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Introduction

Will There Still Be Building,

in the Dark Times?

Gateway to New Europe

It is always difficult to return to Britain. One of the most painful places to arrive is via Luton Airport; or, to give it its full title, ‘London Luton Airport’, demoting a town of over 100,000 people to a mere adjunct of the Great Wen. It’s also one of the main places for processing the thousands of poorly-paid, poorly-housed East and Central European Gastarbeiter, those who largely constructed the ‘New Britain’ promised by the now defunct New Labour movement. The destinations from London Luton are overwhelmingly either the ‘transition’ countries, where it’s not usually holidays that are the purpose – Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and above all Poland – or cheap getaways to the south of Spain or Portugal. One of the operators here, Wizzair, had until recently as its slogan, as you enter the airport, ‘Wizz off to New Europe!’ This Donald Rumsfeld-inspired catchphrase was recently replaced, which is a shame, as Luton services quite precisely the European countries which have been most engulfed by the financial crisis, those that fully embraced in all its lunacy the ‘Anglo-Saxon model’ of deregulated finance, property booms and deindustrialization, adding more recently the concomitant of ruthless, punitive austerity programmes. For these reasons Luton is, in its largely unspoken way, a very important place – a fulcrum of the real New Europe, where neoliberalism has created a new and bracingly unpleasant landscape, leaving far behind the attachment to making and crafting that still occasionally rears its head in France, Germany or Scandinavia.

This is communicated especially sharply in Luton’s architecture, as here you can see that the UK is the very newest part of New Europe, in its total lack of concern for the built environment, in its heedless accumulation of exurban kipple. For instance, if you leave Okcie airport in Warsaw – Poland being admittedly the ‘transition’ economy least affected by the crash, due to ‘old’ methods such as a strong industrial base and public capital investment – you’re leaving behind a reasonably clean, expensive, airy piece of design. Arrive in Luton, and you’re in a carceral, cheap, chaotic place, one that has happened seemingly entirely by accident. At the same time, no other European country, not even the Russian Federation, makes as much fuss about itself at its entrance as Great Britain. First, there’s the posters, designed to intimidate the guest worker and ‘reassure’ the Daily Mail reader: ASYLUM (don’t even think about it). HUMAN TRAFFICKING (you probably are, or the friendly man next to you in the queue is). TERRORISM, too, is a constant visual presence. On little screens above the concourse, Sky News broadcasts a perpetual loop of horror – economic crisis, natural disaster, environmental catastrophe, helpfully subtitled in broken sentences so that you can read as you queue. The sign ‘UK BORDER’ is over the passport desk, again in another ostentatious gesture of reassurance/intimidation. There is, in proper dystopian sci-fi fashion, a bio­metric passport gate through which the lucky few can pass, though the nightmarish future is postponed by the fact that it is seldom working. Get through all that, past a sign informing you that Alistair Darling MP opened the building in 2003, and you’re in a tin hangar where every available space has been crammed with retail. If you’re on your way out of the UK, it’s even more extreme; the waiting room is a cramped, low-ceilinged, badly-lit shopping mall, where the visual gestures – a curved, swoopy roof, Vegas light fittings – are just so much extra clutter.

Then, you’re out, into the forecourt, where you can see some more architectural things; fragments of the earlier, 1970s Luton Airport, such as the concrete watchtower, some dour brick offices for the airlines, and most interestingly an orange hangar for EasyJet, which almost seems to have been conceived as a visual object, with its huge steel supports visible on the façade. One of the blanker hangars on the runway bears the Harrods logo. There’s no way to walk out of the airport, obviously, so you must take a shuttle bus (another £2, please) to the railway station in order to escape; on the way you pass under a heavy concrete bridge – this is here because the runway actually passes overhead, an impressive piece of heavy engineering. You also pass a factory – this is General Motors’ Luton branch, a complex of some size, a reminder that things are made here, after all. In the near distance is the skyline of Luton itself, with its Arndale Centre and its multistorey car parks. Then, the station, which uses the same architectural language as the airport – metal panels that are filthy with accumulated muck, despite the fact that they are designed to be wipe-clean. The small station has to hold many more people than it was planned for, and gets around this by a bizarre circulation system of multiple escalators, each with a barrier to ensure that heavy baggage is not dragged through. Here, you can wait for the most expensive, lowest quality trains in Western Europe to take you somewhere.

The End of the Urban Renaissance

We’re here as an appropriate entry into a country which, from 1997 to 2010, was supposedly going to create a new and better landscape, but produced instead the purgatory around Luton Airport, and the many places like it. In the near-decade-and-a-half of New Labour hegemony there were certain changes slated to be introduced, after the Thatcher-Major years of underinvestment in the cities in favour of out-of-town retail parks and exurbs, when entirely unplanned ‘Enterprise Zones’ were the vehicles for any new development. New Labour didn’t quite break with Thatcherism, but rather attempted to realize a version of the European social democratic city, fundamentally via Thatcherite means. Labour politicians like John Prescott, Richard Leese or Ken Livingstone, urbanists and architects like Richard Rogers and Ricky Burdett, all seemed to want to create Barcelona or Berlin using the methods of Canary Wharf. Rather than leaving everything to the market, there would be ‘public–private partnerships’ for directing the market into the places it had hitherto neglected – public services, inner cities – which it soon found were profitable enough in their way, especially when underwritten by the state. I wrote about the consequences in 2010 in a book called A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, in which it’s fair to say I was scornful towards the results. Even when writing the book, it was abundantly clear that New Labour and its peculiar form of ‘social Thatcherism’ was coming to an end, although it was not entirely clear what it was going to be replaced with. A new Keynesianism, as favoured by the likes of the current Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls? A new One Nation Toryism, under a Conservative leader determined to lose the bad smell associated with the ‘nasty party’? Or something else?

What we got was, as we now know, something considerably worse: a Tory–Whig coalition committed to an extremist revision of Thatcherism with the New Labour fig leaf stripped off as no longer useful. Yet it won’t do to present this, as Labour apologists are fond of doing, as a phenomenon which owes nothing to the outgoing government. What with the likely production of a double-dip recession by cutting off the stimulus programmes brought in under Gordon Brown, not to mention the ex-PM’s startling and passionate attack on Rupert Murdoch and News International, some act as if the man was the greatest prime minister we never had. Harriet Harman is reincarnated as the scourge of benefit-cutters (does anyone remember her first move as Social Security secretary, slashing disabled and lone parent benefits in 1997? Thought not). Though the Labour Party in 2010–11 briefly showed signs of actual life and debate for the first time in a decade, any amnesia is dangerous. Andrew Lansley’s health care reforms, moving towards an authentic part-privatization of the NHS, build on the Foundation Hospitals, Private Finance Initiatives and ‘market discipline’ brought into the health service by Blairite fiat. The ‘free schools’ run by pushy middle-class parents are City Academies taken to their logical conclusion. The punitive cuts to disabled and unemployment benefits were anticipated by Work and Pensions secretary James Purnell, likewise in the face of rising unemployment. The Browne Report on education that paved the way for the elimination of humanities funding and introduction of £9,000 per annum tuition fees may have been enforced and defended by Tory minister David Willetts, but it was commissioned by the Labour government. The slashing of Housing Benefit and the ending of lifelong council tenure on public housing estates, combined with ‘Right to Buy Plus’, aimed transparently at emptying potentially lucrative inner-city areas of their remaining poor, are possible only because of New Labour’s refusal to build new council housing, its demonizing of estates and their inhabitants, and its attempt to break up ‘single class’ estates in favour of a ‘mixed tenure’, in which a mainly private estate would be, in the parlance, ‘pepper-potted’ with a tiny percentage of ‘affordable’ flats for the deserving poor. The rhetoric of ‘austerity’, the ludicrous notion that a luxuriantly rich Western nation cannot afford its welfare state any more, was a staple of New Labour’s more macho ministers. Nevertheless there are real differences, and it’s in the governments’ respective attitude towards planning, the cities, and by association architecture, that many can be seen.

The Tory–Whig coalition declared, very early on, an end to the ‘Urban Renaissance’ that allegedly characterized the New Labour era, with the production of new inner-urban space and the apparent favouring of spectacular or expensive architecture. Michael Gove has made a series of specific attacks on the architect most associated with that movement, declaring: ‘We won’t have Richard Rogers designing your school.’ This he linked to the cancellation of the Building Schools for the Future programme, one of the ambitious late New Labour stimulus projects, which he declared was just a machine for enriching architects, though as ever the real beneficiaries were the consultants brought in to manage the labyrinthine Private Finance Initiative contracts. BSF, as it is called in the trade, entailed a massive expansion of the two-tier state education system, with most of the money earmarked for the transformation of ‘bog-standard’ comprehensives into City Academies; its preference for wholesale destruction over refurbishment of serviceable Victorian board schools or 1960s steel-and-glass comprehensives was not driven by any particularly educational motives. The new schools, when they emerged, were mostly bland, mock-modern structures which on occasion had major structural flaws; a few were allowed to be ‘exceptional’, such as the steroidal Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton, designed by Zaha Hadid for ARK, the educational charity run by Hedge Fund manager Arpad ‘Arki’ Busson.1 But the cancellation of BSF was unconditional – no serious school-building or refurbishment programme would replace it. And what of the coming Free Schools, what might they look like? A clue can be found in the fact that Gove’s advisers on their design were former chairmen of Dixons and Tesco. Richard Rogers will be replaced with strip malls.

