Читать книгу A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain - Owen Hatherley - Страница 8

Perry Anderson recently wrote that Britain’s history since Thatcher has been ‘of little moment’.¹ Admirable as this statement is in pricking local pomposities and arguable though it may be in political terms, in architecture, as in art and music, the UK has retained a prominence that is out of all proportion to its geopolitical weight. British architectural schools (both in the stylistic sense and as educational institutions like the Architectural Association) have retained a massive importance. The High-Tech school of mechanistic style founded by former partners Norman Foster and Richard Rogers was successful in Paris and Hong Kong before London and Manchester, bringing prestige that was appropriately rewarded in the less than futuristic, if geographically indeterminate titles the two men now carry, Baron Foster of Thames Bank and Baron Rogers of Riverside. The immediately succeeding generation of Will Alsop or David Chipperfield would have a similar fate, with successes in Berlin or Marseilles before the UK rewarded their firms with commissions; after them, students—seldom British—of the Architectural Association in London like Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl would achieve international prominence and domestic obscurity for their Deconstructivist warping of architecture into something barely functional but instantly ‘iconic’; most recently, new ornamental-ists like Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT) or Foreign Office Architects found employment in the Netherlands or Japan first and foremost.

London’s Financial District, as remade by Foster and Rogers

This pattern isn’t just at the level of architects-qua-architects, the famous Ayn Randian form-givers. The faceless megafirms for which British culture’s unambiguous corporate fealty seems particularly rich soil, such as RMJM (who recently hired disgraced banker Sir Fred Goodwin as an ‘adviser’), Building Design Partnership, Archial or Aedas, are especially prominent in the hyperactive building booms of China or the United Arab Emirates, producing watered-down versions of High-Tech and/or Deconstructivism for foreign export. Meanwhile, the brief televisual popularity of the Stirling Prize, the architectural Booker or BAFTA, showed both that there was an untapped public interest in architecture, and that British architects were as often to be found working abroad as in the UK, with the prize-winning entries in Germany or Spain more often than Wales or Northern Ireland. Why is it, then, that actual British architecture, The Change We Can See, is so very bad?

The answers to this question are usually tied up with New Labour’s particularly baroque procurement methods and an ingrained preference for the cheap and unpretentious, causing a whole accidental school of PFI architecture to emerge—often constructed via ‘design and build’ contracts which removed any control over the result from the architects, with niceties like detailing and fidelity to any original idea usually abandoned. The forms this took were partly dictated by cost, but also by amateurish parodies of exactly the kinds of high-art architecture mentioned above, creating something which Rory Olcayto of the Architects’ Journal suggests calling ‘CABEism’,² after the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the design quango whose desperate attempts to salvage some possibility of aesthetic pleasure from PFI architects and their developers led to a set of stock recommendations. Their results can be seen everywhere—the aforementioned wavy roofs give variety, mixed materials help avoid drabness, the windswept ‘public realm’ is a concession to civic valour—but here I will call it Pseudo-modernism, a style I regard as being every bit as appropriate to Blairism as Postmodernism was to Thatcherism and well-meaning technocratic Modernism to the postwar compromise.

‘New Home, New Life, New You’—CABEism in Holloway Road, London

The most impressive neoliberal sleight of hand, one pioneered in Britain before being eagerly picked up everywhere else, has been the creation of what Jonathan Meades neatly calls ‘social Thatcherism’. It has existed ever since the mid 1990s, and was not begun by the Labour Party. From John Major’s avowed intent to create a ‘classless society’ to New Labour’s dedication to fighting ‘social exclusion’, the dominant rhetoric has been neoliberalism with a human face. The liberal misinterpretation of this has long been that it proves the existence of some kind of ‘progressive consensus’, a continuation of social democracy, albeit in a more realistic, less ‘utopian’ manner. In the built environment, the thesis of a social democratic continuum that connects, say, the Labour of Clement Attlee to New Labour has appeared to be supported by the resurgence of Modernist architecture after an eclectic postmodernist interregnum, and an apparent focus on the city rather than the suburbs. Lord Richard Rogers has proclaimed this to be the ‘Urban Renaissance’ in a series of books and white papers with titles that now sound deeply melancholic, not only because of the dyslexic architect’s verbal infelicities: A New London; Architecture—A Modern View; Cities for a Small Planet; Cities for a Small Country; Towards an Urban Renaissance; Towards a Strong Urban Renaissance …

