AND ANOTHER THING
London isn't burning but getting better, in many ways
PAUL JOHNSON
London is burning, disintegrating, sink- ing into a morass of poverty, class hatred and violence. 'A third-world city', 'the New Calcutta', `Doomchester', 'the Death of Megalopolis'. The transport system is breaking down. The poor are sleeping in the streets. The muggers and druggies are taking over. Crime is triumphant, the civic spirit gone, government impotent, the police baffled, the ordinary citizens angry, despairing and terrified. The villains, of course, are greed, capitalism, materialism, Thatcherism, the market, all the usual sus- pects. On BBC TV last week, Melvyn Bragg was putting this line across, and try- ing to get it endorsed by some American pop-sociology professor, supposedly an expert on metropolitan sclerosis In fact London is doing very nicely, if only people would stop taking its tempera- ture and pronouncing it dead. I have lived or worked in the place since the early 1950s and I can think of dozens of ways in which it has got better. To begin with, you can breathe in the place. Forty years ago, esc4- cially at this time of year, London had one of the most dangerous climates in the world. Ever since the 16th century, when the city began to consume 'sea coal' from New- castle in large and growing quantities, car- boniferous smoke accumulated in the atmo- sphere during periods of high pressure and, any time from October to February but espe- cially in late November and early December, formed the basis of the 'London Particular'.
This was a killer fog, which made life in London horrible for all and was often fatal for the bronchitic and asthmatic. London traffic came to a standstill, London Airport shut down for days, sometimes weeks, at a time, but it was the poor, living in unheated and substandard accommodation, who suf- fered most. The big fog of the early 1950s killed many thousands of people in Lon- don. It was a disgusting yellow-brown in colour and even smelt evil. But that was the last of these scourges. The Clean Air Act, making the use of smokeless fuel compul- sory, was having a direct and perceptible effect by the mid-1950s, and by the end of the decade the London fog was a thing of the past. Most Londoners under 40 have never experienced a serious fog. As a result the London Particular has been virtually expunged from the collective memory of the city. But its disappearance is the single biggest improvement in British urban life for half a millennium and we should not forget it.
Then again, there have been big changes, all of them for the better, in London's river. Half a century ago, it was a black, oily, noi- some, impenetrable and opaque stretch of water, carrying under the noses of London- ers a vast quantity of rubbish including untreated sewage. At certain conjunctions of tide and weather it was liable to burst its embankments and flood thousands of hous- es and there was always the chance of a major catastrophe. That was why we built the Thames Barrier, a most ingenious and, to my mind, beautiful piece of modern engineering. It provides Londoners with a security against flood they had never before enjoyed and in this respect makes the city one of the safest metropolises on earth.
Equally important is the improvement in the quality of Thames water. The river is not exactly sparkling clean and I do not suppose ever will be. But the effect of numerous anti-pollution measures has been to banish the oily blackness and reduce the disgusting smell, especially in summer. Fish are returning and breeding, and for the first time in centuries salmon are now occasion- ally caught up-river in some of the Thames feeder streams. The river now looks hand- some, as it did in Shakespeare's day, and the foul flood described by Dickens in Our Mutual Friend is, like the fogs, a thing of the past. If you want to see what it was like, take a look at Dublin's Liffey, an unre- formed river like the old Thames.
The huge reduction in London's atmo- spheric pollution has made it worthwhile to clean the city up, and modern high-pres- sure hoses have made it possible. This was the brain-child of Andre Malraux when he became minister for the arts in France in 1958, and London was quick to follow Paris's example. The cleaning of London's public buildings has transformed the capital over the past 30 years. Not only does it enable us to appreciate the quality of the original materials, brick as well as stone, in all their pristine glitter, it also brings out the quality of the architecture and, still more, the richness of the decoration. Uncovering London's treasures in this way has revealed the richness of our architec- tural heritage from the 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries (and, by contrast, the poverty of what we have built in the last half century). Barry's Houses of Parlia- ment, for instance, is now recognised for what it is — one of Europe's finest build- ings; likewise, we can enjoy at last the sub- tle pastel colours of Waterhouse's magnifi- cent Natural History Museum. London has been transformed from a city of charcoal- grey to one of gold and pink, so successfully indeed that it is now hard to remember the dark and dingy past.
I have listed only three ways in which London has been radically improved in my time. There are plenty of others, to set against the growth in crime and violence. The Left complains about the ubiquitous evidence of homelessness, which certainly did not thrust itself on your attention 40 years ago. But poverty has always existed in London in prodigious quantities. In the old days we tried to tidy it out of sight: in grim asylums for the mentally disturbed, in work- houses and doss-houses, cellars and slums — particularly in the greatest slum of all, the East End. That no longer exists, thank God: poverty is no longer fenced off in ghettoes but out in the open, where we can see it — and, perhaps, do something about it.
Previous page
