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  To a chorus of slightly deflated sighs I’d relate how these days Monopoly is under the global aegis of the toy giant Hasbro, whose desire for corporate uniformity has swept away most eccentricities. There are cowcatchers now on the trains at Fenchurch Street, Piccadilly’s site-only rent is £24, and the ‘Uncle Pennybags’ character leaps out of Monopoly’s middle O on boards the world over. But it’s not their fault, I’d say, it’s ours: when the firm held an international vote a couple of years back to decide on a new token, the public’s choice was unforgivingly dull. When precedent demanded an owl, a lighthouse, a fir cone, a bib, the world’s Monopoly players opted instead for a bag of money.

  But though tweaks could be tolerated – a new typeface here, a differently coloured banknote there – I encountered a fierce loyalty to the 1936 board’s eclectic but apparently sacrosanct property portfolio, usually when discussing the ‘special editions’. In recent years Hasbro has produced or licensed a burgeoning range of themed sets – Manchester United Monopoly, Newcastle and Gateshead Monopoly, World Cup Monopoly, Star Wars Monopoly, Scooby-Doo Monopoly, Coca-flaming-Cola Monopoly – but to mention these was to elicit reactions of an intensity to shame even the most maverick Europhobe. ‘My son tells me you can get Pokémon Monopoly now!’, I’d trill fatuously to my neighbouring dinner guests, and for long, silent seconds there’d be a lot of jaw-muscle and neck-artery work around the table, perhaps even a still-quivering knife buried point first in the beech veneer. ‘It’s only a game,’ someone might eventually pipe up, realising as they did so that the only time you hear those words is when they are plainly untrue. It especially wasn’t true because the Monopoly streets weren’t silly fabrications – they were real. Tell someone that the Rovers Return occupied Mayfair’s berth in Coronation Street Monopoly and you’d get a tersely dismissive reply. ‘But the Rovers Return isn’t Mayfair. Mayfair is Mayfair.’

  And it wasn’t just the British. An Australian who came round to paint our exterior woodwork said he’d arrived in the mother of the Empire’s capital anticipating a city of angels and vines and fairs in May. After a little more research I discovered that millions of disparate former colonials had been brought up with the London board: Kiwis, Canadians, Indians, Singaporeans, even Saudi Arabians. Before the war even Frenchmen and Belgians were obliged to set off down the Old Kent Road, and Monopoly was the closest Hitler ever got to parading up Piccadilly.

  All those hours and days and weeks of tocking tokens round that board branded its addresses into the nation’s – the Empire’s – subconscious. Doctor Oliver Sacks, who set formidable new challenges for his fellow neurologists in events portrayed in the film Awakenings, and presumably did the same for opticians with his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, finds space to discuss family Monopoly marathons in an early chapter of his autobiography. ‘Extreme passions developed over Monopoly,’ he recalls, speaking for all who have played the game around the world. But its legacy affected the young Oliver more profoundly and directly, literally colouring his mind’s-eye view of streets he had yet to walk down. ‘To this day I see the Old Kent Road and Whitechapel as cheap, mauve properties, the pale blue Angel and Euston Road next to them as scarcely any better. By contrast, the West End is clothed for me in rich, costly colours: Fleet Street scarlet, Piccadilly yellow, the green of Bond Street, and the dark, Bentley-coloured blue of Park Lane and Mayfair.’ (Even more direct associations were possible on our sixties board, in which the Old Kent Road and Whitechapel were, as they remain today, a basely unequivocal poo brown.)

  How different it was on the original game’s Atlantic City streets, known to me so well from those board-on-board school-holiday epics. Even though I’d lived all my life in London – albeit a suburban London way out west of the West End – I was still infinitely more intrigued by the lingering mysteries hinted at on our own board than the tedious roll call tolled out during a lap of Atlantic City. Indiana Avenue, Illinois Avenue, Kentucky Avenue, Tennessee Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue . . . if you closed your eyes you could almost see a grid of identical streets knocked up by the mayor’s construction cronies in a week and named by his alcoholic wife in an afternoon. And Mayfair was Boardwalk, which as far as I’m aware is a type of plank-paved shoreline promenade that people drop chips on and tramps sleep under.