This was enforced by bodies such as the Architecture and Urbanism department of the Greater London Authority locally, and the Urban Task Force and CABE nationally, with mixed success. It enshrined in policy things which leftish architects like Rogers had been demanding throughout the Thatcher years—building was to be dense, in flats if need be, on ‘brownfield’ i.e. ex-industrial land, to be ‘mixed tenure’, and to be informed by ‘good design’, whatever exactly that might be. The result—five or six-storey blocks of flats, with let or unlet retail units at ground floor level, the concrete frames clad in wood, aluminium and render—can be seen in every urban centre. Similarly, new public spaces and technologies were intended to create the possibility of a new public modernism. One of the most curious, and retrospectively deeply poignant expressions of this early New Labour urbanism dates from the point where it might have seemed a modernizing, Europeanizing movement rather than today’s horrifying combination of Old Labourist chauvinist authoritarianism in social and foreign policy and relentless, uncompromising neoliberalism. This is Patrick Keiller’s 1999 film The Dilapidated Dwelling, referred to by the director himself alternately as his ‘New Labour film’ or his ‘naughty film’, made for Channel 4 but unreleased on DVD and seldom screened. Like his earlier, better known London and Robinson In Space it takes the form of an oblique travelogue, only this time with interviews and an ostensible overarching subject—rather than the earlier films’ Problem of London or Problem of England, this is the Problem of Housing. Introducing it twelve years later, Keiller recalled that ‘I thought in 1997 that we were going to rebuild Britain, after all the damage that had been done to it, like we did after 1945.’ The film is a sharp pre-emptive analysis of why this would not happen.

Today, the message of the film is: be careful what you ask of capitalism, as it might just grant your wish. In short, The Dilapidated Dwelling asks the question: why does the production of housing never get modernized? (With the linked question, why is construction so backward?) It seems to derive from the search for ‘new space’ in the 1995 travelogue Robinson in Space, where the novel if unnerving spaces of containerization, big sheds, security, espionage and imprisonment almost entirely exclude housing, which is only seen in glimpses, usually of neo-Georgian executive estates. Housing, when this film was made in 1997–9, was not new space. It has become so since, however, especially in the cities.

There’s a desperately sad yearning in Keiller’s two ‘Robinson’ films for a true metropolitanism, a Baudelairean modernity worthy of the first country in history to urbanize itself. In London, the capital and its infrastructure are strangled by a ‘suburban government’; and in Robinson in Space, ports like Southampton or Liverpool are weird, depopulated, the enormous turnover of imports and exports never leading to any attendant cosmopolitanism or glamour, the internationalism confined to the automated space of the container port. So it’s interesting to consider these films after the Urban Task Force, after the palpable failure of the Urban Renaissance, the death of which was arguably heralded by the anti-congestion charge, anti-inner city ‘Zone 5 strategy’ that got Boris Johnson elected as Mayor of London.

The Urban Renaissance was the very definition of good ideas badly thought out and (mostly) appallingly applied. The expansion of public spaces and mixed uses led merely to pointless piazzas with attendant branches of Costa Coffee; the rise in city living has led to brownfield sites and any space next to a waterway, from the Thames’s most majestic expanses to the slurry of Deptford Creek, sprouting the aforementioned Urban Task Force blocks. Meanwhile, the film’s central suggestion—that new housing should not only be on brownfield or greenfield, but should moreover replace the much-loved but standardized and deeply dilapidated housing of 1870–1940 that dominates the country—was partially fulfilled in a disturbing manner. This is where the film is at its most controversial.

Britain, it argues, has the oldest housing stock in Europe, and the most dilapidated, and it is enormously expensive to retrofit—why not just knock it down and build something better? Chillingly for conservationists, Keiller takes for his model the modular, inexpensive, prefabricated construction of supermarkets, although introducing the film in 2009 he ruefully wonders ‘why I thought we should all live in Tesco’. Nonetheless, why be sentimental about substandard housing from the era that coined the term ‘jerrybuilt’?

