East-West Read online

  East Acton to Holland Park

  Nowadays, in any typical week about one in 100 young men aged around 24 are being held in a British prison. That figure has risen since 2009, when it stood at around 0.7 per cent.45 Part of the reason for the recent rise has been the arrests made after the riots of summer 2011, but also the provision of more space in prison for younger men, space made available due to that rioting.

  Prison cells are a little like roads. Build them and they become full. A much higher proportion than 1 per cent of all young men have been in prison at some time during their still-short lives. At any one time the number of children who have a parent in prison in Britain is 160,000.46 Estimates of how many children living in Britain will ever have had a father in prison during their school years have risen to stand at about 7 per cent,47 the same percentage as go to private school. Britain sends more children to private school and more young adults to prison than do the citizens of any other country in Europe.

  Along the Central Line the highest child poverty rate is found in White City: every second child there is poor. Poverty in White City means living on so little money that your income has to be made up by state benefits to be just enough money to survive. This is not to have enough to be able to hold your head up, to be respectable and to live at what most people would deem to be a minimum standard. That would require far higher pay and benefits.48

  Most of the poorest children’s parents are in work, and yet they are still poor. That poverty determines the nature of the home each child grows up in, exactly where that home is, what is in it and what is not. It is the tolerance of widespread poverty cheek by jowl with enormous wealth that underlies so many of the other divides in children’s lives and life chances in a city like London.

  Just two stops away, five minutes on the train, in Holland Park, are found the children who receive the highest GCSE results of anywhere along the line. Between Shepherd’s Bush and Holland Park, two minutes’ tube travel and a single stop, life expectancy rises by seven years!49 There are stretches of the line where the gaps between us are greatest. The eight minutes you travel from East Acton to Holland Park is a journey across a social chasm.

  Source: See http://www.londonmapper.org.uk/features/inequality-in-london/

  Source: See http://www.londonmapper.org.uk/features/inequality-in-london/

  Notting Hill Gate, 12.00 noon

  Noon on a Saturday was a good time for canvassing. Not too early, just before lunch, a good time to catch most people. It was the hour they were often in, often up and often not eating. He knew it didn’t really make any difference, but his local branch party were a bit shaken by what was going on over towards Holland Park. It was difficult to get good candidates there. There were rumours. Ongoing revelations in the Evening Standard did not help the party. What was it with politicians, cheap thrills and pornography? 50

  Here, in Pembridge ward, Notting Hill proper, as he liked to think of it, nothing untoward ever happened. Just a few stops west, at White City, and all the councillors were Labour. But that was pinko BBC land. Here, all three councillors were true-blue Tory. But here, as he repeatedly told himself and his friends, was where the wealth creators lived, not the leeches.

  OK, so the house with the blue door that Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts went in and out of was in Colville ward, to the north, but that wasn’t proper Notting Hill.51 It voted Liberal so it couldn’t be!52 Proper Notting Hill was just south of where the annual Carnival route ran, between there and the tube station. That was Notting Hill proper. You wouldn’t let the Carnival into Notting Hill proper. There was just too much valuable real estate. And the job of people like him was to protect property, to create wealth. After all, without wealth creators who would conjure up all the jobs? A friend had once asked him why there were not more jobs, as they were creating so much wealth? He told his friend that it was simple economics, but he didn’t really have an answer other than that there were too many shirkers, leeches and troublemakers in the world. He just thought he was on the right side, he thought he wasn’t a leech.

  At 36 the local association considered him too young to be a councillor. Anywhere else in Britain and they would be begging him to stand, but here it was a privilege. This was the place to be, the place to be seen. If he turned heads here he could make it anywhere. This was where the movers and shakers hung out. Deliver a few hundred leaflets here, on a damp April morning, and you’ll be noticed (they said). Come to the cheese and wine parties, share canapés with the great and the good. Princess Diana used to jog round here. Palace Gardens, the most expensive street in the world, was just thirty yards across the Bayswater Road. Helicopters land down there. They have private security at the end of the road, men with earpieces in. Here is where the money is.

  ‘Good afternoon. I’m canvassing on behalf of Kensington and Chelsea Conservative Association. I wonder if we can rely on your support in future elections?’ he parroted cheerily on her doorstep, his blue rosette on show.

  ‘What elections?’ she asked. ‘You lot have said there won’t be any election until 2015. We had the local election last year.’

  ‘Well, err, can we rely on your support for Boris?’ he asked. He wasn’t used to this. Normally he spent a couple of minutes talking about how terrible Labour was, but the mood was changing, even round here.

  ‘What about the libraries?’ she asked bluntly.

  He noticed she was not answering his questions. ‘We’ve got plans to save the libraries and save a million pounds,’ he said.53

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Soup’s on – got to go,’ she said, shutting the door in his face.

  Queensway, 12.30 p.m.

  ‘You still look great,’ he said. It wasn’t the best thing to have said.

  She enjoyed complaining about being 39, about being almost 40!

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ he said. He was enjoying it, but it was OK for him. He was a man – what did he know? Even if he began to lose his looks he had everything else.

