Earlier this month I was in a bar in Riga, making a few friends and chatting to them about my home city. As expected, they asked for recommendations -places to visit if they ever happened to be in London. I recommended Hampstead and Soho. After all, I was not going to be a tedious bore and discuss my favourite Lewisham pubs with them. If you’re visiting London, beyond Hampton Court Palace or Kew Gardens.. you’re unlikely to leave Zone 1 or 2.
If you’re only visiting London, I said, visit Hampstead Heath, as it is a little bit of English countryside in the middle of the city. Hampstead is like a village and the heath has wonderful views. And rather than offering up the cliched hipsterdom of Shoreditch and Hoxton, or naff Camden, I told them to go to Soho for an evening out. It is the heart of London’s iconic West End and despite gentrification, it retains a sense of community and (counter) culture. It is a place you can walk to after seeing the city’s most famous sites.
Riga’s tiny Old Town is blocked to most through traffic and one can slowly zig-zag and meander across its cobbled streets. I sat outside on tables that spilt out into the road and watched crowds mingle. As I did so, I remembered how my dad would say that streets were not about getting from A to B, but instead, they were where life happens. It is something our 60's town planners forgot, he would sometimes add, rather ruefully. Streets are where we meet, congregate, catch-up, sit, ponder, purchase and create — they’re where life happens.
Over the last year, a little revolution has happened in Soho. To allow for social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic, its old streets have been pedestrianised. The roads have been taken from the clasp of the few, who in petrol-fueled cages, cut through from A to B. The streets have been given back to the many who want to eat, dine and mingle there. Popular among the neighbourhood’s restaurant and bar owners, and their visitors, the changes democratised the space.
But Westminster Council is ripping this up.
If there is one place in the capital where pedestrianisation and road closures can thrive it is in Soho, with its thriving cafe culture and bar scene, slap bang in the middle of London’s tube map. Who needs to drive there? And the noise? You live in the heart of the West End, noise is to be expected!
But the noise won out — the noise of the neighbours, the ‘we like it as it’, the ‘we don’t want change’, the ‘not in my back yard’ voices won.
I witness Westminster Council’s opposition Labour Group lining up to demand a ‘re-think’ of the alfresco dining policy and I am not surprised. One can go on about how the removable of alfresco dining might lower footfall, weakened businesses, impact tourism, and lower business rates intake — but to do so is to miss the point. The goal was to win votes in West End wards, not improve London’s West End or improve London.
If I were a West End Labour Councillor, I know where I would stand on the issue and I would work cross-Party to try and improve the area for the city. I’d probably lose my seat for endorsing alfresco dining and the low traffic streets, but I know I would have helped transform an iconic area of London for the better.
But I guess politics is about the long haul. For Labour in Westminster, it is about eking out those marginal gains, swinging voters however you can, to maybe one day take control of the local authority and transform the borough for the better, in your own collective vision.
The Soho decision is symbolic. This is our politics, and this is our city’s governance. After all, when did you last witness a councillor break from their Group to act in the interests of London as a whole, against the wishes of their existing ward or borough voter-base? And by voter base, I mean the types of demographics — older, wealthier — who vote in local elections.
A recent study showed that golf courses in London cover an area the size of Brent. 1,600 hectares of golf course — larger than Hammersmith & Fulham — are publicly owned. According to the author of the study, Russell Curtis, the area currently occupied by a single golfer could comfortably provide homes for about 380 people.
For the millions of Londoners faced with cripplingly high rents, house prices and homelessness, these publicly owned golf courses, bringing in relatively negligible sums to their local authorities, are an insult. Consolidating these golf courses, producing more pleasant and accessible parkland (like Lewisham Borough have) and providing much needed, high-density housing on them, makes bloody good sense.
But do I think any of these golf courses will be turned, even partially, into housing estates? No.
If any local authority lined up a golf course to be turned into housing, you could expect a rainbow coalition of political parties opposing it — red, blue, yellow or green. The ‘Not In My Back Yard” outcry would be concentrated in nearby wards, among the owner-occupiers who turn out to vote. Any political party would leverage the issue, acting for the interests of local residents over the strategic interests of the city.
We have a Government going to war with a popular London Mayor and Transport for London. A government harming its capital, this economic powerhouse, for short-term, partisan gain. But can we complain? When I look at this Government, I see London’s local politics reflected right back at me.
