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  It isn’t hard to see why. Britain spends only 0.6 per cent of its gross domestic product on transport investment, half the comparable figure for Germany, France and Italy. With subsidies the lowest in Europe, fares are inevitably the highest: travelling on public transport in London costs commuters an average of 71p a mile, double the going rate in Paris or Berlin and four times more than Rome.

  With trains managing the impressive feat of being both expensive and crap, London’s commuters continue, in desperation, to take to their cars. In 2001, the number of train journeys undertaken in the Greater London area fell by 1.4 million; in the two decades before, car use in Britain rose by 52 per cent – more than any other comparable EU country. Congestion increases – a quarter of our major roads are jammed for at least an hour a day – and air quality declines. It has been estimated that 1,600 Londoners die prematurely as a result of atmospheric pollution every year, over 90 per cent of it generated by road vehicles.

  The bottom-line statistic most relevant to those of us not personally affected by a pollution-related fatality is that British workers now spend an average forty-six minutes a day commuting to work, the highest figure in Europe. The solution is a reasonably straightforward one: London’s bus fares have been pegged back in recent years – a one-day pass is half the Tube equivalent’s £4 – and after decades of decline passenger numbers are now consequently at their highest since 1975. To meet demand, drivers are being recruited from as far away as China.

  How different it all was back in the pre-Monopoly era: it’s hard to imagine today’s bureaucrats drafting a Cheap Trains Act as they did in 1883. In 1931 Herbert Morrison, then known as Minister of Transport and now as Peter Mandelson’s granddad, introduced the bill that amalgamated the capital’s Underground trains, trams, coaches and buses into the London Passenger Transport Board. Morrison understood that London’s burgeoning growth and economic importance made a unified transport policy essential, and with a constitution modelled on the BBC’s, what became known as London Transport quickly transformed the capital’s mass-transit system into the world’s greatest.

  Almost everything that made it so occurred under the pre-war aegis of the clearly godlike LPTB chief executive Frank Pick: Harry Beck’s wonderful 1933 Underground map, inspired by wiring diagrams and now the standard blueprint for urban transit networks around the world; the preparation of six Tube extensions and more than fifty additional stations, most of them blissfully happy marriages of form and function designed by the belatedly revered Charles Holden; the first trolleybuses and double-deckers distinguishable only by people you really wouldn’t want to be stuck in a lift with from the Routemasters that still ply the West End today. A 1935 photograph of rush hour at Aldwych featured in a recent history of London’s transport is pertinently captioned ‘No bus in this picture is older than five years’.

  I don’t think there’s really any need to detail the extent to which it’s all gone wrong since. Though perhaps it’s worth mentioning that the chapter following that in which those Aldwych buses appear is titled ‘Public Transport in Decline – The Car is King 1945–70’. The railways had once dominated and even defined London – 100,000 Londoners were displaced to make way for the main lines that speared in as close to the centre as they could get, and the huge terminuses they sprouted when they got there. Though rail travel had lost some of its novelty by the thirties, the big stations were still the capital’s epic structures: they had been built to demand respect, and they were still getting it. But then came cars and planes, and suddenly trains were just another way of getting about, and a rather old-fashioned one at that.

  Once this happened, the stations began to seem rather overblown. Marylebone had reaped the benefits of its obscurity and been almost accidentally overlooked by the developers, but Fenchurch Street was an irrelevant and rather ugly little insect cowering beneath many pairs of surrounding concrete boots. And at Liverpool Street, which had once stood so impressively above its neighbours, those boots had come crashing down. Towering but somehow stocky, the £1.8 billion Broadgate office development loomed not just around the station but directly over it, its gracelessly bland beige and green bulk stamping right on to platforms 11–18.

  Round the back, with the spindly cast-iron arcs of the station canopy like an opened ribcage between the feet of two startlingly oppressive blocks of granite and glass, I stood glumly in the flayingly bitter wind that tall buildings always seem to generate. Inside the concourse the trains were presented as an afterthought behind the retail barricades, and outside the station itself lay prostrate and defeated, not just bitten by the hand that fed it but almost swallowed whole. On the rent-per-square-foot scale, Liverpool Street had more than justified that berth between Bond Street and Park Lane, just as King’s Cross had cemented its position as the board’s lowliest station. In human terms, however, the frigid urban cityscape around me offered nothing to enrich the soul or stir the senses. Gabbyland’s grubby vigour might be too grubby for some, but this place left a far worse taste in the mouth. Though Gabby’s toothbrush would probably beg to differ.

