London – Page 10 – Richard Brown

The drugs don\’t work

Originally posted in Guardian Housing Network, 15 May 2015

Housing was a far bigger issue in the 2015 general election manifestos than in 2010, and generated some of the campaign’s most controversial policy proposals. This reflects a growing public sense of crisis, and the combination of rising prices and slow construction that is particularly toxic in London, where the average house cost 11 times average earnings in 2014 (compared to seven times nationwide).

It is no surprise then that polling by Ipsos Mori shows that 28% of Londoners see housing as a top issue facing Britain today, compared with 13% nationwide. Housing is also not such a big issue for Conservative voters, and London is an increasingly Labour city, so will it remain high on the to-do list – and how will policies affect London?

The Conservative manifesto pledged to build 200,000 discounted starter homes for first-time buyers, to establish help-to-buy Isa savings accounts and to give housing association tenants the right to buy their homes. But London’s house and land prices are so high these policies will have least impact on the housing crisis in the city where it is most acute.

Help-to-buy take up has been much lower in London to date, and the new help-to-buy Isa has a maximum savings limit of £12,000, which will make only a small dent in affordability when London first-time buyer deposits are as high as £50,000.

The extension of right to buy could cost London the most, while benefitting it least. The National Housing Federation estimates that only 15% of London housing association tenants would be able to afford to buy their property, compared with 35% in northern England. But these discounted sales will be cross-subsidised by sales of the most expensive council houses, which will raise most cash in London (though high replacement costs will reduce the amount raised).

Whether boosting demand will boost supply is much debated, but the manifesto made some proposals about supply too. Measures to encourage use of brownfield and public sector land will be important in London, though much brownfield land in London is already allocated. Building on the green belt seems to be prohibited, while new garden cities will only be built where these are “locally led” (which probably rules them out in much of south-east England).

The impact of these measures may be limited in London, and parliamentary time dominated by other issues, but the coming state of constitutional flux offers an opportunity. Thanks to fixed-term parliaments, we know which party will be in government in early 2020. But we are a lot foggier about what they will be governing: a United Kingdom standing apart from its European neighbours; a loose federation of resurgent nation states; or an uneasy and asymmetric patchwork of provinces?

If all this is on the table, then housing in London must be. If the national prescription doesn’t work in London, then the next mayor should make the case for something that does; not for special treatment, but for more powers, resources and flexibility – to build more, better and faster.

London boroughs are starting to build again, and should be less restricted in borrowing against future revenue streams (including rent). The mayor should be able to establish more housing zones and development corporations to build homes using public land.

There is also a case to be made for pooling developers’ affordable housing payments across London to support a London-wide programme for affordable housing. The next mayor may also want to encourage higher densities in outer London, or push to look again at London’s green belt, and ask where releasing land (perhaps under public sector control) might provide more housing and more enjoyable green space.

Many of these solutions are highly interventionist and some would be controversial but it is hard to build the housing needed in a city like London without putting some noses out of joint. Mayors can do that. The political complexion of the incumbent should not make a difference; whatever the capital’s voting patterns, its housing crisis cannot be allowed to strangle growth.

Candidates for mayor in 2016 will vie to demonstrate that they understand the urgency of the crisis, and are committed to action. Housing could be the big issue in the next mayoral campaign; it is in everyone’s interest for the winner to be given the powers and resources to deliver on their promises.

No direction home

Originally posted on Centre for London\’s blog 27 April 2015

Londoners worry differently. We are less concerned about immigration and the NHS than other Brits, but much more anxious about housing – in 2014, 28 per cent of Londoners cited housing as one of the most important issues facing the country, versus 13 per cent across Great Britain (Ipsos MORI Issues Index, 2014 aggregated data).

The symptoms of the housing crisis are more pronounced in London, too. The average house price is seven times the average salary across England, but 11 times the average salary in London. Prices rose by 28 per cent across England between late 2008 and late 2014, but by 53 per cent in London (60 per cent in inner London).

