Urban Messthetics

John Mullan

  • London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City by Sukhdev Sandhu
    Harper Perennial, 498 pp, £9.99, November 2004, ISBN 0 00 653214 4

Sukhdev Sandhu loves a certain vision of London. He finds it realised in the 1987 film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, scripted by Hanif Kureishi, especially the ‘extraordinary scene’ in which the screen is divided and three attractive couples ‘are all shown fucking’. Here is cinematic confirmation of the city as a place of unpredictable pairings and joyful miscegenation. ‘It’s a place of excess. An oasis of joy and gratuitous debauchery.’ The characters in the ‘sexual triptych’ have different racial origins and social status. ‘Collectively, they cover a cultural range the breadth of which can only ever be found in cities like London.’ Out in the suburbs (and presumably the provinces) sex happens behind ‘social screens’. Here it is ‘a dirty and impure celebration of chance, of difference – qualities that the metropolis itself represents’.

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