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ОглавлениеChapter One
The Thames Gateway:
One of the Dark Places of the Earth
You Can Do What You Like, but You Must Do What
You Like Here
Though their innovations should not be discounted, many of New Labour’s experiments with managed neoliberalism were anticipated by the caring, sharing Thatcherism of the John Major government. The return to some form of planning and urbanism was the distant consequence of Major’s curbs on out-of-town shopping centres, brought in partly to assuage the shires, but extended under Labour into a more positive focus on the cities. The Private Finance Initiative and the Millennium Dome were both late Tory policies that Blair executed with great enthusiasm, to the point where both are now indelibly associated with his reign. Likewise, the most extensive experiment in urban planning undertaken by New Labour was the Thames Gateway, which was begun in the early 1990s during the Tories’ twilight years. It’s here that you can really detect the way that there was a subtle shift in the market dominance of the ’90s and ’00s, a shift which is now being repudiated. The ‘Thames Gateway’ was a gigantic dollop of land between London and the North Sea; an area which should really be described as the Industrial South. It begins with the disused wharves of the London Borough of Greenwich6 and the Isle of Dogs, extends up the River Lea to the industrial estates of Stratford, then along the Thames past Silvertown, Barking, Erith, Dartford, Gravesend, Tilbury, Sheerness, Basildon and Canvey Island, finally departing up the Medway to Chatham, Rochester and Gillingham. It passes London’s internal organs, the places that keep the capital going but which property development and conservation have long since expelled from the metropolis itself: container ports, factories both closed and thriving, petroleum refineries, sugar refineries, several power stations, marshes and nature reserves. It is the estuarine path described by Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the riverside journey taken by the Romans to the blasted, uncivilized, inhospitable edges of the known world. It can still feel just a little like that.
Since the 1980s London has not expanded east so much as westwards, past Heathrow and out towards Swindon and Oxford, bringing in its train lucrative property development and business parks – the Thames as a Silicon Valley, the motorcade from Notting Hill to Chipping Norton. Pure, unadulterated laissez-faire would have meant the further incursion of volume housebuilding, microchip factories and tech parks out across the Home Counties into Oxfordshire and Wiltshire; and that expansion is what the reforms to the planning laws are designed to create now. This westward movement meant the continued decline and dereliction of Conrad’s easterly riverside stretch, and that is what the Thames Gateway ‘plan’ was intended to reverse. There are reasons for this, not insignificant among them the fact that these places are marginal constituencies, populated by the people who decide elections. Working-class and fucked-over enough to be inclined to vote Labour, patriotic, atomized and flag-waving enough to vote Tory, they make the area a political battleground, which is weird for somewhere so seemingly uncommitted. In order to rescue the estuary, laissez-faire was tampered with in an interesting way. Development would continue its expansion of London westwards only under fairly strict control, within the planning system’s strictures; but developers were given complete free rein over the industrial and post-industrial wastes of the East End and South Essex, South East London and North Kent. There would be very little in the way of public infrastructural improvements, at least until the forever deferred completion of the ambitious Crossrail scheme, and there would be little planning or co-ordination, with competing Regional Development Agencies and local councils bidding for their piece of the pie. There would be housebuilding on an enormous scale, without the state, local populations or local government able to stand in the way. It was, in short, an Enterprise Zone larger even than London itself, a New Metropolis that resembled the incremental, speculation-led and car-based development of Los Angeles more than it did any of the Bilbaos, Barcelonas or Berlins bandied about by planners and politicians.
The Thames Gateway has recently often been a locus for M25 flânerie or exurban poetics, but it is seldom written about as a coherent entity. This makes sense, because there are few places less cohesive. It is a slippery zone, its very name implying that it is merely the way into the real event, the Metropolis itself. The name seems to have been chosen by a sadist, determined to ensure that the development always sounds pinched, substandard and suburban; but the area covered by it is absolutely enormous. This chapter is far from definitive, and will try instead to detail a journey that you can take, if you want, over a couple of days, rather than visiting every single part of the vast exurb. We will start on the Thames’s south side, or rather from the Medway, then go through North Kent, crossing the river via an imaginary bridge to Barking, where we will gradually make our way to the Metropolitan Enterprise Zone of Canary Wharf, and, eventually and reluctantly, end at the posthumous Blairite utopia of Olympian Stratford. In this route, you can find a place that is absolutely fascinating, with unforgettable landscapes, freakish buildings and marvellously pugnacious people, but it always defeats you in the end. The Industrial South can be contrasted, unfairly but unavoidably, with the Industrial North, in a way which does not credit the Wen and its outgrowths. There are few places in Britain where man has fouled his nest so comprehensively, with the sad concomitant that he is absolutely obsessed with that fouled nest. In fact, he thinks it’s an investment.
Under the Lines in Chatham
So, imagine that a boat has dropped you, as it may once have done, in the Medway Towns, specifically Chatham. Chatham looks at first like a normal town that has been smashed up and reassembled by a surrealistically inclined topographical demiurge. The extreme dips and peaks of the land throw up all manner of chaos, usually of a fairly unpleasant sort, such as the road system that holds the place in a tourniquet; for the pedestrian, the result is that thoroughfares that should be straight lines entail squeezing along weird half-pavements and crossing a baffling series of traffic islands, with entry points in the most counter-intuitive places possible. Across the Brutalist shopping centre and Ahrends Burton and Koralek’s law courts, a concrete flyover sweeps as if at random. An art deco war memorial looks over the general absurdity from up on ‘the lines’, the stark cliffs that run all the way through the Medway, giving it a strangeness and melodrama that is exceptionally unusual for the south of England. Where on earth, you would be within your rights to ask, am I?
It’s an impressively weird place, this quintessential down-at-heel naval town. It is often claimed to be the origin of the class-hate epithet ‘chav’ (‘Chatham Average’ is the suggested, and unlikely, etymology). If you’re coming (as, I’ll own up, I am) from the railway station, after you negotiate the ham-fisted road engineering you step down concrete stairs into a dense High Street of 99p shops and such, with a large Arndale-style block at the end of it; also at the end is a civic clock tower of such grandeur and munificence that you could be in the Industrial North rather than the Medway; similarly, too, with the wonky-roofed, wood-clad Urban Renaissance tower that creeps up behind it. Next to you on the other side is a bus station that has escaped from Tellytubbies, big, jolly and bulbous. Yet at the heart of Chatham is a development which raises some curious questions about the re-use of industrial sites. It’s a pregnant subject in this recession, with the scattered remnants of manufacturing in serious trouble, for all the noises about a return to ‘making things’. At first sight, Chatham Dockyard, disused since the mid-1980s, conforms to the standard post-industrial Urban Regen type, being turned over alternately to the creative industries (an art college), the heritage industry (several museums, ornamental ships) and the property speculation industry (newbuild flats that are ‘in keeping’, loft conversions). Yet there’s something unusual here.
