- THE
CULTURE ESSAY: THE
LIFE
- (AND
DEATH) OF LEISURE
The
Sunday Times (London) December 11 1994
The
computer age was supposed to make time for more play
and less work. But the leisure society turns out to
have been a myth. BRIAN DEER on the grim reality of
working life today
When
each morning's swarms of 747s arrive from North
America, form into line and drop their wheels over
London, window-seat passengers may read a telling
message from the country that lies below. As the
aircraft turn away from the sun to descend westward
into Heathrow, they pass four giant cream-coloured
chimneys that rise from a crumbling cathedral of
bricks. On the south bank of the Thames, by a big
patch of grass and trees, the ruined power station at
Battersea signals. A beacon on the flight path of
time.
For
two generations this building was a wonder of the
industrial age. When gantry cranes first dragged its
31-ton switches from off to on in 1933,
the London Power Company which owned it was hailed as
a miracle of enterprise. At its peak in the 1950s,
Battersea burnt a million tons of coal a year and
sucked 340 million gallons of water daily from the
river. Even after it shut, in 1983, its fluted
337-foot chimneys remained as icons of a golden era.
They spoke of battleships and ocean liners, of steam
trains, mines and mills.
In
the depths of the inter-war depression, the
construction of this colossus gave the finger to
pessimism. When, in June 1935, the third of its
eventual six turbo-alternators was synchronised - a
massive 140,000 horsepower Metropolitan Vickers - the
empire listened to the station's roar by wireless
around the world. This one piece of machinery, 120
feet long and with an 85-ton rotor spinning 25 times
a second, generated 105,000 kilowatts per hour at
11,000 volts. It was a spider in the newly formed
National Grid - juicing the soaring labour-saving
inventory of employed people's consumer goods.
But
from the air today you might easily decipher
Battersea as a vast signpost pleading
"Help!" Although classified as a grade 2
historic building, its central roof, once 100 feet
above the ground, has gone, along with most of one
exterior wall. The inside, much of which was an art
deco masterpiece, has been gutted, and all of its
machinery scrapped. Outbuildings have been demolished
and the 15-acre site is a now rat-infested waste. Of
what calamity could this be a remnant? A firestorm? A
civil war?
On
cursory inspection, the fate of this building is a
peculiarly 1980s tale. After a competition to decide
Battersea's future, a syndicate led by one John
Broome was given the go-ahead to turn it into a
leisure centre and entertainment park. Among the
novel features they proposed were electronic golf, a
dance floor and gym. There would be a swimming pool,
jogging track, weights room and health spa. There
were to be cinemas, shops, restaurants and tea rooms.
There would be an oceanarium, carousels and
Disney-style rides. An all-in ticket, priced #3.50,
would admit you to everything.
Not
least among this plan's supporters was the prime
minister, Margaret Thatcher, who praised Broome, a
leisure entrepreneur, for what she called his
"vision". She particularly warmed to his
intended "theming" of Battersea, which was
meant to turn the great Deco hall of turbo-alternator
No 3 into "The World of Dickens" and give a
similar adjacent industrial cavern a new "Tudor
look". Between the buildings and the river,
where once 85,000 tons of coal had been piled, a
"Tivoli-style gardens" would be laid out,
while the entrance to the station was to get a
"Victorian" glass canopy.
It
was a ludicrous scheme, which appeared to have been
drafted on folded and gummed manila. Although the
developers boasted that by 1990 Battersea would be
entertaining "a quarter of the moving population
of this country for six hours at a time", a
street-corner market researcher could have told them
that this would never be so. Fun park families know
all about London's traffic. And the clientele of
leisure centres, whether private or municipal, is
heavily skewed towards the young middle class - who
would hardly come from Chelsea with their Turbos and
towels to some hideous house of schlock.
