It’s not enough to keep election promises, the latest thinking goes. People have to feel better too. “Change isn’t a few extra lines on a graph moving in the right direction,” said Keir Starmer the other month, perhaps informed by US research with purchase in top rank Labour circles into why Joe Biden’s successful policies weren’t generating voter gratitude. What, then, would make Londoners feel better in their everyday lives?
For clues, let’s step outside. Let’s walk along our high streets. Let’s count the ways in which they bring us down. It’s often hard to know if things have really become worse or you’re just noticing them more, but this is urban territory where hard facts and firm impressions too often coincide in scenes of grime, crime and decline.
This holds for everywhere from Oxford Street to the outer boroughs. In part, it is a tale of changing spending patterns, accelerated by the pandemic. These have seen retail custom move online and shop windows boarded up. Another strand, of course, is the sustained strangulation of local government finance, with more and more demands leaving less and less cash for keeping pavements clear and clean.
At the same time, forms of – often organised – crime are flourishing seemingly almost unchecked, further eroding the ideal of the London street being a comfortable shared space for relaxed interaction and convivial consumption. Phone snatching, shoplifting and bicycle theft have become more frequent, and culprits are hard to catch.
Add to this the distressing increase in the number of rough sleepers and the proliferation – not, I think, in my imagination – of people buttonholing you for change or food. Then there’s the annoyance of street clutter – ranging from phoney phone boxes to obstructive advertising boards – and cyclists riding on pavements or dumping Lime bikes on them, and you have street environments that are nerve-racking and depressing, not pleasant and welcoming. They make us unhappy and sometimes fearful, too sometimes with good reason. They do this right in our faces, every day.
How can this tide of decay and despair be turned back? It isn’t one single problem but a bunch of them, each tricky to solve, perhaps reinforcing one another, or entwined. It doesn’t help that responsibility for tackling them lies with a range of different authorities: local authorities, business organisations, charities, the Metropolitan Police.
And of course, there’s the matter of money. Only this week, Sir Mark Rowley said the Met is preparing to cut officers and staff as budget pressures build. London Councils chair Claire Holland, also leader of Lambeth, has warned of “a real risk that councils across London will start to go bankrupt” unless what she called “14 years of structural under-funding” is made up for. A start is being made, but there is a long way to go.
The finances can’t be got away from. But there are also questions about priorities, approaches, communities and leadership.
Where street crime is concerned, there may be an urge to put force before effectiveness. Towards the end the last century, the idea of Zero Tolerance Policing caught on in the US, its champions proclaiming that aggressive crackdowns on even minor offending in New York had brought about dramatic crime reductions overall. But later assessments have cast doubt on such claims, and even the Big Apple’s police chief of the time said they oversimplified what had occurred, stressing that close work with local citizens was important.
More useful might be some refreshed and focussed combination of collaboration, imagination and a high-profile sense of mission. Holly Lewis of research, urbanism and architecture practice We Made That, who has produced work for City Hall, argues persuasively that closed buildings can be re-opened and revived through local state interventions that emphasise streets as social spaces with many potential uses. Sadiq Khan has put effort and money into reducing rough sleeping and has at least acknowledged there is a problem with selfish cyclists.
The different organisations with responsibilities for and interests in making London’s high streets more hospitable, who also include Transport for London, Business Improvement Districts, amenity societies, health services and more, already work together on the cluster of issues that need tackling. Perhaps what is lacking is an overarching theme that pulls all the strands together, captures the public’s imagination and inspires its buy-in – another key ingredient for success, that take us all the way back to Jane Jacobs.
There is an opportunity there for the Mayor, and also, at the national level, for the Prime Minister. Indeed, it might be necessity for him too. If change for the better is going to be felt, where better to make it happen than where people lives much of their lives – on high streets all over this land?
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