This divergence is hurting the rest of the country as well as London: at a recent Centre for London event, former mayoral candidate Steve Norris described high housing prices as “both a fortress and a cage” preventing mobility between London and the rest of the UK, and undermining productivity.

So it looks like good news that the main party manifestos are making commitments on housing. But the specific symptoms and scale of London’s housing crisis call for specific solutions; many of the policies being touted are likely to have least impact in the Capital, where the housing crisis is most acute. The manifestos are missing the mark.

For example, whatever its much-debated merits as policy, the Conservatives’ proposal to extend right-to-buy to housing association tenants will have least impact in London, where the National Housing Federation estimates that only 15 per cent of tenants would be able to afford to buy their property (even with a discount), as opposed to 35 per cent in Northern England. Similarly, Help-to-Buy ISAs’ maximum savings of £12,000 will only make a small dent in affordability in a city where first time buyer deposits are as high as £50,000. And high land prices may make London the least economic location for 200,000 discounted starter homes.

Labour’s plans for new garden cities could relieve pressure on London, if implemented, though a commitment to working through consensus will make it hard to find sites in South East England. A preference for local first time buyers seems parochially mismatched to London’s churning population; born-and-bred Londoners do struggle to afford somewhere to live, but so do the thousands of young people who come to London every year and fuel the Capital’s economy. Meanwhile, the Mansion Tax would affect more than 100,000 householders in London, many of whom are not particularly high earners, or ‘mansion-dwellers’ by any normal definition.

To be fair, other policies will have more of an impact: the Conservatives commitment to fund brownfield land development, as prefigured by the London Land Commission announced in the budget, could favour the capital. Labour’s commitment to rent controls will be controversial with landlords, but could make a real difference to private sector renters (who comprise 24 per cent of London households, against 15 per cent in England and Wales), and powers to intervene against land-banking speculators could ginger up housing supply (London has 216,000 homes with planning permission in the ‘pipeline’).

Party manifestos are national documents, so maybe we should not expect them to be tailored to the specifics of an asymmetric housing crisis. And they are defensive as well as aspirational, seeking to offer pledges and commitments that will appeal to the majority, without opening up a flank that the other side can attack. But if London’s growth continues to outstrip expectations, how will the city find space for the ten million people forecast to live here by 2030? This is a highly-charged debate, on which the manifestos are silent: should we pursue more housing estate redevelopment, more council-led building to supplement housebuilders’ limited capacity, higher densities in suburban locations, remodeling the Green Belt, allowing more commercial-to-residential conversion?

Each of these ideas has its advocates, but each also has bitter opponents; losers as well as winners. The discussion may be as controversial in London as it is nationwide, but it will be harder for mayoral candidates to duck an issue that is so important to Londoners. Whether government lets them make a difference is a different matter, and the omens are not promising. Amidst all the talk of city deals and devolution, the modest proposal made last year in the Inspector’s report on the London Plan, that London should begin to think more radically about where it could accommodate new housing, was firmly slapped down by planning minister Brandon Lewis: Green Belt was sacrosanct, and there would be no going back to regional planning.

Nonetheless, perhaps the candidates standing for election as London’s next Mayor in a year’s time will feel the urgency of the crisis, claim the mandate, and demand the powers and resources to do something about it. And maybe, just maybe, the next government will listen.

Come bouncing back

Originally published on CityMetric 13 February 2015

Boris Johnson will be banging the drum for the capital with his accustomed panache as he visits Boston and New York this week. That’s not surprising: London has a great story to tell.
But, while we are quick to celebrate London’s gravity-defying recovery from the last recession, we still do not fully understand it. At an LSE London lecture last week, Professor of Human Geography Ian Gordon sought to redress the balance by asking why the capital did not just survive the 2007 financial crash; in its wake, it actually thrived.