But
for all its obvious absurdity, the plan was at one
with the times. The enthusiasm with which Thatcher
ploughed up the landscape of work required, at least
in partial justification, some renewed aspirations
for leisure. The return of 1930s-style mass
unemployment was the stick to a sceptical nation, but
among the carrots was the notion that life would be
better for some. Not only would people have more
leisure for themselves, it was posited, but slumped
manufacturing businesses would be replaced by
burgeoning new activities on this allegedly fertile
terrain.
"There
is much industry to be had from people's
pleasures," was how Thatcher explained it to The
Director magazine in the year that Battersea closed.
It was one of her more endearingly candid interviews
with her own people's publications. "We must
expect that a lot more of our jobs will come from the
service industries - from the McDonalds and Wimpys,
which employ a lot of people - and from the kind of
Disneyland they are starting in Corby. Leisure is a
big industry."
What
better proof, in the heart of the capital, than the
coal-burning citadel of power? Notwithstanding the
taste, this building revamped would have become the
epitome of the Thatcherite transformation. What,
indeed, could be more appropriate to greet foreign
visitors flying into Britain than a relic of the
passing industrial age turned into a leisure centre?
The prime minister herself fired a laser beam
launching Broome's ingenious conversion, switching
her gaze from the hell of the jobless to the heavens
of frolics and fun.
That
the building is derelict speaks for itself, but
Thatcher, as was her habit, was stabbing a hot but
neglected button. In the same way that she realised
that most people agree, when prompted, that their
taxes ought to be lower, but do not otherwise think
much about it, she was also aware of a strong
unstated instinct that leisure is a primary goal. And
since it was clear that British industries would need
replacing with potent money-spinners in the imminent
"information age", many pundits and
politicians joined her efforts to steer the public
mood.
Most
eloquent among them was Peter Walker, her energy
secretary, who in 1983 took time out from plotting
coal's closure to write a polemic on leisure.
"With care and thought we can now have a better
lifestyle," he gushed in a newspaper article.
"And possibilities for time for far more
pleasure, for travel, for reading and for those
activities that bring genuine happiness and enjoyment
to the individual. It is a whole new concept of life
that the information society is going to provide. We
have the opportunity of creating Athens without the
slaves, where the slaves will be the computer and the
microchip and the human race can obtain a new sense
of enjoyment, leisure and fulfilment."
Battersea's
role in Athens without the slaves has yet to be
decided, but, as a power house, a pleasure palace or
a plain old ruin, its message is as much about the
future as its structure is a voice from the past.
Will the replacement of manufacturing industry by the
global infobahn liberate the masses from toil? After
more than a decade of the revolution that Thatcher
began, are there long-term trends behind the fickle
business cycle that promise you and me a better life?
Or is bold talk of leisure a confidence trick of
capitalism - a stroke pulled to suit the time?
*****
On
the morning of St George's Day, 23 April, 1931, a
marquee was erected at the uncompleted Battersea for
a curious gathering. While builders cemented the
structure, engineers measured spaces for the
turbo-alternators and electricians tested cables to
suburban switching stations, a party of great and
good dignitaries held a stone-unveiling ceremony.
Herbert Morrison, Labour's transport minister, gave a
post-luncheon speech and a transatlantic phone call
was taken from Canada's governor-general.
It
was just eight days before the futuristic excitement
of the Empire State Building's opening, but the
assembly in London, as the stone explained, was
looking into the past. A century before, Michael
Faraday had made one of the landmark discoveries of
the industrial revolution - showing that a copper
disk rotated between magnets would produce
electricity. "Science has no frontiers,"
the governor-general's amplified voice boomed across
the riverside site. "The whole world is its
parish."
Those
invited were from the high bourgeoisie, including 21
knights, seven MPs, three Lords and the Dean of York,
so among the party there must have been some
considered positions on leisure. But there was
another centenary connection that was probably not on
their minds. It had been in Faraday's 1830s when the
precondition of having leisure, time off work, began.
