The Planner (8 page)

‘The lesson. What’s the lesson?’

‘That you’re not actually a liberal,’ said Felix. ‘I suspect your worldview is something quite different.’

‘Well, I don’t think I’m a conservative,’ said James. ‘Or a socialist for that matter.’

‘Oh, I’m not so bothered about that. The crucial thing is not how good or bad the idea, but the extent to which you’re prepared to live it. That’s the fundamental problem with these people. Of course, it’s a problem that liberals tend to have in general.’

‘Well, I did really like the PR girls,’ said James. ‘They were great.’

The book launch was over, but Lucian was determined for the night to continue. He invited Felix and James on a North London safari: a group of them were going to play snooker and drink pints of bitter at a working man’s club round the corner. The club had a formidable reputation, and was known for its violation of licensing regulations and historical association with criminal gangs, wholesale drug dealers and corrupt chiefs of police. The neighbourhood was full of highly regarded bars and restaurants, but James could see that for these people there were quite different requirements. They were assiduous social diggers, and actively sought out the company of the lower classes, the desperate and the dangerous. It wasn’t really acceptable for Lucian to hang out with lawyers and hedge fund managers – he needed to develop friendships with retired bank robbers, former IRA commandos and trade union leaders from defunct economic sectors.

James didn’t want to go with them, but he didn’t want to go home either – or at least, not immediately – and he wasn’t ready yet to enter London’s public transport system. He may not have enjoyed being there very much, but he did, at least, feel intoxicated and over-energised – by the gin, the red wine, by Miranda, Kate and Isabelle, by Amelia Zhang-Montel and the glamour of post-structuralist fiction. And so, rashly, he decided to walk it off. After all, the bus station at London Bridge was directly due south and no more than two miles away.

He set off. It was a cold February evening, and on both practical and psychological grounds he needed to go very fast. He walked down the high street, past the bars and restaurants spurned by Lucian, the two hardback books in a plastic bag knocking awkwardly against his legs – even James was sure that was a metaphor. For no good reason, his mind working hard but not thinking, he took his phone from his pocket and sent a text message to Alice: ‘Hey! Was at a book launch and met a friend of yours called Felicity’.

Outside Angel underground station, he saw Miranda, sitting on a bench in a coat that didn’t look warm enough and crying into her mobile phone. He walked quickly past, and turned down the hill, away at last from Islington. But the problem, the problem he should have foreseen, was that he was now in the City.

The City of London. During his long and uneventful adolescence, James had sometimes liked to pretend that the whole world was his private joke. As jokes go, it had been a poor one, but it wasn’t even that any more – he knew that now. For a truly private joke is a philosophical impossibility, meaningless and self-defeating unless there is someone to share it with. No, the world had ceased being a joke and was now something much worse: it was
reality.
It had to be reality, because no single solipsist could be so deranged. A fuck-up on this kind of scale needed a lot of manpower. Not even the most violently insane planner could have dreamt up the City in such detail, with such cruelty and indifference. No, nobody was responsible – that was the fundamental problem.
This wasn’t the work of planners, this wasn’t 1970s Sweden. It was the work of humanity. Only humanity, in all of its raw, unprocessed energy and enthusiasm, could have produced this disaster.

He walked through it all, he saw through it all. The landscape was provisional and disposable, a thawing cacophony, and it wasn’t clear if the city was unravelling in front of him, or being ambitiously rebuilt. That was the thing about economic crashes – they were indistinguishable from economic booms. Whatever the circumstances and financial constraints, whoever the developer or planning authority, the style was always the same: neo-apocalyptic, for every building was now made on the basis that the world was about to end, that however much it may have cost, however technologically innovative and courageous, it would need to be pulled down in the next business cycle.

The architects had got particularly carried away this time. Over-excited by the money from Asia and their new software packages, they had designed impossible shapes with computer-generated angles. Then along had come the civil engineers, the people who actually knew what they were doing, with their powerful machines and smart materials and deadly confidence, even when given the battiest of architectural plans. And the towers that they made soared above him, greedily penetrating the heavens, interfering with weather systems, communicating with satellites, oblivious to the fact that the ones who had granted planning permission all lived on earth.

Head bowed, still weighed down by the books but walking faster than ever, he continued past Moorgate. There were no skyscrapers in Nottingham, and probably not many book launches either, but maybe that was a good thing. The City, the whole of London, had detached itself from the rest of the country, and become instead a global capital for culture and commerce, for vanity and greed. You could only succeed here if you could forget everything you’d ever learnt in England. But he wasn’t like Felix or Alice: he was essentially a provincial, with provincial aspirations and fears.

Another twenty minutes later and at last he came to the river, to the bridge, where London opened up to him and became three-dimensional. There was physical geography instead of all the other kinds. The entire wealth of the city had once been based on the waterway below, but now it was without economic significance, and humans had lost interest in it. Meanwhile, on the south side of the river, the new towers were coming, taller than ever, rising in clumps above the train stations, fracturing the skyline and heralding a new era of prosperity and ruin. He pulled out his phone. There was a text from Alice. It had taken an hour, but she had sent one: ‘I love Felicity. She’s fab. U at a book launch?!’

He stopped along the bridge and looked down into the darkness. If he smoked, he would have lit a cigarette at this point, but he was far too old to take it up now, and so instead he had little option but to send another text to Alice: ‘She seemed very nice and is big fan of yours too. Hope all is good. Fancy going for a drink?’

This time, the answer was almost immediate. ‘How nice. V busy at the moment in work + life. Will email you all soon to arrange something.’

