Tag: Cities

Some years ago, a friend who lives in Camden Council housing within walking distance from St Paul’s Cathedral told me he’d seen a fox on his way home one evening. This, we agreed, was a landmark. Foxes were spotted in London suburbs for the first time in the 1930s. They made their way into the inner city during the sixties; living in green, hilly southeast London for 24 years, I see them nearly every day. But the dense streets of Central London were still fox-free. And then, they weren’t, and the beasts sadistically hunted by the English upper classes were wandering freely around the very centre of the capital, and can be found stalking the Royal Exchange on the average November night. Urban foxes are among the most conspicuous members of London’s sometimes strange wild animal population. In terms of public fascination, these indigenous beasts rank alongside a much more exotic species: bright lime-green parakeets, who have achieved a similar gradual takeover of the city, suburb by suburb, to the point that they are currently more common – at least in my corner of Camberwell – than sparrows or starlings, nearly as ordinary as pigeons and crows.

Both creatures get their due in the geographer Matthew Gandy’s comprehensive, ambitious Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (2022). Gandy has spent the last two decades working on aspects of urbanism that are conventionally overlooked, such as recycling, waste, and most memorably plumbing, the subject of Concrete and Clay (2002), his eye-opening book on New York’s Robert Moses-era water system. He combines this with impatience with neoliberal boosterism (exhibited, for instance, in a ferocious attack on Rem Koolhaas’s praise of excitingly unplanned Lagos). But his most recent book is less a case study than a sweeping, compendious work, focused on the specifically urban nature of ‘urban nature’, and the ways in which accidental and unpredictable interactions of flora, fauna and human beings have taken place within large cities. It is also a timely book; the experience of being locked down in our homes, and finding relief in the exploration of the proximate environment, is still fresh (a phenomenon that has led to the popularisation of the ‘fifteen-minute city’ as both policy and conspiracy theory).

Many people have had unplanned Blakean experiences of finding universes in their local bit of neglected municipal open space – infinities in an allotment, a park, or a back garden. We were locked down as a consequence of the unexpected and ill-thought-out contact among humans, animals and cities; the Covid-19 virus leapt from bats, possibly via expensive, rare trophy animals in Wuhan’s wet markets, to us (another urban anecdote – a friend in the London Borough of Redbridge watching the construction of an impromptu morgue on Wanstead Flats at the height of the virus’s first wave). Both London’s foxes and its parakeets feature in Gandy’s book; he even recounts the delightful urban myth that the parakeets are descendants of birds once released into London’s sky by Jimi Hendrix, rather than, as the more mundane explanation has it, the result of a break-out from Kew Gardens. But much more unusual creatures are just as often the focus – a ‘strange-looking wasp’, for example, that Gandy discovers on his North London window and which turns out to be a member of a rare species (with ‘a liking for dunes, rough grassland and “brambly places”’).

Much of the attention paid to urban nature emphasises its usefulness – urban farms, tree-planting as climate-cooling mechanism and so on. Importantly, Gandy is most interested in an urban-natural landscape that doesn’t ‘do’ anything in particular. Though he concedes that ecology and aesthetics are by no means logically connected, the book is not a study of urban economics or politics (although they do feature) but an attempt to defend a certain kind of urban space created by those evanescent periods in a capitalist economy when one profitable use ends and another has not yet begun; it is essentially a treatise on the virtues of what city planners call ‘brownfield’ (left over by departed industry, property market failure or the effects of war) as opposed to ‘greenfield’ (agriculture, Green Belt, parkland). In trying to create a cosmopolitan, non-nativist ‘reenchantment’ based on the pleasures of ‘brownfield’, he takes issue with a certain urban pessimism that can be found on the left as much as the right; in passing, Gandy mentions his disappointment that the Scottish Marxist geographer Neil Smith’s personal love of ornithology never made it into his critical work on the bourgeois and neo-romantic nature of any project of ‘reenchanting’ space under capitalism.

Natura Urbana’s scope is international. There are detailed excursions to Chennai (home to a thriving community of urban ornithologists), Lisbon (where he finds poplar trees and pampas grass growing around an old gasworks), Yokohama (with its dragonfly-filled ponds), Los Angeles (with its suburban coyotes and parrots) and especially, pre-Wende Berlin, whose wastelands were the subject of a documentary film Gandy made in 2017. But the book is rooted in London, where Gandy grew up in the 1970s. He longingly recalls its bombsites and what used to be derisively called Space Left Over After Planning (SLOAP). In one beloved spot, in his native London Borough of Islington, he recalls a bombsite where ‘bright red cinnabar moths flitted across patches of ragwort, their yellow flowers contrasting with purple drifts of rosebay willowherb, a plant that had become a botanical leitmotif for London bombsites . . . to enter such a space conjured up images from children’s literature, of a magical transition into another world’. This passage recalls Humphrey Jennings’s wartime ponderings on the accidental beauty of bombsites, whose spaciousness and lushness he hoped could inform the practices of post-war planning. But for Gandy it is especially important that this was an ‘accidental garden’, with ‘no planting scheme or trace of human intentionality’ – in 1975, the ten-year-old future geographer wrote a letter to Islington Council protesting the site’s planned redevelopment. Accordingly, this is not a book about consciously ‘designed nature’, though Gandy has some smart and sometimes questionable things to say about it.

It isn’t all poetic encounters with municipal scrubland. Some of the urban-natural interactions Gandy catalogues are nightmarish. He describes the cockroach-induced allergies that beset many children in under-maintained American public housing projects, and the mosquitoes that evolved in interwar London to survive in the Underground, sucking on the blood of commuters. He also evokes the terrifying world of the Gilded Age Chicago stockyards, and the modernist slaughterhouses of Argentina (he could have included the Lyon Slaughterhouse designed in the early 20th century by the pioneering modern architect Tony Garnier, or, in Shanghai’s old International Settlement, the extraordinary, proto-Brutalist Municipal Abattoir). But generally the book is affirmative, if unsentimental.