It’s a multi-billion dollar question, not least because London looked pretty vulnerable as the crisis unfolded. Unlike previous recessions, which had hit the Midlands and north harder, the early 1990s recession had its greatest impact in London, reflecting a shift from manufacturing to “speculation” (broadly-defined, to include housing and stock markets as well as knowledge-intensive activity).

A lot of people (including Gordon, and me) expected the years after 2007 to be a re-run, or worse. Instead, between 2007 and 2013, employment in five central London boroughs rose by 23 per cent, a faster annual growth rate than in the period running up to the crash, though unemployment rose across London, and job number recovery rates in the rest of the capital remained at much the same level as the rest of the UK.

Gordon reflected on whether there were structural features of London\’s economy that helped it survive. He also asked whether there were policy biases in terms of public and private investment and cutbacks, and whether the programmes of economic intervention (bail-outs, guarantees and quantitative easing) had features that favoured London.

The first two factors certainly contributed something. Structurally, the devaluation of the pound by 25 per cent between 2007 and 2009 could have helped tourism and investment (more on this below). What’s more, businesses fought to retain skilled workers , who are disproportionately located in London. And London’s economy was well-equipped to continue to supply luxury goods to rich individuals whose wealth was relatively unaffected by financial vicissitudes (the “plutonomy model”, named after the CitiGroup reports of the mid-2000s).

There were also policy biases towards London. The 2012 Olympics and Crossrail were big capital projects sponsored by government, which boosted the ability of London construction services firms to sell their skills overseas. There is some evidence that firms headquartered in London were quicker to lay off branch office than head office personnel, too.

But these factors shrink in significance, Gordon argued, compared to the sheer weight of financial intervention. He cited Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England in valuing the guarantees given to banks as equivalent to a subsidy of £100bn in 2009 alone (through their reductions in the cost of borrowing).

Meanwhile, quantitative easing was designed to divert nervous money away from safe bonds into more risky and productive investments – but, coupled with low interest rates, it encouraged a surge in equity prices. (Some went to emerging markets in search of even higher returns.) The FTSE 100 index rose from a low of less than 4,000 in 2009 to nearly 7,000 today – around the level of its 2008 high – delivering great returns for many investors.

But the job growth in the five boroughs studied (City of London, Westminster, Islington, Tower Hamlets and Hackney) was not restricted to financial services. It was also in property, real estate and engineering, tourism, hotels and restaurants, public services, and creative and digital businesses.

Some of the growth in professional property and engineering activity can be attributed to the big capital projects, and the confidence that London’s 2012 success created. Growth in creative and digital businesses includes not only Tech City (about which Gordon was sceptical), but also IT support to increasingly tech-driven financial services. Finally, a buoyant stock market does much to help the higher end of the restaurant business: witness the profusion of £100 per head openings around the hedge-y hotspots of Mayfair.

Going beyond Gordon’s careful analysis, it’s also worth asking what part London’s booming property market played. The devaluation of the pound did little to boost tourism in the short term (visitor numbers did not return to their 2007 levels until 2012); but it did make London a safe haven for overseas investment.

Much of this investment went into property, and particularly the prime central London market, where 60 per cent of purchases by value were by overseas buyers in 2007-11. And after a brief slowdown in 2008, prices recovered fast, rising by 45 per cent across central London by 2013.

But, unlike prices, transaction volumes remained stubbornly low; they fell by about 40 per cent in 2007, and have remained pretty low ever since. In other words, buyers\’ money was flooding in, but sellers weren\’t responding; the market has failed to regain its pre-crash liquidity.

Investors wanting to increase their exposure, or to invest gains made in the stock market, had limited options for new purchases. So many chose to extend or dig down, creating catacombs of wealth in London’s most desirable streets – and contributing to the growth in employment in construction, engineering and allied trades.

So, the recovery in London’s economy, or at least in job numbers, has been focused on a very small area of the city. Perhaps more significantly, it could be seen as based on the wealth of a fairly small section of the population, and their spending habits, from underground cinemas to Michelin-starred restaurants.

