When one considers the United Kingdom is the country that gave the world the Magna Carta and the Beatles, the current achievements lead me to think there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. With Denmark, of course, being the great UK.
London is presently my favourite manifestation of the national misadventures of the UK. Truly one of the worlds great cities, pockmarked all over with structures that pervade both my conscious and sub conscious; Westminster, Tower Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace: places that you have been and seen before you have even been there. And it's not even the big tourist icons, it's things like the view from Primrose hill or the curves of the Thames. There's all this stuff that you know because, as an Australian at least, culturally, your culture demands that you recognise.
The really cool part of that cultural memory bobs up when you walk up Regent St and admire the grand Victorian buildings, or perhaps wandering among the bars and restaurants around Soho. Standing in the shadow if St Stephens tower while Big Ben drowns out the latent city noise it's hard to escape the achievements of British civilisation. And, for me, that compounds the, well not constant, but pretty frequent stream of dissapointments, inconveniences and generally being let down by the British service industry and the damned propensity of the people of this country to put up with second best.
The past civil achievements are magnificent. Londoners managed to construct the Circle Line Tube, right underneath some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. Underground, using futuristic mass public transport methods that had only just been invented they built an amazingly effective and useful system that worked so well they replicated it over and over until the city was riddled with underground train lines. All this in 1854 when Melbourne was a smaller city than Ballarrat. Then when they invented electric trains, they installed them and put the entire fleet into service in 11 days. A fairly impressive achievement and no doubt an indication as to why Victorian Britain was the greatest civillisation the world has ever seen.
Now lets zoom forward to 2009, where it is taking 18 months to replace 15 escalators at Bank station. Basically you can hardly move around the station if an escalator is involved. My engineer friends assure me that escalators are a tricky business and that they are much easier to build from scratch than replace etc etc etc.... They are replacing 0.8333333 escalators a month. This strikes me of a lack of will, or organisation, or who know what. Sloth perhaps?
But it's not just the tube, although living with it daily means it is always near the top of the complaints list. No, London has other problems. Fly tipping, for instance. Basically people put their rubbish on the street quite a bit. Why anyone in a modern soceity would think it is ok to just dump your rubbish on the kerb is quite beyond me, but Londoners love it. My guess is they know they can get away with it, which segues quite neatly to the general standards of service. On my scorecard it's a poor to very poor. Anyone who has opened a bank account, got a mobile phone contract, talked to any service provider about anything will know what I am talking about and this experience invalidates any argument that a larger market and more competition improves customer service. They are all as bad as each other. The list of gripes grows ever larger:
* sunday shopping hours
* the false outrage against Bankers' Bonuses from MP's committees
* The fact that 1 guy (the Duke of something or other) owns Mayfair
* Flood Plain insurance subsidising people whose house is guaranteed to get flooded every 5 years
They just aren't doing as well as they have in the past. In Melbourne when there is a total lack ability to do difficult things, such as fix the public transport system we make excuses - the city is too big, there is no real cost benefit, it's just for rich inner city residents yada yada yada there's a hint of truth to the excuses. Here they try to do all the great nation building things but just cock it up. It's good to be somewhere where the nation is willing to have a go at the hard stuff, but the results are just so disappointing.
But then the sun starts shining, U2 play a secret rooftop gig on Regents St, You go out in Covent Garden on a Saturday night, see a West End show (the Lion King - excellent!!) and all of a sudden it's not so bad. In fact London is really cool. Sure they can't make the tube work and the nation is not what it once was but you know they still do a brilliant city. For all its failings London is a place that people want to be. And if you get a bit sick of it, Paris is a 3 hour train ride away!
I love Paris (but not as much as I love London, which is less than I love Melbourne, which is marginally less than I love Richmond)