At first it was only for those aged under 13 in the
mills, whose hours were cut by parliament to a
maximum of eight a day. This was mainly a restrictive
practice by the owners to block parvenu rivals - and
many of the liberated children promptly went down the
mines. But it was a big step in the day's division
that we take as natural now.
Britain
led the industrial world in the move to shorter
hours. The fight began in earnest in the 1880s,
escalated into huge demonstrations in 1890 and was
victorious after the First World War when the
employers caved-in. In the wake of the Bolshevik
uprising (when even the British royal family felt it
wise to withdraw a holiday invitation to their
beleaguered Russian relatives) the eight-hour day
seemed a sensible concession to a truculent working
class. Saturday afternoons had been granted to most
already and the week's annual holiday at the seaside
was rapidly on the rise.
By
the early 1930s, when Battersea was preparing to fuel
the new arsenal of irons, washing machines and vacuum
cleaners, the prosperous suburbs could hardly stop
talking about the new "leisure boom". On
the Faraday centenary, there were 344,000 cinema
seats in the county of London, a sevenfold rise on 20
years before. There were 9,500 bookies in Britain, a
rise over the same period from less than 3,000. Even
in the most bug-bitten slums there were still day
trips to the country, greyhound meetings, boxing, the
wireless and concerts. The war did not stop the
momentum, moreover, which continued in the following
decades.
But
at some point, buried within this boom, time
started slipping away. Even as work was formally
curtailed - with compulsory hours falling, paid
holidays rising and retirement enforced earlier, any
gains were being debited from elsewhere in people's
lives. By the 1980s, this phenomenon had become such
a politically-sensitive paradox, that Thatcher's
"Disneyland-at-Corby" intervention was a
masterpiece of leadership. The bad news about leisure
from jobs was revised as good news about jobs from
leisure.
On
such subjects, the hard data usually belongs to
business, so not much is floating around. In the
United States, however, where a similar trend has
been under way, a Harris survey carried out before
the 1990 recession found that the average person had
37% less leisure time than in 1973. If you
took commuting into account, the organisation found
that the average working week had lengthened -
from just under 41 hours to nearly 47.
The
Henley Centre in Britain has made similar inquiries,
studying changes in the availability and pressures on
our time. It found that between 1985-6 and 1993,
total essential commitments (including work, travel,
household chores and other unavoidable tasks) on
average rose more than 3% for men (to 71 hours) and
nearly 4.5% for women (to 86). Breaking these figures
down, it found that, over the same period, full-time
working females experienced a 10% loss of free time;
full-time working males more than 4% and unemployed
males 3.5%. Even retired women felt a 2% loss of
time.
It
could take forever to explain all this, but the most
immediate reasons are the structural changes that
modernising capitalism requires. With sharp rises in
the numbers living alone, and particularly of single
parents, old domestic "economies of scale"
are shrinking in shopping, child care and
bill-paying. And as the collectively-financed
powerhouses of health and social services withdraw
long-term support for the growing numbers of old,
sick and disabled people, these responsibilities fall
on relatives and friends. The celebrated tax cuts
have, in part, been paid for with deductions from
people's time.
But
if quantitative matters have gone askew, what about
"quality time"? Perhaps post-Battersea
Britain may be dawdling less, but still be closer to
Walker's Athenian order, with its "new sense of
enjoyment, leisure and fulfilment". Possibly,
the appreciation of life-enhancing recreation and
access to the richest corners of the world's cultures
is rippling through a new classless, tasteful and
educated society. Or, maybe, brain-dead channel
surfing sounds more like "leisure" today.
The
slave-owning philosopher Aristotle, to whom Walker
was of course alluding, felt that this was the key
question in the whole leisure thing. For him, leisure
was not a period of time, but referred to a state
of mind of being free from the need to labour.
Activities in this mental frame should have no
ulterior goals. "We think of it as having in
itself intrinsic pleasure, intrinsic happiness,
intrinsic felicity," he wrote in Politics.
