The Ruination of London

I was going to write a blog post about what's happening to London, but Alain de Botton has summed up the problem far more eloquently than I ever could in this excellent short film:



I don't agree with everything he says. There is a place for the occasional 'fun' building and the view from the Shard is one of the most exhilarating experiences I've had in recent years. But if developers have their way, that view will become an increasingly depressing one, as a great, historic city gradually becomes subsumed under a tidal wave of skyscrapers.

I had hoped the the global recession would call a halt to this madness, but instead London has become more attractive than ever to investors, few of whom have an emotional investment in the wellbeing of the city. London has effectively become a high class hooker, flaunting its wares before a parade of wealthy clients.

But I'm now in danger of writing the blog post that I said I wasn't going to write, so I'll stop now.

A Day Out in 1970s London

You are invited on a day out in the 1970s. The train will be departing at 9:57. Please bring some fish paste sandwiches and a tupperware beaker of orange squash.

No chewing gum.

Capital

I was back in London yesterday, remembering why I left. For some reason, the tube seemed to be as crowded as a weekday rush hour, but the tourists and day-trippers lacked the steely determination of commuters and at one point I found myself in a gridlocked tunnel of suitcases and backpacks.

Has the tube always been this crowded?

Apparently, yes.

I'd travelled to London to meet two old friends. I hadn't seen them for 13 years, but within minutes we'd settled back into the same relationship we had as teenagers, albeit with better social skills. It seemed silly that we'd let so many years elapse before meeting again, but sometimes life gets in the way.

We grew up in leafy Richmond-upon-Thames (somewhere I never really appreciated until I visited the badlands of Neasden, Plumsted and Acton)  and when I was 16, I naively assumed that we would all remain in the area until our dying days, still meeting up for odd game of snooker, or perhaps to go cycling in Bushy Park.

Taken during my 'stripes' phase

The late teens are a magical time in some ways - a nebulous borderland between childhood and adulthood, when newfound freedoms aren't crushed by the burdens of responsibility.

Naturally I squandered some of this time sitting in my bedroom feeling angst-ridden, but even that was enjoyable in an odd sort of way. I was the hero of my own narrative, able to delude myself with grandiose ideas that didn't have to be sustantiated by achievements. As one girl said to me, "You're all talk and no action."

I wouldn't go back to the past, but I wouldn't change it either.

Thirty years on, none of us live in Greater London. I left 12 years ago. One held on until earlier this year, when it became possible for him to work from home. The other left in the 1980s. Another friend, who wasn't there yesterday, discovered the Kent coast before it started to appear on property programmes.

The flight of hundreds of thousands of Londoners to the shires has, until recently, almost passed without comment, but next to immigration it is one of the biggest demographic changes this country has seen since the 19th century.

In some ways, it is simply of reversal of what happened in the Victorian age, when London's population quadrupled in size and small villages and towns became swallowed up by the growing metropolis. Five generations ago, my ancestors left rural Kent in search of a better life. Today, their descendents are leaving London for the same reason.

Perhaps, like me, they don't share Boris Johnson's vision of the future and would prefer to live in a less 'dynamic' economy that isn't obsessed with unsustainable growth. I suspect they would also like to live in a town where they know their neighbours and can feel reasonably certain that in 50 years' time, the streets and houses won't have changed beyond all recognition.

But there is a price to be paid for this mass exodus. Some local people now sardonically refer to Lewes as "Islington-on-the Downs" and resent the fact that they are being priced out of the area by an influx of Londoners. Where can they go?

The other night I went to a local screening of a worthy Chilean film about the 1988 referendum that rejected General Pinochet. The hall was packed, which was great, but it also made me realise how true the Islington jibe was. The town is becoming increasingly homogenous, like a retreat for Guardian readers.

If friends hadn't moved away and property prices hadn't gone through the roof, would I have stayed in Richmond-upon-Thames?

