#BalhamOrTooting – a consultation exercise

www.BalhamOrTooting.org.uk
(see bottom of this post for the full website)

Crossrail 2 is the next of London's infrastructure megaprojects – it's a new underground railway line that will run north/south across the city, and relieve the Northern line and railways running though Clapham Junction. It'll take nearly 20 years to deliver, with the first trains estimated to be running around 2030. But it will transform large parts of London – including my patch, Wandsworth, which despite being in Zones 2 & 3 has poor connections into Central London (and partly explains why we have such high levels of cyclists).

The new line has included a station at Tooting Broadway since the route was initially put out to consultation in 2013. A station in Tooting makes a lot of sense as it's at the bottom of the Northern Line, and the area is ripe for regeneration: improving transport connections will unlock new housing.

My friend Dan Watkins – the Conservative candidate in the 2015 General Election – has led a strong campaign to put Tooting on the Crossrail 2 map, so when we found out last month that Transport for London was considering moving the station to Balham we decided to launch a campaign to engage the local population and see if there was support for a campaign to keep the dream of Crossrail 2 at Tooting Broadway alive.

Normally the Wandsworth modus operandi would be to do a combination of door-to-door petitions and email out a link to a Survey Monkey site. This time I suggested we did something different, so my friend Ben Guerin (an ace web developer) got to work on building a website aimed at raising awareness that there was a choice between the Balham and Tooting routes. I designed the graphics and finessed the text. We haven't spent any money on social media advertising.

First social media graphic

Second social media graphic

TfL produced a great map for the consultation

I also designed a leaflet that was delivered to all homes within walking distance of the stations – and at early morning raids on our local tube stations. The effort to get tens of thousands of leaflets delivered in the space of a week was immense – so well done Dan and team on the ground.

DL-sized leaflet

Dan's dodgy photography – something I can't do from the other side of the world!

And of course Dan followed up with local residents who signed the petition.



The results have shown strong support for the station at Tooting Broadway – which is unsurprising given that Balham is a lot more gentrified, and two stops closer to Central London on the Northern Line. Tooting will have to endure a more intrusive construction phase, but the benefits are much, much greater.

What I did find interesting is how support for Tooting Broadway extended in the areas close to Balham station – I used to live in the Heaver Estate area and would walk to Balham if I was catching the tube into town. A station at Tooting Broadway will see some people from Balham and Tooting Bec travel southwards, so perhaps these results are not that surprising after all.

Here's the infographic I produced which summarised the results. I also produced a version for social media (this required slightly different formatting). I love data – so laying this out was a real treat.



The campaign also helped raise the profile of Dan's work in the community, particularly around Tooting Broadway, where Labour has been historically strongest. I was surprised that local MP Sadiq Khan was so slow off the mark – after all, it's a crucial issue for the future of Tooting. Others noticed this too...

We're thrilled with the results, with a substantial majority of the 2500 people signing the survey living in Tooting. It's helped engage people with Crossrail 2's more detailed consultation – having filled out a number of these I know they're usually the domain of the more determined. And that's the point about politics, right? Yes we need politicians to champion causes, but change happens when whole communities are engaged and mobilised.

Tooting responses

Here's the full website:

The full website (background image stretched to render entire length of page)

Bikes v Strikes

I was riding my bike home from central London earlier this week when I noticed there were a lot of black cabs snarling things up in rather a big way. ‘Ahh,’ I thought to myself. ‘That’ll be the strike over the iPhone app thing’. I pulled over to talk to a couple of friendly-looking cabbies, who filled me in as we talked about competition from Uber in the early Summer sun.

Surely The Knowledge gives them an edge over some silly piece of software, I asked the cabbies. They were adamant that they were indeed cheaper and more reliable. But apparently that wasn’t the point, as it turned out that their beef is less with Uber – which you can download at https://www.uber.com/cities/london – and more with Transport for London for allowing new entrants into the metered cab market.

Google Maps reporting traffic flows at the height of London's taxi strike

Like last year, the taxi drivers’ brief period of holding London hostage was the mother-of-all PR cock-ups. Unlike black cabs Uber drivers don’t go on strike – everyone knows that now – and making central London even tetchier by honking horns and clogging up the roads is a novel way to endear yourself to the population.

Yet as I weaved my way home on my bicycle I realised that here we had the political spectrum reduced to a single event: a monopoly administered by the Public Carriage Office snarling up London’s streets for everyone apart from those of us on two wheels, who are bound only by the Highway Code and a sense of survival (and coincidentally my closest shave in years was with a psychotic black cab a few months ago). That the police had promised arrests if the street blockades continued for any duration seemed a wonderful example of how cack-handed the state can be in resolving problems it has created.

Perhaps it is time for the Public Carriage Office’s operation to be reformed. Perhaps it is too late – Uber has joined the ranks of Google and Hoover as companies that now double up as verbs.

I haven’t taken a black cab in years, and the expense of a return trip into town on the tube still makes me wince. But here I was pedalling through Pimlico and enjoying the glorious weather with my progress unfettered by cost or regulation, while others suffered because of people getting grumpy about losing a monopoly licensed by the state.

And I pondered why cycling is associated with the lefty beard and sandals brigade. London’s Mayor and our PM both ride bikes, yet cycling is still regarded as distinctly… Huppertesque, some might say. Indeed the entire Liberal Democrat parliamentary party could ride to work on four tandems.

But cycling is a mode of transport that allows total freedom of movement, requires little government intervention and has ubiquitous vehicle ownership – all solid right wing values. The advent of the modern ‘safety cycle’ in the 1890s played a key part in the emancipation of the working class. And travel by Boris Bike spikes over Christmas and during tube strikes, occasions when state-controlled public transport fails Londoners. Tuesday’s action by black cab drivers rammed home just how inherently Tory the humble bicycle really is.

