Boris Johnson - Johnsons Life of London

A LSO BY B ORIS J OHNSON

The Dream of Rome

Lend Me Your Ears

Have I Got Views for You

Life in the Fast Lane

Friends, Voters, Countrymen

Seventy-two Virgins (Fiction)

The Perils of the Pushy Parents (Poetry)

Johnsons

Life of London

The People Who Made the City That Made the World

Boris Johnson

R IVERHEAD B OOKS

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

New York

2012

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright 2012 by Boris Johnson

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2011

First published in the United States by Riverhead Books 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnson, Boris.

Johnsons life of London : the people who made the city that made the world / by Boris Johnson.

p. cm.

Originally published: London : HarperCollins, 2011.

ISBN 978-1-101-58568-9

1. London (England)Biography. 2. London (England)History. I. Title.

DA676.8.A1J64 2012 2012001665

920.0421dc23

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Marina

Contents

Introduction: London Bridge

S till they come, surging towards me across the bridge.

On they march in sun, wind, rain, snow and sleet. Almost every morning I cycle past them in rank after heaving rank as they emerge from London Bridge station and tramp tramp tramp up and along the broad 239-metre pavement that leads over the river and towards their places of work.

It feels as if I am reviewing an honourable regiment of yomping commuters, and as I pass them down the bus-rutted tarmac there is the occasional eyes-left moment and I will be greeted with a smile or perhaps a cheery four-letter cry.

Sometimes they are on the phone, or talking to their neighbours, or checking their texts. A few of them may glance at the scene, which is certainly worth a glance: on their left the glistening turrets of the City; on the right the white keep of the Tower of London, the guns of HMS Belfast and the mad castellations of Tower Bridge; and beneath them the powerful swirling eddies of the river that seems to be green or brown depending on the time of day. Mainly, however, they have their mouths set and their eyes are blank with that inward look of people who have done the bus or the Tube or the aboveground train and are steeling themselves for the day ahead.

This was the sight, you remember, that filled T. S. Eliot with horror. A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, reported the sensitive banker-turned-poet. I had not thought death had undone so many, he moaned. And yet, ninety years after Eliot freaked out, the tide of humanity is fuller than ever. When I pass that pavement at off-peak times, I can see that it is pale and worn from the pounding, and that not even the chewing gum can survive the wildebeest tread.

The crowd has changed since Eliot had his moment of apocalypse. There are thousands of women on the march today, wearing sneakers and carrying their heels in bags. The men have rucksacks instead of briefcases; no one is wearing a bowler hat and hardly anyone seems to be smoking a cigarette, let alone a pipe. But Londons commuters are still the same in their trudging purpose, and they come in numbers not seen before.

Londons buses are carrying more people than at any time in history. The Tube is travelling more miles than ever, and more people are riding on the trains. It would be nice to reveal that people are ditching their cars in favour of public transport; yet the paradox is that private motor vehicle transport is also increasing, and cycling has gone up 15 percent in one year.

As we look back at the last twenty years of the information technology revolution, there is one confident prediction that has not come true.

They said we would all be sitting in our kitchens in Dorking or Dorset and telecommuting down the information superhighway. Video linkups, we were told, would make meetings unnecessary. What tosh.

Whatever we may think they need to do, people want to see other people up close. I leave it to the anthropologists to come up with the detailed analysis, but you only have to try a week of working from home to know it is not all its cracked up to be.

You soon get gloomy from making cups of coffee and surfing the Internet and going to hack at that piece of cheese in the fridge. And then there are other profound reasons for this obstinate human desire to be snuffling round each other at the watercooler. As the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has demonstrated, the move to the city is as rational in the information revolution as it was in the Industrial Revolution.

And these people are coming here not just from Dorking, or even from darkest Dorset. They come from the ends of the Earth. Dotted in that crowd of commuting faces will be people from every European country, from Russia, from Asia, from Africa and from both the Americas. They will probably have come to Heathrow, the busiest airport in the world, with 68 million passengers a year, and then cabbed or Tubed or trained it into a world city, a cosmopolis of three hundred languages, a city of constant immigration where East End churches have turned into synagogues and then into mosques. National football teams from fifty countries can turn up in London and expect to find a home crowd of more than ten thousand supporters each. No other city matches London for its pull and diversitywith the possible exception of New York, the shining transatlantic mirror that is, it so happens, the city of my birth.

By the time I get to cycle home, most of the morning crowds have tramped the other way. Like some gigantic undersea coelenterate, London has completed its spectacular daily act of respirationsucking in millions of commuters from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., and then efficiently expelling them back to the suburbs and the Home Counties from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. But the drift home is more staggered. There are pubs, clubs and bars to be visited, and as I watch the crowds of drinkers on the pavementsknots of people dissolving and reforming in a slow minuetI can see why the city beats the countryside hands down. Its the sheer range of opportunity.