The place to compare it with is the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, the huge Thames-side engineering works unexpectedly hailed by Tristram Hunt MP as a post-industrial counter-model to the Barratt Homes boredom that was mainly created by the developers’ scrum in the Thames Gateway. In Woolwich, the Wen and all its values pervades the factories entirely, with the majority of them turned into very expensive new flats, with a tame museum, some Gormleyish sculpture and some units serving as estate agents, organic grocery stores and a gastropub. It’s London at its worst, a self-segregating upper-crust enclave, a series of Canary Wharf yuppiedromes that just happens to be cast in severe Vanburghian forms, as if accidentally. Chatham Dockyard isn’t like that – its industrial past feels much closer, it still feels in some odd way itself. Partly that’s because of the way that many of the factories have become exhibits of themselves – one enormous shed houses various big lumps of metal as permanent, open ornaments, though it’s the thuggishly powerful steel frame that catches the eye. Industrial wreckage – cranes, presses, guns, scattered about at random – is more a feature of the space than sententious public art, which is right and good. The architecture is more complete, more vivid, than at Woolwich. But what makes it interesting, almost exciting even, is that there are things actually being built here as well. Pleasure boats and yachts, obviously, but ships nonetheless. Thrown together with the art school and the museums, the result is rich with potential. This is only really possible with the relative distance from London, where the pressure of property is higher; but for once, the idea of ‘mixed use’ seems convincing – strange, incongruous things thrown together that shouldn’t work, but do.
The distance from London has saved Chatham Dockyard from becoming boring, but along the Medway you can still see acre upon acre of developer’s dross – typically cul-de-sacs, of flats as often as houses, clinging to the river’s edges like stock-brick barnacles. From Chatham Dockyard you can see something just slightly more ambitious. In the foreground is an Odeon, using the same industrial Big Shed method as the old factories, then for producing, now for consuming; behind them you can see two skyscrapers. Well, almost skyscrapers, of a sleekness and finish that you don’t generally expect in an area more marked by concrete-framed blocks with oast-house cowls on top. Both have curved, glazed façades, and are a fragment of the ‘aspirational’ side of the Thames Gateway’s property frenzy, the part that involves the perusal of Wallpaper* magazine and viewings of Grand Designs as much as of Location, Location, Location. It’s unusual in North Kent, relatively exceptional for its high-end smoothness.
The Condition is Grave
Now I’ve rooted you somewhere and established the possibility that you may be doing this journey on a boat, I can stop pretending I’m doing the same. I’m not even doing it all at once – my reason for being here is connected with the quirks of the National Health Service, namely the fact that for seven years I have commuted from flats in Deptford, Greenwich and Woolwich to Darent Valley Hospital on the edges of Dartford – a building that I found it appropriate to write about in A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. So when I’ve explored the surrounding area, it’s usually been after treatment for Crohn’s disease and its many side-effects and knock-on irritants; which also means that I’ve occasionally hit North Kent under the effects of codeine or morphine, something which certainly assists in finding sites of interest. However, far too often I just make the same journey, first on one of the worst of the privatized train networks, Southeastern, then on North Kent’s Fastrack Buses or on TfL London buses (both make the same journey, the latter for nearly half the price). On the occasion I went to Gravesend, I took the Bus B from Darent Valley, which took me through Ebbsfleet and Northfleet on a proper round-all-the-houses trip which cost me a princely six pounds. The two Fleets are a study in place all of their own.
Ebbsfleet will be known to Eurostar passengers as Ebbsfleet International. It was supposed to become a practical New Town under the Thames Gateway, but although a lot of houses got built, it didn’t entirely pan out that way. The station itself, from which you can get to St Pancras, Paris, Lille and Brussels, is a Foster-like glass box that was pre-emptively strangled by road engineering, so that it was impossible for a real town to ever grow up around it; a series of spurs from the M25 surround and encase it, and the housing emerges on the edges of that. Ebbsfleet has no centre, though it has many, many units of neo-Victorian or Pseudomodern living that somehow slipped through the CABE net. The nearest thing to a centre is Bluewater, more of which presently. Northfleet, though, is a town of some sort. Like the Medway, it goes along and under high chalk cliffs, atop which you find very surprising things – patterned, Festival of Britain-style tower blocks, tiny terraces of the sort usually built for dockers, millworkers or miners, and the earliest major building by one of the architects of twentieth-century Britain, Giles Gilbert Scott: in the small Edwardian Catholic church here you can see more than hints of the blocky, heavily masonry-clad, modernized Gothic that would bring him to Liverpool Cathedral and Battersea Power Station. That’s a lot, for a town this small.
The town of Gravesend, like Chatham Dockyard, is a minor revelation, a memorable small town both distant from and a cousin to London, able to breathe some of its metropolitan air without completely swallowing its bullshit. There’s not much to Gravesend, but what there is is fairly fascinating. Firstly, there’s the most hated building in Gravesend – I have this on good authority – the Thamesgate Car Park. Arndale Brutalism, massive and monumental, it adjoins a completely uninteresting shopping centre, but is actually a very smart and dramatic building; in rich red brick around sculpted, ribbed concrete, its overhanging volumes have a hint of the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright. From a distance, it’s a ruthless cruiser of a building, fitting just perfectly with the container ships which dock nearby. In fact, you can imagine a Zaha Hadid giving it the nod of approval for its fearless, attention-seeking tectonic melodrama. I can understand the disdain, however, because from the train it gives the impression that you’re about to enter a shabby, disjointed place much like Chatham. You’re not – Gravesend is tight, cohesive and built very much around the river. In its ‘historic quarter’ (there’s no escaping the nomenclature), a dense high street of weatherboarded maritime buildings throws itself right towards the Thames. At the end of it there’s a pier with a restaurant on the end, a characterful pub, and a view of Tilbury Power Station on the other side of the Thames. When it gets dark here, this is a compellingly alien space, the bright lights inside the Power Station speaking of the heat and electricity generated therein. Next to the pub is the local headquarters of the Port of London Authority, housed in an undemonstrative box, a long way from the baroque palace it built for itself near the Tower of London a century ago.
