Primrose Hill and machine guns
I was wandering around Primrose Hill yesterday at lunchtime and walking down Fitzroy Road there's a rather unexciting flat which is guarded by two policemen with machine guns.
I presume it is something like where the Israeli ambassador lives, but it seemed a bit small.
Labels: London
London buses
Also courtesy of
Diamond Geezer,
how London buses got their numbers, with some nice photographs including a good colour one of Totteridge station, which hasn't changed
much (there's still an estate agent) but somehow doesn't look as nice.
Labels: London
People 'fleeing' London
Has been in thew news recently, for reasons stretching from the rat-race to crime to immigrants. This Jan Moir
article rather stretches it to the limit.
Last year, nearly a quarter of a million decent, law-abiding citizens packed their bags and left the capital for good, seeking what they hope will be a better life elsewhere...While their fairytale, roses-around-the-door belief in the safety of the countryside and the romantic ideal of a thatched cottage for two is touching, it does point to an underlying urban unease.
Er, how does she know they are decent, law-abiding folk who want fairytale, roses-around-the-door places in the countryside?
I've read the same Population Trends as she has (although it should be pointed out that I can't see 2007 figures, which she seems to have access to), and it says nothing about that at all. Might not a reasonable number of the 246,700 (3.3%) of people who left London in 2006 be indecent, or law-unabiding, or even not after a roses-around-the-door countryside idyll? It's hardly unknown for criminals to leave inner London for the surrounding counties, after all.
In any case, it's not much of a new thing. Indeed twenty years previous, in 1986,a not that dissimilar 232,400 people (3.4%) left London for other parts of the nation. It's true that the net position, ie outflows less inflows, of Britons to other parts of the country was a negative 78,800 in 2006, the biggest net outflow since 2005, which itself was the biggest net outflow since 2004, which in turn was the biggest since 2003. Which was a big year.
From the data its almost impossible to see why there has been this small increase. The age profile is much as you would expect - those in their mid-30s with children. The data doesn't tell us where they went to, but if we compare last year with 1981, which saw only a small 32,000 net outflows, the main difference nationwide appears to be that the North, Scotland and Northern Ireland have stopped seeing people leave, presumably on grounds of a better economic situation.
Trevor Phillips' concept of 'white flight' is also hard to confirm. I don't doubt that for some people this is a factor - and hardly a new one. Also the boroughs with the largest outflow tend to be those in East and South East London that have the highest proportion of non-white immigrants, although given over 50% of the immigrants come from mainly white Eastern Europe it is difficult to separate populations and immigrants. Furthermore if there is such a link (either with immigrants per se or non-white ones specificially), then simple economics, that it is inevitable that many immigrants will live in those boroughs and hence its previous inhabitants will choose to sell up and move to 'better' (but proportionately less expensive) regions of the capital, or to cheaper places outside London, would explain much of the movement. Unfortunately the data doesn't - except perhaps to newspaper columinists - tell us specifically where the migrants came from or to where they went.
I don't know also whether London life is deterioating. House prices - a measure of the market's worth of living in London, rather than anecdotal evidence from journalists or bureaucrats - suggest it is much more desirable than 10 years ago. The city as a whole - in my opinion - looks a lot smarter now than at anytime previously. Transport on the whole is easier, although obviously for drivers more expensive. Crime figures are mixed.
Labels: London
Britain 100 years ago in colour
I really like the Daily Mail website these days - loads of fun things to read. It never disappoints.
I also like old colour pictures, so I thought I would love this article with previously unseen colour pictures of the UK 100 years ago, but in fact they're a little boring. Anyway here you
go.
Labels: England, London
London old and new
Walking past this church on Sloane Street on Sunday I remembered it was the same one as in this Chalmers Butterfield image, so I took a picture. It seems to have built an extension in the same style on the left.
