BANK — The city’s official dialect has three soothing nouns. Service. Process. Postcode. Each one can appear on a document while the useful thing — a train, a permission, a room that fits a bed — stays optional.
TfL can print “good service” under a list of everything going wrong because good service, in the local sense, means the delay has not yet filed the correct paperwork to be called severe. Planning can print “process” across a wait that can last 25 years because process, in the local sense, means somebody is still allowed to object. Lettings can print a £2,280 postcode because the postcode, in the local sense, is the product. The radiator is a courtesy. Walls may be included on the premium plan.
Put the three nouns in one week and you have the London offer. Pay almost a professional salary not to sleep outdoors. Ride toward the office on a line that is part suspended, part closed and experiencing minor delays, which is the transport equivalent of a cough, a broken leg and low confidence. Wait for the scheme that would have put more people inside Zone 2, currently stalled while a committee decides whether a shadow on a neighbour’s patio is a human-rights issue.
This is expensive even when it “works.” It is surreal when it does not. You can do everything right — references, Oyster, patience — and still be told that arriving on the same date is the ambitious target. You can attend every consultation and still be told the homes are forthcoming. Forthcoming is the planning version of minor delays. It covers everything short of an actual key.
The satire writes itself only because the institutions keep handing it the pen. Nobody needs to invent the packed viewing, the vanished train, or the application that has outlived three housing ministers. They are the furniture. What needs saying is that they interlock. Slow planning permission keeps rents elevated. Elevated rents keep commuters on a fragile network. A fragile network makes the expensive postcode feel even more like a hostage situation with better coffee.
A grown-up prospectus would drop the three nouns and use verbs. Build. Run. House. Until then, London will keep selling good service on the lines that have not yet complained, good process to anyone who can wait a generation, and a good postcode to anyone still able to transfer the salary. The rest of us will change at Whitechapel and try not to make eye contact. The city prefers it that way.
The real story behind the satire: Official language inflates as capacity tightens — on rails, in planning committees, and in the lettings market documented at £2,280 a month.