Cocaine Architect
I arrived—metaphorically limping but physically upright—in that cacophonic space; on one hand a sterile, glass‑encased co‑operative design studio of post‑MA aspirations, and on the other, the a container made of the rugged edges of post-industrial, London grime-soaked progression which encased spatial thinkers: an open‑plan whitewashed amphitheatre peppered with communal Macintosh workstations, several A0 extended drawing boards, a splattering of cardboard models and IKEA desks, where the zeitgeist was filtered through Pantone swatches and the hushed murmurs of Helvetica versus Futura. The place smelled faintly of solvent, if solvent were rebranded as “creative atmosphere,” and it rang with the chatter of junior architects learning the sacraments of practice, while two directors swaggered by swigging cappuccino from Benugo with prestige projects tucked under their pits like ritual invocation.
Yet for all this earnest endeavour, we worked hard and—far more importantly—played harder. Clerkenwell was then incubating its trendiness, that semiotic mutation from industrial precinct to hipster preserve, just beginning to sprout artisanal coffee bars and microbrew pubs. A rough‑hewn door here, an exposed‑brick bar there, vinyl‑curated soundtracking the evening. It was in these embryonic swarms of unwashed creative possibility that I first encountered cocaine. To me, still damp with the wetness of Devonian upbringing despite a decade in the stinking metropolis, it was alarming how ubiquitously distributed the product was—passed discreetly, sleight‑of‑handishly, from the fingers of design directors in horn‑rimmed glasses, to mid‑weight art‑directors draped in scarves, to the receptionists fiddling with their first generation Nokia 3210s behind a counter that read “WE aRe IMAGINEers”.
I recall one particular Thursday night: the week’s pitch (that we had dripped sweat and blood over as we composed those A2 collages) had been crushed, a minimalist tribute to corporate monoliths won, and so we consecrated ourselves to the nearest “Nu Beer” emporium, whose bespoke menu included beers with hints of almost every kind of material in existence. Here, at a lacquered table that caught the evening light like a twig in a brackish stream, it began. The small line—a millimetre of unremarkable powder—was laid out upon the cellophane on a pack of Marlboro Lights and passed under the table first to the older partner, Chinny-Grin—a geezer who looked like John McEnroe and Tom Jones’ lovechild with added smarminess—who inhaled (with an abysmal attempt at covertness) with the devotion of a substance convert, smacking his lips afterwards as if he’d just tasted the Holy Grail. Then Babs, the art‑direction wunderkind, who wedged a slender finger against one nostril and drew it up with the tenderness of a Roman savant sniffing the fragrance of empire. A tiny, almost imperceptible smile spread across her unsullied but dry lips.
We each took turns: the younger partner, who always sounded as though he were auditioning for a role in a Wes Anderson film, claimed—through a thick Yorkshire burr—those goats had sniffed it, that it was “top shelf.” The junior typographer, hands shaking as if the ghosts of kerning errors haunted her, tried to camouflage her tremors by jotting inconsequential notes on a brown Moleskine. Even the flinty‑eyed receptionist—who, I later learned, was moonlighting as a sales representative for an obscure nail‑polish collective—leaned over the Plexiglas counter and executed a flawless tongue‑and‑lip manoeuvre—blink and you missed it—that would have made any chemist nod approvingly.
It was not an act of rebellion so much as an affirmation of tribe. The lines blurred—literally—between ambition and ecstasy, and deep inside me, the studio’s fluorescent lights took on a carnival gleam. I felt propelled, as though inhaling inspiration in a molecularly literal sense. The tension in my shoulders dissolved, replaced by a manic brio: I could have redesigned the Thames Barrier in five minutes; I could have reimagined the Olympic rings in my sleep. The night—or rather the pharmaco‑electronic fugue it engendered—was fucking mine.
By midnight, we’d migrated to a club around the corner at the top of the Farringdon Road, one of those subterranean caverns with a dancefloor that undulated under shitty strobing LEDs, where the DJ spun records like sacred texts. I was more than perplexed, as I knew, I just fucking knew he spent two hours blending tracks from the same two Ninja Tune compilations. The rest of my temporal tribe considered he was fabulous, of course, for the bugle made decisions tonight. Yet, the bass hammered in my sternum; luminous haze painted everyone’s eyes as unmoored and infinite. Tam-tam pumped her fists above her head, jittering along to a highly gated James Brown sample, while Marley, clad in a Kappa jacket (oh! she was so subversive), roamed among the silken pillars of dancers with the aloof stride of an anthropologist studying a ritual. I, clutching my overpriced vodka and cola, now translucent brown caused by melted tap water ice, felt both observer and observed as if I occupied every pixel of the swirling light show.