  CHAPTER 11

  Mr Monopoly

  I WENT TO school with Phil Grabsky. He was in the year above and I believe he served as an assistant patrol leader in our Scout troop; I additionally believe that the torch whose batteries I covertly replaced with a banana in the woods in Stoke Poges, a torch whose consequent inutility precipitated a terrible nocturnal stumble into an earth latrine, may have borne a strip of Dymo tape identifying its owner as P. Grabsky. Though because I left the 34th Hammersmith after a record-breakingly diminutive period of service, of course I can’t be certain.

  But the man I had arranged to meet at a café outside Liverpool Street station was not Phil Grabsky. He was Mike Grabsky. A cheery chap in his mid-forties, with the sort of competent, engaging air of a television DIY pundit, Mike is Britain’s most successful Monopoly player. The one-time holder of more regional and national titles than he can accurately recall, he had also represented his country at the global championships often enough to refer to them as ‘the worlds’. Mike’s day job, undertaken for a foreign bank in one of the Broadgate towers rearing sombrely over our bracing outdoor table, involves the design and maintenance of risk-management computer systems. Deep into the realm of Chris, one can only assume that this work involves much the same mathematical prowess as his extra-mural activities.

  Mike’s life-defining interest in Monopoly can be traced to his encounter with a book of game-winning tips when he was twelve. Only in 1984, however, did he go public. That year the Evening Standard ran a competition to win fifty places in its inaugural London Monopoly championship; using friends’ names and addresses, Mike procured no fewer than ten of them. With the field stuffed full of wilfully incompetent stooges, victory was a formality.

  ‘It’s just the perfect board game,’ offered Mike when I asked him to explain his obsession. ‘Brokering deals, money management – it’s all useful in later life. There’s enough luck involved to allow kids to beat their dads, and enough skill so that if you want you can take it up to another level.’

  The moment most of us came to that fork in the Monopoly road, with one branch signposted ‘Another Level’ and the other ‘What Do You Mean, I Can’t Put a Hotel On My Station?’ was when we got to the bit in the rules about auctions. Everyone was distantly aware that if someone landed on an unowned property and didn’t buy it, the bank was supposed to flog it off to the highest bidder. A Mike-style cousin might even have cajoled you into trying it out, covertly snaffling up the orange set for a tenner a throw before luring you into a £1,473 bid for Electric Company. Thereafter auctions would be pigeon-holed along with mortgage interest and the rule about being able to buy houses out of turn in the ‘Sod That’ file.

  By this token, it was no surprise to hear that Mike’s family stopped playing him years ago. His social acquaintances would have been warned off by the primer on Monopoly tactics Mike has submitted for publication, and
more particularly its title: How to Bankrupt Your Friends In Under An Hour. And he doesn’t get much joy out of his work colleagues these days either, after a group of them made the mistake of humorously belittling his extra-curricular triumphs.

  ‘I said, OK – give us a game and I’ll beat you all ten times in a row.’

  And, um, did you?

  ‘No. I did it twelve times.’

  Mike’s homely features were now beginning to harden into an approximation of religious fanaticism, the bug-eyed, clench-jawed monomania that marks out a competitor determined to dominate his chosen field. His passion for the game is almost boundless: one minute fiercely eulogising my friend Victor Watson as ‘a man who believed in the purity of Monopoly’, and the next, to my unbridled satisfaction, roundly belittling Gyles Brandreth. ‘He turns up at the worlds in this silly Monopoly jumper saying he’s the European champion. We all watched him play and . . . well, let’s just say I didn’t pick up any tips.’

  Mike’s dream is to run a real-estate company named Monopoly Properties, starting with a flat above an Old Kent Road shop and expanding sequentially around the board. He has replaced many of the screen icons on his company’s computer network with images of Uncle Pennybags. When a championship overlapped with the holiday of a lifetime his wife had spent years organising for them, he packed her off to Malaysia alone. ‘That was brave of you,’ I said. He seemed surprised by the suggestion. ‘Not as brave as buying the green set in a three-player game.’

