I did two spells at the Evening Standard, the first in the late 1980s, the second, as editor, between 2012 and 2017. In that first period of time, we covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, the Big Bang and its consequences, and the drama of Princess Diana, still using typewriters and hot metal.
My second phase of the Evening Standard took us through the London Olympics to Brexit, which we covered with an apocalyptic picture of lightning striking Westminster.
Ah, those front pages! But we were no longer holding the front page for breaking news and front pages no longer sold papers. We were in the age of the internet. And now this is where we are going mostly to exist. It is a commercial imperative and an editorial reincarnation. Change or die.
Shortly before I left, I paid a visit to Facebook to discuss the elephant in the room. Advertising income. The friendly senior executive offered to improve my digital profile. I laughed in despair: “I don’t want a profile. I want the money back.”
Beware nostalgia. Recently, I was having lunch with my friend, and former Evening Standard columnist and literary editor, A.N. Wilson at the Ivy restaurant on Kensington High Street, opposite the Evening Standard’s former offices. We were discussing old times, because we have known each other almost 40 years since we met at the newspaper, and we were remembering that about this time of day we would have expected to hear the cry of the newspaper sellers: “Read all about it! Evening Standard! Read all about it!”
I miss that cry. But what has not changed is the spirit of London, its power to expand and renew. Andrew’s next book is going to be about 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, created by the Royal Commission in order to showcase the wonder of new technology.
My heart always skips at the sight of the Albert Memorial and the Albertopolis ambition behind it for the educational enlightenment of science and art. The Albertopolis encompassed the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal College of Music, the Royal College of Art and nearby institutions such as Imperial College and the Royal Geographical Society.
Some of the figures who attended the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations included Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. And about a third of the British population of the time, six million people. The organiser, Henry Cole, described the V&A as a “schoolroom for everyone” and that was another principle of the Albertopolis. It was not just a matter of displaying treasures. It valued applied science and art. It looked for usefulness in society.
When I worked at the Evening Standard, I used to nip to the museums in the afternoons (we started early and had a lull mid afternoon). I was used to seeing printing presses but thrilled to the inventions, for instance of James Watt’s rotative engine 1788 or Alexander Cumming’s barograph clock 1766, used for climate studies; or Crick and Watson’s DNA molecular model, of 1953. British science, British invention.
When we looked for locations for Evening Standard parties to celebrate London’s influential figures in the 21st century, I chose the Science Museum, the Crick Institute and Crossrail at Canary Wharf. No matter that the latter two were building sites at the time. The Albertopolis too started as a building site.
Look East
Something else was exciting. It was the London Olympics of 2012 and a cultural vision sprung from that. What if there were to be an Albertopolis of the east? The axis of London was changing and it was one of the most interesting features of my time at the Evening Standard. We all started to look east.
Next year the V&A East opens, joining Sadler’s Wells East, the London College of Fashion and the British Council. I returned to the Evening Standard after a decade at The Telegraph, then at Canary Wharf, and had enviously watched the early buyers of river warehouses and the food paradise of Borough Market.
The pottery maker and social reformer Emma Bridgewater, whom Andrew Wilson says embodies 1851 (manufactures in Stoke, slightly nonconformist, cares about planning and community) has just bought a house in Bethnal Green declaring herself “a little late.” My Tube line, Central, goes from my home in White City at the old BBC Television Centre, to Stratford, one of the best connected places in London.
The vision of the Albertopolis, of the west and the east, represents to me London as it best. Aspirational, open minded, original, risk taking, creative, heart and head. Post-journalism, I have found my interests have coalesced round these values. Among other things I co-organise an annual science event in Braemar which creates the serendipity of conversations.
With some hubris, we called the inaugural gathering The New Enlightenment and we began an Alexander Fleming prize for the best doctoral thesis, which was won by an early adopter of AI in cancer diagnosis. I particularly liked the cross purpose friendship struck up between a Ukrainian scientist at Oxford, studying hibernation as a means of getting us to Mars, and former prime minister David Cameron on the implications of understanding consciousness for dementia patients.
What is so admirable about Albertopolis thinking is its combination of beauty and practicality. We build on the best of the past but we should never be fearful of change. As Marie Curie said: “Now is the time to understand more, so that we fear less.”
There are no newspaper sellers now with their poetic cry: “Read all about it.” But the history and future of London is still captured in the news of the day. News, fair and true, matters. We can still read all about it in the new incarnation of the Evening Standard.