First published by Platform 10 on May 30th, 2015

My letter to Professor Arthur, Provost at UCL

Dear Professor Arthur,

I am a UCL Geography graduate, and loved my time at University College. London is an expensive place to be a student, but the biggest single help in managing my finances was riding my bicycle to university every day, rather than being stung by public transport costs.

You may have seen that the Mayor has launched an ambitious programme of segregated cycle lanes in Central London. This has been opposed by a few powerful business groups, and UCL is a member of one of these – London First. However if you've followed the issue you'll also have noticed that top graduate employers are backing the new cycle infrastructure. Deloitte says "cycle highways will help us attract & retain the people our business needs to thrive", while Simon & Schuster says "a growing number of our employees cycle to work. More would if they felt safer on the road".

I realise UCL's membership of London First goes way beyond cycling infrastructure, but I know I speak for my classmates in encouraging you to distance UCL from their hostility towards the new bike lanes. Will you publicly throw UCL's weight behind the Mayor's plans for improving the lot of London's cyclists – many of whom are your students and staff?

Best wishes,


Matthew Plummer

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POSTSCRIPT (6th November, 2014) Success! UCL has just announced full support for the Mayor's new bike infrastructure – see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/greenucl/greenucl-news-publication/ucl-backs-proposed-cycle-superhighway

'Everybody rides now: the most fashionable people have taken it up!'

This is an essay I wrote during my final year as a undergraduate at UCL, and it might be of interest to anyone interested in a previous boom era for bicycles in the capital.

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How was cycling in London represented and debated in contemporary texts and illustrations of the late 19th and early 20th century?

I'm interested in how cycling was portrayed in the period between the late Victorian era and the start of the Great War, a time during which cycling moved from relative novelty to an accepted part of London's transport landscape – and a far cry from the advent of the velocipede half a century earlier, when ugly scenes were common: 'In London, one unfortunate 'velocipeder' found himself surrounded by a hostile mob. He frantically hailed a stagecoach, flung his machine on its rooftop, jumped in, and sped off to safety (Herlihy 2006:34). More worryingly, the London College of Surgeons had spoken out against the machines which were 'dangerous to the rider and likely to cause 'ruptures': only a fool would persist' (2006:38).

The 1880s saw the bicycle evolve from being a 'boneshaker' into something with which today's machines share a clear lineage, and Rubenstein identifies two important innovations that brought about the transformation. John Kemp Starley's 'Rover' safety bicycle (illustration 1) had both wheels of similar size, a feature that was advertised as 'set to fashion the world' (1977:48) after it was launched in 1885, with its diamond-shaped frame saving riders from 'mounting a thing like a giraffe, from which an impromptu descent offers unpleasant possibilities' (Herlihy 2006:167). Likewise Dunlop's pneumatic tyre dominated the market after it was introduced in 1888, and Rubenstein argues that these improvements meant that 'cycling could become a method of transport and recreation suitable to both sexes and most ages. Men and women who sought increased social emancipation were eagerly and gratefully to take advantage of what invention and mass production made possible' (1977:48). No longer a curiosity, bicycles were ready for the masses.

Illustration 1: John Kemp Starley's 'Rover' safety bicycle
(Coventry Transport Museum)

These innovations helped facilitate increasingly impressive feats of athleticism. Events that pitted cyclists against horses remained popular until relatively late in the day – English champion David Stanton famously taking on a trap drawn by 'Lady Flora' and her driver Mr. MacDonald at Alexandra Palace in 1875 (Herlihy 2006:165). However Stanton also raced in that same year between London and Bath, covering the distance in just under 12 hours, and demonstrating that bicycles were going to be a realistic transport proposition for many (Herlihy 2006:179). 20 years later Wandsworth's 'Grove Cycling Club' was holding weekly rides of 30-50 miles into the Surrey Hills (illustration 2), which would have been made much easier by the developments in bicycle technology in the intervening two decades.

Illustration 2: The 1897 fixtures card for Wandsworth's 'Grove Cycling Club'
(Museum of London)

Social acceptance of the bicycle was transformed in the last decades of the 19th Century, and Rubenstein describes how in 1895 'popularity became passion', with the ladies of London's high society transforming attitudes towards bicycles amidst a wider bicycle craze. This change was noted by Victorian cycling journalist Constance Everett-Green, who observed that 'it would hardly be too much to say that in April of 1895 one was considered eccentric for riding a bicycle, whilst by the end of June eccentricity rested with those who did not ride.' (Rubinstein 1977:49). Horrall notes that even the least athletic Londoners were keen to be associated with cycling: 'the rotund Sir Augustus Harris, the legendary manager of the Drury Lane Theatre who had created the modern Christmas Pantomime, was photographed outside his home dressed in a business suit leaning uneasily against a bicycle' (2001:55). Women speeding around on two wheels did – however – raise some eyebrows, with Herbert Barrs writing a musical comedy called 'The bicycle girl', which he subtitled salaciously 'The scorcher'! (Horrall 2001:55).

Rubinstein estimates that this period would have seen about 750,000 bicycles built annually, with the number of cycle manufacturing and repair businesses in London growing from 54 in 1889 to 390 in 1897 (1977:53). Despite ebbing popularity after the 1895-97 boom, cycling remained commonplace, with business confidence in the industry holding up, particularly given that 'the cheap mobility offered by bicycles, specially in emancipating women, was resolutely most popular with the lower middle classes' (Horrall 2001:60-61).

This sense of freedom runs through a wonderful interview the Manchester Guardian's correspondent conducted with John Burns (Independent Socialist MP for Battersea) at the start of the 1900 General Election:

Anxious to see Battersea on the eve of the greatest struggle in its history, I had ridden south-west to the silver Thames, crossed that beautiful park, with its smooth roads, its ample playing fields, and large calm waters, and had emerged in the Battersea Road (The Guardian: online).

