Britain was built by private enterprise – so why is ‘privatisation’ so unpopular?

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about the ‘P’ word: privatisation. Ed Miliband’s team hasn’t done the hard policy work to revitalise Labour as a party of government, and it is beginning to show. His platform for next May has a lot of sticky plaster policies, but very little that addresses structural problems like the housing market and transport costs, to name two issues close to my heart. Instead, catnip like ‘no privatisation of our NHS’ and ‘reversing the privatisation of the railways’ is being wheeled out to fill the Left’s policy void.

This conveniently ignores the Blair and Brown government’s enthusiasm for market – rather than state – solutions. Some people know about Hinchingbrooke, the NHS hospital so ineptly run by the state that Andy Burnham ‘privatised’ it when he was Secretary of State. Fewer know that Circle – the private sector company that took control of Hinchingbrooke along with a 50 per cent staff mutual – has done a decent job of turning around something that was – if you’ll excuse the pun – a real hospital pass.*

Just why is privatisation seen as so politically toxic, when much of what we love in Britain has been shaped by private enterprise? Take tertiary education, where students attend the privately run institution of their choice. Our universities have always been ‘privatised’, with the model of academics and faculties competing for research funding well established. Yet the idea of such a system for our primary and secondary schools would currently be politically unacceptable, even though universities like Cambridge and UCL are world beaters – just look at the latest QS rankings, where four out of the world’s top six institutions are British.

And that’s the whole point of privatisation: creating a market where competition drives improvements in quality and efficiencies in price. Try telling that to the British public, who overwhelmingly want to see the railways renationalised – including a majority of Conservative voters. People dislike their trains being run by foreign state operators, but isn’t the point of the railways to move people around, rather than be some sort of national bauble?

Competition has been fantastic for train passengers in the post-British Rail era. This is hardly surprising given that the great triumphs of Britain’s railways were the product of healthy rivalries between private companies – from the Rainhill Trials through to the speed wars in the 1930s that resulted in Mallard, the world’s fastest locomotive. Our railway infrastructure was delivered by companies not wanting to miss out on market share, but today the government is desperately playing catchup after decades of neglect under state ownership – and building HS2 at a pace that would have appalled our Victorian ancestors.

The 2015 General Election campaign is already well underway, and perhaps you’ll hear someone talking about the evils of privatisation in a queue at the Post Office, only to realise that you’ve never had to endure a 40 minute wait at Sainsbury’s or Tesco. That’s because the supermarkets are in competition, and if they made their customers wait that long they know they’d be out of business. They’re also fairly good at keeping down costs for their users – something that we desperately need in our NHS if the principle of free healthcare for all is to survive the challenges of an ageing population and increasing treatment costs. So that’s the sort of privatisation we should be talking about: driving up quality of service, bringing down costs – and no lengthy waits before the automated voice directs you to ‘Till Number Three’.

First published by Coffee House on December 17th, 2014

* About two weeks after this was published Circle announced that it was handing back its operation of Hinchingbrooke to the state. Writing in the Guardian, former Labour MP Tom Levitt said that 'the failure of Circle at Hinchingbrooke hospital, in Huntingdon, where the company very nearly managed to remove an operating loss inherited from the public sector, was due to the failure of the NHS to deliver its side of the bargain, not least the over-demand on A&E which was well above what the company was told to expect.'

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

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

Why £9,000-per-year university tuition fees aren't such a bad thing (and Tony Blair agrees with me)

Children in their last year of school are gearing up for what one contemporary Scottish philosopher calls ‘squeaky bum time’. A-level exams in the summer suddenly don’t seem so far away, and shortly the contents of acceptance and rejection letters from institutions will start being broadcast in Facebook status updates up and down the country.

The deadline for art and design schools is later this month, and last week I had coffee with a student I mentor to look at her portfolio and university application. Her work showed plenty of promise, but as we talked I realised that while she was desperate to do a photography degree, she wasn’t particularly interested in using it as the foundation for a career taking pictures – she just liked the idea of studying photography, and would do something different after her graduation.

She’s by no means alone. We have a large number of students in creative tertiary education, many of whom realise during their studies that enjoying something at A-level (often taken as an alternative to boring ‘academic’ subjects) isn’t enough to sustain them through the long hours of working in the studio at their university. Others quickly find out that that their work simply doesn’t cut the mustard when they enter the saturated graduate marketplace. And – being completely blunt – the tertiary sector’s vast oversupply of creative graduates unable to work in areas where their degree have prepared them for is nothing short of scandalous.

