Do Not Pass Go Page 8
It was time to shake again. This time half hoping a security operative would rush out and ask me what the flaming hell I was playing at, though still mildly concerned that in the current Black Special hysteria he might first drop me with a leg shot, I angled a hand behind my head and grovelled laboriously about in the backpack like a drunk archer trying to find the last arrow in his quiver. At length I withdrew the board, squatted down and placed it squarely over a paving stone.
Along with an ability to calculate and deliver change for a five hundred in less time than it takes to shout ‘RENT!’, another of Monopoly’s conferred mathematical legacies is a solid grounding in the laws of probability. Even as I lined my motor up between the inverted £140s on Whitehall I knew that the most commonly rolled two-dice total would take me to Free Parking, but as the four and the three showed up I also knew that I still had no idea what to do when I landed there.
CHAPTER 5
Free Parking
DISTURBED NO DOUBT by its infuriating arbitrariness, the previous owner of one of my old boards had forcefully amended the P in Free Parking into a B. And why not? Why not give the Scottie a share of the limelight? Why this utterly isolated assumption that we’re all driving round the board, when in fact we’re just as likely to be booting it down Bond Street or ironing up to The Angel? And why didn’t anything happen when you landed on Free Parking? The only completely impotent square on the board, it was no surprise that the people should eventually force Free Parking to work for its living.
The most popular method, certainly within the Moore household, was to employ the central-board void as a temporary vault for the accumulation of income or super tax, to be scooped by whoever next landed on Free Parking. Later this lottery windfall was extended to include all fines deriving from Chance and Community Chest cards; a regular consequence was the unstoppable growth of a huge multicoloured cash mountain that dwarfed the bank’s reserves and whose eventual destiny played havoc with Monopoly’s finely tuned game mechanics.
For the landlord of Mayfair and Park Lane a Tory-style fat-cat rebate from Free Parking represented inevitable and crushing victory over his miserably cowed tenants; on the other side of the same coin, a sudden and dramatic socialist income-redistribution in his favour could send the humble Old Kent Roader off on a nouveau-riche spending spree more reckless than any sixties pools winner. He might blow it all pebble dashing Bond Street, or raucously offer the Chance-card birthday boy two grand to stand up and do the Lambeth Walk with his old mum, God bless her.
The answer to the Free Parking riddle is that Charles Darrow was an American, and so was Henry Ford. The motor vehicle was a potent aspirational symbol, one appropriate for any would-be property tycoon, but it was also such a presence in American life that cities were already being designed around cars. As early as 1921 one in fourteen Americans were car owners; the comparable British ratio was one in 168.
That said, Londoners didn’t need the internal combustion engine to knock up a decent gridlock. That over-quoted statistic unfavourably comparing today’s transcapital traffic speeds with those of mid-Victorian London takes no account of the fact that mid-Victorian London was a stinking logjam of handcarts and hansoms. Contemporary surveys showed that some of the busier junctions had to deal with a horse-drawn vehicle arriving every three seconds; travellers in the 1850s complained that it took less time to get up to London from Brighton than to cross the capital’s central district once you got there. No wonder the Underground proved such a hit – the first line, though consisting of only seven uncomfortably smoke-filled stations, was soon carrying forty million passengers a year.
Initialy playthings for the very wealthy (why else was the RAC based in Pall Mall?), motor cars only began to make a significant contribution to London’s Traffic Hell in the late twenties, when mass production dropped the prices to Everyman level – by 1936, you could pick up a second-hand Austin Seven for a fiver. An obsession with vehicle ownership was one of the first urban American trends to cross the Atlantic; Monopoly, of course, followed soon after. Motorists started to grumble that jams ‘often lasted twenty minutes, and sometimes half an hour’, and though this complaint might tempt the modern London motorist to drum two fingers on his lower lip and so emit a derisive warbling hum, more sympathy is due to the 40,000 motorists enmeshed for six hours in Britain’s first epic gridlock at the 1928 Derby.
