Reviewer – Ife Abe
The poem’s best trick is in its title. A fair is a market, and a fair is a fairground. For nineteen lines the poem lets us believe those are the only two meanings in play. Then the lights come on, and a third meaning arrives late and without a word of comment: fairness, or its absence. A good political poem rarely names its politics, and this one waits until the reader has walked the whole city before showing who holds the keys.
The method is closer to Charles Simic than to protest verse. The objects are ordinary but slightly wrong. A mango looks guilty. A rib bone becomes a lens for looking at the city. A gold coin turns up in a fish’s belly, the way treasure does in folktales. None of this is explained, and the refusal is the point. London appears as a place where value turns up in odd places and goes missing from the obvious ones. The parking machine at Oxford Circus, which takes coins and “gives him / nothing,” is the poem’s most direct satire. It is also its least strange image, and a reader may feel the temperature drop there.
Formally, the poem is a walk. Each stanza opens with a preposition and a place: at Stratford, at Ridley Road, by Oxford Circus, at Southall. The repetition works like a guidebook’s itinerary, and the guidebook’s calm makes the strangeness hit harder. The lines are short and mostly end-stopped, with the occasional break that withholds a word for half a breath (“vanish / upward,” “gives him / nothing”). Those enjambments are where the poem keeps its secrets. The sound is restrained too. There is almost no rhyme, and the music comes instead from plain consonants and the steady pulse of the declarative sentence. The effect is of a speaker who notices everything and comments on nothing, which is exactly the voice this material needs.
The place names do quiet historical work. Stratford carries the residue of Olympic regeneration, which is to say redevelopment and what it displaced. Ridley Road in Dalston was the site of postwar fascist rallies and of the street resistance against them. Southall is a long-settled South Asian neighbourhood with its own history of struggle. The poem mentions none of this, and it doesn’t need to. A reader who knows the history hears it under the market noise. A reader who doesn’t still feels a pattern forming across districts that the tourist map keeps apart.
The single line of overheard trade, the butcher’s Who’s next, is the poem’s hinge, though it hides in plain sight. On first reading it is pure market patter, the sound of a queue moving. After the final stanza it reads differently, as a question about whose turn it is to be priced out, moved on or replaced. The poem plants its political charge inside the most ordinary words of commerce and lets the ending detonate it.
The Southall stanza is the emotional peak. “The children vanish / upward” is a lovely, unsettling line, joyful on the carousel and faintly ominous on reflection. “For three minutes London is beautiful” is deliberately flat, the plainest sentence in the poem. Its plainness makes the beauty feel rationed, like the length of a ride bought with a token. The fairground is the only place in the poem where nothing is being sold to the reader directly, and it is also the only place where joy appears, briefly and on a timer.
The ending is strong but not flawless. “Somebody else’s key” is the one phrase that comes close to stating the thesis. On a careful reading it holds both gentrification and the older history of people let into houses they never owned, and that ambiguity earns it. “The same small door” is the better image: domestic, modest, multiplied across the city. A braver version might trust the door alone and let the key stay in the reader’s pocket. The sovereign in the fish also risks whimsy, though the poem’s market logic of hidden and misplaced value just about justifies it.
These are small reservations about a poem that understands compression. It belongs to a lineage of London poems that read the city through its markets and margins, but it avoids both nostalgia and lecture. It moves like someone walking through London with their eyes open and their mouth shut, and it leaves the reader to finish the argument.
