London

by A. N. Wilson

  What, then, was a Caribbean young man to do at such a period? Ethnic groups help their own, not merely by employing them but by offering role models and examples. The child of the poor Jewish tailor in Stepney in the 1920s could dream of owning a suburban villa in Stanmore like his rich cousins, if he had the right breaks. Similar dreams might stabilize and give momentum to the life of the poor Pakistani youth whose uncle had made it big in computers, or the Bangladeshi with a chain of restaurants, starting in Brick Lane and ending up in the West End. Enoch Powell unpleasantly predicted in 1968 that within a few generations the “black man would have the whip hand over the white man.” Nothing could have turned out to be further from the truth, with economic and educational opportunities slipping from the grasp of black boys stuck in the poverty trap created partly by an appalling educational system, partly by the dependency culture resultant on benefits, partly by an ever burgeoning drug culture.

  Certainly, it is all a very long way from Passport to Pimlico. As we have already observed, that film represented a particularly uncharacteristic phase of London’s history when, thanks to the Second World War and in spite of an influx of Hitler’s refugees, it had lost much of its cosmopolitan richness and variety. For an older generation, mass immigration was a difficult phenomenon to observe. Few white people, if they were honest with themselves, did not read of the murder of Police Constable Blakelock on the Broadwater Farm Estate without allowing, with however small a part of their psyche, the idea to form in their heads that something “primitive” had happened, that black people were now showing their true colors. The murder of Stephen Lawrence eight years later, tragic as it was, caused many white people to recognize that “savagery” was not the preserve of one ethnic group or another.

  Some of the neo-Fascist fringe might speak of “repatriating” black or Asian people to their grandparents’ country of origin, but most Londoners of whatever background recognize that all has changed, that in many respects it has changed for the better, and that this “better” extends beyond a wider availability of curry houses. Yet the fortress mentality is hard to shake off entirely. Migration Watch UK, a newish group led by a former diplomat and an Oxford University demographer, predicts that 2 million people will arrive in the UK every ten years for the foreseeable future. There has been a very dramatic increase in the population of the UK since the late 1990s with, proportionally, an almost identical increase in the crime rate. It would seem that 125,000 new immigrants settled in the UK in 2002.1

  The great proportion of asylum seekers, legal or illegal, gravitate towards London, because that is where they can hope to find work and where they can most easily lose themselves in a crowd. The population, which has been growing since 1989, is expected to reach 8.1 million by 2016, 700,000 more than it is today.2

  How you react to all these facts and figures will very largely depend on your temperament. London could never have stayed still after the Second World War. Given Britain’s imperial past and its liberal attitudes, on which it had prided itself, to travelers, refugees, and foreign visitors, and given the invention of airplanes and airports, it was inevitable that huge numbers of people from different parts of the world would have wished to come and take up residence in London. Heathrow Airport opened as London Airport in 1946, Gatwick in 1958, and Stansted in 1964. Since London no longer has a manufacturing economy, it depends more and more on the thousands who pour in, most of them tourists, bringing the chief source of revenue for many restaurants, hotels, and entertainers.

  London is now a town much more like New York than it is like Rome or Paris. It does not have a particularly national identity. The big City institutions are largely staffed, funded, and run, as well as owned, by hugely powerful non-British companies, American, German, and Japanese. The economy depends upon non-British holidaymakers coming in huge numbers to be fed and tended by, on the whole, non-British restaurateurs, hoteliers, entertainers, prostitutes, and the like. Meanwhile, the great majority of ordinary workers in London cannot afford to live within twenty miles of its center and must commute to work using the increasingly unsatisfactory public transport systems.

  15

  SILLY LONDON

  The history of London does not stop; but any book hoping to chronicle that history must do so. Freeze. Stop the camera. Capture the moment—now, of the London where I sit, in the January of 2003. In the issue of the Independent for Wednesday, January 22, are two articles that in very different ways capture contemporary London.

