The other week I saw Death of a Salesman. Madly I had never seen or read it before. Philip Seymour Hoffman played Willy Loman and Mike Nicols directed (and Meryl Streep was in the audience). As almost all reviewers have noted, and without a doubt most of the audience would have agreed, the play could have been written yesterday (it’s from 1949). But the details that struck me as perhaps most pertinent to today were in relation to building and population growth: Willy complains that his house is “boxed in” by “bricks and windows, windows and bricks.” He laments:

“The street is lined with cars. There’s not a breath of fresh air in the neighborhood. The grass don’t grow any more, and you can’t raise a carrot in the backyard. They should’ve had a law against apartment houses.”

Days after I saw the play I read David Aaronvitch saying:

“Summer announces itself in the traditional way for these parts – with a roar of drills from the property development over the back wall.”

Plus ça change. More people. More houses.

I pride myself on not being a transport bore, but the other day with friends I talked about how when I moved to London in 1998 I could get to or from almost anywhere in 40 minutes. It now almost always takes the best part of an hour. My friends accused me of having always arrived twenty minutes late. Unfair! And not true. I know there are many possible reasons for this, such as the fact that lots of friends lived in shared houses and so could afford to live nearer the tube, and probably the fact that when I lived in Clerkenwell I refused to leave zone one. For now I shall just cite population growth. Transport is usually where we experience the pain of crowding most acutely.

Of course it is apparent other places too. Early in the New Year I went to Tate Modern and had a meltdown: there were so many people. The person I was with tried to match my mood by reminding me of the end of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure – ‘…because we are too menny.’ Happily I wasn’t quite that down about it but I did leave in a hurry. Whether it be in the supermarket, in the library, or simply on the street, there are more people everywhere. I feel it.

But is this really true? A recent article in the New York Times offered:

“Some perspective: As crowded as the city feels at times, the present-day Manhattan population, 1.6 million, is nowhere near what it once was. In 1910, a staggering 2.3 million people crowded the borough, mostly in tenement buildings. It was a time before zoning, when roughly 90,000 windowless rooms were available for rent, and a recent immigrant might share a few hundred square feet with as many as 10 people. At that time, the Lower East Side was one of the most crowded places on the planet, according to demographers. Even as recently as 1950, the Manhattan of “West Side Story” was denser than today, with a population of two million.”

Again, there are multiple considerations that spring to mind when reading this snippet and I’m certain there are many similar things that could be said about London. In excessively general terms, it seems to go in waves.

Last week while walking around the new Tottenham Court Road development I thought about those in the Mayor’s office responsible for calculating the numbers and weight of the people that will use the new Crossrail. The ticket hall will be six times what it was before. That’s a lot. My first instinct was to wonder if we need it. Then I realised we probably do. If not when it opens, not too long afterwards. And then I thought about the waves of people that would come and go through it over the course of my lifetime, and over the course of its lifetime.

Since the brilliant Tony Chakar first introduced me to it in 2010, I am time and again reminded of Fellini’s 1972 film Roma. Firstly I think of the scene in which while boring to make the metro they stumble upon ancient Roman rooms and near-perfect frescos oxidise before their eyes. Secondly I think about the scene with Gore Vidal, installed in a restaurant, talking about layers of living, life on top of death:

“Well, you ask me why an American writer would want to live in Rome. First of all, because I like the Romans. They don’t give a damn whether you’re dead or alive. They’re neutral, like the cats! Rome is the city of illusions. Not by chance, you have here the government, the church, the cinema. They each produce illusions, like you do and like I do. We’re getting closer and closer to the end of the world because of too many people, too many cars, poisons. And what better city than Rome, which has been reborn so often? What place could be more peaceful to wait for the end from pollution and overpopulation? It’s the ideal city for waiting to see if it really will come to an end or not.”

(Does it matter that it’s Rome? Afterall, Vidal now lives in Los Angeles.)

Overall I’m driven to say this is all a question of psychology. As much as there might be a science behind urban planning, ultimately, if we’re lucky enough to be able to, when it comes to city living we each have to determine a personal balance between compromise and desire, to decide what we will or won’t put up with. For my part, after almost 15 years living in the capital, though most of the time I love it, I’m keen to check I’m not the frog that is killed by water heating up around it. And that is one of the reasons why I am going away for the summer…