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- Herausgeber: Muswell Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
As a passionate Londoner, Ken Livingstone has seen London change dramatically over the last 60 years. From playing on bomb sites in an era where St Pauls was the tallest building in the city, to 2019 where the gleaming towers of the Shard and Walkie Talkie dominate the skyline, thanks to new building rules introduced by his administration. With a witty and worldly eye he takes a look at his home town; the people, places and the politics that have shaped the landscape. On this personal journey he shares his views on every aspect of the city from his favourite restaurants and most loved buildings to anecdotes on fellow politicians and the triumphs, and disasters, encountered running the largest metropolis in Europe.
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LIVINGSTONE’S LONDON
A Celebration of People and Places
Ken Livingstone
Thank you Emma for all your help. I hope that London will give Mia and Tom a life as good as it gave me.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Early Days
In 2018, for the second year running, London was named the most dynamic city in Europe in a study of 130 major cities. We topped the rankings in innovation, inspiration, interconnection, investment and infrastructure, and came third in inclusion.
To have been born in 1945 and brought up in London in the decades after the Second World War was amazing. Each year everything got better. My generation of Londoners is undoubtedly the luckiest in history; even as kids we knew that we were living in the greatest city on earth, at the heart of the greatest empire in human history. My parents’ generation grew up in a world where many still believed Jesus had come to Britain before his death, which inspired William Blake’s famous line: ‘And did those feet in ancient time/Walk upon England’s mountains green’, from his poem ‘Jerusalem’. Some also believed that Joseph Arimathea, who buried Jesus in his family tomb, had brought part of the crown of thorns worn by Jesus to England and built a church at Glastonbury.
The British dream of continuing to be a superpower after the war was boosted when a British expedition was the first to conquer Mount Everest and the news was held back to coincide with the day of the Queen’s coronation in June 1953, prompting the Daily Express headline ‘All This And Everest Too’. The following year saw a similar reinforcement to our national pride when Roger Bannister became the first man to run a mile in just three minutes and fifty-nine seconds, which triggered more celebration in the papers: ‘So Britain has been the first to conquer Everest and achieve the four-minute mile.’ Another paper proudly boasted: ‘Britain has pioneered the way. So let us have no more talk of an effete and worn-out nation.’
Growing up while our parents discussed our triumph over the greatest evil in human history meant that we felt safe and secure. But we didn’t know that in the decades to come, everything was going to keep improving as we watched London being transformed from the horrors of the damage done by wartime bombing.
I was lucky to be born and brought up for the first five years of my life off Streatham High Road, which was one of the busiest shopping centres in south London. It had the amazing Pratts department store, which Mum and Nan would wander around with me daydreaming about being able to buy some of the stuff on display. Occasionally Mum would go into a bright red phone box on the street in order to place bets on that day’s horse racing. We only got a phone in our home when I was twelve.
Although the bombing in Streatham hadn’t been anything like as bad as in the East End of London, over 4,000 Lambeth homes had been destroyed and 38,000 damaged. In the early 1950s my friends and I would spend most of our time playing on the old bomb sites. One of the problems was rats and mice. Their population soared in the aftermath of the bombing, and Lambeth council had to employ rat catchers to try and contain the problem, but as late as 1962 the council was getting over 1,000 complaints a year.
Looking back, London didn’t just go through reconstruction but presided over an amazing and dynamic cultural change in almost every aspect of our lives. The concentration of theatres, cinemas, sports stadia, museums and galleries meant that we had so much to do. Post war London had fifty-five major theatres (compared to just thirty-nine in Paris) and 184 museums (New York had just 101). Even more dramatic was our lead in music venues. London had 400 to just 122 in Paris. We also had 3,117 bars compared to 1,800 in New York. Across the city we staged over 200 festivals a year, compared to forty in Paris. There was so much we could in London without crossing continents. I can remember my parents coming back from watching the stage versions of the musical Oklahoma!, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Ivor Novello’s King’s Rhapsody, but perhaps the most amazing was A Streetcar Named Desire with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, although Mum and Dad didn’t see it immediately, as people were queuing for twenty-four hours in order to get in. Tickets were much cheaper then and a working-class couple could afford to go to a West End theatre.