On that same high street there’s a Town Hall that is really worthy of the Industrial South, a sandstone Doric Temple which for all its architectural rectitude and austerity really ambushes you, tells you that this was once a place which thought very highly of itself indeed; a fragment of the Enlightenment cast down to North Kent. Better still, you can walk through it to the seedily seasideish Borough Market, and then through that to Saint Andrew’s Court, a decent, strong, well-made 1962 council estate. Walk back into the town centre, and you find shopping malls much as you do everywhere else. They’re a little strange, slightly crepuscular, at the point between concrete Brutalism and brick vernacular described by Douglas Murphy as ‘Brutalomo’; an attempt to create the dense and enclosed spaces of a real street to replace, well, a real street. The mall’s multiple layers are enjoyable, although it’s all strangely underlit, as if to make it feel deliberately gloomy, even sinister. Out from there, there’s a fine eighteenth-century church, a statue of improbable one-time Gravesend resident Pocahontas, and a view of some developer excrescence. There’s a very active local Civic Society group in Gravesend, and they are justifiably proud of the fact that they recently blocked a tall tower of luxury flats, through a forthright campaign of sit-ins and civil disobedience, a little Kentish Occupy. It’s a precious and rare victory against developers in the Gateway’s free-for-all; but the guff you can see clinging to the riverbanks in Gravesend is not tall, not modern, and is immaculately in keeping; though it tears up the Thames Path, it dresses up its violence with pediments and neo-baroque details. It’s a bit harder to campaign against something that sweet-talks an area like this.
The reason why Gravesend’s urban grain felt so refreshing was because my point of comparison here is always Dartford, a desperately sad town. You can get a hint of that when you leave the train at the station. Look up at the Town Hall, a ’60s complex of no distinction, and you can always see two protruding things – a Union Jack and a CCTV camera, like a slightly laboured Banksy mural brought to life: community, nationality, security. It’s hard to tell which building-boom decade did more violence to Dartford. You can tick off the suspects. The ’60s, with its roadbuilding and loveless offices? Maybe. The ’80s, with its car-centred shopping malls, and more pointedly, the construction of the M25, which chopped the town in half? Quite possibly. The 2000s, with its faceless brick and aluminium blocks of flats cleaving to the edges of dual carriageways? Perhaps, but they’re all missing the point, really – it’s hard to find much of a heart in Dartford at all. There’s a decent enough high street, ending at a pretty medieval church, but not much else. The poky Victorian terraces in the centre make clear why – this too is an industrial town, but one too close to London to be able to carve out an identity of its own. You now get little comic juxtapositions here, from the attempt to Make It Nice. The pediments of an ’80s improvement scheme act as a gateway to a derelict co-op and a couple of greasy spoons. A big metal drum houses a few chains, and the railway gets you back into London either to work, or if you were born here, to live when you grow up. All that said, Dartford is of some importance for the very large shopping centre on its periphery.
Appeasing the Gods of Craft
I often find myself visiting Bluewater, mainly because it’s the closest ‘amenity’ to the hospital. The first time I went there, I was a little underwhelmed – having spent much of my childhood and youth in malls (like 90 per cent or so of those born since the 1970s), it felt like a familiar but expanded version of something I already knew very well indeed. The only novelty seemed to be the extraordinary setting, a gigantic Firing Squad-friendly bowl carved out of a chalk pit. Over time I ended up exploring it in a bit more depth, and its complexities and contradictions became more apparent, without necessarily making it a more pleasant place.
I hadn’t initially realized, given the hospital’s hilltop encampment-like position, that I was so close to Bluewater at least twice a month. I was within walking distance, in fact, or rather I would be if there were any means of walking there. What infuriates anyone used to enjoying the city through walking its short-cuts, walkways, underpasses, parks and general non-routes is that the place is so obsessively channelled, to an extent that makes you realize how much modernist housing projects, with their obliteration of gates and enclosures, were driven by a now-extreme libertarianism. As the crow flies, or in a post-apocalyptic, car-free scenario, I could walk in about five minutes from Outpatients to the back-end of Bluewater, counting in some tricksy negotiation of the chalk cliffs. Pedestrians are necessarily bus-riders, as the fact that access is motorway-only means there is literally no way of just turning up and walking into Bluewater, something which I’m sure Americans are rather used to, but for us is still relatively shocking. Eric Kuhne, the American architect whose firm CivicArts designed Bluewater, opined in a fascinating 2008 interview that Bluewater is ‘a city’ rather than a retail destination.7 In terms of its size and population this is true, so we need to evaluate exactly what sort of a city this is – a city with one ceremonial entrance, which can only be entered in a vehicle, where nothing is produced but where many things are consumed. The only sort of regime that could set up such a controlled, channelled city is a dictatorship or an oligarchy. Neatly enough, Kuhne explicitly praises ‘benevolent despotism’ and critiques the very notion of democratic city planning, with admirable frankness. Yet it’s also clear that Bluewater is one of the many possible termini of the nineteenth-century Arcades that drilled through the solidity of the baroque city, their iron and glass construction the ‘unconscious’ of architecture, an oneiric, ethereal harbinger of the future amidst the ostentatiously solid architecture of imperialism – the place where the ‘dreaming collective’ spends its time. As the bus winds through a series of roundabouts on its way from the hospital to the mall that is yards away, you see the elevations that are the (basically irrelevant) ‘face’ of the building: a series of spiked glass domes over a long, bulbous metal roof, which shimmers in the exurban autumn sunshine.
Inside, the first impression is of everything happening at once. The city of Bluewater soon reveals itself to be docile, unsurprisingly considering the draconian code of conduct, and there’s only the slightest hint of menace – but the entrance is chaos. First you go past the standard-issue Blair-era retail architecture of a Marks and Spencer, and then you hit something odd – four glass prisms, seemingly at random, part of the glazed part of the building that ushers you in. This might just be ineptitude, but presumably the designers know what they’re doing here, given the (as we shall see) heavily didactic elements of the interior; just exactly what is unclear. They’re ‘toys’, then, as Charles Jencks used to write about postmodernist architecture’s little devices, they’re purist solids, they’re the building’s ‘logo’ – but if so, it’s a remarkably asymmetrical and unmemorable one. Then you come up to a series of tall pillars, and two overhead walkways crossing each other, a suspended ceiling imprinted with a repetitious leaf motif, with the glare of the glazed entrance intensifying the effect – the shopping mall sublime, exacerbated by the thousands of people browsing, watching, buying, eating, or expelling their waste (for this is a city where those are the only permitted acts), and it’s thrilling in its way, although the pale stone-like substance with which almost everything is clad softens the effect, stops it from ever becoming jarring and strange. Walking around inside, you find a large quantity of public art, and a surprisingly large amount of seating. Is this, then, a version of the ‘Urban Renaissance’, with its mixed use and its encouragement of sociality? Kuhne talks of ‘special meeting places’ that ‘dignify the heroic routine of everyday life that drives you to produce a better world for yourself and your kids’. It could be Richard Rogers, this stuff, except that unlike the Plazas of the Urban Task Forces, people are actually using it, and in droves – apart from one closed noodle bar, you have to look damn hard here to find even the slightest hint that we’re in the middle of the longest recession in British economic history. Unnervingly, it supports the idea of the financial crisis as a kind of Phoney War, which will intensify only later, but will be truly horrendous when it does.
