The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

29.3
The Last Days of London
that underlies the plan, but I also wanted to use that street as a yardstick for
getting the measure of the wider political culture. I wasn’t there only as a local
recorder, as a witness, and I’ve had some arguments about this. Raphael
Samuel, for example, asked where the celebration of local accents was, but
that sounded too dutiful to me; I reckon there is quite a lot to be said for not
always celebrating cockney accents in a mixed and diverse city like London.
JK: Although you are always very sympathetic to the characters who populate
your narrative, aren’t you?
PW: Well, I don’t think there’s much point simply lifting people into your
pages in order to punch them down, or merely using them to illustrate your
own preconceived ideas. For instance, in A Journey Through Ruins there is a
vicar who had become a Guardian joke. There was a journalist who lived in
the area very briefly (just down from Cambridge, and already heading for the
Daily Mail), who would pick up the Rev. Pateman’s parish magazine on the
way to work, and put smirking jokes in the Guardian diary about the idiocies
of it. Pateman was pretty wild—he once offered to provide a child-beating
service for parents who couldn’t bring themselves to do it for themselves. A
reprehensible idea, to be sure, but when you realize that there are many pious
West Indians in the congregation of this hanging and flogging vicar who
seemed to deplore the whole postwar period as one long slide into degeneracy,
you might still reckon that it demands a more nuanced response. I think
that if one is depicting ideas, one should also try to understand what their ra-