In defence of people watching

I moved to London 11 years ago in search of some education. I arrived into Euston station one November evening on the Sail-Rail service from Dublin, which for around £50 takes you by ferry from the Irish capital to Holyhead in Wales, then by train to any mainline station in the UK. I was carrying two suitcases, an overstuffed backpack and a clunky pre-smartphone Samsung.

Growing up in Dublin had many benefits, chiefly the ease inherent in navigating a city of that size. By the time I left, I felt I knew exactly how the place worked, and there was some comfort in seeing the same streets, the same people, over and over. I had a lot to learn about the world and London, I decided, was the classroom for me. I was 22.

The first thing you learn in a city like London is how to be a citizen of that city. You learn this in public, through a combination of observation and trial and error. It’s the obvious stuff, the unwritten rules of the escalator, the “pretend you can’t see it” eyes-down approach to communal space. And you also realise, sooner or later, that even though it is through looking at each other that we figure these things out, we’re not really supposed to be looking.

I like to think I was a fast learner. On my early journeys to the university library and to my weekend job at a Chelsea furniture shop, it didn’t take long for me to develop the tough, armadillo-like exterior, the thousand-yard stare of the Tube commuter. But I couldn’t help being curious about my fellow Londoners. I carried on looking.

At the bar at the Royal Opera House, a young man in acid-wash double-denim and spiky bleached blonde hair orders three glasses of champagne.

Disembarking a train on a Saturday evening, two women dressed to the nines and almost entirely matching in black body-con dresses and camel teddy-bear coats, Gucci handbags and black strappy sandals with Perspex heels.

Maybe the impulse to look is what makes new arrivals to big cities feel so out of place. People watching, an activity for which London is tailor-made, can be read as a morally dubious guilty pleasure, something more akin to voyeurism. This is partly because looking isn’t always a neutral action. It depends who’s looking, and what their intentions are. This year, the British Transport Police placed posters in Tube carriages warning against “intrusive staring”, which can be classed as sexual harassment and carry a fine or even a jail sentence.

So I can understand, sort of, why a Londoner might choose to keep their head down. Quite apart from not wanting to make someone uncomfortable by staring at them, minding one’s own business, I soon realised, is necessary for a smooth-running daily routine. This city is big, and the demands on one’s time are relentless. Attention is a valuable commodity in a place like this. You needn’t involve yourself in every tiny incident or drama on your way to work. That would be exhausting. But at the same time, life here necessarily involves conceding some degree of privacy — more so than anywhere else I’ve lived.

In all of the places I’ve rented in London, I have been able to hear the comings and goings of my neighbours. In the run-down Shoreditch maisonette I learnt that my neighbour liked to listen to Foreigner’s 1984 ballad “I Wanna Know What Love is” while cleaning. In the stuffy top-floor Camberwell flat I learnt what the brothers downstairs shouted when they were angry. Sometimes I could smell what my neighbours were cooking for dinner: a roast chicken in the oven in Highgate, or a curry simmering in the pan in Tufnell Park.

There is a siloing of the self that many Londoners tacitly agree to, a trade-off we make between clinging to the barest sliver of our own humanity and travelling in a fast-moving sardine can under the earth’s surface to get to work in the morning. At the very least, we’ll pretend we can’t see each other.

Noticing people in public – their flaws and irritations, their small, instinctive kindnesses – requires noticing their humanity, too

This isn’t the only trade-off we make in order to take our place in the metropolis. There is a strange, uneasy relationship between the defensive froideur of the typical Londoner and the palpable presence of surveillance in the city’s public spaces. When I arrived here, surveillance was a hot topic. In the aftermath of the London riots and the run-up to the 2012 Olympic Games, surveillance systems were ramped up on a grand scale, from biometric scanners around the Olympic Park to expanded CCTV across the public transport network. That year, police figures suggested that the average Briton was caught on CCTV 70 times a day.

This morning, on my way to the coffee shop where I sometimes work, I walked past my neighbours’ doorbell cameras. In the supermarket, I observed myself on the screen above the self-service checkout. On the 43 bus home, I caught myself gazing impassively at the carousel of video feeds of my fellow passengers. I suspect that number is now far higher than 70.

