My first new beginning

As a young boy, I grew up in a small village in leafy suburban Surrey, where hedges were trimmed and cars taken for their Sunday wash. When my parents split, I was 11. My mother soon bought a place with her new partner in Camberwell.

I’d stay up late on Friday nights listening to the Mike Allen show on Capital Radio, soaking up Grandmaster Flash, Steinski, and early Run DMC. By the time I was 14, I was venturing alone into the heart of the city via Brixton’s Victoria Line. I can’t help imagining what sort of a sad teenager I might have been without such a wonderful back garden full of punks and prostitutes.

Not every encounter struck home. In 1988, I recall leaving an exhibition Mum had forced me to go to — Diego Rivera — in a sulk in the back of the car. I was too culturally removed from the politics of those times to grasp the momentous story of his and Frida Kahlo’s life and art. I sank into the back seat with my Walkman blaring Music for the Masses, wishing I were at a Depeche Mode concert instead, as we slipped through the rain past multiple posters of a very effeminate Prince promoting LoveSexy. I knew even then that I was spoiled and should have been grateful for the experience, but it wasn’t the cutting edge I was looking for.

Looking back, what strikes me is how porous the world felt. You could listen to a late-night radio show, watch a discussion on BBC2, read a column in Time Out, and then step out into London to encounter it all first-hand. It gave you the sense of belonging to something alive, unruly, and shared — a cultural agora where art and counterculture weren’t separate categories but overlapping circles of the same pulse. I’d listen to what they were talking about on The Late Show and then, within days, I’d be at the Lisson Gallery for Anish Kapoor or at Annely Juda taking in Anselm Kiefer, making up my own mind, smelling the paint, seeing the way the canvas bent under the weight of lead and thick pigment. Television didn’t just report on art: it handed you a map. London became an extension of my living room, a place where the conversation spilled from the TV into the streets, onto the gallery walls, and back again.

I devoured Sarah Kent’s reviews in Time Out, a magazine Mum made sure was always in the house, under my nose and up to date with the latest copy - something I have never really given her credit for. Sarah’s writing was something I delighted in with equal parts reverence and anticipation. She never minced her words. If a show was dreadful, she said so, but if she found something worthwhile, she lit it up like a flare, sending people like me off in pursuit. Her sentences had a quiet authority, and though I was barely old enough to shave, I felt inducted into a world where opinions mattered, where art was serious enough to argue about.

The cultural air was thick then. One week I’d find Peter Greenaway films at the cinema — labyrinthine, painterly, almost unbearable but impossible to ignore. The next I’d be at Tower Records with those heavy plastic headphones clamped to my ears, previewing a CD before parting with my pocket money. Even shopping felt like a form of initiation. At the Conran Shop in South Kensington, you could run your hands over Ron Arad’s skeletal shelving or Philippe Starck’s playful kitchen gadgets and feel the same thrill as standing in a gallery: the sense that design, art, and life were inseparable, that taste itself was a form of adventure.

And surrounding it all were the critics, the voices that gave texture to the age. Sarah Dunant with her measured elegance, Howard Jacobson with his acid wit, Brian Sewell with his patrician disdain, and Christopher Hitchens with his erudite and dangerous brilliance. They were vital, intense, sometimes pretentious, but they made you sit up. Even when they tipped into the nauseating, as with Tom Paulin’s laboured polemics or Tony Parsons’ tired posturing, the failures were part of the ecology. Debate mattered. Culture wasn’t just consumed; it was contested.

Of course, had I stayed in that village, I still could have tuned into The Late Show and picked up Time Out. But it wouldn’t have compelled me in the same way — because the follow-up, the act of going, of standing inside the work, would have been out of reach. Listening from afar, I might have bought a book or two, but that is not the same as coursing through the veins of London’s backstreets like a platelet, swept along by the pulse of Hari Krishnas, production-house runners, fashion photoshoots and free fanzines.

Those years spoiled me with a wealth of experimentation and risk. They gave me a sense of belonging to the hidden life of the city, of being part of its bloodstream. That beginning was more than an address change; it was the opening of a lifelong channel between me and the art that keeps remaking the world.

None of it would have happened without Mum’s spark - her patience, curiosity, generosity, and insistence on leaving things lying around for me to stumble into. This is my quiet thank you.