For something which is supposedly The Authentic Expression of Our Real Uncomplicated Desires (as per countless suburbia-loving libertarians since the 1950s, most of whom seem to live in the nicer bits of inner cities), Bluewater is extremely didactic in its design. It’s trying to make various points to its clientele which very few seem to have registered, whether critics or shoppers. So there are panels with little torn-out-of-context fragments from Vita Sackville-West, Laurie Lee and Robert Bridges about the glories of the countryside, its products and pleasures – well, there is agriculture nearby, of a heavily mechanized sort, although the M25 is the most obvious land usage. These quotes are there to establish continuity, to convince you that the city of Bluewater is a faintly rustic experience, without relinquishing one iota the imperatives of steel and glass – no urban-regen wood panelling here, no Scando. One of the raised arcades here is illuminated by the partly glazed ceilings, evoking the pointy tops of Kentish malt kilns, showing a series of inset relief sculptures. These immortalize all the jobs that once existed here, an accounting of the professions of the workshop of the world. Fishermen, Goldsmiths, Tanners, whatever, the list of all those people who used to make stuff is practically endless, while beneath them are those taking time off from intellectual labour in services financial or administrative. It’s a quasi-religious thing, this – an attempt at appeasing the gods of industry as they are replaced by the newer gods of consumption. What makes Bluewater’s didacticism interesting is that through its poems, its fibreglass leaves and its statues of ironmongers, it comes out and proclaims its transcendence of nature and labour, precisely by memorializing it. When just-in-time production and distribution seizes up and we can actually walk to it, we can look at Bluewater’s sentimental memorials and try and remember exactly what it was we used to do.
If Destroyed Still True
There is another peripheral exurb of Dartford that is worth visiting, partly as a way of getting Bluewater out of your system. New Ash Green was built by Span Developments Ltd, a company who were the other side of post-war mass housing to that of council estates and state-sponsored New Towns. Founded by the architect Geoffrey Townsend (who had to resign from the architectural profession because of his new job) and mostly designed by the talented Eric Lyons (later a president of the RIBA), an occasional architect to Southampton and Hackney councils but mostly a private practitioner, Span was both a profit-making business and an attempt to design spaces which were, at least implicitly, social democratic. They wrote of their approach, ‘community as the goal; shared landscape as the means; modern, controlled design as the expression’. So they were impeccably ‘Butskellite’, as the post-war consensus-describing phrase had it, only with the emphasis on Mr But rather than Mr Skell.
Span’s most famous work is in very desirable places indeed – Blackheath, Richmond, Hove, Cambridge. I remember once hearing a moderately successful youngish architect proclaim that ‘Span is interesting because it works’, implying that this was a contrast with things that didn’t work, designed most likely by local councils. It is however very hard to see how what Span were doing – car-free, pedestrianized public spaces, low-rise houses, plenty of landscaping, a Scandinavian softening of Modernism – was any different in design terms from, say, what Sheffield City Council did at Gleadless Valley which ‘doesn’t work’. Span works for one main reason: it was designed, and designed very well, for (often upper-)middle-class clients, so the spaces are looked after, the designs are scrupulously cohesive, and the inhabitants have invariably chosen to live there. It’s not mysterious, and it’s nothing to do with design. What cannot be denied is that Span produced very lovely places. New Ash Green is a harder sell, though, much more so than their enclaves in affluent districts of the metropolis. This place is not so much a New Town as a New Village which Span had designed in North Kent – so ambitious an undertaking that it basically bankrupted the company. The last few pieces of the scheme were entrusted to the somewhat less socially idealistic developers Bovis, then chaired by Keith Joseph himself, who as a government minister under Heath had tried to stop the place being built in the first place. Bovis still has its head office there, which might explain some of the place’s continued affluence.
As New Ash Green is not a town or a suburb I suppose it must be rural, although I say this with the proviso that I don’t understand or know anything whatsoever about the countryside, generally considering it an ideological phantom wielded as a weapon against towns and cities, inducing them to surrender any true civic life to dreams of homes-as-castles-and-investments, as opposed to a real place, which it must be, for some. You can only reach New Ash Green in a car, or by a tortuous public-transport route – the nearest largish town, Dartford, is reached via a bus which seems to be either hourly or two-hourly, depending on how bad a mood the bus driver is in. New Ash Green stops abruptly at one point, where rolling fields start. Yet although it’s essentially one of the Milton Keynes grids with all the surrounding infrastructure taken away, it’s far more urban in design terms than most of what has been built for the last thirty years, even if the urb in question is in the outer reaches of the Copenhagen Metro system. The houses, for all their wood and brick, are still deeply modernist, almost futuristic at times, an impression reinforced by the signage – pseudo-rustic names spelled out in science-fiction letters. Even the streetlamps have something decidedly Dr Who about them, furnishings that could beam you somewhere else entirely. The landscape – nature under strict control – is the truly impressive thing here, something which even the drabber Bovis parts of the estate manage to retain: a sense that everything is public, everything is permeable, except of course for the houses themselves. Span seem to have assumed that a largish, well-designed house with big windows and a garden was all anyone needed for private space, with CCTV and driveways strikingly absent. Lyons and Span had evidently not read about Oskar Newman’s theories of ‘Defensible Space’, nor had they spotted their incorporation into the Design Guide used by nearby Essex County Council. New Ash Green breaks every one of those nasty little rules, by placing what now seems like enormous trust in the place’s inhabitants. If, as Alice Coleman and her ilk have suggested, certain urban forms invite crime, then the in-between spaces here should be a constant fest of knifings and rapes. It’s hard to imagine they do so any more than in Dartford’s more obsessively defensible closes and cul-de-sacs.
