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The trouble with money
The area, once pleasantly shabby, is now awash with money
A Tory friend once said to me that everyone, however Left wing in general, is always Right wing in his view of anything he knows about. Though that is unmistakably Conservative triumphalism, it is also usually true. The one exception is in one's own backyard. We all know a lot about our own parish pumps, yet we think that the inexorable laws of competition, of free enterprise and of the free market, should somehow be suspended on our own private patch. No motorways or paedophile resocialisation centres for us, thank you very much, and no big supermarkets or sex shops either, even though all these things may be most excellent elsewhere - an awkward view for a Right-wing libertarian to take.
This embarrassment has raised its head dramatically in Notting Hill, where I live. One evening last week I walked to a public meeting at a local church, which, though enormous, was packed with local people of all descriptions - multi-millionaires, Rastafarians and the middling sort - all deeply upset at what the free market is about to do to our neighbourhood. It is about to change it irrevocably. North Kensington is about to lose much of what made it precious to those of us who live here. It's about to lose the qualities that have made it so expensive and finally so famous and so overrun with tourists; it is about to lose its idiosyncrasy: it's about to stop being something that until even now it still is - a remarkable model of integrated inner-city community life. The reason can be summed up in a single phrase: commercial rents.
As commercial leases here are beginning to run out, landlords are putting up their rents, doubling them and more. They would be mad not to. Property values here have rocketed. Commercial profits have soared. The neighbourhood, for so long pleasantly shabby and eccentric, is now awash with money, with property developers, designers, shoppers and tourists, all delighted by this remarkable place, and hell-bent, in their delight, on destroying it with their very interest. Their interest fuels the rent increases that have already driven out local residents and is now beginning to drive out local small businesses, to be replaced by rich, big international businesses. Three well- known shops just off Portobello Road will soon disappear. A flower shop there has already been replaced by a glass-fronted organic juice bar. Several other small traders, including a much loved bicycle repair shop in the now famous All Saints Road, already face closure. The bookshop and the delicatessen will go. And what will happen to the pitches on the Portobello Road itself? Is it true that someone has an air-conditioned Olde Worlde-style shopping mall already designed to take over the old antique and vegetable market?
Many people at that meeting at St Peter's church last week were inclined to blame that damn film, but the film is not so much a cause of these changes as an expression of them. This is a pattern of destruction we have seen again and again in this country. It has been happening here, for at least a quarter of a century. I have protested about it before. The process is always much the same, as is the question: what if anything could, or should, be done about it? What justification is there for the protectionism and social engineering that resisting such change would certainly demand? What justification can there be for keeping McDonald's or Wal-Mart out of the Portobello Road?
I should point out that at the moment, whether or not there is any justification for doing anything about all this , there is no way one can. The powers of the council, under planning laws, are extremely limited. The Department of the Environment could do little or nothing, even if it wished to. There would need to be new legislation, with all the risk, injustice and bureaucracy that that would involve - very awkward for a libertarian to support. All the same, I think it can be supported.
First of all, it will without question be a social evil to drive out local people and local small businesses, to impose homogenised high-street blight and rip up the delicate social fabric here. In Blairspeak it will be a terrible squandering of social capital, that saved up and reinvested goodwill that enables people to live in peace and help each other. This area is actually a shining example of how mixed race, mixed income, integrated inner-city neighbourhoods can work. The Government has recently pledged itself, whatever that means, to urban regeneration. What is about to be imposed on North Kensington is urban degeneration. As well as painful to us, it will be expensive to the taxpayer, in remedial handouts of every kind.
Freedom for the investor or the landlord must be restrained by some obligation not to harm others. We restrict aircraft flying at night; we try to prevent factories from polluting rivers; we try to prevent sweatshops; some councils already prevent property developers from building inner-city ghettos, by giving planning permission for mixed housing only.
We could in theory protect a family-run toyshop from the crushing might of Toys R Us; we could protect our tiny ethnic coffee shops and exotic delicatessens from Coffee Republic and Starbucks. That would be restraint of trade. But the freemarket can never be entirely free. It has always been and must be based upon and restrained by moral agreements. Perhaps it's time to reconsider, in the case of inner-city planning, what those agreements are. And quickly, before it's too late for Notting Hill.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, June 27, 1999
