People watching essay

People watching essay

Web10/08/ · Have you even been able to just sit down and watch people? Watching people is one of the craziest things to do in life. There are so many different types of people in Web14/06/ · Essay Preview: People Watching 2 rating(s) Report this essay Delprøve B – “People-Watching”Death is always hard to go through and it takes a bit of getting used Web10/07/ · It was a young man who looked like—if you have a brother or a cousin you don’t like, in an occupation you don’t like, then that was him. His personality was easy to

FREE People Watching Essay

We use cookies and other data for a number of reasons, such as keeping FT People watching essay reliable and secure, personalising content and ads, providing social media features and to people watching essay how our Sites are used. Ana Kinsella. I moved to London 11 years ago in search of some education. I arrived into People watching essay station one November evening on the Sail-Rail service from Dublin, which for around £50 takes you by ferry from the Irish capital to Holyhead in Wales, then by train to any mainline station in the UK. I was carrying two suitcases, an overstuffed backpack and a clunky pre-smartphone Samsung. Growing up in Dublin had many benefits, chiefly the ease inherent in navigating a city of that size.

By the time I left, I felt I knew exactly how the place worked, people watching essay, and there was some comfort in seeing the same streets, the same people, over and over. I had a lot to learn about the world and London, I decided, was the classroom for me. I was The first thing you learn in a city like London is how to be a citizen of that city. You learn this in public, through a combination of observation and trial and error. I like to think I was a fast learner. I carried on looking. At the bar at the Royal Opera House, people watching essay, a young man in acid-wash double-denim and spiky bleached blonde hair orders three glasses of champagne.

Disembarking a train on a Saturday evening, two women dressed to the nines and almost entirely matching in black body-con dresses and camel teddy-bear coats, people watching essay, Gucci handbags and black strappy sandals with Perspex heels. Maybe the impulse to look is what makes new arrivals to big cities feel so out of place. People watching, an activity for which London is tailor-made, can be read as a morally dubious guilty pleasure, something more akin to voyeurism. So I can understand, sort of, why a Londoner might choose to keep their head down. Attention is a valuable commodity in a place like this. That would be exhausting. In the stuffy top-floor Camberwell flat I learnt what the brothers downstairs shouted when they were angry.

Sometimes I could smell what my neighbours were cooking for dinner: a roast chicken in the oven in Highgate, or a curry simmering in the pan in Tufnell Park. Noticing people in public — their flaws and irritations, their small, people watching essay, instinctive kindnesses — requires noticing their humanity, too, people watching essay. When I arrived here, surveillance was a hot topic. In the aftermath of the London riots and the run-up to the Olympic Games, people watching essay, surveillance systems were ramped up on a people watching essay scale, from biometric scanners around the Olympic Park to expanded CCTV across the public transport network.

That year, police figures suggested that the average Briton was caught on CCTV 70 people watching essay a day. In the supermarket, I observed myself on the screen above the self-service checkout. On people watching essay 43 bus home, I caught myself gazing impassively at the carousel of video feeds of my fellow passengers. I suspect that number is now far higher than At the same time, attitudes towards surveillance have evolved. The appeal of smart video doorbells lies in arguments about increased safety and convenience, but these can obscure their more insidious effects. Freedom of information requests have shown that some UK police forces have partnered with manufacturers of video doorbells to build a network of neighbourhood surveillance since at least The idea is that streets with enough of them are safer though people watching essay released by police forces in the US and analysed people watching essay tech publication CNET in revealed no change people watching essay the usual fluctuating rates of property crime.

But the price paid for this is a softer boundary between citizen and police. What was once a mutual enterprise, people watching essay based on relationships between members of a community, risks being contracted out to tech companies with no knowledge or interest in the social fabric of a place, people watching essay. Is this really a way to live together? A postman with people watching essay tanned shins of a man who spends people watching essay whole year outside, pausing in the generous shade of a plane tree near London Fields. The New York urbanist Jane Jacobs posited an alternative model for city life in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She was in favour of another form: the mixed-use block, like her own on Hudson Street, where the residents lived, shopped and sometimes worked alongside each other.

This model, she said, positioned the street as the essential part of the city, a ground-level shared space where neighbours brushed up against each other and, in a way, watched over each other. This kind of informal surveillance is not only a bulwark against urban danger. For different people in a city, people watching has different functions. For me, a renter who works from home, it gives me a much-needed reminder that I am connected to the rest of London. For the man who works in my local newsagent, by talking to the people who come and go he gathers information about us, people watching essay.

and in doing so his shop becomes a focal point in the neighbourhood. But people watching has been a constant for me throughout that time: a small, daily activity that gives me a sense of rootedness. It reminds me how human we all are, and how connected I am to those strangers who pass through the same streets as me. A patch of grass that barely gets a second look in winter becomes a site for first dates and birthday parties. A park bench becomes the bleachers from which to watch an unusually heated game of boules unfold. On a hot day, I end up treating my local park like an extension of my own home.

I bring a rug and a book and maybe a cold can of supermarket lager, without much care for what my fellow Londoners think of me. Can people watching make me a better Londoner? In that way, it reminds me why I came here in the first place: for economic opportunity, sure, but also to become part of the teeming swell of civilisation that makes up a metropolis like this one. To take up a little bit of space in the dense network of human connection. It feels good to remember this. But I suspect it has a moral value, too. Here I can either be a node or a terminal: I can choose to keep the current of human connection going, people watching essay, or I can let it slip. Follow FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first.

Accessibility help Skip to navigation Skip to content Skip to footer Cookies on FT Sites. Accept cookies. Manage cookies. Summer in the city is made for it — but observing those around us can also make us more empathetic. In defence of people watching on twitter opens in a new window In defence of people watching on facebook opens in a new window In defence of people watching on linkedin opens in a new window In defence of people watching on whatsapp opens in a new window. Reuse this content opens in new window Comments Jump to comments section. Promoted Content.

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PTE Repeat Sentence - DECEMBER 2022 - Most Repeated

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Essay About: Short Story And People Watching

Web10/08/ · Have you even been able to just sit down and watch people? Watching people is one of the craziest things to do in life. There are so many different types of people in Web14/06/ · Essay Preview: People Watching 2 rating(s) Report this essay Delprøve B – “People-Watching”Death is always hard to go through and it takes a bit of getting used Web17/09/ · People Watching Observation I seated myself in a booth with my back faced to the wall. It was here that I had an ominous view of the Galleria food court. With pencil