Town Mouse
Tom Hodgkinson
Rambling through the streets of London, gazing through the windows of the mansions of Holland Park, I am struck by something new: the mixture of cleanliness and vulgarity.
I suppose there have always been rich people around. But when I was a young mouse, the rich had the decency to fill their homes with books and drive old cars.
London, even rich London, was shabby and a little grotty. I went to teenage parties in large houses in Camden and Hampstead, which I suppose were inhabited by well-off people, but they were not white cubes. They had frayed Persian rugs and William Morris wallpaper, owls in glass domes, framed Private Eye cartoons, humorous tea towels and a yellow Volvo outside.
The difference between shabby old and shiny new London is all the more striking to me because I had ten years out, during which I was a Country Mouse like Giles Wood, my neighbour across the page. while my children were small, I lived in a rented farmhouse, in a remote corner of Exmoor, to write books. The farmhouse was very shabby.
‘This kitchen has clearly never seen the hand of an interior designer,’ a friend once drily observed, as ferrets ran over his feet across the torn, blue vinyl floor. The units were a farmer’s jumble of mismatched pine and Formica, which we attempted to improve by introducing white cupboards from Bristol Ikea.
So, on returning to the smoke three years ago, I inevitably surveyed my surroundings with a fresh eye. London is just so shiny. I suppose I shouldn’t complain. The Tube trains are clean; the buses are clean. And the slums of Notting Hill have been restored to beautiful single dwellings by absentee billionaires, whose sportswear-clad wives are occasionally glimpsed at the wheel of an impossibly gigantic, black Range Rover.
Spotless, faultless, gorgeous but, as I said, vulgar. In the old days, it was considered uncool to flaunt your wealth. If you were rich, that was OK; but have fun with it, be stylish, use your imagination, be generous... Don’t buy the identical car to your banker neighbour and don’t show off.
In my early twenties, I lived opposite Alan Bennett for a year, in a rented house at 64 Gloucester Crescent, NW1. In the late 1980s, you could live in such a smart spot for not much – £55 a week. I rented the scruffy house with six other young ones, while working as an assistant in a record shop. Jonathan Miller lived next door.
It was a grand street. But our bohemian neighbours never made us feel bad. They may have lived in big houses, but Bennett’s had a caravan housing an old lady in front of it – later immortalised in his play and film The Lady in the Van. Miller’s front steps had certainly seen better days. Their shabbiness was a profound act of politeness.
Now bohemianism as an aspiration has taken a back seat – and scruffiness is out. The rich flaunt it, perhaps because they think they deserve it.
I wonder why this is. I suppose it’s something to do with the invasion of oligarchs and the rise of Trump, who has personified vulgarity for many years, but is now number one in the wolf pack.
Instead of looking up to Margaret Drabble or Joe Strummer or Jean-paul Sartre, as I did in my youth, we now look up to the jumped-up ad salesmen of Silicon Valley, the digital overlords, the Zuckerbergs and Sergey Brins and that awful CEO of Uber, the minicab firm.
I understand from friends that San Francisco has undergone a similar transformation. Once the home of beatniks and hippies, it now houses the mega-geeks who live in boring, book-free apartments and catch a bus each morning to the Google campus outside town. It’s a brave new world where everyone is happily sedated and no one reads the old poems or smokes or dreams.
Well, this Town Mouse is a trifle horrified by the rise of the vulgar clean, if only because he is by nature scruffy and lazy, like Dr Johnson. To be clean and shiny takes an awful lot of work and money; time which could be better spent reading a book, playing the ukulele or drinking craft ales.
We need to remember the important things. Diogenes wore rags and lived in a barrel. The fame of the cynical – meaning ‘dog-like’ – philosopher spread (yes, people managed to communicate with each other before Twitter, believe it or not) and he was visited in his barrel by Alexander the Great.
‘Can I get you anything?’ asked Alexander.
‘Yes,’ replied Diogenes. ‘You can get out of my light.’
That was the spirit. In those days, the rich were encouraged by the Athenian state to do useful and beautiful things like build roads and temples and feed the poor. They did not spend it on Range Rovers, basements and skiing holidays.
Life was about the many aspiring to freedom, not characterless overspending for the unimaginative few.