Brick Lane and Spitalfields; A Review

I went to have a look…this is what I found

Spitalfields is in London’s East End, near Liverpool Street Station. At its centre is Brick Lane, which runs north-south from Shoreditch to Whitechapel. This is true ‘east-end’ territory. At least it was in the 17th-19th centuries when the area was developed. The current architectural ‘look’ is from the late 18th and early 19th century, as the industrial revolution fuelled urban growth and attracted thousands to the city for work in the new factories (the area sits on several major railway routes, which no doubt helped). Through the 19th century, the area descended into a cesspit of slums rife with disease and poverty, and the name Spitalfields essentially becoming a by-word for “dump”.

However, like almost all the once-grotty areas of inner-London, it has been reclaimed and gentrified and is full of ‘trendy’ folk and millions upon millions of tourists. This is partly thanks to The City being right next door (its glass and steel phallic temples…and the Gherkin…now tower over the old Victorian streets and reflect the sunlight down some of them creating a surreal, film-set like atmosphere). Somewhat inevitably, the whole area is now the sort of place people go to be a bit ‘edgy’ or ‘alternative’ and experience ‘sub-culture’ (whatever that is) for the afternoon. Or they go there because they’ve been told to: “oh, but you MUST visit Brick Lane!”. So they do, whilst supping on a hot mocha-locha-cappa-spreso or something, and eating quinoa (whatever that is, again). Basically, it all comes across as a bit pretentious and a bit…fake. Which is a shame. 

The area around Brick Lane is famed for its various markets, street stalls and urban ‘street art’ of varying quality and purpose. It appears that, at some point a few years ago, when it was still a bit rubbish and run down (and therefore cheap), a skint artist, or student, or something, sprayed some paint on the wall and it didn’t get removed by the authorities. Then other entrepreneurial people started doing it and formed a little arty community making murals on the walls and shops around the area. And they are, overall, pretty good. Then people began visiting the area to see the artwork and realised they quite liked this slightly dingy urban area they’d tried their best to ignore previously (“I mean, really, who gets the Circle Line past King’s Cross?”). They told all their friends about it and before you know it, the old market was redeveloped, the chain stores flooded in to leach off the older, traditional traders’ bemused clientelle, and the middle classes rolled in for the afternoon. The whole place is now a simulacrum of itself. The story of London, encapsulated within a medium-sized-Victorian-indoor-market. 

Inevitably, the Tourists got wind of this ‘cor blimey guv’nor!’ bit of London, and hot on their heels were the over-priced stalls and ‘arts and crafts’ shops selling ‘vintaaaage clothing, yah.’ Thus, another area became another monster; posing and preening itself for the masses. A monstrous Disney-like parody, somewhere between Mary Poppins’ London and Quadrophenia. It even got a new train station and was moved into Zone One (higher price tickets, you see).

Despite all this, it is still worth going around and having a look for the afternoon. After all, it’s so artificial it’s a spectacle in its own right, like Covent Garden. Plus, it is one of the few areas where you can still get a sense of what Victorian London would have been like (if you look up at the buildings or bother to wander down one of the quieter side streets), but don’t expect to find anything too genuine. There are no petticoated whores in doorways, not even on Petticoat Lane. The gas-lamps and smog have gone, and horses aren’t emptying their bowels on every corner. Be prepared to queue for hours behind hundreds of people taking pictures of what’s been painted on the wall too. It’s very much a typical ‘hip’ London district now, like Hackney or Soho. One for the tourists. 

Life as a Job Hunting Graduate

My experience as an unemployed graduate...

Just over a year ago, after completing my degree but unemployed, I realised I would have to sign up for Job Seeker’s Allowance (JSA). I was lucky enough to be able to move back and live with my parents after university, but money for my phone, transport and so on was something I had to find myself, and that is perfectly understandable. Obviously, I wanted to start my own life, however, eight weeks into being a graduate, I still hadn’t found any form of work and my overdraft was expended, I had sold everything I no longer felt I needed (including a lot of my camera equipment) and I had run out of money.

So, with the dawning realisation that finding a job (any job, let alone a graduate job) was going to be harder than I had naively hoped, I cycled the 5 miles to my nearest job centre and asked to sign on. They sent me straight back home to do it online, as that’s how it is done now. This was early October 2012. Finally, in November, I was invited to a meeting at the Job centre. I sat with an advisor and went into more detail about myself, handed over a CV and was assigned a permanent advisor who I was required to visit once a week (I was offered the chance of choosing my day and time so I picked Friday at 8:30am, the first slot of the day (when the centre is quietest)). For privacy reasons, I’ll name my advisor ‘Clare’.

