Occupy London: my nights with the St Paul's protesters

The Occupy London protesters have a kitchen, a tech-tent, a library – even a football team. But do they have any answers?

It is seven in the morning in the City of London, and the sun has just risen. A lone jogger glides down Cannon St, across the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, and through the rows of silent tents that constitute Occupy London. "Wake up," he shouts. "Wake up and get a job."

I'm spending a couple of days at the camp, to glimpse what it's like to live here. Most occupiers aren't yet awake, but I couldn't sleep for the cold, so I'm already up. "Twat," notes the jogger as he turns past me towards Paternoster Square, the home of the London Stock Exchange. The occupiers originally tried to take the square last Saturday, but since it's private land, they were foiled by a well-timed injunction. So they settled for the piazza outside St Paul's, with the (short-lived) blessing of the cathedral leaders.

"What do you think of the camp?" I ask after the jogger. He stops, turns around, and realises I'm a journalist. "What do I think of the camp?" he replies. "I think this wishy-washy thinking, this vague thinking – it shows they don't really know what they want. Either they contribute to the debate, or they're just camping." What's his name, I ask. He's a banker, he says. "Or put it this way: I work. I work full stop." The man's a jogging cliche, but he nails the age-old issues some people have with large groups of protesters who hang around longer than the government want them to. Who are they? What do they believe? And what do they want?

In the short term, I learn quickly, these guys want to stay here. I arrive on Tuesday, the fourth day of the occupation, and already the place seems staggeringly well organised – and growing fast. Estimates vary, but yesterday some say there were 100 tents lining the steps of the cathedral, and along its northern face. Today there are around 150. Tomorrow, maybe 200.

If the church maintains its support (though on Wednesday night, that started looking less likely) the camp has the means to last the winter. A kitchen – compliant with health regulations – has been here since day one. Portable toilets were due to arrive on Thursday. Pallets – to insulate the tent-floors – have been ordered, and the corporation of London has supplied a full gamut of recycling bins.

There is a tech tent – filled, one techie tells me, with enough hardware "to host a TV station" – and a library; a welcome tent, and a "university" that holds daily lectures. Where do they get this stuff from? Most of it is donated. So much food has been dropped off by passers-by that it can barely fit in the kitchen. There's enough spare camping kit to fill a designated storage tent. Financial gifts – including a big cheque from one local businessman – top £3,000. "A woman on her way to work wanted to know what she could buy us," says Kai Wargalla, a 26-year-old economics student who first put a Facebook callout for an occupation. "She said: give me a list!"

Other locals get involved in more surprising ways. Round the north side of St Paul's, five men kick about a football. This is Occupy FC, Occupy London's official football team, and they were founded late on Monday. The funny thing is, the players aren't all occupiers. Two of them are wearing suits, businessmen on their way back from lunch. "It's like that football game they played in no man's land during the first world war," muses one suit, Ian, a management consultant who won't give his surname. "We were just on our way back from our gentlemen's club, the ball rolled in our path, and we thought we'd have a quick match."

Twenty-three-year-old Tom Rodriguez Perez, the club's co-founder, is ecstatic. "This is what it's about," he says. "We're not saying football's going to change everything – but it's starting a conversation, it's bringing people in."

It's a fairly innocuous statement, but it starts to get at the nub of what the camp stands for: dialogue. People always impatiently ask what the occupiers' "demands" are, and why collectively they seem unwilling, or unable to provide quick-fix solutions. These questions miss the point. First, there are lots of occupiers, all from different social and political backgrounds, who understandably need time to thrash out what it is they want to achieve together. The camp gives them that time. Second, if there's one thing that does unite almost all of them, it's their rejection of capitalism – although they are wary of how they couch this. Nevertheless, a huge "capitalism is crisis" banner hangs over the entrance to the site; they're not interested in making petty demands on a system they see as irreconcilably flawed. If anything, the camp itself is their demand, and their solution: the stab at an alternative society that at least aims to operate without hierarchy, and with full, participatory democracy. And to be fair, in its small way, it kind of works.

"That's what keeps me going when I'm feeling really tired, when there are threats to the occupation," says 29-year-old Sarah, a community arts worker who asked for her name to be changed. "I feel like what I want to see happening is happening here, right now. A space to speak. A space to be heard." Wail Qasim, an 18-year-old politics student, agrees: "You can go to the ballot box every five years, but politicians don't actually represent your view. So the importance of this kind of space is in the way it brings together people to open up a dialogue about building an alternative." Blogger Steve Maclean, 31, is slightly more pragmatic: "We're forming a space where people can come together and crystallise all of what we think. Out of this more concrete ideas can be formed."

People often criticise gatherings such as this for their lack of social and ethnic diversity. It's true that the protestors here are, more often than not, young, white, and studenty – but this is still a fairly diverse crowd. There are pensioners, people in wheelchairs, and a whole range of professions. The first person I meet is David, a soldier for 10 years. Then there's Lucy, a performance artist involved with UK Uncut. Randy, like several other campers, is unemployed and recently homeless – "for no other reason," he claims, "than the colour of my skin." My neighbour, Duncan, is a middle-aged barrister. Bear, who co-ordinates the kitchen, runs catering at festivals. He, incidentally, as he picked his way over a few crates of donated fruit, gave me the most nuanced view of what he hopes the camp will achieve: "We're not going to create the answer here, but we can effect a change by leading by example, by showing people that an autonomous, democratic community based on social rather than financial cooperation can work."

