Boris Johnson is waging war on our city’s subversive south

This spring no fewer than five crossings are to close, a sure sign of revolution in the air. South London must have had enough and is on the brink of independence. The Mayor, Boris Johnson, means to seal it off.

The closures are strategically significant. Hammersmith Bridge is to shut completely at weekends through the spring. Albert Bridge is to close altogether for at least a year. Battersea Bridge southern approach will shut off- peak until October. Waterloo Bridge is down to one lane for a year. And anyone who thinks they can sneak round east will find Blackwall Tunnel closed southbound indefinitely. All other access points will be jammed. South London is to become Britain's Gaza Strip.

All true Londoners have a south London past. There they experienced their first flat, their first date, their first taste of city life, with nothing too exotic. They dallied in Clapham, flirted with Dulwich, tested their mortgage muscle on Stockwell. (I lived awhile in Upper Norwood.) South London is the kind of place, as was said of George Bush, that "reminds every woman of her first husband".

In a wider sense, south London is a provincial city hidden inside a metropolis. It does not really begin until a hundred yards south of the Thames, allowing north London outrageously to "claim" the Southbank Centre, the Old Vic and Tate Modern. Beyond the map shows only "here be dragons". From the top of the London Eye the view north is of familiar landmarks. To the south is just city, endless city, stretching as far as the eye can see to Crystal Palace.

South London has always been a place of ill-concealed rage. Its politics have been belligerent. Southwark Labour Party smashed old Walworth to the ground in the Sixties and built slabs of overpowering ugliness. Lambeth was a legend of corruption and incompetence. Wandsworth was so eccentric that it has voted Conservative since time out of mind. Croydon even once applied for city status.

Mention south London in political company and eyes glaze before you can say Brockwell Park. Government has always treated it with contempt. Elephant and Castle was given the most inhuman urban renewal scheme in Britain. Through-roads compare to those in Mexico City. In an arc from Woolwich through Catford and Tulse Hill to Wandsworth there is hardly a dual carriageway let alone a motorway, while the South Circular is a national joke. Compare it with north London's multi-laned road network.

The stately heights of Greenwich and Blackheath never receive the attention lavished on Hampstead or Highgate. The delights of Dulwich and its gallery receive few visitors from north of the river. Crystal Palace would have made an ideal Olympics athletics track — given it is needed for just two weeks. Instead Stratford gets the billions and the lovely greens and trees of Greenwich are raped by the Olympic equestrians.

After the war there was still a working canal system from Surrey docks running down to Camberwell and Peckham. This network should have been restored as a recreational corridor, as was the Grand Union Canal through Islington and Camden. Instead health and safety demanded not just the closure of the Surrey Canal but its complete filling in. Such pleasures were too good for south London.

Back in the Sixties, Croydon demolished its town centre and rebuilt it with towers and slabs, hoping to be the prototype suburban business centre. Look at it today, compared with Canary Wharf. As for transport, south London subsoil was thought to be quicksand and therefore impossible for prestige tunnels. Its surface trains still chug north on viaducts over what were once swamps. Look at the Underground map.

When in the early Eighties London Transport proposed running a new Tube line from north-east London down through Chelsea to Battersea and Wandsworth, the idea was swept aside. Government said that new money should go on the Jubilee line, the Docklands Light Railway and Crossrail. South London could go by bus. When the new high-speed Channel Tunnel link was meant to come to Waterloo, central government diverted it to St Pancras.

This quiet, introverted city within a city has clearly lost its temper, and rightly so. It has no mayor of its own, no governor, no spokesman. It loses every battle. Johnson has clearly received intelligence that it is set on rebellion and is bent on pre-emptive suppression.

He is using his favourite "improvised explosive device", the roadwork. Like the emperor Augustus, who found Rome a city of stone and left it a city of marble, Johnson found London a city of road holes and will leave it a city of road chasms. He has turned roadworks into a counter-insurgency strategy.

The simultaneous closure of five Thames bridges is divide and rule. The Mayor means to push Londoners into two camps. He is the sort of man who partitioned Yugoslavia, split Czechoslovakia and separated Cyprus. He wants passports at the Vauxhall gate of Pimlico.

Johnson may live in north London but he should not trifle with the south. If you prick us, Southwark cries with Shakespeare, "do we not bleed if you wrong us, do we not revenge?" The Mayor should remember that his office is made of glass. And it sits, whatever he may think, in south London.