The idea of destroying and replacing huge swathes of Victorian housing found fruit in the government’s Pathfinder scheme. Designed to ‘revitalize’ the economies of a selection of post-industrial areas from Birmingham northwards, it entailed the compulsory purchase and demolition of (most frequently council-owned) housing not so much to replace it with something better, but for the purposes of, in Pathfinder’s subtitle, ‘Housing Market Renewal’ in northern towns previously untouched by the southeastern property boom. The results are inconclusive, to say the least, and reveal just how little the quality of a set of buildings has to do with its place in the property pecking order. As Heritage campaigners were keen to point out, the streets tinned-up ready for demolition under Pathfinder were just those which, in London, would have been long since the subject of fevered property speculation. In Liverpool especially, Pathfinder’s demolition programmes encompassed some large bay-windowed nineteenth-century houses which would have gone for silly money further south—though they did not stop to ask exactly why their northern equivalents were less lucrative.³ The infill that replaced the Victorian streets, where it appeared, followed the Urban Task Force rules impeccably, albeit that the ‘good design’ element is somewhat questionable.

The architectural argument misses the truly original element in Pathfinder, what differentiates it from the superficially similar slum clearance programmes of the 1890s through the 1960s. It is a programme of class cleansing. The new housing is not let to those who had been cleared, as was the case with most earlier clearance, especially after 1945, but is allocated for the ‘aspirational’ in an only partially successful attempt to lure the middle classes back to the inner-cities they deserted for the suburbs. This is in no way limited to Pathfinder itself, but forms part of the managed neoliberalism which has pervaded New Labour’s approach to urban policy, as to so much else. Instruments brought in after 1945 in order to bypass the interests of slum landlords and landowners legally—Compulsory Purchase Orders, Development corporations—were now used to the opposite end.

In this New Labour were not pioneers. The first to use the instruments of social democracy against its social content was Westminster Council under Shirley Porter, in the 1980s. Concerned that the Council was at constant risk of falling to Labour, the local Conservative leadership found that council tenants, spread liberally across the area by earlier reformers, were more likely to vote Labour. The Council had the legal capabilities to get them out, rehousing them in inferior accommodation out of the borough and offering their—often very fine—flats for sale to upwardly mobile buyers. With an impressive prefiguring of New Labour nu-language, this programme was called Building Stable Communities. Of course, this was gerrymandering, and Porter herself is still essentially on the lam from justice because of it⁴—but New Labour would do something very similar, without even the rational excuse of ensuring electoral success. Under the banner of making communities more ‘mixed’, council estates such as the huge Heygate Estate in the Elephant and Castle or Holly Street in Hackney were sold off and demolished, their tenants transferred elsewhere or heaped onto the waiting list, all in the name of what Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott would call Building Sustainable Communities.

The main semi-governmental organ of ‘regeneration’, English Partnerships, was designed to bring business and state together, the latter often sponsoring the former to such an extent that it would have been cheaper just to build on its own. It formed part of a weird grey area of almost entirely state-funded private companies—the Arm’s Length Management Organizations to which much council housing was transferred, PFI and outsourcing specialists like Capita and QinetiQ, both of which were formed out of government departments. They embody the phase of neoliberalism described by the cultural critic Mark Fisher among others as ‘market Stalinism’, where state dirigisme continues and grows, working this time in the service of property and land.⁵ By 2009 English Partnerships had transmogrified into the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), whose immediate task was to respond to the 2008 property crash with a house-building programme. Early on, there was some hope that this would lead to a new wave of council building, particularly given that waiting lists had spiralled after the crash, but instead private enterprise continued to be subsidized by the state, in the form of the Kickstart stimulus programme. This offered £1 billion of direct state funding to private developers and builders for ‘high-quality mixed tenure housing developments’, which would be assessed for said quality by the aforementioned aesthetics quango CABE.

After its first schemes were unveiled at the start of 2010, Kickstart was heavily criticized by CABE for extremely low scores on all their measurements—in terms of energy-efficiency, design quality, public space, access to facilities and public transport and much else. Both bodies refused to state who had designed the schemes that had been assessed or where they were, despite a Freedom of Information request by Building Design—the HCA’s head Bob Kerslake claimed it would damage the house builders’ ‘commercial confidentiality’. At the very end of the New Labour project was a massive programme of public funding for substandard private housing. This was the change we couldn’t see, as we weren’t allowed to know where the schemes actually were—although some of those in this book are likely candidates.