Thinking back to the way we imagined our future in the 1960s, the striking thing is the small part money played in our utopias. Once nuclear war had been ruled out as a possibility, the big challenge that remained was what our teachers and essay questions called “the problem of leisure”. We would have lots of it. Automation would bring shorter working days without cutting wages. The zero-hours contract was unimaginable then, at least as part of the world to come rather than the dark past of Tolpuddle and Speenhamland.
In future everyone would work in spotless white factories and offices – by housing its winding gear in glass and concrete, even a coalmine could be included in this bright picture – and knock off early to go home to leafy crescents in new towns. How would they fill their hours? In the fifth form, we wrote solemnly about making music, playing sport, reading books and painting. We didn’t mention drinking, or much consumption of any other kind. Our utopia was orderly, well-behaved, and remarkably free of material appetites.
Last Sunday I thought I’d found it. In the late afternoon under a deep blue sky (the kind all utopias require), a couple of us walked around the new development at King’s Cross, where 67 acres of disused railway sidings, gasworks, warehouses and wharfs have been transformed into one of the capital’s most-fashionable districts. Our walk took us through quiet streets of Georgian houses and an old municipal estate where every pub had closed down, until we reached Regent’s canal and struck west along the towpath.
Geese moved silently across the water as narrow boats put-putted under bridges; once, one of them drew over to the bank to take aboard an elderly lady in a wheelchair who settled down beside the tiller as the boat nosed back to midstream. It was done without fuss: the canal had hardly a ripple, all motion on it looked effortless, everything glided, and nobody needed to shout.
The quietness meant that we heard the secondhand bookshop before we saw it. The noise suggested a keyboard and an acoustic guitar, and there they were around the next bend: a couple of musicians playing melodious jazz and folk on the top deck of a barge: an old Dutch coal barge, as I learned later, whose owners had lined the cabins with shelves and set out more books on stalls that faced the towpath. Passersby stopped to browse in the sun. My friend and I were struck by the same thought – that the scene, for reasons we couldn’t completely fathom, represented an ideal of civilised life: that humanity had risen from the slime to reach this point and would climb no higher.
“It’s just like Paris,” I said, thinking of the bookstalls on the Left Bank with the river behind them.
“Paris-Schmaris!” my friend said. “This is much better.” Here was heaven on our doorstep.
We walked across a large square where railway tracks and wagon turntables had been artfully embedded in the pavement. Ahead of us lay the large Victorian warehouse that houses St Martin’s School of Art and several places to eat and drink. To the right in another series of brown-brick railway sheds stood a Waitrose, while to the left, circular apartment blocks had risen inside the ornate cast-iron frames of old gas holders. Here and there a functional sign from the railway era had been preserved as decoration: the gable end of a canal-side building still said COAL OFFICE in 19th-century capitals, while the blue and white enamel of British Railways continued to demand DRIVE SLOWLY. Crowds, mainly of young people, drifted about the square or sat with their faces raised to the sun on the canal banks and at café tables. We joined a long queue of them outside a restaurant and overheard Spanish, Italian, French, German, Arabic and Japanese, and other languages that were harder to identify. The food, when we eventually got in, was India-inspired, very good and delivered by waiters from eastern Europe.
The history that enabled these scenes might be represented as an inevitable progression. Fields and cottages that lie on the city’s edge have a canal cut through them in 1820 – leading east to the London docks and north to the Midlands. The canal feeds coal to a gasworks that opens soon after; railways from the north reach King’s Cross and St Pancras, its neighbouring terminus, in the mid-19th century. Coal from Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, potatoes from Lincolnshire, cold fish from Hull and Aberdeen, live cattle from Scotland to be sold and slaughtered: by the 1870s the landscape has been shaped entirely by London’s needs. And for anyone who doubts that these changes were improvements, there is the story of the vanished settlement of Belle Isle to reassure them.
Belle Isle was the site of some of the city’s celebrated dust heaps, great mounds of cinders, ash, bones, vegetation and dead animals that gave employment to people who were prepared to search for accidentally discarded valuables or sift the dust and sell it to brickworks.
The biggest of these heaps was removed to make way for the King’s Cross railway in the late 1840s – an event that drew the attention of Charles Dickens, who later made dust heaps a memorable feature of Our Mutual Friend – but the people of Belle Isle continued to make a living from smaller heaps and other obnoxious industries such as horse-killing, bone-boiling and fat-melting. In the words of one visitor, James Greenwood, almost every trade had found a home there that was elsewhere “banished from the haunts of men, on account of the villainous smells”.
Greenwood watched some boys playing cricket on “a tolerably level bit [of land] between two dust-heaps”. A pile of old hats and broken crockery served as the wickets and the leg of an old bedstead made do as the bat; while “for the ball the head of a kitten [Greenwood’s italics]. This is not romance, but earnest fact.”
That scene was witnessed in 1874. By then the gasworks had acquired all its gasholders, including numbers 10, 11 and 12, which were built between 1860 and 1867, and number 8, the largest of them, built a decade earlier. If a man had stood on top of the easternmost of them and looked east, he might easily have seen some slum boys – “street Arabs”, Greenwood called them – playing cricket among the heaps, though he would have needed a good telescope to identify a kitten’s head.
The gasholders at King’s Cross stored gas until the year 2000. Today, the refurbished and re-erected frame of number 8, a Grade II-listed structure, holds a park and events space. Numbers 10, 11 and 12 surround apartment blocks designed with a communal roof garden, and spas, bars and dining bars in each of the three cylinders. Prices range from £810,000 for a studio flat to £5m for a penthouse with extensive views across the city and its parks and canals.
“Gasworks” and “penthouse” were unlikely words to have been found in the same sentence 50 years ago.
Our ideas of utopia change, and money often restricts access to the things we think of as ideal. Still, Belle Isle has vanished – it became in the end only a name on a signal cabin – and life is better than it was when the dust was being sifted. Sometimes the sights and sounds of a musical bookshop on a canal can be a little epiphany: this used to be a dream.
