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BANISTER FLETCHER LECTURE 2020
Robert Elms argues that cities are at their best when ragged, frayed and vibrant
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In this year’s Banister Fletcher Lecture, Robert Elms spoke with passion about the changes that London has seen over the past 20 years and how ‘Mammon and Co.’ with its need to make the city neat, tidy and orderly threatens to stifle the life and the creativity of the capital. It was a very different Banister Fletcher Lecture in 2020. The Society couldn’t gather together for our biggest event of the year and so writer and broadcaster Robert Elms spoke to us over Zoom from his home in Camden.
And what a talk it was – entertaining, provocative, and as bracing and crisp as a January morning, as Elms attacked the people who have given us a ‘city designed by greed’ that has lost its points of arrival for the young, the creative and the dynamic. ‘Cities need slums,’ said Elms. The places that are scruffy, difficult and dangerous are also the places that give a place vitality: ‘Cities are at their best when ragged, frayed and vibrant,’ he added.
Elms was at pains to point out that he was not against gentrification, and didn’t have a rose-tinted view of the past, nor a romantic view of poverty. The ‘slums’ he was talking about were not the families in substandard B&Bs, or the migrant workers crammed into sheds in suburban gardens, but the ‘scruffy, rundown places’ that are affordable but central, the places that are edgy and exciting. ‘Culture grows in dark, dank places’ he said, ‘And there’s been a conscious effort to exclude all such places from London.’
In the recent past people arriving in the capital would live in Notting Hill, Brick Lane, Kings Cross, Islington, Camden, but all that is impossible now, and people are being pushed out to the very margins of London and even beyond, so the city is losing those centres of energy and excitement that allow it to reinvent itself. The danger is that we will hollow out the centre of our city, and it will become a ‘bourgeois wonderland’ that is neat, ordered, polite – and utterly sterile. Where will the next generation of Londoners live? As a young man, Elms lived in a squat in a deserted Tottenham fire station, with the bath in the kitchen, and an outside loo that froze in winter. It was far from perfect, but it was a great place to live when young and starting out. These days there are no squats, no seedy basements, no places close to the centre where the economically less able can find places to live, work and party. Instead we have a city full of new builds of glass and steel, with concierges, gyms and basement cinemas, whose prices are far beyond what the majority of the young can afford. ‘‘luxury’ and ‘apartment’ are the two words that are a pox on London Life’. There were caustic criticisms of the developments at Paddington Basin, Nine Elms, Battersea Power Station, and the ‘venal, vital and vivid wonderland’ of Kings Cross was now an elegant, well-executed shopping mall. London shouldn’t be defined by the brands that command the highest prices, asserted Elms, and we shouldn’t buy into the corporate ‘luxury’ view. It’s time to reclaim the city – we need homes that are not fancy, not luxury; we need areas close to the centre that can have a patchwork of different people and different businesses. The alternative is to risk losing everything that makes London a great place to live and watch it be replaced by a ‘London theme park’.
