DIARY - Looking for Eden
Date: 2008-03-04 16:54:20
Author: Pat Kent
I have always had my day job rooted in London, but it was always pretty parochial. More and more, my day job takes me across the capital to meetings and sites in places that I don't know that well, and more and more, it means I have to travel up to central London as a commuter, using public transport.
Now, I will never get away from being a car-driver [or if I'm pushed, a car-passenger] but due to greener concerns regarding global warming etc and the growing meglomanical aspirations of SS- Oberstgruppen-Führer [or Mayor] Livingstone, London is becoming a no-go zone for cars and so my reliance of public transport increases proportionally to his power-crazed rantings and dictates.
Now, I can accept that the centre of any world-class city should not be choked with private cars, but is London a world-class city? Could it ever be a world-class city? Anyone who has any nous would want it to be but could it ever be delivered? I sincerely doubt it.
Today I travelled up on the 8.38 from Beckenham Junction to London Victoria and I share the train with some of the occupants of this aspiring world-class city, or to put it in a more honest appraisal, some of the worst that London could offer.
The man who can't help but share the contents of his nose with the poor young girl sitting next to him, actually not so much as "can't help but share it", more like determined to ensure that she shares it; the young girl opposite me who, in the highest pitch possible that is still audible to human hearing, is telling her "friend" on the other end of her mobile 'phone about how she thinks she got "laid" [not the term she used] last night while she was drunk and how funny it was because she'd only been out with him twice and found out this morning that he knows her boyfriend from the gym.[What a future our world holds, imagine what her off-spring will turn out like]
Then there's the constant phone calls and telephones ringing. Can't these people survive a 20-minute train journey without taking or making a call? Most of them are the "I'm on a train" call that, in truth, serves no purpose to anybody. There's the dickhead with the huge bag, that won't fit on the overhead rack so he leaves it across the doorway, reducing the width of the access down so much that only enough room is left to allow a waif like Kate Moss to get on or off.
I decide to give up and just avoid the dregs that surround me on the train and look out of the grafitti etched, filthy, stained window onto the world-class city that is London as it passes by at speed.
The overgrown wasteland that abuts the rail-lines is full of dead prams and buggies, bags of refuse chucked over fences because people are too lazy to take it to the tip or even put it out for the bin-men to take. The land looks like a landfill site, How can we promote a country or city like London as world-class when people cannot even take care of their own backyards?
The amount of grafitti that adorns the splendid Victorian houses and structures that line the route is probably hailed in some quarters as "street art", the voice of "urbanism" and complementary to living as a "Metro-sexual" in the capital; Well, it's not. It's an eyesore and displays a return to uncivilised living. The fools that look on it as something of any value need to take a serious listen to "The Kings New Clothes" by Danny Kaye. The places that have been festooned with this crap masquerading as art appear derelict and unloved. The grafitti isn't put there as a statement against any supposed oppression that the "kids" who do it have to suffer; It's not productive, it's simply destructive - If it was a "Banksy" form of artistic statement I could possibly understand or even tolerate it, but, more often than not, it's a repititous "tagging" of some cretin's name or symbol of their name [presumably because the author can't write or spell in English].
Moving onwards to Victoria we pass the monument to construction and engineering that was Battersea Power Station. To see it now you simply see a monument to the structural dereliction that litters London. These wonderful buildings are being replaced by buildings of glass with their pseudo-stucco finshes, painted in garish eastern european hues or plied with cheap timber facades so quickly that we are in danger of losing our built heritage in the blink of an eye or the casting of a vote.
Then into Victoria itself. dirty, smelly, fast-food wrappers and free newspapers littering the floors, puntuated by beggars and "charity" workers doing their hard selling in your face. 18-metre long bendy-buses try and navigate their way round corners and bends, on roads built centuries ago to accommodate horses and carts. Footways barely wide enough to cope with pedestrians have to accommodate a growing display of signs, both legal and illegal, as the road sign competes with A-boards advertsiing cafe and shoe repairers. World-class? I don't see that tolerated in many European cities or places Like Boston.
More and more money is spent by the likes of Livingstone on promoting London as a world-class city but they move about it with their eyes closed believing their own publicity and lies.
This isn't an anti-Livingstone, right-wing rant, I'm a socialist, I'm also a Londoner and until fairly recently I loved London, it was my sort of town, and in MY eyes it always was a world-class city. Trying to make it something Livingstone and his cohorts believe is a world-class city is trying to look for Eden..or more possibly Shangri-la. While Livingstone loses the plot; we lose our heritage, our city and our respect for ourselves.
London isn't Eden and never will be; it is degenerating into what I can only describe as a "shit-hole", it isn't nice to live in, it isn't nice to move around and it's getting worse as more and more is crammed into the ever creaking pint-pot. The social infrastructure as well as the physical infrastructure can't deal with it and it will fail.
A sub-culture is growing ever-stronger as more and more operate within an economy and lifestyle that has more to do with crime than trying to let the city flourish. This is taking over and London simply isn't a nice place to be anymore. This maliase is spreading and soon we can kiss goodbye to world-class country as well as any notions of world-class cities.
We're simply not getting our priorities right and that is due in a big way to people tolerating things and blindly accepting the dictates of people like Livigstone and his cronies in City Hall.
I'd love to find Eden in London, but I won't be looking to Livingstone to provide the map [interactive or not].
Pat Kent
P.S. FIVE NEW DRAWINGS UPLOADED TO THE "MY WORK" PAGES.
© Pat Kent 2008 – All rights reserved.
Pat Kent exercises his right to be identified as the author.