The journalist's choice of words are incredibly evocative of freedom and effortless transport in a city that was growing rapidly, and over a century later they still place me firmly in the saddle of a bicycle, particularly as the piece continues:

He was riding towards me on his bicycle, the handlebars decked with a bunch of blue and white ribbons; alert, robust, radiant with confident strength. He greeted me with a gay smile, and, riding side by side, we left the crowds of his too urgent followers and glided into a quieter street (ibid.).

These passages suggests that the roads of Battersea were smooth and well maintained, which adds to the sense of working class pride in the area being toured, with the journalist adding that 'there is little or no squalor, and in this district in the Shaftesbury estate you have a model of how poor men should live well - small, neat cottages, prettily built, each with a gift of "home" for the occupants' (The Guardian: online) – all very much in keeping with the newspaper's socially progressive outlook. Here the bicycle is an accepted, inconsequential part of city life – even with Burns' ribbons festooned on his bicycle – but it also an important tool for the London correspondent's carrying out his daily rounds: this ability to move around the city is highlighted by the description how the pair 'left the villas, crossed the main road and entered the working-class district with that swiftness of transition which makes life on a bicycle so vastly exhilarating and entertaining' (ibid.). The passage also points out how bicycles are able to break down social barriers as they enable people move (and see) other parts of the city far more easily than if they were on foot.

As a cycling member of parliament Burns was able to cover his constituency quickly, and this helped him to build his reputation as one of London's great MPs – he represented Battersea from 1892 to 1918, and today one of the Woolwich ferries is named after him. But the ability to cover ground also meant he was the first on hand when a woman died from heat exhaustion in Battersea Park in 1896 (see illustration 3).

Illustration 3: The death of Mrs. Hodgkins, erroneously depicting a policeman as the first to offer assistance
(Illustrated Police News)

However the cover mistakenly has a policeman assisting the dying woman, which was incorrect:

It was not a policeman named Burns, who first went to the assistance of the unfortunate lady, but John Burns, the member for Battersea, was but a few yards distant, and as might be expected, he at once endeavored to render what help he could, but alas! it was already too late to render any material assistance. (The Wheelwoman and Society Cycling News 1896:15)

The picture shows a rider – presumably male, given the practical clothing – disappearing off in the distance, and this suggests that by 1896 women were able to ride alone without raising eyebrows. Alternatively the point could be somewhat more barbed: despite the freedom of being on two wheels, society is still leaving women behind, encumbered with expectations that are far short of reality. Regardless, the event was reported by the 'Wheelwoman and Society Cycling News' as a 'warning at the heads of wheel women, not to cycle during hot days', with the journal advising that:

Unsuitable clothes, combined with too tight corsets, were more to blame perhaps than the heat. There is nothing more fatal to the health and comfort in cycling than tight lacing, and yet hundreds of women, to whom Nature has been kind in giving them good figures, torture themselves and all lovers of beauty by cramping themselves into clothes that are many inches too small for them. (The Wheelwoman and Society Cycling News 1896:6)

The Illustrated Police News – a cheap weekly tabloid – was notorious for its sensationalized coverage of late Victorian society, and its depiction of the last moments of Mrs. Hodgkins is highly dramatic, yet rich with detail: the details of her corset are captured, as is the shocked expression on the onlooking' faces. There is a tragic contrast between the practicality of her bicycle – with skirt protector covering the rear wheel and chain guard protecting her from grease – and the billowing clothing she is wearing. While her outfit seems impractical to the modern eye, the contemporary report suggests that her dress sense on two wheels was commonplace, and that Mrs. Hodgkins was merely unlucky to be be afflicted by the heat. Indeed, contemporary issues of the Illustrated London News carried advertisements for tailor-made women's cycling clothing (illustration 4), although this still looks constricted, suggesting that practicality came second fiddle to fitting into late 19th Century London's social norms. It is encouraging to see that the Wheelwoman and Society Cycling News's report encouraged women to dress practically, and not for broader social expectations. 118 years on I imagine a comparable journal today would be firmly behind people wearing lycra on their ride to and from work!

Illustration 4: Women's cycling clothing in the mid-1890s
(Illustrated London News)

Despite this tragic episode, Horrall's argument that bicycles were particularly significant in the emancipation of women is borne out by contemporary material. Elizabeth Robins Pennell was an American woman who lived in London for 30 years, and from 1884 she embarked on a series of adventurous cycle tours with her husband – first to Canterbury, but increasingly further afield, including “Berlin to Budapest on a bicycle' in 1892 (illustration 5). These were published in the Illustrated London News, and her accounts would have fired up London's women to greater degrees of independence – after all, if the author could handle Berlin's railway porters the readership would have no trouble with adventures closer to home. And her male audience would also have been impressed with her exploits – Robins Pennell wrote in the first person, clearly distinguishing her experiences from those of her husband Joseph when she writes 'I have told J––––'s story of his adventures by the way; now I must tell you mine' (Robins Pennell 1892:766). This clear assertion shows that she was her own woman, and her cycling adventures around London and further afield were part of her independent image.

Illustration 5: Berlin to Budapest on a bicycle (Illustrated London News)

Back in London Robins Pennell entertained the likes of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw (Bertelsen 2009), suggesting that she was something of a celebrity journalist, and a trendsetter among London's women cyclists. Robins Pennell was certainly a keen advocate of following cycling technology, having switched in 1886 from a two-person tricycle that she shared with her husband to an early single person safety bicycle (Zheutlin 2008:33). Together with women like Annie 'Londonderry' Cohen Copchovsky (the first woman to 'ride' around the world) Robins Pennell fired up the imagination of the growing suffragette movement back in London, and entwining an enjoyable means of transport around London with the politics of women seeking the right to vote.

