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  • Selling the USA everyday

    retail clothing with US cities and states
    Get your USA themed clothes everywhere!

    This is a very quick, hit-and-run random cross-section of clothes for sale on one floor of a major high street fashion retailer. Notice the theme? This was a kids’ department, so even in the 0-24 months section, we are already feeding our kids with a 100%—yes, 100%—visual diet of Team USA. Why?

    Repeat until it’s invisible

    What I realised as I shopped for my toddler was that I don’t even notice the endless USA USA USA anymore. I imagine most people don’t. For some reason I just picked up on the fact that every piece of clothing that had a word on it, had a word denoting the USA. Every single one.

    US themed clothing
    Yet more variations on the USA theme

    This is not an anti-US rant

    I love America. Sorry to get all Donald Trump on you, but I’ve been there, and it’s great. Even before I went there, I knew it was great. It has been—without question—the greatest cultural influence on my life barring—possibly—my native country of Britain.

    But why—in an age that’s apparently all about limitless choice, individual expression, finding your unique style—is the only graphic choice on the clothes we are sold that of the USA. You can have anything you want—LA, NYC, Chicago, Phoenix, Arizona, California, Hawaii—but only, only if it falls within the borders of the United States of America.

    USA themed clothes
    You’re kidding me. No, I’m not. This photo shoot took me less than 5 minutes

    How crazy is that?

    Where is the Vancouver, British Columbia T-shirt? Why can’t I wear München, Bavaria underpants? Why can’t my son buy a baseball cap (yes, I know, a baseball cap) with Provence written on it? Yeah, I know, I’m sure he could if he scoured the internet. They’re all Western countries, right?

    But what about my Dar-es-Salaam T-shirt? What about his Ceará, Brasil undies? Is a Bamako, Mali baseball cap just beyond the pale?

    If you work in fashion retail, pitch this at your next brainstorm meeting. Go on, I dare you!


  • Britain isn’t what it used to be

    Terraced streets in small-town England
    Where have all the children gone?

    A few weeks ago, something extraordinary began happening on my street — a standard issue redbrick Victorian terraced street in a provincial English town. Children started playing among the crowded parked cars. Where there had been only silence interrupted by the occasional revved engine, suddenly there were children’s voices. But they weren’t speaking English.

    The fruits of immigration

    The lament is a common one — not only among my more elderly English neighbours, but across the country. I’ve heard that the street isn’t what it used to be, presumably meaning that the people have changed, since the bricks and mortar certainly haven’t. I’ve also heard the dreamy reminiscence of when children used to be able to play in the street.

    Not anymore. Fear — of traffic, of strangers, of the generalised paedophilic threat — has emptied the street of most kids. But here were a whole host of kids — from late teenage right down to little nippers not much older than my son — riding every wheeled contraption they could find in and out of the parked cars. It was like the 1940s come back to life and put through a prism.

    “Listen to the cosmic laughter in the wind” Robert Newman, circa 1990s

    There is a beautiful irony to the fact that a street in this staunchly Brexit region has had a little slice of yesterday’s Britain resuscitated for it courtesy of its new immigrant arrivals. I don’t suppose it’ll stop the grumbles, but it can’t help make you smile. My son — still just too toddler to join in — thinks it’s the most exciting street entertainment he’s ever seen. Better than telly.


  • Where is the USA on a map?

    A map of the United States
    The USA: just lines on a map? (Photo by John-Mark Smith)

    Is there anything as immutable as the map of the USA in today’s political geography? Its shape is like a branding iron on the surface of North America — an indelible shape. Yet the accidents of history that brought it about — like all states — was revealed to me on a road trip around Washington State.

    As I drove north through the state of Oregon, I came to a dramatic natural barrier — the vast Columbia River. It is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest, with a basin of 258,000 square miles, running from the Rockies out into the Pacific Ocean. It feels like a serious boundary line — and it nearly was.

    As you cross a tall steel bridge over the river, you enter a town called Vancouver. But wait, surely too soon? Nope, this is Vancouver, Washington State. It is 300 miles almost due south of Vancouver, British Columbia, and is some 29 years older. It is the original Vancouver, and was very nearly the boundary between the USA and Canada.

    The Oregon Question

    It all came down to the Oregon boundary dispute between Britain (which owned Canada) and the USA. This was in the 1840s, by which time Russia and Mexico no longer laid any claim to the Pacific Northwest. The USA wanted everything north to Alaska, and Britain everything south to California, but soon the dispute focused in on one area: modern-day Washington State.