London was growing outwards, and though the public transport network did its best to follow it into the countryside most new homes were nowhere near a useful station. For the hundreds of thousands who lived in ribbon developments along huge new arterial roads devoid of local shops or facilities, there was no choice but to drive everywhere. This wasn’t a particular problem out in the distant suburbs, but it certainly was when they pootled into town: by 1931, 61,000 cars were inching around Hyde Park Corner every day. Just as American cities were designed expressly for cars, so the medieval alleys of London emphatically were not. Yet so effectively vocal was the motor-vehicle lobby (as early as 1920 The Times was boldly declaring that ‘the future of British industries lies on the roads’) that plans were almost immediately drawn up to completely reshape central London for their benefit.
It is in the writings of Harold Clunn, a man whose fanatical devotion to motorised transport marks him out as the Mr Toad of 1930s civic planning, that we find the most startling excesses. Clunn’s 1934 book, The Face of London, kicks off with a complaint that ‘London’s life blood is compelled to run through veins and arteries that have not expanded since infancy’, and thenceforth proposes drastic bypass surgery on almost every such vessel. With the ultimate aim of transforming the entire Monopoly zone into an American-style grid of multi-lane highways, Clunn casually proposes demolishing Oxford Street and starting again, knocking a new four-laner smack through the middle of Soho and cutting off huge swathes of central London’s dwindling parkland to widen every surrounding street into a dual carriageway. With a completely straight face – or, who knows, a twitching and wet-lipped pornographer’s leer – he even advocates demolishing buildings at the end of every London cul-de-sac in order to accommodate mechanical turntables, thereby saving motorists ‘the trouble of making the right-about turn’. And that’s all by page forty, long before he really hits his stride. ‘Now that HM Office of Works has sanctioned mixed bathing on the Serpentine,’ he later intones in one of the last century’s more vexing parallels, ‘perhaps we may still hope that some day they will permit the creation of the Piccadilly boulevard.’
Combined with an unabashed anti-Semitism that has him loudly decrying ‘British homes are being appropriated and their businesses snowed under by the Jews’ it is easy to dismiss Clunn as a ludicrous fascist – easy and actually quite fun – but the uncomfortable truth is that in the mid-thirties he was by no means a lone voice in the wilderness on either score. ‘We want a through road from the Bank to Marble Arch capable of taking four lanes of traffic for the entire distance,’ declares Clunn, and whoever this sinister ‘we’ might have been, plans to drive what amounted to a motorway straight through London’s historic heart were well in hand when war broke out. In 1934 he says, ‘The horse which sets the pace for all traffic in our narrow streets is a scandal which ought not to be tolerated’; two years later, horses are banned from the central area (thousands were sent to the knacker’s yard and one grief-stricken driver topped himself). And in 1935 the Daily Mail – Britain’s most widely read paper – came out to support Oswald Mosley; the next year Mosley’s Blackshirts were marching through the East End.
Both strains of totalitarian viciousness seemed to converge in 1952, when the trams that had so infuriated Clunn as he queued behind them up at the Elephant & Castle were finally banished from the streets of London after fifty years’ service and many billion passenger journeys: in 1943 alone, 2,500 trams carried seven hundred million travellers. Londoners – particularly the silent carless majority – loved their trams, and hundreds of thousands turned out on 6 July to cheer E
/3-1904 along her valedictory run from Westminster to Woolwich. Crowds placed pennies in the track before her to have them bent as souvenirs, chalked poignant farewells on her noble scarlet flanks and linked arms to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. ‘No King or Queen received a better reception,’ recalled a wet-eyed local boy watching her clank up the Old Kent Road for the last time. Let us hope he wasn’t there when, in preference to seeing E/3-1904 preserved for future generations in a transport museum, the authorities instead chose to have her pushed over and burnt outside her old tramshed in Charlton.
Anything that interfered with the private car’s progress across the Monopoly zone was simply wiped off the board: after horses and trams, trolleybuses disappeared in 1961. It is impossible to overstress this fixation with the free movement of motor traffic, one that taken to monstrous extremes would, eventually and inevitably, scoop the soul out of large swathes around the cheap end of the Monopoly board.
