They may be hopefully a temporary situation if it's not temporary,
we head for this Singapore on Thames model, where the majority of people are in effect,
surfing through a small group to level off that small group,
the best of 10 percent will be very divided, but their food will be cooked by other people.
That coffee you cooked, some will come and clean their house. They will use different schools to educate their children.
Then we use a privatised health service and we will divide into this society of 90 percent.
You serve the other 10 percent. This is the second episode of the Disobedient Buildings Podcast, an AHRC funded project at University of Oxford.
Our focus is on the everyday lives of people living in ageing blocks of flats in three European countries the UK, Romania and Norway.
My name is Inge Daniels, and today I take it to London, where I will speak with Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography at University of Oxford.
We will be talking about social and economic inequality, welfare and health in the UK and beyond.
I mainly use statistics about the population.
I use numbers that are released by the government to try to work out what is happening, in which direction things are going.
Is it getting worse or better? To what extent is the government lying about it?
Because one interesting thing if you do this for many, many years,
is that governments produce a small press release with data which often has nothing.
But it was evidence the data until the last week.
They released the annual poverty report, and the minister said things are getting better, and the report actually said things are getting worse.
So my kind of job is to look at the data and see what I think is really happening.
And why is a different story sometimes being told what is really happening?
You've mainly focussed on the UK doing that kind of work or have you done it globally as well, mainly on the UK?
I've done some global mapping and some global work, and the most recent project that's been on Finland because Finland is,
if you like the opposite country to the UK and Europe, it's the one where the statistics show that things are going really well.
But the government says, Oh, it's not good enough is bad, but then things go really badly and the government says it's good for our project.
It's interesting because we are comparing these three European countries, so the UK, Romania and Norway.
We picked Finland very, very soon as Norway, but interesting over a bit poorer, no oil money.
And interestingly, it does slightly better than Norway in various ways, especially in education where the Norwegians still divide there children.
The Finns spend more money on the bottom quarter of children than Norwegians.
Norway is so vast that everything works out well in Norway. But but Finland shows how you can do things very well without having to have oil.
In the 1970s, the UK was most similar to Sweden to Scandinavian countries managed to stay more equal.
If you like the rest of Europe, that became more unequal.
I looked at your book, "The 32 Stops" where you kind of travel on all through all the stops on the Central Line,
on the London tube and then read very interesting different issues that the city faces,
I think today related to, they wanted to ask you, what would you say are like, unique or unusual,
interesting things about London that you think our listeners might want to know?
London is very hot. The thing the most important thing to me about London is that it was the largest city on the planet just over 100 years ago,
the centre of the largest empire, the most ever done. It's one of Europe's three megacities.
The other two are Moscow and Istanbul.
People often don't realise that there were European cities really are pretty tiny Paris, Madrid, Berlin in between.
And like Moscow and Istanbul, it's it dominates the country it's in.
So much of it is dominated by Moscow. Turkey is dominated by Istanbul and the UK is dominated by London.
And of course, they're all centres of former empires, the Ottoman Empire, USSR and the British Empire.
Then for a mega city, it's very low rise, you know, not that many tower blocks and so on.
The very know, very dense. It doesn't have very many monuments.
So if you compare it, say to Rome, you know it.
London doesn't have a Colosseum, and the British kind of spent the money they looted from the rest of the world quietly spread out around London,
one of the great big monuments. I say that's that's something you notice while reading your book that the 32 stops I came across the one sentence,
which is quite unrelated to the kind of field work I've been doing in London.
So one of the sites is in Soho or W1, and the other side is in EC one and two, which is the city of London and bordering the bottom of Islington.
So in your book,
you say something that was quite interesting and they quote Inner London has nothing like the urban population of a normal European city.
Most people who work in inner London do not live in London. Inner London used to have an incredibly high population.
Very, very dense 1880 1890 rookeries was the name given to the kind of tenement buildings, and it was shabby and it was slum.
