SO IT’S official — I am Public Enemy Number One. I’m already “Britain’s worst mother” (Daily Mail) and “85th most hated Briton” (Channel 4). This new accolade nevertheless gives me a warm, snuggly glow all the way through, a bit like the kid in the old Ready Brek ad. Mmm, I love the smell of name-calling in the morning!
What have I done to deserve this? Sign an agreement to sell my house. In Hove. Seems pretty tame stuff, doesn’t it? But here’s the rub — I have had the audacity to sell my detached, six-bedroom, 1920s pile (Will Self once described it as looking as if it belonged to a stockbroker — until you got inside, clocked the Schiaparelli pink walls, animal-print furniture and Soviet statuary, and decided that is must belong to the only gay Communist stockbroker in Sussex) not to a fellow white, affluent Hovian but to a developer.
Yes, a hand-rubbing, money-grubbing cosmopolitan who probably doesn’t have a hanging basket to his name. And his name alone — Adrian Black, of Totem Architecture, if you’re asking — evokes visions of flinty-eyed wheeler-dealers straight out of Howards’ Way. This wicked man’s heinous crime is planning to provide homes for more than 100 people where currently only a handful roost, 40 per cent of them to be key workers on low incomes. As for me, selling myself to the highest bidder — who has bid roughly twice the actual market value of the house — well, I obviously put the “ho” in Hove.
I love Hove, even if Hove doesn’t love me at the moment, and I am sorry to be the cause of even more dissent within its well-ordered streets. But the problem is somewhat bigger than me and my backyard. A few years back there was a much- resented merger of the side-by-seaside towns of Brighton and Hove, which is now officially the City of Brighton & Hove — well, when I say resented, resented by many Hovians. It’s fair to say that Brightonians didn’t pay it an awful lot of mind — their collective thoughts were probably on more pressing matters, such as what a perfectly vile hangover they had, or that divine little number they had a hot date with tonight. This is admittedly a typical Hovian view of Brightonians, but there is a basis in truth; it’s as if the suburb which the Monkees sang about in Pleasant Valley Sunday had been slapped down bang next to Sodom and Gomorrah.
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Brighton is a big, brassy broad of a town, even with the recent attempts by the lamebrain council to reposition it as a fully-fledged, if far-flung, branch of Euro-portion café society, and, as they say, nothing grows in the shade. Anything that touches it comes away smelling of it, and thus not only Hove but even the more westerly towns of Southwick, Portslade and Shoreham (where Norman Cook, so identified as a Brightonian, actually lives) have been swallowed up by the magnificent beast — you might be led to believe that Brighton stretches all the way to Worthing these days. This has led Hove in particular to glory in a sort of negative identity vis à vis Brighton; Brighton young/Hove old, Brighton gay/Hove straight, Brighton hell-raising/Hove basket-hanging.
Buildings are a battlefield, too, with Brighton’s colourful mixture of Regency beauties and modernistic tower blocks seen by Hovians as a sure sign of decadence. In response, the more uptight among them have for some time been opposing the demolition of the most ordinary or even ugly houses — “family houses”, as they are always creepily called by their defenders, in order to differentiate them from gay flats and bestial bedsits, one presumes — so that flats may be built on the sites. Brighton & Hove’s housing shortage is horrific, and responses to it so far have been ostrich-like to say the least. The most shameful comment I’ve heard yet came interestingly from a gay, Labour-voting, self-appointed spokesman for the city, who you’d think might know better; when asked where all the underpaid and over-worked nurses and teachers were going to live now that rich London media arrivistes such as him and myself had driven house prices up so drastically, he replied: ‘Put them all in Worthing and build a monorail!’
In their own way, by opposing plans to knock down underoccupied detached houses and replace them with affordable flats, the Horrifieds of Hove who are currently having kittens over my good fortune are showing similar contempt and disregard for the people who work so hard to keep society civilised — as opposed to simply chatter, scribble or carp for a living. One of the arguments against development is that it will destroy “community” — maybe I’m being dewy-eyed here, but wouldn’t any community worthy of the name bend over backwards to welcome nurses, teachers, firefighters and the like into it, and wouldn’t any community be enriched by the presence of such people? Sadly, I feel that often when the word “community” is wielded like a weapon, it usually indicates little more than boorish big-mouths with an axe to grind and not a leg to stand on — be they burning books in Bradford or having hissy fits in Hove.
As one caller to a local radio show said in support of me, “These people who talk about community being destroyed don’t know the meaning of the word. They don’t want to be part of a community — they want to sit smugly in their big houses at the end of their long driveways watching the price of their properties go up.”
Teachers and nurses said that they were delighted at the prospect of affordable housing in the neighbourhood; conservationists said that it was far better to build new homes on existing sites than to destroy vast swaths of the South East’s downs and woodland.
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It’s not just me being me — “if it ain’t broke, break it!” has long been my motto, after all. My neighbours on both sides, with whom I have always had the most cordial of relations, are two charming older ladies and a delightful young family with triplets, no less. They are hardly posses of wild-eyed, money-grabbing anarchists, either of them. But like me, they believe that home is where the heart is, that moving on is part of being alive and kicking rather than dead and buried, and that an overly developed attachment to mere bricks and mortar is actually really rather sad. I have had some brilliant times with my husband and with my friends within these walls, but I see no reason why fun should not be equally forthcoming in a place with a different postcode.
Let’s all have a bit of fun with this dispute, is my suggestion. Let five of the most vociferous protesters volunteer to be wired up to a lie detector machine — a proper police-approved one, mind you, not a toy one! — and then be asked whether or not they would sell their houses to a developer for twice their market value. If three prove me wrong, I promise to give a good-sized donation to the KEEP HOVE NOT HORRID campaign. And just for laffs, I’ll even put up a hanging basket for a day. If they lose, they have to recite Modernist poetry and snog a member of their own sex. How about it, Horrified of Hove?