. . . and petrol fumes
Gavin Stamp
A NEW LONDON by Richard Rogers and Mark Fisher Penguin, £8.99, pp. 255
London has to change. For centuries it has been one of the world's great capitals. It is in danger of being so no longer. In its environ- ment and its heritage, in its diversity and resilience, there is much to take pleasure and pride, but both pleasure and pride are begin- ning to sour as large areas of London life slip into decline.
So begins a new polemical book, A New London, written by the Shadow Minister for Arts and Media, Mark Fisher, assisted by the architect Sir Richard Rogers. I can- not see how any real Londoner — one who does not drive off to a country cottage on Friday afternoon — could disagree. Now that I live in Glasgow — a great city which has pulled itself out of depression through political will and imagination — the descent of our capital into chaos and squalor is all the more painfully evident to me. I dread to use the cretinously mis- managed Underground, while the traffic- choked, pothded and patched streets are depressingly reminiscent of the worst American cities.
Something must be done; but what? No Conservative can wash his hands of respon- sibility for this metropolitan decay, for one of Lady Thatcher's most petty and ill- advised acts was to destroy the Greater London Council (which needed reform, not abolition). The consequences of London being the only great city in the world with- out a single elected metropolitan authority are all too clear, and now the Labour Party has recognised that there are votes in the politics of London — the votes of business- men whose activities are increasingly impeded by the sclerotic state of London's transport system and by the growing flight from the capital as well as the votes of mis- erable, long-suffering commuters. The decline of London is undermining the City's role as a leading financial centre, while competition from cities like Frank- furt and Paris is intense. The state of our capital is in fact a matter of national importance.
The news that the fashionable architect of the new home of that discredited capi- talist institution, Lloyd's of London, Sir Richard Rogers, was advising the Labour Party at first filled me with terror. There are several good reasons for voting Labour at the next election: here was one to vote any other way, especially as the Labour Party's new document on architecture and urban design policy, Architecture our Cul- tural Future envisages a `Chief Architect' to co-ordinate government policy. Rogers as Kinnock's Chief Architect is almost as alarming a partnership as Albert Speer and Hitler, or Anca Petrescu and Ceausescu — not because he would slam great avenues through Holborn and Pimlico but because he would want to turn London into a series of Pompidou Centres, which he and Renzo Piano designed back in the heady nostalgic Sixties. For Sir Richard, `scarcely any plea- sure compares with that offered by a city square', but many may not care for the pul- lulating 'interaction' between tourists, buskers, pickpockets and drug-pushers that the space in front of the Pompidou Centre attracts.
So I opened A New London with a degree of expectant cynicism, but I have to say that I was disappointed. Indeed, although the book is riddled with factual and historical errors which come from listening too closely to architects, and there is far too much space given to praising various `visionary' projects by the posturing Sir Richard, there is no proposal made in the book with which I can really disagree. Of course London needs an elected city- wide authority to co-ordinate public trans- port and develop strategic planning; of course much more use should be made of the Thames; of course pedestrians should have priority over cars in public spaces; of course new developments should be mixed, with a balance of housing, leisure and com- mercial uses; of course major public build- ings should be commissioned through competition as they were in the 19th century; of course there should be greater public participation in architecture and planning, and London should have some sort of public 'Architecture Centre' like the Pavilion de l'Arsenal in Paris. These are not, in fact, so much new and radical ideas but old and sensible ones. The unfortunate consequences of encouraging motor traffic in cities have been evident for years, while foreigners come to study the flagship of `free' market-led development, London's Docklands, as a model of pre- cisely how not to regenerate derelict urban areas. Many of the ideas here about civic life and the evils of single-function 'zoning' have long been argued by the Prince of Wales's architect, Leon Krier (who, signifi- cantly, is not once referred to here). The sad fact is that almost any European city is now better and more imaginatively gov- erned than London. As this book rightly states:
The city-state, with its civic pride, has re- emerged all over Europe, but London — neglected and clogged with traffic — pre- sents a dismal contrast to cities revitalised by political and architectural vision.
I can only endorse this book's repeated observation that it is unbridled road traffic which is spoiling and choking the great city that London was and still can be.
To illustrate his argument, Mark Fisher examines how three expanding European cities have overcome similar problems: Barcelona, where large-scale civic improve- ments of permanent value have been carried out for the Olympic Games; Rotterdam, a very rich and thriving city one-sixth of the size of London where, in 1991, 5,500 houses were built, indirectly, by the city council when a mere 300 were erected in the London boroughs; and, of course, Paris, where the modernised public transport system and the new, fast RER lines show what can be achieved in a large metropolis and how they encourage prosperity. Furthermore, Mitterrand's Paris naturally appeals to architects, as its new image depends on new architecture and reputations have been made through open competitions for the various Grands Projets.
Even here, I find I cannot seriously fault the Shadow Minister for the Arts, for he recognises that the French have always had a taste for megalomaniac architectural ges- tures and that they are a product of deeply authoritarian politics. Furthermore, because of a desperate desire to be avant- garde, many of the Grands Projets are not as good as they ought to be while the dark side of Mitterrand's Paris is now becoming evident. London, happily, is not Paris, and I am glad to find that while Mr Fisher advocates strategic planning he eschews any rigid `masterplan' imposed from above. London, indeed, has always been chaotic to a degree — that is part of its charm — and its development has usually been the result of private enterprise tempered by munici- pal building regulations and controls — and occasionally enhanced by grand civic gestures.
It is precisely here that the Conservative government has failed in recent years — through ignorance about London and its history. Informed by outer-suburban, car- borne prejudices, it has wrongly believed that healthy cities should only be governed by free market forces (although nothing could be less free than Docklands and Canary Wharf — in fact the product of massive hidden subsidies by the taxpayer). For while free enterprise allowed a railway company to slam a bridge across Ludgate Hill, real 'Victorian values' encouraged magnificent civic projects like the Palace of Westminster, the Law Courts, the Victoria Embankment and the great museum and cultural complex in South Kensington. Furthermore, in the 19th century it was Conservative governments that usually commissioned the best public buildings — like Norman Shaw's Scotland Yard — while Liberal administrations were notable for both parsimony and philistinism. And it was a Conservative administration that set up the great and good London County Council in 1889 which, in its early years, produced humane public housing which was the admiration of Europe.
There could be a Conservative vision for London which consisted of more than more new roads and belated and half- hearted encouragement of new Under- ground lines. But, as things stand, and with this book suggest* real possibilities, any Londoner who does not vote Labour must be very rich or uncommonly blinkered.
Gavin Stamp is a Lecturer at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow.
'Unless someone can come up with a better solution, I'll finance my own pay rise by making all of you redundant.'
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