Tag: London

London’s goal — admirable for any city of medieval invention — is to drive the private car underground and replace it with a web of mass transit, suburban trains, bike lanes, taxi stands, and walkways. All of those are well calibrated to an urban grid that consists of mews, squares, and quirky side streets with names like Shoulder of Mutton Alley.

Despite the winds and rains, I recently pedaled all over London and came to the conclusion that it has an excellent chance to get past the automobile era. It could be Europe’s city of tomorrow, one that moves forward with its work/life balance on a human scale. Its future as Europe’s finance center, though, and its real estate forecast, as well as the outlook for its pubs, remain open questions.

I enrolled in Mayor Boris Johnson’s shared bikes — it took a few credit card swipes — and headed off to the City, London’s financial district, which lies north of London Bridge.

Will London remain one of the world’s top finance centers? The continuing economic crisis, the threat of the U.K. pulling out of the European Union, Scottish independence, and strict new regulations could all spell doom for its merchant banking.

The City’s accommodating genius is that while it is as established as the House of Lords or the East India Company, it is, among other things, a go-go offshore financial center — the Cayman Islands with bowler hats.

Neither continental European nor American nor Asian, London straddles all three markets, funneling money from one part of the globe to another. By comparison, Frankfurt, Paris, Zurich, and Amsterdam are staid regional financial centers. Only New York can give it a run for its money.

At G8 meetings Prime Minister David Cameron bemoans corporate-shell tax dodging and come-by-chance balance sheets, but when he gets home he might as well don a visor and leather sleeves. London is a casino cashing in the chips of a capital-intensive world.

During the Crimean crisis, London has been all for economic sanctions, provided, however, that they don’t hurt the City, where Russian oligarchs still get their phone calls returned.

While I was there, London experienced its wettest January since 1670. But one of the city’s virtues is that it copes well with bad weather. Houses and hotels are short walks to shops and trains. In most London neighborhoods you will pass many restaurants, drug stores, newsstands, and pocket supermarkets. On television, England was sinking; in London, it was business as usual.

The pleasure of London on a bike is that its very quickly reduced to an overlapping series of small towns, with such well known names as Chelsea, Fulham, Soho, Sloane Square, Lancaster Gate, and Hampstead Heath.

Fewer pubs were in evidence. I read later that about 1400 have been closing every year around England, victim to archaic licensing laws and restrictive franchising, not to mention the iPhone culture that does not cozy up with a pint to dank interiors with ersatz slot machines and pinball games. Industrial Britain has become a service economy, and the servers prefer bistros, bars, and Pret A Manger.

A downside to London is that the world’s happy money has made its property market an international savings bank, where apartments routinely sell for $6 million and some hotels (not mine) cost $700 a night.

Nevertheless, the excellent Tube, buses, commuter trains, and Boris bikes make it easier to stay in less fashionable quarters and connect to the bright lights. London has spent billions on upgrading its railroad stations, which soon will be the iron standard in Europe. By contrast, Moscow is choking on its gridlocked exhaust fumes, Paris prefers tourism to trade, and Berlin still has a hole in its heart.

When I lived in London in the 1970s, King’s Cross had the air of New York’s Port Authority bus terminal, and St. Pancras appeared only to offer connecting service to The Slough of Despond. The renovated St. Pancras International, where Eurostars depart for Paris, Brussels, Lille, and Avignon, is alive with spoken French, fresh croissants, trendy restaurants, and a five-star hotel. With a soaring glass interior, King’s Cross could be an Asian airline terminal.

The East End and Canary Wharf still feel like warehouse districts, although now the only cargoes are winking screens in trading rooms. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine in the next fifty years a second London growing up around the Thames docklands. It has the infrastructure in place — trains, an airport, businesses, nearby housing stock, and open spaces — to support a major city, one part Venice with canals, another part Shanghai with skyscrapers.

The risks to London’s future are political. Insular Tories could lead Britain out of the European Union, the British pound could become a second-tier currency, and the city’s cost structures could make it only an amusement park for Russian oligarchs and Arab sheiks, not the working or middle classes. Call it the Monaco Model.

Still, I would bet on London’s sustainability at all levels of a city’s food chain… if only because it is so eccentrically welcoming to bikes, banks, brokers, and bookstores.

Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published.

