In 1971 an organisation called the Houseowners’ Association produced a small volume: Where to Live in London. It gave star ratings to the various districts and suburbs for the benefit of potential buyers; the tone would now be considered politically incorrect, but some of the judgements were pretty astute:
BRIXTON*: The place most people love to hate.
HACKNEY**: Distinctly working-class but not entirely without hope.
LEWISHAM**: Very grotty.
GREENWICH***: Clearly coming up in the world. Parts still rough.
HAMMERSMITH***: As Irish as they come. But some parts are beginning to look interesting.
right up to:
ST JOHN’S WOOD*****: An area where money is the only password. Even small luxury town houses fetch £20,000 … and £70,000 is not unknown.
Oh, it’s very funny indeed (talkin’ about my generation). By 2014 ordinary three-bedroom terraced houses in distinctly ** or *** parts of London, which would still have cost four figures in 1971, were nudging ever closer to the million-pound mark. To have maintained their value against inflation they should perhaps be worth £100,000. Even four decades ago, when mortgage tax relief was on offer, house purchase was perceived as a shrewd investment. No one knew how shrewd, any more than the tech multi-billionaires, pursuing their theories in their basements and garages, knew quite how clever they were being. And the techies can be said to have brought about some improvement to the world; they even pay taxes on their riches, sometimes. House price inflation has offered life-changing tax-free windfalls, for nothing.
This is not just a London phenomenon. Property owners across Britain have benefited, but to nothing like the same extent. As Where to Live in London noted: ‘The average price paid in London for a home is nearly £5,900 – well over £1,000 higher than the national average and nearly £2,000 more than in the poorest parts of the country.’ That gap has got wider and wider and wider.
Most of the great buyers’ market phases in London since then have followed a familiar course: prices would surge in the capital, then ripple outwards in a year or so as young couples were priced out and found themselves forced to settle for the suburbs, exurbs or even provinces. The post-2010 boom has been much slower to spread, partly because of London’s stranglehold on desirable jobs, but mainly because the pressure at the top end has been caused not by residents’ need for somewhere to live, but because every oligarch, princeling and money launderer on the planet saw a London property as an essential status symbol, bolthole, occasional holiday home and a seemingly infallible and very lightly taxed investment.
The constant search for new and undiscovered districts has now taken on a frenzy not seen since the European powers competed to grab tracts of Africa. As a young woman wailed to Simon Jenkins, ‘I’m too late for Shoreditch. I’m desperate for Hackney. I may get something in Catford.’ She was not interested in west London, now seen as very uncool.
This phenomenon is typified by the story of Hoxton, which the 1971 book did not even think worth mentioning. I suspect many Londoners had still never heard of it, except perhaps from the opening scenes of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady when Henry Higgins is showing off his ability to pick up the slightest variation of accent: ‘Where do I come from then?’ asks one man.
‘Hoxton.’
‘Blimey, you know ev’ryfink, you do.’
In so far as it had a reputation it was a fearful one. This was enhanced by a 1969 book, A Hoxton Childhood by A. S.Jasper (a pseudonym), which recalled growing up in a rough family – drunken, dishonest father; loving, put-upon mother; thieving brother and brother-in-law – around the time of the First World War. This was backed up by Ted Williams, son of a road sweeper, who was interviewed for a brilliant 1980s ITV series (the sort that hardly gets made these days), The Making of Modern London:
One reason that the posher people who used to live in Hackney moved out, the managers of department stores, foremen, people like that, was because they didn’t like living so close to us lot in Hoxton.
It was a common saying ‘If you put a net around Hoxton you’d have half the criminals of the world.’ They’d do a bit of house-breaking in places where people could afford to lose it, like De Beauvoir. If we saw a college boy, we’d snatch his hat off and fill it up with horse shit, then give it to him back. We were rotten when we went into the posher areas, we wouldn’t do it in our own street.
When the police tried to arrest anybody they’d have to come in pairs, and there was a riot then because people used to get on to the roofs and chuck stuff down at them.
