Undocumented Side Effects

This week: the less obvious problem with high property prices; some fake maps of Roman Britain; and some frankly mad US polling.

I’m sticking my head on the block here – comments like this have got me in trouble before – but until this year, the only time I’d been to Sheffield, it felt miserable as hell. In most fair sized British cities these days in my experience, the centre gleams and bustles, even if there’s a ring of decay just outside it. Sheffield, c2016, though, seemed to lack even that veneer of prosperity; visible decay and boarded up shops seemed to abound. For one of the core cities, which had sparked its own metropolitan council, it also felt oddly small. And so, even though everyone I know who’d spent serious time there seemed to love it, this is the Sheffield I’d been going around with in my head for nigh on a decade.

Well, I don’t know what I did wrong last time. Perhaps I caught the city in a bad mood; more likely it did the same for me. Or possibly there has been a wave of investment and public realm improvements since that showed the place’s undoubted assets – the grand Victorian and art deco public buildings; the Winter Garden, the largest urban glasshouse anywhere in Europe – in their finery. At any rate, in the early spring sunshine a few weeks back, the Peace Garden and St George’s Square and Kelham Island and the slopes of the South Street Open Space with Park Hill behind it all looked gorgeous. I had to get back to London, and was in any case limited in my movements by a small and enthusiastic dog, but I immediately started trying to think of excuses to come back. That’s always a sign a place has grabbed me

Kelham Island, or thereabouts.

.There was something else I noticed about Sheffield: it felt lively. Yes, there were signs of both private and public property investment going on – perhaps the wave of improvements to the shopping districts and streetscape that had gone through many of the great cities in the 2000s had just taken a little longer to reach South Yorkshire. But there were also plenty of interesting looking bars and cafes and food pop ups and work spaces. It’s difficult to quantify such signs of life from ground level. But anecdotally, I’d say, there are a lot of such things on show in Sheffield and Liverpool and Newcastle; rather less in Manchester, Birmingham or Leeds; and remarkably little of it in London, where there’s a Pret on every corner but half the pubs shut at 10.

Which leads me to a theory: high property prices aren’t just bad for those who don’t own property. They squeeze the life out of cities.

Cheap rents, after all, allow non-corporate uses of spaces. They leave room for experimentation: you can try different things, and if they fail, as most things do, that’s fine and you can try something else. Once it costs a fortune just to occupy a space, though, it’s harder for those who might do so to take a chance. It’s harder for those who own that space to use it for something different too. Why risk it? Just hand it over to Pret.

All of which I think explains why mid-sized regional cities sometimes now feel so much more vibrant than the ostensibly richer capital. A couple of decades back central London did have its share of decent nightlife. But the truly interesting things got pushed ever outwards, from Farringdon to Shoreditch to Dalston to Hackney Wick, as the developers regenerated one area after another. The further out it went, though, the smaller the catchment area – and the less chance of anything really sparking.¹

That problem does not apply to smaller cities, whose centres remain walkable, and which the developers are only starting to wake up to now. A couple of years ago, the Wirral MP Allison McGovern told me that events like the 1998 Biennial and 2008 Capital of Culture had alerted people to “the possibilities of what a city like Liverpool could do... you can do stuff with empty spaces”. She had a name for this: the “advantage of disadvantage”.

There’s a term often used for the phenomenon in which once comfortable societies gradually lose whatever genius it was that made them rich in the first place: “decadence”. What we’re looking at here, though, may be something closer to the opposite. It simply costs more to exist and compete in a place that’s already rich: you have to run faster to stand still. It pushes you away from risk and innovation.

The same sort of logic applies to people, too. If life is cheap or there’s a safety net or both, you can afford to mess around for a few years in your 20s: write, or paint, or launch that start-up. When it costs a fortune just to exist in a city, though, there are greater incentives to sell out early. There’s less room to take the risks that might genuinely create something new.

For a very long time, on this island, London often felt the only place to be. That’s caused ever more insane house prices here, and an ever-widening economic divide. But perhaps this phenomenon will ultimately be self-defeating. Perhaps the next big thing will come from somewhere else – because there’s no space for it in London any more.

I should get back to Sheffield after all.

Top of the pops

I’ve been trying to think about the last time I won something. I think it might have been a school maths prize, c1998? Obviously I have an extremely nice working life, but I’ve never won awards, and I don’t spend my life fending off job offers, even though I’m right here, guys! I genuinely did not imagine for a moment that this might happen:

Or this:

That second one’s from the Sunday Times, which is apparently more comprehensive – but still, No. 2 out of every non-fiction paperback on the market ain’t bad.

There are multiple people I wish were here to see that. But there are also a huge number I’m glad still are, and just as importantly, there is the chance that my enemies will see it and be momentarily irritated, and what more could one wish for in life than that?

I don’t really know what alchemical mixture of title, cover, actual literary quality and luck conspired to get me here. But I think support from you people may have actually played a fair-sized part. And I am more grateful for it than you know.

Map of the Week: Almost certainly misleading Roman Britain Edition

I am, not for the first time, going through a bit of a sub-Roman Britain phase, and have spent much of the last few weeks trying to mug up on what the hell was going on on this island in the centuries between 300 and 600. I’ve skimmed my copy of Max Adams’ The First Kingdom, listened to this excellent trio of episodes from the late lamented History’s Most podcast, plus this episode of History Hit’s The Ancients - over six hours of material in all… And would you believe it, I still don’t know? History is bullshit sometimes, it really is.

Anyway, one thing that I did learn from Professor Rob Collins in the latter is that 4th century Britain wasn’t a single Roman province but a Roman diocese, divided into four or possibly five different provinces. Here’s a map: