City montage

Still from TWILIGHT CITY (1989)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cycling in London is to experience the city's moods in a direct and shifting manner. Moving through the backstreets and main arteries of the city day after day reveals its divergent prospects, its rhythms, the patchwork of class and culture that make up the metropolis. Recently in analysis, reflecting on the 2026 London experience of general anxiety and aggression, I stated something which brought this thesis home for me-"I know things are fucked up because of how people drive."

Cycling gives me autonomy and joy in a highly contrived city, an emancipatory practice as much as a dangerous and exposing one. To be on a bike is to increase the possibility of injury or death at the hands of drivers, to be exposed to the eyes of thousands of people and to abuse from both drivers and pedestrians. Cycling while trans is something that keeps me safe (I feel I can leave any given public scene quickly) even as the danger of London roads brings me into contact with morbidity daily. I joked with a friend recently, what a shame it was I was so invested in two activities (transexualism and cycling) that people seemed to really dislike. I hear snippets of many conversations as I pass people, my attention flitting between the scene around me and the position and sounds of other road users. Over the past years I have built up a mental picture of what is going on in my city through this absorption of affect and speech.

Black Audio Film Collective's Twilight City centers on long shots from a car driving around London at night. The visual is accompanied by someone reading a letter to her mother who has left the city for the Caribbean. The writer claims that the London her mother knew is dying, that the city is changing fast, there is an ideological battle playing out over what city London will become. This is a story of struggle for the heart of the city, for the ways of life the metropolis makes possible that I identify with today. City montage is a way of seeing what is falling away, and what is appearing in its place. Twilight City's subtitle reads Sacrifice a piece of the past for the whole of the future. A commitment to cycling, a commitment to living desire, a commitment to the city as home are commitments to a future where we are more able to breath, both literally and metaphorically.