By 1898 the suffragette Frances Abbott was in a position to write:

I have lived to see the woman who never wished her daughter to have a bicycle ride a wheel herself in company with that daughter; and when I ventured to recall her former opinions she said with unblushing serenity: ‘Oh, well, everybody rides now; the most fashionable people have taken it up; there is really nothing like it’, and she began to chide me because I did not own a wheel. (1898:150)

The early 1900s saw a renaissance in the women's suffrage movement, and its campaigns produced highly evocative material that aimed – with varying degrees of subtlety – to make the case for female enfranchisement. The National Union of Women's Suffragette Societies (NUWSS) made long journeys to London by bicycle, and Illustration 6 shows the successful women of such a ride in 1913 surrounded by others in the movement. It portrays them in a manner similar to regimental and sports photos, and photographs like this demonstrate both the resilience and adventurousness of these women in making such a long ride, set in terms that men – used to team photos – would appreciate. The banner also lays down a direct challenge, explicitly pointing out that women have achieved something that only a few decades earlier would have been an accomplishment for the likes of champion rider David Stanton.

Illustration 6: NUWSS Land's End to London ride (The Women's Library)

Photographs were used to present reality and challenge conservative thought, but the early 1900s saw also propaganda artwork from the likes of the Artist's Suffrage League, which was based in Chelsea. 'Young New Zealand' (Illustration 7) points out that women in the newest of the Empire's Dominions had enjoyed universal suffrage since 1893. The poster taps into the public's acceptance of women cyclists, with a girl representing 'Young New Zealand' dressed in practical clothes, rather than the excess that seemingly did for Mrs. Hodgkins. And by having her hand in her pocket the poster suggests the girl has a laid back mastery of her machine, as poking fun at the social expectations of the 1900s – represented by the hatted man.

Illustration 7: Artists' Suffrage League propaganda from 1907 (Museum of London)

But it also plays on the evolution of the bicycle, as anyone walking out of the Artists' Suffrage League offices on the King's Road would have waited a long time for a penny farthing to pass by – by that point they were obselete. The limited enfranchisement of British women to vote in municipal elections in 1907 is acknowledged by the small rear wheel of the penny farthing, but the ungainly appearance of the man riding his bicycle rams home the Artists' Suffrage League main point – not giving women the vote smacks of the 1880s, a bygone era.

Looking back over the contemporary material bicycles clearly represent the zeitgeist of London during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Cycling tapped into the British spirit of industrial innovation, with the pneumatic tyre making riding on two wheels something for all, rather than a few hardy souls capable of enduring the 'boneshaker'. But they also represented social change, with the surge in 'wheelwomen' initially demonstrating that they were more than capable of exercising the freedom inherent in riding a bike, and subsequently pouring fuel on the nascent suffragette movement.

Yet the idea of a cycling 'craze' seems a little hard to reconcile. Certainly bicycle popularity exploded in the mid-1890s, but it was a popularity that endured well into the era of the motor car, and looking at the material a century later it is easy to match the sensationalist, judgmental coverage of Mrs. Hodgkins' death with that of the spate of cyclist deaths in late 2013, and the sometimes excitable coverage that bike riding received in London's media – much in the spirit of the Illustrated Police News.


References

Abbott, F. (1898) ‘A comparative view of the woman suffrage movement’ North American Review 166(495) p.142–152

Anonymous (1896) The Wheelwoman and Society Cycling News, 1st August p.6, 15. Available at: http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/34415508/ [Accessed: 11 Jan 2014].

Bertelsen, C. (2009) 'A greedy woman: the long, delicious shelf life of Elizabeth Robins Pennell' Fine Books Magazine, 44 Available at: http://www.finebooksmagazine.com/issue/200908/pennell-1.phtml [Accessed: 12th January 2014].

Herlihy, D. (2006) 'Bicycle: the history' New Haven: Yale University Press

Horrall, A (2001) 'Popular culture in London 1890-1918: the transformation of entertainment' Manchester: Manchester University Press

Robins Pennell, (1892) 'Berlin to Budapest on a Bicycle' Illustrated London News 1892:766

Rubinstein, D. (1977) 'Cycling in the 1890s' Victorian Studies 21(1) p.47-71

The Guardian (1900) 'A bicycle interview with John Burns, Battersea's man to beat' London: The Guardian Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2012/oct/02/john-burns-battersea-cycling-archive-1900 [Accessed: 9th January 2014].

Zheutlin,P. (2008) 'Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry's Extraordinary Ride' New York: Citadel Press

A gigantic shunting of workers

Last week the Office for National Statistics published research that found commuters who spend between 60 and 120 minutes travelling to work have lower life satisfaction, see their employment as less worthwhile, have lower happiness levels and greater anxiety. This in itself is hardly surprising, but it is useful to be reminded by hard data that ‘commuting is clearly and negatively associated with personal well-being’. Unsurprisingly the research suggested that people who work from home as the happiest: I’m self-employed, and the rare occasions I’m rammed into a rush-hour Northern Line train remind me just how lucky I am to avoid the daily grind on the underground.

Commuter at Waterloo

Our enthusiasm for commuting over long distances owes much to our historically excellent infrastructure, but also the failure to make modern city life accord with modern needs – not my words, but those of The Spectator back in 1964, which recognised that the ‘gigantic shunting of workers across the London conurbation’ was batty. This is particularly so when you recognise that drivers pay hefty fuel bills and require government to build costly roads, and that railway commuters need billions spent on capacity solutions like Crossrail (and Crossrail 2) while paying eye-watering amounts for season tickets. If your daily commute is an hour each way every day of the week, come Friday you’ll have lost a cumulative working day paying for the privilege of sitting in a traffic jam with cyclists whizzing past you. Personally I’d rather spend my time with my family and friends, rather than listening to Southern tell me that yet again they ‘are’ sorry to announce that blah, blah, blah.

For many people the daily pilgrimage to work is an unwitting yet rational response to decades of poor urban planning. Escaping to the countryside to exercise what Nick Boles describes as ‘a right to a home with a little bit of ground around it to bring your family up in’ is perfectly reasonable given some of the shocking housing built across the country in recent decades. After all, if your home is little more than a shoebox, having a garden for your children to play in is very sensible!

