Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business
A dark hour imprisoned in a gridlocked multi-storey car park close to Old Trafford on a home-match evening gave me an opportunity to ponder what was once called ‘the beautiful game’. I was a Chelsea fan in my youth — the heroic era of Cooke, Wilkins and Droy — but I’m irritated by the modern fashion for corporate chiefs to declare their club allegiances in the interest of looking blokeish. I’m prepared to accept that the governor of the Bank of England has a lifelong passion for Aston Villa, on the basis that no one would make that claim to impress, but — to take two examples I stumbled across this week — who really cares that the chief executives of Standard Chartered, Peter Sands, and the advertising agency M&C Saatchi, David Kershaw, are devotees of what Kershaw refers to in his official bio as ‘the mighty Arsenal’?
So I’m not a natural supporter of the Red Knights, the consortium led by Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs, financier Keith Harris and hedge-fund player Paul Marshall, who are trying to wrest control of Manchester United from the Glazer family. That’s not to say I’m in sympathy with the rebarbative Florida resident Malcolm Glazer and his sons: among the few facts known about Glazer père when he first expressed interest in the club in 2003 were that he had never set foot in Manchester and didn’t like sports, and that a US judge had once described him as ‘a snake in sheep’s clothing’. He has loaded the club with debt and alienated its loyal fans, but it has picked up plenty of trophies under his ownership and there’s no obvious reason why a coterie of super-rich City types should be more in tune with the diehards in the stands. Frankly, the whole game — motley owners, overpaid and oversexed players, dodgy agents, financial shenanigans — has become a grotesque circus of greed. I’d rather be incarcerated in a concrete car park than have anything to do with it.
The leap of the FTSE 100 share index to its highest level since the depths of the banking crisis is not a reliable reflection of anything other than the febrile nature of investor sentiment and some better-than-expected US job-loss figures. But it’s cheering nevertheless, coming as it does alongside some indicators that really might turn out to be the first daffodils of spring. On the shopping front, John Lewis was expected to report bumper profits this week (and bumper bonuses for employee-partners) on the strength of strong sales at Waitrose, where the recession-busting ‘Essentials’ grocery range has been a big success. More importantly, British manufacturers have been reporting healthy increases in production, exports and new orders: of course there are still big uncertainties in the sector, including an uptick in inflation in factory-gate prices, but all this is encouraging for the regeneration of British industry and the return of normality to the British high street. And the news item that particularly caught my eye was the profit figure for Persimmon, the northern housebuilder.
Persimmon made £78 million in 2009, compared to a loss of £780 million in 2008 — a dramatic turnaround that chiefly reflects revaluations of its land holdings. The company was founded by Duncan Davidson, an Ampleforth-educated former army officer whose grandfather was the Duke of Norfolk and who served as a pageboy at the Queen’s coronation. But grand social connections did not guarantee him a warm welcome in my part of the world during successive housing booms, when bog-standard Persimmon-built estates sprang up all over Yorkshire. And the turn of the economic tide means we’re likely to see a similar phenomenon all over again, as Persimmon and its competitors reopen sites that have been left fallow for years and start building the hundreds of thousands of new homes John Prescott so memorably declared were needed across England. Prezza may have passed into history but his housing-policy pronouncements, dating from 2003, still cause bafflement and rage among ordinary citizens, who see homes empty in their neighbourhoods and hate the idea of new estates despoiling their landscapes: Davidson, a veteran of such battles, calls local objectors not just nimbies but ‘bananas’, standing for ‘Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere’. Recession has given the bananas brief respite, but the targets are still there, cast in concrete in regional planning strategies. My own North Yorkshire district of Ryedale (coincidentally, and perhaps ominously, the name of the first housebuilding company set up by Davidson, back in 1965) has been told it must find sites for 3,000 houses over the next 15 years, the equivalent of building a whole new market town. Years of nimbyist strife loom, right across rural England. It’s good to see housebuilders back in the black, because they generate jobs and economic activity and returns for investors; but give it five years and we’ll all be praying for the next housing recession to rein them in again.
To Shoreditch, which I’m told is the new Hoxton (or perhaps that should be the other way round), to visit a friend who runs her dotcom business from an office under a railway arch, reached through the courtyard of a cocktail bar; she shares the space with other low-budget start-ups in, among other hip things, web design and music PR. Every old warehouse and workshop in the vicinity seems to be populated by similar new-economy ventures, and the Conran empire’s Albion Caff in Boundary Street, with its bread ovens and open kitchen, provides just the right tone for their lunchtime canteen.
And onwards to York Way, that grim traffic-canyon beside King’s Cross, for a belated first visit to Kings Place, a hybrid development of canalside concert halls, gallery space and offices — some of them occupied by the Guardian and the Observer. The brainchild of developer Peter Millican, this innovative scheme was completed in 2008, just in time for the financial crunch. But it has established itself nevertheless as a major arts venue, a civilised place to work and a flagship for the continuing redevelopment of the King’s Cross-St Pancras district which, like Shoreditch-cum-Hoxton, is slowly evolving into an attractive new facet of 21st-century London. I’m excited about the refurbishment of the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras, which should finally be completed in the next 12 months, and the cleaning of the great ironwork roof of King’s Cross itself. Sometimes, against the odds of modern life, things do actually change for the better.
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