BE is on his fourth flu day, at home feeling sorry for himself.
For some reason I had never seen The Long Good Friday. It turned up in my Lovefilm envelope the other day and being capable only of mooching in front of the telly I got around to watching it this weekend. I wasn’t around at the time it was made, so I can’t tell whether it reflects a fair capturing of the zeitgeist, but I found the background premise of it quite interesting.
Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) is a successful London mobster but it is his aim to think bigger. He wants London to be a bit less parochial and to embrace the new [Common Market, international finance] era by redeveloping London’s now-rotting docks and invites the New York Mafia to London to see the potential. [There's an Olympic angle too, which I didn't quite understand and according to Wikipedia London wasn't even bidding for the Olympics at the time.]
Shand’s girlfriend Victoria (Helen Mirren) lives in a St Katherine’s Dock penthouse. She’s not a kept bimbo, Shand seeks and accepts her advice and she is a trusted lieutenant in her own right.
It’s all very glamorous, nice cars and lots of money changing hands. Shand is a self-confessed Landana and he wants his city to compete with the best in the world. It’s aspirational, it’s forward-looking.
Of course eventually the Docks were redeveloped, under the watchful eye of Michael Heseltine. It’s fun to see the Docks (and London generally) as they were in 1979/80. Eventually London even hosted the Olympics (remember that?!).
I read a fascinating book, written in the early 1970s by a leading Tory light, effectively about how to plan London’s modernisation. The style was very dated in that it took a belief in central state planning as read, but at the same time it exuded confidence that London (and Britain) could plan for and take advantage of the forthcoming inevitable economic changes. The book talked about new infrastructure and housing, it talked about redevelopment opportunities and how they should be embraced to build a better city. Now I’m the first to say that I’m glad that Covent Garden was not subjected to the kind of comprehensive redevelopment that this chap envisaged, and in retrospect his confidence in the ability of planners and architects to create a sustainable community in Thamesmead seems laughable. But I can’t help wondering whether the prevailing attitude today, which seems to be set against ever doing anything new, might be worse.
There are plenty of people drawing new tube lines on maps and drawing pretty pictures of residential skyscrapers on inner city dead space, but they aren’t in the main stream. Certainly in my part of town councillors and activists are campaigning hard against every new development that is proposed. There seems to be an I’m alright Jack attitude. My London lifestyle is perfectly pleasant, I won’t accept anything which might change that. I can’t stand it.
People seem to not accept that Shand and Heseline were actually successful. London is a properly international modern city. It is growing and needs to grow. The houses that once could be afforded by middle-class professionals are now snapped up by the world’s leading metal traders or lawyers or musicians, leaving everyone other than the super-rich squabbling over housing that was built for the poor. Where do these NIBMYs think the next generation of Londoners (whether born here or yet to arrive on these shores) are going to live? The fact that London house prices have been booming even while the UK’s economy stagnates should tell you something.
As I say, I don’t know what the general consensus was thirty years ago but if the film is anything to go by it may have been “yes we can, and we should”. And during the 2012 Olympics lots of people came out of the woodwork and said “oh yes, that was rather good, wasn’t it”. So why have we as a society immediately relapsed into being against everything?
A great london film and no mistake. They say that the very long shot (20 seconds? Longer?) of Harold in the back of the car he’s been bundled into by the bad’uns at the end is one of the great bits of no-dialogue acting.
The development of the docks and the badlands of London was always going to happen when free markets allowed entrepreneurial spirit and availability of risk capital to trump state/council control. Thanks to the Conservatives, that happened in the 80s.
Yes, great final shot. A very young Pierce Brosnan holding the gun!
Yes, agreed. So what happened? Given the sorry state of our economy, why are we not seeing a re-run of the great unleashing of market forces? Why is Boris abandoned by Conservative ministers to defend entrepreneurs, risk-takers and property-developers on his own? Why has the country become so defeatist?
The spirit of the current age seems to be “we don’t know what to do”. Why?!
Mrs Q has the Long Good Friday theme as her ringtone. Watch the end credits on youtube again BE to hear.
When i first went to Whitechapel in the mid 80′s there were still bombsites. Acres of derelict land, old empty warehouses, and whole streets of boarded up housing.
Its all been built on now. The regeneration did go ahead. It carried on right up until the crunch of 2008 when the money ran out and the PFI overpayment lunacy started to unfold. You can see it in the rather small and ugly bright red bricked 80′s houses next to the concrete horrors and the Victorian terraces.
Then there are the slightly larger, taller, brown brick 90′s houses.
And office blocks galore that were never there before. I remember when that shiny new building on the corner of earl’s court went up. HQ of Sony. Before I think it was a kebab shop.