  ‘For all you know you’ve got at least another 50 years to go,’ he said, without thinking about it much.

  He was practically spot on, she thought. She’d been looking it up, but then, he was good at estimating. That was his job, getting the guesses roughly right and sounding confident, but he wasn’t doing a good job of charming her today.

  ‘Look, love,’ he said. ‘You look great – you’ll always be five years younger than me. We’ve got money. If you want a boob job for Christmas that’s no problem. Let’s just fit it in around the skiing.’

  God, he didn’t know her. He just thought everything could be bought. Holidays, happiness, her figure, it all had a price. People are so careless that they drive Porsches into the sides of houses round here.54 Rolex watches and diamond rings are what you get mugged for here.

  It’s all about the money, she thought. It had been fun when she was younger, but everyone here was beautiful, and she had to stay beautiful. He had to stay rich. She hadn’t had kids partly to preserve her figure, partly because he hadn’t pressed. They could give money to charity instead, he had once joked. His firm gave a lot of money to charity. Lots of charity events to attend. All the women there seemed to stay the same age and weight. Were the men trading in the old ones for new ones?

  ‘Where do you want to go tonight?’ he asked. ‘There’s this exhibition on at the Serpentine Gallery,’ he said, answering his own question. ‘It’s all about the tube. Different ways of drawing tube maps, and how it came to be built under the main roads, between the old estates. It was all about money really. The firm’s sponsoring the show, free tickets,’ he said. ‘Good to show my face.’

  He was looking down, scanning the paper, and not showing his face. It was all about pretending with him, she thought, all a show. The Serpentine Gallery was almost always free, but he wouldn’t know, he didn’t get out enough.

  He got paid a huge salary for doing that job, let alone the bonuses. He wasn’t a ‘banker’, he told her. Bankers live out
of town or around Canary Wharf. He was an ‘investor’. His fund invested; it didn’t charge for services. That’s why he could walk to work. Why he didn’t have to work in a skyscraper. It was why his firm sponsored exhibitions at the Serpentine. Round here everyone who mattered could walk to work and also to everywhere else that mattered. It was odd that they took taxis or were driven so often.

  He’d always liked maps, she thought. Maybe it was that geography degree he’d taken. He’d never been that good at numbers, or writing, or thinking really. Very sporty, though, had been in the first eleven at school and all that. Still watched the rugby religiously, but didn’t manage to play as much as he’d like to.

  However, he was a ‘wealth creator’. So what did that make her? A ‘wealth creator’s girlfriend’: she was too old to be a girlfriend. Thank goodness people said ‘partner’ nowadays, even people they knew. Well, she thought, so many well-off people were gay. Did gay people worry about growing old as much? Worry about being dumped for a younger model?

  ‘OK, that’s settled then. The Serpentine it is,’ he said.

  Lancaster Gate, 1.00 p.m.

  Nothing was quite what it seemed around here. Everything was just a little skew-whiff. As if there had been a slight time-shift or something like that, as if all the signposts had been twisted somewhat just a bit to confuse the potential invading German parachutists and they had forgotten to put them back. For instance, here by Lancaster Gate tube, you’d think the people would be in Lancaster Gate ward, but they aren’t, they’re in Hyde Park ward; not that anyone lives in the park – it is a park! Most people who live in Lancaster Gate ward take the tube at Queensway, which is nearer.

  He’d never understand the British. They seemed to have no idea of their own geography and they were always chiding him for how little Americans like him supposedly knew about the world. Being both rude and blasphemous when telling him that war was God’s way of teaching Americans geography! They didn’t even teach geography properly here. It sometimes felt like half the bankers he knew had degrees in geography. What was that about? Was it some old English class thing? Even Prince William, ‘William Wales’ as he liked to pretend he was called (if only he were a US citizen), had a degree in geography.55

  He didn’t get it, but then he didn’t need to get it. He wasn’t staying here forever. It wasn’t as if he could ever afford to buy anywhere in this town; well, not anywhere you’d actually want to live. Anyway, work was helping pay the rent for a little bit. ‘Relocation’, they called it. They could take it off the firm’s tax bill. And it wasn’t cheap rent – it was, literally, a daily hotel bill. This country had all kinds of expense fiddles like that. And no ‘proper’ free speech either; and a royal family. What century were they living in?

  He was American, male, mixed ethnicity, an international accountant, aged 42, in Hyde Park, staying at the Sheraton, Knightsbridge, to be exact, and a bit lonely. That kind of summed him up. It was an amazing address. But the most amazing address was the one nearby. The one that confused plural and singular, advertising: ‘One Hyde Park: The Residences at Mandarin Oriental, London, is the most exclusive address in the world; a residential scheme whose beauty, luxury and service place it in a class of its own on a global scale.’56

  He was surrounded by wealth and he wasn’t very wealthy. But there was something odd about One Hyde Park: too few people went in or out of the building. Maybe the people who owned the residences there were so rich that they chose never to visit them?

  ‘Oh, to live like that,’ he said, to no one in particular.

  ‘But they must be lonely wherever they are,’ he said, again to his imaginary companion. ‘They can’t really trust anyone when they have so much to lose.’