Against the conventional perception of cities as inimical to plants and animals, Gandy insists, surely correctly, that urban areas are in fact very often highly ‘biodiverse’, especially when compared to ‘their monocultural hinterlands dominated by industrialised agriculture’. This is a consequence of the sheer diversity of spaces in cities, and to the sheer quantity, unusual in the more productive parts of the countryside, of places that are left alone. He is therefore enraged by the dismissive term ‘brownfield’. For one thing, these fields tend not to be brown. As an example, he discusses Hauts-de-Seine, the Paris banlieue borough that includes Nanterre and post-industrial Billancourt, whose ‘brownfield’ zones are far more biodiverse than the city’s manicured parks and gardens, comparable to the countryside around. He also finds instances of heavy industry accidentally fostering urban nature as well as destroying it; a vivid case here is the Sheffield-based biologist Oliver Gilbert’s study of the northern city’s wild fig trees, which flourished because the river Don, used for industrial cooling for the city’s steelworks, stayed at 20 degrees centigrade all year round. There’s also Jennifer Owen’s ‘thirty-year investigation of her back garden’ in Leicester, a particularly Blakean endeavour begun in the early 1970s, during which she found ‘over 2,200 species of insects, including 20 that had never been found in Britain and four that were new to science’. This, Gandy points out, is about the level of biodiversity found in Monks Wood in Huntingdonshire, one of Britain’s largest nature reserves; though over time – ironically, as the city has substantially deindustrialised – the diversity of insect life in Owen’s garden has declined.

Gandy’s encomium to the unplanned and overgrown is also a defence of particular plants growing in places where they might be considered ‘foreign’; weeds, wherever they come from, are celebrated here. Much of Natura Urbana is devoted to the ‘non-native’. Examples include the Turkey oak in Britain, hated by conservationists as an aggressive, non-British oak, despite evidence that these oaks were here over 100,000 years ago, before receding and then returning as a consequence of global trade in the 18th century. Gandy speaks up for what are usually described as ‘invasive’, or more heatedly, ‘alien’ plants; most of all for buddleia, the ubiquitous ‘brownfield’ flowering shrub, which is of 19th-century Chinese origin. Just as Asian fauna travelled, usually as a result of imperialism, across Europe and the US, the same process also happened in reverse, like the growth across Chinese cities of sumac plants originally from North America, or the spurges that ‘escaped from the garden of Beijing’s Institute of Botany’ and now grow in the interstices of urban China. This sort of plant life tends to thrive most where systems of management and maintenance have collapsed, though Gandy does not always make the connection. Post-Soviet Kyiv, for instance, he finds to be an especially wild city: by the early 2000s, its 19th-century boulevards and overgrown Soviet ville radieuse housing estates hosted ‘over 500 non-native plant species’. This is undoubtedly true (a photographer and designer of my acquaintance once told me of his joy at coming back to Kyiv after a spell in Vienna – ‘it’s like a jungle!’), but it is a consequence of processes of state abandonment that in other respects have made many people’s lives miserable. Neglect is double-edged, and produces more than buddleia.

The political resonances of the ‘non-native’ species are brought out especially strongly in Gandy’s various tales of Berlin, a city which is returned to again and again in Natura Urbana. Because of the intensity of its wartime destruction and the reservation of an entire continuous stretch of the city as a deliberately fallow ‘death strip’ from 1961 to 1989, Berlin became something like the global capital of ‘brownfield’. It is also, ironically, a city from which Nazi-era botanists, such as Reinhold Tüxen, once attempted to control the vegetation of the Reich according to race science, mapping the vegetation of Germany and Poland according to its degree of Germannness and likening the spread of balsam in rural areas ‘to the threat of Bolshevism from the east’. Gandy devotes much space to scientific attempts to map the city’s post-war wild nature, including Herbert Sukopp’s studies of West Berlin as a place full of what in German is called Brache. Especially intriguingly, he describes Paul-Armand Gette’s 1980s photographs of Berlin streets and tenements overgrowing with shrubs from Peru and North Vietnam as a useful counterpoint to Joseph Beuys’s contemporary proposals for planting 7,000 German oaks in the German urban landscape. Bravely, given Beuys’s enduring (and rather spurious) status as secular saint, Gandy contrasts his nativism, ‘neo-romanticism’ and disinterest in complexity with the much more grounded and egalitarian work of Gette, who was interested in how urban plant life could be at once ‘exotic’ and ‘banal’.

Much of this landscape no longer exists, stamped out by the banal stone facades foisted upon Berlin by the neo-Prussian planning regime of Hans Stimmann, but it does survive in pockets. Some of these are unplanned and wild, in the manner Gandy approves of, and are among the city’s most extraordinary spaces, like Teufelsberg, a mountain of rubble capped by the geodesic domes of a derelict CIA listening station, or the ultra-biodiverse wastes on what were once the runways and landing strips of Tempelhof Airport. A few, such as the recently opened Gleisdreieck Park, try to combine the planned and the unplanned. Gandy gives the Berlin examples a cautious welcome, but in general he reserves some of his harshest words for planned urban nature in this otherwise even-tempered book. New York’s High Line, for instance, a linear park on a disused freight line in western Manhattan, he denounces as an ‘ecological simulation’ of what was once a genuinely wild and enchanting landscape, its tastefully selected grasses and pines planted in the service of an extremely successful motor of property development. Gandy gives similarly short shrift to Instagram causes célèbres such as the densely planted ‘vertical forest’ residential towers of the Italian architect and PD politician Stefano Boeri, built in Milan among other cities. These worked well enough in northern Italy, but elsewhere, their spread has fallen foul of exactly the kind of ignorance of the very specific, local character of urban nature that Gandy is trying to outline here. When Boeri’s design was transferred to humid, subtropical Chengdu, the plants covering the skyscrapers quickly attracted dengue-carrying mosquitoes, making the ‘vertical forest’ deeply inhospitable for its human residents and radically reducing the towers’ property values.