The sickly green of the Job Centre sign. Image courtesy of the Guardian.

My first meeting went well; we set up my job search preferences on the system (journalism, photography, media) and discussed my background. Needless to say, the Job Centre isn’t really geared towards graduates and I knew my job preferences wouldn’t show up many results. There seems to be an attitude that graduates walk into work straight from university and that Mummy and Daddy will pay for them if they don’t. This is partly true (as mentioned with my accommodation situation) but my family is nowhere near wealthy enough to simply fund my unemployment, particularly when unpaid internships and grad-schemes are becoming more and more commonplace, and with two siblings at university too. Hence my signing-on.

This lack of understanding of graduates revealed itself in all its glory in my second week on JSA. Part of the ‘deal’ of receiving JSA is that one is expected to comply with certain rules and conditions (applying to a minimum of three jobs each week, attending all of your appointments, demonstrating a commitment to finding work, being available for work…all things the majority of job seekers do without the condescending attitude from the Job Centre). You are also expected to attend training workshops to ‘help’ you. My experience of these ‘workshops’ is as follows:

I was told to attend a two hour session on ‘finding work’ one Thursday afternoon. I thought this may include interview tips, cv writing skills, covering letter writing and so on. These were things I had had access to at university so I was little irritated at having to go through more, especially as I didn’t expect it to be as high-quality, but there may have been benefits to it. And when you’re unemployed, filling two hours of your day with something vaguely productive is always a good thing. I cycled to the job-centre (something I was already becoming familiar with doing; a true Norman Tebbit cliche) and sat down with five others (we were grouped by age). The advisor doing the ‘course’ was actually a person who had gone into the Job Centre after losing his job behind a bar and they’d given him a job in the centre itself. Not exactly a professional in the field of employment, then. His main piece of wisdom from the 40 minutes we were there (what happened to the two hours?) was that “looking online” is a good thing to try and that “having a cv is very important”. These are genuine things I was told. Needless to say, I felt I had just wasted a lot of time that could have been spent filling in applications (at this point I was averaging three applications a week).  The only useful thing was the list of job websites I was given. But even then, I had already signed up to five or six by that point.

I made my feelings about this workshop clear to Clare, but she simply said that I had to go to these sessions because that was part of the ‘contract’. At this point, I should mention that my JSA was contribution based; essentially, I was being paid an amount which reflected the tax I had paid during the previous five years of work I had been doing, first as a full time sales assistant in a shop and then as a contracted photographer at my university during my student years. To this end, I had effectively paid my JSA through my own taxes and was not claiming from others’ taxes. This is the same for the majority of claimants.

 As December rolled along I widened my search. I had initially been looking for graduate work in the field I was interested in, as most people would do. Sadly, the things I am vaguely skilled at and have knowledge of are arts-based. And the arts industry is essentially in a freelance free-fall to wageless oblivion. So, swallowing my pride and desires to work in a graduate job I wanted, I began looking for other jobs too. I was now applying to an average of ten jobs per week, ranging from bar work, nightclub photography, shelf stacking, graduate schemes, internships, medical photography, shop work, voluntary positions and so on. I was even applying to jobs I was unsure I could get to or afford to travel to/move location for (jobs in Derby, Leek, Stafford, London, Bristol, Wales, Scotland, Hungary, Viet Nam etc). I was mainly receiving the infuriating “due to the volume of applicants we cannot provide feedback” rejection emails, if I received a reply at all. The Job Centre provided no help. Clare had kindly allowed me to visit once a fortnight, as I was meeting all of their requirements, but during these 20 minute Friday morning meetings, I merely showed her my job search records, signed the forms to get the JSA and sighed a lot about the fact I was still unemployed despite having a degree and a lot of extra-curricular skills and experience on top of it.

I had started a short course to add shorthand to my abilities, as this appeared to be something required of those hoping to go into media (in particular, it was a requirement for one graduate scheme I was applying to). For six hours a week I was learning how to write squiggly lines, and the rest was spent applying to jobs and boosting my photographic portfolio. Christmas came and went. I had now passed 200 applications to jobs as varied as fork-lift truck driver and a medical photographer in a dentist’s practice. Still nothing. I was struggling to find voluntary things to do (Birmingham has the youngest population in Europe, and also had some of the highest unemployment in the UK at the time) and I had even been in the infuriating position of being told I was over-skilled for some shop work I had applied to, despite having extensive retail experience. In hind-sight, I could have dumbed down my CV more for these non-graduate jobs, but after three years of university I think I felt that my degree qualification should be something I should be proud of and highlight. It cost me the best of the £30,000!

