It’s the first Monopoly MONDAY ! The first in a regular series of blogs using the Monopoly board as a vehicle (a racing car, a ship, a train ?) for some fun stories about London.
The great family board game Monopoly – which has caused more family fall outs than religion and politics combined (or is that just my family?) and given us standard phrases like “Get out of jail free card” – can be a great way to pass an hour or two…..unless you want to actually finish a game in which case, you should stock up on the snacks. It is also an enduring memory for most British people and especially introduced non-Londoners to exotic sounding places like The Angel, Islington and Marlborough St. However the London Monopoly board with which we are so familiar is not actually the original.
The very first version was based on Atlantic City, New Jersey USA.
Parker Brothers in the USA sold the exclusive UK rights in 1935 to John Waddingtons. (You could say that gave Waddingtons a monopoly on selling Monopoly…sorry). Of course no one would be interested in Britain in playing a game with Atlantic City streetnames (Vermont Avenue anyone ?) – so what next ? Waddingtons was based in Leeds….. and with all due respect not very many people would be interested in playing a game with Leeds streetnames. So Victor Watson – the MD – and his assistant Marjory Phillips, headed off to London for a day to scope out the places they should use. Apparently they raced around by black cab and dashed off back to Leeds that evening.
Which is presumably why we have strange anomalies like the omission of Euston Station, after all they arrived from Yorkshire at Kings Cross and Euston is for Lancastrians ! Also the inclusion of Marlborough St – which never existed – although there is a Great Marlborough St which they must have passed at speed in a cab, possibly after a liquid lunch at the Angel pub in Islington.
The game has made such a contribution to British popular culture that it even has a London plaque. The Angel was one of the weirder places chosen for the board and so that’s why the grandson of John Waddingtons original MD – also called Victor Watson (creative with board games, dull with family names) – was chosen to inaugurate the plaque at the Co-op Bank on Islington High St which is where the Angel public house and tea rooms used to stand. Hence after 86 years we are all so familiar with the top hat, the giant dog (well it’s so much bigger than the racing car anyway) and such phrases as “Go back to Old Kent Road” and “Go Directly to Jail. Do not pass Go ! Do not collect £ 200 !”
But the game we know now as Monopoly has an even more interesting back story, because it was originally invented as a means to challenge capitalism and racism in the USA. Its inventor was a radical socialist called Elizabeth J. Phillips (1866-1948 married name Lizzie Magie). She was an annoyingly talented person across many different fields of expertise. As well as writing and publishing poems and short stories, she was also a high speed news reporter – using her stenography and typing skills to submit copy well ahead of male rivals, and even patenting an invention to speed up typewriting. She also worked as an actress and comedian which gave her first-hand experience of the discrimination suffered by black performers and especially women. Realising that only white men were actually free, she became a committed feminist agitator: in one inspired agitprop action she advertised an auction at which she would be sold off as a “young woman American slave” !
Despite all these achievements she is mainly remembered, in cyberspace at least, as the inventor of Monopoly, although her game was a far more complex version based on subverting the capitalist system. It was originally called the Landlord’s Game when patented in 1904 and 1924 and was designed to inform and challenge people to consider the dark side of land ownership and property and how it could lead to exploitation, poverty and crime.
So there were actually two games: the anti-monopolist version was called Prosperity. In this delightful utopia everyone was rewarded for creating wealth. The collective good (think “Community Chest”) was the main aim and winners would have created the most benefit for the greatest number of people. In the other version the aim was to destroy your opponents by taking over their property, creating huge reserves of land, buildings and cash and bankrupting as many people as possible along the way….. Yes, you guessed it, that one was called Monopoly. Let’s not reflect too deeply on what it says about human nature that we no longer play a game called Prosperity, just the one which involves “crushing your opponents”.
Indeed the London property market exemplifies all that is worst about capitalism with a massive housing shortage in the capital while new builds in Mayfair suck in millions from the international UHNWI community (that’s Ultra High Net Worth Individuals). Of course inflation in the UK has turned the purchase prices and rental values of the game into nonsense. The prices for the Old Kent Road (£60) and Mayfair (£400) would barely buy you a double room in most of London’s hotels. However the relative wealth of the various places chosen in 1935 hasn’t changed massively. Although Whitechapel Road is now the cheapest (as opposed to Old Kent Road) Mayfair remains the most expensive; a recent estimate by one of the mortgage companies put average house prices at £590,000 on the Old Kent Road and £3,150,000 in Mayfair.
So Old Kent Road and Mayfair probably still belong at either end of the spectrum of prices and therefore next time I thought it would be fun to start with the Go ! square, which is equidistant Old Kent Rd and Mayfair on the board and see what is equidistant between them on a real life map. See next blog for the surprising discovery !
Look, I know this is not an original idea (See “Do Not Pass Go!” by Tim Moore) but it is a fun way to tell a few stories about London and hopefully interest you in finding out a bit more…. on one of my walking tours !
Enjoy ! London Town with Mr Brown
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