Like ‘brownfield’ (and for that matter, ‘anthropocene’, a word whose ‘messy omnipotence’ Gandy compares to that of ‘postmodernism’ in the 1980s), ‘Resilience’ is a term Gandy regards with great suspicion. ‘Resilient’ planting in cities tends to entail simple, robust flora, specifically able to weather global warming. This he sees as a new monoculture, in contrast to the constant flux of actually existing urban-natural landscape, the perpetual process of creation and destruction which throws up bizarre and unexpected freaks like the London parakeets. He makes a link between ‘Resilience’ and the mundane practices of neoliberal public management through the example of Sheffield, an especially green large English city, home to those steelwork-induced fig trees. Like ‘Resilience’ planners, the petty outsourcing companies the city charged with maintaining Sheffield’s trees in 2012 have been engaged in a project to replace what were, until recently, ‘fine avenues of elm, lime and cherry trees, some of which harbour rare insects’ with ‘simpler’ streets of little, homogenous, easily pruned varieties. This has led to bitter protests across the city, repeated in the south when a similar bulldozer approach was applied to the post-war boulevards of Plymouth. Disgust at the pruning of the trees helped the Conservatives lose control of that city last year. Gandy cautions that, however justified by the need to counteract global warming, ‘the neoliberal “urban forest” of the future is likely to consist of smaller and younger trees that support far less biodiversity’.

These examples, both glamorous (Boeri’s vertical forests) and shabby (British homogenised tree-lined streets), reveal some of the limitations of planning urban nature. But they are also illustrations of what neoliberalism does in cities. Gandy borrows the term ‘planification’ from Manfredo Tafuri to describe the forces ranged against the unplanned biodiverse urban wastes, but planning is essential to any kind of urban socialism. Given the suspicion of conscious planning that runs throughout the book, there is a question about whether it would be possible to actually create the sort of wild, complex, interstitial spaces that he favours, as opposed to simply waiting for them to emerge through accidents of creative destruction. Gandy surely knows this – his critique of Koolhaas’s dazzled but vacuous reaction to Lagos’s apparent ability to function without planning is among the most powerful attacks on Hayekian urbanism – but seems unable wholly to reconcile municipal socialism with a love of wastelands.

This matters, because conservation can make it perversely difficult to build green infrastructure. Some examples are rural: the construction of High-Speed Rail, for instance, has been made extraordinarily expensive in both Britain and Germany by measures to safeguard landscapes and biodiversity in protected areas – the astonishing cost and endless delays of the ‘Stuttgart 21’ railway project are in part due to the need to resettle thousands of rare lizards whose habitat lay in the path of the high-speed trains, while the preposterous expense of the HS2 disaster in Britain is largely down to ploughing railway tunnels under the Chilterns on routes that would more easily and cheaply run on the surface, so as to leave various southern landscapes untouched. Urban biodiversity is less frequently protected, of course. But a few years ago, campaigners protesting against a council housing development in the London Borough of Southwark, among the borough’s first since the 70s, rechristened the wasteland upon which it was to be built as ‘Peckham Green’. They even managed to get this designation, unheard-of until 2020, onto Google Maps. ‘The intrinsic worth of the ostensibly useless’, writes Gandy, ‘is as much a political question as an aesthetic or scientific one’. Natura Urbana is primarily about understanding and appreciating what already exists; hopefully its many insights will prove useful for understanding what sort of spaces we might want to bring into being. 

Read on: Owen Hatherley, ‘The Government of London’, NLR 122.

Around twenty years ago, public transport in London suddenly got much, much better. The tube and the buses, which had been neglected for decades by central government, improved remarkably – especially the buses. Of course, London’s transport was always (even per capita) better than that of the rest of urban England. This was helped by the fact that the Thatcher and Major governments had exempted it from the worst – they had not privatized the Underground, and while they had privatized the buses, a clause had left the capital’s buses to be publicly regulated. I moved to London in 1999, and even then, at the start of the New Labour boom, you could still feel the neglect, a dereliction that had been lethal in the Kings Cross fire of 1987, caused by uncollected rubbish under a wooden escalator. Aside from the somewhat toy-like light railway across the redeveloped Docklands, new transport construction hadn’t kept pace with the sharp increase in the capital’s population. And then in a few years, everything changed.

This is owed, it is worth remembering, to Ken Livingstone, in his two terms as Mayor of London. While his record on housing and planning was poor, despite all the socialist rhetoric, on transport Livingstone kept his promises. The buses were turned around, recognized as the main mode of transport for working-class Londoners; fares were kept far lower than in the rest of Britain. Under Livingstone’s watch, Herbert Morrison’s nationalized company, London Transport – rebranded as TfL, Transport for London – introduced the Oyster card, battled with Gordon Brown’s moronic plans to privatize the tube, pointedly powered the buses with Venezuelan oil, and began to take ineptly-run privatized heavy rail lines under its control, in the public-private London Overground, making an immense difference to tubeless inner boroughs such as Hackney and Lewisham. But the most visible transport improvement actually had nothing much to do with Ken’s long-term project to democratize London’s transport, which dated back to ‘Fares Fair’ at the Greater London Council.

