Pie Fight

Cold dogs and Englishmen

A month ago, I disagree with Pandagon and some commenters there, when they asked why the UK didn't have better facilities for coping with the heat. We need to improve things here, I said, but it would be counterproductive to have US-style, air conditioning-based systems in place: it's not often really hot here, and, eg, if most people had air conditioning, they'd over use it. I wonder if any of the people who disagreed with me have noticed that the high temperature so far this August has been 22 or so - which is less than New York City's projected low temperature today. Right now in London, it's coming up on noon in mid-August, and it's 16 degrees, windy, and wet. And that's how it's been pretty much all month. 

Songs about London

Here.

Design icon: red telephone box

Everything you ever wanted to know about red telephone boxes.

Gots dem white man's working class blues

Madeline Bunting has read New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict by Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young, and says that the white working class are victims of the post-war welfare state settlement:

The nub of the argument put forward by the authors, Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young, is that the well-intentioned policies of a rights-based welfare state in which benefits and housing were awarded on the basis of need, not past contributions, directly contributed to the ratcheting up of racial tension as poor incoming Bangladeshis were given priority for council housing. The white working-class extended families were broken up as their offspring were moved to Essex for housing. The ones who suffered most were women, left bereft of their social status as the arbiters of family and neighbourhood life. The latter both fragmented. And the blame is pinned on the welfare state (not helped by the economic decline of the docklands in the 60s and 70s).

The problem, claim the authors, was the betrayal of the working class's vision of the welfare state as a system of mutual insurance - to tide one over a tough patch - and its transformation into a welfare state of entitlement and rights based on need. It had moral force, but to many interviewees it was unfair: anyone can live off the system, they complained.

But what's the option? A social insurance-based system more like that of France and Germany? And what of this sense of privilege and obligation? Are today's street chavs supposed to be rewarded for their great-grandfathers' efforts in the war, while second and even third generation non-whites are left hanging in the wind?

And perhaps more to the point, what do we really expect to happen in post-industrial wastelands? The East End is poor not because of the welfare state, but for the same reasons that Bolton and Merseyside are: they were dependent on industry, and industry is dead. And so those who had the capacity to move out did, and those who moved in have been those who need to be close to the service jobs they can get, but who can't afford to live anywhere nicer than Newham or wherever. Repeat: traditional jobs disappeared, most whites quite sensibly moved out in pursuit of replacement jobs, and poor immigrants who had nowhere else they could afford moved in. And the whites who've remained all this time are the ones who were, in social policy terms, the hardest to help. They're the ones who haven't climbed up and out like so many of their neighbours did before them in the Eighties.

For more on this, I'll be reading Mumford and Power's East Enders over the next few days - have just dipped into it and one problem area it rightly flags up is the effect of need-based social housing policies on neighbourhood cohesion and race relations. And I would like to see the Dench et al book when I get some time.

Over at Harry's Place, the commenters and indeed the poster have seen fit to use this as an occasion to bash perfidious lefties and social engineering types. Whodda thunk it? Amidst the bile (it's all the fault of posh lefties in Islington who never asked these poor downtrodden agency-less people what they wanted), one commenter has a bit of perspective, and the capacity to realise that answers aren't always simple and it ain't always your favourite target's fault:

With the proviso of obviously not having read it (I have ordered it!), I wonder how much blame can be laid at the door of the welfare state for movement out of the East End and into Essex, and the break up of large family groupings, and the decline of social networks. The former would surely have happened anyway, particularly with the decline of large employers, such as the docks, plus the need to replace very poor housing, and the latter two seem to me to be partly a universal phenomenon, not just a working-class one (though this was the thesis of "Bowling Alone", and that didn't really prove it all that well).

Furthermore I think using terms such as 'working class' can be highly misleading. What does it mean? If it means the social class below the middle class then that group is not the same group as it was in the 1950s. It is far smaller, it is far less white, it is relatively less successful (by definition). If we look at only those who are white it is far, far smaller than it was in the 1950s. In reality, what is now seen as the lower middle class, is in many cases what would formerly be considered part of the working class. I suspect this grouping has been the main beneficiary of the welfare state, but perhaps in Essex not the East End.

Adios, Master of the Route

The last 38 ran yesterday, and by Christmas, there won't be a single routemaster left in London.

"Only a ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster," said Mr Livingstone in 2001. He was right.

Gentrifying Broadway Market

I'd like to write a book or dissertation on gentrification, its losses and gains. A couple of days ago, the kids from the Hackney Independent ranted through my mailslot about how Broadway Market is being destroyed by the middle class invasion. In one way, they have a fair point: it's a pity that a place like Francesca's Cafe can no longer afford the rents there and must close down or move on. The poor folks who run that cafe are in a very dire situation. On the other hand, as Wendy righly and vehemntly points out, Broadway Market used to be not only a dump, but a wasteland. Before the middle classes came into this area, a large percentage of the shops were boarded up. I guess that's because the "working" class just doesn't spend enough money to make a street thrive - they don't have enough disposable income.