This influx and expansion of wealth in central London may or may not be a good thing in itself – it has generated employment for a lot of Londoners, but its impact on property prices and the cost of living has stretched far beyond central London. And we shouldn’t become complacent about what it means for the future.

Gordon suggests that, just as this unique set of circumstances cushioned London in the downturn, they are also amplifying a speculative upswing. Central London may not have escaped the recession by means of our extraordinary civic virtue and vigour, by the discovery of some magic formula that has “abolished boom and bust” (remember that?).

Rather, he suggests, it may have prospered through a happy co-incidence of circumstances that has papered over the cracks. A change in interest rates, or exchange rates, or a crash in property prices could also have amplified impacts – equally and oppositely.

How London’s economy will fare longer term is a matter for crystal ball-gazing, not secure prediction. But we owe it to ourselves to reflect more rationally and systematically on whether London has achieved such apparently gravity-defying success through luck or good judgement. Those answers may be helpful if – when – the tables turn.

City sickness?

Originally published on CityMetric on 19 January 2015

The Centre for Cities’ City Outlook 2015, out today, tells a story of continuing success for the capital. Since the mid-1990s, the capital’s population and economy have been growing in tandem, and the city quickly regained the economic ground lost in the early 2000s and in the last recession.

Over the past ten years, in fact, London’s population has grown by 1.1m. The number of private sector jobs in the city have risen by 650,000, and the number of businesses by 115,000. The growth in population is greater in absolute terms, but the economic indicators are rising more quickly. London’s economy is growing faster than its population.

The sector that grew fastest, accounting for one third of London’s net new jobs over the past decade, was “professional, scientific & technical activities” – a sector which includes professions such as law, engineering, architectural design and accountancy, as well as management consultancy, advertising, and research & development. London’s economy is increasingly dominated by knowledge-intensive, highly-skilled businesses.

Growth in these sectors is the holy grail of economic development, and something to be celebrated – but it presents challenges, too. Firstly, like other UK cities, London has stubbornly persistent levels of unemployment – the claimant count increased by 40,000 (around 25 per cent) over the decade, despite the growth in job numbers. The jobs being created are not in the sectors that are easily accessible to people with low skills levels. At the same time, entrepreneurs in London’s growth sectors are complaining that finding people with the right specialist and generic skills is one of the biggest problems they face in seeking to grow their businesses.

London also faces a growing affordability crisis, particularly in housing costs. Demand for new housing has outstripped supply by a factor of three: in the decade when London’s population grew by more than a million, its housing stock grew by less than 300,000. Combined with the popularity of property – even unoccupied property – as an asset for investment, this has fuelled spiralling house prices, with the average house costing more than 30 times the average wage in super-prime central London boroughs.

This affordability crisis is pushing many Londoners on modest incomes, including people in entry-level jobs in London’s growth sectors, out of the inner city to places where property costs may be cheaper. But high transport costs still inflict a heavy toll. The Centre for London’s report Hollow Promise called these people, earning less than average but above the benefits threshold, ENDIeS: people who are employed but with no disposal income or savings.

There is also evidence that some are moving even further afield than London’s suburbs: commuting from outside London grew by about ten per cent between 2001 and 2011, and recent reports showed that young Londoners are moving away from the capital in record numbers. In 2012-13, indeed, there was a net outflow of 22,000 30-something workers. This is leading to resurgent populations and job markets; but is also putting pressure on housing in other southern cities like Oxford, Cambridge and Brighton. These are seeing London-esque gaps between house prices and earnings, in part as a result of local wages lagging behind the house prices that London commuters can pay.

Taken together, housing affordability and skills are two of the capital’s biggest challenges, as reflected in business group London First’s recent London 2036: an agenda for jobs and growth report. Unless we build more housing and other infrastructure, and invest in our skills base, London’s long-term position as one of the pre-eminent world cities could be threatened.