Of course, they didn’t take me to the theatre, but two or three times a week we went to the cinema to see such amazing films as Doctor in the House, for which there were queues all over London waiting for the next showing. The films I loved were mainly sci-fi, but The Dam Busters was clearly the most-watched film of that era. When eventually I had children, we went to see all the Star Wars films. National figures showed that most families were going to the cinema at least twice a week in the late 1940s, and that would only change after commercial television came along in 1955. Even more exciting, I would be taken to the zoo every time some amazing new animal appeared. Back in 1947 it was Guy the Gorilla and eleven years later Chi Chi the giant panda. I also remember the long queue as we all waited to see the first ever polar bear cub born in captivity.
The most wonderful experience of that time was when my dad took me to see the Planetarium, which had just opened in Baker Street in 1958. After a few minutes watching the depiction of the stars circling over our heads inside the great dome, the presenter announced this is what the sky would look like if we had no atmosphere, and the audience gasped as suddenly we saw 9,000 stars above our heads. The most significant impact of the Planetarium was it gave you an understanding of the scale of our universe and how small our little planet was in comparison to all of this. I was so angry when Madame Tussauds closed the Planetarium, because all our kids should have gone and seen it.
Back in those days I was gripped by science fiction, particularly the books of Arthur C. Clarke, such as The City and the Stars and Reach for Tomorrow. He also did brilliant non-fiction, such as Profiles of the Future. One of the main themes of science fiction in those days was that humans would spread out not just through our solar system but to colonise the whole galaxy, just as 500 years ago the Spanish, French and English spread out to colonise the whole world. All this suddenly seemed possible when there came an amazing announcement on 4 October 1957 that Russia had launched the first satellite into space, called Sputnik and no bigger than a beach ball. Then, just a few weeks later, the Russian dog Laika circled the world in Sputnik 2.
The impact on the USA, as they realised Russia was overtaking them in the space race, was made even worse when the Americans broadcast live the launch of their Vanguard Missile. The world watched as after rising just two feet it crashed back and the press called it Flopnik. The Americans finally launched their first satellite the next month. But there wasn’t just the space race – there was also the nuclear arms race, with Russia and America exploding bigger and bigger hydrogen bombs, with the radioactive fallout spreading around the planet, Eventually, public concern that that radioactive fallout was getting into our bodies led the superpowers to start testing their bombs underground.
By the time the Americans finally landed on the moon in 1969 it seemed inevitable that we were going to spread out across our galaxy. President Nixon claimed there would be Americans on Mars by 1980 and the media was filled with stories about how we would be mining the asteroids and landing on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn well before the end of the twentieth century; then we would begin our first flights to other stars.
So why didn’t all this happen? There are three basic reasons. One is that it is hugely more expensive than people thought it would be. America’s moon programme cost them £76 billion (in today’s money). Secondly, we also now know the levels of radiation in deep space would be absolutely lethal for long-term travelling and finally, we need to remember that everything about our bodies has evolved based on living on this planet. When astronauts return to earth after spending just half a year circling the earth in a satellite, they have to be carried out of their spacecraft because they have lost the ability to walk after spending six months without gravity. But as I walked out of the Planetarium, I was certain my dream of being an astronaut would one day come true. Very disappointing.
Perhaps the biggest difference between London then and now was the lack of racial diversity. There were small non-white communities, mainly in the East End or around Soho, but it was only in 1948 that the Windrush generation of Caribbeans arrived (just 492 Jamaicans) and were housed initially in wartime shelters in Clapham. I had been born in the Tory suburb of Streatham and one of my earliest memories is my nan excitedly pointing across the road, saying, ‘Look, there’s a black man.’ Even though my secondary school was just south of Brixton, there were no black children because the first wave of immigrants left their children at home and the only time I talked to a black person was when buying a ticket from the bus conductor. It was only when I started work in 1962, and there were three technicians from Ghana working in the cancer-research unit, that I started having proper friendships with people of other races. If you want to get a full view of what the world was like in those days, you should read Andrea Levy’s brilliant book Small Island, which won two awards for the best book of 2005.