So huge amounts of it was demolished and rebuilt, and the population of inner London fell from 1889,
about 1911 continuously fruit and 1980s massive falls as that kind of population went down and the jobs also went down.
The people did financial jobs and similar work to that and say publishing and other things rose in the middle of the city.
But the people who did those jobs tended to come on the commuter lines from outside to get in.
And so you create this city over time where a million people come in every morning, normally often looking very grumpy, packed on trains,
thinking that they very badly done by the middle class who are on the trains, the underground working class, the buses.
And it's just not like a normal, informal European city where you, you know, you live on the second, third,
fourth, fifth, maybe sixth floor and the first floor shops and cafes and children go to school and so on.
It's so different. In a way, he sort of quite inhuman.
And this was accelerated in 1988 by the Thatcher government, who quite like the inhuman way of living.
The idea that you you would live amongst people like you, better off people in the suburbs or even further out of London,
and you would come in and work in your office and be paid lots of money and then go back again.
Margaret Thatcher famously said if she ever saw a man on the bus, she thought he was a failure.
And then the people who clean your office, they could live elsewhere in London sometimes never win.
But you didn't have to mix with them. So the 80s and the way the 90s and even the Tony Blair years was a kind of construction of a polarised,
separated London where different people lived in their different parts and didn't mix in the Victorian era.
You had the segregation within, say, a house, so you can have servants on the top floor and servants in the basement.
And then you were in the middle. The the modern day London has a similar kind of segregation, but the servants don't live in that.
We don't call them servants, but particularly now what's going to be seen?
What happens with COVID and all these buildings here are standing empty?
So that's going to be interesting. What we do. It will attract more people who actually live here, all kinds of backgrounds,
while the people who own the buildings are absolutely desperate to get their profit back and they are very close to the British government,
to me, some almost the same people.
So in heads Boris Johnson, I think saying this week how how will it's time for the holiday to be over and people need to get back to the offices?
People often don't have a lot of choice.
Every year we produce, I don't know, 600 700000 school leavers and university leavers who are absolutely desperate for work and well.
And of course, their risk from COVID is tiny.
To be honest, a, 18 21 year old, so I can see a way in which you will get people back in these offices.
It can start with the young and then there'll be a point in this.
You'll see me of enough or seen as valuable enough. If you're not willing to come back in, you'll be sacked.
On the other hand, though, London has.
Probably lost a lot of people, maybe half a million. He lost many because of the pandemic who've left the UK and gone mostly to mainland Europe.
But we're not sure because we don't care that much. We didn't actually count it that much.
And one thing I thing is very odd I was talking to a friend early about this.
After Brexit, after the Brexit majority and after COVID, we kind of think there won't be any more disasters.
No reason was very particular given how London is.
There's no reason why I say that the banking firm, which has gone bust,
which is backing the steel mills, could just be the start of many economic disaster to come.
We don't know what's going to happen next.
So the majority of the people participating in the study live in these blocks built during the 1960s and 70s.
They include both social tenants and private renters and owners.
We have both of those. So some of the materials I sent you, for example, the two photos.
When you look at these photos, could you, for me, just describe the buildings and your first impressions?
You are looking at them? They, I think they were.
These were former social housing, but it's not a even in the middle of London, you have the Barbican,
so you have, you know, incredibly expensive tower blocks that look, I think, very ugly.
But because they're very expensive, people think that they are great.
And the other thing it's only from going to other countries, I'll never forget, I think it's being in Prague.
I'm looking at a whole series of what what looked like to me, very functional social housing tower blocks.
When these tower blocks are first built in the sixties and seventies, they were seen as incredible.
You got views, you were elevated above and also the people who were first allocated in totally get to be allowed in.
You had to be at the sort of top end of the working class. You have to be well-behaved.
Everything has be going well for you. And there were lots of young families. So at first this was seen as good.
But then you have some say in London was still depopulating.