    The two sides eventually agreed on the 49th Parallel, until the Strait of Georgia. The border was then to follow the channel south, making all of Vancouver Island Canadian, as it is today. But the San Juan Islands in the channel remained disputed until 1872, when German Kaiser Wilhelm I arbitrated on the dispute and gave the islands to — you guessed it — the USA.

    A lovely postscript

    Point Roberts, a tiny tip of the Tsawwassen Peninsula just south of Vancouver, BC, which lies below the 49th Parallel, but east of the Strait of Georgia, is American soil to this day, despite its population of a little over 1,000 having to travel 25 miles through Canada to reach the rest of the USA.

    For more on how the borders of the USA were made, listen to Misha Glenny’s excellent episode The Borderlands, from the BBC Radio 4 series How to Invent a Country


  • What would a soft city feel like?

    Gardens by the Bay futuristic park in Singapore
    Singapore softens space in its Gardens by the Bay (Photo by Carles Rabada)

    What if soft were good?

    It is if we are talking about pillows or grass, but what if we’re talking about a soft city? What if we’re talking about the politicians who run them? Do they like to be seen as soft? Do we like our cities soft?

    Well, in fact we do — in spirit. Cities that are ideological soft — soft on difference, soft on people who stand out, who think differently, who look different, who act differently — are the most sought after on Earth. And if they couple that with some soft nature — green space, clean air, clean water — even better.

    What we know is that the 21st century will be urban. Not only is industrialisation making that unstoppable (the urban population of the planet exceeded the rural in the late 2000s), but ecologically it is actually necessary (the carbon footprint of a city dweller was calculated as on average lower than that of a rural dweller by the International Institute for Environment and Development, a London think-tank, in 2009).

    So maybe we need to think even softer?

    What if we reconceived the city entirely? What if concrete jungles, so famously hard physically and mentally, were made soft? Made to match our actual human need? What if the fabric of our cities became soft, replicating the way we once lived as rural dwellers — softer building materials, softer pathway and pavement materials, softer edges everywhere?

    We know that hard landscaping our gardens is bad news for the environment, but what about making our pavements and roads more porous? The technology is there to create substances that are not only durable but also porous. And what effect might a more porous surface have on our bodies, giving us a more natural walking gait, less pressure on bone joints and freer movement? Even our homes and offices could become less permanent, more malleable.

    What would the city of tomorrow feel like if it were as soft physically as the best cities of today are soft ideologically? Would that be refreshing?

    While we’re on the subject: read my blog on why we build cities where we do here


  • The Silk Road is a great brand

    Bukhara mosque architecture on the Silk Route
    Riches of the old Silk Road (Photo by Darrell Chaddock)

    It’s amazing what marketing can do for your image. The world has been full of trading routes since the earliest human settlements. Trade, and with it rivalry, diplomacy and power politics, have been foundations of human interaction everywhere, and yet one trade route rises in our imagination above all others: The Silk Road.

    Conjuring an awesome sense of history, the Western mind in particular is sent into flights of exotic fancy by those three simple words. The precious silks and spices of the Orient wending their way by camel train out of China and along the fabled cities of Central Asia to the gates of the Middle East and Russia, to arrive in the markets of Europe.

    Had Europeans simply been beguiled by the idea of this single silken thread?

    It was therefore striking to read — in this week’s excellent briefing on China’s Belt & Road Initiative in The Economist — that the term ‘The Silk Road’ was coined on the much less distant date of 1877, by Prussian geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, uncle of the famous WWI flying ace, the Red Baron. My first reaction was to marvel at the power of good branding to elevate even the most tangled and convoluted collection of trading routes.

    Had Europeans simply been beguiled — I wondered — by the idea of this single silken thread weaving from China across the whole of Asia to Europe? If they had, then it is ironic and perhaps appropriate that the Chinese should now be muddying the water with their unwieldy One Belt, One Road or Belt & Road Initiative. Not so much of the neat branding there, but maybe more reality?

    There has been endless media confusion and clarification over the terms and their meaning. China’s ‘Belt’ refers to a network of overland routes connecting China with Central and South Asian countries, and thence the Middle East and Europe. Its ‘Road’, confusingly, refers to the sea routes from China through the Indian Ocean to the West.

    But despite the clunky official titles, there is clearly something of the old branding magic of Von Richthofen’s Silk Road that has rubbed off on Chinese Communist Party planners, since this new and breathtaking (in scale and expense) infrastructure project is very much inspired by and aiming to emulate the Silk Road of old. Whether that’s the Silk Road of our imaginations or of historical fact, I will leave you to decide.


