“In what may well be one of the last utilitarian bean-counting exercises performed by New Labour, the Department of Communities and Local Government has reported the results of its latest ‘Place Survey’. This is a comprehensive look at how satisfied Britons are with where they live.

“You and I might well imagine such activity should be confined to the Ministry of Stating the Bleeding Obvious but why make things easy when you can generate great mounds of paper and waste the time of a great many people and the money of a great many taxpayers to discover that, lo! The inhabitants of leafy Richmond upon Thames report an approval rating of 92.4 per cent.

“This made Richmondians only the second happiest bunch in the country, beaten by the nabobs of the Square Mile but that hasn’t stopped the Westside posse declaring victory, on the grounds that the 10,000 City of London residents are a statistically insignificant sample.

“So, London boasts the most satisfied residents in the land but also, doh! the least: the inhabitants of two-stops-short-of-Dagenham (they’re Barking), and Dagenham itself, have recorded a meagre 56.5 per cent approval rating for their own riverside manors; which may, it’s fair to say, find themselves in the Thames, rather than upon it, if the world keeps getting hotter.

“Being a Stockwell resident and while not exactly miserable, certainly not brimming over with the joys of life, I decided to go west for a day to find the secret of the Richmondians’ inner peace.”

To read the rest of this article, visit here.

“I love London — don’t get me wrong; but it’s a love that’s only the positive pole of a quite profound ambivalence. I think all of us can agree that there are times when the sheer size and weight of the city closes in on us — a vice of bricks, mortar, concrete and steel. For this reason I’ve never liked living in those districts of the city that have no natural features at all. This isn’t too much of a problem, for London — being in a river valley — abounds in hills and rises.

“Perhaps the most London-locked time I ever experienced was when I had a house in Shepherd’s Bush, and then latterly on the fringes of Notting Hill. True, I could get a prospect from the top of Ladbroke Grove — but it was only of more Ladbroke Grove; if I wanted any sense of relief — in both senses — I had to walk to the western edge of Wormwood Scrubs, from which corner of the urban veldt the towers and trees of Campden Hill appeared as a distant oasis.

“For the past decade, however, I’ve been in Stockwell, and while a trip along Wandsworth Road to Clapham Junction offers some vistas, the most prominent natural feature hereabouts is the daddy of ’em all — Old Father Thames. No matter how claustrophobic I may feel, a stroll along the embankments never fails to reposition me in a world that’s as natural as a cormorant scudding across its empurpled wavelets rather than as artificial as a red-faced Cabinet minister tendering his resignation.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s psychogeographic walk along the Thames with his nephew Jack, here.

“I suppose that for those of us who make some of our living from writing about fictional dystopias, rather than utopias, the hysterical reaction to the news that Dr Karim Nayernia and his team at Newcastle University claim to have ‘created’ human sperm in the laboratory can only be a good thing.

“It’s gratifying that in the 77 years since Aldous Huxley published Brave New World his vision of a future in which humans are produced in assembly-line laboratories, according to predetermined characteristics — physical, intellectual and emotional — still remains so deeply embedded in the popular consciousness.

“Of course, I may be kidding myself here, and it’s not Huxley’s inspired — if a trifle didactic — satire that makes so many people so suspicious of assisted reproduction techniques but some sci-fi Z-movie with a title such as Mad Lesbian Scientists Destroy all Men.

“Because to read the lubricious versions of Dr Nayernia’s paper about his work in the press (it was published initially in the drier-sounding journal Stem Cell and Development), it is but a short wriggle from achieving successful spermatogenesis in the lab to the annihilation of anything human that has — in our charming cockney colloquialism — meat ‘n’ two veg.”

To read the rest of this article, visit the Evening Standard website here.

Feature article in the Evening Standard about the tension between black-cab drivers and mini-cab drivers as the recession bites.

“An American travel website is warning travellers off our fair city on the grounds that it’s ‘dirty’ and the cuisine isn’t all it might be. While it isn’t usually my style to enter this sort of fray – I am, after all, a dual citizen – I feel I must speak out.

“I know I’m not alone in thinking that the boom years led London to have a somewhat bloated self-image: we began to think in terms of the City traders’ bunce; if we were property-owners, we fell prey to the delusion that money in bricks and mortar was also cash in the bank; we ignored the widening gulf between rich and poor.

“But while all of this may be true, we never lost our sense of integrity or civic pride. London was the first of the world cities – and it remains one of the greatest. I’ve travelled extensively in the States and while there are some cities that indisputably have a character of their own, for every San Francisco or New York there is a Dallas: a plantation of homogenous skyscrapers and shopping malls that, for sheer blandness, makes Basingstoke look like Baghdad.”

Read the rest of Self’s Evening Standard column here.