Au revoir

… off on my hols next week, so I’ll see you on the 7th. Enjoy the sunshine.

City farms

Let me ask you a question: why are City Farms not more like farms?

Since my four-year old daughter was born, I have visited a number of City Farms (there are a surprising number in London). Mudchute is the closest to feeling like a farm, with proper fields containing proper sheep. I’ve also visited Stepney and Spitalfields. Both were very enjoyable days out (especially for a four-year old) but I’m not sure they teach you much about food.

I admit, my knowledge of the city farm movement is based entirely on a Yes Minister episode in which a city farm describes its purpose as being to teach “young people about livestock and food production”. However, when you actually visit, you find enclosures of goats next to guinea pigs and rabbits next to sheep. Unless I’m missing something, guinea pigs aren’t a critical part of the human food chain (though, in austerity Britain, perhaps that’s just a missed opportunity).

Now, I grew up in the city. As a result, I only ever had a pretty sketchy idea of where food came from. For a while, I didn’t realise this. It was only when I started flatsharing with someone that kept chickens that I realised how unhealthily urban I was in outlook. Somehow, an egg still coated in chicken poo seemed revolting, whereas one nestling in a neat box from Tesco seemed clean and wholesome. Clearly, a bit more exposure to agriculture in my youth would have done me good.

While on holiday in Cornwall, we took our daughter round a real, live farm. She was absolutely fascinated. She watched cows being milked by the milking machines, with the milk squirting along vast pipes and into a giant churn, from which it was bottled and sold at the front of the farm in famililar plastic pint bottles. She toured the enormous, free-range henhouse and saw hens laying eggs in the seventeenth century chimney of the barn from which the henhouse had been converted. She saw cows being weaned from feeder cows, who were kept to act as wet nurses to juveniles when their milk stopped being retail quality for humans.

In summary, she got a very clear and vivid sense of where food comes from and how agriculture works. Now, I’m genuinely not criticising city farms. My daughter loved her donkey ride a couple of weeks ago, and they’re warm and welcoming places staffed by fantastic people who give up their free time to educate others. But I’m genuinely curious to know (and if anyone works in the city farm movement, please do explain) why they’re not more like farms.

Brand park

Welcome to London’s new economy!

Last week, we surveyed the Royal Docks from the vantage point of its cable car. This week, we ponder whether this fascinating area presages the next few decades of London’s economic development.

Canary Wharf was the eponymous bird in the mine in the late eighties. As it transformed into a high rise hub for financial services, it gave notice of the industry that would dominate our city for the next twenty years.

The Royal Docks is the equivalent regenation prospect for the current generation, but already it seems to be going in a different direction. Already Execl and the University of East London have been joined by the Crystal; an urban sustainability exhibition sponsored by Siemens, and the Emirates Aviation Experience on the opposite bank.

The great Diamond Geezer, in his post on Monday, excoriated this trend as “brandtertainment”. Well, DG, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Welcome to Silvertown Quays. The future of the Royal Docks is as a brand park. According to the developers, an avenue of brand pavilions will “allow global brands to influence the online spending decisions of customers, which will be worth up to a total value of £221bn by 2016”.

So, here’s the future. Online comes offline, presented to us by the multinationals. No longer a simple, local chore, shopping is for pleasure – with no need to go through the drag of actually buying stuff. Paying for goods and transporting them home can wait for another day, the world’s first brand park will be purely for show.

if the future of London’s economy in the 80s was banking, perhaps the Royal Docks are hinting that the future of London’s economy is in brands and brandbuilding. After all, we already have a huge advertising industry, we’ve got vast shopping centres and we have the world’s most convenient time zone. Goods will be designed by the Americans, built by the Chinese but sold in Britain.

Personally, the closest I intend to get to Silvertown Quays is another survey from the air in ten years time. I hate shopping at the best of times – shopping stripped of all its utility sounds like my worst nightmare. That’s why I don’t live in Dubai. However, like it or not, shopping as fun is our future.

Factories

It was when my daughter asked “Daddy, what are factories?” that I realised that in the four years she has been alive she has never seen one. Despite being addicted to a shopping game (board, not video) at home, she’s never seen the place where the goods actually come from. She asked this question as we “flew” (sponsors Emirates insist that we fly not ride) on the cable car that links the Millenium Dome and the Royal Docks in East London. The view from the summit of the ascent provides the perfect illustration of Britain’s changing economy.

To the left, the soaring skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, dominated by the logos of international banks. Immediately in front of that, one of the world’s largest entertainment centres, the O2 – formerly the Mlllenium Dome. To the right, the halls and towers of the Excel, London’s largest exhibition and conference centre. And crammed into one tiny sliver of riverside immediately below are the factories of Silvertown, one of London’s last working class, industrial communities, now under threat of extinction.