  • Stockholm’s integration problem

    Stockholm streets
    Even your favourite cities have their blind spots (Photo by Tanja Heffner on Unsplash)

    I love Stockholm. I’ve lived there, worked there and been charmed since my first visit by a lifestyle that seemed to me the world’s best-kept secret. Why, oh why, did no one ever tell me about this place?

    We always see the weaknesses in the things we love. Places we’ve never been can be mocked with cliché, but a place known is revealed, and it came as no surprise when I read Monocle’s Annual Quality of Life survey this month — in which Stockholm always appears — and it sounded a note of caution.

    Among the 25 cities selected for the best quality of life on the planet, Stockholm came in a respectable 11th, with the caveat that:

    “segregation remains a serious issue that no one seems to have a solution for”.

    I lived there way back in 2001, in that distant pre-9/11 world, yet in my short time among Swedes in the city, I was struck by the integration problem. I was also confused. How could a country world-renowned for its liberalism and equality have such difficulties with the migrants in its midst?

    I lived among affluent, liberal, young Swedes. Their instincts were impeccable. They were warm, open-minded and thoroughly right-on. But they had a blind spot: Islam. They were tolerant of anything but that, by the simple logic that it appeared to them to be intolerant and oppressive.

    By an ironic twist of fate, the vast majority of migrants to Sweden at the time were from Muslim countries in the Middle East and South Asia. There is a suburb in Stockholm called Rinkeby and its name was a byword for the undesirable, the unwanted and the best avoided.

    It revealed a wider issue that perhaps permeates the relatively small and cohesive populations of Scandinavia generally — that if you weren’t ‘white’ or ‘native’ or ‘Swedish’ Swedish (whatever you want to call it), you could never be truly Swedish.

    This was true for me, of course, as an Englishman, yet I was aware that I was already more integrated (as a white European) than many non-white Swedes who had lived there much longer than me. It is sad to see that it is still being flagged as a serious issue in 2018.

    Disclaimer: Living in Brexit Britain, as I now do, this perspective is not offered from the comfort of superiority. I know Britain even better than I know Sweden, and as a result, know its weaknesses even more deeply.


  • Where we build our cities

    Astana - the capital of Kazakhstan
    Kazakhstan’s shiny new capital, Astana (Photo by Azamat Kinzhitaev on Unsplash)

    This week, the 20th anniversary of the city of Astana — the new capital of Kazakhstan — coincided with me reading the opening chapters of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, about his journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul in the 1930s.

    As he ascended the Rhine, I was struck by how the main urban centres of a highly industrialised Germany were still all strung along its great rivers. These natural arteries had shaped the design of human settlement. It was at striking odds with the 20th century practice of creating modern capitals.

    Astana is only one of the most recent of a slew of capitals that were inaugurated in the century — Canberra in Australia, Brasilia in Brazil, Ankara in Turkey, Islamabad in Pakistan. What is odd about these places is that, after centuries of settlement defined principally by natural geography, these cities are located primarily based on political geography.

    It is true that, in some cases — such as Astana and Ankara — a sizeable settlement already existed that was expanded upon, but the primary drive was political. These cities were either placed as close to the geographical centre of the state as possible, or (as in the case of Canberra) equidistant between rival claimants to capital status (Sydney and Melbourne).

    What a strange occurrence, after natural geography’s long dominance — from the Rhineland cities to the great sea ports, the cities where the mountains meet the plains, the river mouth cities, the cities on a hill and the cities next to lakes.

    Maybe cities were founded pre-20th century with scant regard for natural geography, but I can’t think of any. Can you?


  • 6 Greats from the Great Plains

    the great plains of the American West
    Into the great wide open (Photo by Louis Moncouyoux on Unsplash)

    1 Plainsong Trilogy (Plainsong, Eventide, Benediction) by Kent Haruf

    On completing this beautifully sparse, stripped bare trilogy set in the imagined flatlands town of Holt, Colorado, I was struck by how the Great Plains have been something of a mesmerizing muse for me — much like the Siberian steppe in Russian literature. So, alongside this account of simple, honest farming life in a community somewhere east of Brush on Highway 34, here are a few more Great Plains classics I’ve come across…

     

    2 Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor

    If Haruf’s novels evoke anything for me, it is perhaps the languid timelessness of that other mythic Midwest town — Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Across these gentle stories, Keillor portrayed a Norwegian Lutheran upbringing in the back of beyond with sparkling wit and compassion. In their audio version, read by the author in his smooth, rolling Midwest accent, they were the soundtrack to my adolescence and a schooling in great writing.

