THE LONDON BLOG
"there is
in London all that life can afford" -
Samuel Johnson, 1777
Gentle reader, as 'blogs are now too fashionable to ignore we've decide to start one ourselves. If no-one reads it we'll stop it. You have been warned.
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| July 6th |
Back from a somewhat lengthy stay abroad to the annual deterioration in Britain's weather: as one friend put it 'better book a holiday to co-incide with Wimbledon as you know it's going to be bad weather'. How true. Thanks to all those Americans in their SUVs (with herbal supplements and viagra surely it's no longer necessary to display substitute genitalia on the road?) we have a nasty global-warming Summer pattern. A few nice weeks up to the first or second week of June, then misery until August (rain, wind, changing weather).
George Monbiot in the Guardian newspaper hopes that the UK government taxes SUVs (and the SoBs who drive them) off the road. They typically get 3 miles to the gallon of petrol despite the official promises of up to 12 miles. They kill pedestrians, cyclists and other motorists. They cause global warming, and ultimately they lead to America invading petrol rich nations in an attempt to replace their governments with pro-US puppet leaders. Without rednecks in their SUVs Iraq might have made a more peaceful transition to 'democracy' (really a more refined plutocracy like America has at the moment.) And now they're trying to introduce them to our crowded island...
Anyway, read Mr Monbiot's excellent article for yourself HERE
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| July 6th |
We have been asked by a researcher at Williams University to comment on the shift from 'old' tourism to 'new' tourism in London. We reproduce here our reply.
Well I think there's a bit of duplicity here. The ones that really
benefit from 'development' are the councils, who earn millions in tax
from new office and residential developments and are the ones that
decide whether development goes ahead. It's in their and the
developers interests to promote a 'new' London. Also the newer
tourist attractions are businesses rather than state-supported
cultural events.
And of course there's the dumbing-down of tourism generally: most
Britons prefer to drink and club and this is a major earner for Britain both at home and abroad (Ibiza).
Old London is vanishing fast - Spitalfields market - old, anarchic and
non-profit-optimised has been desecrated (see www.smut.co.uk
for details) and now they're after Smithfield - for offices. Ask a blue
badge guide and they'll tell you that things are being torn down
weekly (there was a very good article on that in one of the papers a
year or so ago)
The important thing about making money out of tourism is added
value (as described by Marx, in London!) and 'new' tourism is about
adding value. However London is a very expensive city to eat drink
and stay in (though clubbing is very cheap, admission and an E can
be had for the price of a round of drinks) and a lot of that money
goes into tax. Heritage actually costs money - upkeep cripples on
old buildings.
I think there's a shift of London as a concept under Ken Livingstone
towards a more mercantile paradigm away from the old cultural
paradigm - there's a good book called I think litterature and the
working classes which shows that in 1950 people liked
Shakespeare, old buildings, high culture, especially the working
classes who saw it as improving. With the shift towards a leisure
culture where activities are no longer worthy (indeed worthy
activities are marketed as a bore...) and shopping is the model the
old London with it's 'stuffy galleries' doesn't fit - a designer lifestyle
needs designer goods: the quality of the work in the Tate Modern is
actually very poor (IMHO) compared with, say, the National Gallery,
but the TM is the major 'designer lifestyle' gallery.
So at root its a shift towards disposable commodities rather than
enduring cultural ones: selling an experience that accords with
advertising culture. Nowhere is it suggested that there is an
enduring worth to high culture per se. It's old, and non-disposable
and in the end doesn't make as much money for Britain.
And as for the iconic 'old London' attractions: The Changing of the
Guard etc they're usually free...
There's also something about the fall of an often northern academic
high cultural egalitarianism (Lord Snow, David Hockney, Berkoff,
Bacon, Melvyn Bragg etc) who used to rule the cultural roost and
haven't been replaced (this has, I believe to do with the decline of
grammar schools and equal access to high-culture/academia that
has been replaced with the 'all win prizes' mentality) people who'd
been given a privileged access to high culture and wanted to pass
on the good news have been replaced with another wave of those
who are part of the 'low culture/relativistic' school: the grandees
have been disinherited. It's a paradigm shift that has worked its way
through to the tourist arena. On the arts side the interesting battle
is between Serota and people like Sewell for the galleries.
There is some good news: the science museum and the V & A have
had a fantastic makeover, but they don't feature on the tourist
syllabus...
I am very pessimistic about the survival of the 'old London'
attractions: no-one is fighting their corner and the state apparatus
is too powerful and too obsessed with the measurable (the Blair
government's obsession with targets). In the end (as they say so
eloquently in 'The History Boys' , Alan Bennett play on just your
topic, currently on at the National and sold out..) you can't measure
the worth of 'old culture' ... and as Larkin says, books are a load of
crap...
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| WE NOW GO ON OUR SUMMER BREAK FOR 6-7 WEEKS SEE YOU MID-SEPTEMBER
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