The cocaine, though, had transmogrified. Its initial promise of invincibility morphed—alongside the rising volume—into a kind of skeletal revelation. My pulse darted like a frantic moth; my thoughts curled inward, inquiring with paranoid whimsy whether the design directors were secretly exacting a weird social Darwinism, seeing how far they could coax the collective hubris before one of us cracked. Each sip of cheap booze felt like swallowing a cricket’s chirp. The dancefloor warped into concentric rings of glass‑like onlookers, and I wondered whether this too was a crafted installation, a post‑digital critique of club culture that we, ironically, were the subjects of.
Eventually, fatigued by the kinetic delirium, three of us—me, Babs, and Marley—decanted onto the pavement outside. The air was cool, tinged with the sour scent of garbage bins and Black cab fumes. We shared one last rail clandestinely on the curb, under the jaundiced halo of a Victorian streetlamp. It split the night’s dark veil with a microscopic lightning strike; the tingle in our nostrils felt like communion.
We wandered, for what seemed infinity to the stop for our night bus to Vauxhall—a bulbous, exhaust‑belching vessel that occasionally grunted to a halt, doors yawning open. We boarded the thing. Inside, a handful of fellow travellers lay slumped: a half‑drunken banker still clutching his tie, a woman in bright Lycra who looked ready to collapse onto the Perspex seat, and a vacant couple whispering so low their words rippled the air like water. We eased onto seats that clattered up and down as the driver took corners like an amateur’s game of Tetris.
I felt an encroaching emptiness beneath the spurring vibrancy in my veins, as though the world were receding while the bus throbbed forward. Babs sagged against the window, the streetlights casting her face in flickers of bleached alabaster. Marley sat opposite, gazing unseeing at overhead advertisements for tooth‑whitening strips and Latin American vacation packages. I tried to speak, to anchor us back to some narrative, but my words fluttered and died.
The bus rattled across the Thames, its metal spine groaning at each expansion joint. I watched the river flow—murky, indifferent, eternal. Vauxhall loomed: a knot of motorway intersections, a neon‑charged embankment bar scene. As we alighted, the cold night air sluiced into my lungs like a reprimand.
What I didn’t know—and what shot through me with the force of a revelation—was that the studio manager had seen to it that our after‑party pharmacology was not entirely spontaneous. At dawn, in the dismal glow of my flat on the Wandsworth Road, I discovered a dossier slipped under my door. Inside were photographs—grainy, surveillance‑style—of me, Marley, and Babs exchanging lines at that lacquered table, then dancing in the club in moments of unguarded frenzy. There were annotated pages detailing each of our biographical data: my name, my home address, even the model of my rented Ford Escort. The final sheet bore a single question: “Performance review: did we exceed expectations?”
A cold lance of understanding pierced me: this was no mere rite of passage but a staged evaluation—a psycho‑social experiment in group dynamics, stress response, brand loyalty, and the elasticity of creative output under chemical euphoria. The directors, with their horn‑rimmed spectacles and softly crooning Yorkshire twangs, had been puppet‑masters, and we had danced on their strings. Really.
I sat at my IKEA desk, the laminate surface a mockery of the mirror lines we’d snorted and felt the Möbius‑strip horror of it all: that the very studio which promised liberation through design had, in truth, contrived an ideological cage round our psyches. Babs slipped by my desk, and knowingly, but without a single utterance, popped a post-it on my drawing board: “Client pitch: Remodelling Docklands warehouse, Monday 10 am.” Then underneath: “Congratulations. See you in Studio. Bring coffee.”
I tore up my resignation letter that I had been drafting, my hands trembling still, not from cocaine, but from the dread that this was precisely the kind of post‑modern travesty we had once vowed, in brighter naiveté, to dismantle. And so, the cycle resumed. I had become another city rat unable to escape its ever-increasing layers of urban tectonics.
This article is taken from the forthcoming book The Dark Nineties: Falling out of Love with Hip Hop, slated for publication in the coming few months.