There are many similar stories. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the state-funded body that assessed new developments on their architectural quality and planning coherence, was wound up by the coalition with all funding cut off – a rump was merged with the Design Council, its already limited powers further circumscribed; at the time of writing, it plans to become a private consultancy, for the local authorities that can spare extra cash for ‘good design’. CABE was a quango of a deeply cliquey sort, with little ability to enforce its advisory role, but it was also regularly critical of developers, especially in the last years of New Labour, when the ‘Kickstart’ stimulus programme threw money at the worst kind of volume housebuilders. At the same time, the Regional Development Agencies were abolished. These were not, it must be said, particularly noble institutions. They were quangos set up to administer what would once have been the province of the elected Metropolitan District Councils (Merseyside, Tyneside, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Greater London, all abolished in 1986 as a threat to central government); state-funded bodies that threw money at redevelopment projects in depressed ex-industrial areas. They were an inadequate substitute, with no public accountability – but their abolition leaves a near-total vacuum, filled only by the dozens of competing, inimical and underfunded local authorities. The list goes on and on – Pathfinder, the highly dubious ‘housing market renewal’ scheme that demolished acres of decent, viable housing in northern cities in order to engineer a property bubble in areas without one, was discontinued, and a good thing too; but the cities thus scarred have no major source of funding to replace or reconstruct what was needlessly destroyed under New Labour. The more general funding squeeze on local government, hitting poor and inner urban areas disproportionately, means that cities will be left to do what they did throughout the 1980s and 1990s – contract, decline, and slowly die.

Planning, and not just of the urban sort, has been a major Tory–Whig target. The planning reforms of the new government aimed to finally cancel the remains of the 1945 Labour government’s still-just-sometimes-extant attempt to create a vaguely humane city and country. In the process, the coalition have found themselves attacking some of their natural allies – conservationists in the shires, alarmed by the imminent presence of Barratt Homes on the green belt, this being among the few areas now where developers can build and make a safe profit; or the National Trust and its supporters, exercised by the putative sell-off of state-owned forests. The extent of their disdain for any attempt to think about, or design, or care for the human environment can be seen in the government’s declaration in 2011 that they were considering withdrawing funding from UNESCO. This multinational body has a tendency to side against developers, in its protection of heritage sites like Liverpool Pier Head or Greenwich Market. Anyone standing in the way of laissez-faire is being taken on, in a startling, deliberately shocking assault on what remains of a planning system or safeguards against perverse development. In a telling phrase, one adviser to the Prime Minister publicly claimed that in local government, ‘chaos is a good thing’.2

The reasons for this are straightforward enough. In order to at once conform with the increasingly psychotic free-market ideology and cut the deficit (even though it is not particularly large historically), all possible restrictions on development must be removed, in a desperate attempt to get one of the few still lucrative departments of the British economy – that obsessed-over property market – back to speculating, building and selling, irrespective of the fact that it was a housing bubble that triggered the current worldwide crisis in the first place. The same logic underpins their one real alternative model of development – the Enterprise Zone. These were a major feature of Thatcherism, brought in across various former industrial areas – zones where taxes, planning regulations and such did not apply, where the ‘non-plan’ once favoured by lefty urbanists would be deployed in ultra-capitalist conditions. The results did little but lead to the relocation of some offices, malls and houses to ex-docks and steelworks; the counter-example which ‘worked’, London’s Docklands, succeeded largely because of two unusual factors – first, the City of London expanding to the point where it needed a second centre, and second, a large degree of public investment, including the construction of a light railway. Even then, the radically inequitable landscape created on the former London Docks can only be seen as a success in a very limited fashion. The main result of Enterprise Zones in the past was the likes of Luton Airport; there’s no reason to think it will be different this time.

The existence of a Tory–Whig coalition is apt, because ever since Thatcher the genuinely conservative, traditionalist, ‘One Nation’ breed of Tory has been conspicuous by its absence; she remade the Tories into Manchester Liberals, ruthless, modernizing free marketeers. That the old Whigs, especially their Orange Book neoliberal wing, should join with them finally reunites the two split fragments of the nineteenth-century ruling class. The entrance, however circumscribed and compromised, of the masses into British politics, via the Labour Party, no longer forms a real part of the political landscape, Labour having long since thrown in their lot with the new Manchester Whiggism. However, it is not a simple matter to run a country in so unromantic a fashion, especially a country so obstinately traditionalist as the UK. To use the useful phrase of Deleuze and Guattari, the Tory–Whig coalition has to always ‘reterritorialize’ in order to make up for the radically ‘deterritorializing’ effects of laissez-faire; its bonfire of old certainties, destruction of communities, and creation of new and hideous landscapes. So there are other ideas doing the rounds, aside from the total assault on the public sphere; the ‘Big Society’, or the ‘localism agenda’, both remnants of David Cameron’s brief, pre-crisis ‘One Nation’ phase. One entails the voluntary running of public services in theory, with Serco or Capita running public services in practice. The other is a directly reactionary appeal to the old ways of life that neoliberalism destroys, via Housing Minister Grant Shapps’s advocacy of ‘vernacular’ designs using local materials; an attack on the ‘garden grabbing’ that allegedly occurred during the urban-based boom of the 2000s, where densification policies ostensibly caused overcrowded, overpacked environments; and an apparent withdrawal of central government edicts from local government – something which might have more genuinely democratizing effects were it not combined with drastic central government cuts to local government funding. These two sops aside, the Tory–Whigs have no ideas. No ideas about the city, no tangible notion of the sort of country they want to build, no conception of the future, no positive proposals whatsoever. By comparison, the dullards of New Labour start to look like the visionaries they all so evidently thought they were.

Garden Festivals as Crystal Palaces

There is, I admit, one positive proposal on which the leaders of both of the main parties seem to agree. It is expressed in different ways, and with different degrees of sincerity. For Ed Miliband, it’s a question of rewarding the ‘producers’ in industry rather than the ‘predators’ of finance capitalism; for George Osborne, ‘we need to start making things again’. Yet there’s no doubt that both the Conservative Party (from 1979 to 1997) and the Labour Party (from 1997 to 2010) presided over a massive decline in industry and ‘production’; both of them favoured finance and services over industry and technology. Yet here is an apparent change of heart. What does it mean, this stated divide between producer and predator, industrialist and speculator, this seeming desire to turn the long-defunct workshop of the world back into a workshop of some sort? Is it plausible?

Answers might lie in a book published thirty years ago, which was once a fixture of British political debate – the historian Martin J. Wiener’s 1981 polemic English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. This book was on Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher’s notorious ‘reading list’ to the Tory Cabinet of the early ’80s, and ministers were each handed a copy. Most of that list consisted of the classics of neoliberalism – defences of raw, naked capitalism from the likes of Friedrich von Hayek or Milton Friedman, the books which are often associated with an economic policy that decimated British industry. Wiener’s book was different. Not an economic tract as such, it was more of a cultural history, and its manifest influences were largely from the left. A short analysis of English political and literary culture, the centrality it gave to literature evoked Raymond Williams; its insistence on the sheer scale of English industrial primacy showed a close reading of Eric Hobsbawm; and by ascribing industrial decline to England’s lack of a full bourgeois revolution, it had much in common with Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson’s famous 1960s ‘thesis’ on English backwardness. In fact, Wiener seldom cited right-wing sources at all. He invited us to imagine a Tory–Whig coalition that didn’t feel the need to ‘reterritorialize’.

Wiener claimed that British industrial capitalism reached its zenith in 1851, the year of the Crystal Palace, whose protomodernist architecture was filled with displays exhibiting British industrial prowess. After that, it came under attack from both left and right – in fact, Wiener argues that the left and right positions were essentially indistinguishable. Whether ostensibly conservative, like the Gothic architect Augustus Welsby Pugin, or Marxist, like William Morris, opinion formers in the second half of the nineteenth century agreed that industry had deformed the United Kingdom, that its cities and its architecture were ghastly, that its factories were infernal, and that industrialism should be replaced with a return to older, preferably medieval certainties. Wiener claims the foundation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings as one of this movement’s successes – an unprecedented group of people who, in his account, honestly believed that their own era had no valuable architectural or aesthetic contribution to make.