So you end up with some empty voids and then then once you allow, once you allow the privatisation of them, it becomes much harder.
The relationship between leaseholders inside and who owns the freehold and his mates links and all of it becomes, I think, very tricky.
It's interesting, you say, because both blocks are still the majority social housing social tenants say,
but also what you said about views and things like that. Although that was initially a selling point,
it's still something all the people we have worked with mentioned that that's very unusual to have these vistas,
as you said, is quite low rise London amongst them living in these places.
And I was quite surprised to find majority of people are very happy living in them.
The tensions are often with leaseholders, the block in EC one, actually.
This is run by Islington Council.
It's very bizarre. But only their fire escape was clad that with the same cladding as Grenfell, but only the fire escape and the only outcome.
So the first thing they did, they removed that right away.
The other block didn't have the dangerous cladding, but so it's obviously this is a big concern.
And of course, the cladding isn't done for the block. This is a great irony about the cladding is done for other people's views.
Really, really. So the fire escape will be cladded because somebody said that fire escape looks ugly.
But the fire escape only looks likely because it's a fire escape on the building, which doesn't contain which people.
If if that block could contain which people will be talking about how lovely to fire escape walls, so there will be a feature.
I also included some of the materials we received from people living in these blocks,
and so the first thing I sent you was a postcard from Andrew, who is a leaseholder in this block in Soho.
So basically, he answered the question, which was Does anything need to be repaired or improved so I can read it out?
Yeah, I've got it here since I was in our flat, which had water through the ceiling for some months, once or twice a neighbour upstairs.
But more often it seems to extend and walk right when the wind is in the wrong direction.
The rain heavy, who knows, who knows when it will be fixed.
It may be tricky, but still in our block to construction site that surrounds us needs to go after five years.
Information about the noise to that assumption has been appalling, and then we can re decorate at last, he says.
And again, I think this is quite English doing building work around other people's homes and not seeing it as a
problem I think has got worse over time and is a part of being a more brutal country than it used to be.
I mean, other European countries, my impression is people are very much more strict about what can happen, particularly on Sundays.
But anyway, but in the UK, you have to treat people as if they're like you.
In other countries in England, because people don't like each other.
You don't treat them like you're like you. Then you just drill away.
It was really bad in the pandemic when people couldn't get the house their flats and there were people drilling and building around them.
It was awful. And then the last point about the rain coming in one British problem this property is just how expensive it is.
One of the main aims of government is to try to make house prices in London as high as they can be and government don't say this,
but whatever it looks like, council rental values will fall.
They introduce a new kind of help to buy scheme to make it possible for a few more people to buy the really high
prices because they want the prices to be really high because they see expensive housing as a sign of success.
That one problem with this is that increasingly, again, since 1986, let the people you don't fix your housing.
That's madness. You money you spend fixing it is wasted because the actual value of the property is largely just the land.
And whoever comes in and buys it can fix it and unfair.
The quality falls over time and the leaks increase and so on.
You expect if you buy property in England to receive a report from a surveyor telling you
how bad it is when you buy it and you might go to the person you buy it from and say,
you know, there are so many things that they fix and they go, We don't have to buy it. Somebody else will even further in the future.
Then eventually, it's often leads to this quick turnover destroying and building building a new one so that that
attitude to things as opposed to the care you see in a normal European city with these that in effect,
tenements may be a hundred and fifty years old.
But the idea is that they'll be there for at least another hundred and fifty years, and you're constantly seeing the tiniest thing being fixed.
You wouldn't put up with water coming through the roof, but also the soundproofing is really high because,
you know, why would you why wouldn't you want it to be soundproofed?
And the contrast with very strong feelings in the UK as well about preservation of these more historic places that are is this real tension there?
I think that's quite interesting. You only actually preserving the outer wall, though.
So you quite often see in London everything behind the outer wall is demolished,
but outer walls are kept up and then you build something deeper behind.
But also, if we look at what our builders do in London builders, electricians and plumbers, you can look at where their vans are.