Yet ripping up the green belt to build garden cities simply compounds the cost and misery of commuting. Instead we need higher-quality housing in London and our other urban areas that entices people into living closer to where they work, and to challenge what the ONS describes as ‘inertia’ towards our rigid commuting patterns. Historically Britain’s inner city areas were much more densely populated than the leafy outer suburbs: today the reverse is true.

Fortunately there is hope. New homes are being built at sites like Battersea Power Station to higher design standards, and there is a renewed interest in promoting walking and cycling to work. And adopting new guidelines like ‘Building for Life 12′ means that for the first time in decades we are taking significant steps to avoid blighting lives at the planning stage with the expense and wasted hours of traffic updates and platform announcements – with which the inhabitants of our existing garden cities are only too familiar.

First published by Platform 10 on February 19th, 2014

Has local government in London left cycling in the wrong lane?

A couple of months ago I wrote to the Crown Estate about its bike-unfriendly redevelopment of London’s Haymarket area, and was rather surprised when their London team offered to meet me and set out Crown’s cycling credentials. I was encouraged to see the company's new Central London developments have fabulous facilities for bike commuters, with showers, lockers, and ramps that allow you to ride straight into the basement parking space.

The past decade has seen an explosion in two-wheeled travel across the capital, while car use has declined. Recent data shows that cyclists make up to two thirds of traffic on certain parts of London’s roads. This is hardly unexpected, given the cost of tube travel and packed conditions. So Crown knows that letting its buildings means accommodating the rocketing numbers of people who ride to work.

But, as we discussed the Haymarket redevelopment over coffee, I realised that the challenge facing Crown is that while car use is falling, budget freezes mean parking revenue has become much more important to the balance sheets of London’s inner city authorities. This is problematic for new cycling infrastructure, as installing bike lanes comes at the expense of income-generating street parking.

Catering for cars might superficially help local authorities’ coffers, but a string of studies have shown that bike lanes, locking points, etc. give huge boosts to local businesses: New York City’s recent flagship bike lane on 8th and 9th Avenues led to local shops enjoying a 49% increase in sales. Saving the £1,216 cost of a Zone 2 annual travelcard frees up money to spend in the local economy, and gets people off our overcrowded tubes and trains during rush hour.

None of this washes with Westminster City Council (Crown’s local authority counterpart). The council would be hauled in front of the Competition Commission if its parking business model was the product of anything other than geography – incidentally only a third of Westminster’s households have access to a car. Sadly, as things stand, it’s difficult enough trying to find somewhere to lock up a bike before going shopping in the West End, wasting valuable time that could be spent in the shops and cafes that pay the council’s rates.

The recent spate of cyclist deaths on London’s roads is, obviously, terrible news. But I fear that the cycle lobby’s focus on fixing the Mayor’s flagship Cycle Superhighways misses a deeper problem: how we get the various tiers of local government to confront the sustained change in our transport use. The private sector manifestly gets where the market is at, as was clear when I saw Crown’s magnificent cycling facilities. Unfortunately, our politicians are stuck making rational decisions based on the perverse incentives of the city’s disjointed government structure. With London’s population gaining an extra 600,000 by 2020, this muddled approach is clearly unsustainable. Bold decisions are required.

First published by Coffee House on November 19th, 2013

Ignore Labour's rage against the machines

Two months ago I walked into the railway station at Biarritz. Without thinking I headed to the ticket machine on the concourse, pressed the small Union Jack on the touchscreen, and thirty seconds later had my ticket in my hand. Very simple and stress free, which is unsurprising as modern ticket machines are beacons of sanity for the international traveller. I remember the palaver at the Polish Railways ticket counter at Wrocław in 2006, when I was saved by a local in the queue behind me who could translate ‘could I have a single to Poznan for the early morning train tomorrow, and do I have to buy a supplementary ticket for my bicycle?’ Give me a machine every time.

Yesterday, Labour and the TSSA started making a huge song and dance about leaked plans that most of London’s tube station ticket offices are to be closed and replaced by 20 ‘travel centres’ in the major hub stations. Ominously, we’ve been told that – horror of horrors – ‘passengers would have to use automatic machines instead’. Labour’s London spokesman (and rumoured 2014 Mayoralty hopeful) Sadiq Khan told us that this will have a ‘devastating effect’ on commuters.

Old London Transport ticket machines (wemadethis.co.uk)

All of which is complete nonsense. London’s workers are already perfectly happy buying their weekly and monthly tickets from the Oyster machines, and I suspect that tourists to the UK would get better treatment at dedicated travel centres rather than the local ticket counter – if indeed it is open. Most of London’s visitors are already happily navigating their way through computerised menus in their own language, just as I did in Biarritz. I can’t actually remember the last time I used a ticket office, although I think when I did the upshot was being given some sort of ghastly form that I had to post to TfL HQ. Now you can probably fill in that paperwork online; meanwhile, the latest generation of touchscreen machines is guiding Joe Public through a bewildering array of ticket-based adventures.

Of course, this ticket office hoop-la is another example of Labour's inability to stand up to the transport unions. It is madness to be arguing for the value of a chap in a cubby-hole when in most instances a machine will do the same job better. Mick Carney’s predecessors at the TSSA must have felt the same way about automatic ticket barriers – ‘dreadful things that don’t offer the certainty of a ticket clipped by a friendly conductor’ – or something like that, I imagine. Certainly, the failure to embrace modern staffing practices across Britain’s railways in the 1960s did irreparable damage to the economics of operating trains and stations, for which Harold Wilson’s governments need to shoulder a lot of the blame.

These days budgets are leaner, and failing to take advantage of modern ticketing technology ties up funds that TFL would otherwise invest in new trains, signalling and step-free access to stations, all of which are essential to the bothersome business of moving people around. And wasting money on keeping the unions happy pushes up fares – hitting those on the breadline disproportionately hard, which makes Labour’s stance all the more puzzling.

