20 JANUARY 2007, Page 22

Who's new in 2007 — and how are things in Sakhalin, Comrade Lobachov?

MARTIN VANDER WEYER An entry in the new edition of Who's Who isn't quite like a knighthood — you can't buy one, for a start — but it is nevertheless a distinction. It's also a useful indicator of trends. Business leaders appearing in the big red book for the first time this year illustrate the march of international corporate life: a big hello to 011i-Pekka Kallasvuo of Nokia, the Finnish mobilephone giant, and Pierre-Henri Gourgeon of Air France-KLM. But the names that particularly caught my eye are Britons who have expanded the horizons of consumer technology. Much has already been written about Jonathan lye, the Chingford-born designer at Apple Computer in California who led the team that created the iPod — a work of genius for the elegance of the `scroll-wheel' which drives it, replacing the awkward little buttons on earlier generations of hand-held gadgets. lye studied industrial design at Newcastle Poly, now Northumbria University — a fact which will prompt many educationists, for the umpteenth time, to lament that polytechnics which taught useful skills were turned into the sort of universities which mostly do not.

Much less famous than lye are a pair of Who's Who debutants who remind us that innovation is alive on this side of the Atlantic, despite the state of education. The brothers Ben and Jonathan Finn founded, in 1993, a company called Sibelius which creates musical notation software, allowing composers to write music on computers — and to collaborate via the internet on joint compositions. That may sound cacophonous, but from an old toy factory behind Finsbury Park station the Finns have set a global standard in a field which touches all of us just as much as the electronic devices that play the music. A multi-composer fanfare to them: knighthoods next, I hope.

Lenin Street revisited Restacking a pile of old logs in my shed, I came across something extraordinary: not a dead rat or a murder clue, but the tattered business card of Vladimir V Lobachov, chairman of the 'Committee for managing municipal property of the town of YuzhnoSakhalinsk, USSR'. Those initials, and the fact that his office was in Lenin Street, gave an indication of the age of the card. How he ended up in my log pile I'll never know, but I vividly recall meeting him in St Petersburg, shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He was bearded, earnest and eager to interest me in the mineral wealth of Sakhalin Island, off Russia's Pacific coast: this was the brief period of optimism in which progressive officials like him were anxious to adapt the best of Western capitalism to the building of a new Russia.

We never met again, and I can't help wondering how his career developed. The tragedy of modern Russia is that Lobachov's cadre of Gorbachev-era intellectuals and planners was so swiftly shoved aside by the gangsters and would-be oligarchs of Boris Yeltsin's years. Foreign investors were certainly keen to exploit Sakhalin's resources, but the wheel of fortune has turned again: the Putin regime has just forced Shell, Mitsui and Mitsubishi to hand over majority control of the Sakhalin II oil and gas project to state-owned Gazprom, while Exxon-Mobil is fighting a similar manoeuvre by Gazprom's rival Rosneft to grab Sakhalin I. Meanwhile, internet sources suggest that life in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk has not lived up to Lobachov's dream of progress: the town still has no domestic gas supply despite the presence of so many profithungry energy companies; instead, it has exceptionally high rates of business failure and juvenile crime; worse still, an invasion of rats seeking refuge from the winter cold has brought fears of plague in the suburb of Vladimirovka. If that's where Comrade Lobachov lives, I hope he doesn't go searching in his log pile for my business card.

Doughty Street farewell I shall miss the weekly walk from King's Cross to Doughty Street, now that The Spectator is moving to Westminster. For 15 years it has offered a tableau of economic and social change. Argyll Square, just south of the station, used to be a hookers' hang-out but has cleaned up its act and will no doubt be a property hot-spot when the St Pancras redevelopment is finished at last. Its improbably named bed-and-breakfast hotels — the Riviera, the Montana — now accommodate (guessing from the accents) far more East European job-seekers than native benefit claimants.

Southwards through a Camden council estate largely occupied by Bangladeshi families: the blocks have been neatly refurbished, and the ones called Great Croft and Hollisfield which my route bisects look really quite prosperous: one resident keeps a pair of shiny dark-blue limousines parked side by side. The next landmark is the Harrison pub — once nondescript, now offering free WiFi, Fairtrade coffee and chessboards. In this vicinity are gangs of hoodies whom I have sometimes crossed the road to avoid — but these days they are probably nothing more sinister than students of `tourism and leisure' at Westminster Kingsway College on Sidmouth Street.

Beside the college is the entrance to St George's Gardens, an old graveyard which is one of the loveliest but least-known green spaces in central London and was an early beneficiary of Heritage Lottery Fund cash. The garden's southern gate leads to the grand sweep of Mecldenburgh Square, dominated by university residences, and onwards past the Dickens Museum to the clutter and buzz of the Spectator house. In the early 1990s I used to scan local estate agents' windows, thinking to acquire a pied-a-ten-e in this handsome — and in those days, 'affordable' — quarter. I never did, and now I wouldn't have a hope: one Doughty Street house just sold for two and a quarter million. Savills says that more than £5 billion of this year's City bonus pool is pouring into the London property market, driving expected price growth of 15 per cent for 2007. So if you're outside the magic money circle, you should forget trying to buy anything you'd actually like to live in — and with interest rates on the rise, beware of mortgaging yourself to perdition in the attempt. I doubt there's a cardboard box in my pied-a-terre price range within walking distance of Old Queen Street, but I shall enjoy exploring the byways of Westminster to find out.