Beatrice Groth bemoans the way Londoners are rubbishing their own backyard.
London is a heavenly city – that’s what many of us thought when we first arrived here. We saw the Queen and her pristine palace; we could not escape all that heritage – even if we wanted to. And London is now renewing itself with a fresh set of opportunities in fashion, art and design, and music; not forgetting the health service which – though some Londoners would disagree – still seems top class to me compared to what there is back home.
So how come this city is so ill-treated? Not by the bloody foreigners, but by Londoners, born and bred. Don’t they know they’re only harming themselves when they make such a mess of old London town?
Last week I saw a couple casually dropping their burger wrappers on the street in Stratford, just as soon as they had finished eating. This they did without a second thought. Do you think they were plebs who’d been brung up wrong? No, not a bit – this was a well-dressed, upper middle class couple. Perhaps Spencer and Francesca were out on the razzle, choosing to forget their normal standards of behaviour? Surely not with baby Sebastian and a £1000 Bugaboo in tow. Bingeing they weren’t; this was their normal behaviour. Upper, middle and lower class, Londoners are constantly littering the place without even thinking.
And I won’t even mention the dog dirt, people peeing in lifts and in corners behind the train station, and all the other detritus of everyday London life.
Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, has a policy for all this. He’s calling on local communities to tackle ‘litter, rubbish and graffiti in their local parks, streets, estates, residential areas and waterways’. But paper policies won’t make much difference. The only way to solve it is if we take to heart the kind of culture shift which has already occurred in Germany. In Hamburg, the routine is: stop; pick; and drop every item of rubbish in the right place – even if it wasn’t yours to start with.
That’s the only way to go.