  A world final is played with real money, and with $16,500 up for grabs (the bank’s total reserves, apparently), gamesmanship in the qualifying heats is intense. One Japanese player stands up throughout, barking out bids and prospective deals like an old-school broker on the trading floor. The early rounds have a ninety-minute time limit, and are vulnerable to tactical time-wasting: proposing ludicrous exchanges, mortgaging and unmortgaging properties. No commercial advantage is spurned. ‘I once had a fairly serious, er, bank error in my favour,’ Mike confessed, with a wink that suggested neither contemporaneous admission or subsequent remorse.

  Ask Mike the longest game he’s played and he’ll tell you about the shortest: ‘A whole table of pros bankrupted in forty-three minutes.’ Make no mistake – tournament Monopoly is pitilessly gladiatorial, a dog-eat-battleship conflict. Weaknesses are seized upon: when a player is in trouble, you first dispirit them with insultingly low offers for their stricken property empire, then play the nice cop next turn and invariably snap it up for just a few quid more. You play on people’s emotions by whispering that another competitor has been trying to rip them off, or appealing openly for an all-board alliance against the current leader. ‘But in the early stages at least you’ve got to be liked – never propose the first deal or you’ll be marked down as the hustler, the man to beat.’

  Mike, however, likes to be the man to beat, and not just with dice in one hand and a tiny iron in the other. During the course of our chat it emerged that in 1991, his annus mirabilis, Mike won an unlikely treble: the South-East Monopoly championship, the UK backgammon crown and – are you ready for this? – the national Cluedo title.

  ‘Backgammon,’ he philosophised expansively, ‘is a little like Monopoly – easy to learn, hard to master.’

  ‘Yeah, but Cluedo’s rubbish,’ I blurted impulsively. Mike looked at me, hard, before slowly draining his cup. Then he sat back in his aluminium chair and cracked a big, lazy smile, a smile that said, ‘No, son: losing is rubbish.’

  In a way, I wasn’t learning anything new about the game itself: what made Monopoly good – its intolerance of caution or charity, its brazen yet hard-headed ruthlessness – were the same attributes that made Mike good at Monopoly. Already cold, it was now starting to darken. I changed tack.

  ‘An affinity with the streets on the board?’ Mike repeated dubiously. Mad Monopoly Mike had gone; mild-mannered marquetry Mike was back. ‘What, me personally?’

  I suppose his games are too intense to permit any idle ruminations on the history behind those title deeds. Did he then have any thoughts on whether London had improved since the game’s debut?

  He did, but it took him a while to find them. ‘Um . . . cinemas, theatres, galleries . . . although I suppose they had those back then.’ I nodded. ‘Public transport – that must be better now.’ I grimaced slightly and shook my head. He shrugged cheerfully. ‘Well . . . you’re asking the wrong person. I’ve got a place in Brighton.’ He paused. ‘That’s the difference. People can’t afford to live in London now.’

  That certainly was a difference. The average price of a three-bed London semi at the start of the thirties was £700 – the equivalent of about £20,000 today. Turn up at a twenty-first-century estate agent with that in your pocket and you’d find yourself £358,000 short. In 1935 one of those new suburban dream homes could be yours for as little as 8/11 a week – only a shilling more than a Monopoly set cost. Monopoly now sells for £19.99; even the weekly rent on a horried bedsit in Tooting is over three times that, and assuming you somehow wangled a 100 per cent mortgage on that aforementioned semi the repayments under the Monopoly Price Index would set you back twenty-six sets a week. For a half of all Londoners, including nurses, teachers, firemen and others engaged in similarly useful professions, home ownership simply isn’t an option.

  Nothing brings Londoners together like a discussion of accommodation costs. We were still on the topic when, having first requested his permission, I placed the board on the chair next to us – it was too big for our hubcap-sized table – and handed Britain’s greatest ever Monopoly player the dice. I dropped my car on Marylebone; he scuttered the dice across the board’s centre with a practised flick, talking as he did so.

  ‘I mean, some of the prices out in west London are just ridiculous. My brother Philip was telling me that . . .’

  ‘Sorry?’ My fingers froze over the token; he had rolled a nine but suddenly it didn’t matter.