There was no Jubilee line out east when I worked in London in the 80′s it just stopped. because the docks were just docks, and no ships came. All that regeneration continued on through the 80′s, 90′s and then the dome and associated projects
When I went back to work in the city in the 90′s the skyline was transformed. Many areas i used to visit are unrecognisable and mostly for the better.
I still like the way traveling up the M4 into west London, through Brentford, hasn’t changed too much. Its a drive i used to do with my Dad in the 70′s. The famous Lucazade sign is gone and almost every office block is newer and better , but still on the same footprints of the demolished, so it doesn’t look too different.
The smaller industrial is all gone. Garages, repair shops, plant hire, car showrooms. Now housing.
Vauxhall and Battersea is next. Seems to take about 20 years from plans to completion.
I agree London has been transformed. But it must keep going and it seems to me that there are lots and lots of people set against the continuing transformation. Livingstone put such a hefty tax on new residential development that *shock* developers are scaling back plans. There seems to be a lefty-conservationist nexus (cheer-led by Prince Bloody Charles of all people) who think that anything that isn’t built in Bath stone is pollution. These are the same people who insist on building luxury council flats in Chelsea for asylum seekers while forcing people with jobs to commute in from Peterborough.
Iirc, Sir Horace Cutler, Conservative Leader of the GLC pre Red-Ken days, did make a bid for the 1988 Olympics around the time of the film, but had no chance of success because the bid was not supported by the national government. It was another age, for sure, but I remember it being full of possibilities – the unleashing of the entrepreneurs was not all bogus.
Aha, that is the bit of information that Wikipedia lacks.
If I recall correctly, three cities were in the running; London, Birmingham and Manchester; The idea being that they put forward their own proposals with the winner being presented as the official UK bidder. London’s plans seemed the weakest because they were attempting to shoe-horn the Games into existing sites + Wembley. If you like, a city games rather than a stadium centric one, and ironically similar to what we got in 2012 (maybe they were just too ahead of their time). Birmingham proposed new facilities around the then successful NEC and highlighted its central UK location. Manchester put together the most competent package but the Government of the day was quite clear that it would be a privateers games with only minimal Government support… The Olympic Committee didn’t much like the idea of holding their prestigious games in a lesser city or the fact the games wouldn’t come with a blank Government cheque.
Long Good Friday is a movie that EVERYONE should see once. I watched it in the cinema, mistakenly believing it was a comedy (owing to the Hoskins headline), boy was I blown away!
Interesting! That isn’t a bad way of doing it, what a pity the IOC would never entertain such a “free market” approach!
“I wasn’t around at the time it was made, so I can’t tell whether it reflects a fair capturing of the zeitgeist…”
I was. And it did.
A great film that I tend to watch every couple of years, lots of us young scousers worked in London around that time and I remember it fondly.
Yes, a brilliant film for the age (film-titles around then had to begin with ‘The’: … LGF, … Ploughman’s Lunch – another zeitgeist special, and … Draftsman’s Contract [set in another era])
An historian writes: just for the record: Docklands was Geoffrey Howe’s baby, not Heseltine’s
Interesting, I had always associated Hezza with Docklands! Oop!
Any idea why we’ve given up these days?
the Thatch / Major governments were chocka with serious, accomplished people from top to bottom (plus the inevitable sprinkling of dolts, of course) who set the tone
e.g. Peter Walker, whom I never liked but he sure knew how to get things done
today ? I think you know my views on Osborne … a man for whom the utterly trivial ‘Nudge‘ constitutes political philosophy, Heaven help us !
what hope for the rare older, more experienced minister (e.g. Hammond) with this oik at the purse-strings and as strategist-in-chief ?
Marvellous film, and, as mentioned on an old Scrobs post, the best ending of any story!
I worked on several early Docklands schemes, and back then, we just drove straight across the derelict sites as there were no real roads!
Sadly, the first project was demolished after it’s 25 years of white splendour, to make way for an even more futuristic building!
LDDC weren’t that bad to deal with, but presumably the dead hand of Tower Hamlets causes a lot of wasted time, money and energy these days.
We’re not against ‘everything’.
It’s rather frustrating to always be told that we are simply because we disagree with certain issues.
Things should be much better than they are in fact.
Bit of an odd martyr comment that. If you aren’t against everything then why see it as an attack on your viewpoint?
Are you in a local architecture/amenity group? Are you campaigning against new development in London?
There’s a very elegant defence of the ‘All development is bad and we have to fight it’ view here http://www.paulkingsnorth.net/journalism/dark-ecology/. I disagree with almost all of it, but it has helped me understand where people are coming from with it. And it’s beautifully written.