Does this matter? For better or worse, London’s success over the last decade has been built on its appeal as the destination for skilled workers, from the UK and beyond. This has resulted in a skewed economy, for sure. The distribution of resources, talent and infrastructure has been meant a north/south (or, more accurately, an SE/rest of UK) divide.

But a more balanced economy could also be a less prosperous one. Talent has been concentrated in London, a pre-eminent global city; the alternative is not that we have multiple global cities, but that we have none, and that a big chunk of the business coming into the UK disappears.

Knowledge intensive businesses are not sentimental or nationalistic; with the right infrastructure in place, they can easily sell their services across borders. What they depend on above all is a highly skilled workforce; they will operate from whichever cities can offer them this workforce at competitive rates.

London offers not only the critical mass of high-skilled workers, but the infrastructure and the cultural energy which attracts the biggest, and most lucrative, international employers. Over the last ten years it has become increasingly important to the country’s economy. But if London continues to become unaffordable to everyone but the richest and the luckiest, it will lose the skills that have supported its growth, and growth across the UK.

Some firms may follow the talent to Birmingham or Bristol, and many would welcome that type of rebalancing within the UK economy. But a large number of firms would move to Berlin or Barcelona – and we will all lose out.

The UK’s regions may have lost out from internal migration, but they shouldn’t necessarily welcome the tide turning against the capital. Economically, at least, the affordability crisis in London could become a big problem for all of us.

Just another accident statistic?

The recent spate of horrific cycle accidents in London, many resulting in fatalities, has focused attention on the perils of cycling on London\’s busy streets. There has been understandable grief, outrage and a rising political temperature as Mayor Boris Johnson is accused of \’blaming the victim\’.

What there hasn\’t been (as far as I have seen) is any assessment of how dangerous cycling is in proportion to the number of cyclists, or compared to other forms of transport on London\’s roads. It may seem a callous question to ask, as one cyclist crushed by a lorry is clearly one too many, but I was curious about the relative risk.

After not much digging in the London Datastore, I found some statistics from TfL\’s Transport Trends survey, which reports on number of journeys taken on different forms of transport each day (strictly speaking \’journey stages\’ – if I walk to a bus stop, take a bus, then cycle, I have had three journey stages), and the number of accidents and deaths suffered by users of each form of transport each year. Oddly, the last set of numbers are for 2009 for journeys and 2010 for accidents, but I suspect the ratios did not change dramatically between those two years.

Here are the statistics:

The difference between relative accident rates is pretty stark. London\’s cyclists are eight times as likely to be fatally injured as car drivers and passengers, and seven and a half times as likely to be injured. Cycling isn\’t as dangerous as riding a motorbike (more than 50 times the risk of driving a car), but it\’s substantially more dangerous than walking or using other motor vehicles. It would be interesting to extend The Economist\’s comparison of USA and Netherlands fatality rates, but I don\’t have the data.

Overall, cycling on London\’s roads is about five times more risky than the norm for fatalities, and 10 times more for injuries. I\’m not sure whether I expected this to be higher or lower; by way of comparison, occupations such as roofers, electricians and farmers have similarly heightened fatality rates. But it\’s not encouraging me to get on my bike.

Your city\’s a sucker?

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It\’s been a busy week for citittude. Bruce Katz has been in town, showcasing his latest data on how US cities are leading the economy out of recession. And Benjamin Barber joined him for a Centre for London debate, arguing that, as nation states flounder, mayors are the most dynamic and pragmatic leaders, and that international alliances of cities are the powerful organisational structure.

Work has irritatingly stopped me attending several of the events but what I\’ve seen from Twitter feeds and blogs suggest an almost evangelical level of excitement; that as the world turns increasingly urban, cities are asserting themselves, seizing power and initiative from the drab and clumsy nation states that hold them back. We have come a long way from the sixties or even the eighties, when cities were viewed a crime-ridden and corrupt rat holes, best avoided by upright citizens or treated as a problem, a target for initiatives, by well-meaning politicians.