  ‘My brother was telling . . .’

  ‘Philip Grabsky,’ I intoned robotically. ‘Philip Grabsky of west London.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mike, carefully.

  My face felt wrong, and I tried to make it look different. ‘Can I ask you something, Mike?’ I said, the chumminess sounding woefully fragile.

  ‘OK.’ Jaw clenched, eyes hard and unblinking: Monopoly Mike had returned, and now leaned forward with his hands on the table, preparing to rise and leave.

  ‘Would Philip be an older brother?’

  ‘Younger.’ He scanned me quickly. ‘About your age.’

  I nodded very slowly, seven or eight times.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Reds

  I DIDN’T REMEMBER about Mike’s nine until the following morning; such was my easy familiarity with the board I didn’t need to open it to know where his throw had taken me.

  Nowhere else on the board so perfectly embodies London’s civic dithering as Trafalgar Square. In 1829 the royal stables of King’s Mews and the less grand buildings around were demolished as part of John Nash’s Charing Cross Improvement Scheme; Nash was the first architect to throw his hat in the ring, but he died soon after and the vacant space was quickly knee-deep in toppers and stovepipes.

  First they couldn’t agree on the name – the initial working title was William the Fourth’s Square – and having finally settled on Trafalgar, they couldn’t agree on how to honour the admiral mortally wounded during that famous victory over the French and Spanish fleets south of Cadiz in 1805. The competition for a new Nelson Monument wasn’t even held until 1839, and the one hundred-odd entries were all so poor they had to hold a second. One proposed a pyramid, another a prodigious globe held aloft above a lake by the figures of Fame, Neptune, Victory and Britannia and topped by the man himself. The largest of the several column suggestions was a 218-foot monster of cast iron, and though most stuck Horatio on top, James Hakewill put him at the bottom, explaining ‘it was improper for a mere subject, however heroic, to look down on royalty’.r />
  William Railton supplied the winning design, but the public hated it. His column was called ‘a monstrous nine-pin’, and a Commons Select Committee declared it ‘undesirable’. But no one could agree an alternative, and work began by default. Finally, fourteen years after the space for it was cleared and thirty-eight after he died at Trafalgar, the 17-foot image of Nelson was bolted to the top of 145 feet of fluted granite. Around its base were bronze bas-reliefs of his victories, cheekily cast from melted-down French cannons captured therein.

  That was a start, but the issue of what to do with the vast space behind remained. The original scheme had been to fill it with a grand new home for the Royal Academy, but now people were talking about a coliseum. The chief architect, Charles Barry, still wanted to bin the newly erected column and place a more modest group of statues in the middle of the square. In the end, though, they agreed on the fountains, but it took a further two years to complete them and when the water was turned on they leaked. It would be another quarter of a century – long enough to become a staple London joke – before those famous lions were put in place (six times over budget), and an additional fifty-eight years until the square was properly paved.

  Nothing, however, illustrates Trafalgar Square’s sloth-like development quite so perfectly as the epically drawn-out saga of its corner statues. Generals Napier and Havelock commandeered the southern corners in a whippet-like eight years, but the statue on the north-eastern plinth – George IV on horseback – was intended for Marble Arch (which itself, of course, was intended for Buckingham Palace) and erected at Trafalgar Square only as a stopgap. Over a century on, that gap hasn’t been stopped.

  Most notoriously, the debate over what to put on the opposite north-west plinth has rumbled tediously on for more than 150 years. In 1936 someone proposed a statue of Cecil Rhodes; in 1947, George III; the year after, William IV. In 1950 there were moves for a monument celebrating merchant seamen, and in 1964 they very nearly decided on Winston Churchill. And every few years thereafter some quango has discussed and laboriously rejected all other suggestions: Air Chief Marshal Lord Trenchard in 1965, Lord Mountbatten in 1979, Canada’s war dead in 1988, Lord Kitchener in 1993. Only in 2001 was it finally agreed, again more or less by default, that the vacant north-western corner should serve as a rolling exhibition of contemporary art, its sculptures regularly changed; currently the plinth supports Rachel Whiteread’s transparent resin replica of itself. As an artistic impression of something disappearing up its own arse this could hardly have been more aptly located.