This horrified reaction to industry, and most of all to the industrial city, affected middle-class taste (and Wiener has it that working-class taste invariably followed suit). The ideal was now the country cottage, and if it couldn’t be in the country itself, then the rural could be simulated on the city’s outskirts, as in the garden suburbs of Bedford Park or Hampstead, followed by the ‘bypass Tudor’ of the early twentieth century. The real England, insisted commentators of left, right and centre, was in the countryside – despite the fact that since the middle of the nineteenth century, for the first time anywhere, a majority lived in cities. One of Wiener’s sharpest anecdotes concerns a book of poetry about ‘England’ distributed to soldiers during the First World War. Not one poem even mentioned the industrial cities where those who fought had overwhelmingly come from. By the 1920s, competing political leaders posed as country gents, whether the Tory Stanley Baldwin, marketed rather incredibly as a well-to-do farmer, or Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald, who presented himself as a simple man of the dales.

This sounds far from a Tory argument. Britain’s industrial and urban reality was ignored or lambasted in favour of an imaginary, depopulated countryside, and its industrial might and technological innovation suffered accordingly – what could the Conservative Party possibly find to its taste in this? That becomes clear in the third of Wiener’s points. British capitalism, he argues, had become fatally ashamed of capitalism itself. It was embarrassed by the muck, mess and noise of industry, shrank from the great northern cities where that was largely based, and cringed at being seen to be ‘money-grubbing’. Wiener, like many a left-winger, argued that this came from the English middle class’s love affair with its betters, the usually fulfilled desire of every factory owner to become a country gent, a rentier rather than producer. But he also suggested it came from a misplaced philanthropy, and a pussyfooting discomfort with making a profit from making stuff. In the form of the City of London’s finance capitalism, it had even found a way to make money out of money itself.

Now the book starts to sound like the Tory–Whig consensus we know today. British capitalism, it argues, needs to rediscover the free market, the profit motive and the ‘gospel of getting-on’ that it had once disdained. Wiener’s adversaries here are the same as Thatcherism’s punchbags – the BBC, for instance, an institution of paternalist arrogance which haughtily refused to give the public the money-generating entertainment it really wanted; or the Universities, devoted to the lefty talking shop of the ‘social sciences’ rather than robustly useful applied science. Enter current universities minister David Willetts, and his war against academia. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit divided the Tory Party between those who welcomed this new, swaggering capitalism – the heir to nineteenth-century Manchester Liberalism – and the true conservatives who were horrified by this scorn for the countryside, old England, conservation and preservation. The former faction won, but in its rhetoric the contemporary Tory Party still tries to balance these two impulses, rather ineptly – Grant Shapps praises garden cities and Philip Hammond raises the speed limit, Cameron advocates concreting over the green belt and Gove slates modernist architecture.

Yet if the book fell into obscurity, it’s because Wiener’s central thesis was so resoundingly disproved. He predicted that in bringing back ‘market discipline’, Thatcher would rejuvenate British industry and the ‘northern’ values it inculcated; instead, the industrial centres of Tyneside, Clydeside and Teesside, South Wales and South Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and the West Riding all faced cataclysm, on such a scale that most have still not recovered. Wiener might have praised cities and industry, but the former usually voted Labour, and the latter implied strong trade unions. Neither point was to endear them to the new, swaggering capitalism. The cities were even further emasculated, their organs of local government defeated and destroyed, their economic bases of coal, steel, shipbuilding and textiles downsized or simply wiped off the map. How did this happen? Perhaps because of that politer, more reliable way of making money – the City. Wiener scornfully quotes one Rolls-Royce executive in the 1970s who tells him that he is in the motor industry for pleasure, not for profit; if he just wanted to make money, he says, he’d be in the City. And from Spinningfields in Manchester to Canary Wharf in London, former industrial sites now house the trading floors of banks that had to be bailed out like the lame-duck industries of the ’70s. And where industry really did transform rather than disappear, it took new, discreet forms – the exurban business park, the BAE Systems airfield, the container port, all safely nestled far from public view, enabling the fantasy of old England to continue unimpeded.

Wiener’s heirs are those, sometimes to be found on the left, who try to separate out finance and industrial capitalism, as if they could be prised apart. Britain is more obsessed than ever with an imaginary rural Arcadia which bears less and less resemblance to the places where we actually live, yet the profit motive has been strengthened in the process, not limited. It seems amazing at this distance to imagine anyone could have thought otherwise – a counterfactual Thatcherism which revived industrial, urban Britain. The Garden Festivals that Michael Heseltine bestowed upon Liverpool or Ebbw Vale, with their enormous exhibition hangars, were presumably the new Crystal Palaces. But what is especially bizarre about the current orthodoxy – from which none of the main parties are exempt – is that Wiener’s attack on all but ‘useful’ moneymaking activities is continued, without the concrete industrial products or technological advances that there was once to show for it. There is a counter-theory, which has it that neither speculators nor small businesses are the real ‘wealth creators’, but rather the masses who have nothing to sell but their labour. Their voice wasn’t heard in Wiener’s book, and it is scarcely heard in the current political debate.

Society against the Big Society

There is an awful impasse in contemporary Britain, a failure of imagination or intellect, producing a manic-depressive society locked into what Ivor Southwood calls ‘Non-Stop Inertia’, while the free-market ideology that seemed to be mortally wounded by the bank bailouts has managed, somehow, to thrive and become even more extreme. This is a book about architecture and town planning, or at least a book about architecture and town planning that uses these as a way to talk about politics (or vice versa). It might be thought that these areas of reflexion and practice, based as they are on positive proposals for space and place, might have some contribution to make. They may, perhaps, be able to offer some ways out.

One suggestion made by some on the libertarian, anarchist end of the left, recognizing the manner in which the Tory–Whig coalition has inadvertently used ideas not massively different from the anti-state-planning ideas of anarchist architect Colin Ward (although radically against their original intent), entails using the Big Society against itself; taking literally the notions of ‘localism’, voluntarism and ‘community-driven’ development against quangos and government agencies. This is perhaps not as implausible as it might sound. To take one, highly-charged example, we could look at the change in management in a council estate in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The Byker Estate, designed by a team led by Ralph Erskine, begun in 1969 and abandoned, unfinished, in 1981, has long been both an architectural and social cause célèbre. Looked at coldly, it’s hard to see why. First, it’s a council estate, and a big one, the product of post-war comprehensive redevelopment, and the comprehensive demolition of terraced housing. No ‘mixed tenure’ here. Second, it’s full of winding paths and walkways, some of them in concrete; there are no ‘streets’, not much in the way of the privately-monitored ‘defensible space’ now considered indispensable in all housing estates. There’s a lot of communal in-between spaces – parkland, squares – which have no clear ownership. Architecturally, it’s hardly ‘in keeping’, with bright colours, abstract forms, and a modernist sense of sublime scale. It’s as poor as it is ‘iconic’ – it even had its very own famous crime case, the duct-living miscreant ‘Rat Boy’. It breaks every conventional rule for house-building and town planning in the UK over the last thirty years.

It’s not too far, in fact, from Sheffield’s gutted Park Hill, which was redeveloped under New Labour into a ‘creative class’ showcase, with its council tenants expelled and forgotten. But instead of Byker’s tenants being the object of class cleansing, they have just been given effective control over the estate through a ‘Community Land Trust’, and the debt the estate has accrued over the years has been written off. Housing Minister Grant Shapps has hailed this as ‘the Big Society in action’. So what’s the difference? Walking around it, the differences are a matter of upkeep, planting and care, rather than architecture. The bright, inorganic colours of the original scheme are still present and correct; the communal areas are lush, not scrubby; there’s no sign of any ill-considered or stingy later additions to the estate. It looks coherent, confident, totally modern. Maybe that’s a legacy of the extraordinary care taken in the planning and design of the estate itself, with residents involved from the start. Development was famously incremental, with tenants’ reactions to each phase influencing the next – but even so, by the 1980s it had attained in local hearsay as fearsome a reputation as any big estate. But somehow, those ideas haven’t gone away. The estate is now run by a charitable body, entirely controlled (in theory) by its tenants, which surely means the foundational principle of residents’ active participation has produced a real legacy.

