HIGH-RISE HEAVEN
Ross Clark says the tourists should lighten up.
There is nothing wrong with the inner cities that the market can't cure
IT IS an axiom of British political com- mentary that the Tories are strong in the countryside and Labour is strong in the towns. On many big country roads you will now see signs hurling messages of hate at Blair and New Labour; and at the same time you are about as likely to find a blue rosette in bloom, betwixt the flyovers and the gas holders, as you are to spot a cannabis plant flowering in Ann Widde- combe's window-box.
That is why William Hague has decided to attract the middle classes back to inner cities by declaring war on the tower blocks. Private finance would be sought to replace them with low-rise housing, while schools and other services would be put in private hands. 'In the past 30 years we have seen a huge exodus from our inner cities as middle-income families have moved out to the suburbs,' he told his audience in Bournemouth, 'putting enor- mous pressure on the green belt.'
The omens are not promising, and not just because that last line reveals the Tories' true interest in the matter: they don't want new houses ruining the views from their mock-Tudor mansions in Surrey. Mr Hague's words have a whiff of those of Mrs Thatcher, who declared on the steps of Central Office after her third general elec- tion victory in 1987, 'We've got a big job to do in some of those inner cities.' The 'job' she had in mind, as we now know, was the poll tax, which by landing blameless souls in mismanaged boroughs with punitive tax demands for more than L500 not only speeded her own demise, but also ensured the further descent of the inner city into a ghetto of lawlessness.
By 1992, the inner cities weren't just not voting Tory; in many cases they weren't voting at all, having discovered that the only way to keep out of debt was to cease, as far as officialdom was concerned, to exist. Population records show a remark- able downwards blip in the inner cities in the early 1990s as thousands tore up their electoral-register forms, along with their poll-tax demands, to reduce the risk of being traced.
Labour ministers are accused of failing to understand the countryside, but it is not clear that Mr Hague, whom we now know spends Christmas Day in his hiking boots in the Yorkshire Dales, understands much about the inner cities. He certainly can't have visited many of them lately. If he had, he would have noticed that many of those reviled tower blocks have become colonised by the trendy middle classes. When Mr Hague's bulldozer-drivers turn up, they will find themselves having to evict Zaks and Quins among the Liams and Kellys. Extra- virgin olive-oil bottles and cous-cous steam- ers will gleam amid the rubble.
To describe the inner cities as areas of degeneration is half-a-dozen years out of date. In recent times, the inner cities of Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham have all become overrun by slick-haired property developers profiting from a remarkable boom in overpriced and underdecorated apartments. For every acre of decay there's now an acre of stripped-wood flooring. If you've got a million or two to invest, and a head for dealing with planners and navvies, you can't go far wrong in the inner cities at the moment. In Manchester, apartments beside the River Irwell — a channel of sump oil which divides the city from Sal- ford — have been changing hands for more
than million. In those cities it is the sub- urban council estates and lower-middle- class artisans' neighbourhoods beyond the ring roads which are becoming the depressed areas.
What makes Mr Hague's 'big' idea so miserable is not just that he is behind the times, but that his prescription is so thor- oughly wrong. It isn't some wholesale state- sponsored regeneration package that is bringing dry-roasted aubergines to the con- crete jungle. In fact, quite the reverse: the state-planning apparatus only ever made things worse. In my days as a geography undergraduate, I was fed textbooks analysing the structure of cities. In the mid- dle was the central business district; beyond that, I was informed, invariably lay a 'twilight zone' — a sink of the poor and unemployed that was created because any- one who could afford to do so moved off to the 'affluent suburbs'.
Budding planners, in other words, have it knocked into their heads at an early age that inner cities are necessarily places of poverty and dependence, and over the years public money has been pumped into them to ensure that they stayed that way.
The current regeneration of the inner cities is something quite different; it is spontaneous — a consequence of the indi- vidual choices of people who thankfully have never read a geography textbook in their lives. It cannot be quite what Mr Hague has in mind, but the wealth now flowing into inner-city Manchester was sparked off by cottaging homosexuals. A few years ago they picked a dingy thor- oughfare called Canal Street — or 'anal treet' as the signs were adjusted to read as a meeting place precisely because it was run-down and deserted. In time, the entrepreneurial among them started buying redundant warehouses and turning them into apartments, which attracted buyers not because it was a safe and comfortable envi- ronment, but because it was exactly the opposite. Then four or five years ago the idea of living in inner-city Manchester made the 'species jump' to heterosexuals and a mainstream market emerged.
The moral is, if you want to regenerate your inner city, cut out the spending and the big ideas: just instruct the cops to ease off the anti-cruising patrols in the area you wish to be regenerated. In Manchester's case, regeneration would never have happened had the city not been allowed to become so grim in the first place. It has become desirable among the wealthy, entrepreneurial classes because it is the antithesis of the net-cur- tain suburbs where Mr Hague still appears to believe all successful people wish to live.
None of this is to say that capitalism wasn't responsible for the decay of the inner cities. Mrs Thatcher's mistake was to try to blame everything on Loony Left councils. The free-marketeers among us ought to be big enough to admit that it was the mill-owners and railway-builders that inspired — and in the case of railway com- panies hugely profited from by forcing peo- ple to commute — the evacuation from our inner cities. But the uncomfortable truth for ideologues is that just as laissez-faire capital- ism is very good at trashing places, it is uniquely good at bringing them back, too.
Previous page
