The Planner (28 page)

This lift wasn’t anything like the one at Southwark Council. It was the size of a bedroom, no one needed to brush against anyone else, it didn’t judder and it had a screen on a wall with business news. It didn’t occur to James for the slightest moment that it might get stuck between levels for two hours, and it took no more than twenty seconds to take him all the way up to the thirtieth floor, three-quarters of the way to the top. His confidence still perfectly intact, James stepped out directly into the reception of Galbraith & Erskine and strode on.

‘Yes, hello, can I help you?’

Only now did James falter. The receptionist who looked up at him from behind the crescent desk was unnervingly magnificent, almost impossible for James to describe without romanticising or dehumanising. She was a gypsy princess, with black hair, ferocious white teeth and red lips that took up almost all her face. Her dark eyes were serious, but her smile so large and friendly it was incoherent, as if James was an old friend.

‘Hello, I’m James Crawley. I’m here for a meeting with Robert Wenham at three. Sorry, I’m a bit early.’

‘Okay, just wait here and I call him.’

She had a Spanish accent and imperfect grammar – displaced from the mountains of Andalusia by the European financial crisis, she was now stranded in London’s service economy. She was exactly the woman he wanted to be holding hands with when he next saw Alice.

‘Don’t worry. Please sit down and I’ll tell Robert you’re here. Would you like tea or coffee?’

‘No, thanks very much. I’m fine – I don’t need anything.’

‘Robert will be out in a minute. Just let me know if you need anything.’

Unable to think of anything else he could talk to her about, James went to sit down on a soft leather chair. On the low table in front of him were neatly arranged copies of the
Financial Times
, the
Economist
and
Property Week
. On the walls above was a series of large and beautiful photographs of Galbraith & Erskine projects from across the country. There were apartments in Glasgow on the banks of the river Clyde, Victorian warehouses in Manchester converted into creative studios, a business incubator in Oxford, a block of pastel-coloured flats in Stratford overlooking the Olympic Park and neo-Georgian town houses on the edge of Basingstoke.

There was none of the naive hope of James’s Sunbury Square masterplan poster. They may not have had a significant affordable housing component, they may not have been supported by local community groups, but they had all happened: these were photographs, and they hadn’t been created on a computer. It wasn’t Metroland either – none of them had been built for the aspiring middle classes with limited means and imaginations, desperate to look like each other. Galbraith & Erskine’s buildings were as confident, diverse and ambitious as the people they had been made for.

‘James – it’s good to see you,’ said Robert. ‘Thanks so much for coming over. Let’s go into my room. It’s just here.’

Robert’s office was just as James had thought it would be: attractive, busy but uncluttered, designed to motivate and encourage effective decision-making. It wasn’t as pretentious as an architect’s, and it wasn’t anything like as depressing as being in a local authority. It was, James thought, a room he could be comfortable with, and had lots of space – enough for James to recalibrate Robert’s seniority within the company. For surely, in that respect at least, it worked just like the public sector.

‘This is Paul. He shares the office with me. It’s just the two of us at the moment.’

There was a third desk in the corner – a conspicuously empty one, with a cover over the computer screen. Perhaps, thought James, they had it in mind for him. It seemed a perfectly reasonable supposition.

‘Can I get you anything to drink?’ said Paul.

‘Just water, if that’s okay,’ said James, determined to answer every question as appropriately as possible.

Paul nodded. He was younger than James and looked well designed for long-term subservience and steady career progression. His light brown hair was cropped short, his face slightly freckled, and his eyes blue with only a dash of cruelty. He wore a pinstripe suit, which James didn’t care for, but was bound to be expensive. James very badly wanted to know how much he earned.

‘Some water sounds good. It can get very dry here.’

Above Robert’s desk was a large map of London, just like Lionel’s. But it was more than decorative – it was dotted in coloured pins, yellow Post-it notes and arrows drawn in felt-tip pen. There was a cluster of red pins around the southern borders of Southwark. It was gratifying, in a way: even if the residents weren’t bothered, over in Canary Wharf the things he did were being followed closely.

‘Ah yes, the battle map,’ said Robert. ‘As you can see, we’ve got interests all over London – particularly in your patch.’

‘Yes, I can see that,’ said James. ‘It looks like the whole of South London seems to be interesting you at the moment.’

‘That’s correct. We’re still interested in the east of course, everyone is, but we see inner South London as being the major driver of residential growth over the next ten years.’

‘Southwark, Lambeth, Lewisham, Greenwich,’ said Paul. ‘The opportunities are there, but it’s a question of how willing the boroughs are to make things happen.’

Looking towards the window, James could see that the tower was on the western edge of Canary Wharf. Directly beneath them, away from the business headquarters and landscaped squares, things were more complicated, with a wide range of obstinate market failures. It was the Isle of Dogs, in the jurisdiction of Tower Hamlets, and contained all the things that you couldn’t find in the Docklands any more: post-war housing estates, medieval street plans, ramshackle graveyards, organised crime, disgusting pub lunches, psycho-geographers, religious maniacs and communist politicians.

‘Yes, the view is great isn’t it?’ said Robert. ‘They keep trying to reorganise the seating here, but I refuse to move. I like being reminded of all the work to be done.’

Robert was just as friendly as he had been at the football match, but there were details that James hadn’t noticed before. He was, for instance, at least two inches taller, while the eyes were narrower and his voice louder. Maybe it was because he had home advantage. They made some small talk. James had been expecting this, and was well prepared. Besides which, he was also getting better at being less prepared. They talked about Chelsea and their prospects in the FA Cup. They talked about how successful Canary Wharf had been, possible new developments on the north side and all the things that were going wrong in the Olympic Park.