Photo of King’s Cross by Matthew Stevenson

Busted. “Even in the best of times, whinging, as Britons call the persistent low-grade grousing that is their default response to life’s challenges, is part of the national condition”, Sarah Lyall writes in the New York Times, about Londoners’ failure to embrace the Olympic Spirit. If a British newspaper mocked America there would be a flood of patriotic remonstrance right back at us. But when The Guardian asked its readers whether it was true that Britons were whingers, this is how the poll went:

There is a lot to complain about with the Olympics. The police have been heavy-handed, pushing around people who have argued with the Olympic hype. The Olympic Park has been forcibly cleared of its official and unofficial tenants.

Dave Renton, author of Lives; Running, who believes in the Olympics but not in the corporate hype and security that comes with it explains:

Already the park is enclosed by a sky high fence, topped by razor wires and electronic sensors, with CCTV every few metres and security patrols inside the fence, all to protect the Park from intruders. But in addition the towpath was closed to public access 23 days before the Olympics even began. All across London on the edge of Olympic venues there have been similar restrictions imposed. (see his Olympics-and-other sports blog, http://livesrunning.wordpress.com/)

Most shockingly, the army has put surface to air missiles on the roofs of local tower blocks, to the outrage of the residents, who see them as a threat against London’s rioting youths rather than any imagined Al Qaida attack. Pointedly, the one estate that has welcomed the installation is the Bow Quarter, a super-rich gated community in the heart of impoverished East London (the site, ironically, of the re-birth of British trade union struggle in the nineteenth century, the Bryant and May match factory).

There are special Olympic lanes painted on the roads, like those that the old Soviet bureaucracy had for the Zil limousines carrying officials. We are warned that spectators wearing the wrong logo will be barred from the stadium, as will Tibetan flags and any kind of political slogan.

There is much to complain about, but Sarah Lyall is right: scoffing is the British way. Poor Sebastian Coe, goody-two-shoes of the 1980s track, has a hard job selling the Olympics to the British public. This coming Saturday radicals of the counter Olympics network will meet at noon to protest in Mile End Park.

Of course Briton’s have not been big on public celebration since they lost that last toe-hold on world domination, as subalterns to the United States in the Cold War. The Falklands War against Argentina (oh, the shame!) was the last that drew out a jingo crowd. Ever since the Berlin Wall came down, we only come out on the streets to object or mourn. That is why the Millennium celebrations drew such a vicious reaction from the intelligentsia here, and why the most recently celebrated Queen’s Jubilee was such a damp squib. By contrast, hundreds of thousands mourned the death of Princess Diana, and perhaps a million marched against the war in Iraq.

It is not easy to be a British sporting star. Jaded Britons willed Wimbledon tennis finalist Andy Murray to lose with the fervour that in years gone by they would have willed him to win. England’s soccer captain, John Terry, is better known for swearing at Anton Ferdinand than for his defending skills (after a failed prosecution for racial abuse, the press, unwilling to accept the jury’s decision, found him guilty anyway). The mood behind team GB in London right now is markedly downbeat. Londoners’ main interest has been whether they could make any money letting out their homes (no, it turns out, the market was flooded).

The mood is not helped by the downbeat promotion. Filmmaker Danny Boyle is in charge of the opening ceremony. He says he will not follow the Beijing triumphalism, but instead threatens a mawkish recreation of the English countryside, complete with sheep and even a mob of countercultural festival hippies. On television, Britons follow not the hype, but a mockumentary satire of the hype, Twenty Twelve.

The London that Britain will showcase to the world is at a difficult crossroads. It is the centre of the financial services sector, Britain’s most successful export since deregulation in the 1980s, but currently mired in successive crises, most recently the manipulation of the LIBOR rate by Barclays (with the apparent connivance of not only shamed Chief Exec Bob Diamond, but the Governor of the Bank of England, too). There is little doubt that Britain’s economy is dangerously skewed in favour of its financial sector, which buys influence from out-of-touch and cash-hungry politicians. Sadly, the one occasion when the financial sector might have been reined in, the crash of 2008, led to a massive bailout instead. Advice from financiers that the banks were ‘too big to fail’ was accepted with much the same gullibility as advice from the securocrats that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction could strike London in 15 minutes. In the manner of a naïve maiden aunt, the press and the politicial establishment here were repeatedly surprised that the billions the government gave the bankers went straight into bonuses, instead of being passed on as loans to businesses. Did no one ever tell them that banks are in the business of making money, not giving it away?

