CITY LIFE
BENNY GREEN
There is at the moment the slightly overripe aroma of a Town Hall masterstroke wafting across London, and not for the first time in our island story, it has its origins not far from the river. Hammersmith Borough Council has occasioned much surprise and
ribald laughter by announcing its intention of making Fulham fashionable, so that it can then sell off, at what a friend of mine in the district described to me as 'exstrawbitant' prices, the kind of properties where even the mice keep threatening to go to the Rent Tribunal and which ought really to be pulled down to make way for decent, respectable slums. Ribald laughter by all means, but that after all this time anyone should be surprised, or even pretend to be surprised, by the Grouchovian extravagances of town hall diplomacy, comes itself as a great surprise.
Certainly there is nothing very unusual about the council's naivety. The argument appears to go something like this: the King's Road is fashionable; Fulham is not far from the King's Road; therefore, why isn't Fulham fashionable? I don't know why, and nor, I wouldn't mind betting, does Ham- mersmith Borough Council, which thinks the trick can be done by planting some trees, blocking off some roads, and then bestowing the ultimate cachet of price tags ranging from £12,000 to £25,000,
My instinctive reaction to all this is to acknowledge its devilish cunning. When borough councillors prove themselves capable of divining, all by themselves, that Fulham is not far from Chelsea, who can say that civic intelligence is dead? And when those same officials 'screw their aldermanic wisdom to the point where they are 'able to perceive, without benefit of market researchers, that the King's Road is fashionable, then it seems that the glory of local government has been confirmed once and for all. However, having extended the hand of friendship in this way, I must now ram it down the municipal throat by asking whether there be anyone so cruel, even a borough councillor, who would wish upon us another King's Road? To live with one cultural junkyard of that kind is un- fortunate; to live with two sounds very much like polygamy, as one of Chelsea's most distinguished residents once very nearly said. It so happens that I have a deep personal regard for precisely the type of Fulham pro- perty which Hammersmith wants to pro- mote. Indeed, so romantic do I find the ordinary two-up-two-down of the area that I used the very setting for the opening scene of a musical I wrote three years ago. It was rather a good musical which played to packed houses for nine weeks without taking anything remotely like the amount which Hammersmith Borough Council is thinking of asking for the real thing. For a description of those properties about a hundred years ago, when they were still fairly new, it is necessary to look no further than the preface to Shaw's Immaturity, where he talks about his mother's house in Victoria Grove, Fulham, on which he descended in 1876. Whatever the rent was, Shaw certainly con- tributed nothing towards it ('I did not throw myself into the struggle for life: I threw my mother into it'), but he was interested enough in the environment to note how quiet and respectable Fulham was in comparison to the dissipations of Chelsea down the road, Hammersmith Borough Council please note.
By one of those curious and totally ir- relevant literary coincidences, twenty years later Arnold Bennett came to live in the same Victoria Grove, in whose purlieus, ac- cording to his journal for 1897, he arrived at his famous conclusion about the mental con- dition of the dedicated novelist. While taking the Fulham air he is much moved by the beauty of the London fog, as only a resident of Stoke-on-Trent could be, and then strolls do into the King's Road, where he perceives that 'the• men and women were each totally different from every other', which brings him to the realisation that 'the novelist must see everything like a baby or a lunatic'. Whether Hammersmith Borough Council is behaving like a baby or a lunatic only time will tell, but I wish it would understand that those shifts in the tides of fashion which suddenly elevate one district to popularity and relegate another to Outer Moqgolia socially speak- ing, are not entirely fortuitous, have absolutely nothing to do with tree-lined streets or blocked roads, and may just con- ceivably have some vague connection with the architectural grace of the local in-
teriors. •
The apotheosis of Canonbury is proof that seekers after pleasant domestic bolt-holes will put up with anything, even each other, when they find what they are looking for. The road linking The Angel with Highbury Corner is not the kind which would make anyone believe in the perfectability of man, but its almost comical seediness has not stop- ped the march of sensibility towards the Georgian pastures lying a few yards due east. That section of Fulham which Ham- mersmith Borough Council covets, has nothing like the same things going for it, and I suggest in all seriousness that if the mayor and corporation wish to do something of real practical value to improve the fortunes of Fulham, then they should buy the local foot- ball club five first-class players, and then forbid Tommy Trinder to transfer any of them at least until the club's Third Division status has been consolidated.
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