First published by Coffee House on August 13th, 2013

The mentoring challenge

As a photography student I loved the lectures and hours spent in the studio, making mistakes and getting lost in my work. But one of the most important parts of my development was listening to the professional and amateur photographers who came to show us their work. Some were seasoned pros, others had graduated more recently – but they all helped broaden our horizons. Our lecturers promised them nothing more than a bottle of wine and a captive audience, but they inspired us. Some subsequently became friends, and further helped me to find my feet.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I moved back to London, began to build my client base, and discovered that I’d learnt more in six months as a working photographer than I had in two years of photography school. That – of course – is pretty similar to most industries!

But I also realised that in the era of expensive higher education, I could help the sixth formers studying photography in the schools around where I lived in south London, and potentially steer them towards or away from photography at university. I’d benefitted from other people putting their time in to me, and mentoring was a debt I needed to repay. I rang all the secondary schools in the two boroughs my home was straddled between, and offered to talk to their students, show them some of my work and equipment, and explain how photography had transformed my life.

What surprised me was that of the dozens of schools I contacted, only two were interested. One had a strong focus on the creative arts – with a fantastic head of department, who regularly took her students to see exhibitions in town, and practically bit my arm off when I explained why I wanted to get involved. The other was a new 6th Form college with three quarters of the children receiving free school meals, and an inspiring head of sixth form who wanted all her students to have an adult mentor who could give them an insight into the professional world, contact that she was adamant would help them maximise their potential and broaden their horizons.

As a careers and skills mentor I’ve been able to help my students learn the rules of the game, recognise the value of volunteering in developing CVs, etc. – the things that are subconsciously drilled into students with parents working in the professions. And last week I got an email from one of my sixth-formers who’d been offered a part-time job after I prodded her into a round of door-knocking in the field she wants to study when she finishes her A-levels.

Likewise, I hope I’ve opened new horizons for my photography students, as well as given them a glimpse of the professional world on the other side of the expensive creative colleges. And I’ve helped the school’s art department buy equipment that enhances their teaching and persuaded my suppliers to sell gear at cost so that the children are learning with the same tools that they will use if they go and assist commercial photographers. Their excitement when I showed them how to shoot magazine cover portraits in their classroom was a priceless experience.

Of course, it isn’t exactly news to anyone that mentoring is hugely helpful – as I found out when I was a student photographer. The Department for Education’s latest guidance describes how ‘mentoring programmes and mentoring relationships have greater potential than others to maximise impact’, but frustratingly only acknowledges learning mentors (i.e. helping with day-to-day school work) and peer mentors (helping with bullying, moving to new schools, etc.). Nothing on helping children to see the bigger picture of what life might be able to offer them when they finish school, or about their university choices (an area where the state really could do with some help).

I remember a confident young girl telling me at the start of her A-levels that she wanted to do law at one of the UK’s top five universities. She’d chosen to study A-levels in law, general studies, media studies and psychology, and was nonplussed when I told her she would seriously struggle to get a place at the likes of Cambridge or UCL with her subject choices. Her teachers had told her she simply needed lots of A* grades, and the notion that some subjects are seen as ‘soft’ was unwelcome news.

Mentoring can play a big part in breaking down barriers in education and the early years of employment. Many people mentor at schools, but we don’t have a national culture of putting something back into the education system – particularly from white collar workers. How do we change this?

Some local authorities recognise the benefits of mentoring, yet fail to understand that it isn’t a command process – an appeal from a local education authority or council don’t really inspire people in the same way that being directly involved with a school does. I’m not particularly interested in jumping through whatever hoops Lambeth council might have in store for me; conversely I feel a strong sense of loyalty towards the two schools who were initially interested in how I could help their students. They took me purely on my enthusiasm and work experience (and current CRB form), but without spirit sapping paperwork that would deter most people.

There are difficulties: it is easy to match mentors with students in London, while there will be parts of the country where the need is greatest, but where there is a relative lack of people who are able to help. The good news is that mentoring doesn’t require significant money or time from schools – it just needs political leadership in encouraging people to knock on the door of their local school, and ensuring teachers are receptive to the idea of outsiders helping make education truly transformational.

First published by Platform 10 on March 28th, 2013

Heathrow to Stansted by train: not as expensive as you’d think

In some ways Heathrow’s third runway is like giving your wife an incredibly expensive diamond necklace when you realise your marriage is on the rocks. It will buy you some short term goodwill, but ultimately you’re still in trouble. The £10 billion third runway project might well stimulate some work in the boom-and-bust construction industry, but it does little to address the fundamentals of growth, or indeed offer a long term solution to London’s need for airport capacity: it is lazy policy.

So instead of looking at expensive, shiny baubles, the government’s review should concentrate on getting the basics right: remembering to put the rubbish out, cooking more often, or in the case of London’s airports, making sure they are used more efficiently. Considering an expensive runway as a short term fix to Heathrow’s woes seems mad when you consider that Stansted is running at 50% capacity, with the space for more terminal buildings that would linked seamlessly into existing motorway and rail infrastructure.

The problem is that getting between London’s airports is utterly nightmarish – as anyone who has trekked across the capital to catch a connecting flight knows. Slow bus journeys around the M25 are the order of the day: not exactly reassuring if you have a tight schedule, and hardly an advertisement for modern Britain. The logical solution would be a Heathrow-Stansted rail link, yet this would obviously be a wickedly expensive option given the distance involved.

But curiously enough we already have all the infrastructure in place to operate such a service.

Re-laying the track on a disused rail chord south of Tottenham Hale is all that stands in the way of running trains between the two airports. The Gospel Oak – Barking line is a busy railway, but improved passing loops and signalling would allow passengers to transfer in about 70 minutes.

The disused rail chord

The work could be delivered as part of the already proposed capacity improvements to the Stansted Express, and for a tiny fraction of the £10 billion required for Heathrow’s short term third runway solution. The connection at West Hampstead would link to Thameslink’s Luton and Gatwick services, and Willesden Junction would give access to the new HS2 interchange. It wouldn’t be too much of a leap in imagination to see a ‘London Airport Connect’ service quickly becoming popular for both transfer journeys and passengers travelling to and from west London.

