Ivonne, it's certainly feasible - but not for the whole of London, as Lucille and you point out, London is much bigger than Paris. But even there the idea is to think of the city as being made up of a number of villages, and even more so in London. After all, as the city expanded it absorbed a series of villages: Hampstead, Ealing, Fulham etc. In The Woman in White, Marian Halcombe, Laura Fairlie and Walter Hartright travel out to the village of Fulham at one point in the book, considering it a holiday destination.As for people who live the country and work in the city, one of the things we've seen in the lockdown is that many many people can work from home with only very occasional trips into town. Of course this applies to people who work in offices not in factories or in building work and maintenance, for example. But it's so wasteful for people to spend two or even four hours a day travelling in to work: people commute into London from Peterborough, Portsmouth and even further out places, and that's madness.Simon Kuper, in a column in the FT weekend magazine, quotes the historian John Dower, as saying in the context of achieving democratic change in Japan after the Second World War, that "There are moments in history - fleeting occasions of opportunity - when people actually sit down and ask: 'What is a good society? How can we bring this about?'" We had just such an opportunity in the coronavirus crisis to do exactly that, but our dismal government could neither see the opportunity nor, if it had, would have had the wit to think more deeply than simply returning things to as they were. What a terrible, missed chance actually to do something imaginative and good! But they haven't, and Wandsworth, with their usual dismal foot-dragging, have been even worse.
Richard Carter ● 2304d