throw himself into activities, and to host other activists, some of who helped him with his daily needs. Here he worked with Camden Disabled Income Group, got involved in the campaign to ‘Save Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital for women’, worked with Camden Community Law Centre. In this period, he also was a co-founder of a self-help group, ‘The Liberation Network of People with Disabilities’. The name was significant. It was not disabled people, but people with disabilities that formed a part of who they were, but by no means defined the whole of them. The first issue of its magazine, In from the Cold, from June 1981, reflects on different terminology and its implications. For ‘PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES’, it muses thus:

PRO: It puts the word people first and doesn’t contain any cover-up or denial. It also can’t be shortened to ‘the something’. The argument runs that if you are paralysed from the waist down, then in fact you are un-able to walk.

CON: It does convey the idea that our lack of abilities is a result of our conditions rather than the result of our treatment by society. The direct argument about the person who is unable to walk is that it is rare that the objective is actually walking, and if the objective is to get from A to B, then they could do so if society gave them whatever mechanism suited them best (e.g. an electric wheelchair).¹⁷

The same issue of In From the Cold, had a feature, under the title ‘Success Story’, on how Armstrong had been able to arrange his affairs so he might live independently, despite requiring daily assistance. It described how he had been able to live independently as a squatter, for three-and-a-half years in a GLC property, and then as a council tenant.

Members of the squat shared ‘caring’ for him (help with dressing, cooking, bathing etc.) When the group were rehoused Keith refused to be housed away from all his friends. He therefore asked for a 2-bedroom flat in which he could live with a full-time helper in the same area as the squat. After an Appeal, the DHSS agreed to pay the whole rent of the flat which meant that Keith’s helper could be offered a rent-free flat plus the low rate of attendance allowance in exchange for giving him the assistance he needed. This was in 1976.¹⁸

The arrangement worked well until November 1980, when, as a result of a new Social Security Act, a proportion of the money was to be withdrawn and he was expected to charge his helper rent. That a low-waged helper would pay rent was unlikely and Armstrong’s independence was threatened. He began an appeal (and won a broad principle that helped others to pay for non-related carers).  The Liberation Network of People with Disabilities wrote a press statement to draw attention to what was happening. They also organised a picket outside the appeal hearing, while a good lawyer specialising on Social Security cases was found.

On the day of the appeal there were as many ‘press’ as demonstrators, but it was good to feel that we had shown our solidarity in public. The appeal was adjourned and Keith was later informed by letter that he had been successful. Furthermore they had agreed with Keith’s lawyer who had discovered that people who need ‘personal assistance’ because of a disability (and do not live with a blood relative) are entitled to Domestic Assistance Allowance - the equivalent of the amount one pays to a helper. Keith now receives an extra £14.50 a week as well as having had the rent allowance restored. Added to his attendance allowance it means he can pay his helper almost £30.00 a week. This victory makes it much easier for other people with severe disabilities to start living independently, because they will now be able to pay helpers something approaching a living wage.¹⁹

Armstrong wrote numerous scholarly papers, especially about disability issues. There is work on the history of mobility aids, the life and achievements of Roman emperor Claudius, a particular fascination, in part because of the rumoured deafness and his limp, the distribution of the word ‘cripple’ as a place name in England and Wales, wheelchairs and fire risks, the history of the words cretin and handicap. He also documented and analysed the history of disability activism in the UK and elsewhere. His history of the first teach-yourself book in English, from the sixteenth century, was researched at the British Library. This autodidacticism was dear to his heart. A suspicion of authority and an advocacy of self-development and accessible education is perhaps what motivated him to type up a registration form for the autonomous, radical ‘Antiuniversity’ of London which existed from 1968-1971. The front and back page of the only magazine published by the Antiuniversity of London in 1968 were concrete and visual poems by Bob Cobbing. The repeated word ‘antiuniversity’ was broken up, spun upside down, misregistered, assaulted and scattered, turned into a constellation or a network. Perhaps this was done as an emulation of what might be done to official and repressive knowledge and perhaps it prefigured an imagination of language and knowledge after liberation. Keith Armstrong’s typed registration form, in contrast, from a couple of years later, composed at a time when the Antiuniversity had lost its premises and operated ad hoc from pubs and houses, was more sober, if in political red. The leaflet had a function: to gather information. The form outlined the courses on offer, which included ‘Logic’; ‘Poetry’; ‘Communication and Antisocial Work’; ‘Alternative Law’ and ‘The I Ching and the Alternative Society’. The form invited the attenders to pre-order three books. One was the 1970 guide Alternative London by Nicholas Saunders, a counterculture bible. The other two were Drop Out (1968) and Theory of Voting (1969), both by Robin Farquharson, who lived – derangedly by all accounts – in a squat in North Somers Town. He coined the term drop out. He was mentally disturbed, as well as being an extraordinary mathematician who had written about game theory. He was also the founder of the Mental Patients Union, a self-organised grouping for mental health patients, which met in Charrington Street. He died as a result of a fire in 1973. Farquharson, incidentally, had provided the slash & dash alphabet that prominent poet dsh (Dom Pierre-Sylvester Houédard) developed as a typewriter font for concrete poetry.