If looking at airport strategy is indeed a completely open-minded exercise, then there is the potential to shift the political consensus from a negative (a wasteful short term fix at Heathrow) to a positive (creating a long term solution – potentially building Boris Island in the Thames Estuary).

This process will be drawn out, with either solution decades away. The fine tuning of our existing facilities should start without delay – and with the imagination and flair that London desperately needs.

First published by Platform 10 on September 10th, 2012

London's Centre Point building

This is an essay I wrote during my first year as a undergraduate at UCL. I've published it here as I couldn't find a decent single account of Centre Point's history, and it might be of interest to anyone who has walked past it wondering how it came to be.

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Critically explore how Centre Point fits into the surrounding urban landscape and assess how its function, design and everyday use can be used to examine processes of urban change in London.

Centre Point is a building that many Londoners regard with ambivalence at best. Its concrete construction and prominent position on the West End's skyline places it firmly in the imagination of the architecture of the 1960s, and the length of time the building spent empty adds to the general sense of its being unloved. However Centre Point's construction was not a simple redevelopment of an existing plot, but a substantial rezoning of the St. Giles Circus street layout, and assessing the building's aesthetic merit must include an examination of how it was integrated with its surroundings. Most importantly, though, is understanding the blend of politics and social change that allowed the construction of a building so vastly different from the surrounding area: in short, this boiled down to property speculation and motor cars.

Compared to Manhattan, London's skyline was historically dominated by church spires, a result of the 100' restriction that was in place until 1954 (Marriott 1967). The easing of building restrictions meant that property suddenly became substantially more lucrative – A.N. Wilson points out that in 1943 Land Securities was a sleepy company with three Kensington houses: 25 years later it was worth £28 million, and that this sudden expansion changed London's skyline 'so irrevocably and with such brutality' (Wilson 2005:114). The boom commenced in the summer of 1959 when construction started on the 118m high Vickers (now Millbank) Tower. This building showed how the outlay on purchasing land could be met by the revenues from the large volume of space in a high-rise building, and the new 177m tall Post Office Tower in Fitzrovia would have further spurred the interest of developers with plots of land in the West End.

Figure 1: the layout of St. Giles Circus and environs before the Centre Point redevelopment
(Ordnance Survey)

It was the rise of the motor car after World War Two that created the local conditions for redeveloping St. Giles Circus (the junction of Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street). Urban authorities across the United Kingdom were busily reconfiguring streets for the era of mass car ownership, and London County Council (LCC) was keen to install a roundabout (the latest thing in highway technology) at St. Giles Circus to enhance the flow of the A40. This scheme was vigorously resisted by Pearlmans, the company who owned the land required by the local authority. Fortunately for the LCC, the city's property developers were usually amenable to doing a deal: 'Developers bought up the land required and made it over to the LCC; the council in return granted planning permission on adjoining land owned by their benefactors' (White 2008:112). And in Harry Hyams the council had found their man. As a private business concern Hyams had far greater flexibility to bargain with other landowners, and his solution was simply to throw money at the problem until it was resolved. LCC had offered the Pearlmans £55,000 for their property and been rejected, but when Hyams offered them £500,000 they gave in (Wilson 2005). He amassed other local properties to complete the collection of titles the project required, and in 1962 Hyams handed the site to the council in return for a 150 year lease at £18,500 a year – an amount that was regarded as peanuts at the time (White 2008). Construction started immediately. The use of pre-cast concrete removed the need for scaffolding and shortened the building phase, and Centre Point was ready for tenants three years later (Wright 2006).

The deal between Hyams and the council is the most important factor in understanding how Centre Point came to be at such odds with the surrounding urban landscape. Hyams' commercial savvy was in obtaining his pound of flesh from LCC, and the 20,000m2 building he was given consent for had a floor area equal to the size of the site that he handed over to the council – including the proposed roundabout. Hyams was also canny in his choice of architectural partner, and in Richard Siefert he had found someone whose 'reputation for speed and mastery of planning law made him the doyen of commercial architects' (Pawley 2001:online). Wilson is blunter, describing the 'undistinguished' Siefert's genius as 'not for architecture, as Londoners are now all too painfully aware: it was for getting round planning regulations' (2005:115) – a criticism that underlines how polarising Centre Point has been since its completion, but also the speed at which Siefert had to work. He submitted the Centre Point proposal on behalf of Hyams four days before the 1959 Town and Country Planning Act came into force – legislation that would have forced the development team back to the drawing board (Bayley 2006).

Harry Hyams' decidedly fast approach to business and Centre Point's subsequent impact on London's skyline might well have been long forgotten had its impact on the immediate vicinity been a success: it wasn't. As the project's contractors were putting the finishing touches to the building, the local authority was quietly shelving their proposed changes, as the temporary one-way system around the site had proved so successful (White 2008). Porter describes Centre Point as 'a fine building squeezed too tightly into the wrong place' (2000:521), and it was this sense of imposition on the new street layout that provided a common cause for both the building's advocates and opponents. Paul Williams, the architect currently working on the site's landscaping as part of the new Crossrail station and a self-confessed fan of Siefert, recognises that street level integration was a weakness of architects in the 1960s and 70s. The indecisiveness over the roundabout created a site that Williams considers a 'lethal catastrophe which unsuccessfully mixes angry traffic with anxious pedestrians' (Bayley 2006:WWW). Hyett points out that the situation was compounded by a 'useless water feature [that] has sprayed pedestrians struggling to use the miserably narrow pavement around its base' (2001:online).

