Mark Thomas joins the guerrilla knitters (original) (raw)

London is perfect at 3am. Sober bourgeois mores are tucked away, fly-by-night revellers and office parties have crashed and burned, and City wide boys have barked their babbling directions to cabbies. All that is left at this hour are the serious drinkers, rogues and lovers, mingling with the flotsam and jetsam of the night shift.

In my 20s this is when I felt most ownership of London, when those who genuinely owned and controlled the place were out of the way, or at least thinner on the ground. A time when every other soul was intoxicated and the hour made comrades of us all. It felt as if the city was a playground for us to enjoy.

I'm a 46-year-old reformed drinker now, and if I am up at 3am it is usually because I am walking off heartburn or indigestion, and the only bulge in my pocket is a Ventolin inhaler. Tonight, however, I have other reasons to be lingering in the moonlight.

At Greenland Dock, I pass the yuppie hutches that pass for executive housing, where nothing blinks but the motion sensors, listening to my own footfalls echo on a wooden bridge. All I have for company is an urge to whistle As Time Goes By, a young woman called Perri and a bag full of knitting. And if you're wondering why I'm here, then that makes two of us. All I know is I am about to desecrate a public work of art.

The work I am after is an abstract piece erected to commemorate the London Docklands Development Corporation. Back in the 1980s the LDDC was a quango responsible for "regenerating" the docklands, a task made easier for it as the Conservative government helpfully abolished planning regulations, enabling the LDDC to ride roughshod over local residents. The sculpture I am heading for is a bent piece of metal tubing by William Pye called the Curlicue, and it stands on the south side of the river, opposite Canary Wharf. Now, I may not know much about art, but I know what I dislike. And right now that's the Curlicue.

Perri is a "yarnstormer", and she is my entree into the world of guerrilla knitting, where groups of predominantly young women calmly reclaim the cityscape by covering things in wool. It is to crochet what graffiti is to fine art and, like graffiti, it can strike anywhere and any time. Tonight there are only the two of us, but there are guerrilla knitters across the world, and they have covered everything from a bus in Mexico to a tree in Norway.

"It is part of the craft movement," explains Perri, who is particularly proud of yarnstorming an entire phone box in Parliament Square as part of a six-woman squad earlier this year. "We prepared the panels in advance and then tied them up when we got there."

"Why Parliament Square?"

"Some people thought it was to do with the right to protest, but it was just so we could get a photo with Big Ben in the background so you could tell where the phone box was. These pictures go around the world."

"How did the police react?" I wonder.

"Well they didn't arrest us. People are surprised to see something they see in their grandma's living room on a phone box. The fact that it is knitting rather than spray paint has been why we have been allowed to get way with it. People like the idea of brightening up the city and making people stop and take notice of things that they have never noticed before, even if it is a crappy bit of railing."

The craft movement and "young women coming back to knitting" might explain some of this, but surely there is a world of difference between making booties for newborns and putting a massive tea cosy on a phone box in an area swarming with police?

"For some people," Perry agrees, "it is part of reclaiming public space."

This might sound like a trite catch-all phrase for artists, crafters, graffiti boys and situationists alike, but to me it has a more thrilling side. Increasingly we need permission to enjoy our basic rights and pleasures, whether it be demonstrating outside Parliament, taking a photo in Canary Wharf, or parking a scooter in our own street. So creative acts that defy the corporate or government vision of our cities have an intense joy to them.

Guerrilla knitting is probably the fluffiest example of such "interventions", but they include more controversial actions such as May Day 2000's guerrilla gardening, when Parliament Square was transformed into an allotment by folk who turned up with trays of cress and daffodils.

Out on the Thames, Perri and I stand by the Curlicue with a large bag full of knitted bits. "We should start at the top," she says, and we promptly begin to clamber over the sculpture, stretching the woollen panels around the tubes and clipping them together with plastic grip ties. Perri has worked out how much wool we will need from a photo, using a brick at the base of the sculpture to gauge the height and width of the piece.

Now, night-time is the right time to be with the one you love, but it is also the right time for nefarious acts of mischief: from flyposting to graffiti, this is the defacing hour. But guerrilla knitting is surprisingly calming. It lacks the wanton damaging of property that you get with plastering "Troops Out" on doorways or tagging on a wall, so the consequences of capture are less severe. After all, what police officer would want to spend time and paperwork prosecuting a knitter? And the work itself has a pleasurable repetition.

But it is standing by the Thames at night that is perhaps the most enchanting pleasure. The only souls we encounter are a couple of old blokes looking for drink and a middle-aged woman with four chocolate-coloured labradors, all of whom, save one hound, smile in bafflement and walk on. After an hour of hushed chattering, deft balancing and sewing, we have covered the Curlicue with a patchwork quilt, leaving it quaint and somewhat infantilised, and me with a childish grin. No damage is done to the sculpture, but when folk wake up tomorrow and head off to work they will see a less serious public work of art than that with which they went to sleep.

I would be the first to admit that as yarnstorming goes, my first attempt lacks the skill and creativity of some of Perri's other actions. With a group of friends, she targeted the six churches in the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons, knitting figures, icons, boats and fruit to decorate the sites, sometimes hanging the pieces over the doors, at others entwining them around railings. The YouTube video of their efforts that day (tinyurl.com/orangesand) is a wonderfully idiosyncratic work of true beauty.

In all honesty, I doubt my efforts have radically redrawn the inhabitants' vision of London, but it was fun – free and colourful fun.

Standing back from the sculpture, I suddenly realise what the whole thing looks like. Seriously, folks – take a look at the picture. It may not be anatomically exact, and it may have more in common with the classic bus shelter scrawl, but without a doubt the Curlicue is a massive set of genitals standing opposite Canary Wharf, celebrating the London Docklands Development Corporation. Perhaps I have underestimated the artist William Pye, and I wonder if any of the corporate bigwigs who commissioned the piece had the nerve to say: "I don't know much about art, but are you suggesting we are a bunch of knobs?"