by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)
I told one of the officers standing a few feet away from the picnic blanket that I didn’t envy his job enforcing laws as absurd as this one. He smiled. ‘To be honest, it is a terrible law, but what can we do?’ Another younger officer was less relaxed. He stood with his arms folded looking down his nose at the skirts and home-made cakes that swirled around him. I asked him what the definition of protest was so that I could make sure I wasn’t doing anything that might make me liable for arrest. He looked at me in frustration. ‘What do you think it means?’ I said that it didn’t matter what I thought it meant because I didn’t have the power of arrest; it was what he understood it to mean that mattered to everyone there. I asked again. He stared at me, shook his head and walked away. This is the most absurd aspect of the legislation that created the protest exclusion zone. If you can’t get a clear response from a policeman on what exactly it is you are doing that he is threatening to arrest you for, then what chance do you have of preventing yourself from breaking the law?
It was at that moment that Cindy arrived. The film crews and photographers outnumbered everyone else as Brian took her through his banners and posters. The photographs of dead children had her in tears. She held on to Brian as he guided her along the pavement between well-wishers and photographers. She said she thought he was a hero and hugged him time and time again. The police remained unmoved, staring quietly at Big Ben. They had told the crowd that they would start making arrests at half-past one. At 1.25 I walked over to the inspector who was going through the plan with one of his officers. ‘At half past we’ll ask them all to leave and if we’re not satisfied that they are going to disperse I’ll give the call and get the vans from around the corner and then we’ll start making arrests,’ he said.
One of the picnickers approached and asked for more time to clear the food away. The inspector clearly didn’t want to arrest anyone, but he would follow the letter of the law if he had to. ‘Look,’ he replied, ‘if 1 can see that you’re all making an effort to move on then I won’t make any arrests when it gets to half past.’ I went up to him and pointed out Peggy, a ninety-two-year-old peace campaigner, sitting in an armchair behind Brian’s display of banners and posters. Brian had just introduced her to Cindy as ‘their mother’. I asked the inspector, ‘Do you think you could start by arresting her? It would do wonders for the publicity campaign.’ He looked at me in horror. He seemed exhausted, shook his head and said desperately, ‘But that wouldn’t do me any good, though. Would it?’
Without getting too misty-eyed about it in retrospect, there wasn’t an unreasonable person standing on Parliament Square that afternoon. Everyone sat or stood on that patch of grass acted courteously, even if their tempers were frayed. In the great history of Parliament Square, I can’t imagine there has ever been anything quite like what happened that day. The police politely informing a group of twenty people that they were breaking the law; the same policemen agreeing with the people about the insanity of the law the people were breaking; police vans parked round the corner waiting to arrest people with smiling, laughing faces, having a picnic while a mother who’d lost her son in a war cried on the shoulder of a peace campaigner. Now that may seem like I’m laying it on a bit thick, but that was how it felt being there. I realized at that moment that I didn’t want anyone to get arrested that day because I didn’t want to do it to that police inspector. I could see that he simply didn’t need the hassle of having to deal with Section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act. He was being asked to treat teenagers, adults and grandmothers who believed in freedom of speech like criminals and load them up in riot wagons. Parliament hadn’t just let down the people it was supposed to be representing by allowing such an undemocratic law, it had also severely let down the police who had more than enough to deal with as it was. After all, a good relationship between citizens and their police force is vital for any society. It was inexcusable for Parliament to make a law that contravened the principle of free speech, and it was just as inexcusable to drive a wedge between the people it served and the people entrusted with ensuring their safety.
I walked over to Mark and asked whether he was going to stay to be arrested. He shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t really want to spend eight hours in Charing Cross police station again. Do you fancy a drink instead? I’d love a pint.’ I told him what I’d learned from John, that our birthright required us not only to stand up against tyranny but also to drink lots of beer. He smiled. ‘Well, that’s settled it. We can’t deny ourselves our birthright.’ And with that we all headed off to the pub.
Chapter 4. Déjà vu in Derby
Watford’s is called the Harlequin Centre. Basingstoke opted for Festival Place. Reading decided on The Oracle (in classical antiquity, a place at which advice or prophecy was sought from the gods). Cumbernauld, meanwhile, kept it simple with Cumbernauld Shopping Centre, although residents, I hear, refer to it simply as ‘Hell’. This disease has now spread to every town in Britain. The chainstore makeover was, seemingly, not enough. Now every town needs an absurdly expensive and pretentiously titled shopping mall to entice shoppers away from the identical shopping mall that’s just been built in the town down the road. But Derby felt it was missing out, which is why its council opted for the Riverlights Centre, a 500,000-square-foot development which, according to the developer’s website, would include ‘22 units of restaurants and bars, with premier operators, a Grand Casino, a 120-bed quality city hotel, and 150 high-quality city apartments’. The only thing in their way was a forty-two-year-old lady called Dorothy who was camping on the roof of the bus station the developers needed to bulldoze before they could start work. ‘Of course you can come and interview me,’ she said down the phone. ‘And if you do come, could you bring me some cashew nuts? Oh, and white chocolate?’