The Jubilee Line extension, doubling the size of a truncated 1970s tube line and opened by London Transport in 1999, was a wild contrast with the miserable shabbiness and poor service provided by now-forgotten privatized companies such as Connex and Silverlink. Directed, architecturally, by the Hong Kong Metro’s architect Roland Paoletti, it captured a generation of British designers who were then more likely to be employed abroad than at home at their peak. It was the most impressive public transport achievement in London – in Britain – since London Transport’s 1930s heyday under the Christian Socialist bureaucrat Frank Pick and architect Charles Holden. The Jubilee extension’s stations are among London’s finest buildings, from Hopkins’s concrete Carceri at Westminster to Foster’s cavernous Canary Wharf to Richard McCormac’s delicate Southwark.

But it was expensive, very expensive indeed – a bizarre anomaly in the decade that John Major brought in the Private Finance Initiative. Nothing like it would be tried in TfL’s building projects under Livingstone, particularly the new Overground stations on the rebuilt East London Line, such as Shoreditch, Dalston Junction, Haggerston and Hoxton. The point was to sort out long-running problems and get things done quickly, cheaply and unfussily, as in similarly tightly-budgeted northern projects of the era like the Sheffield Supertram or the Manchester Metrolink. One can maybe praise the intent, but the results on the now extensive Overground can be a little grim – no toilets in the stations, staffing often an optional extra, adding up to a line which mostly ignores (and is, in turn, seldom used by) the elderly, those with children, or those with disabilities. Then came another patch-up job, this time by Network Rail, the extension and rebuilding of the 1980s Thameslink heavy rail network, which involved an ingenious, if cramped new station balanced atop the Victorian Blackfriars Bridge. It was completed a couple of years ago with little fanfare.

Well, the now finally opened Crossrail has a lot of fanfare. It is the one major British public transport project of the 21st century to have escaped Gordon Brown’s parsimony and George Osborne’s axe (unlike mere trams in Leeds, Liverpool and Portsmouth-Southampton), and though planned decades ago, it was commenced under Livingstone in 2007, and obsequiously renamed under Boris Johnson the ‘Elizabeth Line’. Above all else, it is emphatically not cheap or ad hoc. It was, notoriously, constantly delayed and subject to cost overruns, but now you can explore it with your Oyster card, you can see where a lot of the money went – into space.

It is hard to overstate how much of a shock it is to go from either the Victorian cut-and-cover brick vaults of the District and Circle, or worse, the claustrophobic, meanly proportioned deep-level tubes built by the American robber baron (and allegedly, partial Citizen Kane inspiration) Charles Tyson Yerkes like the Central, Northern and Piccadilly, into these gigantic stations. The proportions and depth – not to mention the mood-lighting – evoke the Soviet transport systems in Kyiv, St Petersburg and Moscow, as does the strict restriction of advertising. Similarly Soviet are the long, long escalators in stations such as Tottenham Court Road, which take a good two or three minutes to travel up, and are tough on the acrophobic; below, cathedral-scale central vestibules link the platforms. A common aesthetic underground has been created by the lead architects, Grimshaw, a 1980s boutique high-tech firm turned global conglomerate; a great deal of fun has been had with concrete panels, shaped into forms both mass-produced and organic, especially delightfully around the archways towards the platforms and escalators. 

With its long tunnel through almost the entirety of London’s Zones 1 and 2, end to end from Paddington in the west to Canary Wharf in the east, this is heavy, expensive, grandiose engineering, a return to the Jubilee extension’s drama, its richness, and its arse-kissing nomenclature. But architecturally, it isn’t as original or personal. Stations are richly provided with diverting abstract artworks, interesting concrete surfaces, accessible lifts and, crucially, toilets (something far too often absent on the tube), but there’s no stand-out work of spatial flamboyance like Foster’s Canary Wharf or Hopkins’s Westminster. Surface stations are boxy, and carried out either by the Overground’s designers Weston Williamson, or by very safe British/multinational firms such as Aedas (Farringdon), Hawkins/Brown (Tottenham Court Road). Their work here is powerful, but there’s nothing fancy. Outlying stations that have been bolted onto earlier sets of platforms and buildings, such as Southall in the far west and Abbey Wood in the far south-east, are big, airy and functional, but that’s as far as it goes.

Crossrail has been trumpeted as something new in the world of transport, but that’s not quite right. If the Overground is an S-Bahn and the Docklands Light Railway a Rhine-Ruhr style Stadtbahn, then this, like the earlier, less heralded Thameslink reconstruction, is London’s Parisian RER, with a fast service in the centre and dozens of stations stretching a spider’s web right out across the Banlieue. What this means is that the focus that there has been on the photogenic inner-city tunnel – and the fact that most new London transport infrastructure since the 1980s has been about connecting the docklands of the inner east and south-east to the centre – obscures that this is very much a suburban line, which will be mostly used not by people in Whitechapel or Paddington, but in Ealing, Acton, Thamesmead, Ilford and Romford.

This should not be odd – London is still a mostly suburban city, and its suburbs are in many cases as multicultural and firmly Labour-voting nowadays as Lambeth or Tower Hamlets – but it means that a journey across the whole network is quite different to one across the Jubilee extension or the Overground, which move between recently fashionable zones such as Peckham and Hackney (the line from Clapham to Dalston on a Friday night is always crammed to bursting with young professionals on the razz) or high-density, Shanghai-in-the-drizzle new districts such as the Olympic Village or the Royal Docks. It may pass through Whitechapel, Forest Gate and Stratford, but Crossrail is really about Southall, Romford and Thamesmead. Not only that, it links Berkshire to Essex, encompassing such unlikely places as industrial Slough, the relatively self-contained sunbelt town of Reading, Theresa May’s constituency in quintessentially bourgeois Maidenhead, the classic multicultural London suburbia of Ilford, the edges of the London County Council’s sprawling Becontree estate at Goodmayes, the lush garden city of Gidea Park, and finally Brentwood, with its Barratt Homes Cathedral by Quinlan Terry. All these have been dragged forever into the tube map, and hence into ‘London’.