What do these stories tell today? That activism and carving out a space takes a lot of work and a lot of solidarity, but also a certain amount of decay which means the spaces deemed unfit for human habitation can be opened up to genuine human habitation, occupied in the fullest sense, and in solidarity with others. 

I have seen talk of the speculation and financialisation of the present with its inevitable bashing of the deprived, squeezing them out or allowing their substandard accommodation to rot further, succumb to mould and fire, as weird, a weirdness in time and space. But is it not more part of a continuity – as Benjamin said, progress is the continuation of the status quo, which is the catastrophe.²⁰ ); originally in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972–89), V, p. 592.] It is not only a sudden fatal fire in a London tower block, an eruption from out of the blue, seemingly, though it was forewarned by the residents group and by firefighters and fire experts. But rather it is a relentless process of ‘social murder’, as Engels called it on three occasions in his 1845 study of The Condition of the Working Classes in England, naming the bourgeoisie’s ‘offences of omission not commission, but none the less murder’.²¹ It is ‘slow violence’ as others have said, which sometimes accelerates, sometimes abates. The empire never ended, claimed Philip K. Dick, referring to a wild idea of the continuation of the Roman Empire repeatedly across time and into the USA of the 1980s. The empire never ended – which empire? Work lately has written of Empire’s endgame, in the context of arguments about so much endism. In Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (2021), the editors characterise the ‘particular flavour’ of our moment in the United Kingdom as ‘an acute awareness of being at the end of one thing and the beginning of something else, whose form is unstable and unclear’.²² Empire is declining, that is British ‘greatness’ is disappearing.  This in-between moment – end of one time, a new time struggling to be born – may exist and may be a strange place to be, and it might signify dread and hope, closures and contingent openings. But there is also much continuity, both on the part of oppressors and resisters, who cross the same ground, stage the same fights, push back, push forward, endlessly. Perhaps this fatal, futile and fantastic dance across time is also in a way a weirdness. The spaces that are constantly running out, succumbing to take over, densifying their commerciality, networking themselves into surveillance systems, tied up in fintech and healthtech are never finally finished and stable. Crashes come, catastrophes for them become opportunities for others. Walter Benjamin called it a ‘weak Messianic power’ that is passed on.²³ It has burst out again and again in the small patch of land I just led us through, one not unlike elsewhere, though it has its specific histories. It just needs those close to the ground to amplify the echoes and make new noise.

But we cannot diminish the catastrophes of the present, which intensify at times.  One of the start ups that Somers Town based LocalGlobe/Latitude back is Venn, that reinventor of urban neighbourhooding, from Tel Aviv to Brooklyn to Berlin and on. The company took off, gentrified a few places, earned a lot of money for its founders. Last year, Electronic Intifada published an article about its founder’s proposal to transform the Gaza strip.

The plan was submitted by Or Bokobza, an Israeli reserve officer in the Sayeret Matkal elite commando unit, who was deployed in Gaza for several weeks during October and November.

Bokobza lives in New York City, but was in Israel on 7 October when the Palestinian resistance group Hamas led a military operation that destroyed the Israeli army’s Gaza Division, which is responsible for enforcing Israel’s siege on the territory.

Bokobza “immediately reported for duty and was deployed to root out the Hamas fighters that day,” according to a glowing tribute in The Wall Street Journal.

Bokobza, who spent eight years in Israel’s army, far longer than the mandatory service requirement, has also participated in “every war since 2005.”

He is also the chief executive of Venn, a company that makes software for large-scale residential landlords to manage, monitor and extract maximum rents and revenue from tenants. It has received $100 million in venture capital, according to The Wall Street Journal.

At least 15 percent of his employees also enlisted as reservists with Israel’s military after the genocidal war on Gaza was declared.²⁴

Bokobza proposes wiping out northern Gaza and reconstructing it as a managed colony – Gaza 2.0, where Palestinians who adhere to rules set by Israel may stay. Disobedient Palestinians are exiled to southern Gaza, or as he calls it, Gaza 1.0 – the ‘area of terror’. It is one of a long line of plans to disempower the state. But Electronic Intifada notes: ‘Bokobza’s vision is in this tradition, albeit with the nightmare softened by the cheerful language of a real estate brochure and sprinkled with upbeat tech charlatanry.’ At its heart is violence.

These are the seeds cultivated, harvested and nurtured in Somers Town, in between the glaring indices of deprivation that are there too, in the Silicon Valley that is a bash in the landscape that has many scars unhealable by some app. What the financescape represents and enforces is both local and operative across the world. It is immense, because their dreams are big and violent. Ours must be equally forceful in the name of liberation.