"Happiness of that order does not belong to
occupation: it belongs to those who have
leisure."
Since
the sum of Western ideas are largely footnotes to the
Greeks, attempts by intellectuals at redefinition
have failed to displace this view. By Aristotle's way
of thinking, leisure activities are not so much the
kind of things that were later planned to transform
the power station - often intended to prepare for, or
aid recovery from, the effort of work. Nor was
unemployment a life of leisure - because that was
tainted by fear. In fact, he felt the only real
quality things were music and contemplation.
Sadly,
if you look at "leisure" today, you
discover a quality problem. For instance, although
well over half the population go swimming at some
point each year, it is often an own-time work duty
for fitness and social advantage - the late 20th
century's version of the tin bath in front of the
fire. Alternatively, like the gardening craze, the
meaning of leisure has been turned into little more
than the purchase and consumption of goods.
Tending even a modest back yard is fraught with
extraordinary expenses on equipment, plants and
fertilisers. Britain spends £7m a year on slug
killers alone.
For
all our Greek heritage, nearly every pursuit away
from work has become a frenzy of spending money. As
Christmas shoppers are now being reminded, in order
for the volume of goods and services to be increased,
the other side of the equation - consumption - must
go up accordingly. In this vortex, leisure in
Aristotle's sense is more or less dead time, when
people are neither working nor consuming - doing
nothing from which the controllers of capital can
readily make a profit. Production and "leisure
time" must hold each other tightly, or the dance
will come to an end.
Of
course, the bosses spotted this symmetry before
conceding the eight-hour day - and to fully
appreciate its beauty you need only look at Henry
Ford. Although during Battersea's earliest years, his
employees across the Atlantic toiled like slaves
without the Athens, their wages were considered
progressive for manufacturing and they had enough
hours off each week to enjoy the new "leisure
lifestyle". Time-and-motion experts had long
before found that shortening the day need not reduce
an industry's output. And the first thing the workers
wanted for their precious free time and hard-earned
money was an automobile from Ford. When the man died
in 1947 he was very, very rich.
But
today any charm is leaving the waltz as the music
plays faster and faster. Despite current political
worries about the public's reluctance to spend, in
the longer term consumption must accelerate to foster
growth and profit. Time away from work must more than
ever be exploited ruthlessly with expensive goods and
services - and not just through changing footwear
fashions, or the choice of television stations. We
must fill every vista and orifice with an
exponentially increasing inventory of
investment-intensive produce.
To
sample the horror of what is to come, consider
"leisure" computing, which is opening the
frontier of cyberspace and its potential to be
infinitely consumed. The Mintel market intelligence
company estimates that, despite the recession and
price cuts, sales of computer and video games have
risen from £179m in 1989 to £700m this year. Half
of homes now have the hardware on which to play them.
And, while 15% of people surveyed said that these
games were too violent and 23% said they discouraged
conversation, an incredible 46% said they were addictive
- including nearly half of those aged 15 to 19 and
60% of those in their early 20s, who know all about
such things.
*****
Like
most pursuits, cyberspace games do not require
300-foot chimneys, but looking again at Thatcher's
Battersea hopes: they made a certain sense at the
time. With her grasp of social history, she might
well have spotted its claim to have been a leisure
centre all along - fuelling distant dishwashers and
television sets, at the simple flick of a switch. And
she would have known that for Marxist intellectuals,
mass electrification was seen as a step on the
socialist road. How their defeat must have made her
want to dance around Faraday's memorial stone.
But,
if the political landscape has dramatically changed,
those better-life hopes for the National Grid have a
clear modern parallel. Under the streets around the
old power station, its giant copper cables have been
joined by a new web of fibre-optics. In this
revolutionary network, a single strand as thin as a
hair can carry, at the speed of light, 1,890
simultaneous digital signals - be they telephone
calls, television programmes, computer chat or video
conferences. The information superhighway is being
laid, raising bold visions again.
