Lowri Griffiths on the issues that matter to Finsbury Park, Highbury, and the Overground commuter
LONDON, UK – There is a new Mayor of London, which means there are new promises about the Tube, new promises about housing, and a new set of unfulfilled promises from the previous Mayor that the new one is politely ignoring while implying they would have done better. I cover London politics for Bohiney Magazine and for The London Prat, and I have been asking people in North London this week what they actually want from City Hall, which turns out to be a more interesting question than either the mayoral campaign or the coverage of it suggested.
The Tube, Obviously
The Tube comes up immediately and continues to come up throughout the conversation, which is true of every conversation in London that lasts more than ten minutes and touches on transport, and which is because the Tube is the shared civic experience that binds this city more effectively than any other institution. When it works, London works. When it does not, the city fragments into millions of people making individual calculations about whether to walk, bus, or wait, calculations that produce a collective output of frustrated inefficiency that ripples through the working day.
The specific issues in North London: Victoria Line capacity at peak hours is a recurring complaint that predates the current Mayor by several administrations. The Piccadilly Line upgrade, in progress, is one of the most anticipated infrastructure changes in this part of the city. People know about signal problems and interworking arrangements in detail that would surprise most politicians who represent them. They have studied it. They have opinions about it. They do not feel that City Hall has been equally studious.
Housing: What People Actually Say
The housing conversation is longer and more nuanced than the mayoral campaign suggested. In Finsbury Park, the specific anxiety is not about house prices, because the people I spoke to are not in a position where house prices directly affect their immediate decisions: they are renting, they expect to continue renting, and the question they are asking is not whether they can buy but whether they can continue to afford to rent. These are different questions that require different policy answers.
The renters’ concerns are about stability as much as cost: the ability to stay in a place long enough to build a life, to know the neighbours, to find a GP, to have continuity if you have children. The insecurity of the private rented sector, where periodic rent increases and short tenancies produce repeated household disruption, is the specific problem that London’s renters are experiencing. The Renters (Reform) Act was intended to address some of these issues; whether implementation produces the intended results is what tenant advocates including Generation Rent are tracking.
The Question Nobody Asked
Nobody mentioned the river. This is perhaps obvious but worth noting: the Thames, which dominates the physical geography of London and which various Mayors have approached with ambitious plans, is not on the list of things that North Londoners are primarily worried about. This is partly because from Finsbury Park the river is not particularly present as a daily reality, and partly because the concerns that feel proximate, the rent, the Tube, the GP waiting time, the school place, the bin collection, the planning application for the building behind the garden, are the concerns that fill the available political attention. Good Mayoral politics would take the proximate concerns seriously and connect them to the structural questions they are symptoms of. Whether the current Mayor is capable of this I cannot yet assess. I will be reporting back. Probably from the Overground, during a signal failure. For more on London politics, see My London.
Further Reflection
The week described above sits within a longer pattern that is worth documenting. London journalism, whether about business, royals, culture, or politics, requires a sustained attention that individual articles rarely capture. The diary is the form that allows the accumulation, and the accumulation is what makes the individual pieces possible over time. Without the sustained observation, the observation itself becomes thin, relying on the most visible surface of a story rather than the texture that makes it significant. This publication, through Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, is committed to the texture rather than the surface, which is why the diary format exists alongside the more conventional journalism.
The city continues to produce material at a rate that exceeds any single writer’s capacity to process it in real time. What I am doing in this diary, and what the published pieces do in their more finished form, is a selection from the available material, guided by what seems most illuminating rather than most immediately newsworthy. The distinction between illuminating and newsworthy is the distinction between journalism and literature, and the best journalism occupies the space between them, using the techniques of one to achieve the purposes of the other. I am trying to occupy that space consistently, which is harder than either pure journalism or pure literature and more satisfying than either when it works. The week that produced this diary entry was one in which it worked more often than it did not, which is the standard I measure against and which I do not always meet but which is worth maintaining as the target. For more London journalism and satire, see The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
