LONDON IS

FALLING DOWN

Roy Porter insists that, while there have

always been moans about the capital, this time things are really serious

IN HIS generous and astute review of my London: A Social History (Centre point, 29 October), Simon Jenkins takes issue with the dismal diagnosis advanced in the final chapters. There I highlighted the economic and social malaise threatening the capital since mid-century and casting long shad- ows over its future.

For this Jenkins berates me, implying that this is typical academic gloom, and doom-mongering: while jaundiced intellec- tuals wring their hands, real Londoners in tune with the times are out there in the clubs and pubs, knowing a good time when they see one. For Jenkins, London, so long monochrome and monotonous, really is, in the Nineties, a colourful place to be.

And he's right. In terms of shops and nightspots, architecture and street life, You've never had it so good' applies not to 1959 but to 1994. If London's health be measured by its congenial Covent Gardens to stroll around, chic Soho pavement cafés to drink at, and new buildings that have shed the pretence of being shoe-boxes, of course things are better now than 20 or 50 years ago.

Is Jenkins bouncy simply because he can nowadays buy a decent espresso on Paddington station, whereas Porter is pee- vish because he has experienced the theft of three heavily padlocked bicycles in Cen- tral London within the last two months? I think there's more to it than that.

The London Jenkins loves — the Lon- don I love — is the London that can't fail to be enjoyed by people like us: affluent, professional males in work and consuming Conspicuously. But there are other Lon- dons too: slum London, jobless London, outcast London. It may be the height of boorishness to bang on about street people huddled in doorways and sleeping rough, but the fact is that 20 years ago we thought that beggars were eyesores littering Cairo and Calcutta not Camden and Camber- well. Now a tourist might be less sure where the Third World starts.

The homeless are only part of a litany of metropolitan woes no less true for being all too familiar. Unemployment, almost unknown in the capital till the Sixties, now runs at well over 20 per cent in boroughs like Hackney and Haringey. With the dra- matic collapse in metropolitan manufac- turing, an increasing proportion of the employment available is low-paid, tempo- rary or dead-end. Homelessness has grown, alongside other evils: classroom violence, vicious racial attacks. The disaf- fection of many of the young is mirrored by the depression and disorientation of old age pensioners.

Muggings, sexual assaults, drug-related crime, especially soaring property theft, are not a disgruntled academic fogey's phantasms. They are trends that can readi- ly be documented — 584,000 reported crimes in 1979, 834,000 in 1990; they are oddly absent from the London sketches. We are witnessing the emergence of an underclass made up of males never effec- tively integrated into the world of work and of women running single-parent families to say nothing of drunks and dossers and others without real prospects, trapped by dependency, resented by the rest, leading to a degree of ghettoisation little known in the heyday of the Cockney. Of course, Simon Jenkins and I are not the kind of people who are likely to get raped or made homeless, but that doesn't diminish the reality of the experience.

We should add to all this the prevalent conviction that London's infrastructure and public services are disintegrating. It may be labouring the obvious, but the capital's traffic problems continue (by most indices) to worsen; its public transport services are notably inferior to, and more costly than, those of many West European big cities; and fume pollution is (it is widely feared) a worse health hazard than smog used to be: witness rising asthma amongst children. Schooling, hospitals, the warehousing of families in bed-and-breakfast hostels and so it goes on — who actually feels good about all of this?

It's hardly surprising that a recent poll suggested that two-thirds of Londoners wanted to leave. (Here Jenkins and I are on the same side, amongst the 'stayers', but apparently we're in the minority.) And that doesn't include those who have left already. The enthusiastic exodus in motion since the war has continued — to new towns, to the Greater South-East Region, to the M4 corridor and the Sunrise Belt anywhere. Often the emigrants have been the more enterprising young, seeking opportunities, desperate to bring up their families somewhere green and clean, flee- ing the dreadful expense of the capital. Left behind are disproportionate popula- tions of problem people — resource consumers rather than producers, storing up further problems for the future.

All that may be true, Jenkins will respond, but what's new? Was there ever a great city without great problems? Fore- boding is the emotion not of a city in decay but of one undergoing change, find- ing new feet, experiencing renewal. Progress has its casualties, and hasn't all this happened to London time and again in the past, in Defoe's or in Dickens's day? These are fair retorts. But there may be reason why, taking the long historical view, one cannot feel confident that things will turn out fine this time.

In 1800 or 1900, London had troubles galore, but it managed to ride them out because it was the heart of the greatest empire the world had ever known. Imperi- al commercial prosperity spontaneously helped to solve London's worst problems by creating jobs in some shape and form — in the docks, in manufacturing, process- ing and services — for everyone, immi- grants included, thereby knitting the whole population into the urban fabric.

For myriad obvious reasons, the eco- nomic future of London is today, by con- trast, wildly unpredictable — so much of it may be utterly beyond our control, hinging on rulings made in Brussels, Berlin or Frankfurt. Doubtless, London will remain a hub of affluent people and a centre of wealth-creation, through City finance, multinationals, the media, the professions. But how fruitfully such well-being will rip- ple outwards, through the generating of jobs, remains to be seen. The `renewal' of Docklands in the 1980s, at huge private and public expense, created little work for native East Enders and left the quarter with mounting joblessness.

The resolution of London's problems cannot be helped by the lack of any overall democratic, representative body. To say this is not to weep for Ken Livingstone's GLC; but by now Mrs Thatcher's itch to take revenge against Red Ken has penalised the metropolis enough. So long as County Hall is empty and the capital is run by a medley of ministers, quangos and borough councils, problems facing the city as a whole, like traffic and transport, will never be coherently addressed.

Simon Jenkins is doubtless right to con- tend that laissez-faire (even Victorian tumbledom) served London well. The city has thriven in the past despite, or even because of, an absence of centralised municipal government; but the hidden hand has done the trick only when the economy has been booming, creating work and expectations for all. On the other hand, long-term economic uncertainty, combined with the lack of the visible hand of responsible government, is an inauspi- cious mix which leaves me less than san- guine about London's future.

Simon Jenkins and I offer contrasting perspectives on the present. It would be agreeable to share Jenkins's confidence that what I interpreted in my book, to bor- row from William Blake, as 'marks of weakness, marks of woe' are best under- stood as transition pains. Today's London is certainly a brighter place. But are the foundations solid? And is it brighter for all? To expect a sunny future without a secure base for employment or capable government will be the triumph of boosters over gloomsters. I can only hope that it is booster Jenkins who is right.

Roy Porter is author of London: A Social History (Hamish Hamilton, 120).