Beyond Clapham, adventures in the mind of the urban elite
Beyond Clapham, fortunately, is where most people live. Not the important people, obviously, but the people who, as George Bailey put it, “do most of the working and paying and living and dying”.
“The little car was soon free of the city, for the smear of suburbia that had once lain along the western highways for miles was gone. During the Plague Years of the eighties, when in some areas not one person in twenty remained alive, the suburbs were not a good place to be. Miles from the supermart, no gas for the car, and all the split-level ranch homes around you full of the dead. No help, no food. Packs of huge status-symbol dogs—Afghans, Alsatians, Great Danes—running wild across the lawns ragged with burdock and plantain. Picture window cracked. Who’ll come and mend the broken glass? People had huddled back into the old core of the city; and once the suburbs had been looted, they burned.” Ursula le Guin
Beyond Clapham lie the wastelands. Each mile away from the city the rot becomes clearer, the sense of failure and decay become more plain. The shop fronts, or at least the ones not boarded up, feature half opened shutters and ooze a sense of fear of what is outside. Inside those shops, worried looking immigrant owners huddle behind a counter and hope that the CCTV will defend them. The shelves are empty of all but a few items of any value. It isn’t that the shopkeeper doesn’t stock razor blades, deodorant, paracetamol and batteries but that much of the stock is locked safely away from the customers. Or rather from bunches of hooded shoplifters, their faces covered by scarves, their hands encased in cheap knitted gloves.
Beyond Clapham people drive with purpose, doors locked making every effort not even to glance at the life of the streets. Heading home to a small oasis of safety, relative safety, behind double-locked alarmed doors and secured windows. People whose income or circumstances don’t run to a car scurry, slightly-hunched, about their business fearing the phone snatcher, the bag grabber and the crazy folk who attack without apparent purpose. Like drivers these pedestrians, bus passengers, and bicyclists avoid any sort of eye contact with strangers. Shutting out the clips of what might be music from their phones, the aggressive shoving, the king of the walk attitude from young men who look, in truth, like they could use a good meal instead of cannabis, speed or coke.
Beyond Clapham this smear of suburbia, post-war two bedroomed slums, spreads for miles, filled with the dull, stupid and dangerous. What good there is has been enclosed behind gates and barriers where some London people remain out of cost, habit or history. Passing a school, the high fence, the security, the barred windows make it little different - just smaller and with more hesitant mothers outside at 2.45 in the afternoon - from the prison a short distance away. But there are still some schools, still children. Families are broken, the kids feral, humanity hasn’t yet given up like it has in the city.
Beyond Clapham is a dark place caused, not by violence or war, but by rot, a slow social rot. Nobody remembers how it started because nobody noticed that beginning. Some look and see immigrants abandoned in a society that hates itself. Others hear the music, the street speech, and the misogyny then get cause and effect in the wrong order. Still others hope that the rot will stop if the two-storey smear of suburbia is replaced with avatars of the shiny city. Little patches of high rise apartment living filled with eager young professionals with their shoulder-strapped laptop bags, e-bikes and strangely titled jobs involving computers, consultancy and an endless round of important sounding meetings. No families, no children, no old people, just man-children busy with their self-importance.
Beyond Clapham may not seem like a good place but it does at least contain some grains of hope for society. And the further we go Beyond Clapham, deeper into the darkness of suburbia, the more we see the glimmer of this hope. Where the exciting, sparkly, shiny city is a place for adults, free from the curse and drudge of parenting, suburbia, the parts still resisting the rot, is still a place of families, of dull routine. Parents who think what they do is a pleasure. A tiring, infuriating, unvalued activity made into a pleasure when Sylvie takes her first steps, Lori reads aloud and Majid shows off his cricketing skills in the back garden. Back in the city people are reading books with titles like “What I did while you were breeding” and sharing selfish little memes about preferring cats to children because of some lame reference from an American politician they are told to disagree with.
Beyond Clapham is a real world filled with real people looking for help, guidance, some direction. Instead those for whom Clapham is the edge of civilisation preach about turning their homes into blocks of flats, their roads into bikeways and their jobs into robots. The clever, witty and selfishly successful people in the city explain, of course, that this is for the good of the planet, the economy and their bank balances. Being a parent is a drain on the economy because parents aren’t focused on the deal, on their work. Parents have a life not a series of encounters and activities designed for short-term pleasure that nobody will remember when you are dead (or even the week after they happened).
Beyond Clapham, fortunately, is where most people live. Not the important people, obviously, but the people who, as George Bailey put it, “do most of the working and paying and living and dying”. The world of people Beyond Clapham is falling apart. Everything, if it isn’t actually broken, is held together by string, duct tape and the efforts of a few who refuse to be beaten down. Like some echo of Soviet Russia or an extract from a Kafka novel every public service is wrapped in barely comprehensible bureaucracy and managed by queues. Everywhere there is litter, dereliction, rudeness and the detritus of failure. The important people, the ones who aren’t Beyond Clapham, say they care. They have meetings, they write papers, they argue over strategies or policies. And then the people Beyond Clapham are told to live lives like the sparkly shiny people in the big city. Then their lives, in high rise blocks with expensive rents but free from the distraction of families, of children, will be so much better. Purposeless but better.
Note:
Clapham is an area of SW London about a ten minute tube ride from Westminster or the City. Wandsworth - Beyond Clapham - is an inner London borough. The inspiration came from a post by Ant Breach from the Centre for Cities as part of a discussion about prison policy and whether Wandsworth Prison could be knocked down for housing. Ant also commented thus:
“It's also the case that all around HMP Pentonville there is loads of low quality, two-storey postwar housing. I don't understand why deleting an inner city prison is something we should consider before improving actual housing conditions”
It would seem that having a prison is more valuable than having a suburb. The Beyond Clapham post:
“HMP Wandsworth is in the urban core, but it's hardly London's city centre. It's beyond Clapham.”