For the moment, to explore the full line, you have to get off at the big termini of Paddington or Liverpool Street and walk across their concourses to take the Elizabeth Line trains that were temporarily branded ‘TfL Rail’ while Crossrail was being delayed – the full service will open only later in the year. But the network makes sense not as a line from Paddington to Abbey Wood, but only if seen as a whole. That is, as a project to unite London’s two major outward growths since the 1970s. One is along the Thames Valley/M4 corridor route of high-tech affluence. It is easy to imagine future extensions that will bring Oxford and Swindon into the tube map, maybe even Newport and Cardiff, in the same way that Bratislava appears on Vienna’s transport map.

The other is the ‘Thames Gateway’ to the east, a swathe of post-industrial dereliction towards which capital has had to be forcibly directed, from the London Docklands Development Company to New Labour’s Urban Renaissance and Livingstone’s Olympic Village, clownishly ‘delivered’ by his Tory successor. It is, as mentioned, this eastern zone which has seen the most new transport investment in the last four decades, in order to make these contaminated wastes with adjacent council estates into places attractive to investors and employers. In the process, the more westward expansion of London has been relatively neglected, especially by geographers and psychogeographers. Post-industrial West London is less gentrified than anywhere else in the capital, and immense sites such as Park Royal, once the largest industrial area in the world, are off very many Londoners’ mental maps. Hipsters seem to face a forcefield just before entering the London Borough of Ealing, and the ‘creative class’ are conspicuous by their absence in Slough and Southall.

Stay underground, or on the train, and Crossrail is an eminently rational project, and it should hopefully have the effect of making the miserably overcrowded Central and Jubilee lines more pleasant for human beings to use. It will also make it much easier to get into town if you live in extremely un-‘regenerated’ areas such as the post-industrial Punjabi heartland of Southall or the GLC’s forlorn but beautiful lakeside New Town at Thamesmead, served by Abbey Wood station. Yet there’s no getting away from the role of property in all of this. Housing and office development has been part of London Transport from the start. The Metropolitan Line and its property development arm created the Mock Tudor suburbia of ‘Metroland’, in what was once the county of Middlesex, but since the ’60s has consisted of the London Boroughs of Hillingdon, Hounslow, Harrow, Ealing and Brent; Frank Pick got in on the act at Golders Green and Edgware. Even after nationalization, some of Charles Holden’s most beautiful stations, such as Oakwood in Enfield, were built in open country to stimulate development, which meant commuters buying season tickets, which meant much-needed revenue – unlike many transport networks in big capital cities, London Transport has usually been expected to make a profit.

So there are a lot of really very nasty new spaces that have cropped up as a result of Crossrail. The most notorious is at Tottenham Court Road, where genuinely much-loved places, crucial to the history of London’s popular music, like the Astoria on Charing Cross Road and the music shops and gig venues of Denmark Street, have been either replaced or dwarfed with a series of frankly hideous, funereal black office blocks; the area is surreal enough as it is, and a new entrance mid-way along Oxford Street spits you out into an increasingly bizarre thoroughfare dominated by semi-legal ‘American-style’ sweet shops, many of which have just been raided by police in the aftermath of the Conservatives losing control of Westminster Council for the first time.

Further west – skipping over the still-unopened Bond Street station – the new Paddington station is very convenient for the canalside kipple of Paddington Basin, a particularly bleak office district between the waterways and the start of the Westway. Farringdon station’s entrances are adjacent to massive, boxy, squat offices which will have helped pay for the whole thing. However, this isn’t the case everywhere. Whitechapel, designed by BDP, is a minor revelation, scooping out a formerly grossly dilapidated station via an enclosed glass bridge, the entire complex construction hidden behind the original Italianate frontage of 1876; and rather than the border of new offices at Farringdon or Tottenham Court Road, you’re thrown right into the electricity of Whitechapel Market, an enduringly working-class space, with the glass skyscrapers of the City in the near distance. The closest of these is One Commercial Street, the subject of a notoriously dystopian marketing video. It is still blackened and scarred by a recent fire, a little reminder of how many of London’s ‘luxury flats’ are unsafe. 

One stop from here is Canary Wharf, the malevolent heart of financial London and, deeply unexpectedly, the most delightful of all the new line’s spaces. The station platforms are fairly ordinary, but everything else about it is mindboggling. From the existing DLR and Jubilee Line stations you enter through a long overhead walkway, dressed in pulsing bright colours by the artist Camille Walala, into Crossrail Place, a long complex of restaurants, designed by Foster and Partners, with a roof garden on top. It is one of that firm’s most unusual London projects in a while, its bubbling timber and teflon structure evoking Norman Foster’s one-time enthusiasm for the work of Buckminster Fuller; the garden itself is both banal and utopian, verdant and eerily calm above the station and beneath the skysrcapers. The Ballardian undergrowth leads to a Sports Bar. Rather than ‘Dubai-on-Thames’, this is more Singapore on the West India Dock: a strictly controlled and policed yet fascinatingly odd balance of nature and technology. But the fact remains – stations mean development.

