Thanks so much for doing this, Dan. One thing that might be a useful way to begin is by explaining the distinction you make in the book between “closed” and “open” crowds. What’s the difference? And which kind is a New Year’s crowd? A closed crowd is something like a concert hall or a football stadium – somewhere with secure perimeter fencing with paid-for tickets nearly always as a condition of entry, and with a bunch of other conditions of entry as well. You’re entering into, usually, a private space, and you’re paying for the privilege to do so, and your behaviour sort of responds accordingly. You’re more likely to sit still in the seat that has been assigned to you and to comport yourself according to the social norms of that particular space. Open crowds in the modern city are increasingly rare. And New Year’s Eve crowds are a very good example – a rare example – of a substantial urban open crowd in which there is theoretically no boundary, that people freely leave and join and move around in without any kind of authority. You get this at Notting Hill carnival [in west London]. You might get it when, say, the Lionesses win the Euros and people spontaneously gravitate towards the city centre to celebrate, but nobody has particularly summoned them there to do so. Most protests are open crowds too, even if they have stewards in yellow jackets, marshalling the edges. It’s about your freedom of movement to join and leave. In recent years, as part of a wider change in the way people in cities are policed, new year celebrations have become more likely to be closed crowds with particular areas that you’re allowed to be in, and ticketing and more heavy-handed security. What does that change about the experience? That is absolutely the trend of the last decade, to turn those open crowds into closed crowds, and New Year’s Eve is a prime example of that. In cities like London and New York and Sydney, you have what was hitherto an assembly of up to a million people, sprawled quite messily across the city in an attempt to join the throng, being quite heavily securitised. In London, it was Boris Johnson in 2014 who introduced ticketing for the fireworks for the first time. And with the ticketing, you get a cavalcade of other conditions – fencing, stewarding, security guards, closer surveillance, and now also stratified ticketing, where you can pay more for a “better” service. It has the effect of compartmentalising the crowd, because an open crowd is viewed as dangerous and suspicious by people in power. It’s a very clear hierarchy of wealth and class that revives the way cities were constructed in the 18th and 19th centuries. The current mayor, Sadiq Khan, was critical of it at the time, saying that this was purportedly about safety but was really about monetising people’s good time – but then when he was elected, he kept it. Ticket prices start at £20 and go up to £50 for a better view. They’re already sold out for this year. There’s also a company offering new year packages where you get a boat for 12 people to float down the Thames for £5,775. One of the big consequences of this, which I think is a real demerit, is that you just get many fewer people coming – in London, it’s down from a million to 100,000. The same thing is true in Sydney and in other places where the same thing has happened. It works quite consciously as a dispersal method, which should be antithetical to what they want, which is a thriving, buzzing city. You quote Elias Canetti, who wrote a book called Crowds and Power in 1960, and says that what people want in a crowd is a “blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another”. I would say that it cuts against the spirit and the fun of joining the crowd. The new year’s crowd is essentially the carnival crowd, by which I don’t mean Notting Hill or Rio but this ancient spirit of carnival – the moment where the pauper is the king and vice versa, and everyone in the village is allowed to escape the bonds of the usual hierarchy in the name of a good party. If you’re being compartmentalised according to taste, wealth, mobility that goes against something innate in us. There’s this brilliant Finnish expression, torilla tavataan, which literally means “to the town square”, but is used figuratively as an expression of joy, say when your team has just won the ice hockey. It reveals something really important: the crowd belongs in the public square and the public square belongs to the crowd, and there is something instinctive about congregating with strangers when something exciting happens. |