Of the 250 or so applications I had done by the end of January 2013, Clare had probably been responsible for 12 of them. The Job Centre had effectively been little more than an (ugly and unwelcoming) administrative building I went to, to receive money. In the first week of February, something happened which shocked me. By now, the job centre had moved to an online portal, through which job seekers have to keep a record of all of their search activity, upload a cv and demonstrate how they are looking for work. This is a reasonable expectation, despite it infringing somewhat on privacy, as the Department for Work and Pensions demands access to everything on there. This means the advisor also has access and can recommend a job to you. When they say ‘recommend’ they actually mean “APPLY TO THIS JOB NOW!”

Clare had picked a job as an optical technician or something. It was a job in an optician’s, responsible for their image archive. It sounded quite interesting and I would have applied even if it hadn’t been mandatory. I left the job centre and went home (I’d usually be home by 10am, so had the whole day to do applications and my shorthand course).  I applied to seven jobs that day. However, Clare’s link on the job search system didn’t work. This wasn’t the first, second or even 10^th time this had happened and I was used to it. I looked up the company who had posted the job and went to their site, but the job was no longer listed. Thinking nothing of it other than mild disappointment, I assumed my seven other job applications that day (let alone the seven or so I had done earlier in the week) would more than meet the minimum of three I had to apply to.

A week later, Clare saw that I hadn’t applied to the job she had selected. I explained what had happened and about the 14 other applications I had done that week, which she could see online too, but she said she would “have” to sanction me. A sanction is a thirteen week suspension of your JSA. For me, this was frustrating. But for someone who depended on that money to pay bills, or rent, or to eat? How is that possibly going to help them find work? What’s more, it was the dreadful website system that had caused this problem in the first place. It wasn’t my fault they had listed a job that no longer existed. And now I had lost my only source of income despite having applied to over 250 jobs in three months. (During this week I had also been rejected from a £17,000 a year job working for Eurostar as a part-time copy-writer, because I was ‘overly skilled for the position’. That phrase is the one which always left me feeling utterly hopeless and lost. How can you ever be over-skilled for something? Surely that’s just a benefit?).

Annoyed about the lack of common sense, discretion, and the injustice I felt I had received due to incompetence elsewhere, I appealed the decision. Almost absurdly, whilst the appeal is on-going you still have to attend the job centre every week and continue to meet all the requirements they place on you, even though you are no longer getting anything from them in return expect a smug superiority and the feeling of being the base of society. My first appeal was rejected by the middle of March. I later found out that the people who judged my appeal were the same people who enforced the sanction…because that’s a fair system. From my viewpoint, it appeared no logic or thinking had gone into the decision; the circumstances and my records had clearly not been looked at. So I appealed again.

Luckily, by the middle of March 2013, some former colleagues had recommended me for a job and I had been offered a part-time position in a shop. The sanctions no longer mattered and I gladly signed off, hopefully to never, ever go through this situation again. My second appeal was still pending and I heard nothing about it once I singed off.

In April, I was offered an interview for a graduate position in London (my 286th job application). Ten days later I was offered the job and moved down to the South East in May, as I had always suspected I would end up having to do. My quest to find a graduate position had finally ended, and I was even working in something vaguely close to my original hopes and getting paid far more than I had ever hoped. A far cry from the dark days of December when I had lost all self-esteem and belief in myself and for the first time since being a young child, had at one point broken down in tears because of the hopelessness. JSA gladly faded from memory until one day in July, a whole six months after I was first sanctioned, I received a random payment into my bank account. No letter, phone call or email, just a payment that matched the exact amount I had not been paid whilst sanctioned. I had to phone up to clarify.

I was lucky JSA was merely there to help me afford travel, a phone and to slowly clear my credit card and overdraft debts. Had I depended on that to survive, I don’t know what I would have done. I was wrongly, unfairly and pointlessly sanctioned by an over-zealous and incompetent service which does not help those it is supposed to. It demoralises, demonises and ridicules those that use its service, making them jump through higher and higher hoops and punishing them for petty and minor things. And I had been lucky enough to avoid the work-fare scheme!

I doubt I am the only person to experience this, and if you haven’t, I sincerely hope you never have to. 

Note: I kept a record of all of my job applications as part of my requirements to receive JSA and for personal records. I still have this file as testament to the amount of applications I sent.