  But how many centuries of deranged linguistic alchemy were distilled into Pall Mall and Piccadilly? Who was the angel of Islington? What white hall and which white chapel? ‘Ah – your famous Pentonville Road,’ exclaims the Singaporean tourist; and if his cabbie stifles a derisive snigger then, he’ll be laughing on the other side of his face an hour later while desperately scanning the A–Z for any trace of Vine Street. Because, as I was beginning to realise and as many of my associates had suggested, however stoutly we might defend it as an untouchable icon, that board made some very unlikely legends. We’ve all packed up penniless in Park Lane, bailed out bankrupt in Bow Street and, most memorably, met our makers in Mayfair. And when we did so, who didn’t slowly emerge from the clamorous aftermath of defeat and take a moment to ponder the mysteries of those malls and squares and fairs, to reflect on the rags-to-riches progress around a board which found a home for all human life; and having done so, looked anew at the triumphant landlord and thought: this top hat is still going in your ear, mate.

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner’

  Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, that I love London so,

  Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, that I think of her, wherever I go,

  I get a funny feeling inside of me, just walking up and down,

  Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, that I love London town.

  I’M SORRY, BUT what the parted buttocks is that all about? Hubert Gregg penned the capital’s best-known anthem less than ten years after the launch of the London Monopoly board, but its lyrics hardly offer much in the way of insight. As an aid to establishing what it is about London we’re supposed to like, Hubert’s maddeningly circular argument proves stubbornly unhelpful. I’m reminded of the scene in Oliver! where Bill Sikes roars his response to Nancy’s whimpered inquiry as to the extent of his affections: ‘I lives with you, don’t I?’ Then twenty minutes later he beats her to death. And what about this funny feeling? Contemporary cynics might mutter about atmospheric pollution; at Hubert’s time of writing it could just as easily have been shrapnel.

  Where were the majestic landmarks? Whither the Beach Boyish paeans to the irresistibility of London’s womanhood? Couldn’t Hube have fleshed things out with a chorus extolling its parks or pigeons or river? The most famous song about what at the time was certainly the world’s most renowned city, and there’s no so good they named it twice, the scandal and the vice, no Rio by the sea-oh, no I like Paris in the springtime. Men of Harlech is a better song, and precisely twelve people live in Harlech.

  In fairness, Hubert’s failure to pin down London’s elusive charms is preferable at least to the dire lamentations of urban decay that have dominated the capital’s musical anthology since someone with an ear for a tune noticed the bridge kept falling down. The ‘Streets of London’ described by Ralph McTell are unsteadily trodden by shambling, filthy loons, and the Clash’s ‘London’s Burning’ cruelly raised false hopes for the fate of my school’s physics blocks with its confident assertion that even quite considerable structures might literally burst into flames by simple virtue of their capacity to generate tedium. Of course, you’d hardly imagine Bucks Fizz to have majored on dead cats and tramp’s vomit in their 1983 hit ‘London Town’ – although for all I know they did exactly that: I couldn’t bring myself to listen to it then and I’m certainly not about to now.

  It’s not easy to find a Londoner ready to stand up for their home town: when the most recent Lonely Planet guide lambasted a city of filth, traffic and ‘yobbos’, the newspaper reporters despatched into the capital’s streets to procure some outraged vox-pop ripostes came back with their tapes full of mumb
led assent. Demand an explanation as to what a Londoner likes about his home town and the floundering consequences are hilarious to behold. Minor celebrities witter unconvincingly to the Evening Standard about restaurants and architecture. A City gent stopped in the street by Newsroom SouthEast talks it up stalwartly as a global transport hub. Mayor Ken Livingstone’s departmental website proudly asserts that ‘London is special because three people a week try to kill themselves by jumping under a Tube train’. Overall, I think I’m happiest to align myself with an eight-year-old’s paean exhibited on a corridor wall at my children’s school: ‘It hardly ever gets flooded and it’s never too hot.’

