We're a consumer society emotionally as well. We expect to be happy 100 per cent of the time, 365 days a year, which of course makes us really quite pissed off. We're used to this emotional culture of polar opposites, happiness and sadness and nothing in between, but for generations people operated on that fulcrum in the middle, neither too happy or too sad. If you and I were in Greenwich in 1840 we would be surrounded by all the disease and degradation of a dock, the disabled sailors, the beggars and prostitutes and molls, and we would have been passed by a couple of fantastic-looking carriages with some rich and very beautiful people in them. And when you see those sort of extremes you're keen to find a middle ground. The problem today is we have no dark side.
- Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, decorator