You must know that many map collectors treasure 19th century maps of London. That is when the railroads were introduced and it was a period when you can see, literally decade by decade, the stretching and sprawling out of the City that the building of those railroads caused. True connoisseurs can tell you literally by year when new areas and neighborhoods were being developed. Sadly though, the 1800's are a little too early for my shop and I would say that maps from that era are not considered to be truly antique.
Were those the words of such august figures of urban affairs like Jane Jacobs, Robert Bruegmann, Randall O'Toole, or Smart Growth types like Andres Duany or ersatz sour heads like James Howard Kunstler? No gentle readers, those were (as best as I can remember) the words of a cultured and well educated antique map dealer named Tim Bryars who runs a shop called, appropriately enough, Tim Bryars Ltd, located in Cecil's Court, London.
I thought I would take the time out to write an epistle of true stories regarding my experiences and observations of London and southern England. I have spent over 2 out of my last six months in London on behalf of my company. Before this spat of visits, I also visited London in May 2002 for two weeks on holiday. I thought that I would share, in one fell swoop, a narrative of stories I have collected while I was over in the Imperial City.
I was over in London from April 6 - April 29. On my most recent trip I had trouble as usual with adjusting to jet lag, but after about 11 days or so I finally got into a rhythm and had no more sleeping problems. I made it a mission of mine to do something that 99 percent of tourists and short time visitors never do when they visit London. And what was that, gentle readers? Why go visit the suburbs of London of course! Yes sir, I made it a mission of mine to try to cover a decent swath of London during my time there. I managed to visit Camden Town, Islington, the Battersea Park area, Brixton (made famous by the Clash song), Notting Hill, Knightsbridge (where Harrods is located), Sloane Street, Mayfair, South Kensington, Chelsea, Pimlico, Belgravia, Highgate, Muswell Hill, the Richmond and Kew Gardens areas, as well as Hounslow, Acton Town (I have seen that Tube station, btw), and Ealing. I also took strolls around several major parks including Richmond Park (about twice as large as Memorial Park in Houston - you can see deer there), Regents Park, and Highgate Park. I would have to judge that London probably has more parkland than any other city in the world. Many tourists probably don't realize this, but London is loaded with golf courses in its outer suburban areas.
I should also state that in many of London's older areas with terraced housing, residents of particular squares will have a key and access to a private park that is encompassed by the square. They have this since of course the estates within 5 or so miles of the center of the city (nee the Strand or Houses of Parliament) are terraced housing which is part of a large building. They date from the 18th century onwards and do not have front or back yards the way that American house plots do. This tends to fade a bit as one gets to the outer suburbs like Richmond where one starts to see single family housing similar to what you see in American suburbs.
One thing that really burns me up about criticisms which the "Smart Growth" crowd fires at American suburban development is that America's suburbs are fully of cookie cutter "ticky tacky houses" that all look the same. Well I am going to take an opportunity here to launch a broadside counter attack at this piece of aesthetic snobbery on the part of the the urban planning and architect professions. You people have not truly beheld London's endless stretches of 2-4 story high row houses along narrow streets, nor have you experienced the joys of looking at narrow street after narrow street of the light tan colored buildings which line the streets of Paris. This might sound like heresy to many, but in both cities the monotony of each form of development easily matches the supposed monotony of America's suburbs.
More to the point, in each city one of the first things that one notices in walking around neighborhood after neighborhood is that both sides of every street are lined with endless lines of automobiles. I counted two parking garages in all of the area of London which I managed to cover. One garage is on Oxford Street while the other is in the City of London. My hunch is that it is zoning ordinances that are holding back the building of parking garages, especially in the inner areas of London. Otherwise property owners would be falling all over themselves to convert their buildings into parking garages in order to accommodate the endless lines of automobiles that line the streets. They could make a fortune charging for parking space. As it is, there are signs everywhere in the inner areas of London which warn would be motorists that they have to pay 20 pence every five minutes (2.40 pounds per hour) to park their vehicles. Vehicles have to be moved every 4 hours or they will be clamped down. I suspect that one of the things that is driving housing costs in the inner areas of London is that the value of that parking spot is being impounded into the sale or leasehold price of property. As of the Spring 2007, the average house price in London is 300,000 pounds - $600,000 U.S. The ratio of average house price to annual salary is now over 10:1 and the the papers run plenty of stories like this one which describe how younger people plot their housing situations in a city where they work, but in which they are priced out of the housing markets.
I took a quick survey of my co-workers at VLICA, how it was that they lived and how it was that they got to work. Two of my immediate co-workers now ride motorbikes to work from 10+ miles away. Why? That is because motorcycles are not charged under Lord Mayor Ken Livingstone's famed congestion pricing scheme - which has improved road travel speeds from a whopping 8 mph to 10 mph, BTW. The supervisor of the group whom I work with complained to me one day that he and my colleague used to share one of the four parking spaces set aside for motorcycles in the basement parking area. The problem now is that there are now 10 employees whom now are using motorbikes to get to work because of the congestion charge and there is a rivalry for the limited parking for motorbikes. One afternoon I decided to take a walk around the back of the building which faces the Thames. I noticed that there were some motorcycles parked along the back. When I went back there, I discovered that there was an entire line of motorcycles parked in a neat row. I counted 49 motorbikes in that row.