  I’m not sure how this reluctance to praise London came about. Perhaps it’s to do with embarrassment at the sheer dominance of the metropolis over its provincial brethren: London was once eleven times larger than its nearest rival, Liverpool, and today there are more Londoners aged over seventy-five than residents of Manchester. So what did I like about London? Though always aware of a slight swelling in the chest area when informing Continental acquaintances of my lifelong residence in what after all remains one of the world’s most famous cities, I still couldn’t understand why so many of their footballers came here in apparent preference to Rome or Barcelona.

  Only when you break the city down into manageable postcode-sized pieces does London begin to come into focus. The principal sporting teams of almost every other important capital proudly incorporate the city’s name in their own – the New York Mets, Paris St Germain, Real Madrid – but London’s footballing giants flaunt their parochial origins. Tell a north Londoner that west is best – as I’ve often done – and they’ll suddenly remember they’ve got a tongue in their head, as well as a sock full of snooker balls in their hand. The reluctance of cab drivers to venture south of the river is a London cliché. And it’s certainly not difficult to think of warm lyrical tributes to constituent parts of the unwieldy whole – ‘A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’, and of course Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Ealing’.

  This at least raised some hope for my hatching scheme: London did begin to make sense if you cut its big picture up into small snaphots, and although I might have no idea how to do this, I knew a man who had. An old man with a top hat and a moustache, bursting through a capital O near you today. From the Old Kent Road to Mayfair, the Monopoly board distilled London into twenty-two cameo performances; if I went and watched them all perhaps I’d make sense of an otherwise overwhelming production. What did those twenty-two snapshots reveal about London? And as you stuck them all together would you watch a profound truth about this enigmatic city gradually take shape before your eyes, or just end up with a really shit collage?

  If I’d known then what I subsequently discovered – that no fewer than seven Monopoly streets, starting in clockwise order from Pall Mall and spanning every set on the way to Park Lane, had been described as either London’s finest thoroughfare, or Europe’s, or the world’s – I’d have realised that even culling Greater London’s 45,687 streets into twenty-two hardly unmuddied the waters. But at the time it seemed a reasonably straightforward method of answering questions that were beginning to acquire a strange urgency: who was actually responsible for choosing these twenty-two streets back in the thirties, and what did their choices reveal about London then and now?

  I began telling people that I was going round the Monopoly board, though because even when I got my children to whisper ‘but, like, in real life’ afterwards this didn’t sound particularly epic – sponsored Boy Scouts do it in an afternoon – I soon adopted a rather more grandiose mission statement. I was going to tell the story of London, or at least its last few chapters, through the Monopoly board’s twenty-two streets. That did the job for me, but if there was one thing I should have learned it’s that when it comes to Monopoly everyone feels entitled to the last word.

  ‘Not bothering with the stations, then?’ snided a neighbour, and I tutted and said, yes, all right, and the stations.

  ‘What about Jail?’ asked Birna, my wife, and with my blood up I fired back a reckless retort – fine, and I’ll do the utilities and Free Parking and all.

  That should have been that, but it wasn’t quite. ‘But Daddy,’ began Kristjan, in a voice painstakingly purged of smarm, ‘who are you going to play against?’

  It wasn’t quite so snappy now. ‘I’m going to tell the story of London by visiting the twenty-six streets and stations on the Monopoly board, along with appropriate but as yet undecided activities on every other square except the Chances and Community Chests, and in order to . . .’

  ‘Well, and Super Tax and Income Tax.’

  ‘. . . and in order to . . .’

  ‘And GO, obviously.’

  ‘. . . and in order to achieve this I will be playing myself in a cashless, one-player facsimile of a game, equipping myself with a board and concomitant accessories and throwing the dice to dictate my progress between the colour groups, which for the sake of simplicity I shall treat as a single entities rather than three . . .’