At the same time, attitudes towards surveillance have evolved. The appeal of smart video doorbells lies in arguments about increased safety and convenience, but these can obscure their more insidious effects. Freedom of information requests have shown that some UK police forces have partnered with manufacturers of video doorbells to build a network of neighbourhood surveillance since at least 2018. The idea is that streets with enough of them are safer (though statistics released by police forces in the US and analysed by tech publication CNET in 2020 revealed no change to the usual fluctuating rates of property crime).

Maybe it’s that smart doorbells offer peace of mind, a feeling of safety and control. But the price paid for this is a softer boundary between citizen and police.

There’s another danger, too, that by fortifying our private property in this way, we shore up the lines that separate us from our neighbours. What was once a mutual enterprise, something based on relationships between members of a community, risks being contracted out to tech companies with no knowledge or interest in the social fabric of a place. Is this really a way to live together?

A postman with the tanned shins of a man who spends the whole year outside, pausing in the generous shade of a plane tree near London Fields.

Two Mohawked punks in Dr Martens and black leather jackets
sitting on the pavement on Camden High Street, with a cardboard sign reading “Help Punks Get Drunk”.

The New York urbanist Jane Jacobs posited an alternative model for city life in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs, an activist and writer living in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, was opposed to the fashionable modes of city planning of the time, as seen in Le Corbusier’s Radiant City concept with its rows of utopian tower blocks. She was in favour of another form: the mixed-use block, like her own on Hudson Street, where the residents lived, shopped and sometimes worked alongside each other.

This model, she said, positioned the street as the essential part of the city, a ground-level shared space where neighbours brushed up against each other and, in a way, watched over each other. She referred to the goings-on on her block as the “intricate sidewalk ballet” of the city. If the pavements were constantly in use, she argued, there were “eyes on the street”, to make it safer for everyone.

Noticing people in public — their flaws and irritations, their small, instinctive kindnesses — requires noticing their humanity, too

This kind of informal surveillance is not only a bulwark against urban danger. According to Jacobs, it’s also a way to strengthen the fabric of a community. Let’s call it “people watching”. For different people in a city, people watching has different functions. For me, a renter who works from home, it gives me a much-needed reminder that I am connected to the rest of London.

For the man who works in my local newsagent, by talking to the people who come and go he gathers information about us. and in doing so his shop becomes a focal point in the neighbourhood. I’ve lived near it for three years now and I go there not only to buy my newspapers but also to be seen by him. Doing so demonstrates to myself that I’m part of this community, too. It’s a good feeling. Having moved home six times in 10 years, I’m all too aware of the isolation and loneliness that peripatetic urban living can engender.

But people watching has been a constant for me throughout that time: a small, daily activity that gives me a sense of rootedness. It reminds me how human we all are, and how connected I am to those strangers who pass through the same streets as me.

At the British Museum, a sunburnt man in a faded yellow sou’wester peers over his glasses at a pair of Assyrian tablets.

A group of women in floral dresses and white sneakers set up a circle of camping chairs, picnic rugs and sweating bottles of rosé in the shade of a cedar tree in Regent’s Park.

It’s summer again and London’s communal spaces have come into their own, as they do every year. A patch of grass that barely gets a second look in winter becomes a site for first dates and birthday parties. A park bench becomes the bleachers from which to watch an unusually heated game of boules unfold. Flat windows are opened and drivers wind their windows down, making the city’s private spaces a little more porous than before.

On a hot day, I end up treating my local park like an extension of my own home. I bring a rug and a book and maybe a cold can of supermarket lager, without much care for what my fellow Londoners think of me. After all, they’re doing the same thing, too.

Can people watching make me a better Londoner? Certainly it helps scratch the itch I’ve had since I first moved here, the looping curiosity about what the people around me are up to. In that way, it reminds me why I came here in the first place: for economic opportunity, sure, but also to become part of the teeming swell of civilisation that makes up a metropolis like this one. To take up a little bit of space in the dense network of human connection.

It feels good to remember this. But I suspect it has a moral value, too. Noticing people in public — their flaws and irritations, their small, instinctive kindnesses — requires noticing their humanity, too. And if we are all going to share London’s tangled circuit board, then noticing them means I have a choice to make. Here I can either be a node or a terminal: I can choose to keep the current of human connection going, or I can let it slip. But I’ve always known what my decision is. I’ll keep my eyes open.

Ana Kinsella is the author of “Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City” (Daunt Books Publishing)

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