Busking has existed for as long as there have been cities and towns with more resident musicians than gigs to support them. This week, the Greater London Authority has finally launched its Busk In London website. This, their newsletter gushed, was “where you’ll find all you need to know to get busking”. How anyone has managed to busk in London until now is truly a mystery.
Among other features, the site boasts a “new digital map with information about busking in different locations,” plus “stuff on London’s first busking code of conduct, and tips to help you deal with any issues”. Articles on the launch appeared in various newspapers, mostly accompanied by photos of a gurning Boris Johnson posing with a tenor ukulele. A cursory view of the website suggests that literally hundreds of pounds must have been spent on this flagship project.
What will it mean for London’s buskers like myself, and for the police, the local authority staff, the shopkeepers, stallholders and the general public who encounter us every day? I’ve been busking for more than 25 years; for the last seven years I’ve held a London Underground busking licence. Between this, teaching music and playing in function bands, I manage to make enough of a living to support my hobby, which is composing, recording and performing music. The code of conduct is a heavily edited version of the widely praised Best Practice Busking Guide produced jointly last year by Jonny Walker’s Keep Streets Live! campaign, Liverpool city council and Liverpool business improvement district, for the buskers of Liverpool.
The Liverpool document demonstrates how buskers of all kinds can perform in a spirit of consideration and respect to those around them and to one another. The London version is mainly a list of things that buskers shouldn’t do, including the immortal line: “If you only know a few songs, move to a new location when you’ve played them.” Buskers who only know a few songs make no money at all and are widely hated, especially by other buskers. Such people really aren’t a long-term problem.
Where the spirit of the Liverpool document is analogous to Wil Wheaton’s “don’t be a dick”, the spirit of the London edition seems to be “you are a dick”. All the stuff from the Liverpool document advising police and local authority workers on how to approach buskers politely has been removed. Instead there’s unhelpful advice that bagpipers, drummers or electric guitarists should find locations away from flats, offices, shops and hotels. Or people.
What I can’t understand is why Busk In London didn’t simply adopt the Liverpool document wholesale. It wasn’t called “best practice” for marketing reasons or for branding reasons. It was called “best practice” because it contained, as far as it was able, actual best practice; it was agreed to in Liverpool by stakeholders on all sides, including shopkeepers, police, local authority representatives and buskers themselves. It was written in a spirit of mutual respect. The results in Liverpool have been demonstrable.
Still, it would be churlish of me to be overly harsh on Busk In London. I’m old enough and ugly enough to know a first draft when I see one. Clearly Busk In London is still at the beta stage. Here’s hoping the final release replaces the existing code of conduct with a document basically the same as Liverpool’s, only with “Liverpool” replaced with “London” throughout, and, of course, our own mayor. With or without tenor ukulele.