There are nooks of mild criminality in the form of the graffiti that is scribbled on the walkways, much of which is so cute and indie that it seems like the local youth are all living in a Belle and Sebastian song. ‘If destroyed still true, please keep our memorie’s here.’ It is not suffocatingly nice, though, and New Ash Green lacks the obsessive upkeep, the Keep Calm and Carry On posters and the general austerity nostalgia that you can find in the Span parts of Blackheath. Nonetheless, by the standards of 98 per cent of Britain this is hard-line stuff – the hedges impeccable, the original features mostly in place, the spaces extremely trim. You could have a wonderful life here and you could also go completely bonkers in a week. Span probably knew from early on that this one would be a hard sell. The RIBA’s recent Eric Lyons and Span book about their ex-president reproduces some of the flagrantly sexist ads used to convince people to move to the back of beyond (or the back of beyond less than an hour’s drive from London). Architect’s Wives, ‘vital statistics (no, not those ones!)’, some fairly blatant suggestions of possible wife swapping and the general sexual intrigue that goes with being terribly modern.
The place may well soon become both modern and terrible, as architectural hacks Broadway Malyan are slated to redesign it. To get an architect of similar talent and prominence to Lyons, they should really be asking Richard Rogers – his recent speculative housing in Milton Keynes is a precise modern equivalent – but I don’t suppose he comes as cheap. The shopping centre is slightly knackered, but even when compared with many more inner-city estates, it’s thoroughly self-sufficient with its banks, health food café, branch of Oxfam, Co-op, newsagent, various other bits and bobs. I’ve seen places in Zone 2 with fewer amenities. Up on the roof there is some slight sign of ruffness in the graffiti, though having ‘HENCH’ as your tag is a bit sad. Like writing ‘I’M A BIG MAN, ME!’ everywhere. It protests too much. There appear to be only two places where New Ash Green seems anything other than idyllic: the back-end of the shopping centre, a car-parking area that for some reason has gone derelict before everywhere else; and the village pub, not exactly welcoming, full of regulars who look at us like we’re from Mars – which is rich, as they live on it. The door of the pub advertises the Sunday Carvery, but rather than showing a farmhouse, the advert shows the outline of a thoroughly modern dwelling.
This Building Kills (or Abets) Fascists
At this point on our progress towards the Wen we leave Kent altogether, finding ourselves in London, Zone 4 to be precise. This is Outer London, not one of the areas that was part of the original Greater London Council (unlike Woolwich, just over the river), but it is geographically London, and votes for the Greater London Authority. From here the route is different – more on foot, and more by London’s own, far superior public transport – the Docklands Light Railway, not Fastrack Buses. It is, it would seem, an even darker place than North Kent. The northern side of the Thames Gateway, once one of the few Labour strongholds in southern England, had a tendency during the boom to vote for fascists, and elect them as councillors. Thurrock, Tilbury, but especially Barking and Dagenham, appeared to be defecting en masse to the British National Party. Their Barking base was unexpectedly destroyed in the elections of 2010, and far-right politics have returned to the Plan A of cracking heads, in the form of the Luton-derived English Defence League. A week before the General Election I had a wander round Barking, and though thankfully the election proved the town had far more decent people in it than broadsheet commentators may have assumed, many of the points made about its built environment still stand, I think.
Barking was thought likely in spring 2010 to become the first place in British history to elect a fascist MP. East End sentimentalists don’t like to remember that Mile End was once one of the three places in Britain to have elected Communist MPs, which would imply that local political identity once extended beyond pearly kings and costermongers, although there’s no doubt that the consignment of Phil Piratin MP to the memory hole has worked effectively. Although electing fascists is considered normal in much of oh-so-civic continental Europe, especially after the financial collapse, in the UK it is often still, rightly, considered alarming that such a thing could potentially occur. I won’t pretend the following is much more than a light skimming of the (architectural) surface, but hopefully a few insights can be gained from looking at Barking. We walked there from Canning Town, through East and West Ham, a workaday, multiracial London interrupted by flyovers and creeks that make the demarcation with Barking itself particularly clear.
The area we saw was Barking Central (in the regenerator’s terminology). This is as opposed to Becontree, the huge inter-war ‘homes for heroes’ estate which by many accounts was where most of the BNP support is concentrated. I grew up somewhere similar, cottagey council houses overlooking a giant Ford works, so I suppose I already know the territory. The centre of Barking was not untouched by the boom – in fact, it was subject to a very ambitious regeneration scheme, which local MP and spectacularly philistine ‘culture minister’ Margaret Hodge has described as ‘my kind of architecture’. This is hardly a recommendation, but the comprehensiveness of the scheme is at least impressive: the redevelopment encompasses housing, leisure and public space, on a very large scale. Already as soon as you pass under the flyover, the difference between the terraced density of East Ham and Barking’s sprawling suburbia is noticeable, with a straggling collection of dodgy pomo, Victorian factories, 1930s semis, tower blocks and wasteland announcing it. This then fades into a quite pleasant town centre, marked by medieval remains, pedestrianized shops and town-centre office blocks, all on roughly the same scale as, say, Dartford; though significantly more multiracial, and with much more character than the latter. BNP-voting areas do not, on the whole, have very high rates of immigration – Barnsley and Thurrock are not Burngreave or Poplar – but Barking is a partial exception. Customarily, this is presented as being at bottom a question of housing. In 2010, no new council housing had been built for decades, though a large 1960s estate had been demolished. Right-to-buy had warped the perception of what exists, so that considerably more agency was attributed to council housing allocations than actually existed. However, to suggest that, well, racism has nothing to do with it would be foolish. The fascist sympathizers in places like the Isle of Dogs didn’t disappear in the 1990s – they went somewhere.
The edges of the town centre are where the tensions lie. One side features a large, derelict shopping parade, which has flats at the back, curving around a car park and some lumps that might or might not have been public art of some description, or mere traffic-controlling blobs. There’s no disputing that leaving a load of housing derelict in the middle of a housing crisis is rather grotesque, especially in a place this charged. It’s hard to decide which side is the more depressing, the empty flats – which are very likely of decent Parker-Morris proportions – or the shops, bookies and recruitment agencies that were no doubt even more depressing when they were open. The eye is drawn, though, to two pieces of very jolly architecture. First, the Town Hall, proof that there are simply no uninteresting town halls in London, a Dudok-Georgian mash-up with a wonderfully unscholarly approach to historical styles. The bell tower is full of suspicious-looking telecommunications equipment, and Bobbies On The Beat walk back and forth in front of it at a more regular rate than I’m used to seeing. Then there’s Alford Hall Monaghan Morris’s Barking Central development. AHMM are a paradigm of Blairite architecture at its most thoroughly developed, a glossy, brightly-coloured neomodernism that feels like CGI even when you touch it, the Weimar Republic colourfulness of Bruno Taut relocated to DOSAC from The Thick of It. Their tendency to the rictus grin conceals architectural talent and presence, but if there’s a better exemplar of New Labour architecture than their bright, jolly Pseudomodernism then I don’t know what it is. Their buildings here, very dense low-rise blocks and towers, hinge on the contrast between what you see – the fun façades – and what you don’t, the grimness of the small, single-aspect flats.
