Jacques Tati’s beautiful, gentle 1958 film Mon Oncle begins with a scraggy pack of dogs sniffing around a series of Parisian spaces, from scrappy street corners to the local place, and ending up in the soulless modern housing of the suburbs. In contrast to the concrete jungle, that little square with its cafe, shops and ineffectual street-sweeper represents our archetypal image of an intimate Parisian quartier: ramshackle houses, stalls, eccentric characters and colourful community life. It is the kind of city that everyone seems to pine for, a utopia of freshly baked bread, lazy cafes and children playing in the street.
London has never been like that. Despite ambitious new plans to revitalise 100 of the city’s key spaces - Ken Livingstone’s Architecture and Urbanism Unit (AUU), headed by public-space evangelist Lord Rogers, has plans in place for the first 10 revamps, which include Brixton Central Square and Lewisham town centre - and despite all the hyperbole accompanying its Olympic bid, the city remains dirty, inefficient and congested. It is aesthetically and architecturally incoherent, and, unlike Manhattan, Barcelona or Paris, essentially suburban. It is also, however, hugely successful and consistently fashionable. So why has London got such useless public space - and will it, indeed should it, ever change?
London is among the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. In his book The Fall of Public Man, Richard Sennett traces the word “cosmopolitan” back to the 18th century, when it meant “a man who moves comfortably in diversity”. The word derives from an era, he explains, when the notion of public space emerged, when coffee houses, and then cafes, became the places to meet, when London’s large urban parks emerged, when streets were cleared of horseshit and effluent in an effort to make strolling down them a pleasure rather than a torture. Shopping became an entertainment, and shop windows encouraged what Marx termed “commodity fetishism”, machine-production making attainable fashion and other goods that previously only the wealthy had access to.
The first public London square, Covent Garden, was a grand space designed by Inigo Jones in the 1630s. It began life as the place to be seen, but quickly became louche, a focus for brothels and dissolution. The market set up at its centre was the final insult to any residual elegance or desirability. Lessons were learnt and most of the subsequent 150 or so central London squares were built, not as public spaces, but with fenced-off private gardens at their centre.
Continental piazzas were often absolutist monuments, dedicated either to church or state, or centred around a palace, sculpture or fountain. Other, modest squares simply provided a little relief from the dense, walled-in city around them. London, unlike Paris, has always been a city of sprawl. When extra space was needed it was built around the edges. We have inherited that city, lacking in fashionable density. But we also inherited the Puritan notion of the city as symbol of moral corruption and, conversely, of country as bucolic paradise which, as so many of us work in cities, has led to the compromise of the suburbs. These notions were exported to the US; it in turn sent back the mall, fast-food drive-ins, out-of-town shopping and, ultimately, the idea of exurbia, placeless suburbs no longer even linked to cities.
The medieval Bartholomew Fair in London, centred on Smithfield, was similar to those great continental piazzas. It was the venue for huge religious festivals, the setting for a meat market, public executions and rowdy medieval games of pig’s bladder football, when apprentices were allowed to run riot for a day. This was Peter Ackroyd’s kind of public space. But it offended the London elders, who (always obsessed with repressing the mob) never encouraged public space to be used as it was in, say, southern Europe. City life there revolves around a series of feast days - it is common to go to Italian towns and encounter some kind of fiesta, or a saint being pulled through the streets. Living conditions in these dense, walled towns are often cramped and overcrowded - the inhabitants are glad to evacuate downstairs, dress children up in their Sunday finery and show them off to the neighbours. Protestantism, however, disdained fiestas as idolatry. A sign of its spirit of misery ruling London is the Metropolitan Police’s plea, every New Year’s Eve, for people to stay away from Trafalgar Square: it’ll only be crowded and there’s nothing to see anyway - move along please.
Trafalgar Square is London’s heart, one that beats to the faint sound of public protest. On days when there is no demonstration, however, few Londoners would go near it. It has, it is true, been significantly improved by Lord Foster’s renovation and is no longer a traffic island - but the symbol of our imperial and martial glory has no soul. Its half-hearted fountains (boarded up for New Year’s Eve) have no art to them, the statues on its three (out of four) plinths have even less. This is no Piazza Navona overflowing with baroque Berninis. Even Nelson is elevated to the point where his likeness is irrelevant, the isolated column the unaffecting focus.
