Sometimes there comes along an image, whether moving or still, photographed or drawn in ink, that sums up a place, a situation and a time. These images are indelibly linked with some aspect of culture or society and they end up being snapshots of their time and place.
A good example of an image that sums up place and time is William Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’ whch showed the depths of depravity that 18th century London, soaked in cheap and readily available spirits, had fallen to. We look at the image of Gin Lane and see the inebriated woman dropping her baby down the stairs, the dissolute and depressed man hanging from the end of a rope, the sign to entice the drinkers reading ‘drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence, clean straw for nothing’ and we are disgusted at the sight. Hogarth intended to disgust people with this image, he wanted to draw attention to how drunkenness had got out of hand in London and the damage that this drunkenness had caused.
I was reminded of Gin Lane when I saw the short video that I’ve embedded below. Just as Gin Lane was a tableau of the depravity of 18th century London, so this video is a tableau of 21st century London. It shows how the capital has, for want of a better word, been taken over by bestial characters who bear a worrying similarity to the Orcs of Tolkien’s legendarium.
In this modern tableau, the Gin Lane image rewritten, the elderly woman lying on the floor after being hit by a man on an e-scooter represents the modern analogue of the dropped baby in Hogarth’s image. The people standing around filming the incident are no different from the people in Gin Lane ignoring the dropped baby too intent are they on their own quest on getting drunk on cheap gin. The man hitting the e-scooter thug and the subsequent short fight followed by the e-scooter thug getting away with it, could also have come from some Hogarthian nightmare.
London has always had good bits and bad bits and some bits that were not safe to walk around at night. However in recent years, especially since Sadiq Khan became Greater London Mayor, things seem to have got worse. I’m not talking about crime statistics, although these are pretty bad, I’m talking about the general depravity on the streets which seems to have got worse and worse.
Violent and deranged individuals walk the streets and even in decent areas like Hampstead where the above video was taken are not immune from problems. It’s illustrative of how bad London has become that the e-scooter thug had no concern about the old woman he’d knocked down, was so unconcerned about being caught that he engaged in a fight whilst the woman was lying on the ground and was self centred enough to nonchalantly ride off. There’s no sign of the Met Police anywhere near this incident of course, which is sadly standard for London these days.
The above video sums up today’s London just as much as Gin Lane summed up the London of the 18th century and like the viewer of Hogarth’s image who were disgusted at the sight of such depravity, we also should be disgusted at the depravity on display here.
A scene repeated in my town on an almost daily basis. The pavements are rendered dangerous by both cycles and electric scooters charging about on them with no consideration for the pedestrians. Near misses are common and we have had one elderly lady knocked down recently who died. Street violence is always a threat and its not uncommon to see drunks sleeping it off in the Street seating area’s and the smell of burning cannabis is common. Gin lane is today’s British high street and as always the Police are nowhere to be seen apart from the rare occasions when we see a police car cruise by with the officers inside completely ignoring the blatant criminal behavior they are driving by. I wrote the Chief Constable asking for something to be done about the situation and his reply was that it wasn’t like that and I was not seeing things properly.
Yes, the e-scooter has become the anti social thugs vehicle of choice it seems. I agree that this sort of behaviour is not confined to London but to many high streets in many different towns and cities. There’s always been people fighting over something but the street violence we are seeing now is both more common, more visible, more brutal and less controlled by the police than it should be. It’s got the stage now that when I see a police car I don’t wonder whether or not its on its way to or back from an emergency, but whether they are on their way to or returning from yet another diversity indoctrination session.
Yes, but Hogarth was a satirist! We have no evidence that a baby actually was plumetted down some steps through his or her mother having become helpless on gin. We do I think though have some evidence that cheap gin was a problem in the late 1700s/early 1800s and this led in some way to the promotion of beer as a safer alternative c.f. the Beerhouse Act of 1834, allowing any householder a cheaper licence to sell beer only before granted to fully licensed inns.
Re street crime, if we’re going that far back, travelling by stage coach in that era before the railways carried a real risk of attacks by highwaymen.
I’m not really arguing any point, but looking at history objectively (as far as we can) may question if we’re really suffering a breakdown into lawlessnesss?
Maybe not this particular baby but Hogarth might have been aware of other gin related child neglect cases that might have fed into this image or at least this part of it. I agree that the Beerhouse Act was a great move forward and in my view is an example of how loosening restrictions on a less lethal product caused less consumption of the more lethal one. Maybe this might be something that legislators could bear in mind when considering drug legislation?
I’m certainly in agreement with you with regards certain types of street crime. It’s certainly safer to drive or get a train or a coach to Oxford from London without being robbed. It was indeed more possible to be robbed in the past by highwaymen than it is now.
When comparing lawlessness and different periods in history there have been times when crime and especially violent crime was at appalling levels. We are not at the levels of that sort of violence of the period of the Anarchy or the Interegnum or during the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution when urbanisation was going at a great pace. However we are in a more violent era when compared to more recent history such as the period from the 1950’s to the early 1980’s. In my own lifetime I’ve seen street crime get much more brutal today than when I was in my early 20’s in the mid 80’s and I put this down to cultural and other changes. Knives for example might have been boasted of but rarely were they used but now they seem to be used on a depressingly regular basis.