There’s little doubt that lack of democratic control and management was a reason (if not the sole reason) for the failures of some high-profile estates. But whether or not the new Community Land Trust will grant that control or not, the real irony is that this place is being hailed by the housing minister at the exact same moment that all its ideas are being destroyed, all over the country. This sort of giant city-centre estate is the very thing that the coalition’s Housing Benefit proposals aim to eradicate. Its careful, slow, bespoke (and expensive) state planning is the antithesis of the Enterprise Zones and the Free Schools. Perhaps, the anarcho-Big Society contingent might argue, we should demand many Bykers, spaces owned by the Community in which we could develop anti-state and anti-capitalist forms of urbanism. It falters on an obvious point, though – that a place can be taken into real public ownership in this manner, but no new space can be created using these methods; all that can happen, at best, is a situation where some older spaces are radicalized. During an acute, national housing crisis, where there are millions on the council waiting list, it can only be a holding operation.

Architecture and/or Revolution

Architects have not been conspicuous, lately, in coming up with new planning ideas. That’s not too surprising, as they were the hardest-hit of any profession during the Great Recession – unemployment of young architecture graduates was at one point running at 75 per cent. The solution many resorted to was moving abroad, often to ‘emerging markets’ in the Middle East and South East Asia, where British firms have made a killing; this has led to embarrassing moments, such as when the Libyan crisis caught all of the main British firms with their finger in Gaddafi’s city planning schemes. However, the architectural orthodoxy of New Labour has been very definitely challenged, at least on architecture’s conscientious fringe. The buildings built in that era, often encouraged and abetted by the rulings of CABE, were all about the cladding. Stuck-on aluminium balconies, stapled-on slatted wood, brightly coloured render, clipped-on covering materials such as the ubiquitous industrial material Trespa, green glass tacked on at random, metal extrusions that look like they serve some sort of screening purpose but which are really just a form of ornament, wavy or tilted roofs, staggered ‘barcode façades’ which hide the basically regular proportions, wild and crazee angles with no apparent rationale, wonky pilotis holding up the whole thing … Underneath there was usually either a concrete frame or a load-bearing wall of breeze blocks, while the dwellings themselves were tiny, single-aspect flats. This created, as if by accident, an entire new architectural style, which elsewhere I’ve tried to describe as ‘Pseudomodernism’, for the way it reverses the old function-over-form morality of modernist architecture while rejecting the direct traditionalism of ‘vernacular’, neo-Tudor, neo-Georgian or neo-Victorian styles. That era has ended, at least in architectural design, although its products are still limping to completion. The fashion, at least, is changing. There are material reasons for this. Go to Clarence Dock in Leeds, or the flats just off Broadway Market in London, to see ‘luxury flats’ less than a decade old which are already in a state of advanced disrepair because of their delinquent cladding.

There have been two architectural alternatives since then; both existed during the boom, but there was always a sense that they were just biding their time. The new style, appropriately, has been largely used for social housing, or the little of it that gets built. The charitable Peabody Trust, once major sponsors of metal-balconied Pseudomodernism, have gone in their most recent work in Pimlico, Central London, for a heavy stock-brick style that speaks of solidity, continuity and coherence, courtesy of respected architects Haworth Tompkins. Barking and Dagenham Council have taken a similar approach in their very small new council housing scheme, designed as low-rise brick terraces by architects Maccreanor Lavington, with input from one-time fans of Big Brother House aesthetics, AHMM. It sounds a little pat, this move from cladding to masonry, like a simple reversal of the boom’s architectural values; and yet this new brick severity is notable for its seriousness, robustness, and social programme, all of which were absent from Blair-era architecture. However, with even Housing Associations unlikely to build much over the next decade, this will remain a marginal movement, confined more probably to luxury schemes such as Accordia in Cambridge. A similar movement can be found at the more scrupulous end of ‘signature’ architecture, the stuff that makes it into the magazines. Rather than the instantly consumable, instantly impressive and instantly forgettable logos that were expected, architects such as David Chipperfield and Caruso St John have designed provincial art galleries of sobriety, complexity and intelligence, often with great local specificity (albeit usually to the horror of the local press). Something like the site-specific concrete pavilions of Chipperfield’s Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield exemplifies this intensive, highly thought-out, cliché-avoiding approach.

Then there’s the second, more obviously provocative new architectural movement, christened by its advocates ‘Radical Postmodernism’, to differentiate it from the commercial tat that 1980s ‘pomo’ is best known for. The architects involved in this are London-based firms like muf, Agents of Change (AOC) and most of all, Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT): note the jazzy names, most unlike the usual approach for architectural firms (proper name or corporate name or solicitor-style brace of surnames). All share an interest in the social, and especially in taking seriously the idea of design input from, and very close collaboration with, the future users or residents of their buildings, pointedly refusing to discard their ideas or suggestions for reasons of metropolitan ‘good taste’. They show an interest in researching the patterns of life, collectivity, privacy and interaction in working-class and suburban areas without judgement or condemnation. Their accompanying embrace of spectacle and jokiness, with trompe l’œil effects, nostalgic motifs and an épater les bourgeois approach to decoration and ornament, might seem to put them closer to Blairite styles; in short, unlike Chipperfield or Haworth Tompkins they still produce the sort of architecture that looks great on the cover of a regeneration brochure. That’s deceptive, maybe, as there is a sophistication and intelligence in the new postmodernism which marks it out from the vacuous iconists and solutionists of the ’90s and 2000s. Nonetheless, the most obvious architectural development of the Great Recession has been the ‘pop-up’, the temporary, often developer-sponsored use of a dormant development site, a way of papering over the cracks and pretending everything’s ok, of bellowing ‘Move along now, nothing to see here’. Architects can’t work without clients, after all.

Alternatives in EUtopia

British architects and urbanists, at least the more ‘off-message’ ones, are keen to contrast the difficulties of working in the UK with the very different approach to planning in Old Europe, especially Northern Europe – the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia – where these things are taken more seriously. Is it possible that we could find there a way of rebuilding cities that is not just aesthetically superior, but also more equitable? One scheme I visited in summer 2010 seemed at first to be absolutely everything that British urban redevelopment is not. I was invited there by one of its local critics, mostly because I had published some harsh criticism of the gentrified new modernism of British cities, but at first all I could see were the differences – the ways in which a different planning system and building industry were obviously far more capable of creating viable, attractive, enjoyable and architecturally convincing pieces of city than the British were. The similarities became more visible only later.

This was in Germany, a useful example, given that during the boom the Federal Republic was regarded as a retrograde Keynesian dinosaur, what with its large welfare state, industrial base and reluctance to reform and deregulate. Accordingly, German commentators have been justifiably smug as they watch their Anglo-Saxon antagonists fall into chaos and collapse. ‘HafenCity Hamburg’ is Germany’s largest regeneration scheme, although mercifully they don’t use that word. It comprises a huge swathe of former wharfs, but the differences with Anglo-Saxon dockland schemes are as interesting as their similarities. Both basically serve the same constituency – an urban middle class. HafenCity is not particularly concerned with being hip or ‘vibrant’, as it houses a disproportionate percentage of Hamburg’s affluent pensioners. This isn’t as odd as it sounds, as it’s the only clean, safe, and perhaps more importantly, quiet space in the centre of Hamburg. In planning terms it’s certainly not a chaotic Thatcherite free-for-all, but something very careful. It is centred around a public landscaping project – here by Benedetta Tagliabue’s firm EMBT – which weaves together a series of small plots each given to a separate architectural firm for houses or flats, along strips of dockside. These form the ‘background’ to some more wilful stand-alone architecture around the edges.

EMBT’s landscaping is far and away the most original part of HafenCity. Especially choice are the lamp-posts, which swing around tracing peculiar metallic waves, perhaps so as not to have any bourgeois strung from them (Hamburg has more millionaires than any other German city, as well as a very active and disputatious anarchist left). The seating in particular, moulded, concrete and Gaudiesque, is very well-used, and any fears that the place might be desolate or depopulated because of its class homogeneity are patently groundless – even unfinished, HafenCity is a massive tourist draw, with open-top buses passing over a steel dock bridge that was formerly closed to the public.

I’ve been told that buyers at the Glasgow Harbour development, a comparable scheme, complained about the view of the Govan Shipyards. HafenCity, however, is practically built around a working harbour, and glories in it – each expensive apartment has a view of the container cranes, refinery and passing ships. It’s as if it wants to encourage you to see as spectacle something usually hidden away from view. Accordingly, the office blocks which are mixed in with the flats are sometimes occupied by the shipping companies – to see a name like China Shipping, usually emblazoned upon a container, emblazoned upon a building, is a jolt. The building itself, designed like much of HafenCity by mild modernists Bothe Richter Tehrani, is a typical part of the complex, a piece of sleek, unromantic modernism, modelled like all of these blocks with sharp overhangs, presumably as a gesture against the North German climate. Each block is self-contained, but all are of a similar height, rectitude and expense, achieving the rare thing of a city that emerged all at once while being both coherent and diverse, at least to the eye. The individual structures are detailed in a variety of styles, with vaguely Hanseatic/expressionist clinker, Miesian steel, bright render and so forth, in order to give the effect of variety within carefully controlled parameters. It’s all very Teutonic.