But even this has to be seen as a let-off: if Clunn and his ilk had been given full and free rein half the Monopoly streets would have disappeared for ever and my journeys along the remainder restricted to cowering central-reservation cameos. Thanks only to the war and ‘the English method of doing things by halves’ bemoaned by Clunn was the full horror prevented. I’d often have cause to thank the English for this method, to the point where the consequently half-baked shambles of much of London once again shone out as its defining and most endearing quality.
I suppose it isn’t surprising that the Harold Clunns of this world would never consider what to do with deliberately stationary vehicles in their obsession with speed and movement. Cars were better than trams and horses because they could, at least in theory, go faster; driving about was somehow an end in itself. No one seems to have spent too much time considering the possibility that, having arrived at B, motorists might actually want to stop for any reason before heading back to A or on to C.
In fact, London’s parking problems pre-date the motor age. Just off Marylebone High Street there’s a garage which had earlier been a stable, and which until thirty years ago was dominated by an enormous hydraulic lift that facilitated multi-storey horse parking. When cars arrived, the issue became rather more pressing and in 1901, only three years after a handful of vehicles lined up outside the Henley Regatta to form Britain’s first car park, the City & Suburban Electric Carriage Co. built a seven-floor multi-story just behind Piccadilly. London’s age of free parking ended almost before it had begun, so inaugurating a hundred-year quest for that secret place round the back of D.H. Evans where the wardens ran out of yellow paint.
The newly widened Park Lane was laid over what in 1963 was the world’s largest underground car park, but even this proved a token gesture. A single parking space near The Angel went under the hammer in 2001 for £37,000. Alan Clark, maverick MP and patrician petrolhead, mothballed a fleet of slightly knackered Bentleys and Rollers under the House of Commons: ‘The cheapest parking in central London,’ he said, ignoring all official demands to move them.
These days, of course, it’s not so much about finding free parking as finding any parking. Every Londoner knows what it is to join a dispirited crocodile of motorists crawling around the back streets looking for kerbside gaps and craning their necks to read the small print on those infuriatingly evasive restriction plates. So intense is the competition and so stacked the odds that it was an uncanny ability to find a parking space in London that first led David Icke, former television presenter and Coventry City goalkeeper, to suspect he might be in some way spiritually favoured.
Westminster Council, which in Monopoly terms in nicely set up with every property on the board in its possession except the five crappiest ones and Fleet Street, has in recent years established an enviable reputation – enviable, that is, amongst truly evil men and cyclists – as the undisputed champion of parking levies. In 2000, it issued 897,467 tickets, an increase of 13 per cent on the previous year’s total and almost three times more than any other London council managed. The fine is something like £9,000, though if you pay four hours before the ticket was issued you can get this reduced on appeal to £7,000. And at 20p for three minutes, Westminster’s meters are more expensive than Hamburg’s peepshows. You don’t even get any free tissue, though at those tear-inducing rates you could probably find a use for some. If you had a counter job at a West End McDonald’s and drove to work – an unlikely scenario in any number of ways, I know – at the end of an eight-hour shift with your motor on a meter you’d be left with precisely 80p in your salt-speckled, sauce-smeared palm.
Most of my previous dealings with Westminster Council’s parking department have involved sending them very long letters and, after an interval of many months, receiving very short replies. As a moth-wallet whose unappealing tendency to bear grudges against officialdom stands comparison with America’s militia movement, I should by rights have built up an impressive armoury of payment-avoidance tactics; the regular appearance of words such as ‘forthwith’ and ‘proceedings’ in these short replies pays eloquent testament to the opposite.
Talking to an unusually forthcoming old chap in the council’s ticket-appeal office I began to understand why. Accepting that bona fide Free Parking was a hilarious improbability, in fact a traveller’s non sequitur to rank alongside Great North Eastern Railways or Happy Eater, I’d phoned him to procure a next-best compromise – if you don’t pay to park, you get a ticket; but if you don’t have to pay the ticket then you haven’t paid to park. Ergo, free parking.