  ‘Or two.’

  ‘. . . or two individual properties.’

  And when they realised I’d finished everyone would dutifully raise their eyebrows and nod slowly, and then someone would say, ‘So you’re counting Go To Jail as part of Jail, then.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Advance to Go

  FILTH-FACED STEVEDORES, bowler hats streaming out of Tube subways, milkmen pushing handcarts, dicky-bowed Bertie Woosters and plump old women waddling uncertainly through gaps between trams: as revealed by my trawl through the capital’s photographic libraries, few cities have ever more richly earned the flogged horse-corpse appellation ‘City of Contrasts’ as London in Monopoly’s year zero.

  In 1936 London stood on the threshold of the consumerist age, yet had somehow got its pelvis wedged in the Victorian porch out front. So although there were Maltesers and the speaking clock, there were also chimney sweeps and lamplighters cycling through the streets. Britain’s millionth telephone was cast in gold and presented to the City of London’s elders at Mansion House, and in October the world’s first proper televisions went on sale in the West End; but then again sheep grazed in Green Park and St Paul’s – as it would be until the sixties – was still the city’s tallest building.

  Most of these contrasts suggest a city split between the very rich and the very poor, but in 1936 Britain was beginning to squeeze its population in from the extremes: a transition, in effect, from a Cluedo nation split between Colonel Mustard and his servants to a populist Monopoly, where with a bit of luck and judgement an Austin Seven and a Metroland semi was within everyone’s grasp. A bit more of both and you could bag a place in Mayfair. The game was emblematic of a new economic and social mobility.

  Exuding the grateful humility of a lottery-winning pensioner, I’ve always thought Uncle Pennybags made an inappropriate ambassador for such a cut-throat game. Far better that slicked-back, winking conman phased out by Waddington in the early sixties: the original Loadsamoney, waving his wardrobe-sized wad with a horribly cocky leer that told you it had not been acquired through honest toil. If he represented London, it was a very different London from the E.M. Forster depictions. Greed was good; if you’ve got it, flaunt it. In London, you could out-Yank the Yanks.

  This was what drove people to the capital. London was the planet’s financial centre, and handled almost 40 per cent of Britain’s trade with its vast and sprawling Empire. Almost 1,700,000 Londoners commuted to jobs in offices, shops or hotels in the City and West End, and almost as many worked on the shopfloor: 35,000 alone at Ford’s new Dagenham plant out at the East End, and more still along the light industrial parades lining the dual carriageways as they wound out towards the new suburbs. Of the 644 factories opened in Britain in the five years after 1932, 532 were in Greater London.

  A 1937 eulogy of the capital, subtitled Heart of the Empire and Wonder of the World, concluded, ‘It can truthfully be said that nowher
e else in the world today is there so large a community enjoying so high an average level of comfort as London, nor has there been at any time in history.’ Well, if you put it like that, said the miner’s daughter in Jarrow, and ran down to the station for a single to King’s Cross.

  This, in truth, had been going on for rather a long time. In the sixteenth century, the city had been a European backwater and a global irrelevance. By 1800 it had grown into the continent’s largest city, and by 1900, when only six European cities needed seven figures to total their populations, London was more than a million ahead of its nearest rival, Paris. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, four hundred newcomers were settling in London every day. By the twenties it was the largest city the world had ever known, and driven by an astonishing expansion into the countryside around still it grew: the number of commuters using Rayners Lane station, out near the Piccadilly line’s western extremity, rose from 20,000 in 1931 to a monstrous four million just six years later. In 1938 the city’s population would break through nine million, a total that has since been falling consistently and is likely to remain as the high-water mark.

  It was all terribly exciting. Most of the information I was acquiring shouldn’t be soberly acquired in clock-ticking libraries, I felt, but blared out of Tannoys by an over-animated newsreel commentator. I couldn’t wait to get going. But there was only one place to start my tour of London, and that, of course, was Leeds.