Now, if this is a new religion, I\’m a worshipper. The vitality and variety of London continues to astonish me, and the two mayors I have worked for are far more impressive than the national politicians I have come across. Similarly, I broadly sign up to the \’Mayoral Manifesto\’, the programme of policies that pretty well every mayor pushes, whether nominally from the left of the right. This manifesto (which I will write more about another time) promotes open borders and global capitalism, but is also concerned about housing, about social equity and about climate change. It embraces minority groups and marginal lifestyles, invests in public transport and public space, but also endorses a tough law and order regime, with low tolerance for anything that could be seen as civic unrest or even dissent.

So, to borrow from Edward Glaeser, cities have triumphed. But there\’s another side to this story too; one that would caution against too much triumphalism, would whisper warnings against hubris like a Roman senator’s attendant whispering a memento mori. As cities become more like each other – with the same Mayoral Manifesto, the same coffee franchises and the same bus rapid transit systems – they drift further and further away from their rural hinterlands. Some would argue, and in the case of London have done so – that this process should be followed through, that cities should be granted proper autonomy, controlling their own tax, welfare and regulatory systems.

Absent that solution – and modern city states are a pretty motley collection, including Singapore, Hong Kong, the Vatican and Monte Carlo – and cities will continue to have to live with their sprawling green neighbours. Cracks are showing: in England, the tension between London and the rest (including regional cities) is becoming a leitmotif of debate: on house prices, on High Speed 2, on funding for the arts . But in the west (where the vast majority of the population already lives in urban communities), the urban elite has tended to stay in control, though the Tea Party movement in the US and UKIP in the UK can be seen as rural/provincial reactions to metropolitan values.

In the developing world, where urbanization rates remain below 50 per cent, and urban values are perhaps less widespread, rural champions have been elected and tensions have been more clearly manifested. In Istanbul, the Taksim Square demonstrations brutally repressed by the police were the actions of a beleaguered urban liberal class fighting against destruction of a public space (one of the gravest sins in the urban catechism) by a President elected by a more religious, more conservative hinterland that is even more remote from Istanbul than rural Arkansas is from New York.

Similarly, India\’s urban, secular Congress Party is perpetually locked in battle with the more sectarian rural politics of the BJP. In Sri Lanka, a recent profile of President Rajapaska argued that the urban elites of Colombo regard their president, elected on a rural buddhist ticket, with embarrassment.

I\’m not sure where all this leads us. Personally, I am clear where my loyalties lie, and I don\’t think cities should be in the business of kow-towing to rural conservatives. But even in their moment of greatest triumph, cities should tread softly in proclaiming inherent superiority and denouncing their rural opponents as bigots and hicks. Those singing hosannas to the greater glory of the urban inside the church should be aware of those outside, many of whom are indifferent or actively hostile to their creed.

Come together?

There\’s a piece by urban maven Richard Florida on The Atlantic Cities blog, summarising some research on the link between urban density and productivity. What is perhaps more interesting than the fact that there is a link (talented people and businesses benefit from \’agglomeration\’ and are drawn to the locations that support it) is the fact that this only works for cities with high levels of skills:

\”[the report] notes that density plays a bigger role in cities where levels of skill and human capital are higher. Metro areas with below average levels of human capital realize no productivity gains from density, the study finds, while doubling density in metros with above average human capital gain productivity benefits that are roughly twice the average. This \”negative net agglomeration effect\” found in less skilled metros leads the authors to conclude that the negative effects of congestion swamp the positive effects of urbanization in less skilled places.\”

That is to say, densification works for you if you live – put bluntly – in a middle-class professional city, but less well if you are in a low-skilled working class city. This seems to highlight something that is little remarked on by professional density fans like me, even if it is about people and communities within cities, rather than cities as economic entities. For all the benefits (viability of local services, lower car dependency, lower carbon impact) that high density urban living can offer, high density means different things for different classes: living in the Barbican and living in the Heygate Estate are different experiences, even if cast from the same concrete. Notting Hill is not Canning Town.