  The first, by Johann Hari, is entitled “What I Discovered inside Finsbury Park Mosque.” It is an extraordinary piece of prose. Most of the Londoners described in this book—Pepys, Dr. Johnson, Henry Mayhew, Herbert Morrison—might, were they to read it, have wondered whether it was a work of fiction. Edward Gibbon, who described the defeat of the Saracens by Charles Martel in the fifty-second chapter of his great history, pointed out that if that eighth-century military victory had not taken place, “perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”1 Gibbon would have looked with a sardonic eye on the story told by Mr. Hari, who, by virtue of having “a vaguely Islamic-sounding name (in fact Swiss)” and having studied Islamic philosophy at university, “and because I look about 12 years old,” found his way into the mosque in the north London suburb of Finsbury Park. It was a place built in the 1990s at the prompting of the Prince of Wales, in the hopes that it would provide a recreational, educational, and social center for the many young Muslims living in the area. It was, from the late 1990s onwards, quickly taken over by extremists; the figure of Abu Hamza, with his one eye and his hook instead of a hand, became a familiar bogeyman in tabloid newspapers in the after-math of September 11, 2001. Johann Hari is struck, in his article, by the violence of the gender politics that obsess the young men of this mosque. They hate the “sluttish” way that London women dress: “We allow all our women to be whores, dirty fucking whores.” Hari reports that “no conversation would go by for five minutes without returning to this topic. These are, after all, sexually frustrated young men who are convinced that even masturbation is immoral—so, like all people who fanatically suppress their sexuality, they have begun to hate the thing they desire.”

  Abu Hamza, the Captain Hook to these lost boys, feeds their minds with what Hari calls “theocratic fascism.” Yet when the police raided the mosque, finding there a number of items that troubled the security forces, Johann Hari could not help feeling a “slight tinge of sadness.” “Shorn of Hamza, shorn of the handful of lunatic preachers who gravitate towards it, the mosque has the potential to be a terrific community centre for local Muslims, as mosques across the Arab world are.”

  Optimists will believe that all the mosques in London, which are growing in number, will provide a similar refuge and inspiration in very confused times. London, which has seen the fires of Smithfield, when a Catholic queen burnt Protestant heretics, and the fires of the Gordon Riots, when a mob attacked Catholics at the end of the eighteenth century, is no stranger to religious bigotry. And yet it is hard not to feel that, when the bigotry is non-Christian, a new phase has been entered.

  In the same issue of the Independent, another young writer, Jemima Lewis, editor of The Week, began an article with the words “London is under attack.” She was not referring to a terrorist threat, but to the “doom-sayers” who believe that London transport doesn’t work, and that its crime and squalor are out of control. Miss Lewis disagrees:

  Far from going to the dogs, London is better than ever. Once famous for its filthy food, stinking air, blackened buildings and atmosphere of defeat, it is now a neon-lit and cosmopolitan place of beauty. If you doubt me, walk across Waterloo Bridge at night. The banks of the Thames—for so long dark and neglected—are now ablaze with light. The futuristic pods of the London Eye, the golden silhouette of the Houses of Parliament, the glowing red sign of the Oxo tow
er, the blinking lights of faraway sky-scrapers, and the pale silvery dome of St Paul’s: London, which always lacked a proper nocturnal skyline, now has one of the most ravishing in the world.

  Jemima Lewis says that fifty years ago London was a parochial city of bad food and gloomy attitudes, but has now become “a city of pleasure. . . . Every evening after work, thousands of grey commuters tear off their suits and gyrate wildly at salsa clubs and belly-dancing classes. We’ve come a long way since the demise of the bowler hat.”

  Both these journalistic snapshots of London at the beginning of the twenty-first century are accurate. On the one hand, the capital city is a place where Islam is making more impact, in many respects, than Christianity and where growing numbers of young people feel not merely disillusionment with, but violent hatred of, everything to do with their fellow citizens. The young people crowding into bars and salsa clubs whom Miss Lewis finds such a cheering prospect are anathema to the fanatics of Finsbury Park. We all know now what a potentially explosive thing that is.