The problem with the banks, in any event, is misunderstood. The febrile financial sector is more symptomatic than causal. It has been fuelled for some years by the surplus capital that British and European industry fails to reinvest in its manufacturing base. Europe’s risk-averse business leaders are reluctant to disturb their cozy relations with each other and government by innovating new processes or products. Where their forebears ploughed profits back into the business, our business leaders prefer to put them in the bank, hunting around for some fantasy of high yield investments that do not entail any relationship more demanding than a phone-call. It is not that bankers steal the cash from business so much as that business that is falling over itself to give it up.

High on the list of London’s problems is its house-building industry, which has systematically failed to meet the expanding demand for homes. Characteristic of the institutional prejudice against development here, house-building has been stymied by a planning system that restricts building to brownfield sites, and is strangling London’s growth with a ‘green belt’.

Predictably, the limit on building new houses has forced up prices, and priced poorer Londoners out of central London. According to a study by Tom MacInnes and Peter Kenway for the City Parochial Foundation:

… more than half (54%) London’s low income population live in Outer London. This is an increase compared to the late 1990s, when London’s low-income population was split equally between Inner and Outer London. Reflecting this relatively bigger population, a larger number of children in low-income households live in Outer London (380,000) than Inner London (270,000). (London’s Poverty Profile, 2009, p 29)

The impact of high prices on where people live, the gentrification of the inner city, and the exodus of the poor, has been dramatic. For poorer residents to carry on living in London gets more and more difficult. That is particularly so because the rise in rents mirrors the rise in house prices. For too many families living in London means accepting less and less space. Meanwhile, in Caledonian Road, a local developer bought up local shops to convert into flats, and then realised that the cellars could be made into houses, too.

With some cheek, London’s former Mayor, Ken Livingstone, architect of the London plan that put the dampeners on development is now protesting that ‘rents have soared beyond people’s ability to pay’. But it was Livingstone’s policy, with its mantra of building up, not out, on brownfield, not greenfield land, that created the scarcity of homes that is forcing up prices and rents. All of Livingstone’s solutions are about redistributing the limited housing stock available, without understanding that the real problem is in the realm of production.

The Olympics, of course, are supposed to have a lsting and positive effect on the London’s housing. But that will not happen unless there is a cultural shift in favour of development that is not engulfed in precautionary regulations and political indecision.

So let’s hope that Londoners do cheer up before the games start, and enjoy the sight of people giving their all. It ought to be a good antidote to the dog-in-the-manger attitude that is wrecking the prospects of recovery. Londoners have to choose between Olympic spirit, or Olympic whinging.

Photo by BBC World Service: Homeless Hostel, East London

James Heartfield’s latest book The Aborigines’ Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836-1909 is published by Columbia University Press, and Hurst Books in the UK.

Why does anyone persist with the Greek mythology that the Olympics are an engine of economic development, sportsmanship, or peace on earth? London is spending $15 billion on the hope that it can sell enough tickets to synchronized swimming, and earn enough from television ads, to cover the costs of the 30,000 rent-a-cops and military personnel being deployed in the spirit of Olympic harmony.

Even though the Games break few economic records, except those for non-performing sovereign debts, governments around the world scramble madly every four years for the right to act as host, as if influence peddling were an Olympic sport.

The original cost estimate, sold to the British public to convince them to get behind the bid for the 2012 Games, was about $4 billion. Those budget forecasts imagined that, after the event, Olympic sites would be recycled for use as schools, homes for the aged, and handicapped parking, even though earlier Olympic cities have found little use for their table tennis stadiums and aquatic centers.

In 2005, London beat out Paris (narrowly), New York, Madrid, and Moscow for the right, if not the privilege, to spend billions of dollars (that no one has) on a temporary Olympic village, a badminton complex, and swimming pools suitable for the American relayers to lap swimmers from places like Albania and Costa Rica.

Those who advocate Olympian edifice dreams include smiling politicians who can dole out sweetheart construction contracts; national sports associations, whose budgets are commensurate with gold-medal production; the International Olympic Committee, which in the past has been something of a Dream Team for backhand payments; and the television networks, which use the Games to fill the dog days of August and to develop various story-lines around medal-gobbling athletes (see Michael Phelps) or mildly voyeuristic content (women’s beach volleyball comes to mind).

Everyone wins at the Olympics: stadium contractors, strutting central governments, and athletes who place high enough to be crowned with the laurels of corporate sponsorship. Well, everyone except the bondholders, who are left with little more than folded tents when the circus leaves town after three weeks of breathless commentary about women’s weightlifting.