I admire Dorothy for many reasons. Spending the night on the roof of a bus station in the depths of winter is not something you do unless you’re desperate, but she’d already been there for eight weeks by the time I visited her, so she certainly had guts. But it was her bloody-minded defiance that really impressed me. The Crap Towns project had revealed a lot of things about the state of Britain’s towns and villages. People cared very much about where they lived but seemed, in the main, resigned to the fact that their councils were more interested in companies that wanted to invest in their towns than in the people who actually lived in them. But Dorothy wasn’t prepared to let her council’s plans go unchallenged.
Before Crap Towns came out I went on a forty-day road trip to visit some of the places Idler readers had voted as the worst in the UK. It was a very interesting journey that took me all over Britain, from Dover in Kent to Thurso in the northern reaches of Scotland. I visited some truly surprising places: Blackbird Leys, the home of joyriding just outside Oxford; Winchester in Hampshire, the smuggest town on earth; the Bransholme Estate in Hull, John Prescott’s back yard; Cumbernauld in Scotland, by far the most miserable and depressing hell hole in Britain, largely due to its poverty; and then, inevitably, there was Slough.
Good old ‘butt of a thousand jokes’ Slough. It means ‘bog’, by the way, but then if you’ve been there you’ve probably already guessed that. Slough was somewhere I had experience of because I used to work there as a weed sprayer. The job of a weed sprayer is to kill weeds. I had to wear a green boiler suit with yellow Marigolds and carry a twenty-five-litre tank of weedkiller on my back. I remember it well because working in Slough was actually a promotion from my previous job scaling motorway embankments spraying around the little trees that were being bullied by thick bramble and other violent plants. I learned a lot as a weed sprayer. Namely, that if you spend all day every day doing a job you loathe there are only two ways you spend the rest of your time - drunk or asleep. I also learned something about humiliation. It’s the only time during my life I’ve been called a ‘sad bastard’ by both an incontinent bag lady and the driver of a souped-up Capri. Discovering that you are lower down in the social hierarchy tha
n those two elements of society gives you a unique sense of perspective on life, I can assure you.
Economically, Slough is the perfect modern town, which should strike fear into the hearts of everyone living in Britain. It is near an airport, the local economy is thriving and provides plenty of jobs for local people, it is racially inclusive, it lies close to London and, at the same time, is also located near beautiful countryside. This is the British town that exemplifies the priorities of modern life. It’s town-planning perfection. Slough is a microcosm that tells you everything you need to know about the things our country prioritizes, yet everyone in Britain who’s ever been there thinks it’s a shit hole. The BBC even did a series called Making Slough Happy, for goodness’ sake. Slough is the kind of town Morrissey would have immortalized if The Smiths were around today. Slough makes you want to slit your wrists. Well, it made me feel like that when I worked there as a weed sprayer. As it happens, the guy I used to spray with did slit his wrists, but that’s another story.
Returning to Slough on a book tour because it appeared in my book as one of the crappiest places to live in Britain was, therefore, quite a cathartic moment. At least it was until the end of the evening, when it also became rather enlightening. After the audience had laughed along politely to my slightly offensive judgment of their town, I asked them why they were all prepared to live in such a God-awful, depressing, ugly place. A woman immediately put her hand up and said, ‘I’ve lived in seven countries all over the world and the reason I love Slough is because it’s the most racially tolerant place I’ve ever been to. A friend of mine from Ghana came to visit us last year and he said when he walked down the high street he’d never felt so free of prejudice anywhere else in the world. He heard someone speaking his language, and saw people of all colours and styles of dress walking freely and without fear.’ Everyone around her nodded sagely. Then someone else added, ‘And no pretentious people would ever dream of living in Slough, unlike down the road in Windsor, which is full of c**ts.’
Now you can’t really argue with that, can you?
But Slough aside, wherever I went on my journey the complaints always seemed to be the same: too many supermarkets, too many of the same shops, too many bars selling cheap booze, too much puke on the streets, too many councillors with their noses in the air and fingers in the till, too many planning applications approved for huge companies despite local protests, too few police on the streets, too much violence, too few schools, no voice and no sense of community. The other recurrent theme was the way our towns and cities are beginning to look. So many of them are irredeemably ugly. There is no inspiration, no sense of being part of something. The places we live in have just become places to work and shop that masquerade as towns. A prime example is South Woodham Ferrers, just north-east of London. Go there and you’ll get a surprise. It’s Asda town, and all the streets are named after characters and places from Lord of the Rings. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. I’ve always imagined the logic behind enormous supermarkets is that they are built to provide a service for people who live in the area. In South Woodham Ferrers you begin to realize that now it’s the other way round: Asda isn’t there for the people, the people have been brought in for Asda. On the day I was there the entire place was like a ghost town -until I went into the shopping centre and found hundreds of people milling about. There was nothing else to do in South Woodham Ferrers except spend money and get bored. The planners have learned from the success of Slough. South Woodham Ferrers is the town of the future.