The foreground buildings are less careful, and make clear how mistaken it would be to think this a purely social democratic piece of urbanism. Each row ends with a tower. One is ‘Coffee Plaza’, by American architect Richard Meier, another is a building for Unilever by Behnisch Architekten, evocative not so much of a robust Hanseatic modernism but more of Brazilian maestro Oscar Niemeyer, with flowing, feminine biomorphic curves. It consists of both offices and penthouses, and is advertised here as ‘Marco Polo Tower – design for Millionaires’. By far the most expensive and controversial project in HafenCity is Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie. It is a large swooping thing at the end of one of these rectilinear streets, completely ignoring their context of neatness and self-effacement. It is, respectively, a hotel, a car park, luxury penthouses and a concert hall, this last a preposterous Caspar David Friedrich thing billowing and crashing atop a 1960s warehouse. It was not initially part of the HafenCity plan at all; it was the private project of two local ‘business leaders’ who personally commissioned Herzog & de Meuron to draw up a ‘landmark’ scheme for the site, claiming that they would pay for the execution, holding many fundraising dinners among Hamburg millionaires in order to do so. Needless to say it soon went over budget, and the bill was offloaded onto Hamburg city council. The cost has risen over fivefold, and is hence a matter of some controversy. When I looked at the construction site of the Elbphilharmonie, rather than high-rent high-spec apartments for millionaires, I could see ads for bedsits, aimed at the building workers who are erecting this enormously complex edifice. They are at least going cheap, although the rate ‘per person/night’ implies that they aren’t supposed to stay there very long. Many are in both German and Polish, so readable by the workers from New Europe who are actually building the place.

As a town planning project, it forms a chastening contrast with the sort of schemes you will find in this book. Hamburg is not much richer than Edinburgh, yet it’s hard to believe HafenCity was designed by the same species that redeveloped Leith Docks. The place is a thumping indictment of the Birmingham Canalside, Bristol Harbourside, Belfast Laganside, London Docklands, all of which were trudged through for the purposes of the book you hold in your hand. As enjoyable public space, as urbanism contiguous with the existing city, as architecture, their equivalent in Hamburg is immeasurably superior, and any British councillor, planner or architect visiting the North German city would be well within their rights to fall to their knees and weep. All this masks the fact that HafenCity is the exact same place as Bristol Harbourside et al. It is a place which caters for, as the slogan goes, the ‘1%’. It has been commissioned by and for the ruling class. In order to get planning permission for such a project in a Social Democrat city, there are sops: a small percentage of ‘affordable’ units, public access, a University expansion and a U-Bahn extension, but these are minor differences, some of which you could find in the UK anyway. It’s the precise same typology – mixed-use redevelopment of a former industrial area, with only the most insecure, casual labour left for the former industrial classes. I dare say there’s less buy-to-let speculating and more renting, and suspect it is all much more carefully managed, but the basic ideology is not different. New Labour tried to make neoliberalism look nicer, and failed miserably, largely because they tried to create a social democratic city using Thatcherite methods. The Germans are constructing an unambiguously capitalist city using social democratic, or at least Keynesian methods – public investment, tightly controlled long-term planning, very little speculation. In the last instance, here too, the public purse ends up paying for the follies of the super-rich. But it really does look nicer.

Agency (1): A Corporate Headquarters for Collectivists

The problem with expecting alternatives to emerge from the practice of architects or from the town planning of less casino-based economies is that they’re still tied to the dominant orthodoxy, whether out of choice or otherwise. Returning, reluctantly as ever, to the UK, we can find three groups, three forces, which are able and willing to resist the extreme neoliberalism of the Tory–Whigs, and who could eventually become the pioneers, the clients, even, of a more equitable society. The problem with imagining the city we might want, of prospecting around for solutions, is always one of agency. You can propose it, fine. Who will build it, or at least, who will force the changes necessary for it to happen? I have three answers here, which are Trade Unions, Students, and the Young Unemployed. They have all, in the last two years, made their own interventions into urban space, all of a very different order.

In summer 2011, I visited the new London headquarters of Unison. Although they don’t, funnily enough, tend to be considered part of the Big Society, trade unions are still, by an overwhelming margin, the largest civil society organizations in the UK. The unions are voluntary, democratic, mutual, bottom-up, and yet they’re the very obverse of ‘localism’, philanthropy and the other current shibboleths. Membership might have declined since its late 1970s peak, and a series of amalgamations might have swallowed up many of the once-influential unions, with even the fearsome Transport and General Workers Union absorbed into Unite – but membership still stands at seven million, which puts the much-vaunted likes of, say, London Citizens in the shade. And paradoxically, the frontal attacks on public-sector unions from the coalition have revealed their unexpected strength, whether in the half a million who marched in London on 26 March or the 750,000 or so strikers who walked out during just one of the several public-sector strikes.

The largest, along with Unite, of today’s amalgamated super-unions, the public-sector union Unison have just begun occupying the first purpose-built trade union headquarters to have been erected in the UK for nearly thirty years, in King’s Cross, London. While as a piece of architecture it’s quite deliberately unspectacular, Squire and Partners’ building shows a face of the trade union movement that is seldom seen. The stereotypes of donkey jackets, gavel-bashing and brawny masculinity are wholly absent – instead, this is quite consciously an exercise in branding and modernization. It suggests what the 1997–2010 era’s Blairite buildings might have been like if Labour had remained a socialist party. It’s a fascinating, occasionally rather inspiring place. But the first thing to note about the Unison building is what it is not.

Oddly, given their once pivotal and still key role in British political life, trade unions have not always been major sponsors of architecture. The most famous union building is in Central London, in the form of David Aberdeen’s Congress House for the TUC, a very expensively detailed Corbusian palazzo, with a Jacob Epstein sculpture and craftsmanlike finishes. It is one of several in the Bloomsbury/King’s Cross area, near to the termini serving the North and the Midlands, traditionally the unions’ strongholds. Even now, the NUJ, Unite and others are nearby. Also in the area is the original headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers, a stripped classical building now occupied by University College. The NUM moved out of here even before their fateful defeat in the Miners’ Strike of 1984–5, to a purpose-built headquarters designed by Malcolm Lister – relocated to Sheffield, as a gesture of distrust to Union leadership’s tendency to get cosy with the Great Wen. It was left unfinished at the end of the strike. Unison’s tower is almost certainly the first of its kind since then. The two have a passing stylistic similarity, both centring on severe columns as a slightly strained metaphor for mutual support. It’s worth remembering that the Unison chief, Dave Prentis – not exactly known as a firebrand – has said of the current wave of public-sector strikes that it will be unlike the Miners’ Strike, as ‘this time we’ll win’.

The air of siege and conspiracy that all this might imply is conspicuous by its absence; no union barons or smoke-filled rooms to be seen. Michael Poots, the project architect at Squire and Partners, calls it a ‘corporate headquarters’; Unison’s site manager John Cole speaks of a ‘bold high-street frontage’, and both talk about it as a form of branding, a statement of what trade unions are in the twenty-first century. Cole contrasts it with the office block Unison previously occupied just across the road, a large, slit-windowed concrete tower which he refers to as the ‘East European grey concrete building’. The union had considered moving to the City of London (before deciding that ‘culturally, it didn’t quite fit’), but decided to stay near to other unions and to the termini for the North. But happenstance has meant that the new Unison building directly faces the old. Originally designed for the local government union NALGO, one of those that merged into Unison, Cole says of the old HQ now that ‘it was basically a concrete tower block’, although this is also a fair description of the most obvious element in the new Unison building. To the Euston Road, it is a concrete-clad, steel-framed tower, with a mild case of the barcode façades and a rhythm of different window heights; but this becomes more complex at the rear and the side, where that corporate symbol, a glass atrium, links it to the listed Arts and Crafts Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building, a former women’s hospital, and at the back, a small cluster of housing. It’s a complex more than a singular building, although this is hardly apparent from the laconic street frontage, where the most notable moment is the aforementioned branding: a large UNISON logo at the top and at the entrance, manifesting the purpose-built nature of the project, and announcing the union’s public presence.