By chance, I have been to many of the cities that have hosted recent summer Games — Barcelona, Moscow, Beijing, Athens, and Seoul. In nearly each locale the thought crossed my mind that city residents have little more to show for their indebted billions than a few light-rail lines, perhaps an airport facelift, and impractical buildings that can be converted only into minimum-security prisons.

Beijing still has its iconic Bird’s Nest and Water Cube, although neither stadium is used now for anything more than tourist photography and an aqua park.

My son Charles and I spent a week driving around Greece after the 2004 Games. As best as we could tell, all Athens got for its now-bad loans were signs pointing the way to the Olympic Sailing Center (we even found these billboards miles from the sea), and a light-rail connection to Piraeus. Weeds covered the infield of the softball stadium.

Barcelona, the 1992 host, ended up with some new apartment buildings — since the Olympics were played in downtown areas — a few marinas, and of course light-rail. Many cities, however, have successfully put up apartment blocks without staging a field hockey tournament.

Nor did Moscow get the political bounce it had angled for when it hosted the 1980 summer Olympics. In protest over the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the United States and many allies refused to send teams, giving the Games the feel of a Warsaw Pact scout jamboree. The paint peeled off the Olympic village faster than some of the times in the marathon. (In London, the US has decided against boycotting its own invasion of Afghanistan.)

In theory, politics have nothing to do with the Games, although by organizing teams according to countries, the Olympic Committee has ensured that the spectacle is best understood as the continuation of war by other means, including archery and (in 1900) live pigeon shooting.

When the modern Olympics were revived in 1896, individual athletes paid their own way to Athens to compete as amateurs. Now, nearly all nations field the equivalent of the East German swim team, a squad bred in laboratory test tubes to demonstrate a triumph of the will.

The reason terrorists have the Games on their hit lists (Munich in 1972 was the worst example) is because the governments that they revile enter the stadiums with such wild displays of flag waving, as though the opening ceremony were a bullfight. At the London Games, security contracts are worth more than gold medals. For example, the British army is deploying surface-to-air missiles near the Olympic Stadium (apparently javelins no longer do the trick), and the FBI, in theory an exclusively domestic US Agency, is sending over about 500 agents, even though it was the Secret Service that won the regional escort trials in Cartagena.

Does the corporate business of the Olympics negate the achievements of the athletes? Am I so cold-hearted that I cannot admire Joan Benoit Samuelson coming home in 1984 with the gold or Fosbury’s flop? Not at all. I enjoy watching Moldova lose at water polo as much as the next American. At the same time, there is something cartoonish about NBA All-stars dunking over a Latvian small forward.

Were the decision mine, I would let the Olympics go the way of Nuremberg rallies. The Games strike me as ruinous to city finances and bad for sport. Should not the goal of the Olympic movement be to encourage more players and fewer spectators? Instead, the Games are a celebration of reclining consumerism. At least the athletes get to go through 100,000 condoms in 17 days.

Nor does any sporting event that requires the protection of thousands of soldiers, surface-to-air missiles, and 24/7 cable coverage strike me as the spiritual heir of the Games first contested in a Greek sanctuary.

Several school vacations ago, I took my younger daughter to Olympia, located in the western Peloponnese. We were tracking down the ancient wonders of the world, and Olympia once had a huge gold statue of Zeus, until “promoters” stripped it for parts and carted off the gold to Aleppo on donkeys.

We strolled around the original Olympic stadium, which even today could be built for about $200,000. The “seats” are slopes of grassy lawn, and the field of dreams is covered with dirt. The rest of the Olympic village is a few pine trees and some worn temples, but it’s magical.

Even during times of conflict, from 700 BC to 400 AD athletes came to Olympia from the contours of the Greek world, and left for home, if successful, only with olive branches in their hair. Along with paying honor to Zeus, the ancient Olympics celebrated athletic achievement, not prime-time nationalism or Coca-Cola. To show modesty, athletes were naked for their competitions. The Games ended only when Christianity moved to wipe out what it viewed as a pagan ritual.

At the end of three weeks of the London Games, even if the British army has had to shoot off a few of its surface-to-air missiles, TV commentators will pronounce the Games an immortal success, a triumph of Spartan proportions, and an epic not seen since Jason came back with the golden fleece.

Then, in three years, if not sooner, London will get the $15 billion invoice for its fun summer, and all it will have to show for it will be a few used diving boards and, with luck, some new light-rail. In the words of George Best, the great Northern Irish footballer: “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.”

Flickr photo by Jesse Scott / twowaystairs – Wenlock, the 2012 Olympic mascot.

Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His next book is Whistle-Stopping America.