The Future Names Of London

Here in Canada, there are a lot of places named after other places. London, Ontario, is probably the most famous, but also within a short drive of my home, you can visit Paris, Stratford, New Hamburg, Vienna, Cambridge, and Delhi. I’ve always found these weird. First, from a standpoint of culture: a borrowed name means that the identity of your place is tangled up in some other place. And secondly, from a standpoint of convenience: you’re forever saying, “I’m from London…no, not that London.”

But of course, that’s looking at it from my perspective in a country where many people live in settlements named for other, much older and more famous settlements elsewhere. It occurred to me recently to wonder at the mentality of those people who gave these sites their names in the first place. For each of those places, somebody thought it was a good idea to give it an already-used, already-famous name. I can’t really imagine what would make a person think that’s a good idea.

First of all, what inspired the names? Some British settler came across a small encampment in the middle of a forest and said, “You know what this reminds me of? London!” I suppose you could say that the name is more of an inspiration: they’re not saying it’s like London, but that it aspires to be like London. But still, that’s kind of setting it up for disappointment. Surely they’d give it a more attainable goal. I don't know, Sheffield? 

It seems a little odd today to call a city of half-a-million by the name of one of Europe’s largest cities, but how did folks in the early years call this collection of houses, “London,” with a straight face? As an early English settler in southern Ontario, you know London as this huge city, and now you’re using the name to refer to a little hamlet. “I will journey to London on the morrow. By Jove, I would that there existed some manor of hand-gesture to indicate that one uses a name of such ridiculousness with a sense of reluctance, as if it were in quotes.”

Secondly, why do they reuse the name exactly, without any changes? I mean, I can understand calling it “New” something. You know, don't confuse us with York; this is New York. Then you’re paying tribute while giving it individuality, and you’re explicitly saying it’s a new version of that old place. The Americans have plenty of “New” places, but Canada doesn’t have many, we prefer just reusing names. So in addition to not understanding why that old explorer decided to associate the rudimentary settlement with the grandest city of his homeland, I also don’t understand why he felt no need to distinguish it from its namesake. 

I guess there's a parallel with people's names: we often name people with the same name as a parent. But then we invented the word, “junior” to avoid confusion. Reusing place names is like naming a kid after his father but insisting that you not call him junior. Who would do that? 

“I’m Frank, and this is my son, Frank.”

“Ah! Frank Junior.”

“No! Frank!”

Then, years later, the kid introduces himself, "I'm Frank, no, not that Frank."

But here's another way of looking at this: To better get inside the head of those early place-namers, let’s say we Canadians were exploring space. We’re colonizing a new planet, and we’ve just established a settlement. It’s only three habitation pods and a greenhouse, but we then say, “And we’ll call it, Toronto.” Okay, that’s a bad example, Canadians wouldn’t feel right naming things after ourselves — we’d probably just name that settlement, “London.” 

So let’s say it’s the Americans establishing a space colony, and they have to come up with a name. They wouldn’t use New York, since that’s already a borrowed name. But would they call their new settlement something like, “Los Angeles” or, “Chicago?” I can’t imagine that, since those names have — for both good and bad — a lot of emotional connotations. They wouldn't feel right calling a place “Chicago” when it doesn’t have L trains, disappointing baseball teams and ketchup-less hot dogs. They’d either fall back on generic American names (Columbia, Freedom, Liberty) or name it after a person. Which brings up the question: how could you journey across the Atlantic and half of North America — in the eighteenth century — without anyone in your party doing something that deserved getting a small town named after them?

"So I'm from London...No, not that London. How about you? "

"I'm from Pickles The Ship's Cat. It's a long story."

London Stalling

I've mentioned before that I'm amused at the differences between my own Kitchener-Waterloo and London, Ontario. Both are similar size and close together, yet there remain distinct differences. We're seeing some of those differences played out right now, as both communities are going though the process of building new transit systems, with KW building the "Ion" Light Rail system, and London planning a Bus Rapid Transit (buses in dedicated lanes) system. They're at very different stages, though. London is still in the planning, while KW's is nearly finished.

We should keep in mind that when it comes to transit, KW has an unfair advantage: it's several communities that have grown into one (a conurbation, as the urban planers call it) so it's evolved into a long, thin community with a few urban areas more or less lined-up. Thus, it's always been fairly obvious how a single transit line would link the community.

London, on the other hand, has a layout that's more typical of Canadian cities: a small urban core, with lots of suburbs stretching off in all directions. So it's not immediately clear how transit lines can serve the whole city. They've gone for two lines; one in an "L" shape, and the other in a "7" shape, with the two "corners" meeting at the centre.

Looking back at our effort to get the system built, I have to say that I'm amazed at how easy it was. I know some people would be furious at hearing it called "easy", but stepping back and seeing that we accomplished this in an unprecedentedly-small, largely-suburban community in a time of constrained budgets, all in about a decade with no major roadblocks, that's pretty impressive.

London's plan has run into some problems. I'm not that familiar with the project, but what I find disturbing is that two big opposition groups are downtown businesses and property developers. That's troubling because they should be leading proponents: the system would bring more people downtown, and raise the value of land near stations. One has to wonder which groups are going to push the proposal forward if these two groups are not on side.

And although it's still early in the process with no shovels yet in the ground, setbacks now could cause an avalanche of problems: Submissions have already been made for approval and grants from higher levels of government, and changes to the plan would mean re-submitting and starting the process over. At best, that would introduce a year of delays; at worst, it would mean they'd be applying for massive public transit grants from a new Conservative government.