The main bulk of the complex is the office block in the tower, spilling into the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building, and curiously it’s here that the difference between this place and any other corporate headquarters is most apparent. On one level, it’s a question of rhetoric. You find the brightly coloured sloganeering that adorned some Blairite structures, but the content is very different. Instead of, say, AHMM’s Westminster Academy and its Mandelsonian mantra of ‘Enterprise, Global Citizenship, Communication’, each room features the rather more meaty, contentious ‘Solidarity, Participation, Democracy, Equality’. What would once have been called ‘improving quotations’ are also littered around the building, with ‘everything from Mahatma Gandhi to Billy Bragg’ etched into glass doors and internal windows. Most memorably, given that the UK has, as Tony Blair once proudly pointed out, the most repressive labour laws in the Western world, one wall comes courtesy of Michael Foot: ‘Most liberties have been won by those who broke the law’. All this heated (albeit graphically soft-toned and lower-case) rhetoric has to have some sort of correspondence to how the building actually functions. Given that the organization exists at least in part to fight for better working conditions, it had to be ‘an exemplary working environment’. And here Unison are clearest about the old NALGO building’s limitations. Not only was it dark and lit by artificial light, John Cole also points out that it had ‘no social spaces’. Now, the union ‘wanted large floor plates’ in order to be able to create these areas. In the concrete tower block, there’s a very pleasant roof garden, a café, a crèche, a ‘breakout room’ and much else. In design terms, these aims are compromised a little by the rather cold, identikit corporate detailing. Cole comments that opulence was out of the question, as ‘we have lots of low-paid members’ (something that didn’t deter the designers of Congress House in the 1940s) but there’s no doubt that the spaces work. When walking around it I chance upon a small office get-together, with crisps and what is (euphemistically?) labelled ‘juice’. One comments that in three days in the new building, she’d met six fellow Unison employees she’d never met before. ‘It shows how a building can change things’.

Most of the workers I saw here were women, and the building seems – perhaps inadvertently – to reflect where trade unions are currently strongest, in poorly paid but traditionally ‘white-collar’ jobs, largely female, and highly computer-literate. In the face of accusations that unions are lumbering pre-modern dinosaurs, Cole points out that Unison has the the largest intranet in Europe, and Michael Poots lists with equal pride the building’s impeccable environmental credentials. Given the evident success of the internal arrangements and the lightness and airiness of the place, it’s a shame that its design language stays at such a low voltage.

That’s something which becomes especially clear with the transition to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building. This late-nineteenth-century hospital was closed in 2002, with its functions transferred to nearby University College Hospital. The complex required a complete restoration of its much smaller, cosier rooms, with the original tiles and fireplaces scrupulously pieced back together. Sometimes this leads to enjoyably surreal juxtapositions, as when a vaguely art nouveau fireplace sits unused in the corner of a video conference room. Irrespective of the TUC’s brief foray into high modernism, the most famous visual image of trade unionism is deeply Arts and Crafts-influenced – the embroidered trade union banners that are still carried on marches, where the aesthetics of William Morris socialism, in a pre-branding era, still have a vivid emotional role. Framed with foliage, symmetrically organized and allegorical, sometimes you even find architectural modernism immortalized on them. One RMT banner I spotted on a protest a few months ago was centred on an image of Charles Holden’s Arnos Grove station. This powerful language is at least partly present in the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building. In its main room, which is being adapted as a museum, with interactive exhibits on feminism, the health service and trade unionism, there is remade Arts and Crafts furniture (that you can sit on, for once) and a small library stocked with the likes of Friedrich Engels, Mary Wollstonecraft and Sheila Rowbotham. If the rest of the building avoids traditional notions of what trade unionism looks like, here there’s a reminder, and it’s a quietly powerful one. Perhaps this is a project which needed rhetoric and imagery as much as clarity and spaciousness. While Squire and Partners clearly took the place very seriously, a more nonconformist firm might have reconciled the traditional and forward-looking impulses of the union in a more forthright, convincing, dialectical way. Instead, the pretty but mute faceted roof of the atrium provides the main connection. Maybe the commission should have been given to the Radical Postmodernists at FAT.

The atrium also leads the pedestrian towards the housing that was demanded by planning – deceptively so, as there is no public access. It’s a decent, unspectacular, stock-brick scheme of houses and flats, ‘mixed’ as ever, and clearly demarcated between the private element facing one way and the ‘social’ side the other, with both quite aggressively gated from the street. You’re reminded that the context is the redevelopment of Somers Town and King’s Cross, a working-class, industrial area of dense council housing undergoing severe gentrification, from commercial architects HOK’s BioMed Centre behind the British Library, that was fiercely opposed by local campaigners who pointed out that the site was zoned as social housing, to the new St Pancras International or the King’s Place commercial development. It’s the sort of area where unions used to thrive, now being completely transformed. The Unison building shows trade unionism transforming in turn, and in that, it’s an optimistic, encouraging building, an enclave of sobriety and solidarity in amidst the regen tat. It stands its ground, quietly.

Agency (2): The Students Take the Squares

Sometimes, the self-referential, apolitical world of architecture intersects with politics in unexpected ways. In the same week as the student occupations spread, on the same day as the ‘Day X 2’ demonstration organized by student protesters against cuts and fee rises,3 there was a story in the local and architectural press that summed up much of what the students were fighting against.

This was the granting of planning permission to something called ‘The Quill’, a tower of student housing aimed by developers at students from King’s College. It’s a fine example of contemporary architectural idiocy, a lumpen glass extrusion full of clumsy symbolism – the flurry of steel spikes that gives it its name is ‘inspired by the literary heritage of Southwark’ – but it’s a reminder that students are far from the privileged, cloistered group that some present them as. It’s the obnoxiously detailed tip of an iceberg, of the pile-up of awful student housing that has resulted from the partial privatization of education. Developers have made large quantities of money out of some of the bleakest housing ever built in the UK, marketing it as student accommodation usually on sites which would otherwise be allotted to ‘luxury flats’ or other ‘stunning developments’. Student-oriented property developers like Unite (no relation) and the amusingly named Liberty Living are, amongst other things, revivalists of the prefabricated construction methods favoured by the more parsimonious councils in the 1960s, and their blocks, all with attendant ‘aspirational’ names – Sky Plaza in Leeds, Grand Central in Liverpool – recall the worst side of modernism, in their cheapness, blindness to place, and total lack of architectural imagination. Inside, they’re a matter of box rooms leavened by en-suite bathrooms, charging outrageous rents; the most apparently ‘luxurious’ of them, the skyscraping Nido Spitalfields, charges £1,250 a month for each of its self-described ‘cubes’.

They’re also a reminder that students were encouraged under New Labour to be an ideal combination of indentured serfs and aspirant yuppies; the actual conditions of students’ existence in the 2000s, from the poverty of their housing, to their catastrophic debt, to their part-time jobs in call centres, to their years of unpaid intern labour, were bleak indeed; but all was hidden by an oxymoronic language of inclusivity and privilege; you might be living in a cupboard, but it’s a cupboard with a plasma screen TV; you might seem to be underpaid, overworked and tithed, but you were constantly reminded how lucky you were to be able to enjoy the hedonistic student lifestyle. Suddenly, under the Tory–Whig coalition, one half of that bargain – the expansion of education that accompanied its part-privatization – has disappeared, and we’re now witnessing the fallout. So it’s worth keeping New Labour’s student architecture – desperately private, paranoid, gated, restricted, securitized – in mind when you consider the dozens of occupations of universities and public buildings that were such an important part of the student protests. Implicitly or explicitly, this is the kind of space they are reacting against. A protest against the coalition, to be sure; but it’s also a magnificent rejection of the fear, quietism and atomization that was the result of earlier policies. Their use of space is equally fearless.

The first major explosion around the programme of drastic education cuts – well before the trebling of fees was announced – was at the University of Middlesex in April 2010. The coalition’s aggressively philistine and class-driven rhetoric was amply foreshadowed here, in the closing of the college’s most successful programme: its Continental Philosophy department, a programme encouraging critical thinking which was clearly considered surplus to requirements at an ex-Polytechnic orienting itself towards Business, or lucrative overseas campuses in Dubai and Mauritius, spreading itself to the ‘emerging economies’ like any architectural firm. The interesting thing about Middlesex University is how totally decentralized and suburban it is, a series of disconnected outposts in several outer North London boroughs, and it’s just possible the various actions suggest what can, and possibly can’t, be done to politicize these places, so far from the metropolitan idea of protest as something which happens in highly symbolic central locations (Parliament Square, Whitehall, Millbank). The first occupation took place at Trent Park, the campus where the Philosophy Department was based, in one of those places where the ‘green belt’ instituted around London in the 1930s can be seen to not be entirely fictional. The advertisements for Middlesex courses at nearby tube stations are a literal facialization of the neoliberal student as a series of demands, alternately hedonistic and utilitarian, and always grimly conformist. Headed by ‘I want to be more employable’, it continues thus: ‘I want to be the best. I want to do my own thing. I want to excel. I want to go to the gym. I want to study business law. I want to see West End shows. I want business sponsorship.’ And with particular bathos: ‘I want to see what’s possible.’