By the late twentieth century Hoxton had started to morph into an artists’ quarter; by 2014 the artists had been priced out, partly due to what is perhaps the most important contribution to London of its first mayor, Ken Livingstone: stitching together bits of forgotten railway into the new Overground network. I went to dinner in Hoxton Square (three-bedroom apartment: £2 million) at Zigfrid von Underbelly, a restaurant with a lot of TV screens, the sort of place that asks how you want your burger cooked, though I’m not sure the answer makes much difference.
Hackney Council, being barred from imposing a sensible amount of tax on £2 million ‘apartments’, ekes out its feeble public services by charging £5 an hour for parking in Hoxton Square right up to midnight. No one was seen vandalising the cars, chucking stuff from the penthouse rooftops or putting horse shit in hats. Down the road, into once equally no-go-for-respectable-people Shoreditch, was a nightclub called Cargo. That week’s programme read: ‘Monday – Resident DJ; Wednesday – Bloomberg Corporate; Friday – Deep Disorder’. I’m not at all surprised by the Bloomberg Corporate, just amazed there isn’t more Deep Disorder.
The old places still attract older people’s money. In both 2012 and 2013 Egerton Crescent in South Kensington was named as the most expensive street in the UK, with houses changing hands at an average of £7.4 million. It is a terraced row with most of the front doors opening straight on the pavement, not unlike pound-a-house Bond Street in Stoke-on-Trent, where (extrapolating) you could buy 7.4 million houses for the price of one in Egerton Crescent, with homes that are more pleasingly proportioned and handy for the museums, but honestly …
In reality, although too few properties change hands for it to show up in surveys, the most expensive street is probably Kensington Palace Gardens, a bit further north, where the Sultan of Brunei and Britain’s presumed richest man, Lakshmi Mittal, live next door to each other (Oh, the chats they must have over the fence: ‘Yer onions doin’ awright this year, Lakshmi?’) in houses that may be worth over £50 million, within hailing distance of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (‘Mornin’, Kate, pet, ’ow yer diddlin’? Oo, in’t the baby lookin’ bonny?’). Most of the street is taken up with embassy residences and many of these buildings seem somehow to reflect their nation’s image – Finland: unpretentious and bourgeois; France: elegant and fussy; Russia: cold and forbidding. The continuing value of many of these houses depends partly on them not collapsing into their vast new basements.
Despite all this, London property is becoming less and less about location, location, location. The streets are far safer than they were in the 1990s, in keeping with a trend across the Western world, helped a little by Britain’s North Korean-style mass surveillance system. Singles in particular, fuelled by desperation, are becoming more adventurous about where they live. Brixton, which used to be described as diverse, meaning black, is now diverse meaning diverse. Deptford, only six minutes from London Bridge, has always been resistant to change, mainly because so many of the old do-up-able terraces were bombed out in the war and rebuilt as council flats. Even so, on Deptford High Street you can already smell the macchiato. At the Elephant and Castle – such a pretty name, such an ugly place – the huge Heygate Estate is being demolished to be replaced by something more appealing and market-friendly. The population has been dispersed by the council.
The once gentle rise and fall of neighbourhoods has been succeeded by a dizzying momentum, almost
all of it upwards. London was never a truly segregated city, like Johannesburg or Washington, DC. Charles Booth’s great survey of the 1890s, Life and Labour of the People in London, includes maps, coloured to indicate the wealth of the inhabitants in each street: the very rich in gold, the very poorest in black and described as ‘lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal’, gold and black nuzzling surprisingly close to each other.
One of the black areas was the south side of Chadwick Street between Victoria and Westminster, barely five minutes’ walk from Parliament itself. The residents were described by Booth as ‘labourers, hawkers, flower-sellers, bottle-gatherers and organ-grinders, also thieves, beggars and prostitutes’. I went to Chadwick Street and found myself standing outside the headquarters of Channel 4.
