I left London recently for New York after a five-year stay in the British capital. It would be wrong to say that the place where I grew up after spending my infancy in South Africa has become unrecognizable. Just because there’s a “Pret” on every corner, and a camera on every other corner, and Hoxton is hot, and sleek towers for the world’s financiers dot the City’s skyline does not mean that London is changed utterly. In fact it is familiar, but often in a troubling way, as if the city were one of those buildings transformed within but left with a preserved facade.
The streets look the same — if spruced for the new gentry from drab and dreary to spick and span — but London’s animating spirit is another. Money, and I mean the world’s money not Britain’s, now determines how London looks, sets it apart from the rest of the country, and defines what it is. Belgravia is still Belgravia. On closer inspection, however, it resembles a mausoleum reserved for the occasional use of the globe’s peripatetic rich and their ample staffs.
Real estate as investment and tax dodge, rather than as dwelling, is a life-sucking force. Georgian mansions of cream-colored splendor sit there, empty much of the time, with a banner to the great unwashed on their shuttered windows proclaiming: Stay out!
Before I get to that, a word about what is right in London. The city works. It is the most open metropolis in Europe by some distance, the polyglot chatter and subcultures of its vast sprawl a constant rebuke to the drumbeat of anti-immigrant bigotry from the Daily Mail and the U.K. Independence Party. The faraway “Continent” of my youth — full of such unfamiliar and vaguely suspicious items as garlic and French intellectuals and edible food — has defied the Channel and arrived. London and gastronomy are no longer strangers.
French and Polish and Romanian youths pour into London in search of a living wage and passable English, followed by young Spaniards and Italians. That they are undeterred by how crazy-expensive London life is testifies to the economic slump and high unemployment across much of Europe.
The reeking sidewalk-filling summer garbage of New York and the 11-minute subway waits at rush hour are reminders of ways in which the British capital rarely enervates. You can get around in a generally predictable time frame; the streets are clean. London’s bike scheme and bike lanes make New York’s seem woeful, and the city’s congestion-fighting levy on weekday traffic in the center might be a solution to the near insoluble problem of a cross-town journey in Manhattan. Of a soft summer evening, by the canal or in a park, London in its civility and continuity can seem like perfection.
But London is skewed in dangerous ways, indicative of European and global problems. House prices keep jumping. Cranes are everywhere, hoisting new luxury developments into being. Some are certainly for wealthy Greeks fleeing their country’s problems. There’s a bubble. The capital has become a glittering enclave in a country often resentful of its dominance. It presides with an air of superiority, like squeaky-clean Singapore looking down on Southeast Asia.
An alternative way of looking at the push for independence by Scotland, now a one-party Scottish nationalist state, is to think of London as having seceded from the rest of Britain, a city-state unto itself. There is widespread resentment of the city’s self-absorption. An alternative way of looking at the way London sucks in money and the affluent from the rest of Europe is as a reflection of the stagnation and unresolved structural problems of the eurozone. In some ways, London reflects both a country and a continent in which the fracturing forces are, for the first time since World War II, stronger than the unifying forces. London is a capital of culture, but also of inequality and tax evasion.
What draws the world to London is opportunity. But it is also a magnet for people looking for a safe place for their money. Having made it in countries like Russia and China with a cowed press, rampant corruption and no rule of law, oligarchs and crony capitalists reach the conclusion that they like nothing as much as democratic systems with real legal systems and a vigorous press. Having trashed the West they trust the West with their money.
Autocratic hypercapitalism without Western checks and balances produces new elites whose dream is an American or British lifestyle and education for their children, and whose other goal is to buy into the rule of law by acquiring real estate, driving up prices in prime markets to the point where the middle classes of those countries, with incomes stagnant or falling (and taxed), are pushed aside.
London is the capital of these trends. That is the different reek, of something amiss and skewed and wrong, in its purring streets.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered