My Lord Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I was very pleased to read this report, which doesn't mean that I endorse everything in it, but it means that we share the same aims and objectives and very many of the same methods.
We should feel immensely proud in our capital city. It is a marvellous capital, it's a living capital. It's not one of those artificial capitals which just has government and diplomacy. It grew up with thriving commerce, finance, industry, new ideas, very discriminating people who built some of our most marvellous buildings—lovely Georgian squares, wonderful development. I should also say that although I am in the presence of many developers we owe quite a lot to people who withheld their land to development so that we may now enjoy very beautiful parks. But of course that is something which we do profit from. I don't think we fully appreciate how fortunate we are with the number of open spaces that we enjoy in London, because of the mixture of the supreme development and those who said no we will withhold this in order to get our marvellous parks. Fortunate again, because the people who over the centuries built this city didn't start with houses, commerce, finance and industry. They used the profits from those things also to set up marvellous museums and art galleries. This was fortunate. Wonderful orchestras, theatres and music. We really have every single thing in London that makes a city. And now of course it is constantly having new ideas, whether it be in the commerce, whether it be in industry, whether it be in artistic [word missing]. Its alive, it is still growing. We are fortunate too that quite a long time ago people had the wisdom to stop urban sprawl and said we will have a green belt policy—that has served us very well indeed. So here we are with a capital of which we should be immensely proud and which is steadily revivifying its whole life.
Now let me tell you of two incidents to illustrate the point I wish to make. Opposite the end of Downing Street, No. 10 Downing Street, the other side of Whitehall, are a number [end p1] of buildings and for a very long time after I had come to No. 10 Downing Street, opposite this, there is a building now known as Richmond Terrace. It was encased in polythene and I had assumed that a lot of work was going on under that polythene. I came back from a European Council one day, from the Hague. I looked at the beauties of that city, the splendour, the distinction and grandeur of the buildings; how marvellously they were maintained. But as we came back we swung into No. 10 Downing Street and I thought I wonder when that building is going to be complete. I called in Nicholas Ridleythe Secretary of the State for the Environment and very gently said—[laughter] very gently, “Tell me, when is Richmond Terrace going to be completed? It's had its jacket on for about three years. You must have nearly completed everything going on.” He said, “Nothing's going on, nothing's going on, it's just put in mothballs in its polythene jacket.” . I said, “That simply will not do for the centre of a capital city. Now just get on with it straight away. As First Lord of Treasury I simply cannot have that.” Well, now you know yourselves we really have a lovely building which is a blend of the original Georgian and of architecture which fits in with it. And I said one [word missing] about it, “Look down the whole of the other side of Whitehall between here and Parliament Square, because that too is a disgrace.” And I did that because I felt it wasn't right for our capital city, with so many visitors, to have that kind of shabby badly maintained building without doing something about it. The work still continues, but we have steadily completed Richmond Terrace and cleaned up the front and decided to keep the old tradition going down to Parliament Square and rebuild more modern facilities behind it. Now that was the outward and visible sign of something when we had to give attention to the buildings and where I felt that other people were being prouder of their capital than we were, and maintaining it better than we were. [end p2]
The other thing which I wanted to draw to your attention is so relevant of so much that comes out in this particular booklet “The New Look for London” . I went to inaugurate the new international flower exhibitions, and the first one we had was in Liverpool. And it was in Liverpool because we felt that Liverpool needed a lift—it needed a morale booster. And so we would have the first international flower festival there. And as you know, we have them because we put them on land which has had to be recovered, it's had to have all the services [word missing] and before we go to development we say, right we'll have a flower festival and then we'll retain half of the open space and the rest will be developed. As I visited there, I wondered what I would find. The buildings were absolutely marvellous, it was full of people, the flower beds were lovely, the design was superb. The thing which struck me—I looked around and said, “It's marvellously clean. There's not a single piece of litter.” Of course coming from London you notice things. “Now how have you done it?” Now what they told me was extremely interesting. They said that “We have a lot of people going to clear up the litter.” I said “If it's cleared up don't people just throw it down because it's going to be cleared up?” “No,” they said. “We cleared up the litter and any graffiti, and we went on clearing and we went on clearing the graffiti. And we found that very soon, because it was clean, no more [word missing] were throwing out their litter and there wasn't any more graffiti.” Now that in a way was the opposite to what I had expected. But it just shows you this psychology that when we do make tremendous efforts to get things clean and well presented everyone feels an innate pride and they start themselves to keep it well because they don't want to let the side down.
Now, my Lord Chairman, you have said there have been times when I blew my top about the state of our streets and I still do. And I wonder how much further we can get by exhortation. Because in some areas it plainly isn't working. I went recently [word missing] local authorities, businesses and ordinary people and said “You're doing so much for the community with business in the [end p3] community, [words missing], would it be too much to ask that all commercial buildings, whether offices, shops or industry, took over the obligation to keep the front of their building clean and the pavement outside their building clean?” And they certainly don't want those ghastly black polythene bags full of rubbish outside, for them to be kicked over. Because really it's no good talking about building new buildings, building new social facilities, talking either about the greenhouse effect, about the ozone layer, about the problems of the environment up there, if we ignore the environment down here. And there is so much that we can do. This is what [words missing]. Yes, of course we have to create our own characteristic architecture, and I believe we are beginning to do that, of this period. Because I said previously, just as we had architecture from a different period, characteristic of the period handed down, so we have to create the best architecture of our period to hand down to other people. And we also have the very ordinary things of life to attend to. I've been delighted with the extra attention given to design, whether it's design of lamp-posts, design of drains, design of—every single thing matters in design. We must have the best and it makes so much difference to the streets. We still have to tackle this problem of litter. To some places that don't get it at all, the pride is there. In others we do. And we still have to make certain that they're going to get rid of it. And I do ask business to take a view, because sometimes we have so much packaging that people will come out of shops or restaurants or take-aways and just throw the stuff down. It doesn't matter how many notices we put in a park, it's astonishing how they throw the stuff down. Now we again have to clear it up and clear the graffiti, and hope that the magic recipe will work with us that when it's clean people will keep it clean, so that we too can once again be very very proud of our city. We haven't sold London pride, do remember it [word missing] war time days [word missing] “London pride has been handed down to us, London pride is [a flower that's free” ] We have a very thriving, [word missing] enterprising, artistic, musical, marvellous city. We have a people who are passionately interested [end p4] in the environment, whether it be the global environment, whether it be the trees, whether it be the birds, whether it be the ecological chain—animals, flora, and fauna. We have this one other thing to tackle, we must all tackle it together. I hope voluntarily, if not we shall have to bring in some further legislation because people haven't a conscience.
Ladies and Gentleman, we have a marvellous city and I hope that at the end of our leasehold of life we shall be able to pass on at least to the next generation in better condition than we received it in our [own?].