As for some of my other co-workers, one woman lives about 3 miles outside the town of Woking, where she has a nice detached house with a wonderful garden. Hint, you don't find this kind of housing in London. Her commute everyday consists of riding a bike 3 miles to the train station (she rides her bike there because the car park charge is 5 pounds per day), then she rides the train in to the Victoria Station, a 30+ minute commute. Then she walks from the train station for about 15-20 minutes to get to the company office. Her entire trip takes about 1 hour - 1 hour and 10 minutes. Another of my co-workers lives in Brighton where he pays 370 pounds per month to ride the train 70 kilometers to get to work in about 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Here is a story in the London Metro. which describes that the Tube had better performance 10 years ago:
Delays on the Tube are getting worse, it was claimed yesterday.
Despite a three-fold increase in fares and a major increase in Government handouts, there are now more delays on the London Underground than there were in 1997, research has revealed.
Commuters were hit with a total of 2,740 delays lasting 15 minutes or more in the 12 months up to April 1 this year. During the corresponding period ten years ago, the number was 2,656.
snip
The rise comes despite fare rises which have seen the price of a Zone 1 single cash ticket go up from £1.20 to £4. A one-day travelcard covering Zones 1 to 4 during peak times now costs £9 – up £5.40 since 1997.
snip
Five-minute delays have fallen by more than 5,000 to 21,255. And ten- to 14-minute delays fell from 4,660 in 1997 to 3,600 now.
Lengthy delays of 15 minutes or more fell by by more than 500 to 2,740 over the period.
Of course, according to this guy trains will always run on time.
BTW: I have experienced the wonderful pleasure of having trains canceled as well as having been rerouted in mid trip to train stations where I had to circumvent "engineering changes" and in which it took me another 90 minutes to get back to my hotel room. Here's a story from the April 26 edition of The Economist about the price of upkeep on the Tube.
I am currently reading two books which I brought at a Waterstones on the Tube. One is called The Story of London's Underground by John R. Day. The other is called Underground to Everywhere by Stephen Hallliday. Both are amazing books. I learned that most of the Tube that was constructed between 1920 and 1940 was because Britain was in the throes of 10% + unemployment after WWI and that rail construction was seen as a way of providing employment for many, that Tube patronage dropped from the mid 1950's to the early 1980's, that rail capacity has the same inherent problems of crowding that freeways do during rush hours, and that the transition to the modern day service based economy has been a minor disaster for railroads on account that factories used to (and still do) run on a 24x7 schedule, which was much more ideal for rail transit. Instead what we now have is a world where millions work 8am - 5pm, leaving rail managers with the huge problem of massive capital tied up in rolling stock not being utilized to its fullest. It's a pretty safe bet that the planners (as usual) didn't see the shift from a manufacturing economy to a more service based economy coming.
While walking back to my hotel on several late nights, I watched as the Tube stations closed for the night and looked onwards as the engineering crews came out to do maintenance. Few tourists or visitors can tell you of this story, but that is when the buses get crowded, especially on weekends. One night during my last week in London, I awoke in the middle of the night feeling extremely hungry. Rather than order room service, I walked down to the Spar convenience store located on the Strand. It was 2:45 am. The store was still open, as was the McDonalds next to it. And what did I see? London's famed red buses were still running at 2:45am!
I should say here that there are some people out there that have done some absolutely amazing work putting together websites detailing London's bus system. Briefly, Transport for London monitors private companies which operate both the Tube and London's buses. Try reading some of these websites if you want to read some of the amazing details which Britons have described their transportation. I especially like these two websites which describe bus borough reports and how to improve bus services. Though the last link was written in 2001, I especially like page 18 of the report:
The public transport market is not uniform across London but varies significantly between central and outer areas. Within central London public transport has an 86 per cent market share, a 75 per cent market share for trips into central London but only a 29 per cent market share for journeys outside the central area.
Car use and congestion has risen faster in outer London and in this area buses are generally the only mode of public transport readily available. Over 3 million bus journeys a day take place completely outside central London compared with just 400,000 daily journeys on the Underground.
I like how the Brits put things sometimes. London changes dramatically as you go outwards towards its suburban areas, but since many tourists and short time visitors don't do this, it is easy to think that everything looks like it does on Charing Cross. All I can say is that gentle readers need to get out to areas like Muswell Hill or Highgate, start walking around, and look at what the traffic patterns look like.
London is now more than twice the size it was in 1938, just before the outbreak of war. It has a population that is about the same as it was at that time, indeed it had declined to about 6.8 million in 1981. As is noted in the Wiki entry, Britain had a real problem with homelessness after the war. About 3-4 million Britons were rendered homeless after 1945. The post WWII governments built scads of highrises in various places in London to accommodate them, but most of their residents didn't like being packed into them. Ergo, by the beginning of the 1950's, the government began a new policy of relocating these people into so called New Towns. This policy was also enacted in the hope that this would help arrest the ongoing sprawl of London. A green belt was enacted around the city, aided and abetted by the nationalization of development rights but the only real effect of this policy was that the sprawl was simply exported and transferred to various counties in Southern England.
All of this from the country which gave America its heritage, which was the first country in the world to industrialize, which experienced sprawl before anyone else, and which has 60 million people living in 94,000 square miles of land.
Have a good evening gentle readers. I hope you have learned something new.
Wizard.
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at May 7, 2007 10:06 PM