Welcome to my gong show

Some years ago I knew of a lady living in south London who used, every evening, to put on her coat and hat and take the bus to Waterloo. There, quite alone, she would descend to the Bull Ring vaults and distribute soup to the cardboard city dossers. She would listen if they wanted to talk, and seek help only if help was requested. Otherwise she never intruded and quietly returned home.

I suggested to someone claiming a link to Downing Street patronage that she was the sort who merited " people's honour" recognition. The reply was classic. "You must find someone who has heard of her." Someone, of course, meant "one of us".

London does not have a New Year honours list and it is as well. Enough Londoners receive "People's Honours" for being rich, famous or fawning. Give another list to the Mayor, Ken Livingstone, and I dread to think what circus of cronies, hangers-on, fund-raisers and property developers would be covered in mayoral ribbon. Better let them die and await their turn for a blue plaque. That is a real honour.

Yet I intend to break the rule. Let me step out of critical mode and salute citizens, none of them famous, who came to my humble notice over the past year. They are not the "heroes for a day" beloved of charity galas. Nor are most of them Dickens's do-gooders. Yet they have contributed their year's dues to the life of the metropolis. They have made London a better city for us all.

No London mountain is higher to climb than that of an inner-city school. Head teacher of the year is surely Bob Vereycken of Addison Primary in Hammersmith. He must not just weld into one institution a united nations of Kosovars, Bosnians, Somalians and 42 other native languages. He must do so while holding at bay a tidal wave of obstructive bumf surging over him from Whitehall. His parents are united in saluting him. He must even put up with David Blunkett claiming that his school "is succeeding because of our reforms".

Switch from school to prison. London's prisons remain a concession to Victorian values of punitive slumdom. Why should actor-turned-entrepreneur Bruce Wall spend time bringing his Shakespeare workshop to groups of hesitant prisoners? The answer is that in making them read, write and perform fragments of the Bard, he brings them laughter and self-esteem. Prisoners clamour for his sessions. Supported by some in the prison service, he is also met with indifference and obstruction. A gong for Mr Wall.

The architect Ptolemy Dean assiduously records London's streetscape, revealing beauty to eyes that would otherwise stay shut. He fights to get telephone boxes listed, Smithfield rescued, lamp standards preserved in Regent's Park. His are the beautifully textured walls of the new Southwark Cathedral precinct. The drab concrete of the capital everywhere awaits his eye, his brush and his draughtsmanship.

An award too for Dominic Welch, the Peckham youth worker, still himself a teenager, on Damilola Taylor's estate. He stood up, plainly terrified, to tell Tony Blair and an entire " photo opportunity" of politicians that these sink estates could not be left to rot. Nor could they find salvation in their own conspiracies of silence. He showed that Government paternalism is no substitute for brave leadership from young people themselves. His is London's own West Side Story.

Let us recognise the indomitable Judith Cherniak who this year brought back to the Tube her Poems on the Underground. It was in 1986 that she spotted a gap in London life, literally the gap of empty advertisement cards on the Tube. If nobody would pay for them, why not fill the space with "free" poems, she thought. How easy the idea, how difficult the execution. Yet execute it she did. Few things so enlighten subterranean London as her anthologies.

More controversial perhaps is a prize to Jeff and Abigail Batton, fundamentalist missionaries from America who were on their way to the Third World. They stopped in Brixton and concluded that its needs were great too. They opened their house at night as an "accident and emergency unit" for local prostitutes, most of them drug addicts, to crash out, recover, clean up and have breakfast. Despite the dismay of neighbours the Battons battle on, bringing not social work but conversation, love and the comfort of religion to surely London's most wretched citizens.

Solicitors do not normally qualify for praise, but Ajneet Jassey appears to be a character from Bleak House. Seconded from a City law firm, she attached herself to the charity Refuge to battle for victims of domestic violence. Alerted to a world outside "the blinkered existence" of the City, she found a mission as legal adviser to these desperate emotional casualties. Homes for battered women enjoy none of the glamour of cancer and children's charities. They need the physical and legal first aid that no police or hospital can give them. An award too to all "pro bono" employers such as Jassey's.

Urban developers rarely need gongs - they get enough already. I encountered Eric Reynolds of Urban Space Management this year deep beneath old Shoreditch station. He was trying to rescue its Piranesian tunnels, arches and undercrofts from wreckers who want to build another glass cliff to wall off the City from the East End. No industrial site in the capital is so precious as adjacent Bishopsgate Goods Yard. Reynolds is a veteran campaigner. Since 1974 his speciality has been inserting markets, and thus value, into old neighbourhoods and proving they do not need demolition. His hand has been at work in Covent Garden, Camden Lock, Gabriel's Wharf and Spitalfields. Now fighting the City Corporation, a Labour Mayor and a Labour Government for what the city values but they do not, he deserves more than a medal. He deserves a profit.

And hundreds more like them. These people make no headlines and no photo opportunities. They pack no political punch. Honour lies in the work each one does, not in Browning's "riband to stick on the coat".

They would say they are just doing a job. For such jobs we say thank you.