This is not to say that there is no street life in the city, rather that Londoners use space differently. On a warm summer’s evening, drinkers appropriate the streets outside pubs; clubbers crowd around Soho’s Bar Italia in the closest we have to a late-night passeggiata; football fans walk the streets draped in flags. Most use of public space is in some way linked to alcohol. The liberalisation of licensing laws is likely to introduce a radical reappropriation of public space - but not, perhaps, in the way some would have hoped.
Meanwhile, the Danish public-spaces guru Jan Gehl, whose work in Copenhagen is invariably cited as the holy grail of urbanism, has been hired by Lord Rogers to study London’s public realm. In Copenhagen, extensive pedestrianisation, better street furniture, surfaces, signage and traffic schemes led an essentially suburban, cold-climate and northern-temperament city towards the Mediterranean ideal of bicycles, people sitting outside cafes (albeit under heaters), and an increase in business for all independent design shops. Gehl has concluded that London is a complete mess. Where, he asked, are all the children? He saw none in the centre - and said that public transport, steps, kerbs and extreme overcrowding all conspired against bringing them there. Why are people always hurrying and never lingering? Where are the squares, markets, where is the joy in urban life? All are obvious questions, but not the whole story.
The British are traditionally sceptical about the public realm. They delight in low tax, minimum state intervention and individualism. What is not private is subject to vandalism and neglect. London is unlike Copenhagen, where people borrow state-subsidised bicycles - and then return them. (When a similar scheme was tried in genteel Cambridge in the 1990s, all the bikes were stolen.) There is a history of rubbish in the city, from the stinking Thames to 1978’s winter of discontent, dog shit to chewing gum, from Smithfield’s Shambles (named after its bloody slaughterhouse waste) to the black bags and overflowing bins that are London’s contribution to street furniture, this is a city built over the waste of previous generations. Public space, from bus stops to back streets, bridges to parks, is routinely littered, graffitied, vandalised, and quickly becomes unloved. The response has been the de facto elimination of public space, and the privatisation of anything that can be privately run; a city not of grand plans but of Making Do and Getting By, as Richard Wentworth called his touching photographic series documenting Londoners’ talent for improvising with scrap.
So, though the AUU has effected successful change in Trafalgar Square, and its plans for Sloane Square, Dagenham and Brixton are good, thoughtful proposals by interesting designers, London’s peculiar character needs to be considered.
The city’s apparent disinterest in public space stems partly from its wealth. Despite an increase in city-centre living, many of its citizens occupy relatively spacious houses compared with their apartment-dwelling European counterparts. The more active street life of Hackney, Brixton or Bethnal Green may be due to poor living conditions, crowding, deprivation and unemployment, but it is closer to the urbanists’ ideal model. Turkish, Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities have often escaped the homogenisation of their high streets by corporate chains through purchasing within their own communities, just as the Italians and Jews did a century before them. This reinforces London’s deserved reputation as being not a city, but a series of interlinked villages.
One of the mayor’s new schemes, a £35m proposal to revamp Exhibition Road in South Kensington, seems unnecessarily grand. South Ken is already an interesting amalgam of hugely popular museums, varied shops and people that works quite well. But there is one thing in it: the proposal to allow cars and people to use the whole road on equal terms - contrasting with the dull pedestrianisation of many provincial city centres.
The idea, based on studies in northern Europe, is that drivers slow down and become considerate when forced to share the roadway. This seems an admirable fudge, a cheap compromise, very London. In fact, looking through a book of Victorian photos, one sees a messy, incoherent city full of scrappy signage and construction sites, heavy traffic and crowded roads. What was different, however, was the use of the streets. Strollers and street urchins did not limit themselves to the pavements, but walked, stood and ran in the roads - while the congested, horse-drawn traffic travelled at about 4mph (not much slower than later vehicular traffic).
A hundred revitalised public spaces may be very nice but, more importantly, pedestrians need to be able to reclaim the streets. Why do we gesture to thank motorists who stop at zebra crossings? Because of an in-bred pedestrian inferiority complex. That way lies exurbia. What we need, like the dogs in Tati’s Mon Oncle, is a sense of ownership of the whole street - or at least equality with cars. The future for London urbanism may be as simple as legitimised jaywalking.