So that was that – clearly she didn’t want to meet. She was v busy and, he should have guessed this, not just with work. But it had never been the plan to go back out with Alice. He crossed the bridge, and went over the water to the train station.

5

9 February

Consultation and involvement activities should also seek to empower communities and neighbourhoods.

–
The London Plan
, Section 2.64

‘Of course, the reason I’m still in this job is because of all the glamorous locations,’ said Rachel.

It was a Saturday morning, and James was doing something that had to be taken seriously, but wasn’t terribly important. He was consulting the public. It was something he had done many times before. For much of the wet summer and sullen autumn, he had spent his Tuesday evenings, his Thursday afternoons and not-particularly-precious Saturday mornings trying to meet the eyes of his fellow citizens, to ascertain the thoughts and feelings of the people he was supposed to be helping.

And this particular project really was going to help them. He had worked on it long enough to be certain. The masterplan for Sunbury Square would result in thirty new houses and 250 flats spread across six low-rise blocks, all compliant with energy-­efficiency best-practice guidelines, and of which 35 per cent would be affordable for low-income families and a further 10 per cent reserved for designated key workers in the borough’s health and education sectors. There would be eight retail units, ranging in size from 500 to 2,000 square feet, a nursery and new playground. Two existing doctors’ surgeries would be merged into an improved health centre with paediatric facilities, and there would be a piece of public art commissioned by the Arts Council.

Although in practice it was quite straightforward, on paper it had been almost impossibly difficult. The masterplan crossed the boundaries of two local development frameworks and would need to be signed off by transport, housing, environmental and regeneration assessors and approved at council and city level, and possibly by the Secretary of State. And then the whole thing would have to be funded. There would need to be transport infrastructure investment, and there would need to be money from local, regional and national government. It probably wouldn’t work without some match funding from the European Development Fund, and the developers would have to be persuaded to increase their costs and reduce their margins. In all likelihood, getting the planning consent and the funding package agreed would take longer than the Second World War. And before any of this happened, they had to complete the public consultation.

‘It’s very good of you to do this with me,’ said James.

‘Tell me about it. It’s not even my project,’ said Rachel.

So here he was again. This time he was in Clifford’s, a once state-of-the-art shopping centre that had been admired by a group of highly influential but now generally despised planners in the late 1970s for its durable concrete-composite walkways, integrated multi-storey car park and smoked glass ceiling. He could at least see the point of holding a consultation here. There was little point in searching for the local residents of Sunbury Square in the public library, arts centre or any of the other things that the council provided for them. No, this was their natural habitat: if they weren’t working in shops, then generally they were buying things in them.

But at least he wasn’t alone. Rachel, deservedly the most popular member of Southwark Council’s Planning Directorate, was with him as they stepped on to a raised platform in the very centre of Clifford’s, directly under the glass atrium, at the intersection of four broad avenues of shopping units. Beside them was a coffee kiosk and a little grouping of indoor plants, which may have been natural – it was practically impossible to tell, let alone know what that meant. James unfolded the camping table he had brought with him, expertly assembled his plastic stand and unpacked two canvas chairs for them. He pulled out clipboards and felt-tip pens, and a neat pile of blank yellow cards, on which people were encouraged to submit opinions and ideas.

‘Well, we’ve got four hours here. Let’s see if anything happens.’

‘Oh, I’m sure we’ll learn something,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m quite excited. I haven’t done one of these for ages.’

James had done this many times before, and what had he learnt? Well, nothing worth learning, nothing that would actually improve the masterplan, nothing that would make the building materials stronger or the houses less costly or the public realm more attractive. How could it? It wasn’t as if anyone he ever consulted knew anything about these things. Felix had told him last week that he wasn’t a liberal, but maybe he wasn’t a democrat either. Rather, he was a technocrat: he believed in technical solutions to the city’s problems, and he knew he wouldn’t find them here.

‘I wish we didn’t have to be on this stage,’ said Rachel. ‘I don’t like being so exposed. All those gormless people staring at my thighs.’

James gazed down the shopping alleys. As a rule, he wasn’t comfortable about being on view like this either, but he didn’t think they had much to worry about. It was a raised floor really rather than a stage, only one foot high, and it was unlikely that Alice, or anyone else he was at university with, was going to walk past.

‘I wouldn’t get bothered about that,’ said James. ‘The usual problem is trying to attract their attention.’

According to some measures, London was the most unequal city in the developed world, and hardly anyone gave a shit. That was one of the hazards of being a town planner. You ended up getting cross and anxious about things that no one cared about. You worried about the amount of nitrogen dioxide in the air, the target rates for domestic recycling and why more people didn’t go to the theatre. You tried to absorb and articulate all of the city’s problems, and you did this so that other people didn’t have to. As a result, it was perhaps inevitable that you became fretful and unhappy.

There was another reason too. The night before he had spoken to his family on the telephone. He had mentioned the job offer in Nottingham and his mother, who even more than most mothers hated London, had spent an hour making compelling arguments why he should take it. And what reasons could he give for staying? To attend book launches, hang out in bars and seek enlightenment? His mother prided herself on never being influenced by television commercials and would not be impressed with anything Felix had to say. And yet .
.
. could he really go to Nottingham? It had, after all, just come joint runner-up as the British city with the highest quality of life. Why on earth would he want to live there?

The early morning shoppers walked past, curious only until they realised that they didn’t have any gifts or product samples to give away. Rachel’s enthusiasm had disappeared. There had been some spasms of disgruntlement, but that had gone too and now she was playing patience on her mobile phone. James was trying to read
Sexheads
, but was finding it hard to get into.