For over a week, Trent Park became a ‘Transversal Space’, which is to say a Free University, with speeches and actions taking place inside the usual University spaces. The thing with Middlesex, and what made it so unlike occupations at SOAS or LSE, is that the place is already the model of the neoliberal university – totally dispersed, totally atomized, with no particular Traditions of Glorious Rebellion. If, as Mark Fisher argued in his book Capitalist Realism, the 2006 student protests over employment laws in France were easily presented as conservative attempts to retain privileges, Middlesex, and the protests of winter 2010, are the exact opposite – rather, they are what happens when an already neoliberalized student body tries to politicize itself. If, as Middlesex Occupation banners insisted, this particular University is a factory, like the factory it has learnt one of the principal lessons of the twentieth century – if you want to avoid conflict, decentralize, get out as far away from the (imagined) centres of power as possible, disappear from public view, and make the question of who actually holds power as opaque as possible.

The second part of the actions which I saw some of was a rally in Hendon, an area which is somewhat less exurban, and where you can actually walk to the campus, from Hendon Central tube. The University’s administrative offices sit opposite some particularly horrible developer-led student housing; the guilty party here is ‘Servite Homes’, who are just one letter away from accuracy. At Hendon, something seemingly familiar – a rally – was used as a convenient cover, a means of convincing authority that this was a situation they understood and could deal with easily, until it mutated into one they didn’t like one bit. In short, the event consisted of several speakers whose interventions were quickly followed by the instruction to ‘take the squares’, meaning the grass squares in front of the University, and set up a Tent Park, aka a ‘Camp for Displaced Academics’. The purpose of this seemed pretty opaque until students started erecting the tents on the space – several small ones to sleep in, and one large marquee, which was then draped with political banners, ranging from direct slogans, oblique pronouncements and at one point, some art-historical point-making, with banners adapting imagery from Paul McCarthy and others. The Middlesex protests ended in a partial victory, with the Philosophy Department and most of its students being taken on by (the equally suburban ex-Poly) Kingston University.

The tactics of surprise and spectacle used at Middlesex have a clear correspondence with those used by later Occupiers, albeit on a much larger scale. At the first major occupation, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, it was especially interesting to see the movement dealing with such a central location, right next to Russell Square, where it was much easier to reach a public of some sort than it was in Trent Park; the place has long had the feel of an activist enclave, and a large banner reading ‘THIS HAS JUST BEGUN’ flew for some time in front of the college. Somewhat larger, and for that and other reasons the focus of much of the publicity, was the Occupation of University College London, at the other end of Bloomsbury. As fans of Michel Foucault would appreciate, they picked the capacious Jeremy Bentham Room for their operational base (‘Jeremy Says No!’ read one poster, depicting the eighteenth-century thinker; adjacent was another poster reading ‘Jeremy Also Says Panopticon’). The Slade, just opposite, soon followed them into occupation, as did countless other universities up and down the country, and both SOAS and UCL had a board listing those which had come out.

The spatial politics of the occupations themselves are obviously worth considering. From what I could see at UCL, the ten days of hundreds of people sleeping together in one very large room had brought a certain intensity to the proceedings, and had shown how much this was becoming not just a campaign to bring down a singularly grotesque millionaires’ austerity government, but also to imagine a new kind of everyday life. I was invited to speak here about student housing and the awfulness thereof. Afterwards, one of the assembled students said something along the lines of ‘Yes, we know that’s awful, you don’t need to tell us – but we’re here creating something different, something positive, by ourselves. We’re living our ideas.’ It later transpired that the young man in question was a former Conservative who had worked for a while in the office of David Miliband, before getting radicalized. Let’s not forget that under New Labour, the front bench was largely occupied by Russell Group-educated student firebrands.

The student movement would have been of little interest if it were just confined to what is undeniably an elite university. What the UCL occupation were extremely adept at, however, was the use of both social media and the space itself to publicize their cause. Not only were they impressively media-savvy – in one corner of the room, a round table dotted with laptops, which bore the label ‘RESPONSE’, people were constantly sending out communiqués on Twitter and elsewhere – but they were also keen to use the space around to draw attention to their demands and those of the student movement in general. This was the rationale behind their involvement in UK Uncut pickets of Vodafone (who allegedly recently evaded £6 billion in tax) and of TopShop (whose boss Philip Green is both a prolific tax avoider and a coalition adviser, making a nonsense of the already outrageous slogan ‘We’re all in this together’). It was also the rationale behind one of their more inspired actions, a temporary occupation of Euston Station, where they also produced a parodic Evening Substandard, pre-empting the media’s hostility to them.

The student movement was astute in trying to avoid the tedium and predictability that marred the previous decade of protest in the UK, from the polite and for all its numbers easily ignored Stop the War protests in 2003, to the various sparsely attended ‘Carnivals against Capitalism’, usually easily ‘kettled’ and beaten by the police. On marches the students adopted tactics to avoid police kettles, leading to a chase through the streets of London on ‘Day X 2’, and many refused to follow the prescribed route into pre-prepared holding pens. By now, we know the response to this – the carnage of ‘Day X 4’, where a police force clearly out for revenge and a spectacularly servile media preferred to cover the mild harassment of two royals over, say, the police’s near-fatal attack on twenty-year-old student Alfie Meadows, or the dragging of Jody McIntyre, a student with cerebral palsy, out of his wheelchair and across the pavement. Yet throughout, this enormously unexpected and unpredictable movement showed it was willing to use the streets as it liked, a fine riposte to the grim, circumscribed, privatized urbanism of the last thirty years.

From this moment came, most obviously, the Occupy protests across British cities in autumn–winter 2011. There’s another moment which grew from it, to some degree, though it is often disavowed. It arguably came from the protests against Education Maintenance Allowance, the grant which kept poor young people in post-16 education, who made the Day X marches a rather surprising affair for those expecting the usual, usually middle-class suspects. In Hackney in August 2011, a chant went up of ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’, a slogan long-used by the anti-capitalist left on their symbolic marches. The results were very different.

Agency (3), The City and the City

One of the most succinct and intelligent descriptions of ‘urban regeneration’ was a documentary film by Jonathan Meades called On the Brandwagon. It begins with riots in Liverpool in 1981, a city whose population had halved, whose docks had disappeared; then moves through the attempts to put a sticking plaster over the wound. First, ineptly, via the Garden Festivals bestowed to Liverpool or Ebbw Vale, alongside the first, ‘enterprise zone’ version of Regeneration – then more dramatically through New Labour’s abortive attempt to turn our chaotic, suburban-urban cities into places more akin to, say, Paris, that riot-free model of social peace. Meades looks at the middle-class return to the cities, adaptive re-use, luxury apartment blocks, Mitterandian Lottery-funded grands projets and loft conversions in the factories whose closure was the problem in the first place. The film ends in Salford Quays, its gleaming titanium a ram-raid’s distance from some of the poorest places in Western Europe. The likely result? ‘There will be no riots within the ring-road.’

We’ve long congratulated ourselves, in London, on the fact that we have no banlieue. We felt especially smug about it when zoned, segregated Paris rioted a few years ago. It’s not like it’s untrue – irrespective of the existence of a Thamesmead or a Chelmlsey Wood, our poverty is not solely concentrated in peripheral housing estates, at least not yet. Oxford might try not to think about Blackbird Leys, but London, Manchester/Salford, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham – the cities that erupted in August 2011 – these places by and large have the rich next to the poor, £1,000,000 Georgian terraces next to estates with some of the deepest poverty in the EU. We’re so pleased with this that we’ve even extended the principle to how we plan the trickle-down dribble of social housing built over the last two decades, those Housing Association schemes where the deserving poor are ‘pepper-potted’ with stockbrokers. We’ve learnt about ‘spatial segregation’, so we do things differently now. Someone commenting on James Meek’s London Review of Books blog post4 on parallel Hackneys mentioned China Miéville’s recent science fiction novel The City and the City, where two cities literally do occupy the same space, with all inhabitants acting as if they don’t. He set it in Eastern Europe, but the inspiration is surely London.

All of us, all along, if we were honest for a microsecond, knew this was a ludicrous way to build a city, to live in a city. I, like most of the people who were waving brooms in the air post-riot and claiming to represent the ‘real London’, was not born in London, and I know only two or three people who were. In the earlier of the twelve years I’ve lived in the city I’d often idly wonder when the riots would come, when the situation of organic delis next to pound shops, of crumbling maisonettes next to furiously speculated-on Victoriana, of artists shipped into architect-designed Brutalist towers to make them safe for Regeneration, of endless boosterist self-congratulation, would finally collapse in on itself. Like most thoughts of this sort, it stayed in the back of the mind, and I’d almost forgotten about it when it finally happened.

