Abstract
Writing about London and its people has been a powerful and influential tradition within and without the social sciences. The work of Booth and Mayhew in the nineteenth century left an enduring record of the lives of working people in the Victorian Age. In the 1950s, the accounts of East End lives supplied by Townsend (1957) and Young and Willmott (1957) were no less influential – both with a wider public and for sociology itself. More recently, books about London have increased in number and scope, with the capital now having its own ‘biography’ (Ackroyd, 2000), numerous social histories (eg Inwood, 1998; Porter, 1994; White, 2001), as well as ‘psycho-geographic’ musings (Sinclair, 1997). And that is leaving out of course the numerous novels with London as their central theme, or academic studies of London's contribution to literature and culture (eg Sandhu, 2003). London from a broad ‘sociological’ perspective has in some senses been under-served, although very many studies (not least in urban sociology) take the global role of London as their starting point.
Peter Hall's book is a further contribution to studying London life and is itself linked to another major study Working Capital: Life and Labour in Contemporary London (Buck et al., 2002). Working Capital conducted a large number of interviews with Londoners, most of which were not used in any detail in the resulting publication. Hall's book draws upon these interviews and was intended to provide ‘a more discursive book on London and its people’. The book is built around 132 interviews conducted in seven areas of London – outer as well as inner. The study is divided into three main sections: the first providing accounts of each of the areas with a sample of ‘voices’ from the semi-structured interviews; the second part explores a number of themes arising from the interviews; finally, there is an assessment of the various changes affecting Londoners and prospects for the future.
Thisis, inmany respects, afrustrating book to review. Peter Hallhas, of course, written many fine accounts of city life – not least his groundbreaking work Cities in Civilization (Hall, 1998). But the great merits of that book, with its deep understanding of the historical and cultural processes running through cities, does not find its sociological equivalent in this study. Certainly, there are many fascinating observations collected from the interviews. Indeed, the stories these Londoners have to tell are of great importance, with significant ramifications not least for social policy. London is a world or global city but according to Hall's respondents it repels as much as it attracts. Many of these interviewed seem keen to want to leave the city at some point; indeed (though Hall does not cite the figure) we know that around 20–25% of Londoners between 55–65 migrate to other parts of the UK or abroad in some cases. Many feel ‘excluded’ from London and all it has to offer: ‘Many of those we interviewed told us stories of quiet and not-so-quiet desperation: the struggle to live on low – or, in some areas, moderate – incomes; the sheer inability to find any housing in the privately-rented sector, let alone owner occupation …’(p.285). And many were just ‘characteristically rootless’ (p. 321), with no particular attachment to, or affection for, the neighbourhood in which they lived. Of course, this is not the entire story. Many of those interviewed also reported a strong sense of attachment to their local area and of being locked in to dense social networks and family ties. Hall further makes the point that certainly for working-class groups, ties to community may in some sense be interpreted as ‘compensation for a lack of other opportunities’. But the dominant picture from the interviews is one of people struggling with the enormity of London: the pace of change, the ‘clash of lifestyles’ (p. 465), the environmental pressures, and the polarisation between different groups divided by age, ethnicity and social class.
So the story the book describes is important and certainly deserves to be read. As a sociological account though it is disappointing. Partly this has to do with the way in which the interviews are used, especially in the seven chapters describing experiences in the case study areas. The technique here is to quote large slices of material from a small number of respondents (typically 10 or 11) from each area. But the end result is unsatisfactory, raising issues (not discussed in the book) about the way in which individuals were selected and data extracted. And the interviews themselves suffer from poorly formulated questions in some cases, leading questions in others. The other main section of the book, structuring the interviews around specific themes, is more successful in its organisation of material. Here, there are some important findings relating to the experience of life on income support, housing problems, lack of access to decent schools (a recurring theme), relationships with friends and neighbours, and problems with, and fear about, crime. The final section does not add to these observations in any substantive way, with a weak set of conclusions about the impact of social change and variations among different localities.
Problems in the way the interviews are used appear as one difficulty with the book. But another is that the study lacks an overarching framework within which the material can be placed. London voices and London lives are certainly compelling but they need to be related to a wider account of the forces influencing urban change. The key element here is the relationship between urbanization and globalization, with the former not just an ‘adjunct to the globalization process but also its primary driving force, stimulating innovation, creativity and economic growth while at the same time intensifying social and economic inequalities and conflict-filled polarization’ (Soja and Kanai, 2008: 54). The interviews bear powerful testimony to this observation, with respondents struggling with the consequences of different types of social and population change. But a conceptual vocabulary is also necessary to make sense of these responses. The ideas associated with globalization and the global city can be seen as a starting point, but from a sociological perspective require significant development. The interviews in London Lives and London Voices tell us about how people are reacting to changes in their community but we learn little about the new lives and relationships they are building or the connections these have to social and economic institutions –transnational as well as national. The book reminds us, however, of the need to build a new sociology of the city, one that will almost certainly need to have London life and labour as its starting point.