There are all sorts of political groupings, too. The occupation is the spawn of three or four competing actions called by several different groups (one of which was UK Uncut), which then merged plans. Predictably, there's a forlorn Socialist Workers party stall on the plaza. A few yards away are camped half a dozen Anonymous campaigners, frequently clad in crumpled suits and shiny Fawkes masks. There are people from Climate Camp here, while members of a shop stewards' union rallied in solidarity yesterday. Conversely, a few of the key facilitators in last winter's student protests haven't come down – they're not sure it's radical enough.

For all everyone's best efforts, the camp isn't the most comfortable place. The wind blasts through like a racing car, buffeting the strongest tents and uprooting the weakest. On my first afternoon, it collapses the kitchen marquee, the largest structure on site. At night, until 11, an orchestra of occupiers bang drums on the cathedral steps, others dancing manically around. It's for fun, of course, but it's also to keep warm. The evening I leave, the temperature drops to 4C.

Tent-pegs can't pierce stone, so some campers have gaffer-taped the guy-ropes to the cobbles. If it rains overnight, the tape will get unstuck, so they'll repeat the process again in the morning. Others weigh their tents down with leftover Evening Standards. Jay Gearing, a 32-year-old graphic designer from Peterborough, uses large bottles of fizz and a sack of potatoes.

It's with these groceries that I shelter overnight. Gearing's heading home for a couple of days, and needs someone to man the tent, so he generously lets me house-sit. Good luck sleeping, he says. The cobbled floor is freezing, there is no nearby toilet, while the traffic and police helicopters buzz away all night. And then there are the bells. They'll wake you up on the hour, every hour.

Some people don't sleep at all – the police guarding Paternoster Square, and the techies. Eight of them work through the night, huddled around a long table covered with cables, computers and hard-drives. "Sleep doesn't interest me," says UCL undergraduate Sam Carlisle, at least not when there's so much to do. They're trying to sort a video link-up with parallel occupations in New York and Frankfurt. He and the team have also made a clever e-map of the camp, and now they're creating an online donations wishlist, and a wiki that will chronicle events and decisions made at the camp.

The tech team is one of 15 autonomous sub-groups at the camp, each with responsibility for a particular area. There is a group that deals with the camp's donations; there are the food, and "university" teams; the police negotiation group; legal, which has enlisted a friendly QC, in case of future trouble; recycling; outreach, which distributes flyers about the camp, and is planning a politics workshop for schools; music, art, and entertainment; a cathedral liaison team, which is tactfully dealing with its increasingly wary clergy; and a media team, for dealing with people like me.

Almost everyone's involved in something and, crucially, there's no hierarchy – or there's not supposed to be. The teams meet once a day and agree things by consensus, in a discussion "facilitated" (but not led) by a different member of the group each time. Their decisions are announced every lunchtime at a pan-camp logistics meeting – once again ideally facilitated by different people, to avoid anyone gaining too much influence. But the main meeting of the day is the general assembly. Held at 7pm, it's attended by 400-500 people and aimed at political discourse and camp strategy. To avoid people speaking over the top of each other, the occupiers use a series of silent gestures popularised during anti-capitalist protests in Seattle in 1999. To the uninitiated, they look like a satanic version of jazz hands, but they're fairly simple to master. Waving your hands upwards means you agree with something. Waving downwards signals disagreement. Raising your index finger means you want to make a point yourself; rolling your arms suggests you want the speaker to come to a close.

At its best, the system is empowering. But facilitating's a tough job – and even though some of the more visible members of the camp constantly encourage newbies to get involved, sometimes the same people end up mediating discussion. Sarah, the community worker, is one of those who often draws the short straw. She admits it's a slight problem: "I worry that people who have simply got more time to commit themselves are seen to be the people who are the 'organisers'. Some people don't understand that the process is completely open and that we want and need people to get involved in these processes so that we can carry on for a long time and grow our organisational skills."

It's a hard system for newcomers to get their heads around. "Our institutional structures – schools, university, most forms of employment – only involve hierarchical structures where you either do what you're told or tell other people what to do," says Sarah. "Sometimes people want to help and they have a sense that they need to ask permission, or be expressly told how to help so they find themselves asking people who are working if they can do anything to help."

Part of the problem is that everyone can be here all the time. Around 300 probably sleep overnight, but up to 1,000 supporters drop in over the course of the day. Elaine Williams, 25, comes every day for a few hours with her seven-month-old daughter, Phoenix. With half a dozen other parents, she hosts Tots with a Cause, a play area at the bottom of the church steps. "We don't stay late – we're not bad parents," smiles Williams. "But we don't want other parents to feel they can't come because they have children." Toys are supplied, along with a warm rug, and spare nappies. In fact, it's a bit like the creche that, thanks to the education cuts, was almost scrapped at Goldsmith's university, where Williams studies. If the nursery goes, "I can't complete my degree."

Mid-afternoon on Wednesday, a reporter from the BBC's One Show convenes an informal debate between the occupation and a greying banker. Packed across the cathedral steps, the occupiers surround him and take it in turns to lambast the financial system. Don't blame the bankers, he replies. Blame the regulators who didn't stop them. Surprisingly, this time the occupiers don't slaughter him – and the BBC man can't understand why. "You're letting him off the hook," he cries. But most of the occupiers don't think this is a problem that can be solved by a few tweaks to regulation. They think it's a systemic problem not attributable to a single group. It's a problem with capitalism.

At the back of the crowd, the suit standing next to me leans in to say something. "So what answers have they got?" is what I expect him to say. After all, he's a former investment banker now studying for an MBA. But Nikita – "yes, just call me Nikita" – surprises me. "Even if they don't have a solution, people still have the right to say 'no'," he says, pausing between each word. "It's only once people start saying 'no' that we will start thinking about what the solution could be."