When local worthies did rally round to defend their town’s appearance in our book they always trotted out the same old arguments, blaming the building programmes of the fifties and sixties. My friend Fin concurred in the case of Hull, claiming, ‘Its best town planner was Hitler.’ But you can’t blame everything on the architects of yesteryear and the Luftwaffe. It’s hard to imagine that no-one working in town planning over the last fifty years saw the generic, every-high-street-is-indistinguishable land we now live in looming on the horizon.
I called a friend of my mum’s, Honor Gibbs, a retired architect and landscape architect, to ask how we had got ourselves into such a mess. Honor pointed me in the direction of a book published in 1955 by an architect called Ian Nairn, aptly titled Outrage, which I tracked down on the fantastic website abebooks.co.uk. Outrage is a combination of a prediction, a call to arms and a plea for planners, designers and ordinary people to appreciate the enormous impact our environment has on our lives. It is a savage premonition of a country that is almost identical to the one we find ourselves in today, the country of crap towns, or as Nairn described it, ‘Subtopia’. Right from the start, Nairn is clear about who is to blame for things going wrong:
Public Authorities are responsible for nearly all of the faults exposed in this [book]; they have most power and often least awareness of the visual responsibility that should go with it, but they are only a corporate reflection of what goes on in the mind of each one of us... this is a prophecy of doom - the doom of an England reduced to universal Subtopia, a mean and middle state, neither town nor country, an even spread of abandoned aerodromes and fake rusticity, wire fences, traffic roundabouts, gratuitous notice-boards, car-parks and Things in Fields. It is a morbid condition which spreads both ways from suburbia, out into the country, and back into the devitalised hearts of towns.
What interested me most about Outrage was that Nairn saw a direct cause and effect between our sense of unhappiness and the places we call home. In essence, the crap towns we live in are a physical reflection of our mental state. The more unhappy and unfulfilled we are as people, the worse our towns and villages will inevitably become.
For Nairn, the world was split between what he called the self-conscious world of man and the unselfconscious world of nature. It was possible, he wrote, for these worlds to co-exist providing each was treated with care and attention. Instead, the reality was that man had levelled off these two worlds, morphing them into one indistinguishable and unpleasant ‘mean which is a threat not simply to our felicity but to our continued development as more than an order of termites. The environment is an extension of the ego, and twentieth-century man is likewise busy metamorphosing himself into a mean - a meany — neither human or divine. And the thing he is doing to himself and to his background is the measure of his own mediocrity. Insensible to the meaning of civilization on the one side and, on the other, ignorant of the well-spring of his own being, he is removing the sharp edge from his own life, exchanging individual feeling for mass experience in a voluntary enslavement far more restrictive and permanent than the feudal system ... it is man enslaved dragging down his environment to his own level.’
We have certainly done that to the way we think, confusing the ideas and principles of driving the economy and our overwork ethic with our sense of safety, happiness and contentment. As Nairn predicted, the result of this way of life has manifested itself physically in every identical town in Britain. All the complaints people have today about the way their communities are decaying is simply a reflection of the way our values and sense of happiness have been eaten away by our slavish acceptance of an ever-expanding economy with its work, debt and consumption.
But even if we don’t care that we’re becoming an order of overworking and over-consuming ‘termites’, chasing mass experience, Crap Towns at least proved that people really do care about the places they call home. Civic pride is alive and well in Britain, but small local groups don’t get to fight the corporate world on a level playing field. Planning law exists to ensure equal treatment, but if it was ever intended to protect our communities or the people that live in these areas then it has catastrophically failed. We may be growing blind to the damage the corporate vision has done to the way we live on a day-to-day basis, but we are not blind to the way this corporate vision has redesigned our country. Our environment, the unrecorded world of Albion, has been pushed, bulldozed and ransacked, and the only chance we have to reclaim and prote
ct it is to start listening to, and recording, the common-sense opinions of local people.
For Nairn, the origin of our downward spiral, when our misery directly began to destroy the world around us, was clear. ‘Any hope of intelligent interpretation was lost when planning was tied down step by step with local government, and made into another unrewarding office job,’ he wrote. ‘This chained it to the very points where democracy is most likely to give the lowest common denominator, not the highest common multiple: corporate Subtopia with all the planning rules as its armoury, perverted to make every square mile indistinguishable.’
A friend of mine, an architect called Jason, confirmed this was still the case today when I spoke to him about the problems he faced with local planners in South London. ‘You can’t find people to do the job who have any stake in the local area, that’s the problem,’ he said. ‘I’m always coming up against planners who are twenty-somethings from Australia or New Zealand. They’re nice people, but in six months they’ll be back at home.’ What should have been a sacred, valued job became the domain of pompous local dignitaries and local planners who often had no longterm interest in the area they were responsible for. The design and appearance of our nation was surely something we all had a stake in. How had it become so devalued in our minds?
Nairn was an architect so he couldn’t be accused of being anti-development, far from it. He was just desperate for people to realize that an area of life that required enormous care was receiving very little attention indeed. The crimes were there for all of us to see, in the housing estates, the high streets, the failed urban regeneration plans and the decimation of the countryside, but for some reason, then as now, we just shrugged our shoulders, went back to work and assumed an ‘expert’ somewhere was taking responsibility for these things on our behalf.