                

Silvertown still contains the beautiful, iconic Tate & Lyle factory (now bedecked in banners marked “Save our Sugar”) as well as the slightly less sweet rendering plant belonging to John Knight (Animal by Products) Ltd, but in all directions it is dwarfed by the towers of Britain’s booming service sector: finance, entertainment and corporate.

I have a friend who shouts about the fact that Britain no longer makes anything anymore. At an emotional level, I agree, though I’m not sure why. It feels more honest, somehow, to make something with your hands and sell it on the open market than to run conferences for people with impenetrable job titles or create financial products for people with impenetrable jobs. The O2’s business is more comprehensible to the outsider, but still seems frivolous. Can our economy really be based on divas singing?

However, this emotional reaction is probably flawed.

After all, goods have no greater inherent value than services. The service economy dates back to the first days of trade: there are certain things that some people do better than others, so let’s swap. I will make you a chair (goods) in return for you milking my cow (service). As economies grow and specialisms deepen, why is there anything wrong with one economy specialising in goods and another services. In some way, we feel goods are more real and that if the chips are down (as they have been recently) there is something more solid in refining sugar than running networking events. People will want food when they no longer want derivatives.

However, many goods are no more necessary to human survival than many services. Britain has a specialism in life sciences which may lead to cures for some of the most serious illnesses we know. Some of these will be in the form of goods (medicines), but others will be services (treatments). By contrast, much of the Chinese goods economy is built on consumer tat that is hardly worth buying (e.g. corporate merchandise – all of which is goods).

Selling being good at things is actually perfectly credible. While I will feel a huge emotional wrench if the Tate & Lyle factory in Silvertown closes and is replaced by another exhibition centre, if it turns out that one of Britain’s specialisms is organising conferences then be glad that a modern, globalising econmy seems to generate very high demand for conferences (though I suspect humans will always have a greater affinity with cake…)

Launch

It turns out that your wife having a book published is very time-consuming.

She wasn’t naturally into blogging, tweeting, websiting, but has had to take it up because – it turns out – you can’t be a novelist without it. 

Then there was a launch to prepare, and then host, and then clear up from.

It was great. I just really hope that this is able to become her future.

So, please buy her book!

I’ll be back doing proper London blogging in a few weeks. 

Two for Joy

You may remember that, back in Septembet, I was bursting with pride that my wife had recieved an offer from a real publisher for her first novel.

Well, since then, proofs have been edited, covers designed and tomorrow it becomes a real, live book.

It’s already on Amazon. Tomorrow, it will also be available in all good bookshops.

As you can see from the cover, Helen shares my fascination with London. My regular readers will probably have spotted that chick-lit isn’t really my style, but Helen’s book presents London through the eyes of people living complex lives, but always with the rich sense of place that our city deserves.

It’s had incredibly good reviews so far. I hope you enjoy it.

Chatsworth Road

What is going on in Clapton?

Have you been recently? Nor had I until Sunday. Well, not for several years, and the place has transformed in that time!

The Chatsworth Road market must be one of the most successful examples of locally-inspired regeneration in the country.

Just two years ago, Chatsworth Road was a rather sad former market street, of the kind replicated hundreds of times around the country.    

In 2011, some locals succeeded in getting the market restarted. It’s grown extraordinarily quickly, with 40 traders offering an eclectic, appealing range of different products. Various antiques shops have sprung up, alongside the kind of shop selling quirky bits that middle class Londoners love. There’s now a gorgeous (gorgeous!) deli (called l’epicerie, of course). There are TWO coffee shops that make the London Coffee Guide – one of which makes the top 10 coffee bars in London. There’s also Venetia’s (a very family friendly, yummy mummy cappuccino type place), a seriously good pizzeria (where we were given a free cotton carrier bag just for showing up) and a creperie. All of it is either shabby chic or Farrow & Ball.

Being honest, it looks like Primrose Hill. Seriously, it does. And none of this existed just two years ago.

Unsurprisngly, change of this speed is not without controversy. This article gives a hint, but the comments section at the bottom is far more revealing.

So, having read all that – is this all good or bad? Probably neither – just the latest in two thousand years of social upheaval. But it’s certainly a nice place to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon…

The future

Click here for a map of Amsterdam.

As you can see, the city has a rather dramatic layout of rings of concentric canals radiating from a medieval core.

Most of these canals date from the mid seventeenth century when Amsterdam was the richest city on Earth.

Immigration from the south created a dynamic merchant economy, with the city quadrupling in size in the 1600s. As the old city became inadequate, a new canal network was laid out.

The builders must have thought that, in the future, all cities would be built like this.

Suddenly, mass transport was brought to peoples’s doors. One can imagine the scene as these watery high streets became centres of commerce, trade and communications. The contrast with the crowded medieval centre must have been extraordinary.

So impressive was this new model city that Tsar Peter the Great of Russia adopted the idea for his new imperial capital, St Petersburg. We’d seen the future, right?

Well, of course, as we all know, wrong.

Cities weren’t to be laid out along canals. Both railways and roads replaced water as the dominant feature of urban design.

