Britain’s finest transvestite potter is hard at work exploring the nature of masculinity. Over a game platter near his London home, he discusses motorbikes, body image and more
For a while, perhaps all his life, Grayson Perry has been making a study of what it means to be a man. So, what do two blokes nursing a beer in the corner of a pub talk about of a Tuesday lunchtime? The topics of conversation with Britain’s greatest ever transvestite potter-cum-tapestry-maker kick off as follows: what do net curtains really signify (he was working on a theory on his way here); the difficulty of taking corners at speed on a 9ft-long pink motorbike (he is having a more wieldy model custom made in Sussex); books as the last talisman of taste (“they are the knick-knacks of thought, aren’t they?”); and the distinction, if any, between bohemians and hipsters (“as soon as something becomes a phenomenon it’s already died”).
We are in the Draper’s Arms in Islington, north London, a place in which we both feel something of a proprietorial interest. I lived in a flat across the road 20-odd years ago, when this place was more a villains’ pub than gastropub. Perry’s association goes back further. He moved into his wife Philippa’s house near here in the mid-1980s, and watched the area become a byword for gentrification. He’s more normally found in an unreconstructed caff on nearby Upper Street, he insists, but the Draper’s is a good option if he is going posh. One way of looking at his career, he suggests, is that he has spent half a lifetime working and saving enough money to move his studio from Walthamstow to within a five-minute bike ride of his home. He calculates that the relocation of space cost him £220,000 a mile (seven in all).
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