Cultural Geography

26 HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

station, via Euston. (All sites on the London Monopoly board. You get the idea.) At King’s

Cross, the bikers handed out free food, breakfast, even to some police.

In a taste of things to come, the police reaction was extraordinary: transit vans full of

police followed the cyclists, and roads around King’s Cross had been blocked off. By mid

day, small protests were taking place across London’s ‘real-life’ Monopoly board – from the

Elephant and Castle to Mayfair, from the Old Kent Road to Hyde Park Corner. Most events

were relatively small, involving handfuls of protesters. Almost everywhere, there were twice

as many police as demonstrators. Around Trafalgar Square itself, the police had thrown a

cordon to prevent people from moving down Whitehall to Parliament. The protesters didn’t

seem that bothered: small groups angrily/joyously chanted and sang wherever they could get

to. For example, a small group gathered at the top of Whitehall and began declaring, very

loudly, the injustices befalling women outside the west. In the Square itself, the protest

amounted to about half a dozen people dressed as Mary Poppins and feeding the pigeons (in

protest against remarks by the supposedly radical left Mayor, Ken Livingstone) – and a ring

of police around the base of Nelson’s Column.

At each location of Monopoly London, the symbolic meaning of the place was being

drawn on by different groups to protest different aspects of capitalism. In its diversity and

heterogeneity, it marked a full-blown critique of the myriad and shifting injustices and

inequities of lives led under capitalism. No. More than this, the variety of protests was show-

ing exactly that there were as many capitalisms as forms of protest. And more besides. To

bring all these strands of critique together, all the protests were due to converge on a central

location, Oxford Circus. Although people were not meant to get there until 4 p.m., Oxford

Circus had been occupied from early afternoon. The site is the symbolic centre of one of

London’s most famous shopping streets: significantly, NikeTown faces into the Circus. In

preparation, as you might expect, precautions had been taken, and the shops along Oxford

Figure 3 Riot police guard Laura Ashley near Oxford Circus, 1 May 2001 (Photo: Steve Pile)

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