All this is what is normally described as ‘regeneration’, a friendly, wholesome word. Regeneration usually means government-assisted gentrification, or embourgeoisement. What we are seeing is a variant of the Paris-ification that we saw in Oxford in Chapter 14: the poor being shoved towards and beyond the periphery. But there is a mitigating influence: new developments are expected to have a small proportion of ‘affordable’ houses (as opposed to the unaffordable ones). This means that the inner London of the future will probably not conform to our old notion of an inner city. It will be confined to the rich and a few of the poor: in other words, the tycoons, bankers and oligarchs plus their nannies and cleaners. There will be a few middle-class people with grandfather-rights, living in the homes their grandparents shrewdly bought after reading Where to Live in London four decades ago. But most of the teachers, journalists, nurses, policemen, even doctors of tomorrow will be elsewhere. In terms of the future city’s balance that is not so much regeneration as degeneration.
For reasons lost in the smog of memory, I have on my shelves the S–Z volume of the London Post Office Telephone Directory, April 1959. It is a feast of nostalgia, complete with advice about how to make calls from a telephone without a dial or on a party line (i.e. a shared one and less fun than it sounds). Then there are the old exchanges with their strange-sounding names, of which you dialled (if you had a dial) the first three letters. Some were boringly geographical (FULham, KILburn, SWIss Cottage); but others were regal (MONarch, ROYal, TUDor); heroic (CUNningham, RODney, FRObisher); artistic (ELGar, KIPling, VANdyke); or pastoral (ACOrn, CHErrywood, SPEedwell).
And, darling, simply everyone was there. The British were not yet addicted to going ex-directory for fear that someone might phone them. Harold Wilson MP, of 12 Southway, NW11 (MEAdway 2626) was in, just five years before he became prime minister and entered a gateless Downing Street with a lone copper outside the door of No. 10. There were two pages given over to representatives of our old friends from Hertfordshire (Chapter 23), Spirella Corsetières; and less than half a column of Singhs. C. M. (Molly) Matthews used the 1961–2 phone directory as the basis for her classic work English Surnames, reasoning that it was a fairly representative sample of the country. It was a very different London.
In 2014, on an Overground train between Brondesbury Park and Stratford, I could eavesdrop on – no, was unable to block out – half a dozen simultaneous mobile calls, conducted in half a dozen languages, the one in English being heavily accented. This is not a stretch of line obviously frequented by tourists.
There were always foreign voices and non-white faces in London; it was that kind of city. However, there was no organised large-scale immigration until the arrival of the Empire Windrush and 500 migrants from Jamaica in 1948 to alleviate labour shortages in those heady years of full employment.
In the years that followed, more West Indians arrived, then Asians, and the trickle became a steady stream. This soon produced growing concern within the Cabinet, which struggled to find a way to stem the flow without, on the one hand, alienating people from the white Commonwealth who still perceived themselves as distant sons and daughters of the Mother Country and, on the other, being seen as overtly racist.
The first act designed to restrict post-war immigration was passed in 1962, but still the numbers grew, (a) because the British economy was growing too; (b) because it was held to be inhumane to restrict the admittance of families; (c) because crises came – particularly the persecution of Asians in East Africa – which required an urgent humanitarian response; and (d) because successive governments hadn’t got the foggiest idea what they were trying to achieve (let alone how to achieve it) and veered between laxity and harshness. And of course the first generation now had children born here who were clearly British, but sometimes had trouble grasping that themselves.
The pre-existing British fell into two camps: a largely elite group who felt that immigration was so obviously a Good Thing that it must never be discussed, for Fear of the Consequences; and a largely non-elite group who felt, usually without much venom, that things had got out of hand. The first attitude prevailed, and perhaps deserved credit for the fact that, except for the original Notting Hill riot of 1958, the racial violence that did take place only rarely involved the local white population as such, and more often directly centred on the police as provocateurs or victims, depending on one’s perspective.