Perhaps. It wasn't a bad place to live:

 

 

On Richmond Green, outside 'The Cricketers' pub

On balance, I'm still glad that I moved to Lewes. Which is just as well, because unless you're in possession of a large fortune, once you leave London, there's no going back.

Finally, a clip from the 'good old days'. I wonder if any of the children in this clip still live in London?

Underworld

106 years ago yesterday, a new London Underground station opened in the West End. It's purpose was to give the middle classes easy access to the heart of London's theatreland. It was initially called Strand, but was renamed Aldwych in 1915.

Sadly, the station was a failure. Built at the end of a one stop spur on the Piccadilly line, the number of passengers was lower than expected and when several leading theatres in the area shut down, Aldwych became a white elephant. Surprisingly, it wasn't closed until 1994.

Today, the London Transport Museum offers a limited number of guided tours of Aldwych station. The demand for tickets is high and the tours are usually sold out within hours. Luckily, I'd found out in time after making a brief foray into the Twitterverse and booked a ticket for yesterday afternoon.

The train from Lewes was packed. At first it looked as if it was standing room only, but then I noticed that someone had done the old coat and bag trick on the seat next to them, so I took great delight in making them move their things. One point to me.

As the train pulled out of Lewes and entered a tunnel, I got my book out. I wanted to find out what Alice Vavasor had written in a letter to her cousin Kate. Then it started: pchhh, pchhh, pfffff pfffff, pchhh pchhh, pfffff pfffff... My seat-hogging companion's earphones were just loud enough to distract me from reading, but not noisy enough to warrant a complaint. One point to them.

I got my smartphone out and decided to watch a video. After scrolling through the list, I settled on an episode of 'The World at War', which I've been watching over the last couple of months. The credits began and the episode title appeared: Japan.

I spent the next 50 minutes watching footage of Pearl Harbour, 'Zero' fighters, Japanese people performing Nazi-style acrobatics, Tokyo being bombed and the bloody capture of Iwo Jima. It was fascinating stuff, but for some reason my companion seemed to be increasingly agitated. I wondered why. It wasn't as if he could hear the explosions through my headphones.

As the train drew into Victoria, my companion frantically gathered his stuff together, as if he couldn't wait to get off the train. I was busy watching footage of Kamikaze pilots, but turned off my phone and got ready to leave. I turned round and looked at my companion's face for the first time. He was Japanese.

I wondered how interesting a station that had only been closed 20 years ago would be, but hadn't realised that the veneer of modernity had been stripped away and what remained was a series of fascinating time capsules:

 The lifts are now out of service, so visitors have to be prepared to use a 160-step staircase:

This platform has been used in many well-known movies and television series and if you pay enough money, London Transport will even arrange for a train to appear.

This is what's left of the 1907 tiles that bear the station's original name: Strand.

During the Blitz, Aldwych station was a popular destination for Londoners who wanted to escape from the bombing. As the station was at the end of a branch line, families could camp on the platform for the night without disrupting any passengers.

George Formby and other celebrities of the day used to perform concerts on this platform, some of which were relayed to the neutral USA as part of a propaganda effort.

It's a pity that these original titles haven't been looked after properly in the past, but they must have seemed so commonplace, nobody could see their value.

These early 1970s posters were very familiar to me, from the days when a trip "up to London" was the greatest of treats. My parents regarded the city as a den of vice, populated by hippies and other ne'er-do-wells.

We only lived a dozen miles from Hyde Park Corner, but it might as well have been a hundred.

The poster below was one of many that appeared before Britain joined the European Economic Community, as it used to be known.

Above and below are photos of a platform that has been protected by a Grade I listing. Apparently it has some very unusual insulators, for people who like that sort of thing.

The police regularly train sniffer dogs at Aldwych station. Our guide told us that for some unknown reason, the dogs refuse to enter this tunnel.