This is the reason why many Londoners secretly resent the project. Irrespective of the many people taking photographs of the new stations and the new tunnels (they’re still doing so, several weeks after opening), everyone knows property values are going to go up, up, up, in the places that are made newly accessible. Woolwich, the industrial suburb that has long been one of the cheapest places left to live in London, is going to be almost as accessible from central London as Fulham or Clapham. The kitsch, bricky redevelopment of the 18th century Royal Arsenal complex was already a place apart in Woolwich, feeling wholly separate from this working-class Cockney, West African, Somali and Latvian district. In the six years I lived there during the 2010s I watched that development spread along the river, but it was always constrained by the arterial road that cut it off from the suburb’s centre; at rush hour, Woolwich would suddenly become whiter and more affluent than it was during the rest of the day, but the effect would quickly disappear.

Woolwich’s Crossrail station, substantially funded by the developers, is actually in the Arsenal itself, on a square with the Airstrip One-style name of ‘Victory Parade’, but we can now expect the overpriced brick high-rises of the Arsenal to expand into the entire rest of the place, making it newly unaffordable. Luring bourgeois residents over the dual carriageway into Woolwich proper right now is something called the Dreamachine. Around five years ago, when I was last in the covered Public Market, the space was occupied by the  likes of the Boss Revolution internet cafe next to Silverrite & Lady T’s Catering Service Cakes and Decoration. Well, until late July it contains an experiment in psychedelic ‘Deep Listening’, a slice of Altered States opposite a high-rise Little England.

A similar process is likely to happen at the Olympic Site. Crossrail makes Stratford, once a very mundane East End area, even more spectacularly well-connected. Irrespective of septic leaks, buildings granted by the Olympics such as Zaha Hadid’s rather glorious London Aquatics Centre are actually very well used by people from across London’s multiple fault-lines, but that balance can’t be sustained forever. A couple of stops away is the adjacent suburb of Forest Gate, the working-class area whose inequalities of race and class are heartbreakingly brought out in Joy White’s powerful book Terraformed (2020). As with sporting festivals, new transport networks double as a way of pumping huge quantities of public money into our only real industry, property. However much Crossrail might be useful (it is) and beautiful (it is, mostly), that is also very much what it’s for.

In any case, the fact remains that much of what the network newly connects is seldom visited by people who don’t live there. ‘Welcome, young man’, boomed a smirking, elderly Anglo-Punjabi gentleman at me outside Southall’s new Crossrail station. He was right, I had never been to Southall before, even though my great aunt ran a caff here, until she made enough money to move to the Isle of Wight. West London is often deceptively suburban – the stretch from Ealing to Slough between the Great Western Railway and the Grand Union Canal became densely industrial in the 20th century. This industrial sprawl attracted one of my grandparents, who came here to work in one of these factories, and a little later, the Punjab-born grandparents of the people going about their shopping on a Southall afternoon. Look around the Crossrail station today, and you’ll find the south side of the railway tracks is familiar – the same skyscraping brick-clad ‘luxury flats’ you can find in Whitechapel or the Royal Arsenal. But the north side is something else entirely, an intense, fiercely independent city-within-a-city, where 1920s Chinoiserie cinemas have been carved into shopping arcades full of jewellery shops, and comfortable cafes where people are very much living outside, in the ‘Urban Renaissance’ style, except they’re drinking masala chai next to a ‘Fashions’ emporium rather than flat whites next to Foxtons.

Another stop on, and you’re in Hayes and Harlington, John McDonnell’s constituency (with Boris Johnson’s, in more affluent Uxbridge, on the other side of the tracks). Here, as in Woolwich, you’re surrounded by what feels like every language and every nationality on earth, in a landscape of caffs and charity shops, loomed over by an astonishing Brutalist telephone exchange. But along the railway tracks, you’ll see the property industry has been here, too. Factories in industrial West London were mostly a matter of light industry, consumer commerce – Hoover, Firestone, Gillette –  and EMI. The record company’s enclave of early 20th century, Detroit-style ‘daylight factories’ – great grids of glass and concrete – has been mostly turned into a long strip of ‘luxury flats’, currently devoid of any facilities aside from a gym and three estate agents. The Astoria may have been demolished and Denmark Street butchered, but music fans can rest assured that in Hayes, they can live in blocks of flats called ‘The Venue’ or ‘The Record Store’.

There is a similar sense of two completely separate parallel worlds coexisting, for the moment, at Thamesmead, which is now finally served by a high-speed service at Abbey Wood (while under construction in the 1960s, this concrete New Town was promised a Jubilee Line station, which was meant to be completed in the 1970s). In a sense, Thamesmead is a cautionary tale of what happens when a part of London isn’t properly connected to its transport network, with its photogenic clusters of towers along lakes and nature reserves – essentially a giant budget Barbican – gradually run down by successive owners after the GLC’s 1986 abolition; some of its most impressive areas were demolished for vacuous and now dilapidated new flats in the 2000s.

In the late 2010s, in anticipation of Crossrail, the Peabody Trust, the venerable social housing developer, took the town over. It is subsidizing its repairs to the estate with swathes of new private and ‘affordable’ housing. A decent new library faces Southmere Lake, and the public spaces have been renovated for the first time in decades, but the plans also entail destroying much of what makes the place interesting, with the lakeside social housing towers under threat of ‘decanting’ and demolition (curiously, Peabody have also subsidized books and exhibitions celebrating the original architecture). There’s a reason for this. Thamesmead is one of the last places an ordinary middle-class Londoner can conceivably buy property without courting bankruptcy, and it seems that serving this constituency by building private brick boxes on the lake is Peabody’s interest here, rather than building the social housing the city desperately needs on Thamesmead’s still abundant post-industrial brownfield sites. Transforming a fascinating social-democratic modernist failure into a mere commuter suburb in easy travelling time of Canary Wharf and Tottenham Court Road and Heathrow will seem like an improvement, to some.

