By Colin Wiles

Given the general gloom surrounding social housing, I thought I’d instead write this week about a film. The last time I did this was eight years ago when I discussed one of the best housing films of all time for Inside Housing – It’s a Wonderful Life. This time, it’s about Living starring Bill Nighy. Inspired by Kurosawa’s Ikiru, and with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s deeper and darker than Wonderful Life and tells the tale of a man who, told he has terminal cancer, decides to leave a mark on the world.

It’s 1953 and London is rebuilding after the war. The cinematography perfectly captures the dark streets, the bomb sites and the rationing. Evocative footage of the period is skilfully blended in. Bill Nighy plays the aloof and silent Mr Williams, a section head in the Public Works Department of the London County Council. Each day he takes the train with his bowler-hatted colleagues from Esher to Waterloo, then takes a short walk to County Hall. There they sit facing each other at desks laden with files that are symbols of inaction and delay. Each desk has a set of wire trays marked In, Out and Pending.

A group of “ladies” regularly visits County Hall to press the case for a playground to be built on a bomb-site in Stepney. They are passed from one department to the next and their application ends up in Mr Williams’ Pending tray. “We can keep it here for now,” he says. “It’ll do no harm.”

One day he leaves work early for a doctor’s visit and is given a terminal diagnosis. He goes to Brighton, intending to take his life, but meets a lively drunk who shows him the town and brings him back to life. He exchanges his bowler hat for a more rakish trilby, returns to County Hall and announces to his team that they’re going to Stepney. “The District Line and a short walk”. He takes up the playground scheme and relentlessly pushes it through the Byzantine bureaucracy of County Hall. When one colleague in the planning department gives a vague answer about dealing with the application, Mr Williams pulls up a chair and announces that he will wait there until it’s dealt with. He even begs the whisky-drinking chairman of the LCC to approve the scheme.

And then he dies.

But in flashback we see that the playground has indeed been built and it’s improved the lives of people in the area. The “ladies” revere Mr Williams as a God-like figure. His colleagues pledge to follow Williams’ example and to “get things done” but they seem to disagree about his role in the playground project and soon they’re sucked back into their bureaucratic straitjackets. Files end up back in the Pending tray. It seems to be easier than making a decision.

There’s a couple of sub-plots, but that’s the gist of the story.

I have a particular interest in this film because in the early eighties I used to go to meetings in County Hall. It’s a magnificent Edwardian municipal building that was swept away by the Thatcher government when she abolished the LCC’s successor, the Greater London County Council, in 1986. Now it contains a mish-mash of different uses. I worked then in the housing department in Camden and the piles of files, the wire baskets, the hand-written memos and reports, the obfuscations and delays, and the typing pool are all familiar to me, as is the fact that almost everyone in Mr Williams’ office smokes. Many people at Camden smoked back then. In fact, I used to smoke on the underground. I descended the Piccadilly Line escalator at Kings Cross on the evening of 18 November 1987 about an hour before the tragic fire started that killed 31 people. Smoking on trains and stations was then banned. But four years’ earlier I was a NALGO steward at Camden when I put forward a motion to ban smoking in the office. It made me very unpopular, especially among the men in M&E who all chain smoked. It seems incredible now, but that was how it was then. The past is another country.

Anyway to return to Living. Ishiguro probably offers up a rather unfair and misleading portrayal of the London County Council because it transformed London between 1889 and 1965, building infrastructure, schools, public buildings and thousands of homes, not least some of London’s finest estates such as the Boundary and the Millbank estates. In the decade around when the film was set, around half of all homes built in London were council housing, with 44,000 homes being built between 1945 and 1949 alone. This spirit of municipal achievement continued well into the 70s. When I joined Camden in 1978, they were building 3,000 council homes a year. Within a year of the 1979 election that all came to an end, for ever in most cases.

But the key themes of Living are eternal, for me at least. It’s all too easy for all of us to be sucked onto the bureaucratic hamster wheel, too easy to hide behind rules and regulations, too easy to say ‘No’, too easy to opt for a quiet life, too easy to pass the buck, too easy to assume that someone else is responsible (a key theme of the Grenfell inquiry), and too easy to do nothing instead of something. What Living shows is that real leadership comes from those who have the courage to break out of this straitjacket, to take responsibility, to refuse to take ‘No’ for an answer, to confront useless bureaucracy and to ‘get things done’. It’s a great film and I recommend that you see it.

Let’s hope that we don’t wait for a terminal diagnosis before following Mr Williams’ example. “The District Line and a short walk”.