The View From the Train (13 page)

Myrtle Avenue, Hatton, from
London
(1994)

In the sequence after Ridley Road, Robinson ‘discovers' Defoe's house in Stoke Newington, where he wrote most of
Robinson Crusoe
, and London is revealed to him as a place of ‘shipwreck, and the vision of Protestant isolation'. Not long after this, during footage of the Notting Hill Carnival and the float of the Colombian Carnival Association, the narrator reads:

The suggestion here, and elsewhere in the film, was that there is something about London – some ‘absence', perhaps – that makes it easier than it might be elsewhere for incoming cultures to establish themselves, but that perhaps also limits the extent to which London's diverse cultures experience each other.

Towards the end of the film, Robinson makes his way along Fleet Street, where he has to be prevented from attacking the Lord Mayor during a parade, to the portico of the Royal Exchange, outside the Bank of England, where he declares: ‘The true identity of London is in its
absence
. As a city, it no longer exists. In this alone it is truly modern: London was the first metropolis to disappear.' I had wondered if the last line of this rhetorical assertion might not exceed the terms of the character's licence, but it did seem to echo something about the state of London as an
idea
. Notions of absence, however, had been implicit in the project from its beginning, whether as ‘the absence of Continental diversions', as the idea that London suffered – or benefited – from an absence of a (known) identity, or as an identity that could be characterised as a sense of absence. Apart from these generalisations, there were a number of candidates for specific things that were absent – the memory of the historic centre, for instance, obscured by the increasing blandness of the spaces of the banking and finance industries, which had driven out most other forms of economic activity and were staffed to a great extent by commuters from outside London; the port, and its once-numerous shipping in the river. The absence of metropolitan government, of a credible London newspaper (the
Evening Standard
is read all over the south-east of England), even the lack of topographical logic in London's territorial subdivision into boroughs, all contributed to a sense that Londoners had only a very vague idea of what London was, or
simply did not need to know. Perhaps London's economic dominance makes this unnecessary. In any case, people who have lived in London all their lives often have only a very limited knowledge of its topography. A good deal of the above can be dismissed as a feature of any large capital city, where the national often eclipses the civic, but anyone who has ever tried to buy a postcard of London will have noticed that it is a city that lacks a contemporary self-image.

Such images, in any case, have probably always been misleading. In the nineteenth century, London's population grew from about 860,000 in 1801 to 6.5 million in 1901. Although the children of Londoners stood a better chance of surviving than many elsewhere in the country, most of this increase was the result of in-migration either from the rest of the UK or abroad. Not only that, but many migrants did not stay in the city, so the actual extent of in-migration was even higher than the growth in the population suggests. A ‘typical' Londoner of the nineteenth century might be imagined, not as a cab-driver or a publican, but as young, isolated, poor and newly arrived from somewhere else, probably more so than today. Even now, net migration into London is principally by people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine.
⁸

Similar things can be said of other aspects of English culture. Leaving aside industrial items such as white bread, gin and sugar cubes, or niche-market regional revivals, whatever might amount to an ‘English' cuisine, for instance, has been very hard to find since the decline in the agricultural workforce during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or perhaps for even longer, since the establishment of national markets centred on London. Agricultural decline (which was one of the factors that drove migrants to London) was partly the result of importing cheaper food, often from Britain's colonies. At the same time, the cuisines of cultures colonised by the British and others began to find their way to Britain. The result is that the stereotype of unattractive ‘British' food, which is still not difficult to find, contrasts with an enormous variety of imported and hybrid cuisines that is
probably more extensive than that in places where some kind of indigenous cuisine survives.

It is apparently an assumption of ‘classical' economics that a nation, having established some comparative advantage in producing particular goods or services, should strive to import as much of the remainder of its material and other needs as possible. I came across this idea only recently and, to someone who can remember the 1960s, when there seemed to be a near-permanent balance of payments crisis, it came as something of a surprise. I had always thought that an industrial economy's success was more likely to be indicated by the volume and quality of its exports. Culturally, an unwillingness to make things might seem unattractive, but as an indicator of wealth, imports do make sense, given that, in the long run, they confirm the ability of the importing economy to generate the means to pay for them. A high level of imports might therefore be seen to indicate success, rather than failure, and certainly seems to have characterised the UK's economy for long enough for it to be regarded as traditional.