  The lights of London make it look pretty at night but even the sunny Miss Lewis would probably agree that much of modern London looks hideous by day, especially by wet day. The M11 swooping and snarling into the North Circular Road from the east, the M1 crunching into Finchley from the north, the Westway swooping across west London to the chaos of Shepherd’s Bush, all clogged with lorries and cars belching their noxious exhaust fumes—these are not a cheering sight. And only the most romantic optimist would find much to delight the eye in the huge sprawl of roads and ugly modern buildings south of the river. The graffiti-sprayed council estates that litter the suburban outskirts are nurseries of vice and crime. The bus services are badly organized. The funding and organization of the Underground service are scandalously inadequate.

  Yet there are a few exceptions even to these gloomy observations. After generations of boring architecture, the Jubilee Line extension has commissioned Underground stations where space, light, perspective, and line are at last recovered. The new Westminster station by Michael Hopkins and Partners, Waterloo by Sui Te Wu and team, Southwark by Richard MacCormac, and London Bridge by Andrew Weston and Chris Williamson are all outstanding. Canary Wharf, by Foster and Partners, ceased to be a station and became an imitation airport, its seemingly endless escalators swooping the ever growing number of office workers who commute to that part of London (more than 25,000 daily) into a garishly lit array of shopping malls that could be anywhere.

  If Canary Wharf is a fantasy airport, the journey to the real Heathrow, one of the most tedious features of life for visitors and Londoners alike, suddenly became easy with the construction of a clean, efficient, comfortable airport express service from Paddington Station. (The price paid, seemingly, was the airportization and uglification of Brunel’s Paddington Station, once one of the noblest old Victorian stations, now the predictable hideous conglomeration of glass, sushi bars, sock shops and cash-dispensing machines.)

  If it was possible to construct such a good train service to the airport, why could not London have an Underground system to match that of Paris or Moscow? The answer must be found in the old question, unresolved since the Local Government Act of 1888, of how London is governed and of the relationship between London’s local administrators and central government.

  In an interview posthumously published, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) bewailed the “Americanization and moronization” of Britain, a phenomenon gleefully abetted by the newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch. Anyone who has observed Britain over the last fifty years will know what he meant, and anyone who has lived in London for the last twenty years will know that the capital city is an organic expression of this moronization. Three examples must suffice.

  On December 31, 1999, the eve of the new millennium, the Sovereign, the Prime Minister, and a great crowd of notables assembled for a mindless pop concert beneath the Dome that had been built in Greenwich. Enthusiasts for this ugly, and above all silly, building told us in advance that it would rival the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition of 1851, both in the profit it made and in the luster it shed upon the nation’s reputation. At the time of writing, it still stands, but it stands empty, costing the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds. I was among the disconsolate 3 million who were conned into visiting the Greenwich site and finding that there was nothing in it but silliness. The Astronomical “Zone” told you far less about outer space than the excellent planetarium in the Marylebone Road; the Money Zone was conceived on a level so elementary as to insult the intelligence of the youngest child; the Faith Zone, which had to be paid for by a pair of Hindu businessmen, who subsequently obtained British citizenship, was a pathetic travesty of Christian history. The most revealing feature of the whole place was its poor catering. One dreary pub, serving not especially nice food, was the only place where you could obtain alcohol; for the rest, it was pseudo- or actually American “fast food” joints. This was supposed to be a celebration of Britain, but it had not caught up with the revival of interest in British food, organically produced meats and vegetables, good English cheese, and real ales.