  He wasn’t badly off either, but here – surrounded by all this wealth – he might as well be a peasant. That’s why they’d left England, some of his forefathers, all those years ago, to stop being peasants, and now he was back, in the heart of the new aristocracy. The flagship Rolex store (flashy wristwatches for those just begging to be mugged), McLaren retail (sports clothes for the unsporty to wear) – the old Mandarin Oriental Hotel (hints of opium wars and colonialism) and the new Bulgari Hotel (hints of Russian Mafia corruption). This was where it all came together, where all the money met up. Somebody had to count it in and out, and that somebody was him.57

  Marble Arch, 1.30 p.m.

  She was annoyed. Everyone made all these assumptions about her, just because she lived here. Even her family thought she must be doing all right: she had a job, she was a teacher and she lived in a ‘Prospering Metropolitan A’ area.58 Not bad for an Asian woman, but then there was that stereotype that she worked hard, and that her skin colour meant she was a Muslim. Well, she was a Buddhist. She was a mother. She wasn’t rich and she lived here. She lived in Bryanston and Dorset Square; it said so on her polling card, but she lived at the north end of Balcombe Street, on the very edge of the ward. The place was only known, and not well known, for being where the Balcombe Street Siege had taken place, where the IRA bombers who had really bombed Guildford and Woolwich were arrested (the ones, it was rumoured, who were never actually charged). She knew all these things. Her neighbours didn’t, or didn’t care. She’d even added the name of the siege to the online Google map of the area. She looked out on to what had been mostly council blocks, looked on to Church Street, the next ward to the north: ‘Inner City Multicultural’ and lots of children. It was very different. She had more in common with the people there maybe.

  ‘We’re going out,’ she said. ‘We’re going to the park. We’ll go and see the Chinese boat on the lake.’

  ‘Why do you like that boat?’ her sister asked. ‘What is it with you and boats?’

  ‘I’ve always liked them, and anyway the park is free,’ she replied.

  ‘You’d have more money if you didn’t live here,’ her sister said.

  ‘But I’ve always lived here. Why shouldn’t I live here? I teach here,’ she exclaimed.

  ‘In a Catholic school and you’re not a Catholic,’ her sister teased.59

  ‘I don’t make an issue of it, and anyway the kids speak 36 languages there – how many of them do you think are really Catholic? The point is that they live here. I teach here. Why shouldn’t I walk to work? Why should I live miles away?’

  ‘Why do they live here?’ her sister asked. ‘Because the council flats are here, because their parents get their rent paid, like you?’ This wasn’t teasing any more.

  ‘I don’t get all my rent paid. If I got all my rent paid I’d be rich. And they all live here because they’ve got a right to live here, because here is their home too!’ she retorted.

  They were approaching the lake now. She always argued with her sister when her sister came to visit. She knew her sister didn’t really mean it. She knew she secretly respected her for hanging on in there, for the results of the school, for keeping her politics true in a place like this. For being the one who walked to work, who talked about being green, who had a useful job, not just trying to make money, who had a faith and worked in a school with a different faith, and with people who assumed she was of a third faith, and worked out a way of living with it, but, for all that, her sister just couldn’t stop herself having one last go at her 45-year-old younger sibling.

  ‘But they only have a right to live here because they declare themselves homeless and with a connection to the City of Westminster!’ she chided.

  ‘Hardly any of them do that, and even if they did, what do you want to do about them? Make them live somewhere where there are no jobs, out of sight, on the edge of London, even further away? We have a map on the wall at school – I printed it off the Web. It colours places by how posh they are. Here, this ward, and just where the school is, is green – posh – but almost everywhere they come from, west and north, is red – poor. There’s a lot of red on that map.’60

  Notting Hill Gate to Marble Arch

  You tend not to think of people living in the hearts
of cities, but they do. Inner London has nothing like the urban population of a normal European city. Most people who work in the heart of London do not live in London. Over a million commute in each working day to areas where normally just a quarter of a million sleep. Even on a Saturday many come in for work, others to shop, sightsee, study or just stroll. In a normal large European city it is far more common to think of where you labour as also where you live. The closest-in many of us think of people actually living in London, regarding a part of London as home, is Notting Hill, the famously fashionable hang-out of the more affluent and, often, more svelte, younger businessperson.

  In fact Notting Hill is slightly downmarket compared with the two stations either side of it. Life expectancy dips by almost two years in the minute it takes to travel here from Holland Park and it then rises by just over three years in the (officially timetabled) two minutes to Queensway. Queensway residents live longer than anywhere else on the line to average almost 86 years each. Who said inner-city living was harmful to your health? There are no guarantees that residents of the million-pound apartments in Queensway will live this long. For any individual, predicting longevity is prone to great error, but for groups of people the errors shrink.

  Statistics are not certainties. Even for those clustered around each tube stop, a chance event, not looking before stepping on the zebra crossing, or that germ picked up from the cocktail party, can result in one fewer or one less premature death which is enough to slightly change the expectancy number for any given year. However, the overall shape of the panorama of the most important of life chances is pretty fixed over time, and it is shown in the chart of life expectancy (on page 129).