I'd like to claim that the difference in the two communities' experiences is the result of our being a little more forward-thinking and open-minded, but I don't think that explains it. We in KW have a kind of benevolent apathy towards civic government. Sure, people complain about local government, but they don't do anything about it. That seems unusual these days. In other communities, the voters periodically elect a human tantrum, while we just rubber-stamp the same folks over and over.

And that's the approach we've taken towards transit too. You heard people complain, but it never developed into anything meaningful. There were a few attempts at mounting political movements against it, but they didn't seem to get the quality personnel behind it, and they didn't really threaten incumbent councilors and mayors. Ultimately, it was hard for opponents to gain traction when the politicians supporting the LRT plan kept getting elected.

In contrast, complaints about London's transit plan have reached a critical mass that will make it hard to continue. I mean mass in a more literal sense, seeing as the latest meeting took place at Budweiser Gardens, the city's hockey arena. While attendance was nowhere near the venue's 9,000 seat capacity, it's still a far cry from the community centre spare rooms where Waterloo's transit meetings took place.

But it's also reached a critical emotional mass, which will be a big problem for proponents. An idea like this inspires some, terrifies others, but leaves most with a mixture of reactions: neither good nor bad enough to act. Something like that might pass if the support is passionate enough, since there are only a few who will fight it. But if you get just enough emphasis on the downsides, you push the conflicted majority onto the no side, or at least, onto the skeptical side. And for a big project like this, skepticism is enough to sink it.

In London, opposition is large and well organized, and has taken the initiative. Aspiring politicians are seeing it as a route to the top. Again, this has roots in the particular politics of the city; While Kitchener and Waterloo's civic politics are relatively quiet, London has been very antagonistic and divided for a while now. An expensive and highly-visible issue is the perfect situation to bring out more rancor. At this point, even if they get a good number of politicians on the pro side, I’m guessing both sides will dig in enough that the issue will stagnate.

9 Represent

You occasionally hear places described by their area codes. For instance, Toronto's satellite communities are often collectively called, "the 905." Toronto's original area code was 416, and it has since added a second one that I can't remember, but it apparently has a six in it, so Drake had decreed that henceforth, Toronto shall be known as, "The 6."

But outside of Toronto's cultural currents, the numbers don't come up much. For instance, I've lived my whole life in the 519 area, yet those digits just sit in my phone's contact list doing nothing.

Until now, that is. I've heard the evening news refer to the 519 region a few times as shorthand for Southwestern Ontario. I suspect it's just because in our world of consolidated local news, it's a convenient way of using the same report on CTV's London and Kitchener stations without anyone noticing.

But it actually makes some sense. After all, the 905 and 416 may be at each other's throats in elections, but they really have a lot in common. The 519 is really more distinct culturally and economically. Yes, I hate allying with our rivals in London (the Knights are going down in the playoffs!) But there I go: we both care about junior hockey, while the GTA shows little interest. That settles it: Shad, as the foremost hip-hop artist in the 519 region, it falls to you to popularize the region as, "The 9."

London Mauling

A few days ago the people of London, Ontario got rather upset over an article published on line.  Wait, "upset" doesn't seem like the right word.  What do you call that feeling when, after years of anonymity, someone says something mildly bad about you, and you're not sure if you are glad about the recognition, or angry at the insult?  There probably isn't a word for it, since it's only experienced by introverts and Canadians.

Anyway, the mildly bad thing was an article titled, "10 Problems Only People From London Ontario Will Understand" at the website WhatCulture (a Buzzfeed wannabe.) Of course, as a resident of nearby, similarly-sized Kitchener-Waterloo, I wanted headed straight for the list as soon as I heard about it.

The main thing that strikes me upon reading it is that it’s not exactly a hard-hitting list. You’d think a genuinely critical shot at London would include its notorious east-west class divide. (We in Kitchener-Waterloo at least have the decency to maintain our archaic two-city setup to make our class divides less obvious.) Most of the items in this list apply to all of Southern Ontario, if not all of Canada.  Really, cross-border shopping is inconvenient?  How about "your newspaper makes Fox News sound neutral"?

The only one that applies specifically to London is the shot at its unoriginal name. I totally agree, but I realize that naming your city after a more famous place is one of those things that makes sense to Canadians, but that I’ll never understand. It’s right up there with the monarchy, Don Cherry, and Hedley. You might think that the London name is just a matter of tradition, but here in Kitchener - where we dodged the same bullet by dumping the name “Berlin” during WWI - there’s still a significant part of the population that wants to go back to the Berlin name, despite London’s teachable example.

I was going to write a list of legitimate bad things about London, but I don't have enough venom. One of the entries was going to be that you couldn’t make a list of top ten tourist attractions without padding it out by including White Oaks Mall. But then I realized that to pad my list out to ten entries, I would have to add something about how hard it is to find your way around White Oaks Mall.

But I do have to take issue with the part about the embarrassment of former mayor Joe Fontana.  For one thing, it was hard for anyone in Canada outside of Toronto to be embarrassed of their mayor over that time period.  But my problem is that the article makes it sound like he was a good mayor who made one perplexing mistake. It even says "he was able to get some things done". Actually, if his term is known for anything other than scandal, it will be for U.S. Congress-style division and paralysis in city council.