If the everyday experience of London in the early 1990s really was characterised by some more or less definable sense of
absence
, combined with an apparent comparative openness to incoming cultures, perhaps this has something to do with London's or the UK's economy. In a recent essay,
⁹
the film historian Paul Dave referred to the film
London
in the context of Ellen Meiksins Wood's book
The Pristine Culture of Capitalism
(1991). Having considered the various declinist scenarios of post-war British economic history, Wood asks the question: ‘Is Britain, then, a peculiar capitalism or is it peculiarly capitalist?' and argues that it is the latter. She also offers an explanation for what sounds rather like Robinson's ‘problem of London':

This statement locates the origin of London's ‘absence of Continental diversions' in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, at the time that the English began to colonise other parts of the world, and it is not difficult to see a propensity for colonisation in ‘the commodification of all social goods', as Robinson Crusoe and his contemporaries in the sugar-growing business amply demonstrated. The urban landscape that Wood describes, which is particularly typical of London, can be seen as the current manifestation of a quality that has endured through pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods.

What is particularly intriguing about London in 2003, rather than in 1992, is that the post-colonial, cosmopolitan make-up of its population is juxtaposed with a physical form that, while it largely remains in the dilapidated condition to which Wood alludes, is increasingly the subject of initiatives by people who might be construed as members of a previously absent ‘burgherdom', whose aim is to make urban experience in London more like that of a certain kind of European city. Examples of this tendency might include Lord Rogers's Urban Task Force, various projects of the Architecture Foundation, the RIBA's award of its Gold Medal to the city of Barcelona in 1999, and the creation of new and successful public buildings and other spaces, such as Tate Modern, the London Eye and the central London riverside generally.

One wonders if the culture that Wood describes, which seems to be very much a characteristic of the era of colonisation, might
be changing. Latterday burgherdom has emerged in the context of an economy that, while it shows few signs of becoming a European-style social democracy, is now inevitably more closely linked to that of mainland Europe than for several centuries. The call for an urban revival, for example, is underpinned by the idea that, in order to maintain its appeal to the international financial sector, London needs to upgrade its amenities to the level of more civilised European cities. Generally speaking, this project is largely, though not exclusively, the province of a white, well-heeled middle or even ruling (if not exactly
upper
) class; but it does, arguably, represent a commitment to the kind of public and other spaces in which London's potential to become a genuinely cosmopolitan city might be realised.

At the same time, ‘regeneration' is both accompanied by and accomplished through the ‘discovery' of previously overlooked value in neighbourhoods and property often occupied by the people most characteristic of this cosmopolitan city, who are usually among the first to be pushed out when ‘regeneration' occurs and values rise. This point is frequently made, but a more fundamental question might be whether the cultural diversity and richness of old-fashioned, hard-faced London – the London of ‘capitalist development and the commodification of all social goods', which is the economic reality from which the present-day post-colonial city has emerged – are actually opposed by the economic and cultural changes that the current attempts at quasi-European make-over arguably exemplify.

If cultural diversity and richness are synonyms for poverty, as to some extent they are, they are almost certainly threatened. In postregeneration London, for example, the frequently ensuing sterility is perhaps not so much a question of culture as of residential densities. Wealthy, childless couples living in 300-square-metre riverside lofts are unlikely to generate anything like the street life of a community of immigrant families with children, each living in a single room. Diversity and richness, however, will survive in other neighbourhoods. In any case, it is not certain that the make-over, such as it is, is European in character. The pavement cafés of
post-1994 London seem to have arrived, not from Europe, but via North America. The evolution of London's population, too, increasingly polarised between extremes of rich and poor, more closely resembles that of North American cities than anything in Europe.

London in 2003 certainly seems to be a more enjoyable place than it was in 1992, in all sorts of ways, but physically it has not changed anything like as much as its stock of recently constructed public buildings might suggest. One of the more striking aspects of the cities of present-day mature economies is how, in the twentieth century, they changed, physically, much less than they might have been expected to at the beginning of the century. Cities now often evolve in ways that involve social change and subjectivity rather more than actual physical alteration. Much of London's physical fabric is older than that of many other cities in Europe, and older than that of much of the rest of the UK. New built environments are usually less socially and economically diverse than older urban fabric, so perhaps the fluidity of London's population is encouraged by this physical stasis – though at a price, since it condemns thousands, if not millions of people to live in unusually impoverished physical surroundings, both public and private. If London really is more open to new possibilities of various kinds than other cities whose urbanism is more conventionally European, its physical shortcomings soon restrict their impact on the general condition of the city. In the long run, London's economy is becoming increasingly specialised (in finance and administration). In this, as so often in the UK and presumably elsewhere, life in London seems to be characterised by predicaments in which a ‘yes' is followed by a ‘but'.