The tunnel complex is a little spooky, but the best parts are those that haven't been lit:

A couple of friends had joined me for the tour. They were both as impressed as I was, but one was disappointed by the absence of any maruading aliens. For British people of a certain age, the London Underground is synonymous with this:

I must admit, I was also disappointed by the absence of rats, zombies, cybermen, yeti, third generation cannibals or SIS employees.

However, the guided tour was excellent, striking the right balance between being informative and giving visitors time to look around and take photos. I'd happily go again. If I do, I'll bring a proper camera instead of relying on my phone.

Apparently, Aldwych is one of 26 disused tube stations. I hope that London Transport are able to make a few others accessible for visitors, without actually turning them into proper tourist attractions.

Indeed, one of the best aspects of the tour was the absence of tourists. I'd just spent half an hour trying to dodge my way past hordes of people aimlessly dragging suitcases on wheels. The Aldwych tour filtered out the box-ticking "10 Things You Must Do" brigade.

As you can see, quota of white, balding middle-aged men was predictably high, but there were also a couple of beanie hat-wearing 'urban explorers' and someone who was particularly interested in some of the Art Noveau features.

After the tour, we went for a drink in the Strand, followed by superb curry in the India Club. I left London agreeing with Dr. Johnson, but also felt grateful that ten minutes away from my front door, I have this:

Talk To the Organ Grinder

This is from 'An Indiscreet Guide to Soho', by Stanley Jackson:

'How typical of Soho is the story of the organ-grinder who was "playing" that piece from (Mascagni's) "Cavalleria Rusticana" in Dean Street, when he was stopped by an old man in a shiny black overcoat.

"Too fast," he said excitedly. "Much too fast!" He seized the handle and began turning it slowly with one hand while he conducted an invisible orchestra with the other. Having finished the piece he dropped sixpence on the organ lid and was about to depart when the organist stopped him.

"How do I know you are right?" he demanded. "I've been playing like that for three solid months. "

The man black drew himself up proudly. "Nobody can tell me how that should be played," he declared. "I am Mascagni."

The following day the piece was played to a slower tempo and, chalked on the side of the barrel organ, was the simple legend, "Pupil of Mascagni."'

Ghosts

This morning I felt as if I was in an M.R. James story: alone on a misty country lane, listening to the sound of horses hooves that seemed to approach, but never arrived. I don't believe in ghosts, but fog has a curious ability to induce feelings of paranoia. When the visible world is reduced to a radius of 20 yards, the sounds that come from beyond its limits can seem vaguely threatening.

I don't think that working on my own suits me. I'd always thought it would, but I spent this morning alone in my cowshed, picking the book orders for tomorrow's collection and found myself going over past injustices, broken friendships and unresolved conflicts. I've no idea why.

David Sylvian wrote a very good song about it.

Yesterday was more my cup of tea, with a return visit to the wonderful Light Show at the Hayward Gallery:

I was there two weeks ago and was so impressed, I decided to buy tickets for my wife and youngest son. Taking a seven-year-old to an art gallery is always a gamble, but I thought that the Light Show would be a safe bet and I was right. My son loved it.

We should have quit while we were ahead, but my wife had heard that there was a free performance of Poulenc's Story of Babar the Elephant, next door, in the Royal Festival Hall:

Poulenc's sub-Stravinskian score lacks the big tunes that make Peter and the Wolf so successful, but the players and two narrators performed with gusto. Sadly, they were no competition for several hundred under-fives with a short attention span and we struggled to hear the music above the din of screaming children and mothers shouting "Lily! Please stop hitting the man."

As I was the man that Lily was hitting, I was quite keen to leave.

We walked back to Waterloo Station via the South Bank. Even in February, the area was packed with street entertainers and the queue for the London Eye seemed longer than ever. In an archway, a man was lying on the ground singing "I...woz...bawwnnnnn...in... Lahhhhhdan...tahhhhhn..." and I realised that his was the first genuine London accent I'd heard all day. It would be rather poignant if the only real Londoner I saw was a homeless man.

