Endpiece

HOW WE LIVE AND HOW WE MIGHT LIVE

The title is borrowed from William Morris’s 1887 essay on socialism. How we might live was also the theme of his book News from Nowhere, published three years later. Here Morris creates a utopian vision of a post-industrial, post-revolutionary, early 21st Century England, returned to an agrarian society by the depopulation and disaggregation of its towns and cities. Its subtitle is An Epoch of Rest. It is an attractive vision in many ways, and would be a quite sustainable proposition if only people stayed put and didn’t move about all the time; or if they did they went about by foot, rowing boat or horse, like the narrator Guest and his new friends.
In fact our future looks unavoidably urban. But if we could achieve the peacefulness of Morris’s imaginary England in our towns and cities, urban life and society could have something of the idyllic nature of that vision, without sacrificing too much convenience (in fact gaining a lot more). From our second-floor Velux window in Balsall Heath I can look out over about 20 square kilometres of Birmingham. With the summer sun shining on it, it looks very green, and calm, but I know that below the tree canopy, at street level, much of it is teeming with noisy, dangerous and polluting vehicles. I can imagine another better version of it, without them.
I have memories of times and places where I have experienced that wonderful combination of serene quietness in a densely populated city. A Sunday morning in the centre of Oxford, walking to the Turf Tavern. Opening an apartment window in the early morning onto a street in central Helsinki, smelling the bakery and hearing music (was it really the Karelia Suite or did I make that up?). Drinking beer with my daughter and her husband on a sunny pavement in Jordaan in Amsterdam. An uncelebrated campo in the far reaches of Venice, populated by old women and cats.
One key characteristic of these quiet urban places, I think, is the combination - somewhat paradoxical - of intimacy in public space. To achieve this, they need to have a double identity; to be populated both by strangers, visiting shops, bars, cinemas or passing through, and also by resident locals, at home in their own territory, on familiar terms with their neighbours - the publican, the greengrocer, the antique dealer. These places are that apparent oxymoron, urban villages.
I described in the previous Endpiece the attempted forcible removal of people and businesses from Birmingham’s Eastside regeneration area. This misguided process would make the quality of intimacy difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. In 2002 I co-wrote an essay which we called Eastsiders – a day in the life of a family who had sold their car and moved into the new inner city in 2012. They live in a low-energy townhouse in Digbeth near the newly-green corridor of the River Rea, they shop in local shops and the farmers’ market, and they walk and cycle locally to their work and study. Much of the small-scale industry remains, and adds to the diversity and utility of the quarter. The place has a combination of the genteel and the grotty, of the planned and the spontaneous. It is a picture, admittedly romanticised, as Morris’s 21st Century England also was, of the good life lived in a densely-settled inner-city district, a place which while busy, also possesses the civilised qualities of peace and serenity. I like to think this is achievable.

Joe Holyoak

William Morris, News from Nowhere and other writings, Penguin Classics.
Eastsiders (Joe Holyoak and Tracey Fletcher, 2002) can be found on the website www.localisewestmidlands.org.uk/Eastsiders.htm.