The receptionist returned with a tray of both carbonated and still bottles of water, and tumbler glasses containing lemon and ice cubes. She gave them all the loveliest of smiles, making sure that James received the very largest. He had failed to protect Erica from Rick, but maybe if James worked here, he could rescue her from the developers.

‘Thanks, Margarita, that’s great,’ said Paul. ‘Don’t worry – we’ll serve ourselves.’

‘So, you’ve seen our map,’ said Robert. ‘It’s no secret we’re trying to do things in Southwark. And I was struck when we met by some of the things you were saying. They weren’t the sort of thing you often hear from a town planner in London.’

‘Well, as I said, I’m interested in making things happen, and getting things done. It would be great to hear more about what your thinking is.’

Robert gave a short speech about his ambitions and plans. It was, thought James, a pretty good one. There was no doubt that he understood South London. Not in the same way that James did, he wasn’t a planner. He didn’t talk about economic clusters, regeneration priorities, housing densities or unemployment rates. Instead, he talked about property values and construction costs. He wasn’t guided by well-meaning targets and strategic frameworks, but by market forces and prices – and it meant that everything he said was clear and to the point. As well as being better paid, it was, James realised, so much easier being a developer.

‘Yes, I can see what you’re saying,’ said James. ‘I think there’s a real cross-over with what I’ve been trying to do.’

There was a knock at the door and Simon Galbraith entered.

‘Simon!’ said Robert. ‘I didn’t know you were going to join us.’

‘Sorry – I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just wanted to say hello to James.’

James rose to his feet and they shook hands. He was wearing glasses, delicate ones with rimless frames that didn’t in any way diminish the power of his blue eyes.

‘Really good to see you. How do you like the office?’

‘Oh, yes, it’s great. I love the view.’

‘Yes, I thought you’d appreciate it. Sometime I’ll have to show you the view from my room on the other side. I often think it’s a shame that town planners don’t get to work in places like this. You always seem to be tucked away in those squat municipal buildings where you can’t see anything.’

‘We’ve been talking about what’s happening in Southwark,’ said Robert.

‘Ah yes, of course – Sunbury Square.’

‘We were just about to get on to that.’

‘Well, yes – that’s right,’ said James. ‘There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to work together. After all, fundamentally, we work in the same sector. We may have different priorities, but we all want to see the same things happen.’

This was pretty much what he’d said to them at the football, but now it seemed that more was expected of him. There was a pause. Simon nodded his head, but didn’t smile. Robert took a piece of paper from his desk and handed it to him.

‘So do you think you could help us with these?’

James looked at the sheet. There were eight questions, most of which he could answer there and then. If they had bothered to download and read his masterplan then they could have found the information themselves. But the last two were more difficult. In fact, they weren’t really questions, they were requests to do something.

‘We’re only looking for a bit of friendly advice,’ said Robert. ‘There’s no pressure or anything.’

But of course there was pressure, there was great pressure. These people were the real thing – they were
businessmen
. They weren’t bureaucrats and do-gooders, and they weren’t like Felix’s advertising friends either – they didn’t spend their time dreaming up zany websites and brand strategies. Every single thing they did incurred a cost and needed to make a return, and that included this meeting.

‘Yes,’ said James. ‘I’d be happy to help. I can give you the answers to these tomorrow morning. But you know that the height restrictions are fixed, and I can’t alter specifications on the affordable housing or key-worker allocations. That would need to be a policy decision.’

‘That’s helpful,’ said Robert. ‘Of course, we don’t want you to do anything that you’re not comfortable with. It’s just about trying to speed things up.’

‘So on the social-housing issue, would that need to go back to council members?’ said Simon.

‘No, it shouldn’t do. To a certain extent, the composition of individual mixed-use developments can be done at the discretion of executive officers, but not at my level. Although I can make recommendations.’

‘So you’re saying we’d need to have a conversation with Lionel Rogers?’ said Simon. ‘Or should we go higher than that? If need be, I can put in a call to someone.’

‘No, I wouldn’t do that,’ said James. ‘Your best bet would be to talk to one of the housing associations who have already submitted an expression of interest. I can give you the contacts. What we’re expecting are consortium bids from commercial and not-for-profit partners.’

But Simon didn’t seem particularly interested in that piece of advice.

‘Yes, of course, the housing associations. We know them all well.’

‘We prefer not to have to work with them if we can help it,’ said Robert. ‘Most of them seem to be more bothered about hitting targets than accruing genuine value.’

‘We’re much more interested in inward investment,’ said Paul. ‘In bringing jobs and prosperity into your borough, rather than just managing decline and shifting low-income groups from one patch to another.’

Simon and Robert both nodded their heads, and James could see that Paul would rise and rise in Galbraith & Erskine, that he was surely headed for senior management. Did he have a planning qualification? Almost certainly not. More likely, he had studied economics or finance, maybe even philosophy – something that taught you how to be cold-hearted in a way that came across as sensible and wise.

‘You’re not saying that Sunbury Square has to be delivered by a housing association are you?’ said Robert.

‘No – even if we wanted that, we couldn’t do it. Our tender process doesn’t allow us to exclude or specify any partners. It’s just what we’re probably expecting.’

‘The Bermondsey developments. None of those had a housing association attached, did they?’

‘No, they didn’t.’

‘So there’s no reason why this one should have to.’

‘No, no reason. It’s just what we’re expecting will come back to us. As I said, some housing associations have already been in touch.’

‘You mean they’ve submitted bids?’

‘No – not yet. No one has. But there have been informal meetings.’