With the British government warning that Islamic terrorists could strike the British capital at any time, London at the close of 2002 is a city with the jitters. The other day, the veteran British journalist, Ian Jack, wrote about the frantic spirit of ‘every man for himself’ that has become routine among people trying to board London buses. Jack is far from alone in his uneasy feeling that one of these days London is simply going to snap.
In the eighteenth century, Dr. Johnson famously remarked that ‘he who is tired of London is tired of life’. But that great man of letters was not familiar with the soul-destroying pressures that are the daily lot of latter-day Londoners. Crazily escalating property prices; gross social inequalities; rampant street crime; streets and a transport system grotesquely unworthy of what purports to be a developed society: such ills are making for a brutal and degrading metropolitan environment. With its theaters and art galleries, its concert halls and art-house cinemas, London retains much of its old cultural vibrancy. For growing numbers of its inhabitants, though, it is becoming a place to be endured rather than enjoyed.
And yet ever more people are pouring into a city whose booming economy of the past several years has spawned jobs galore (albeit mostly low paid ones). For the many ‘asylum seekers’ who are anxious to cross the English Channel from France and gain entry to Britain, London is invariably the destination of choice. During the last decade, the population of London has risen by approximately half a million; a similar jump in numbers is anticipated over the coming ten years. With its overstretched public services and old and inadequate housing stock, London is ill-equipped to cope with this fresh influx of humanity. One writer has made the desperate suggestion that the only answer to the capital’s problems is to build a major new city in the southeast of England, a duplicate London.
It is not just by comparison with the capitals of other European countries that London appears decrepit and inefficient. In Britain itself, resurgent provincial cities, such as Manchester and Newcastle, now have much to offer that London woefully lacks — basic amenities like affordable housing and buses and trams that get people to work on time. Recently, a PR campaign was launched on behalf of the north of England to persuade jaded Londoners to relocate, to take up jobs in comparatively under-populated northern cities where they can expect to experience a better quality of life. “Why put up with ‘capital punishment’?” was the campaign’s mischievous slogan. London’s own Development Agency was not amused.
Much of the blame for the malaise of the Britain’s first city can be laid at the feet of Margaret Thatcher, who ruled Britain from 1979 until 1990, and who abolished the Greater London Council, the overarching metropolitan authority which for years ran London, latterly under the flamboyant left-wing leadership of Ken Livingstone. It is thanks to ‘Thatcherism’ that privatization and the free market have run riot in London. The result is mounting disorder, a dysfunctional city where — with coordinated civic administration a distant memory — unending road works have for some years been carried out in more or less haphazard fashion by a multitude of private contractors. The overwhelming impression — the re-emergence of Livingstone as London’s mayor notwithstanding — is of a city careering out of control.
So far from conceding that privatization has failed to benefit London, Britain’s business-friendly Prime Minister Tony Blair remains determined to involve private companies in the running of the city’s dilapidated tube network. Much of Ken Livingstone’s time in office has been devoted to what has finally begun to look like a doomed attempt to stop the semi-privatization of the tube — it was after all because of general public opposition to the scheme that Livingstone got elected. But now it transpires that a number of the private companies in question are effectively bankrupt. Tony Blair’s plans for the tube may yet have to be shelved. Meanwhile, the investment-starved tube system seems fated to degenerate still further — even as the number of people who use it every day continues to swell.
Two years ago, the London-born writer, Peter Ackroyd, published his remarkable magnum opus, London: the Biography. Conjuring up an entity that is always changing but forever the same, Ackroyd portrayed London as a scene of endless human energy and voracity, a microcosm of man’s fallen nature. For all its erudition, the book was less straightforward history than a sort of mystico-philosophical sermon. Small wonder that it enjoyed such enormous success: the hard-pressed denizens of present-day London need all the philosophy they can get.
(Neil Berry, a London-based freelance journalist since 1980, is the author of Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism.)