If you look at the looted, torched places, many of which are in this book, you can see they have certain things in common. Take Bristol, a port where you could walk for miles and wonder where its working class had disappeared to, which seemed to have been given over completely to post-hippy tourism, ‘subversive’ graffiti, students and shopping. Well, those invisible, young, ‘socially excluded’ (how that mealy-mouthed phrase suddenly seems to acquire a certain truth) people arrived in the shiny new Cabot Circus mall and took what they wanted, what they couldn’t afford, what they’d been told time and time again they were worthless without. Look at Woolwich, where the former main employer, the Arsenal, is now a vast development of luxury flats, and where efforts to ameliorate poverty and unemployment centre on a giant Tesco, just opposite the Jobcentre. Look at Peckham, where ‘Bellenden Village’ pretends to be excited by the vibrant desperation of Rye Lane. Look at Liverpool, where council semis rub up against the mall-without-walls of Liverpool One, whose heavy-security streets were claimed by the RIBA to have ‘single-handedly transformed Liverpool’s fortunes’, as if a shopping mall could replace the docks. Look at Croydon, where you can walk along the spotless main street of the privately owned, privately patrolled Business Improvement District and then suddenly find yourself in the rotting mess around West Croydon station. Look at Manchester’s city centre, the most complete regeneration showpiece, practically walled off from those living outside the ring road. Look at Salford, where Urban Splash sell terraces gutted and cleared of their working-class population to MediaCity employees, with the slogan ‘Own your own Coronation Street home’. Look at Nottingham, where private student accommodation looming over council estates features a giant advert promising a ‘Plasma screen TV in every room’. Look at Brixton, where Zaha Hadid’s hedge-funded Academy has a disciplinary regime harsher than some prisons, and aims to create little entrepreneurs and budding CEOs out of the lamentably unaspirational estate-dwellers. Look at Birmingham’s new Bullring, yards away from the scar of no-man’s land separating it from the dilapidated estates and empty light-industrial units of Digbeth and Deritend. This is urban Britain, and though the cuts have made it worse, the damage was done long before.

With his customary haplessness, Ed Miliband said during the riots that ‘there must be no no-go areas’. But these places are nothing of the sort: they’re parallel areas occupying exactly the same space, and any urban theory stuck in the problems of an earlier era, fulminating against the evils of mono-class estates and rigid zoning, is ill-equipped to even begin to describe what’s going on. That isn’t to say that all insights from history are useless. During the riots, an assortment of ex-punks, chroniclers of rebel rock, ‘Situationists’ and ‘leftists’ decided that these riots were somehow different, somehow apolitical, compared to those that went before. The bizarrely romanticized ‘no poperie’ Gordon Riots. The Watts Riots of 1965, where local shops were burned and ransacked with as much intensity as they were in August 2011, only with more firearms. The UK riots of 1981, when corner shops were not spared. The 1992 LA riots, where innocent truck drivers were dragged from their vehicles and killed. Riots always start with an immediate grievance – a hugely corrupt police force shooting a man to death, this time – and become a free-for-all, where people exploit the absence of the law, in which the people who suffer are often innocent. Rioting is a politics of despair; but to claim that these riots are somehow different, somehow ‘neo­liberal’, because of the allegedly novel phenomenon of mass looting, is asinine. It would have been wrong to cheer on rioters against corner shopkeepers trying to defend their already small livelihoods; but it is equally wrong to pretend that this had nothing to do with the demonization of the young and poor, nothing to do with our brutally unequal society and our pathetic trickle-down attempts at palliation. Then we line up with those who think that looting Foot Locker is worse than the looting of an entire economy.

Something snapped in August 2011, and it was a long time coming. If you listened to what those few rioters to have got near a journalist had to say – ‘The whole country is burning, man’; ‘We’re showing the rich people we can do what we want’; ‘They’re screwing the system so only white middle-class kids can get an education … everyone’s heard about the police and members of parliament taking bribes, the members of parliament stealing thousands with their expenses. They set the example. It’s time to loot’ – what you heard was an excuse, sure, but also a truth. Over the last few years, the ruling class kept trying to commit suicide – financial crisis, expenses scandal, News International, the Met, financial crisis mark two – and most of us wouldn’t let them, we’d rather Keep Calm and Carry On. These kids, venal and stupid as some of their actions obviously are, don’t want to carry on. They want to see the whole bloody thing burn.

Back to Business

Not that this seems to have had much immediate effect. I live in Woolwich, where among the burnt-out (or in one case completely destroyed) buildings appeared a hoarding headed ‘BACK TO BUSINESS’, promising a mega-Tesco, a Travelodge, and imminent Royal Borough status as panaceas for the poverty and frustration that led to the riots. It may as well have been headed ‘WE REFUSE TO LEARN ANYTHING’. It could be a cipher for the way the country has responded to the crisis at large; from city councillors to homeowners, there appears to be a widespread hope that if we can get the property bubble reinflated, 2007 will be here all over again and the whole bloody cycle will start up again. You can feel this especially acutely in London, where the property crash was so brief that in the city’s richer areas, it’s impossible to detect any change between London-in-Recession and London-in-Boom. That, at least, is the main thing that, say, Knightsbridge has in common with, say, Woolwich. So change is happening, if it is happening, very slowly in British cities. There is still a feeling of inertia and hopelessness that has not, yet, been entirely shaken off. This book is about an interregnum, a time in which the new has not yet been born. The Tory–Whigs have not created a specifically new space; nothing has been built in the new Enterprise Zones, few Free Schools have been planned, no Localist housing schemes are on the drawing board. These may well emerge, but they are unlikely to even begin to rival the urban changes wreaked under New Labour. I attempt to search for the coalition’s space, to some degree, although there is much more evidence for the effects of their negligence of existing space, their deliberate strangling of the cities, and more than anything else evidence of the swift dereliction that has overtaken the spaces of the outgoing regime. However, this is a book much more concerned with looking for previous urban alternatives, partly as possible inspiration, partly as a reminder that things now considered impossible were once considered normal.

Like the earlier A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain it is based on ‘Urban Trawl’, a regular feature I wrote for the architectural magazine Building Design, a series of architectural travelogues through British cities during the Great Recession. In these essays those cities are seen as political spaces subject to the changes in the British economy from the post-war settlement to the Thatcher-Blair consensus, as spaces where the movements in architectural theory from modernism to postmodernism and back have had profound and complex effects, and as spaces where the self-image of rural Albion can be tested against the urban and suburban reality. This book is entirely a continuation of that project, though I hope I can be understood without prior acquaintance. The first Urban Trawl was to a large degree an unrequested and mostly unrequited love letter to the great cities of the North5 – Cardiff, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Glasgow – and the many criticisms I had were offset by a genuine awe at these often wonder-filled cities. The places discussed in the second Urban Trawl are not, often, quite of the same order. There’s a lot more of the South and the Midlands, a lot more in general of the ‘Middle England’ that all politics in the UK is based on courting. Britain’s First and Second Cities receive return journeys, but the rest have mostly been virgin territory for me.

Because of this it may often seem a grim book, one that concentrates perhaps overmuch on the gory details of some extremely unlovely places, though it is my contention that it’s often here where ways out may be found. As a counterbalance to Middle England, there is a lot more focus on Scotland, a seeming alternative space within the United Kingdom itself, which accordingly may not be in the Union for too much longer. Large cities do feature in this book, but they are not its principal focus. Edinburgh, Bristol, Birmingham, London, none are places that hold out a great deal of hope, in my account; but we could find glimpses of potential new worlds in Leicester, Cumbernauld, Lincoln or Coventry. This book is in roughly chronological order, taking as I took them journeys undertaken between October 2010 and February 2012. Given the indigestibility of these investigations into Britain’s urban space, it may be best to approach the work as separate portions – discrete journeys to the North’s second-rank towns, to the West Midlands, the South West, the extensions of London, the East Midlands, and then the ‘Celtic Fringe’ – rather than trying to swallow it whole. The earlier Urban Trawls were accompanied by photographs from a Bradfordian friend; his photographs are here replaced with my own less professional efforts, along with biro drawings by a fellow denizen of the West Riding, Brighouse’s Fra Angelico of Brutalism, Laura Oldfield Ford. She also put herself through a few of the journeys.

While the first Urban Trawls were mostly undertaken with a man who often knew British cities better than I did, around half of this book is based on travels with my partner Agata Pyzik, a Polish writer whose prior expectations of proper European urbanity were a constant source of shame, as I faced her incredulity at the chaos we’d made of our cities, her shock that Empire and First World wealth had managed to create such squalor. I tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to convince her that urban Britain does have certain qualities of its own, and if I failed with her, I hope to have better luck with the reader.

We will begin, as befits a period of indeterminacy and interregnum, with a monument to the old regime, to its most sweeping project of recolonization, redevelopment and the production of new space. After that miserable, abandoned present, we will try and find some solace in both the past and the future.