The Anonymous Widower

Is The Cause of High Unemployment Our Housing and Transport Policies?

There was a program on BBC Radio 5 this morning about unemployment.  It was the usual left versus right battle, which has been fought so many times to a non-conclusion, that the program got boring, so I went shopping at Upper Street.

I have lived in several houses and flats in my life and in some ways, where I am now suits me best. Visitors like it too and they feel it is absolutely right for me.

So what is this house like. It’s a three bed-roomed house with two en-suite bathrooms and one that isn’t. It’s modern and it’s built upside down, with two bedrooms, a bathroom and the garage on the ground floor and a seven-metre square living area, kitchen and a bedroom on the first floor. It has a lot of chocolate-coloured steel and big glass windows. Unfortunately, it was built by Jerry. It doesn’t have a garden, but it does have two patios front and back.

In some ways the nearest to it in feel, was our flat in Cromwell Tower, in the Barbican, where we raised our three sons for the first few years of their lives. There we had three bedrooms, a large living room, kitchen, an underground car park and superb views across to St. Paul’s.

My house is however not the sort of house that most people aspire to or in fact that many can afford.

So many prefer one of Pete Seeger  ‘s Little Boxes on a new estate somewhere in the countryside with space for two cars.  After all, these sort of estates don’t get inhabitated by the riff-raff do they? They are also as eco-friendly as Obama’s Beast.

I have now come to the conclusion that I don’t like to live in the countryside.  It is all so sterile, unfriendly and full of lots of little cliques.  After the loss of C and my son, not one person in the village came to see me. After all I was a loser wasn’t I, especially as I had a stroke? There’s a great belief too, that widows might decide to walk off with your partner! It was a real relief to escape on a train to somewhere, where something actually happened. But there was no public transport, so simple things like getting any food meant a taxi or scounging a lift.

I also should say I hated living in Cockfosters as a child.  There the problem was that there were no children of my own age and most of my school friends lived some distance away.  Only when I was old enough to work in my father’s print works and ride my bike all over the area did I feel liberated.

How I live now, is surprisingly similar to how C and I used to live with the boys in the Barbican and St. John’s Wood before that. Except of course that I am now alone and do the things like food shopping, that C used to do. But then when I wander round Chapel Market, it’s like going back to the early seventies and she’s still guiding me.

It’s a friendly and a mixed area, with some good shops, four pubs that know their gluten-free within walking distance, several gardens and superb public transport links. The people are friendly too and I’m starting to add to my circle of friends. In this sort of mixed area, you also develop passing acquaintances with people, who you say hello to as you pass.  In the countryside, it’s a bit difficult to talk to someone about their basset hound as I did today, when the dog is in the back of a 4×4 passing at speed.

So the sort of mixed area where I live is not to most people’s taste, but in my view, if we want to decrease unemployment and create worthwhile jobs, then this sort of area can do it’s bit.  Another mixed area, I know well is the centre of Cambridge and it could be argued that that mixing helps with the development of ideas.

How many good ideas have been hatched in pubs or coffee shops? Sterile country villages might have an award winning gastro-pub, but the only ideas that come out of places like that, are things like better ways to cook asparagus.

One of the complaints in all the villages I’ve lived was the lack of any staff locally.  This was mainly because, those same people didn’t want any affordable housing built, that might spoil their view and lower the tone of the place. I have a lovely lady, who sorts my house out, once a week and she was fairly easy to find. Incidentally she comes on a bus from the other side of Dalston JUnction station.  so just at a selfish level, good public transport helps people to get to their jobs. In those much admired villages, there is no public transport, so everybody has to drive, so those that can’t afford their own car, often can’t get a decent job.  But then a lot of those that live in villages don’t want more public transport, because of all the noise and inconvenience of passing a bus in a large 4×4.  But they have their own cars anyway!

To illustrate what I say further, I will take the Suffolk town of Haverhill, which has large numbers of little boxes, which asre being added too at a fast rate. There are jobs in the town, but many require a car to get to, as the town isn’t the most cycle-friendly and the public transport is limited. Haverhill is also a sensible commute to Cambridge, where there are far better-paid and more worthwhile jobs, but the only way to do it, is to use a bus or car. There used to be a railway, but that was axed in the Beeching cuts. Axing it actually wasn’t the problem, but building over the right-of-way was, as that railway, which is needed to provide a link etween Sudbury and Cambridge, could have been reinstated.  In Scotland, they have been reinstating railways like Airdrie to Bathgate with some degree of success.

If I was in charge of eployment policy in this country, I would reinstate railways like Sudbury to Cambridge, as they not only create employment, but allow people to get better jobs. Recently, the line from Ipswich to Cambridge has been updated with better and bigger trains and the investment has led to a large increase in passenger numbers.

Where I live, we also have the example of the recently-rebuilt North and East London Lines of the London Overground, which are now used and liked by everybody.  In fact, so much so, that frequencies are being increased.

I have also read and heard stories how the new lines have decreased unemployment, just by enabling people to move more easily from where they live to where the jobs are.

I think too, we concentrate on unemployment and rightly so, but in many cases better transport links will enable people to move up the employment ladder.  This is just as important, as not only does it create a need to replace the person who’s left, but if people earn more, they tend to spend more and that helps to create jobs.

May 29, 2011 Posted by AnonW | News, Transport/Travel, World | Architecture, Building, Buses, East London Line, Jerry Builder, London, London Overground, North London Line, Unemployment | Leave a comment