Now that it exists, Crossrail can be seen as multiple things, some good, some bad. It is a way of seeing how Boris Johnson’s London Design Guide has created a thirty-mile linear city of brick-clad high rises along the old industrial belt of railways, the docks, the Thames and the canals. It is a gentrification superhighway, and a line which finally makes getting into town more bearable for working-class people living in Southall or Thamesmead. It is an attempt to finally erase London’s east/west divides, and a convenient means for business travellers to get from Heathrow to Canary Wharf without spending two hours in a taxi. It is, as someone on twitter pointed out, ‘the asian suburban experience line’, connecting for the first time Slough to Southall to Ealing to Whitechapel to Ilford.

What I suspect it is most of all is the last piece of major public transport investment in London we will see in a very long time. TfL is being ostentatiously squeezed of funds, and like most of the railway network, it is not being given the government help it needs to recover fully from the pandemic – a situation of managed decline being fought by the rail unions in the forthcoming all-out strikes. TfL, though by far the most efficient and pleasant transport company in Britain’s idiotically fragmented network, has been barred from pulling the last of the private railway lines in south-east London into the Overground; its bailout has been made conditional on firing staff; and in the week Crossrail opened, TfL proposed to close dozens of bus routes, including lines such as the 12 which I have never seen anything other than full in the 23 years I have lived in London. Crossrail may prove to be a great leap into the future in a network otherwise regressing to the pre-Livingstone era.

All this is being done in part to humiliate Mayor Sadiq Khan, who has still not been forgiven by the government for defeating the Tories so comprehensively in 2016 and 2021, not to mention his polite request for the power to institute rent controls (refused, with contempt, naturally). For all Khan’s timidity, the intensity of development and the ever more surreal escalation of rents and house prices here in the last decade has quite unintentionally, ‘built the Tories out of London’, to a degree not seen since the London County Council of the 1930s under Herbert Morrison. That is to say, the majority of Londoners have had enough. Crossrail is a mixed blessing for them. It will intensify the nightmare for anyone trying to cling on to relatively affordable housing in Stratford, Woolwich or Whitechapel, but it will do something else, too. It will redistribute those who can’t afford to live in these areas, and grant them to the last holdouts of Conservatism in and around the capital. The ‘Elizabeth Line’, with its naff royalist name, will be the agit-train that paints Maidenhead, Romford and Brentwood red. Perhaps when it does so, the Labour Party that currently dominates London to a degree not seen since the 1950s will be ready to imagine a less moronic way to run its public transport than as an expensively engineered rocket fired into the rent gap.

Read on: Owen Hatherley, ‘The Government of London’, NLR 122.

The Soviet Union had a rule that any urban area that reached a million people had to have an underground Metro system. This went alongside a developed network of trolleybuses and trams that served most cities, which of course had its gaps and failures – there was nothing in the USSR that did not. Yet ‘1 million = Metro’ was such a strong rule that it was open to abuse by ambitious local authorities.

In the 1960s, the city council in Yerevan, which had been lobbying repeatedly for a Metro despite having an urban population of less than half the magic figure, received a delegation from Moscow. Although a supposedly autonomous soviet socialist republic, Armenia couldn’t build a Metro without the capital’s permission, cash and resources. Yerevan’s city council accordingly organised enormous traffic jams to keep the Moscow Nomenklatura stuck for hours on their way from the airport to the city hall, and insisted that this proved that Yerevan would be in chaos by the time it had reached a million inhabitants. The government were sufficiently impressed, and since 1981 Yerevan has had a gorgeous, if currently somewhat dilapidated underground Metro network. Public transport in Britain is administered in a similarly centralized manner, but is more miserly in spirit.

According to the EU’s planning project ESPON, there are twelve urban areas with over a million inhabitants in the UK – Greater London is in a category of its own at 10 million, but Greater Manchester, the Birmingham-Coventry-Black Country and Leeds-Bradford-Wakefield-Halifax conurbations all have over 2 million people; at over a million are Glasgow, Merseyside, Tyne and Wear, Nottingham-Derby, Southampton-Portsmouth, Cardiff and the South Wales Valleys, Bristol and Sheffield.

Of these, none outside London and Nottingham has a fully integrated public-transport network where buses, trams and trains are planned and owned by the same body, and only London, Newcastle-Sunderland and Glasgow have true Metro systems of the sort you will find in cities and conurbations of their size in France, Germany, Italy or Spain. Some cities have trams, usually integrated with old railway tracks, such as Nottingham, Sheffield’s grandly named Supertram, Manchester’s Metrolink and the West Midlands ‘Metro’ between Birmingham and Wolverhampton. Liverpool and its satellites have an extensive S-Bahn-style network, Merseyrail, built in the 70s as a replacement for the dismantled Liverpool Overhead Railway; operators try their best to hide it from the tourists, presumably because they might expect better.  

To find such a failure in provision elsewhere in Europe, the only obvious comparison is Dublin (the Republic has inexplicably copied almost every foolish planning decision made in Britain since 1922). Elsewhere, you have to look quite far – the big cities of the former Yugoslavia are the nearest equivalent, where a decade of war in recent memory and a total economic collapse provide a better excuse. One of the less-discussed possible consequences of the coronavirus is that the already rudimentary British public-transport systems may soon go bankrupt.

Where they exist, these urban-rail networks have lost between 80 and 95 per cent of their custom since the start of March 2020. In Britain, where urban rail and Metro systems are funded largely out of ticket receipts and advertising – most around the world are funded by government grants – this has led to mayors like Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham raising the possibility that their systems will have to be abandoned. As a result, a bailout was organised for England’s urban-rail and tram networks (somewhat inaccurately called ‘light rail’) in May. Some money has been thrown to the Tyne and Wear Metro (a superb system, built in the 1970s as a part of T Dan Smith’s ‘Brasilia of the North’), West Midlands Metro, the Metrolink, the Supertram, and Nottingham Express Transit.

