Inner City Pressure
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A GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, PITCHFORK, NPR, METRO AND HERALD SCOTLAND BEST MUSIC BOOK OF 2018‘The definitive grime biography’ NME’A landmark genre history’ PitchforkThe year 2000. As Britain celebrates the new millennium, something is stirring in the crumbling council estates of inner-city London. Making beats on stolen software, spitting lyrics on tower block rooftops and beaming out signals from pirate-radio aerials, a group of teenagers raised on UK garage, American hip-hop and Jamaican reggae stumble upon a dazzling new genre.Against all odds, these young MCs will grow up to become some of the UK’s most famous musicians, scoring number one records and dominating British pop culture for years to come. Hip-hop royalty will fawn over them, billion dollar brands will queue up to beg for their endorsements and through their determined DIY ethics they’ll turn the music industry's logic on its head.But getting there won’t be easy. Successive governments will attempt to control their music, their behaviour and even their clothes. The media will demonise them and the police will shut down their clubs. National radio stations and live music venues will ban them. There will be riots, fighting in the streets, even murder. And the inner-city landscape that shaped them will be changed beyond all recognition.Drawn from over a decade of in depth interviews and research with all the key MCs, DJs and industry players, in this extraordinary book the UK’s best grime journalist Dan Hancox tells the remarkable story of how a group of outsiders went on to create a genre that has become a British institution. Here, for the first time, is the full story of grime.
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One Canada Square, the actual name of the fifty-storey, pyramid-topped building often identified as ‘Canary Wharf’, was completed in 1991, and became the UK’s tallest building, the most visible legacy of Thatcherism, towering over London. It was not until the first years of the new millennium that Canary Wharf really fulfilled its destiny as ‘the second City’, and took on a life of its own, outstripping the old City of London (the capital’s traditional financial centre, around Bank and St Paul’s, with its antiquated heraldry, liveries and rituals), and becoming the home of the newer, much more dangerous unregulated financial speculation that would be instrumental in creating the global financial crisis of 2008. Peter Gowan called it ‘Wall Street’s Guantánamo’, a lawless bolt-hole where firms like Lehman Brothers could get away with complex debt-repackaging and trading they would never have been allowed to pursue in Manhattan.7
In a neat example of the laissez-faire capitalism which led to the financial crisis itself, the building of Canary Wharf itself benefited from special government exemptions on rates, tax and a speeded-up planning permission process. No questions and no regulations. It was to be the Big Bang of urban regeneration – creating not just the bankers’ skyscrapers that watched over the grime kids, the yin to the estates’ yang, but also a new airport aimed at business-class customers (London City Airport, opened 1987), the Docklands Light Railway (1987), the Jubilee Line Extension (1999) and the ExCeL conference centre (2000). The LDDC was the flagship of the hyper-gentrification that would follow across British cities, legitimising New Labour’s urban renaissance, of which the renovating and demolishing of council estates was also a vital part. Canary Wharf’s tower blocks were barely a couple of miles from the council blocks where the pirate radio aerials were going up, but ‘the second City’ was never designed to have a relationship with its neighbours: the attention was turned towards its rival and parent. Canary Wharf was deliberately laid out so its ‘central axis’ – a gap in the two tower blocks facing One Canada Square – looks out across a fountain, and lines of trees, towards the City of London.
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