And they're located in the most expensive streets in London, where in the past,
after somebody has had a kitchen for two years, you drip out and for £100000, you build a new kitchen in four.
Instead of the builders and the plumbers electricians fixing property across the capital.
They're all concentrated not on the old, but the large majority are concentrated, doing work for the rich.
Mainland Europe doesn't have that idea. You don't let that be stupid.
Why would you let that happen?
So then the second piece of material I sent was this letter, which we received from one of the residents in the other block who's called Esther.
Yes. So she's saying she's in the 19th floor block.
But a few close friends have been ill around her, not necessarily COVID, with a lot of illness in the building,
she sees those with addiction, alcohol, drugs, tobacco, which is less right about so I'm worried about family relationships and so on.
We had. Falls in life expectancy in the UK as a whole, life expectancy peaked in 2014 and then it fell to 2015, and it didn't rise again until 2019.
Five years later. And then, of course, COVID. It failed because the elderly particularly were neglected with a stent in the guts.
And so more elderly people would die early, including people dying in flats like this,
and they're not being found for weeks and it's much smaller than the elderly people dying earlier.
A slight increase in the number of people dying in middle age from multiple diseases of despair, overdoses, alcohol and so on.
Nothing like the American kind of epidemic of that.
But but worse than other parts, much worse than parts of Europe.
So when she says she goes on to say, however, a generic worry is what future awaits her children.
A society seems more and more polarised, the population more controlled.
It's the it's kind of it's rational for her, because society,
the society she's in has become more polarised and possibly could become more polarised again at some point.
What the young people do in the society which treats them like this, which says this is your future.
It's it's a very different future that young people have had in previous generations when
you could look to at least having what your parents had and when it comes to housing,
it's. Utterly shocking. You know, maybe in your 40s, if you meet the right person and you're very, very lucky,
you might be able to settle down and have a family if you if you're slightly above average income.
That there were times, probably in the 1880s, and so there are certain points in Victorian England which when you couldn't do that.
But you could go long, a long way back in time. I mean, it's interesting to see what call it again, what some of these problems have.
Become worse, of course, with particularly and just look at the Esther told me as well that but she said what was the most shocking
with Korva this that she discovered how many elderly people live there that she didn't even know lived?
That was very revealing, but she was done very optimistic and seeing the bloc itself through WhatsApp.
And this kind of means and you hear that in other places as well have come together and have been helping the elderly.
And for the first time, there was some feeling of neighbours and community in this block because I mean,
again, it has given lots of people in the block hope because actually they managed to.
What they did was not only stopping, but they managed to get isn't the council not to switch off the heating in winter,
which they are were doing because the elderly couldn't even go out to work constantly in this room?
So it's interesting. Some of these things have changed. But then perhaps that was it will return back to normal.
Yeah, because this interim council will have a budget problem, a huge budget problem,
and the government will pass that budget problem to them because the government,
the central government, want to blame local authorities who don't have the money.
If people keep accepting when they're told it's their own fault, then it will get worse.
But if people begin to realise that it's not their own fault, it doesn't happen like this in other places, then it's possible for it to get better.
I'm not completely pessimistic.
I I just think people can be easily battered by events like Brexit, which can distract them and the pandemic, which obviously is distracting.
Then if you can simply throw more and more things and distract people? That's that's my worry.
So try to cause an argument to stop people talking about really important things that matter in their lives by constantly distracting.
Thank you for listening to the Disobedient Buildings podcast edited by Anna Andersen and produced by Jake Soper.
If you want to hear more,
go to our website at WW Dot Disobedient Buildings dot com or search for a podcast where you normally find your podcasts in the next episode.
Gabriela Nicolescu takes you to Bucharest to speak with Ștefan Ghenciulescu,
editor of Zeppeline Magazine and lecturer at the University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest.
How do people in Bucharest view issues surrounding cars, traffic and pollution in their city?