Parliaments, picnics and social cleansing: a walk in London
By: Matt Tidby
Tags: London, Life

Sometimes walking up and down hills is the only way to truly try and understand what’s happening in the city around you, writes Matt Tidby.

The view from Primrose Hill. Photo: Richard Kaby via Flickr CC

I’m pretty good at walking. I enjoy exploring places on foot — I once spent a full day finding Coventry utterly fascinating, which is no small achievement. Last year, I moved to London. In such a sprawl, it can be difficult to perceive and appreciate the social and historical value of even your immediate surroundings — let alone try to think about the place as a terrifying, multitudinous whole. So, I’ve started walking about. This Easter bank holiday, spring had sprung, so I jumped on a train to Gospel Oak and climbed Parliament Hill — intent on walking from there, via Primrose Hill, to its namesake in Westminster.

The view from Parliament Hill is a hazy east-west panorama of blue smudges — the city still feels distant, but I was distracted — I had seen someone whom I thought was Josie Long on the Overground a few minutes before and had promptly tripped extravagantly whilst disembarking. Pride suitably prodded, I set out down the hill and out the park; past children doing earnest laps of the athletics track, past fedora-topped characters openly smoking cannabis within waft of the ice cream van queue.

The walk towards Primrose Hill took me through the gargantuan mansions of Belsize Park, down the aptly titled England’s Lane — itself a coldly concise summary of London’s housing crisis. The average asking price for a property here, amongst the designer eateries and near-toxic levels of chic, is a spicy £2.1 million. Yet, at the top of the road, sits the squat and uninspiring redbrick form of the England’s Lane Hostel, where Camden Council ‘temporarily’ houses its homeless families — often for years at a time.

I stopped for a moment on the opposite side of the street, watching the Bank Holiday coffee crowds luxuriating in the sunshine. A recent burst of resistance to social housing evictions, with occupations from Barnet in the North to Stratford in the East, has been a strong and uplifting rallying cry against the wilful disassembly of working class communities. However, it may ultimately be in vein — with council’s facing increasingly taut financial boundaries, and with ‘Right to Buy’ rearing its ugly head once more, the incontinence of London’s property gold rush may already have burst the dam.

The trouble with England. Photo: Bex Walton via Flickr CC

Reaching Primrose Hill, I meet my first proper crowds. Appropriately for Easter, there’s something pleasingly occult-ish about the clamour of sun worshippers atop the summit of the park. The more ostentatious among them have gone the whole hog with wicker and wine — reclining to survey the eclectic swinging dick spires of their capital.

To avoid being accused of looking sideways at nearby romantic entanglements, I focus on the skyline — as ever, feeling sorry for St. Paul’s amongst its charmless looming neighbours, whilst furtively admiring the Pyongyangian protuberance of the Shard. London is in the white heat of a skyscraper boom — clusters of chrome dugtrios are bursting upwards, with the number of buildings over twenty storeys set to double. Quotas of “affordable” housing have been established to prevent these glittering upstarts being the sole estate of the rich, but developers are becoming savvy to avoidance manoeuvres.

Speaking of which — eventually, the couples begin daubing their naked torsos in pentagonal patterns, ready for the ever-popular sacrificial dance at sundown. Before I get short-listed for the slab, I potter down the hill and into the Regent’s Park.

Beyond the boulevards and blossom of the park, and in a fit of self-punishment for not having the foresight to bring a picnic hamper, I elect to take a direct route to Westminster — following Portland Place and Regent’s Street, past the doom-destined horseshoe of Broadcasting House and into the crowds proper. For the first time, my pace slows. At one point, within the echo of an earnest Oxford Circus beatboxer, I become trapped amongst an enclave of Spanish teenagers, who appear to have set up their own static autonomous state on the borders of Banana Republic. I manage to traffic myself out by jumping into the bus lane. I nearly lose a foot to a Tuk Tuk outside Hamley’s, and decide that enough is enough.

I dive down a lane of tradesman’s entrances, emerging into the comparative silence of Messrs Carnaby and Beak — Soho, increasingly encroached upon, still manages to cushion the chrome-steel horrors that mass upon its borders. A campaign to preserve the cultural role of the area has gained national attention. However, just as with the mothers of E15 and the homeless of England’s Lane, the burrowing claws of cash may be too deeply entwined in the fabric of Soho to preserve her tapestry indefinitely.

I skate across Piccadilly Circus without looking up — its piazza of pizzazz looking grubbed and tawdry under the glare of sobriety. Within moments, the garishness recedes to be replaced by another kind of brazen monumentalism. From Waterloo Place, adjacent to the dusty halls of the Royal Society, a party of statues — Captain Scott, Florence Nightingale, Edward VII and others — welcome me to Westminster proper.

With an election looming, there’s something unfathomably pregnant about the Palace of Westminster. With the civil service off darning their socks in the bank holiday sunshine, the silence of Whitehall evokes the possibility of more ‘There’s no money left’ notes, patiently waiting on desks. I skirt the rear along Horseguard’s Parade, to get my favourite view of Downing Street. From here, that sun-kissed coalition rose garden, for all the power it contains, can be seen for what it is — the modest yard of a lonely, besieged terraced house, behind barbed wire and security gates. It looks like somewhere to dig out of, not commit your life to get in to.

I walk into Parliament Square from Great George Street, and tweet my delight at being out in the sunshine, having done enough exercise to permit the consumption of a quite indecent volume of banana loaf once home. London, for all its grace and comedy, is fundamentally flawed — a great city, but a victim of its success. Our national media are delighted to blame London’s problems on the crowd — particularly those in social housing, or the 37% of its residents born outside the UK.

But any walk in London, whichever way you go, makes it plainly obvious that the greatest threat to the future of our capital is capital itself. It saturates every edifice — a groundswell of finance, flooding our commercial thoroughfares and communities alike. And in the grand tradition of apocalyptic storytelling, this catastrophe can often be best seen from the surrounding hills, of Parliament and Primrose.