by Jonathan Glancey, Verso £7
Since the 80s London has been turned over to the play of market forces. The institutions which previously had any form of public service remit have been broken up, sold off, underfunded and downgraded to second class provision or abolished by successive governments. The quality of life has fallen as the city becomes less and less 'livable' in the face of failing infrastructure, a higher cost of living and a widening gap between rich and poor.
Jonathan Glancey - the Architecture Correspondent of the Guardian - contrasts London today with the best of public provision in the 20th century and presents a passionate argument for a "new form of social economy" which combines planning, imaginative social provision and high quality design.
The book starts with a splendid polemic. "London more than any other European city (except perhaps post-Soviet Moscow) has prostrated itself on the altar of free enterprise. It offers a bewildering and ever-increasing choice of goods, services and ways of life to the free market faithful. Such is the crude, if effective, philosophical underpinning of New London."
Radical politics have withered to be replaced by "bread and circuses", ranging from the Dome and the wobbly Millennium Bridge to a Tracey Emin launch in previously lumpen Hoxton:
"The New Labour government of Tony Blair might have been expected to cut through this consumerist swill. Instead it offered a more ambitious form of 'designer' Thatcherism. It continued to strip London's public sector of any pride and independence it might have had with dogmatic free market policies that saw privatisation move silently and stealthily through the city like the sleekest sewer rat."
Glancey links this to the decline of the two forces that had previously provided the basis for radical politics in London. The first was the industrial working class, "the skilled and politically active workforce", which was "disbanded or tamed" as Thatcherism set out consciously in the 80s to make London a city ever more dependent on financial and service industries. Instead "low paid, unskilled work is one of the keys to London's 'success'. The much talked-about freedom of choice we are all meant to enjoy so much today are possible only because of cheap, hidden and even illegal labour."
The second force is the "London mob", which has exploded onto the capital's streets from the Peasants' Revolt to the Poll Tax Riot of 1990. The mob served to strike fear into the city's rulers and remind them that there were some limits to how far they could push the poor. But, it appears, not even riots are what they once were
Glancey goes on to chart the impact of declining public provision on a whole range of services vital to any large city. Perhaps most central are transport and housing, which threaten London with collapse unless they are addressed urgently.
He starts discussing transport by going back to the 1930s when the hero of the book, Frank Pick, ran London's transport after it had been taken into municipal control. Pick thought "Nothing was too good for London only the best would do." Money was raised through the bond issues now advocated by Ken Livingstone, though the flaw, in Glancey's view was that this meant that the service "was charged with making a profit and paying dividends."
A decline began when car transport became more widely available. It was accelerated by a low level of investment, falling subsidies and rising fares, different forms of central government control and a falling quality of service. Comparing London's Underground with Paris's Metro and New York's subway, Glancey notes their lower fares, and ties it to their funding of the system through taxation and subsidies. Instead London is faced with the Public Private Partnership which raises money by selling off parts of the tube infrastructure.
He concludes: "Public transport is one area where London needs rigorous, heavy-duty, civic-minded and almost draconian planning to get itself back into shape. It needs to invest in a new publicly owned and publicly accountable body to oversee and run a revitalised system". This seems like common sense when the system is close to collapse. But who is fighting for it today?
The absence of a supply of decent, low cost public housing in London is another systemic problem that requires a move away from market orthodoxy. Workers who are vital to the running of the city can no longer afford to live there. Average house prices are five times the average household income and many of those workers earn less than the average. 55% of nurses live between five and twenty-five miles from work. Firefighters commute to London from across the South East and beyond, often ending up sleeping in their stations rather than commuting every day.
Areas of London that once would have been spurned by those seeking rising property prices have become gentrified, often at the cost of the previously existing working class communities. Glancey tells of how an innovative 1950s block in Bethnal Green had come by the 90s to require major repairs. The council didn't have the money to do it, so instead turfed out the existing tenants and sold the block off to a developer, who did the repairs and paid for it by selling the flats. "These idealistic post-war council flats were no longer for the people who needed them most. They had been shifted on Not shareholders in the brutal market economy."
Glancey is not short of practical proposals when it comes to ways to deal with these problems. He is much weaker on how a movement might be built that could force the implementation of any of them. He is quite realistic about the impotence of the Mayor and the Greater London Authority, tending instead in retrospect to over-idealise Herbert Morrison's London County Council of the 30s and 40s. Having dismissed the remaining sections of the working class as bought off by consumerism and council house sales and other potential sources of radicalism as having been destroyed, he is left with nothing but encouraging more public debate.
There are still potential sources for revitalising radical politics in London, however. The public sector unions that deliver the services are one; an alliance between them and service users could begin to draw up plans and demands for how their services should be run and delivered. Another is the broad 'anti-capitalist' movement that has emerged in the last years, rejecting precisely the kinds of market solutions dominating London today. Perhaps the European Social Forum in London in the autumn could be a starting point for such a movement.
Without it, mightn't the London of 'bread and circuses' follow its Roman predecessor into ruin?
Reviewer: Bruce Robinson