So how does density relate to deprivation? In London, the most densely populated wards include both some of the richest and some of the poorest (Tachbrook and Green Street East (in Westminster and Newham respectively)), but the poorer wards are denser overall. The graph below shows London\’s 620 wards grouped in order of their average rank in the 2007 Index of Deprivation, with their population density on the vertical axis.

The co-efficient of correlation is -0.48, which implies some relationship between high deprivation rankings and high density, if not a precise one (IMPORTANT HEALTH WARNING: this blog post involves me using statistical formulae and large datasets, so should be treated with something between suspicion and disdain). So far, so unsurprising. Poorer areas are more likely to be in the inner city (so likely to be denser), and also likely to include fewer fripperies like parks that would detract from density (when measured as people per square kilometre, rather than as dwellings per hectare). Prosperous areas that look dense because they are built up may actually be low density in terms of residents (from, for example, single people or couple living in larger flats with spare rooms).

So, if that\’s our starting point, how has London been changing in recent years? The chart below shows actual and projected changes in population density (2001-16), against deprivation rank.

Three things are immediately noticeable. The first is that London is becoming denser almost everywhere. Secondly, the curve is a lot more ragged: most wards are seeing a relatively steady change in population, but there are places (like Stratford New Town, Canning Town and Fairlfield) where density is more than doubling. Finally, it is the poorer places that are densifying most intensively (with a correlation co-efficient of -0.40 between deprivation rank and absolute increase in density). These are the places that are densest, and getting denser: Northumberland Park, Bromley-by-Bow and Mile End are all among the places that are densifying by more than 20 per cent in fifteeen years.

So, what if anything does this all mean? It means that we need to look at the numbers more closely. How are inner and outer city areas differentiated, and how does densification relate to changes in prosperity and deprivation? Is greater density a symptom of improving fortunes, or a cause of them? Or does densification have the opposite impact on richer and poorer places, boosting prosperity in the former and amplifying the problems of poverty in the latter? In the meantime, you can note that the densest, and poorest, areas in London are densifying fastest. It\’s not clear that this is necessarily a good thing.

(Thanks to London\’s http://data.london.gov.uk/ site for the figures, and to Paula Hirst for the tip off)

DRAFT POST – TO BE REVIEWED

Old Flo, the Bamiyan of Bow*?

In a bland blog in the Huffington Post, Tower Halmets Mayor Lutfur Rahman defends his plans to sell off Draped Seated Woman, the Henry Moore sculpture erected in an east London housing estate in 1962. The article runs through predictable bromide about ring-fenced funding, Tower Hamlets\’ record in providing affordable rented housing and his electorate\’s support for the sale.

But Mayor Rahman makes an interesting point in passing: \’if only there was as much national media interest in the fact that we are being forced to make £100million cuts by 2015, as there has been over the proposed sale of this sculpture to mitigate the effect of some of those cuts.\’ There is something slightly uneasy about the intense focus on the sale of this work of art, when the material conditions for the people of Tower Hamlets, where more than fifty per cent of children live in poverty, are so poor and receive so little coverage in the media.

Of course there is more to it than that (and you can worry about poverty and cultural deprivation). The sale of the sculpture (affectionately known as \’Old Flo\’) is understood by both sides of the argument as symbolic. On the one hand it betokens nostalgia for post-war \’nothing too good for the workers\’ social solidarity that also gave us the magnificence of the Royal Festival Hall. On the other hand, there is impatience with this nostalgia, which is largely (but not exclusively) being expressed by middle-class liberals like me: when will we start protesting as loudly about poverty and exploitation; when will we value flesh and blood, as much as bronze?

The comparison needs to be cautiously made, as Tower Hamlets is not the Afghanistan, but the terms of the debate remind me of when the Taliban government of Afghanistan blew up the great Buddhas at Bamiyan in 2001 – an act that scandalised the world. The Taliban said that they did so after Swedish scholars offered money to repair the statues, but refused to let it be used instead to provide food for starving children. Their gratuitous act of vandalism was a dynamite retort to westerners worrying about material heritage more than current poverty.

