London’s former mayor Boris Johnson might now spend most of his time on planes, performing Brexit badinage around the world in his new pantomime role as foreign secretary, but his presence still looms large over the capital.
He is there in the east, in the inescapable form of the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a mangled £20m totem pole intended to make £1.2m a year for the upkeep of the Olympic park, but which has instead cost the taxpayer £10,000 a week to maintain. He trundles along the streets of London in the bulbous shape of the New Routemaster bus, an overheating, overpriced lump of nostalgia, whose famed back doors turned out to be faulty. He dangles across the Thames in the form of the Emirates Air Line, a novelty cable car ride presented as a crucial transport link, which has failed to attract regular commuters and loses an estimated £50,000 a week. And he is to be found all over the skyline, in the tens of tacky towers that sprouted across the capital during his tenure, stacks of empty investment units to fill his “housing” quota, without actually providing any homes.
The classically educated Johnson should have known the Ephebic Oath of the Athenians, to leave the city more beautiful than you found it. Instead, he furnished London with a plethora of ill-conceived ornaments, novelty solutions to problems that didn’t exist. Usually planned as canny sponsorship opportunities, these schemes ended up raiding the public purse – and will continue to do so for years to come.
The recurring sequence of events is told in all its lurid and depressing detail in a searing new book by architecture writer Douglas Murphy. Aptly titled Nincompoopolis, it charts the surreal gestations of the aforementioned follies, along with the mad attempt to revive the Crystal Palace with the help of a Chinese developer, and the saga of the Thames garden bridge. What emerges is a portrait of a politician relentlessly out for himself, with little respect for both due process and the public he is supposed to serve. This is not the hapless bumbling Boris beloved of the Have I Got News for You audience, but a man possessed of ample cunning and a startling ability to make things happen. As Murphy ponders: “It almost makes you wonder what could be achived if that energy and guile were put towards something actually useful.”
The author is well placed to tell the tale; he found himself at the starting point of one of Johnson’s earliest projects, working as a jobbing architect on a building that would turn out to sum up the mayor’s entire approach to the city.
If you ever find yourself hanging in a lonely capsule on the docklands cable car ride, you’ll be treated to a close shave with an angular glass building as you descend to the north. This squat, faceted box, which looks like something went wrong with the architect’s digital model, is the Siemens Crystal. Johnson dreamed up the project in an attempt to kickstart the development of the remaining vacant areas of the Royal Docks at the beginning of his tenure in 2008. The enterprise was typically Johnsonian: the lust for a piece of “iconic” something, anything really, to create the illusion that something was happening, that this was a place in which to invest. It would be part office, part conference centre, part exhibition space and, as Murphy observed from his position in the architect’s office, “there was clearly a strong political momentum behind the project, but it didn’t seem all that clear that anyone knew what it was for”.
This crumpled bauble, marooned at the end of the docks, would set the formula for the following eight years of sponsored trinkets, of ever-increasing scale and seriousness of consequence. Whether it was the Crystal Palace-shaped mall (which thankfully bit the dust), or the fairytale sylvan bridge (ditto), each time the sequence would be the same. A large source of investment would be found to prop up a one-liner idea, for which there was no real need, in exchange for ample promotional opportunities. The funding would be generously topped up from the public coffers, with seemingly little oversight, and the new toy would be trumpeted as a crucial part of maintaining London’s position on the world stage. Any critics would be painted as “moaning Minnies”, the hopeless naysayers standing in the way of growth.
Following the first half of the book’s comprehensive evisceration of Johnson’s infrastructural follies, both planned and realised, the second half deals with his record on the areas of transport, housing, the rich and policing, a realm where things become a little more nuanced.
As his mayoralty is all too easy to parody, it is refreshing to see Johnson being given (albeit grudging) credit for some of his policies. He introduced the London Housing Design Guide, for example, which set space standards and encouraged a move away from flashy buildings to “great background architecture made of durable materials that weather well”.
How far this was a Johnson victory is moot, given that, just like the so-called “Boris Bikes”, the momentum for space standards began under the previous mayor, Ken Livingstone. It is a policy that also spawned the ubiquitous trend for stick-on bricks, thin slivers of baked clay applied like wallpaper to the same old product. As a result, Murphy notes, “we see any old nonsense being clad in dingy brown brick in the hope that it will be given an easy time through planning”.
The book is a passionate and well argued demolition job, but if it has a weakness, it is that some of the material feels secondhand, compiled from news reports rather than the result of first-hand digging. Murphy’s writing can seem detached, assembled from the desktop, rather than from speaking to the people involved, or to those who have suffered the consequences of Johnson’s grand plans. What do the drivers of the Boris Buses think of them? How are the residents who were forcibly displaced from their “regenerated” council estates faring?
Given what has happened in the last 12 months, the story ends on a much darker note, making the vanity projects look like they were merely the prelude to Johnson’s true crime. As one of the chief forces responsible for pushing the country blindfolded towards the cliff-edge of Brexit, with a poisonous cocktail of bluster and lies, he has made his previous litany of offences seem almost innocuous. “It’s as though politics is just a game, played by the elites,” says Murphy, “with the rest of us simply the mob, particles in a cloud of ambition that leads only to gratification for the people who think they belong at the centre of the world.” It is a damning record – and one that must be remembered when Johnson launches his next attempt at becoming prime minister.
• Nincompoopolis is published by Repeater. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