A percentage of Barking Central is ‘affordable housing’, that all-purpose get-out-clause, and it bears constant repeating that affordable housing is not council housing, but is usually shared-ownership or slightly-cheaper-to-buy, and so makes virtually no difference to the problems that were purportedly stirring up the BNP vote. Let’s imagine for a moment, irrespective of the crappy space standards, what a gesture it would have been if a development this large, this shiny and optimistic, were let to council tenants – how many political arguments would then be won at a stroke. As it is the place is not altogether hideous, for all its fiddling-while-Rome-burns nature, and part of that is due to extraneous things, extras on the architecture which are surprisingly clever, and suggest how much more could have been done here. The colonnades (courtesy of landscape architects muf) are great, the size of the site letting the architects do something they couldn’t have squeezed into a tight plot of inner-city CABEism; it’s an actually quite pleasant and successful public space. The main occupants so far are pigeons, but that need not remain true.
Across from this is – honesty here, at least, in the choice of name – ‘The Folly’, designed by muf. It’s rather asking to be judged as a description for the entire project, stigmatized as an act of expensive futility, and yet the sheer menance of it marks this out as something perhaps more interesting, one of the few built instantiations of the recent ruin-mania of any consequence. It’s a brick edifice that presents itself as an instant pagan ruin, from the headless creatures lined up and inset into it, to the gates that lead to nowhere – there is after all a ruined abbey nearby. The suggestion that it might be some comment or satire on the surrounding scheme, or on AHMM’s refusal to imagine the possibility of ageing or weathering in their buildings, seems a bit much, although placing a sheep atop the whole thing has at least some tongue-poking symbolism. However, the massive return to the Labour fold here in the 2010 election has evidently provoked the party’s gratitude; not far from here is now a small estate of stock-brick houses, masterplanned by sober brick austerity types Maccreanor Lavington, with a terrace by AHMM themselves – moving sharply away from the bright shiny cladding of Barking Central to a robust interpretation of an early Victorian dockside terrace. For once, provided you forget that this is an only partial replacement of the houses they demolished, it seems the local Labour Party realized who they were supposed to represent. It’s not complicated, and neither is the architecture.
The usual way into or out of here is another indication that a quite exciting town could be made here, if the will existed. Barking Station is a rare fine British Rail building with an angular roof in concrete so richly, darkly shuttered that it’s hard to remind yourself it isn’t wood; a bespoke station which suggests a local centre far from Zone 1 which nonetheless had a sharp, defined identity for itself, which wasn’t reducible to being just another notch in the commuter belt. Opposite this is something that speaks much more of what Barking is today – a shopping mall, a glass and fibreglass atrium that resembles the iron-and-glass canopies of Leeds City Markets relocated to Thorpe Park, picked out in pink, with a false top-floor and an interesting selection of shops. Here you can find Freedom Mobility Barking (Grabbers, Folding Commodes, Scooter Bags and Capes, Overbed Tables, Walking Sticks, all at ‘Low Low Prices’) and on the upper floors there’s a Job Shop which offers ‘jobs for local people’. At least they don’t use the term ‘indigenous’. Aside from the tacit racism, it doth protest too much – the implication is that there’s something to prove here, that when they aren’t loudly pointing it out, housing and jobs might not be going to ‘locals’. But in light of the way a huge swathe of Barking has been redeveloped neither in the interests of council tenants nor of the incomers pushed here by rising rents and housing clearances in Tower Hamlets and Newham, and looking too at how large-scale and blaring the private development was, you have to wonder who is fooling who here.
Enterprise Interzone
Getting yourself onto the Docklands Light Railway – a bus to Beckton will do the trick – you can now explore the effects of the Enterprise Zones of the 1980s and 90s, and their remnants and extensions today. The first notable place you will come across is the University of East London, whose tubular, brightly-painted halls of residence you could not fail to notice. Get off here (Cyprus Station, evocatively) and you can find a place which sums up very well the New Labour approach to Higher Education. You’ll notice first of all the things about it that are reasonably laudable. ‘UEL’ is a very long way from University College, and its proportion of working-class students is second-only to the far less coherent and definable London Metropolitan University, scattered from Holloway to Minories. It’s a campus, very much on the pattern of the ‘plate glass Universities’ of the 1960s, with all possible amenities, so that in theory you would hardly need to leave, which is helpful given the location. The masterplan and the design are courtesy of ‘organic modernists’ Edward Cullinan and Partners; Mr Cullinan worked with Denys Lasdun on the University of East Anglia in the 1960s, the most architecturally impressive of the Wilson-era universities, and some of that ability to create a strange and distinctive integration of architecture and place can be felt here. The public squares and undulating classrooms, offices and ‘simulated trading floors’ of UEL open out towards the runway of London City Airport; in fact, the Library has a direct view of planes taking off and landing. It’s easy to attack this as the effect of planning policies that don’t give a damn about where they dump the lower orders, and yet there is something deeply special and haunting about this place – the University at the end of the world. Given that the funding cuts to the universities are mainly a frontal assault on expanded ex-polytechnics like UEL, it is also the last of a species on the verge of extinction. If it were not such an epitome of a segregated education system, it’d be easier to mourn it.
The airport and the University are both the direct consequence of the closure of the Royals, the last docks within ‘official’ London; we have passed on our route through North Kent several docks and wharves operated by the Port of London Authority, but they’re safely out of sight and unremarked. The Royals – the Royal Victoria Dock, King George V Dock, and Royal Albert Dock – were gigantic engineering undertakings, designed to take ocean liners, that were finally made obsolete by containerization as late as the early 1980s. Because of their vastness – wider than the Thames itself at times – they cannot make up a pretty marina, in the same fashion as the more narrow stretches of water in Rotherhithe or the Isle of Dogs. Whatever happens here has to factor in the prodigious scale of the Royals, something which usually leads to an obvious recourse – the Really Big Shed. The most interesting place to explore the Royals, aside from the disconnected enclave of UEL, is via a long path through the district of Silvertown. The place to begin, which is helpfully just outside the DLR stop for City Airport, is the Tate & Lyle refinery. This must be the largest extant industrial complex left in East London. It still makes Golden Syrup, and scatters its sweet, sticky smell across tiny terraces and system-built GLC tower blocks. You are very close here to the wealth of Canary Wharf, but trickle-down has, surprisingly enough, failed to take effect. The best walk is along the former route of the North London Line, the overground railway that was closed less than a decade ago, replaced by a DLR extension and, putatively, Crossrail. This disused railway offers a view of some very melancholic spaces indeed: the Tate Institute, a boarded-up Arts and Crafts building that has met a very different fate to the sugar baron’s more famous cultural endeavours upriver. The memorial to the Silvertown explosion, a First World War accident that destroyed much of the area. Lyle Park, a small green space tucked in between foul-smelling chemical works, which has the former gates of the Harland and Wolff shipyard left as ornament. Looking over it all is a church by S.S Teulon, the wild proto-Brutalist mid-Victorian architect. It now houses the geographically absconding ‘Brick Lane Music Hall’, and it’s still a staggering work of architecture, a freakish monster of banded brick and thuggish stone, rising to a squat, monstrous tower, bursting with an uncanny, guttural power. It’s a surrealist church for a surrealist landscape.