‘The general rules when you write an appeal,’ he confided, ‘are to know the terminology and not to lose your rag.’ Though my cocksure mastery of the phrase ‘penalty charge notice’ ticked the first box, a tendency to invoke unflattering comparison with administrative procedures in the Third Reich left the pen hovering over the second. ‘More particularly, most people say the meter didn’t work or was somehow running fast – they’re wasting their time down that road.’
While he was inevitably reluctant to give me precise directions to more productive roads, reading between the yellow lines it seemed that unless you could prove your vehicle was in the service of a visiting military force, the best option was to say it had broken down. ‘Though you’d ideally need photographic evidence that you’d displayed a note to that effect, as you would to back up any allegation of missing or faded lines or a misleading or ambiguous sign.’ Photographic evidence? ‘Keep a disposable camera in the glovebox. I do.’
That was too mad, even for me. ‘Listen,’ I said, in a more expansive, confessional tone, ‘I’m not going to do that. I just want to park in your borough without paying.’
‘Right.’ There was a pause. ‘We’ve got some quite cheap parking up Harrow Road,’ came the eventual reply, quickly followed by the caveat that ‘quite cheap’ in this context actually equated to the approximate hourly cost of playing pinball if you were really bad at it and had a broken wrist. Nothing actually free, then. ‘Not currently, not at the moment,’ he replied teasingly, somehow implying that the outcome of an imminent council debate on the abolition of all parking controls and charges was too close to call. ‘At least not unless you’ve, er . . .’ and here he issued a little snort of private amusement, ‘. . . you’ve got an electric vehicle. Then you can park on double yellows or wherever you want.’
An agreeable young man called Anthony duly delivered my electric vehicle six evenings later. Fashioned from enough bright blue plastic to have a whole borough of schoolchildren wondering where their lunchboxes had gone, this cheeky-faced, tiny-wheeled conveyance irresistibly recalled the playground in many other ways. To send it shooting off down the road the casual observer wouldn’t try to plug the car into the mains but press down the roof and roll it backwards before letting go. It was so short that Anthony was able to park it face on to the kerb in front of my house without causing obstruction, and so silent that as he did so I could hear the nine-year-old from three doors down teasing, ‘Look out, here comes Noddy.’ Circumn
avigating it in half a dozen strides I noted the vehicle identified itself as the TH!NK city, a name certain to dominate the index of my forth-coming treatise, Brand-Name Typography – A Wanker’s Guide.
But all this was perfect, not just because of the free parking angle, but because in every important respect the TH!NKcity was both an idealised embodiment of twenty-first century London and the vehicular antithesis of thirties London. What Londoners were told to aspire to now was a TH!NKcity; in the thirties it had been an open-topped Bentley with the cubic capacity of a meat fridge. And it’s because they had all that noisy fun racing each other to Croydon Aerodrome and back that we now have to face a future of humming slowly about in plastic toys (batteries included).
In those days it was all about speed and glamour, and getting there quickly, loudly and in a huge cloud of smoke; for the TH!NKcity to have been any more diametrically opposed to these principles, it would have had to have been made out of marzipan. The TH!NKcity was made by metal-spectacled technocrats in Oslo, not leather-aproned apprentices in Walsall. Its top speed was 54mph. When Anthony applied the horn it made a sound like someone down the road receiving a text message.
‘I can’t believe you’re allowed to park this on double yellows,’ I said to Anthony as we squeezed in together for a demonstration drive round the block. Anthony worked for the Energy Saving Trust, a charitable foundation whose eagerness to promote alternatively fuelled zero-emission urban vehicles extends to letting idiots like me borrow one of their cars for a day in order to drive about town parking like Starsky & Hutch.
‘That’s because you’re not,’ he said, blankly, setting us off down the road with a rising milkfloat hum.
My father, with whom I share both a keen interest in motoring novelty and a lifelong determination to disprove that maxim about free lunches, had arranged to come up specially and was crestfallen at this news when he arrived the next morning. ‘It’s not so bad,’ I said, grappling with the bonnet-mounted charger socket into which Anthony had inserted my extension lead the night before. ‘We can still park free in pay and display bays and meters. For the maximum time specified on the restriction plate.’