One    

Sunday, December 16    

I  

Five o'clock and freezing. Piledrivers and jackhammers were blasting into the wasteland by the side of West Cross Route in Shepherd's Bush. With a bare ten months to the scheduled opening of Europe's largest urban shopping center, the sand-covered sitewas showing only skeletal girders and joists under red cranes, though a peppermint facade had already been tacked on to the eastward side. This was not a retail park with trees and benches, but a compression of trade in a city center, in which migrant laborwas paid by foreign capital to squeeze out layers of profit from any Londoner with credit. At their new "Emirates" Stadium, meanwhile, named for an Arab airline, Arsenal of North London were kicking off under floodlights against Chelsea from the West, whilethe goalkeepers--one Czech, one Spanish--jumped up and down and beat their ribs to keep warm. At nearby Upton Park, the supporters were leaving the ground after a home defeat; and only a few streets away from the Boleyn Ground, with its East End mixture ofsentimentality and grievance, a solitary woman paid her respects to a grandfather--come from Lithuania some eighty years ago--as she stood by his grave in the overflowing cemetery of the East Ham Synagogue. Up the road in Victoria Park, the last of the dogwalkers dragged their mongrels back to flats in Hackney and Bow, gray high-rises marked with satellite dishes, like ears cupped to the outside world in the hope of gossip or escape; while in a minicab that nosed along Dalston Road on its way back to base, thedashboard thermometer touched minus two degrees.   In his small rooms in Chelsea, Gabriel Northw...