We were a short bus ride from the Festival of Britain, which opened on the South Bank in 1951 on the 100th anniversary of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Up until then we had clapped-out old trams, but they were being replaced by buses all over London. The last tram went in 1952. Luckily I was six when the festival opened, because for some bizarre reason they had decided that no child under five should be allowed in, so my poor sister Linda was left at home with my nan. When we arrived at the festival I was amazed at the size of the Dome of Discovery (the largest dome in the world, 365 feet in diameter, one for each day of the year) and the 296-foot-tall Skylon. Sadly, I wasn’t old enough to be terribly impressed with the sculptures by Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein and Barbara Hepworth. But even better than the Festival of Britain, and at the same time, the Battersea Park funfair opened. I was really annoyed when my parents didn’t let me go in the giant spinning rota drum, as they were frightened I might end up breaking a bone. Although the funfair stayed open for decades, the new Tory government under Churchill decided to close the festival after accusing Herbert Morrison, then Labour’s deputy prime minister, of having wasted too much money on it.
One of the best things about growing up in London was that there were so many parks. My first five years in Streatham were in a tiny little flat without a bathroom, but in those days councils ran communal baths and laundries (back in 1950 only 46 per cent of homes in Britain had their own bathroom, and even as late as 1971 in inner London 37 per cent of families shared a bathroom, with 21 per cent of families still sharing a home). Although our flat was very cramped, we were a short walk from Streatham Common, where on sunny days Nan and Mum would take me so I could run around with Linda in the lovely little woodlands.
When we moved to our new flat on the Tulse Hill Estate, it had its own bathroom and, even more amazingly, a bedroom each for both me and my sister. We were so excited with this new home that Mum and Dad talked about staying there until they died. Once again we were just down the road from Brockwell Park, another wonderful place to explore and play in, and with a lido that Dad would take us to on hot days. But seven years later Mum and Dad got caught up in the rush of people planning to buy their own home, even though they had to struggle to get the £400 deposit. When they bought their home in West Norwood in 1957 we were still near a park – Norwood Park.
Wherever we lived when I was growing up, there was always a library where we could go and choose from a huge range of books. Back in those days hardback books were expensive and it would be two years before you could get a paperback version, so there was always a long waiting list at the library for people anxious to read another James Bond book. When I got older I used the library to read magazines I couldn’t afford to buy, like The Economist.
Of course, the most significant event of those years was the Queen’s coronation on 2 June 1953. Luckily my mum’s best friend had just bought a television, so we got the bus over to their house to watch it. There was no one else on the bus and there was virtually nobody out on the street, as everyone was already sitting around their radios or joining in the crowds to watch the Queen being driven by. It was breathtaking to sit there for the first time looking at a dense wooden box with a tiny concave screen not much bigger than a square foot and grainy black-and-white pictures. But for a seven-year-old the lengthy ceremony soon got quite boring.
Twelve years later I was totally gripped watching the live broadcast of Winston Churchill’s funeral. In the days before his burial 320,000 people had filed past his coffin in Westminster Hall. The life of Churchill dominated the news in the days following his death, which unleashed enormous emotion, particularly for my parents’ generation, who saw him as the man who saved his nation, and they were right to believe that.
We now know the real history of that period. When the Tory prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, was forced to resign in 1940, the bulk of Tory MPs feared the war would end in disaster and possible defeat, so they wanted to do some deal with Hitler. The person most likely to do that was the only other potential prime minister, Lord Halifax. Fortunately, as Halifax was in the House of Lords, that undermined his chances, and Churchill was more determined to win the job. Churchill had stood out on the Tory benches for years as the strongest opponent of the Nazis and was prepared to pay whatever price it took in order to defeat them. When he became prime minster, with support from the Labour benches, he created a coalition that included Labour. Just a few days later France fell, and for the following year Britain stood alone in the world in resisting the tide of Nazism. My parents always complained that it took a long time for the Americans to come in on our side.
While Churchill was an absolutely brilliant prime minister in preserving democracy and defeating the greatest evil of our times, he had been deeply reactionary as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s by returning us to the gold standard, which meant an overvalued pound, hitting our export market. He was also totally opposed to allowing independence to India and other colonies. But all that is overshadowed by his influence in creating the post-war world based on democracy and freedom.