If
more leisure does not come from this, it is hard to
see at the present time from where it is likely to
spring. As the cables go down, a line is being drawn
through societies all over the world, on one side of
which millions of people will join the information
age. For scores of occupations, from finance, through
every kind of design, marketing, brokering,
scheduling, consulting, educating and entertaining,
the drudgery of fact retrieval, data manipulation and
communication is being lifted miraculously. Working
in stateless service enterprises, their opportunities
to apply their brains will be greater than ever
before.
For
this group, an international infoclass, the future
looks reassuring. What could be conceived that is
further from the grim age of factories and clocked-on
days? With ideas, creativity and decision-making as
the essence of these people's work, many could switch
it to California or the Caribbean and nobody but they
need know. And with current trends extending towards
self-scheduled leisure, their day will be as flexible
as only poets and painters have known, at least since
agrarian times. With such thoughts, these movers and
shakers might feel an Athenian song coming on.
This,
however, is the ultimate deception of capitalism's
modernisation - another elaborate fantasy world that
nobody will ever see. Unlike 18th century shepherds
blowing flutes and watching their flocks, or farmers
tapping mah-jong tiles while they wait for the rice
to ripen, the infoclass will find itself trapped in a
fearsome round-the-clock race. Not for them will be
the life of cheerily hawking their wares to village
neighbours, with modest local competition. They will
be trading in global markets, where their rivals
never sleep.
Here
is not a beginning for leisure; this is where it
ends. A public relations executive in Manchester
loses an account to another in Sydney because he was
taking the kids to school when the Australian made a
pitch. A Cape Town cardiologist is fired by an
Ontario hospital because she took her summer vacation
during its busy winter week. Dozens of publishers in
New York and London are trapped by a prized author in
Nairobi in an instant bidding contest. All
reconfiguring costs and margins against
millisecond-counting clocks.
As
the machines run faster (and processing is currently
doubling in speed about every 18 months) people may
have more theoretical discretion about their work and
recreation time. But the superhighway will favour the
quick, even above the inspired. And as market signals
approach the economists' dream of perfect
knowledge, non-market considerations will come to
count for less. All the small pauses in which leisure
once lived, will be relentlessly squeezed in the Net.
In
this world, time itself will seem to accelerate with
consumption. A trip to the opera, a dinner with
friends or a long night of sex may need to find some
justification in what it brings to the working day.
Will it give access to classical paradigms for use in
an advertising war? Will it create a friendship to
open a door that on-line is stubbornly shut? Will it
release the tension in shoulder muscles caused by
hunching in front of screen?
Many
among the infoclass, of course, will find pleasure in
providing their services - but confusions of labour
and leisure only quickens the pace even more. It is
no new discovery that people toil harder if they have
a sense of purpose, discretion and responsibility.
Even in 1991, the national census showed that a
quarter of corporate executives worked more than 40
hours a week and 7.5% more than 50. This compares
with less than 5% and 0.6% respectively of
more-directed clerical staff.
That
the length of the day is linked to what it entails
is, in fact, one of the most important lessons of the
old eight-hours campaign. Much of that movement's
energy emerged in the 19th century precisely as mill
owners most vigorously assaulted the labourer's
quality of life. As pre-industrial features like
creativity, responsibility and diversity were
eliminated by intensive technologies, so work's
duration diminished - creating the chance for leisure
time. It is another reason for forecasting that, as
the infoclass reclaims those features, its time spent
working will go up and time for leisure will fall.
Those
who will sell Disneyland hamburgers rather than join
this harried class may hope to get off lightly. But
no evidence points to that. As Britain shuts the door
on the industrial age and the last vestiges of
manufacturing move to more appropriate, foreign,
locations, most of those in face-to-face jobs will
feel carved-up as well. If they are spared the
frenetic chase of the infobahn, their jobs will be
pursued no less keenly by those millions who do not
have them. A few doctors, lawyers, teachers and
hands-on technicians may smile, but for most, the
businesses in other people's pleasures may not be a
lot of fun.
