Thoughts on Flights I - On Cities Big and Small

20 May 2009. BA 799, HEL-LHR.

The most reassuring public announcement? Whatever comes from a BA cockpit, in a magnetic male voice in Her Majesty's English (I do sometimes wonder if they're filtered by quality of speaking voice as well as aviary skills) must rank among the top. 'Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I'm pleased to let you know that we're making good progress towards our destination, London Heathrow. Weather report is very good indeed, a cloudless day, making it a nice descent...'

Since truly cloudless days are actually something of a real rarity in London's skies, when it turns out to be true, you notice every single window-seat passenger - and some further from the windows attempting a neck-crankling exercise - being completely absorbed by the birds-eye view of the metropolis, noses stuck to the windows. All the more remarkable considering the vast majority of the passengers on this flight appear to be frequent business travelers who may have the tendency to count their daily/weekly commutes in airmiles. The reason is that the view is indeed mesmerising on a day like this. To start with, you can't help being startled by the realisation (or confirmation really) that London is MASSIVE. Even the area within the Circular (the 'inner circle' as opposed to the monstrous M25), which looks like a reasonable size on your road atlas, contains a fascinatingly diverse landscape, viewed from this height. Landmarks along the Thames - there's a reason why every major city in the world has to have a river in the middle of, or circling, it - are easily spotted. But you also take in the green patches everywhere, among the concrete sprawls: parks, heaths, commons, with the undulating trees and boat-dotted ponds. The Millennium Dome (aka 'The O2'), the arch at Wembley Stadium, and the 2012 Olympic site echo each other as 21st-century London's answer to the Colosseum. We spend far too big a part of our daily lives getting from A to B in a sealed tube carriage or on a standing-room only bus, we tend to forget to look up and look around everywhere in between. On this enormous canvas, even the clusters of ugly big council blocks suddenly take on an intriguing character of their own, a striking cubist shade perhaps.

Which, inevitably, brings up the nagging thought I've always had at the back of my mind: how can so much of the London surface that we do encounter everyday seem so helplessly dull? How can so big and great a city have so little character on its streets?

To be specific: London, like every other sizeable city in the UK, is now full of 'cloned streets'. You know the one: a Next next to a Boots next to an Oasis next to a Starbucks next to a Zara next to a Tesco Metro next to a Coffee Republic next to a Waterstones next to... etc etc. And the more upmarket version of this, available to the yummy mummies of the more expensive postcodes (Upper Street in Islington, King's Road in Chelsea, High Street Kensington, shopping centres in Westfield and Canary Wharf), would be something like: a Whistles next to a TM Lewin next to a Café Nero next to a Waitrose next to a Karen Millen next to a Zara (big winners are those who appeal to all classes)... and so on. Even the mighty designer brands, having been so mercilessly bombarded in our faces in every media outlet in the last couple of decades,have lost their previously haughty air of exclusivity, and even Bond Street and the northern end of Sloane Street now merely feel like clones of all the other shops in other world capitals offering identical goods, give or take the currency discrepancies.

I do realise that these are all inevitable and bountiful fruits of market economy/capitalist consumerism/globalisation. And it's produced at least one immortally funny line on screen - in Woody Allen's last good film, Small Time Crooks, the cop who caught the hapless, cookie-shop fronting bank-robbers red-handed offers his priceless one-word advice on how to really make it big without breaking the law: 'FRANCHISE!' But I suspect that I'm not the only one suffering from clone-street fatigue, longing for something different, something that stands out from all this predictable drab (predictability being the evil twin of the omnipresent convenience that modern technologies bestow on us).

This collective frustration has, presumably, played no small part in the increasingly wild popularity of the markets of Portobello, Spitalfields and Borough. That trusty barometer of middle-class Londoners' opinions, Evening Standard, launched its 'save our small shops' campaign last year as a firm rebuttal to the clonisation of high streets everywhere, and had overwhelming responses. Being a realist, though, I think we'll have to accept the demise of independent retailers as an eventuality, a price to pay for having an iconic city without microscopic iconic components on the street level. Yet how does London compare with other capital cities in this respect? My first reaction, on pondering this question, is that the bigger they are, the fewer interesting, non-chain shops they seem to allow. If we take the distinctive architectural backdrops out of the picture (an easy task these days, thanks to technology), the shopping streets of London, New York, Hong Kong and Beijing can all blur into one. Globalisation flaunts itself in the flesh, loud and proud. In comparison, the smaller European capitals and other major cities that often captivate me, rarely fail to come up with unfamiliar brands and logos in their spades (and this is a shopaholic writing): Stockholm, Copenhagen, Antwerp, Berlin, Bologna, Tallinn, Vilnius. But wait a minute, there are exceptions to this theory too. Paris and Tokyo are both bona fide metropolises, yet still have plenty of shop-keepers who run their hundred-square-feet spaces with phenomenal success, and who would run a mile from the smiling corporate boss contemplating a merger/acquisition deal. Is this the great socio-cultural divide again, the one between the English-speaking world –yes, the likes of Hong Kong and Beijing can almost be comfortably categorised as such - and the rest of the (real) world? I don't have an answer, but I know I'd be happy to see London, for one, de-cloned considerably. But I have to stop thinking about it, because in the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived at London Heathrow Terminal Five. The local time is seven p.m., the ground temperature, eighteen degrees. It's been a real pleasure to have you on board.