Weather in the 1940s was so different from now. Back in 1947 the Thames was frozen at Windsor and there was 17° of frost (-9°C/15°F). Our energy supplies struggled and we occasionally had fuel shutdowns for three hours in the morning, between nine and twelve, and two hours in the afternoon, between two and four. It wasn’t just that our weather was quite miserable in those days – sometimes it was lethal. Every home had a coal fire and most of our industries used coal. My first domestic job of the day was to get up in the morning and clear out all the old ashes and then light a new fire. Every spring Mum had to take down all the curtains to wash them because they were filled with coal dust; the washing water became black. This was before we had a washing machine, so all laundry was done by hand and all year round we hung up the clothes indoors to dry them.
The worst consequence of everybody using coal fires came in 1952 with the Great Smog, in which over 3,500 Londoners died and my sister and I weren’t allowed out of the house for days, even though this meant missing school. I sat by the window but couldn’t see the other side of the road. Why on earth did the London City Council (LCC) build our flats in Irby House with coal fires rather than electric? In 1956 the government passed the Clean Air Act, which began the dramatic reduction in the use of coal and opened the way for a wave of central heating.
It wasn’t just the air that was bad; in 1953 a flood on the Thames Estuary swamped 24,000 homes and killed 300 people. It would take nearly twenty years before the Greater London Council (the GLC, which replaced the LCC) decided to build the Thames Barrier, which wasn’t completed until 1982, meaning we lived through those decades with the risk of a catastrophic flood in central London. When I became the leader of the GLC in 1981, one of my biggest worries was that a flood would come before the barrier was finished. Fortunately, it was completed just in time and raised twice during 1982. Now it is raised many more times each year. Part of the problem is that at high tide today the Thames is three metres higher than in Roman times, as the London clay sinks deeper and the ice caps melt, so by the middle of this century we will need a bigger barrier and governments have to start working on it now. When I was London Mayor I failed to get the government to focus on this because most politicians are only concerned about the next election, not what’s going to happen in half a century.
As the government tried to tackle Britain’s vast wartime debt it even had to increase rationing to cover bread, and life did seem rather tough. A Gallup poll showed that 42 per cent of us wanted to emigrate, which was up from just 19 per cent two years earlier. It was only in 1948 that for the first time a black teacher was given a job in a London school. His name was Eustace Braithwaite and was depicted as the teacher forming close bonds with his students and fighting adversity in the 1967 film To Sir With Love.
The conservative mood of the times was reflected when the Manchester Guardian newspaper (which changed its name to the Guardian in 1959) warned that the state welfare system would see an ‘increase of congenitally deformed and feckless people’, and Bernard Griffin, Archbishop of Westminster, persuaded the government not to bring Catholic hospitals into the NHS. The BBC was just as bad, banning any jokes about lavatories, effeminacy in men and immorality of any kind, including suggestive references to chambermaids, prostitution, ladies’ underwear and honeymoon couples. Later on, the Carry On films would become a huge success as they exaggerated all these ridiculous bans.
Although 75 per cent of Brits were working class, the number of working-class Labour MPs had slipped from 72 per cent in 1935 to just 38 per cent in 1945. While the weather was not good, a lot else was beginning to change, with newfangled products like washing machines, vacuum cleaners and fridges, the appearance of Nescafé instant coffee, which became my favourite drink, and suddenly you could buy frozen chicken pies and fish fingers. The first launderette opened in May 1949 in Bayswater and by 1955 a majority of homes had a vacuum cleaner, one in five a washing machine, and one in ten a fridge.
Crime was so low that most people left their front door unlocked for a large part of the day and people didn’t feel the need to chain their bikes up. It was only in 1957 that for the first time that motorbikes were made with locks. In that year the police recorded half a million crimes a year, compared to 4.5 million forty years later. Eleven thousand were violent crimes in 1957, and forty years later that had risen to a quarter of a million.
CHAPTER TWO
School Days
Although you might think I had no worries about my life, I had nearly died from gastroenteritis just before I was three. It meant I grew up as the smallest boy in my class and it was only when I got into my early twenties that I caught up with everybody else.
A major change in education policy was the government’s decision that kids would no longer leave school at the age of fourteen and this meant a massive new school building programme and the arrival of comprehensive schools replacing secondary moderns. London’s first new comprehensive school at Blackheath had 1,700 children when it opened in 1954.
