Portraits and Miniatures(63)

This leads on to the question of what gives a city metropolitan atmosphere, which Glasgow in my view indisputably has, and which, amongst English cities, Birmingham and Leeds for example, although both now bigger in population than Glasgow, do not. It is obviously not therefore a simple question of size, although a certain minimum is a necessary qualification. To stick to English examples for the moment, York and Bath, Salisbury and Winchester are all satisfactory and indeed distinguished little cities, but no one could possibly describe them as metropolitan.

Yet at the other end of the scale I do not think it is possible to deny metropolitan status to any of the really enormous cities of the world. Poverty and confusion by no means exclude it. Nowhere could be more pulsating with a metropolitan current that sparks well beyond the frontiers of the country of which it is the capital than is Cairo, with its seven million or so fairly wretched population and communications chaos. Nor can Calcutta, with ten million even more miserable inhabitants, be denied great city status. It is an artificial creation of the Raj, or at least of ‘John Company’ before that, and it is declining vis à vis Bombay and maybe Delhi too. But it has enough governmental, legal, commercial and journalistic tradition, expressed in its buildings and layout, to keep it in the metropolitan league. Shanghai, of approximately the same monstrous size as the other two, is another example like Calcutta of a city that has lost the purpose for which it was built. The early twentieth-century buildings of the Bund stand as an isolated and fossilized monument to Western commercial penetration. But as Shanghai remains the second city in political importance and the first in population of the biggest country in the world it too can hardly be pushed out of the league. Indeed it is Peking which, away from the contrasting authoritarianisms of the Forbidden City and the Great Hall of the People, looks unmetropolitan because of its unconcentrated layout.

‘Spread-outness’ is indeed in general the enemy of metropolitan quality. I cannot see Milton Keynes becoming a metropolis however large it grows. It is because New York is so far at the opposite pole that its position as the captain of the metropolises is not seriously in doubt. And it is a concept which provides a battlefield over which the metropolitan status of the other great American cities can be fought out.

Chicago does not suffer from ‘spread-outness’. Fifty or sixty years ago it broke out of the constriction of the Loop which had previously held tight its downtown area. But it remains concentrated by its lakeside site, has the most striking high buildings in the world, and securely holds its position as America’s second city, culturally and commercially. This is probably because the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles, Chicago’s exact twin in population and the centre of a more rapidly growing area, is so scattered that it contains a peak significantly higher than Ben Nevis within the city limits. Its wealth, its size, its cultural resources, resulting partly from its position as world film capital, save it from being provincial, but its lack of a centre of animation means that it has never wholly vanquished the much smaller but superbly sited and highly concentrated San Francisco as the capital of the West Coast, let alone pushed Chicago out of national second place.

Philadelphia and Detroit, the fourth and the fifth United States cities, have dull sites and unexciting terrain. Philadelphia is redeemed by its history. It claims to have been the second largest English-speaking city in the world until the very precise date of 1794, and one wonders to what it then ceded this distinction: New York, Edinburgh, or perhaps Calcutta (if ‘English speaking’ is defined as loosely as in much of America today)? Detroit’s start as a French fort does not give it a comparable historical redolence to William Penn’s city and it remains a manufacturing town rather than a metropolitan city, no more a rival to Chicago than Leeds is to Glasgow.

Washington is the most intriguing example of a city that stands uneasily on the frontier of being a metropolis. It is also interesting as the oldest and the most important of the politically and artificially created capitals, and hence the one which has had the longest opportunity to grow into a real city. It is now large enough by any standards. With over three million in the metropolitan area it is bigger than any German city, and bigger than any other European one except for London, Paris, Madrid and Moscow. But for the first 130 years it remained a small town built on an often muddy brown marsh with remarkably few amenities. When Theodore Roosevelt, a fashionable New Yorker, became President in 1901, he regarded Washington as a place of adventurous exile and life in the White House almost like being in an army camp. British diplomats there were paid an unhealthy living allowance until well into this century.