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 It's time to stop complaining about London and celebrate its achievements
says High Life Editor Mark Jones
| | |  Should we stop condemning London?Do you agree? Join the discussion by calling 0870 010 0444, lines open at 1.30pm. | |
LISTEN - Hear Mark Jones discuss 'rural correctness'
They've got a Selfridges in Manchester. And a Harvey Nichols in Leeds. London had better look to its laurels. Manchester's Commonwealth Games was a triumph. Wembley Stadium is a disaster. Newcastle has got a new art gallery. London should watch out. Let's hold the Olympic Games in Birmingham: the transport connections are better. You can get roasted polenta in Cheshire and organic couscous in Devon. London's had its day. Arrogant, isolated, out of touch with normal England. Ask any countryside marcher.
2002 was the year when a new kind of British barminess took hold. I call it Regional Correctness: the habit - the policy - of praising rural and provincial England to the skies - and talking London into the dirt.
The MPs, the councilors, the phone-in hosts, the rural lobbyists and the provincial trendies, they've all gone bonkers on RC. If Harrods opens a shop in Derby we might as well turn off the lights in the West End and leave. You don't need us anymore.
Oh yes you do! It's time for London and Londoners to fight back!
What England needs is more good ideas from London. I met a former Soho commercials director in Totnes who had a superb organic café and deli. London idea, local ingredients. The most successful new country house hotel opened in recent year is Babington House in Somerset. It was started by a Soho member's club.
Of course, this isn't seen as Londoners taking their expertise to the rest of the land and doing things which benefit everyone. It's seen as urban imperialism. If escaping Londoners rescue dying villages with the profits from their terraced houses in Putney, it's not regeneration but invasion.
I've been a Londoner for 20 years. It took an effort to get here. London was a kind of bogey-place when I was growing up in the Midlands: a place which took impressionable young people and turned them into arrogant automatons with bad manners, even by automaton standards.
Everyone called London 'The Smoke' where I come from. They still do. Like American tourists who come looking for pea-soupers, they cling to the picture-book vision - part-Blake, part-Bunyan, of a city sunken under a pall of misery.
London wasn't smoky when I got here. Nor was it nasty, grasping and blood-drainingly expensive. It's not the most handsome city in the world, but it has a genius for locality. London is a network of boroughs, villages and in-between bits, all with separate loyalties and characters. I've been trying to get to know London for two decades and I'm still trying. It's a challenging, fine city, up there with the best of them.
But the English aren't proud of it: not the way the French are proud of Paris and the Australians are proud of Sydney. We think London is too big for its boots. And so if a London department store opens in a provincial city, or a London-style art gallery conversion springs up somewhere, we don't thank London for having a good idea: we jeer at it for losing its monopoly. Quite ridiculous!
My Countryside Alliance friends all loathe Babington House and everything it stands for.
They will defend their right to eat hormone-inflated meat and soggy vegetables till the cows go mad. But there is one thing that puzzles me.
How come the staunchest defenders of the traditions of rural England all seem to have houses in…er…London?!
Do you agree?
Join the discussion by calling 0870 010 0444
lines open at 1.30pm.
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