     

    3 Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne

    Scratch the dusty surface of the Great Plains, and you will quickly unearth an Indian. The Native Americans who were the first people of this land were vanquished an astonishing short time ago, but the last and most tenacious of them — the Comanches — survived with skill and extraordinary bravery. But what sets this book apart is its fascinating detailing of ordinary Comanche day-to-day life, not the set battles with the whites. In it, I saw a more authentic face of the Native American than I’ve found elsewhere.

     

    4 True Grit by Charles Portis

    “You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the grace of God”

    So says Mattie Ross, the young girl who is the heroine of this classic Western set in Arkansas and the Indian Territory of modern-day Oklahoma. The book is a wonderfully self-indulgent read for anyone who’s ever enjoyed a John Buchan or similar adventure story, but it also has, well, the true grit of the American Great Plains about it. I found the book via the great Coen Brothers film starring Jeff Bridges. That was in turn a remake of a 1969 film — one I’ve never seen!

     

    5 Nebraska (2013), directed by Alexander Payne

    Now for some film. For anyone who loves the wide open bleakness of Springsteen’s 1982 album, a film with this title is always going to capture the imagination. In the event, it turned out to be one of the best films I’ve watched in years. A touching story of family life in Nebraska and Montana, with lots of humour, some wonderful dialogue and, of course, lots of wide open cinematic space.

     

    6 Certain Women (2016), directed by Kelly Reichardt

    This snapshot film follows the lives of three different women in rural Montana. But the one I want to draw your attention to is the story of Jamie, played by Lily Gladstone, a farm hand tending horses alone through a winter outside Belfry, Montana. The town sits on the edge of the Crow Reservation, not far from Bighorn country, and Gladstone herself is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce ancestry. The epic lonesomeness says so much about not only life on the Great Plains, but also the Native American experience.


  • Why we like camping

    Why we love camping
    Finding your inner nomad

    I went camping last weekend. We got chatting, round the proverbial campfire, about why we — the British, but north Europeans in general — seem to be drawn to taking ourselves away from home for a few nights to sit in a field somewhere and do everything we’d do at home, only with less light, less equipment and a longer walk to the toilet.

    The party without the host

    One of us made the strong argument that camping appeals because no one is host. Everyone comes to neutral ground. Everyone brings what they can with the object of sharing (food, drink etc.). No one has the pressure of making it a ‘good time’ for everyone else. You are all equally responsible for the experience.

    Don’t forget the toaster

    A lot of modern camping is ‘kitchen sink’ stuff. With an electric hook-up, we bring every comfort of home we can think of, in order to create the suburban dream, but on a campsite. Why? In most cases, the people in question could afford a hotel — so why choose a field under canvas?

    Finding the inner nomad

    Could it be that this is some faint hangover of our ancestral past? Are we communing, however tenuously, with our hunter-gatherer forebears? Urban Arabs in the Gulf still return to desert tents with satellite dishes on the edge of futuristic cities for weekends in order to reconnect with a cultural past. Are northern Europeans doing something similar?

    Where is Timmy Mallet?

    In the simplicity, the resourcefulness, the proximity to nature, there is something of a pre-settled time about the camping experience. We shed civilization — some more than others.

    If, like me, you arrive as an amateur (no mallet, no hook-up, no kitchenette, the wrong cylinder for your gas stove, the busiest party weekend of the year) just remember the two-night rule. There’s only so much ancestor worship you need in one holiday.


  • Talking to a three-year-old

    Goldfish swimming in pond
    A pond full of goldfish (Photo by Maja R. on Unsplash)

    We’re going to the pub.

    Which pub?

    The Britannia.

    No, but which pub, Daddy?

    I just said, the Britannia. We are going to drink some lovely orange juice.

    Which orange juice?

    Which orange juice?

    Which orange juice are we going to drink?

    The orange juice in the Britannia.

    But men drink beer.

    Yes, men drink beer. But Daddy might just have something refreshing, and we can look at the goldfish in the pond.

    Which pond?

    The pond in the Britannia. We can look at the fish.

    Which fish?

    The fish in the pond.

    Which pond?

    The pond in the Britannia.

    We’re going to look at fish in the pond at the Britannia.

    Yes.

    Is the Britannia our pub?

    It’s our local pub.

    But is it our pub?

    Well, no, it’s Mike’s pub.

    Which Mike?

    The Mike that owns the Britannia.

    Is he a very big man?

    He is quite big. Bigger than you. And he runs a pub.

    Which pub?