After this, redevelopment begins. Sandwiched between the Royals and the Thames is one of the best of the yuppiedromes, at least for its sheer scenographic quality – Barrier Park, and its adjoining housing, Barrier Point. The park overlooks, as the name implies, the technology that has saved London from more than one flood; its placement is an admiring gesture, imploring you to gaze upon it and boggle. The park itself has been taken relatively seriously as a piece of design; a cubic pavilion café sits in the centre, and a sunken garden where the dock used to be is a collection of abstracted topiary which perfectly accompanies the sheer bloody weirdness of the surrounding landscape. The flats have a stepped section down to the park, which makes them much more well-mannered than is customary – they’re best on a foggy day, when you can’t see how penny-pinchingly cheap the detailing is. They’re a project by Barratt Homes, and were pretty pivotal in making clear that volume housebuilders could adapt to the new aspirational privatized modernism with some ease. Pass under the DLR bridge, and you pass through their earlier work in the Dockside Enterprise Zone – Prince-friendly closes and cul-de-sacs, with lots and lots of parking space for very big cars. A gaunt concrete grain silo is a hint that there are remnants nearby, a whisper which becomes a scream when you reach Millennium Mills. This magnificent inter-war Flour Mill was always lurking here to demarcate where regeneration stopped; Sir Terry Farrell was hired to come up with ideas for it, and proposed flats combined with an aquarium, to be called ‘Biota!’ A very high, spindly, wobbly and bracing cable-stayed bridge now brings you to the more fully yuppified part of the Royals.
This revolves around the ExCel conference centre, the favoured heavily-guarded location for an annual Arms Expo. The building’s first stage, a giant hangar with a Rogers-esque external frame, has recently been extended by Nicholas Grimshaw, meaning that ExCel is now roughly the size of a small town. In its train are heartless, overdeveloped, architecturally nugatory luxury flats, many of them high-rise and higher, plus hotels for conference delegates and a small bit of re-used Victorian warehousing. I’ve only managed to get inside ExCel once, for an event called ‘EcoBuild’, where various destructive multinationals show off their experiments in green technology, but mainly exploit the occasion as an excuse to promote and sell other more or less sustainable wares to the building industry. Various countries have their own stalls, where they tell you a little bit about how they’re lowering carbon emissions and a lot about how you really ought to invest in them. Surrounded by motorways and pylons, just under an airport, it’s a little hard to take. Get on the train here at Custom House DLR, try not to be frisked by security, and then make your way to a place that should, in theory, be very different.
Poplarism Revisited
The Borough of Poplar, absorbed during the 1960s into Tower Hamlets, gave the political lexicon the phrase ‘Poplarism’. It describes the stand against central government made by Labour councillors under the later Labour leader George Lansbury, when they continued to improve working-class health and housing no matter how much the screws were put on them. ‘Better to break the law than to break the poor’ was their slogan and defence. Every muncipality that has tried to take on the government since has appealed in some way to their example. The LCC that tried to ‘build the Tories out of London’, the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, Militant Liverpool, Livingstone’s ‘loony left’ GLC. Some on that list were more successful than others, and ‘Socialism in One Borough’ was always a bit of a stretch, but Poplar did win significant victories. Labour might not have taken the whole of London in the 1930s without their example, and the huge amount of public housing in Poplar today is surely evidence of how seriously they took their task. Some might feel it a shame that none of the old, seedy, dockland Poplar survives today, but the Poplarists would have seen that as a resounding success. Their determination to take on the government contrasts with the current craven stance of councils forced to implement the most extreme cuts. The option to fight is there, if they are willing to risk the court cases and prison sentences. The fact that the current Mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, presents himself as a left-of-Labour diehard, suggests that there may be contemporary potential here too, though Respect, the left-of-Labour party that once nearly took control of the council, has disintegrated almost completely, with some of its councillors even joining the Tories.
Poplarism’s built legacies are not always well treated by Tower Hamlets council, it must be noted. Poplar Town Hall, an art deco building with a Socialist Realist frieze of local trades and workers, is now Bow Business Centre, a gratuitous but typical insult. Poplar Baths are derelict. The estates are often very good indeed, whether the mansion flats or incongruous cottages built under Lansbury himself or the Cockneyfied modernism of the Attlee government’s Lansbury Estate, but the boarded-up or rotting high streets in between them are not models of a surviving socialist enclave. The DLR runs up, down and across, trying gamely to make the place more coherent. The work of Tower Hamlets itself, the later 1960s system-built estates, make a depressing complement to the yuppie fistulae that have shot off from the bowels of Canary Wharf. And the Mini-Manhattan there is an entirely inescapable presence. If you really want to see the London that neoliberalism built at its Brazilified worst, at its most brutally segregated and stratified, if you want to make yourself unconscionably angry, you must go to where Poplar meets Canary Wharf. The Docklands Light Railway, several car parks, the Blackwall Tunnel approach and the Crossrail building site slice the area in two. On one side, towers of trading floors and ‘luxury flats’; on the other the crumbling remnants of public housing. Among these remnants is Robin Hood Gardens.