Today the site is changing again, and Centre Point presides over the large construction site for Crossrail's new Tottenham Court Road station. This will metamorphose into a public space that rectifies the 'dysfunctional and missing link between Covent Garden, Soho, Bloomsbury and Oxford Street' (Terry Farrell & Partners 2008). The landscaping that was so studiously in sync with the sense of 'white heat' modernity in the early 1960s in which the car was the future, will instead reflect the priority that today's urban planners place on the pedestrian. The visual line down St. Giles High Street from the Circus will be restored, pavements will be widened, and the area between St. Giles Circus and St. Giles-in-the-Fields will be prioritised for pedestrians (ibid.) – much of which seems to address Glinert's observation of public anger towards the original scheme:

What the 1950s and 1960s public found distasteful was the mass destruction of the locale – old St Giles and the stretch of ships at the northern end of Charing Cross Road which included London's first women's bookshop, opened in May 1910 to cater for growth in suffragist literature – to build a 380-foot, honeycomb-windowed white elephant'. (2007:188)

Crossrail will be completed in 2018, and it is worth pondering how the Centre Point building will be regarded in the decades to come. Freed from the shackles around its footprint, will the skyscraper finally enter the public's affection? By the time of his death, Siefert's reputation had been restored, with the Guardian noting in his obituary that in 1993 'his former enemies at the Royal Fine Art Commission called for the listing of Centre Point for its "elegance worthy of a Wren steeple"' (Pawley 2001). London's skyline has also moved on, and while the controversy surrounding Centre Point finished off any thoughts of building other skyscrapers in the West End, it is a relative minnow amongst the giants of the early 21st Century.

Figure 2: The proposed pedestrian plaza and entrances to Tottenham Court Road station (Crossrail)

So far I have concentrated on the impact of the physical building. But there is an elephant in the room that must be addressed when looking at whether Centre Point's everyday use is symbolic of urban change. 'Everyday use' is a complete misnomer, as the building was notoriously left vacant by Hyams, who would only consider renting the office space to a client willing to take the entire building. The dynamics of the booming property market were to blame, and the politicians felt powerless:

By June 1972, it had been empty for almost eight years, yet still Hyams showed no signs of finding a tenant; indeed, because of the tax laws on capital gains, he was probably making more money by keeping it empty than if he had rented it out. (Sandbrook 2010: 523)

Figure 3: Protesters occupy Centre Point in 1974 (Museum of London)

At a time of great social unrest across the country Centre Point was becoming the focus for protests about the wave of urban change driven by property speculators. There was talk of compulsory purchase orders and nationalisation of the building. Protesters broke in and occupied the building for two days in January 1974, and The Times columnist Bernard Levin asked:

'What sort of a society is it that says dockers are holding the country to ransom by striking but does not say that developers are doing so by keeping office blocks empty until the rent has risen high enough to satisfy their greed?' (ibid.)

The building's reputation had transformed from representing the excitement of the swinging 60s to the malaise that gripped Britain in the 70s.

Hyams finally relaxed his demands for a single occupant, and in 1975 a Greek shipping company took over the building's 5th floor. It was only in 1980 that Centre Point had its first major tenant, with the Confederation of British Industry taking over 14 floors (Wright 2006). Today the building is home to a variety of businesses, including a serviced office operation with flexible leases: a move that would surely have been an anathema to Harry Hyams back in the early 1960s, but one that reflects the flexibility that today's businesses demand. The battle between commercial property interests and government continues to ebb and flow, most recently with the Rating (Empty Properties) Act 2007 – legislation against which property agents have already honed their skills in avoiding compliance (Guilfoyle & Askham 2010).

The bad press surrounding the development of Centre Point spilt over to Siefert's work on other projects. His plans for NatWest's new headquarters involved the demolition of historic buildings, and while the canny Siefert was ultimately successful in his battle with the authorities, the decade-long planning battle meant that the 183m tall NatWest Tower was obsolete by the time it was opened in 1981 (Pawley 2001). More importantly, the desire for building iconic skyscrapers in the capital subsided for the next two decades.

Hyams eventually sold his interest in Centre Point in 1987. His approach might have made business sense, but today commercial property operates on a very different model, with large companies like Unilever sharing their iconic buildings with other tenants. 2008 saw the opening of The Paramount, a members' club located on the top three floors, and the venue was favourably reviewed by London's influential 'Coolhunter' blog as 'a blend of 60s retro and futurism' (Evans 2008:online). For decades Siefert's creation has been the ugly ducking of London's tall buildings, but with the passage of time and attention finally being paid to the building's immediate vicinity, will opinion still be so polarised ten years from now?



Bibliography

Bayley, S. (2006) 'At last, things are looking up at the end of Oxford Street' London: The Guardian retrieved 17th March 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/oct/01/architecture?INTCMP=SRCH

Evans, L. (2008) 'Paramount bar by Tom Dixon (London)' retrieved 17th March 2012 http://www.thecoolhunter.co.uk/article/detail/1410

Glinert, E. (2007) 'West End Chronicles: 300 Years of Glamour and Excess in the Heart of London' London: Penguin

Guilfoyle, S. & Askham, P. (2010) ' Rating (Empty Properties) Act 2007 and business rates avoidance tactics' The Sheffield Hallam University Built Environment Research Transactions 2,1,p.5-13

Hyett, P. (2001) 'Wonders and blunders' London: The Guardian retrieved 17th March 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2001/jul/02/wondersandblunders.architecture?INTCMP=SRCH

Marriott, O. (1967) 'The Property Boom' London: Hamish Hamilton

Pawley, M (2001) 'Richard Siefert' London: The Guardian retrieved 17th March 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2001/oct/29/guardianobituaries.arts

Porter, R. (2000) 'London: a social history' London: Penguin

Sandbrook, D. (2011) 'State of emergency : the way we were : Britain, 1970-1974' London: Penguin

Terry Farrell & Partners (2008) 'St. Giles Circus: Strategic Framework Study' London: Terry Farrell & Partners

Wilson, A. (2005) 'London: a short history' London: Phoenix

White, J. (2008) 'London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People' London: Vintage

Wright, H. (2006) 'London High' London: Frances Lincoln