Adieu City PM Towers: A toast to the Tiktokers
As City PM bids adieu to its current home, Lucy Kenningham considers The Tiktokers
With change comes loss.
As City PM prepares to leave its current riverside offices, dubbed City PM Towers by a journalist in a generous mood, it felt a good time to reflect on what we would be leaving behind. For it is a strange but endearing facet of life at this newspaper that when one’s gaze inevitably wanders towards the window – however hard one concentrates on the latest financial news – it will land upon gangs of dancers on the balcony below. The situation is full of paradoxes. We, demonic, caffeine drenched, screen-glued occupiers of an upper floor office space are surrounded on all sides by young and agile-hipped groovers who use our balcony space, walled with mirrors, as an open-air dance studio. We see them; they can’t see us (due to our darkened windows). We are absorbed in blue light, they are doused in daylight. We sit in tomb-like stillness, they whirl about in constant motion. Some are armed with a whirling wooden rod. They look ecstatic, we look miserable.
Amongst us staff, they are known as The Tiktokers, although in the writing of this memorandum it transpired there are competing theories as to The Tiktokers’ origins. Another theory is that they come along from a nearby dance school. Noone has ever thought to ask them.
It is a strange sight because it seems so incongruous: there is something deeply humanising about the misuse of a space, or indeed the reappropriation of an area, as well as something reassuring about space existing without a purpose. People will populate this “urban breathing room”, and engage with it in unpredictable ways. But urban planners and local authorities, understandably, can struggle with the concept.
Some call them incidental spaces: spaces that just happen to exist, by an accident of architecture. These provide the urban nooks and crannies reclaimed by would-be dancers as a place to jig and prance, as is the case of the balcony that adorns City PM Towers.
After all, the City can be utilitarian and cold, and having a bunch of 15-year-olds dancing like nobody is watching – despite everybody watching – brings the area to life.
That said, this particular space is not totally incidental. Our nearly-former offices, St Magnus House (which is set to be retrofitted) was designed by the modernist architect Richard Seifert and built in 1979. His conception came with all the ideals of socially cohesive spaces bounding around at that hopeful time: community, public space, gatherings. The wide walkways on which The Tiktokers gather to bust their moves are supposed to be used to socialise and bring people together. Seifert would love them, I think. The Tiktokers are finally realising his ambitions that have largely failed over the last half a century. After all, the City can be utilitarian and cold, and having a bunch of 15-year-olds dancing like nobody is watching – despite everybody watching – brings the area to life.
Of course, City PM is far from unique in enjoying this spectacle. Tiktokers are to be seen in other parts of London too, no doubt more so than ever before. But it’s mostly parks, clubs or schoolyards, and those aren’t ‘incidental spaces’ with all the pleasure these accrue.
So – allow me to raise a toast. These groups of “real people” have entertained and propelled us through the journalistic grind. Whether it’s a nunchucker intimidating a stressed-out news editor with his prowess, or a Michael Jackson impersonator (in costume) performing his “insanely good” moves in front of the art director, their entertainment and character will be missed. As plans to retrofit St Magnus House into a “best in class” workplace come afoot, will someone, somewhere consider The Tiktokers?