Walk the streets of Shepherd’s Bush and you will not lack for the company of the deranged and the drunk

There was another one of those stupid studies, reported on last week in some of the papers, that London has not made it into even the top 50 of the world’s most liveable cities. The knee-jerk response to this is scorn. Yeah, right, that’s why no one wants to live here, property prices are so low, and it doesn’t take 15 minutes to get down the steps of Baker Street station because they are clogged with gawping, idiotic tourists.

(I know it is wrong to judge a book by its cover but these tourists are idiotic. You know they couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel, not only because of their zombie-paced, shuffling gait – one sometimes wishes one were a New Yorker so one could be rude to them with impunity – but also because they all eat in McDonald’s. What kind of degenerate Morlock goes all the way to a foreign city and then stuffs his pimply face with a Big Mac?)

These studies are usually tosh. They always end up saying that the best city in the world is Vancouver, an assertion that can be exposed as complete rubbish by anyone who has spent more than 20 minutes there. I have, as it happens, and can pass on the information that if you like a city where it rains 363 days of the year, where you cannot get milk and the papers before 10am on a Sunday, but you can get your dog groomed (the city’s pet shop problem, as one Vancouverite told me, is “out of control”), and which is about a thousand miles away from anywhere you might actually want to visit, then Vancouver will be your cup of tea.

Actually, there is a very good case for saying London is vile, and it’s not just because Americans use the word “Londoned” to mean “ripped off and disappointed at the same time”, and the French use “la Londonisation” to describe the process of chain stores ripping the heart out of a city. Of course, it all depends where you’re standing. If you’re standing in my neck of the woods, it’s lovely, but only millionaires or the inordinately fortunate live there. If you live, as do my children, in Shepherd’s Bush, then it’s dreadful.

I was stationed there for 17 years or so before being thrown out and it has got scuzzier and scarier as the years have gone by. I used to take some pride in living in a place that was resistant to gentrification, but the Bush takes this idea too far. Walk the streets outside commuter hours and you will not lack for the company of the deranged, the extravagantly drunk, the incredibly smelly, and the wannabe gangsta barely controlling a slobbering pit bull at the end of a leash. (Boy, do those animals raise the tone of a neighbourhood. Viz magazine calls them “shit machines” and, as in so many matters it touches on, is right on the money.) And Shepherd’s Bush isn’t even nearly the worst part of London.

This kind of thing is exacerbated, or you notice it more because you’re on foot more, when there’s a Tube strike. As I drove my son and three of his friends back from a school cricket match, they asked me what the latest strike was about. I went into a long and perhaps alarming rant about how though most of the time I was generally in favour of industrial action, in this case the RMT’s bewildering demand to reinstate one Tube driver who was dangerously incompetent and another who was accused of being a thief surpassed my comprehension; and that the only plausible explanation was that Bob Crow was a secret government lackey, employed to discredit the trade union movement by forfeiting any sympathy the public might have had for the rest of their demands. I also added that in Australia, when public transport employees go on strike, they open the barriers and let everyone ride for free, which not only hits the government where it hurts but cheers everyone else up enormously. I went on for rather longer than this. I could expand on my theme at my leisure because the streets were solid with traffic. As the engine and, indeed, myself overheated, the windows steamed up and one of the boys asked to be let out a couple of hundred yards before his home.

So I am ambivalent about London. Cities are very good at turning their faces from you when you are broke, but London still has amenities that no other can offer. If you think this is an eccentric view then simply consider its great green spaces, particularly Hyde Park and Regent’s Park. A stroll in these is one of the pleasures that not only unifies the populace, it unifies it through time, because people have been doing it for centuries. You can do it irrespective of income, and if you have an umbrella you can even do it when it’s raining. Do it now, before some bright spark decides to start charging for entry.

Nicholas Lezard

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