  If the Dome made London a laughingstock, the conversion of the redundant Bankside Power Station into the Tate Modern was more risible, more pathetic. At least all the visitors to the Dome were able to see, once they had arrived there, that they had been conned and that the exhibits were absurd. The Bankside Power Station, which opened in 1963, was one of the last great works of functional architecture in London, built by Mott Hay and Anderson as engineers with the guiding architectural genius of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, he of Liverpool Cathedral and the red telephone boxes. The brickwork is stunning, the spatial interiors worthy of some of the great Roman churches. It would have been an inspired idea to make the power station, when redundant, into an art gallery. Unfortunately, what it became was an advertisement for the fact that there was no art to put in it. Millions of visitors too scared to say that they did not know what art was flocked there and declared themselves excited, stimulated, and uplifted by the overpriced jokes perpetrated on the art world by clever “artists” and their dealers.

  The third example of the moronization of London was the announcement in April 1996, by the dynamic and newly elected leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair, that if his party were to win the next general election, he would introduce an American-style elected mayor for London. What followed, when Labour was duly elected the following year, outstripped the most satirical dreams of parodists. The Greater London Authority Act 1999 created the framework for an elected mayor and an Assembly of twenty-five members. Ken Livingstone, the nasal-voiced newt fancier who had made such a mess of being leader of the GLC, wanted to be the Labour candidate. The Prime Minister thought otherwise. Blair put in a stooge Labour candidate, the former leader of Camden Council, a bearded old dullard called Frank Dobson (Dobbo). He was not the People’s Choice. In an election in which barely half the electorate chose to vote, Dobbo and his young puppetmaster in Downing Street were humiliated. The Tories fielded an amiable philanderer called Steve Norris. Livingstone stood as an independent candidate and won.

  The London mayoralty has so far been the dismal failure which could have been predicted. Tony Blair liked speaking of democracy but he had no democratic instincts. The mayor was given an Assembly, and an ugly new building to replace Aston Webb’s County Hall (which has been bought by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi to house his notorious collection of dead sheep, unmade beds, and other artworks). But the mayor was given no power to raise tax, and therefore no real authority.

  The central government refused to fund Livingstone’s scheme to keep the London Underground in full public ownership and it insisted upon a scheme of public–private partnership, which the American transport supremo in charge of revitalizing the Tube, Bob Kiley, has declared unworkable. It is too early to say, at the time of writing, whether Ken Livingstone’s congestion charges, designed to reduce traffic in the West End, will be a success. The
difficulty of registering, to make oneself eligible to pay the charge of £5 per day, has dramatically reduced traffic in central London. In consequence, revenues from the scheme, to supply the much vaunted improvement in public transport, have been lacking. The scheme has been kindly described as a victim of its own success: this is what others would term a failure.

  Livingstone’s London Plan, published in the summer of 2002, is a masterpiece of ill-disguised euphemisms and clichés. “In the emerging information society London will need to become increasingly a learning city” (p. 30) is a piece of gobbledegook trying to hide from itself the fact that half the population of London will in future be illiterate. It points to the decline of manufacturing and says that the main “driver of jobs creation has been . . . services primarily dominated by the leisure and people-orientated services sector.” This means that very few Londoners any longer make or do anything specifically useful and that your best chance of a job, if you are unemployed, is work as a waiter, a domestic servant in a hotel, or a prostitute. The elected mayor feels it his duty to “tackle disadvantage—particularly among groups including women, disabled people and black and minority ethnic communities” (p. 15). Building a London that is “more accessible to disabled people” (p. 10) and “delivering the vision” will perhaps prove more of a challenge than “tackling” (a beloved word) the problem of unemployment. The mayor’s plan notes that “29 per cent of working age adults in London are non-employed. . . . The rate is much higher for London’s ethnic minorities, at 42 per cent” (p. 33). He makes no mention of the “black economy”: no Londoner ever employs plasterers, decorators, carpenters, plumbers, or electricians, except in an emergency, in a manner that could be detected by the taxman. These individuals charge cash, as do most domestic cleaners and childminders or nannies, a high proportion of whom supplement their income by claiming unemployment or disability allowances. Not to do so would mean, quite simply, that they could not afford to live in London, where adequate rented property is hard to get and where purchasing even the smallest bedsit is beyond the financial reach of anyone trying to live on the pay of a teacher, a nurse, a firefighter, or a policeman.