Re writing a book on gentrification, there's plenty of fodder to write two almost at once - eg, an academic or analytic piece on gentrification in general, perhaps focusing on one area in particular, but also a much more journalistic style slice of life book, based on, eg, spending a couple of years hanging out in a gentrifying area, and telling the personal stories of the change. I do like doing interviews, even if they do frighten me a bit before I start. Another idea would be to take different neighbourhoods at different stages of gentrification, look at them all, tell lots of personal stories, and analyse what might make them different and the same - eg what are the similarities between Upper St and Holland Park and Broadway Market, and what are the differences? Certainly the anti-gentrifiers argue that gentrification is a monolithic beast, turning high streets or areas into "clone towns". It'd be interesting to look at ways that this is and isn't true.

Safer cycling in London town

Following up on the two recent links to articles about how dangerous cycling is in London, what do you do?

My personal pet peeve is cars that don't use their turn signals. The way I figure it, bikes can be hard to see, so I can understand if cars sometimes turn across us or cut us off. But we are always looking for them; so long as we have reliable information about what they are doing or are about to do, we'll take the necessary actions to protect ourselves. With turn signals, the onus is still on us to protect ourselves, but at least we're not in a minefield of false information.

Realistically, though, many drivers just don't like to use their signals for what they consider obvious turnings or turnings that aren't that big a deal to other cars. Is it possible to alter that? I would argue that in the long term, creating a climate where it is clear that cyclists have rights of the road would be a good step along those lines. But it'll take a lot of public education, and I suspect that Brits are quite hostile to that - unlike, say, Scandinavians, who seem to have some success in mass alteration of behaviour, including that related to diet.

The best solution would be to have cycle lanes and lots of them, and to keep cars out of them. How feasible is that in an old city with lots of narrow-ish roads and a whole hell of a lot of traffic, particularly if adding cycle lanes actually slows down that traffic?

Cycle lanes are important becuase in the short or even medium term, it's very difficult if  not almost impossible to radically change the public's behaviour simply on an appeal to their good will. Motorists aren't going to suddenly start using their turn signals simply because we tell htem it's a good idea and will save lives. Force of habit (and the fact that they don't really give a shit about cyclists) will always win out. So rather than change people's culture or ways of thinking, we need to change the environment in which they do that thinking. The changed environment - one in which cyclists are clearly given higher priority, and are seen to be given such - will then stand a chance of changing attitudes - ie, changing the culture of our roads.

Making it harder to cycle

Lionel Shriver, the woman who wrote the much-celebrated (and Wendy-endorsed) book about hating her son, has a pretty sharp and funny piece in today's G2 entitled "London - the city that hates cyclists". In it, she attacks one of the banes of my own life, the ten-foot cycling lane. I mean, what the fuck?

I will say, though, that the marked "suggested bike paths" are a great help. Following the little white biker does make me feel much safer and far less traffic-stressed.

I had no idea about this great west side bikepath in New York. We could certainly use a few of those here.

An economic analysis of cycling's safety

Economics and cycling? Now that's sexy stuff.

What's most interesting her observation of just how fucking dangerous cycling is in London:

But is this why Londoners are belatedly taking to the green asphalt? We know it is not. They do it because it feels safer - which it is not. Mile for mile, you are 84 times more likely to get killed travelling by bike than by Tube. Cycling is also about 14 times riskier than going by car. But if you are cycling, you feel that you have more control over your fate. And economists know that makes all the difference to the way people evaluate risks.

But I also like the fact that she looks at the larger picture when asking whether or not cyclists should abide by traffic laws:

So, a happy vindication, then, for the inner economist, and the cyclist? Well, yes and no. The trouble is that we cyclists suffer from our own variant of the "control" theory of risk. Namely: we don't think it's dangerous to go through traffic lights, or ride up one-way streets, or cycle on the pavements. Just so long as we are the ones doing it.

This has never been a very easy theory to defend to the world at large. With so many more cyclists pouring on to the streets, it's getting downright impossible. Economists would call it a case of rising "negative externalities".

When I am one of few cyclists breaking the rules I may ignore the broader social costs: the reduced tolerance of cyclists by other road users, for example, or the accidents caused later by those enraged motorists we left at the lights. Now everyone's doing it, the costs afflict us all. Think global warming, as applied to Highway Code-breaking.

My theory is that you do what you think is best for the greater good - and I think presenting an image of cyclists as a bunch of people to whom the law doesn't apply, either to hold them back or to protect them, makes us less safe from lazy or inattentive drivers. We're not seen as a legitimate part of the traffic flow, but would seem more so if we were better about abiding by the laws.

Pepys had it much easier that day

Monday 7 July 1662

Up and to my office early, and there all the morning alone till dinner, and after dinner to my office again, and about 3 o’clock with my wife by water to Westminster, where I staid in the Hall while my wife went to see her father and mother, and she returning we by water home again, and by and by comes Mr. Cooper, so he and I to our mathematiques, and so supper and to bed. My morning’s work at the office was to put the new books of my office into order, and writing on the backsides what books they be, and transcribing out of some old books some things into them.