STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

This month my subject is Will Self, the novelist, tireless provocateur, cyclist and successful irritant of conventional liberal causes. He is also funny. We are not close friends, but are neighbours and like each other well enough. Certainly, if we must have ‘public intellectuals’, Will would be my choice. We collided recently on a Speed Awareness Course. I had been doing a sedate 26mph in what I (mis-) understood to be a 30 zone. Will’s offence was unclear, but probably extreme. When asked about the underlying causes of his anti-social speeding, he told the red-faced martinet course leader: ‘I like driving fast because it’s **** ing fun.’ All the rude boys on the course tittered.

However, Will does not much like cars, but then he does not much like anything. He once wrote a story called

,a in The High Selfian Mode, but I doubt it has come to the notice of Thomas Ingenlath, who has given Volvo stand-out optics in recent years. Will and I were interviewed for

about a new traffic management scheme in our ’hood, something designed to let locals use cars while deterring opportunistic commuters and Tesco 36-tonners from debauching residential streets. To congratulate him on his contribution to the debate, I sent an old photograph of a teenage me in a Brabham BT21 F3 car.

Suitably irritated, Will replied: ‘Over the years I’ve come to find the car culture abjectly revolting… A picture of a racing car looks to me like one of Bogart smoking a cigarette: a harbinger of the disease and death to come.’

I responded that he shouldn’t be so cross. That while I saw every reason for controlling misuse of cars, cities need the animation of traffic. Paris was more wonderful when all that was required to park were skill and courage. The Rue de Rivoli no longer resembles a Jacques Tati version of the Mulsanne Straight; something has been lost. For additional irritation, I also said to Will that an intelligent control of cars in cities was like gentrification of houses, a sensible improvement, bringing benefits to everyone, adding value along the way. ‘What !!!! You’re gonna pull the mewling resentiment bullshit on me like every other mother- **** ing liberal… Get you gone, sir!’

Gentrification of houses is the exact equivalent of classic car restoration. And that’s to say: the recognition of value in properties that had been neglected. This applies to a wrecked Victorian terrace or a rusting Lancia Fulvia. Will and I see both. Cities are the finest network of commercial, cultural, social, economic and practical resources yet devised. And cars have their part in them.

It’s easy to denigrate the car and amplify its damaging effects on town and country, but it’s more interesting to find positive things to say. My champion here is John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909-1996), whose career began as an intelligence officer in the US Army, analysing the topography of Europe after D-Day.

Then Jackson applied military intelligence to the world about him, finding beauty and fascination in what the painter Philip Guston called ‘crapola’. Jackson enjoyed crowded ball-parks and preferred commercial wood-lots to primeval forest. A blacktop Interstate was at least as interesting as the torrential Colorado River. He makes the wonderful point that so much did Americans respect the culture of traffic that even in the tumultuous anarchy of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, people obeyed red traffic lights.

The wild territory Jackson wanted to explore was the ordinary American town. For Jackson, the human impact was always beautiful: power-lines enhanced the view and he was fascinated by the loading-bays trucks used at their depots, something he wrote about at impressive length.

And he loved cars. A rich man and a Harvard professor, late in life Jackson joined an African church, got a set of jailhouse tatts and became a car mechanic. I think if my friend Will sat down, sucked his pencil and tried to understand an epicyclic gearbox, it might have a helpfully calming effect. To me, the workings of a car are metaphors of life itself.

But thinking to repair our schism about car culture with a two-wheeled gesture, I sent a message to Will, told him about my custom-made Brompton bike with titanium components, and challenged him to a bike race.

Speed frightens me, but, whether in a car or on a bike, there is what Matthew B Crawford, author of

Drive, calls a ‘tonic effect’ in scaring yourself senseless and relying on fine hand-eye-foot coordination to survive. Nice to be able to exercise control over your wheels as well as your bowels. But, at the time of writing, my challenge has been ignored.

‘CITIES ARE THE FINEST NETWORK OF CULTURAL RESOURCES YET DEVISED. AND CARS HAVE THEIR PART IN THEM’

Robert grew up with classic cars, and has owned a Lancia Aurelia B20 GT, an Alfa Romeo Giulietta and a Porsche 356C. He currently uses his properly sorted 1955 Jaguar XK140 as his daily driver, and is a founding editor of