The sale is probably a done deal now, and a scandal of sorts. The issue is what sort of scandal it is: one of a callous council ready to sell its heritage for a mess of pottage, or one of tough choices between selling artworks, or cutting back services, exposing to greater risk local people already leading precarious lives.

* or Stepney, actually, but the rhyme works better if shifted a little further eas

Gilded palaces

If there are two things I dislike with a moderate but consistent intensity, they are shopping malls and crowds. So it was against all sorts of better judgement that I visited Westfield Stratford this evening.

As we walked through the thronged corridors of shops clad in gleaming marble, shiny glass and fashionably-distressed copper, my companion observed that the crowds really looked and sounded like East London – loud, ethnically mixed, not particularly well-heeled.

This reminded me of a middle-aged man I watched being interviewed when the Royal Festival Hall was refurbished in 2007. When the building opened in the 1940s, the interviewee was growing up in South London, and vividly remembered his first visit to the venue: he could not believe that someone like him was not only allowed but encouraged to visit somewhere with this thickness of carpet, this richness of marble, this elegance of balustrade.

In many ways Westfield Stratford, the apotheosis of 21st century consumer capitalism, is the polar opposite of the Royal Festival Hall, with its high-minded aspirations towards \’culture for the masses\’. But the buildings share something too: like the Festival Hall, Westfield Stratford isn\’t a dumbed-down version of something else. It doesn\’t fob local people off with cheap finishes and \’value\’ retail outlets, but gives them as good a high-end shopping mall that it would build anywhere else.

There are plenty of criticisms to level at malls – their gaudy promotion of consumerist fantasy, their impact on neighbouring shops, their introverted street systems and privatised public space – and Westfield Stratford will probably be accused of many of these. But it doesn\’t patronise, or pander to presumed poverty of aspiration. It deserves credit for that.

Step on

After the riots, the surge of opinion and analysis. As Aditya Chakrabortty observed in today\’s Guardian, this week\’s mayhem has acted like a tumultuous Rorschach Test in which everyone can see what they want to see. So, three quick thoughts on the week\’s events (please take \’nothing can justify\’, \’London is the poorer\’ and \’in a very real way, we are all guilty\’ as read):

As any halfway-decent engineer understands, suspension bridges wobble worst when crowds fall into step: the unified pace amplifies the sway, and bridges become perilous. This natural tendency to lock step scuppered the Millennium Bridge in 2000, and a sign on Albert Bridge still warns troops to break step. Social networking enabled the rioters to converge and focus their looting, but enabled the clean-up too. The cumulative impact was dramatic: just as rioters overwhelmed the police, volunteer street cleaners swamped Hackney and had to be redirected to Clapham Junction. The capacity of social networks to foment groupthink makes for a queasy feeling, like being on a ship that lurches, as its passengers rush first one way then another. This alleged anarchy was built upon systems and herd mentality.

The roll-call of closed roads on Tuesday\’s radio bulletins gave a trivial taste of what is must be like to live in a war zone, never sure from one morning to the next what districts remain intact. It showcased the precariousness of urban life: the actions of a few hundred teenagers can quickly disrupt the delicately-balanced metabolism of the ecosystem (as can a few days\’ fuel blockade, or a heavy snowfall). But Tuesday also showed the resilience of that ecosystem: people picked their way past burnt-out buildings to the tube, and shops continued to operate from behind smashed windows.

Finally, the riots may not have been explicitly political, but they were about power. Or at least about powerlessness. It may be as futile as it is presumptuous to speculate about individual rioters\’ motives, but it is not hard to read into the faces captured on CCTV the euphoric rush of suddenly and surprisingly being in control – of your life, of your neighbourhood, of your scared fellow citizens. The price to be paid for those moments will be harsh, but will the violent euphoria prove addictive?