It is
hardly surprising that so many Britons have an
inexplicable feeling of fear. Prod a little, as
Thatcher did over tax cuts, and you find that people
know instinctively that, say, the currently rocketing
numbers of part-time, self-employed or short-contract
jobs is not a foretaste of booming leisure, with
microchips for slaves. Even the bosses are in terror
at the prospect of losing their positions - awarding
each other stunning sums of money, just in case of
the worst. But, as with the vast ruined building at
the heart of the capital, the very familiarity of
such issues tends to jade any sense of concern.
Joe
and Joanna Public, however, know that something deep
is happening - and, if you bother to ask them, more
or less what it is. In what must be one of the least
publicised sequences of social questioning ever,
Gallup put to people in April: "There used to be
a lot of talk in politics about a 'class struggle'.
Do you think there is a class struggle in this
country, or not?" Of those surveyed, a startling
78% said "yes there is". This figure was a
rise from 74% in 1984, from 60% in 1974 and from just
48% ten years before that. People may have
interpreted the inquiry differently, but, unusually
for opinion polling, the words stayed the same.
There
is a lot to be debated about the attitude suggested,
but for now it is enough that this fascinating
question may help with the paradox of leisure. In the
1960s, when the poll showed that more than twice as
many people denied there was a class struggle
than do so today, the landscape of life was fertile
ground for personal, high-quality time. And to see
how that can have been: just watch how, say,
inflation trails behind interest rates, or employment
behind public spending. A window of opportunity opens
and then it closes again. Free time became available
before consumption caught up with it - when, for a
brief moment in history, people had hours, days and
weeks that they did not convert straight into
products and services.
That
period, which began in earnest after the war and
partied-on until the end of Edward Heath's government
in 1974, had all the magical pleasure of the
unplanned childhood treat. It was as if in 1945 the
nation had woken up feeling ill, got the day off
school and then mysteriously recovered by about half
past ten. There was no guilt, or fear of punishment.
There was no homework to do and no more would be
coming that night. The afternoon was pure freedom,
even for music or contemplation.
As it
happens, that was when Britain built its welfare
state, but those were also the days, for instance,
when there were twice as many bingo clubs, but less
than half the gaming machines. When students could
claim housing benefits and so often spent the summer
travelling, or just hanging out. When many women had
seen some of the burdens of housework lifted, but
could still choose not to work. When there
were no mobile phones. And when there were not even
four television channels, let alone the home shopping
network, QVC, headquartered by Battersea.
But
then it ended in a miner's strike, an international
oil crisis and economic "stagflation". The
minority administration of Harold Wilson, elected in
February 1974, symbolically marked the moment of
change - and even by the following year, as Britain
voted on the Common Market, everybody sensed that the
days of leisure were firmly in the past. What seems
to us now to be receding ahead had already fallen
behind.
This
was also the time, by one of life's coincidences, of
an event at the power station. Below the
still-smoking chimneys, another curious ceremony was
held, although no knights or deans took part. On 7
February 1974, amid a wave of workers' emotion, the
signal was given from the control room to shut down
No 3. Valves turned away its steam and for the last
time the giant turbo-alternator lost speed and spun
to a halt. In nearly 39 years, it had run for 205,000
hours and generated 14,558 million kilowatt-hours for
the Grid. The station carried on for another nine
years, but this machine was its heart.
It
would be fair to hope that on a winter's night you
could still hear the roar of No 3, and not the thwack
of ghosts playing squash. But when the roads have
calmed and the airport has closed, you cannot find
much in this monument to leisure of what has gone, or
what was planned. You do notice cats and scurrying
rodents, but the most conspicuous sound, every 15
minutes, is from a couple of miles downstream. From a
gothic tower above the "mother of
parliaments" comes the striking of a clock.
| brian deer |
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Brian Deer. All rights reserved. No portion of this
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