Close to the Madding Crowd

At a crossroads between time and eternity, with a digital camera

A few months back,on a Saturday afternoon, I noticed a large crowd gather around the pedestrian-resistant base of Centre Point, the skyscraper at the end of Oxford Street which separates Bloomsbury from St. Giles. (Ed. This piece was originally published at cityofsound.com on 3rd November 2004.)

It turns out, from overheard conversations amongst the crowd, that a stuntman was going to jump off the top on to a smallish pile of landing mats. I couldn’t see the top of the tower, though every now and then some figures appeared to look down. It soon became clear that nothing was happening any time soon, but what became interesting was the crowd itself, looking up …

The crowd was a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a sense. The more that people gathered and looked upwards, the more that people gathered and looked upwards. The lack of information about the event barely mattered; indeed, the mystery may have added to…