A similar bailout was later agreed for Transport for London, which had deliberately onerous strings attached. These were designed to humiliate Sadiq Khan, whom the government appears to consider a prime enemy after the vanquishing of Jeremy Corbyn – a telling obsession, given his centrist politics. As bankruptcy still loomed, a further bailout of TfL followed in October, after some grandstanding between Khan and the government, which initially planned to force a series of draconian fare hikes, before executing one of its trademark U-turns.

It is of course an odd time to talk about extending public-transport provision, given that local governments have at least temporarily been encouraging people not to use it, but to cycle or walk instead. But we still know there is only one plausible approach to ensuring city and town dwellers can move around in an allegedly soon-to-be zero carbon age – not just by cycling and walking, even less by buying electric cars, but by taking tubes, trams and trolleybuses, segregated from cars and roads. The cities that have lowered their emissions furthest are precisely those that have the most extensive, efficient, frequent and cheap transport networks.

The fact that there are so few of these in the UK is the consequence of the micromanagement of all infrastructure from Westminster – an Act of Parliament is, preposterously, required in order to fund a tram line – intersecting with a ruinously complex, expensive and wasteful system of contracting and procurement.

Local authorities can be criticised for a great deal, but the paucity of public-transport provision in the UK is not for want of cities trying to get funding for something more ambitious. Glasgow has repeatedly, over many decades, begged for money to extend its one-line 1890s Subway; such an extension has never been agreed, let alone commenced. In the 1970s, proposals for a Manchester Metro were thrown out by the government – the fact that the city’s public spaces are clogged up by what are basically railway platforms for the Metrolink’s heavily engineered tram-trains is a direct result of this. Most of the networks outside London, Newcastle and Glasgow date from the 1980s and 90s, and were attempts at putting back a little of what was lost in the 50s and 60s, when the Beeching Axe – wielded by a ‘modernizing’ Tory minister, Ernest Marples – slashed suburban lines, while tram networks were torn out to make way for buses and, mainly, cars.

The South Hampshire conurbation, where Southampton and Portsmouth, the two densest cities in England outside of London, have had to contend with a Tory county’s objection to any expansion of their local-authority boundaries, have had two proposals rejected in Parliament. A slightly goofy Monorail proposal was thrown out by Thatcher, and, much worse, a serious, costed and extensive Metro network which would at last have properly connected this interminable sprawl, with a line gradually being built westwards from Portsea Island to Southampton, was vetoed by Gordon Brown’s Treasury and replaced with a bus running in railway cuttings between Gosport and Fareham.

New Labour talked a great deal about public transport, but Brown seems to have had an animus towards urban rail and trams, spiking plans for Liverpool and for Leeds, whose transport is probably the worst of any big city in Britain. The latter’s problems were compounded under Cameron and Osborne when a truncated trolleybus, which would at least have given Leeds transport of the quality of, say, Sloviansk, went to a public enquiry and was thrown out in 2016. Some of this hostility derives from an early New Labour report on urban transport, which argued that buses should play the major role in expanding public provision. While their importance is considerable, refusing to back pretty much anything else was strikingly short-sighted – even before one considers the way buses are run as private fiefdoms by private companies, seldom integrated with trams and trains.

Yet what did get built sometimes became cautionary tales, making the situation yet worse. Only two new systems were commenced under the Blair–Brown governments – Nottingham Express Transit (NET, modishly), a good, publicly owned tram-train which is partly funded by a surcharge on car parking; and Edinburgh. This was a scandal in Scotland, as cost overruns and ineptitude on the part of its contractors meant that the system came in at half the planned length and thirteen years late; its expense has become notorious, though the single line that now exists is pleasant and popular. Le Havre’s recently constructed light-rail/tram system, longer than Edinburgh’s, with more stations and a 500-metre tunnel, took three years to build, at a cost of £347m – less than half the price of the Edinburgh system.

The enormous expense of building infrastructure in the UK has been as prohibitive as the Treasury’s refusal to invest outside of London and Manchester. It is often claimed this is due to labour costs, but the French counter-example makes this obvious nonsense. The labyrinthine public-private contracting systems that have been dominant in the UK since the 1980s are the real culprit. In this context, Manchester, Nottingham and Sheffield can be proud of what little they have.

One of the many possible interpretations of the profound shifts in electoral politics in the North and Midlands – dramatically instantiated in the 2016 Brexit vote and the December 2019 Tory landslide – can be derived from public-transport provision, or the lack of it. The cities, towns and suburbs covered by the London Underground, Merseyrail, NET and the Tyne and Wear Metro mostly voted Labour in 2019; but an electoral apocalypse hit the poorly served outer towns of Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and West Yorkshire.

Leigh, for instance, the Greater Manchester town that saw the largest overturning of a Labour majority in the country, held by Labour since 1922, is almost completely cut off from Wigan, Salford and Manchester except by unreliable and slow buses. Dudley, not far from the centre of one of the largest urban areas in Europe, is treated by government and residents alike as a self-contained provincial ‘town’. The‘left behind’ cliché has a very concrete meaning in places like this.

Britain is clearly being polarised between London – plus a handful of similar places with property booms and bankers, such as Manchester and Edinburgh – and everywhere else. The entrenched character of the current culture war rests upon people believing bizarre things about the people who live down the road, and upon inculcating a sense of parochial resentment in places that are in reality dense urban areas. The possible collapse of the urban-transport networks was clearly not planned by this government, and it is unlikely that they will be allowed to fail permanently. A situation in which they rust away, offering a skeletal service to ‘key workers’ (or the ‘metropolitan elite’, depending on the audience) is highly plausible. This will only aid a politics based on pettiness and paranoia.