‘Sunshine and hills! Attractive individuals in tight pants! Neat cars everywhere! Also kind of a toilet’
BRITISH PEOPLE MOVE to Los Angeles. Especially in the city’s car circles, where UK expats seem to grow on four-wheeled trees.
Over here, a 911 at some Cars and Coffee show, disgorging two London accents. Over there, a Ford GT40 carrying a man who spells that nonferrous metal A-L-U-M-I-N-I-U-M, instead of just saying ‘lightweighted freedom steel’ like every colonial south of Canada. Car collectors, journalists, racing drivers, anyone who has decided that rain is stupid
– the type list of British imports is endless. Some parts of LA sound more like Blighty than Blighty.
None of this should be surprising. Los Angeles is famously a city of transplants, and everyone knows why: you see the region in movies, and it looks good. (Sunshine and hills! Attractive individuals in tight pants! Neat cars everywhere!) Then you visit and realise that it’s also kind of a toilet. (Infamous pollution and living cost; nasty sprawl, because all those individuals have to live somewhere; horrendous traffic, because everyone is constantly driving to the store, buying the latest in tight pants.) Like many things American, Southern California makes its first impressions in blazing neon, whether you want that or not.
I pondered all this while driving around the place last month, testing the Tesla Model 3. The photographer on the job, a lovely dude named James Lipman, grew up outside London. He moved to California a year ago. We discussed the implications of that move, mostly while stuck in traffic in the Tesla.
Lipman loved Los Angeles, he said, but – like a lot of people there – couldn’t stop thinking about its problems. It occurred to me that I was in the same boat, despite not living there. Every visit produces the same train of thought on the town’s trade-offs. Call it one of those odd quirks of human nature: we can seem hard-wired to focus on the negative, even if we don’t want to.
Perhaps this quality is rooted in some pessimistic cavemannomad urge to perpetually improve our personal lot. While talking to Lipman, I did a reflexive inventory of the good I could see from the road. The way old cars are street-parked everywhere, unrusty and patinated, from faded ’60s muscle to carburetted Ferraris. How the city’s borders of ocean and mountains somehow help it feel vast and homely at once. The impossible air clarity when the smog retreats, and how the weather always manages to be just warm enough to make you wonder if you should leave work without notice and just crack off to a canyon or a beach. The sweet smell of eucalyptus up in the Angeles Forest, north of downtown, where the pavement is cambered and singsongy for miles, sprinting to the Mojave Desert through empty and painted hills. And the rest of the state, over the mountains, a world as varied as the LA basin is predictable, Death Valley and the Sierra Nevada and everything else California, massive, heartbreakingly pretty, and mostly empty.
Later that day, out of curiosity, I emailed a man named Rob Dickinson. Rob moved to California from England in 2003, and runs Singer Vehicle Design. You’ve probably heard of his cars. Restored and re-imagined Porsche 911s, they’re ass-engined Fabergé eggs. Famously unique, famously expensive.
I asked Rob why he crossed the Atlantic and came to Los Angeles. What made it worth it?
‘Optimism,’ he said. ‘Incredible light, skill, talent, and yearround car madness. I realised I could do whatever I wanted here – nobody to tut-tut and to say, “You can’t do that.” Bliss.’
I thought about Rob’s words for a bit. I may have thought about them on Latigo Canyon Road, high above Malibu, while parked and staring at the Pacific. Possibly after more than an hour of turning the Tesla’s tyres to powder, on one of city’s best roads, in some of the prettiest and most unaffordable real estate on Earth.
In that moment, staring at the ocean from atop a mountain, the benefits of LA seemed both intangible and endless. A fuzzy possibility set that you work to remember on the ground, so you don’t get swamped in the more obvious negatives. But also something you don’t get anywhere else. A value exchange.
A terrible, horrible place. A crowded smog by the sea. But then, I’m biased: like a lot of people, I’m thinking about moving there. It sounds perfect.