Labels: London
Shame on the No.6 bus
You've all been on a bus when a bunch of 'hoodies' (or whatever teenagers are called nowadays) get on and start playing music very loudly out of their mobile phones. Well the fightback has started here, with me. On the no.6 bus winding its way through the mean streets of Kensal Rise, I was trying to get my new mobile phone to play a soundclip I had downloaded. I didn't have the Nokia headphones with me, but I thought maybe you could play it through the speaker on the phone you listen to when having a normal phone call.
You can't. And also pressing 'clear' which usually stops any function, doesn't (I suppose for obvious reasons) stop the background player. And then you have to go through about five menu options to find the player to stop it again.
So there I was, on the no.6 bus with teenagers and grannies, and my phone on full volume blasting out through its stereo speakers..."Welcome to today's Daily Telegraph podcast. Britain's best-selling quality newspaper".
Labels: London, music, Technology, Telegraph
The cost of living
Nick Cohen in last week's Evening Standard (not online, I think) returns to one of his favourite themes, the rising cost of living in London. He quotes Martin Amis[1]:
"In the 1960s you could live on 10 shillings a week: you slept on people's floors and sponged off your friends and sang for your supper," Amis remembered. " Then , abruptly, breakfast[2] alone cost 10 shillings. The oil hike, inflation and stagflation revealed literary criticism as one of those leisureclass fripperies we would have to get along without."
and adds himself:
Class is once again dominating London's culture because the extraordinary house price inflation is pricing graduates from ordinary backgrounds out of intellectual life.
There is clearly something in this, with many salaries in these types of jobs failing to keep pace with the general rise in income, and house prices in any case have exceeded the rise in income [3]. And yet the example chosen is not a good one (and it's worth recalling that Cohen means couples on £100,000 a year when he talks about these things)
Ten shillings in 1969 is equivalent to about six pounds today. That doesn't sound very realistic, even for the 1960s. But of course Amis is remembering those days as sleeping on people's floors, sponging off friends, and singing for your supper. Obviously this means a low cost of living as
everything there is free. The cost of doing that today is identical. Zilch. Furthermore, Nick Cohen's interpretation makes no sense at all, because house price inflation is essentially irrelevant to Amis's story.
You could argue that higher house prices mean people have smaller houses, and thus less room for people to crash on their floors. But really the lesson of this is what we were discussing the other week, which is what Cohen and Amis mean is no-one (and particularly one assumes not people of their age) would put up with the deprivation that they did then. This is essentially at the heart of middle-class whinging - they want foreign travel (vastly cheaper) and new TVs, etc, when their parents probably holidayed in Devon, and made do with a single black and white set until it stopped working.
[1] The choice of Amis as an example of better days in piece about how nowadays people can't work in the arts unless they have rich parents is amusing.
[2] Cohen's genius for misquotation continues, unless there are two version of War Against Cliche. It's a
bus fare that now costs 10 shillings in my version (but his italics).
[3] Although houses are investment goods, and so the cost of buying a house contains implicitly a positive amount of saving. People should really look at the cost of purchase using an interest-only mortgage.
Labels: economics, London
I'm back
Yes, my internet connection is working again.
I thought I'd share this photo (on my new Nokia) of an ex-pub I passed today whilst walking from Paddington as the Circle Line was down. I thought it was quite impressive.
Labels: London
NOT SO SOON, HOME SECRETARY
John Reid dismisses claims that Britain is turning into
a Police State. Yet at Paddington Stations this morning, I heard the announcer say over the tannoy:
The people being held outside the station are being held their for their own safety and protection
"Safety and protection". Those are the weasel words of Police States througout history and across the world.
ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION HOME SECRETARY?
This wasn't a small group of criminal, but instead a large number of commuters, honest hard-working people.
ARE YOU STILL READING HOME SECRETARY?
Labels: Jeffrey Archer, John Reid, London
Tubes
I thought, given the snow cover, I would check the tubes are OK. Here is the update. I'm looking forward to hearing the PA announcement at the station as they always go through the lines that aren't working, and then say 'there is a good service on all other London Underground lines' [typo corrected - see comments].
Labels: London