The journey home took longer than usual, as someone had decided to throw themselves on the railway line at Shoreham. Instead of the usual euphemistic descriptions of a 'passenger action' or 'incident', we were baldly told that someone had "committed suicide at Shoreham". My son looked horrified.

On the way home, both my wife and I agreed that being in London was invigorating. We had got into a rut since our oldest son became ill, last year, avoiding any journeys outside Lewes because our absence exacerbated his anxiety.

It had seemed liked the right thing at the time. However, when I found myself working in a remote cowshed, surrounding by hostile dogs and limbless humans, I knew that I'd only stay sane if I had a little more fun at the weekends.

When the landscape looks like this and the first thing I see on leaving work is a sheep's carcass that looks as if it's been stripped by zombies, it's time to buy a ticket to London Victoria.

Fortunately, I won't be working alone for much longer. The two postgraduates who worked with me last year will be back next week, so I won't be as susceptible to to the ghosts.

I'll end as I began, with M.R. James. Do you believe in ghosts?

Londoners

What makes someone a Londoner?

The Canadian writer Craig Taylor examines this question in his excellent book 'Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now—As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It' and finds a bewildering variety of answers from the hundreds of people he interviewed.

For some, being a Londoner is simply a matter of having been born within a clearly defined geographical area, but nobody seems to be able to agree what on is and isn't London, with definitions ranging from anywhere within the M25, to a few miles either side of Trafalgar Square.

For others, being a Londoner is a state of mind, or a badge of honour that can be earned by anyone who learns to survive in the city.

Technically I suppose that I'm a Londoner. I grew up in the London borough of Richmond upon Thames and spent the first three quarters of my life living within ten miles of Hyde Park Corner. But as a child, I always regarded London as a remote, exotic place, full of odd-looking people, where everyone seemed to be in a hurry.

The impression of remoteness was compounded by the tortuously slow journey into London by bus and tube, which usually took at least an hour. On the one occasion I cycled into London, I was amazed at how quickly I got there.

We rarely went up to London. I was never given a reason, but I overheard depressingly bigoted mutterings about the expense, the coloureds and the people on drugs. My parents were much happier driving out to the Surrey countryside or, if the weather was good, down to the coast, where we would huddle behind a windbreak on pebbly beaches and pretend that it was still 1935.

My father always told people that we came from Middlesex and rued the day when the county was absorbed into Greater London, as if a wall had been breached. London was elsewhere. It began somewhere after Putney; on the other side of Hammersmith Bridge; just before Clapham Junction. It wasn't Wimbledon, but it was Acton.

For Craig Taylor, Londoners are simply "the people you see around you. The ones who stock the tube trains and fill the pavements and queue in Tesco with armfuls of plastic-wrapped veg. Whatever their reason or origin, they are laughing, rushing, coniving, snatching free evening newspapers, speaking into phones, complaining, sweeping floors, tending to hedge funds, pushing empty pint glasses, marching, arguing, drinking, kneeling, swaying, huffing at those who stand on the left-hand side of the escalator, moving, moving, always moving. It's a city of verbs."

But my favourite defintion of a Londoner comes from a stranger that Taylor met in a Cricklewood pub:

"The only thing I know is that a real Londoner would never, ever, ever eat at one of those bloody Angus bloody steak houses in the West End. That's how you tell."

A 448-page book consisting of 200 interviews with people who live and work in London could be a rather dry read, but Londoners is one of the most moving and compelling books I've come across, with some stories that are more extraordinary than any work of fiction. Anyone who has ever travelled on public transport and wondered about the hidden lives and secret thoughts of their fellow passengers will enjoy this book.

Reading Londoners, I felt an increasing admiration for the interviewees' passionate, brave, difficult and sometimes rewarding struggles with an unforgiving city, particularly those who had migrated from abroad, with no family or friends to support them. I also felt a growing conviction that being a Londoner was not a birthright, but something that had to be earned.

I have never eaten in an Angus Steak House, but I would never dare to call myself a Londoner.