This was particularly true in London. People grew to like their Gujarati newsagents and Polish plumbers, who worked longer and harder than their home-grown predecessors. This did not mean the capital embraced the newcomers but, in the tradition that governs behaviour on crowded tubes, paid them ‘civil inattention’.
Any kind of control gradually became more difficult because European Union laws insisted on free movement of labour, although the British government declined to join the Schengen Agreement allowing passport-free travel across the Continent, a decision which was more a nuisance to its own citizens than a deterrent to anyone else. In 2004, much of Eastern Europe joined the EU, and Britain, unlike the other rich countries, imposed no interim controls. Hence the arrival of, most obviously, the Poles.
But the immigration of the twenty-first century is altogether harder to explain. It extended far beyond the Commonwealth and the EU: migrants came from Somalia, whose residents sought refuge as their country disintegrated; from southern Europe, as the euro crisis took hold; from Francophone Africa, South America, everywhere. ‘Who?’ was now anyone on an increasingly mobile planet: the footloose, the love-struck, the ambitious, the knowledge-hungry. ‘How?’ remained a bit mysterious, given the toughness of ministerial rhetoric and the difficulty of getting through Heathrow even for the natives. It was also hard to be sure how these newcomers lived, given the property market, though there was evidence of a vast penumbra of life in relentlessly subdivided houses in the more unfashionable boroughs.
‘Why?’ was easy enough. From Dick Whittington onwards, it has been believed that the streets of London are paved with gold. And London, if not exactly welcoming, ignored you benignly, was full of one’s own fellow countrymen, had a language that was far more accessible and pliable than any other, and made few demands – certainly no expectation of adaptation to the new surroundings – as long as you remembered to stand on the right of the escalators.
The effect has been stunning. According to the 2011 census only 44.9 per cent of the population of Greater London was ‘white British’. Tony Travers of the London School of Economics has surmised that the figure has now dipped below 40 per cent, in part because of higher birth rates among the incomers. This is not the product of any coherent political will of the sort that governs migration into a country founded on immigration like Australia; it stems from a situation of which the government lost control the moment the Empire Windrush docked.
The deeper mystery is what has become of the aboriginals. Even ten years ago the default voice you heard on arrival in the capital was that of the fark-me-guv-cor-blimey-my-ol’-man-said-follow-the-van kind of Cockney who has dominated London since Bow Bells first sounded. Such people still drive taxis but off-duty the drivers are often parked in Hertfordshire or Essex. Cockney can be heard all over south-east England and
beyond, but less and less in the capital itself.
The migrants have made London an even more heterogeneous, varied and fascinating place than it was before, exemplified by what is now its most popular free event: the bottom-up Notting Hill Carnival (originated 1966) having surely now overtaken the top-down Lord Mayor’s Show (originated circa 1215) after shrugging off a once-fearful drug-ridden reputation to become the kind of multi-culti celebration which, in the white liberal middle-class imagination, sums up day-to-day London.
There, as the London School of Samba sashayed through the street, I met Cecilia Beckett who came to Hackney from Barbados, involved with the carnival since 1988, when there were twenty bands rather than the current seventy or eighty. For her, carnival is not about the day itself so much as the preparation: all the costume-making and practising. ‘It’s about giving young people something to do over the summer holiday in a place where they don’t have much to do,’ she said. ‘Teaching them about their heritage, about calypso, about steel bands and about carnival. But it’s changed. It used to be about doing your own thing. Now it’s about putting the right thing on the form so you can get funding.’
Meanwhile, those white liberal middle classes are being driven out by the conversion of London homes into ‘a global reserve currency’ – a phrase given resonance in a much-read article by London-based American writer Michael Goldfarb: ‘The property market is no longer about people making a long-term investment in owning their shelter,’ said Goldfarb, ‘but a place for the world’s richest people to park their money at an annualised rate of return of around ten per cent’ – all abetted by council tax rates, at the top end, of staggering generosity. It may be significant that the piece was published by the New York Times, rather than any London paper – whose senior executives are almost all among the beneficiaries of the ever-reverberating boom.
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