The Spectator The politics of PleasantvilleRod LiddleThere is a sort of golden crescent in London — and they should start doing
guided tours of it for those of us who don’t live there. It begins way out west
in leafy Ealing, swings north and east to Notting Hill and Holland Park,
traverses the gentle inclines of Hampstead, Highgate and Primrose Hill, touches
the funky little hem of Crouch End and then ends — where perhaps all life should
end — in Islington, N1. Even if you have never so much as visited London, you
will be immediately familiar with the names of most of the above mentioned
‘villages’: they have become bywords (and in some cases even adjectives) for
various powerful cliques of people: Hampstead thinkers, the Notting Hill Tories,
the Primrose Hill set of coked-out celebs, Islington’s beating heart of all that
is New Labour. But these demarcations, although fun and containing a germ of
truth, ignore the bigger picture: these places are sociologically,
demographically and politically identical. They should really be seen as a
whole, for they are the Pleasantville from wherein the rest of us are ruled; a
glorious band of red-brick or Georgian villas containing clever, implacably
active and creative little middle-class monkeys from the media, politics,
academia, advertising, charities and the law. Chattering agreeably at one
another over a nice, sharp bottle of Sancerre. And some Fairtrade olives.
There are, to be sure, small differences in the tone of each ‘village’.
Ealing, for example, is where the BBC’s top producers end up when they’re too
well off to stomach the grime of Shepherd’s Bush or Kensal Rise. Genteel
Hampstead is, by now, slightly de trop (although house prices must have risen
when the exciting columnist David Aaronovitch moved in a year or so back).
Islington — by which I do not mean Dalston, but Barnsbury and Upper Street — is
also beginning to feel a little, you know, 1997: too few Polish restaurants and
too many Spanish. But by and large, the extremely affluent inhabitants of this
ten-mile swath of the capital have far more in common than that which divides
them. Whatever their politics, their core values are identical — and, crucially,
at odds with much of the rest of the country.
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