The Planner(43)
‘You’re mixing use with ownership. Planners can’t make a judgement on who owns buildings, only the different uses they put them to.’
‘Well, what about if the government owns them?’
‘We don’t really own all that many buildings any more. We certainly wouldn’t own the lease on a cafe like this.’
‘In that case, your whole profession is fucked. Ownership is everything. If you don’t own anything then you’re nothing.’
They walked to Felix’s car. It was, and James should have guessed this, elderly, French and battered – the smallest and least expensive car on the street. It was like the pieces of public art that accompanied new shopping centres: an expression of non-market values, paid for out of the proceeds of consumerism. James was not necessarily any closer to having his own worldview, but he was at least getting better at understanding Felix.
They drove off and left the knowing streets of Notting Hill with its pink and blue houses, dark velvet bars and retail follies run by the wives of investment bankers. They crossed the West Way and continued north-west, beyond the Georgian terraces and Victorian villages. They travelled between the disputed territories of Kilburn and Kensal Rise and into Willesden with its food wholesalers and less fashionable ethnic minorities. They went on, passing Cricklewood, which James had always found difficult to interpret, and through Wembley’s uncompetitive light-industrial base.
Further still they went, until the roads widened out, the speed limits rose, the cars got bigger and they were somewhere else altogether: they were in Metroland. James knew it well – not from direct experience, but from the books he’d read, and the things his lecturers had told him. Terrible things. For this was London’s Wild West – unplanned, unregulated, manically constructed by speculators before Patrick Abercrombie and his men at the County Council had tamed the city, bound it with Green Belt and stopped it from eating England. But what had been done couldn’t be undone: Uxbridge, Stoneybridge, Ruislip, Harrow Town, Ickenham – they would be here for ever now. The permasuburbs, more enduring and solid than the city they had come from, as if it was London itself that was the afterthought, the shanty town in the centre that wouldn’t stay still.
As James knew, it had happened very quickly – no more than twenty years – for private investors can do bad things so much faster than public investors can do good things. And everything had been set-up for them, largely of course by the public sector, who had constructed an Underground line, new arterial roads, energy supply lines and beautiful train stations – everything the developers had needed. In no time at all they had built tens of thousands of semi-detached houses that were perfectly designed to make money. Beloved by house buyers, estate agents, mortgage lenders. Beloved by Laura, and all those people who didn’t know anything about town planning.
And ever since then, all those new families on moderate incomes and long-term fixed-rate mortgages had come here with their pet goldfish and made decisions entirely on the basis of their own desires, unconstrained by planning restrictions and with the sole purpose of increasing their individual happiness. They had built porches, bought plastic window frames, decorated facades with replica Tudor beams, covered their brickwork in stone cladding, poured concrete over their front gardens and stuck satellite dishes on their roofs.
‘I can’t bear this part of London,’ said James. ‘The way it just goes on and on, and with all these bloody awful people.’
‘I won’t hear anything against them,’ said Felix. ‘These are my tribe. I may not interact with them on a personal level, but these are the people whom I am paid to relate to. There wasn’t really even an advertising industry until they came into being.’
But it was more difficult for James to take an objective perspective. Largely because he was one of them, James couldn’t abide the lower-middle classes. It had taken a long time and quite a lot of money for him to learn this, and to learn to be suspicious of his own tastes and values. But now he knew better. He was a planner, and one of the things he was paid to do was to have opinions and make judgements on how horrible other people’s houses were. Although, the strange thing was, driving at forty-five miles per hour on a dual carriageway in the sunshine, it didn’t actually look all that bad.
‘I think part of the problem,’ said Felix, ‘is that cities are never finished, like works of art, and they don’t die like humans. There’s no shape or dignity. London is two thousand years old, and it’s still an unruly adolescent.’