The Dutch canals were built in the mid seventeenth century. Someone looking back from the mid-eighteenth century will probably have been pretty smug. But by the mid-nineteenth century, as railways spread through Europe, their descendants realised a teensy weensy mistake had been made.

So, what does this tell us? Well, mainly that we can’t predict the future.

London invented both intercity rail travel (with the opening of Euston in 1836) and underground railways (with the Metropolitan Railway in 1863), and both have become the engine of the global economy. More than ever before in our history, money is made in cities and cities depend on trains to get thousands of people in from dormitory towns and then get them dispersed into clusters of specialisation. London was first and has profited most.

But perhaps, in two hundred years, this will seem a costly mistake.

This is relevant as we’re about to spend billions on HS2. Personally, I support it, despite the Government’s business case not adding up.

But is it really the right thing to do? I have no idea, and neither have you.

However, if it does turn out to have been a really stupid idea, then here’s one piece of good news. When we visited Amsterdam for the last bank holiday, the canals were bustling with tour boats and the coffee shops were packed. Perhaps in two hundred years time, Britain will be doing a roaring trade offering HS2 heritage tours.

Who knows?

One thousand years of history in a day and a perfect London weekend

Stage 1 – pizza in that tiny Italian place under the arches of Borough market. Everyone thinks they know where to find the best pizza in London, but I actually do.

Stage 2 – sitting quietly in the nave of Southwark Cathedral. A beautiful building enhanced for the visit by the sound of the organ. Four year-old daughter visibly moved by organ, and sits in remarkable tranquillity given her age.  Didn’t realise that much of Southwark Cathedral is actually a nineteenth century reconstruction (including the entire nave above seven feet from the ground) but, unusually, they built it as a medieval building, not how the Victorians felt a medieval building ought to have been.

Stage 3 – climbing the Monument. Four year-old lovs this. 311 steps is a challenge for anyone but each one comes nearly half-way up her legs. She’s been doing the Great Fire of London in nursery recently, and is fascinated. Am glad she didn’t ask where Pudding Lane actually is (or was?)

Stage 4 – visiting Three Mills Island, courtesy of diamond geezer’s recommendation. Have you been? It’s very close to Stratford but Olympic regeneration doesn’t seem to have reached far beyond the park. Actually, that’s unfair. There’s lots of new street furniture on the island itself, but lots of post-industrial dereliction on the opposite banks. Three Mills Island is an island in the River Lee, shortly before it reaches the Thames. It contains the House Mill, Britain’s last working tidal mill and the largest in the world. It’s grade I listed, and deservedly so. It’s beautiful. It’s also very London. Built in 1776, it was used not to mill flour for London workers’ bread, but to grind grain for London workers’ gin. I would dearly love to know whether this 18^th century building looked beautiful to its builders, or if it was simple functional, industrial architecture that is only beautiful to the modern, middle class eye. Surely Walthamstow Homebase won’t look like this to our descendants?

Stage 5 – taking boat trip on the River Lea. The reason for visiting Three Mills this particular Saturday is for boat trips on the Lea. They don’t normally run these. I don’t mean to sound disloyal to my local river, but I now see why. There is no commentary, but perhaps this is because it is awkward to stand in the prow of a tour boat and point out graffiti and industrial waste. Four year-old daughter enjoys it, though, and that’s the main thing.

Stage 6 – enjoying very jolly dinner party at home

Sunday

Stage 7 – eating breakfast at the Modern Pantry in Clerkenwell; as you’ve probably gathered by now, one of my favourite parts of London. I love the Modern Pantry partly because it is housed in a gorgeous Georgian building, and there is nothing my relaxing (in my humble opinion) than sunshine streaming in through large sash windows while looking out onto a cobbled square. And an ancient gatehouse.

Stage  8 – enjoying very jolly lunch with friends in Honor Oak Park. An area of London I’ve never been to before, and am glad to have seen. Gosh, though, it’s hilly! Visited a little park close to their house which has views of the City (including Shard and Gherkin) in one direction, Canary Wharf in another and the lush treetops of Kent in a third. If you’re ever in the area, pop in. It’s got a good playground too…

Stage 9 – enduring rail replacmenet bus journey home. Actually, this was good fun too. The advantage of a rail replacement bus (if it’s double deck and you get the front seat) is that it has all the advantages of a bus – i.e. you can see out – without stopping at all those pesky bus stops. From Honor Oak to Walthamstow is one hell of a bus ride, but at the end of  long London weekend, it was a great way to tie the city together.

Stage 10 – going home to bed.

This is embarrassing …

Regular readers will know I blog every Wednesday.

Unfortunately, this week, I have been thrown by the bank holiday and in my world it is still Tuesday.

Oops.

I’m afraid it’s now my bedtime (fellow parents of young children will know that our bedtimes are just as rigid as theirs) and I’m out tomorrow.

I’ll do my best to post on Friday but if you don’t hear from me then I’ll definitely be back next week.