To someone with a rose-tinted view of the whole university experience this probably sounds harsh. University is about growing up, finding one’s feet in the world, etc. Yet the ease in justifying a degree in the creative arts is symptomatic of the distance we have yet to travel in shifting society’s attitudes towards tertiary education.

The wretched ‘50 per cent of school leavers going to university’ aspiration was a misplaced and profoundly damaging New Labour ploy to seduce parents. It was also politically very smart: ‘thanks to the government my child is the first in our family to have a university education’. The policy flooded the workforce with graduates, and sent a clear signal to students that choosing not to do degrees made them second best.

At the drop of a hat sixth formers saw areas like photography that really should only be one or two years in duration as the gateway to the newly hallowed university education – albeit in a technical subject that doesn’t give them the transferrable skills and intellectual rigour that employers associate with degrees in subjects like history or geography. Private schools also need to take some of the blame: it’d be a rare headmaster who tells parents that their child isn’t university material having taken £150,000 in fees over the past five years. Better a degree in photography, music journalism, etc, than no degree at all, or so their logic flows.

The danger is that students are supposedly now paying for the bulk of their education. Fundamentally this is a good thing: America’s dominance of the top 100 universities is plainly and inescapably due to their system of fees – not my analysis, but that of Tony Blair in his autobiography, who (rightly) points out that when it comes to recruiting academic staff “those who paid top dollar got the best”.

Tuition fees also address the small matter of successive governments failing to fund universities properly. And as a Head of Sixth Form friend of mine pointed out, “if you’re not intelligent enough to realise that £9,000 a year to go to a top Russell Group university is a bargain, then you really shouldn’t be applying to those places in the first place”.

The scrum of blue chip firms recruiting on Britain’s top campuses hammers home the value of forking out for the best education the UK can offer, and the new fee levels will help ensure that graduates from UCL, Cambridge, etc, can expect their qualifications to stack up globally (with salaries to match) and help ensure our universities continue to churn out world leading research.

Incidentally, as someone who mentors students in two of South London’s most deprived schools, I was really pleased to hear from the teachers there that the new fees structure and bursary support is more favourable for those from less affluent backgrounds than the previous government’s scheme – which is exactly as it should be. Nevertheless I remain to be convinced that many of the wide-eyed UCAS applicants for photography and music journalism degrees will actually find that their three years of undergraduate study has transformed their employment prospects.

More importantly, will their studies enable them to repay much of the £18-27k in tuition fees that they’ve taken on, full of enthusiasm for whatever creative A-level subject they dabbled in at school? Or will they find they’ve been sold a pup by institutions who are desperate to prop up their student rolls with courses of dubious value? It’s interesting to hear Pam Tatlow of the Million+ think-tank (representing many former polytechnics) describe this year’s small increase in university applications as a “recovery”, whereas the market behaviour from this year’s students seems to indicate that for some of the institutions Million+ represents the decrease in rolls of 50-60% could well be terminal. And while this plays out the Treasury’s exposure to the student debt it underwrites grows and grows – after all, the government pays for your education until you’re actually in a position to reimburse it.

So where does this leave my enthusiastic photography student? Higher student fees are here to stay – Mr Blair himself saying that “once introduced as a concept, there [is] no looking back”.

For some disciplines this must surely spell trouble for the idea of three year degrees. The higher end providers of vocational courses will flourish, but institutions without the cachet of the Slade and LCC may well have to rethink how they deliver education to increasingly savvy consumers. Photography, journalism, graphic design, etc. are hardly lucrative careers, so the American concept of shorter ‘associate’ degrees for some vocational and creative subjects seems very sensible: students avoid the £10-15k involved with a third year of study, and employers provide the final polish in the initial stages of paid employment.

My student wants to experience tertiary study, so understandably a single year course doesn’t appeal. I did a two-year photography diploma in New Zealand, and by the end of it I was desperate to finish and get stuck into winning clients and getting proper commissions, as well as avoid an expensive third year – the money saved being more than enough to buy a decent studio setup.

Why is it then that our creative universities stubbornly persist with courses that seem aimed at lining their own pockets and propping up a ill-conceived system? Sure, politicians and society at large need to take some responsibility for fostering the often dubious allure of ‘going to uni’, but there’s a horrible irony in institutions aimed at nurturing creativity being so painfully regimented and unoriginal in what they offer today’s young talent – and cheerfully milking them dry at the same time.

First published by Egremont on March 8th, 2013

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