This estate of two long, curving blocks was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson in 1969, and is scheduled for demolition by owners Tower Hamlets Council. When it was built, it was already seen as dated. It derived from the Smithsons’ ideas for the Golden Lane bombsite just outside the Square Mile, where rather than just dropping blocks in parkland, they would try and design something that had the intuitive, dense, warm communal life of the areas that had been bombed and that were being cleared as slums. These ideas were properly implemented by largely unheralded architects at Sheffield City Council; the Smithsons’ own version was, curiously, far less tectonically or socially convincing, for all the architects’ relentless theorizing and self-promotion. Park Hill is a world-class masterpiece, Robin Hood Gardens its slightly gawkier, provincial cousin. However, you don’t demolish somewhere just for being somewhat architecturally unresolved. When Tower Hamlets announced their intention to pull it down, Building Design launched a petition and a very high-profile campaign – a brave move on the part of editor Amanda Baillieu, one which put them out on a limb when rivals like the Architects’ Journal sniffily disassociated themselves from the campaign, aligning themselves with the advocates of class cleansing. It’s here that things get complicated.
Tower Hamlets has a massive shortage of council housing, which should be enough to make the case for the buildings’ renovation. Yet signatories to the petition, ranging from self-help philosophers to property developers, were all too keen for it to be restored in a similar manner to formerly council-owned buildings like Denys Lasdun’s Keeling House, where ‘restoration’ meant privatization and the expulsion of tenants, or Bloomsbury’s Brunswick Centre, where a majority of the inhabitants are actually designers. Accordingly Tower Hamlets were able to play people’s champion, claiming that their proposals – selling off the site and increasing density sevenfold, with no guarantee that tenants could return bar a vague commitment to some ‘affordable’ housing in its replacement8 – would put ‘people before buildings’. Tower Hamlets have repeatedly claimed that their coffee-morning consultations show that a majority of residents want the place demolished, but a recent survey carried out by a long-term tenant found 80 per cent wanted it renovated and refurbished.9 Described by its architects as ‘a building for the socialist dream’, the estate sits oddly next to a world centre for unrestrained capitalism. The estate is run-down, with virtues and flaws like any other – its famed ‘streets in the sky’ clearly work well, for example, with residents chatting and leaving their doors open, at least during the day. The stairwells are harshly claustrophobic, unlike the sensitively designed lift lobbies. The concrete, which picks up light beautifully, is harsh to the touch on the exterior walls, smoothing down to a soft, clean surface when you get to the entrances of the flats; which are poky, albeit nowhere near as poky as the average contemporary ‘luxury flat’. A random pattern of concrete slats gives off a threatening ambience, offset by vegetable gardens and a spacious park. The Blackwall Tunnel approach road passes adjacent, defeating even the most impressive attempt at creating a humane environment. It’s a strange place, but by no means an unsalvageable one – if you ignore its place at the heart of a class war over London’s space. Robin Hood Gardens’ likely successors have been decided upon, designed by multinational hacks Aedas after several London firms publicly called for a boycott of the competition: there will be architecturally nondescript, internally cramped ‘executive’ high-rises. Few seem interested in defending the place as viable council housing. The real story here is not about the qualities or otherwise of big concrete buildings, but about the uninterrupted denigration of council housing and the expansion of London’s second financial district.
Tower Hamlets are, it must be admitted, over a barrel. Hugely underfunded, running one of the poorest places in Europe, they have evidently decided that selling their land and desperately crossing their fingers that some of their voters will get rehoused in the ‘affordable’ units will help keep the wolf from the door. The Housing Associations have no such excuse. Next to Robin Hood Gardens is the Brownfield Estate, designed by Hungarian architect and Communist fellow-traveller Erno Goldfinger, who moved in here for a few months to make sure everything worked properly. As a piece of architecture, it achieves with ease all the things which the Smithsons fussed over. The flats are large and simple, the bared concrete is beautiful, detailed with a craftsman’s obsessiveness, the communal areas largely make sense, and the buildings have an impressive sense of order and controlled drama. Much of it is undemonstrative low-rise flats, with concrete frames and brick infill, but the three buildings that always get noticed are more, well, ‘iconic’. Glenkerry House is a ten-storey tower with services on top that are modelled like a work of Constructivist sculpture; it is owned by a residents’ co-operative, so is exempt from the current redevelopment. Carradale House is a long, low concrete block connected by external walkways, thrown out to a futurist length, angled around the central image – the vertiginous Balfron Tower, which skyscrapes its way up to overlook much of East London. It’s often seen as the first draft of Goldfinger’s slightly later Trellick Tower, but it’s a design all of its own, animating its attempt to protect residents from the din and ugliness of the Blackwall approach without the clumsy, fortress-like enclosure resorted to by the Smithsons. It has, however, had done to it what many of Robin Hood Gardens’ advocates have demanded.
After one of those desultory low-turnout ballots of residents, the estate was given to a housing association, Poplar HARCA, with the usual promises that only they could renovate the flats to a decent standard after so many decades of neglect. What they did instead was move out the existing residents, move in artists (who did a few projects about the departing tenants) and propose to demolish most of the low-rise housing in the estate, leaving only the icons. In this case the residents weren’t even ‘decanted’, or given the promise that they could come back, because apparently they had not asked to be rehoused here. Though of course there will be an ‘affordable’ percentage of the renovated flats when they do emerge. This is where the political conformism that still, maddeningly, pervades local authorities gets us: a clearance either way, but you can choose your style of class cleansing, from stunning development to preserved 1960s heritage. And where will the residents end up? Why, in the outer reaches of the Thames Gateway, of course, in nondescript little closes stuck on the edges of motorways in Barking or Thurrock. It all starts to look like a deliberate plan – space is freed up in the inner city, and new space is allocated in the exurbs. Crossrail will get the cleaners back in from Essex, and get the bankers from Maidenhead to Canning Town. There is, as a walk around Poplar makes clear, always an alternative. If the elected representatives who were supposed to stop this can’t or won’t, if in fact they prove themselves complicit and willing, then there are the options of either despair or riot. The rioters got about as far as Bow, last time.
The Olympian Landscape
The reason why this is all able to occur is easy enough to discern; it’s there in front of you, everywhere you turn in Poplar, with that air-traffic alerting light flashing on and off the pyramid at the top, winking mockingly at you. Canary Wharf, like the first City, is breaking its banks, and spreading bankster colonies all over the borough of Tower Hamlets. As we have grown to expect, the financial crisis they triggered (Lehman Brothers and AIG did their naughtiest things here) has not led to any noticeable contrition or humility. From Poplar we could make our way into the Isle of Dogs itself, to peruse its glass and steel, or to jeer at the way that the kitsch of the ’80s still sits around it, dating the place horribly; we could walk around the mean, low-ceilinged shopping mall that sits under the central phallus of One Canada Square, the pyramidal erection dubbed at the time ‘Thatcher’s Cock’. We won’t, however. We’ll head away from this Thatcherite landscape with its Fosterian Blairite appendages to a much purer space of New Labour, just to finally give them their due, for their most large-scale experiment in the planning of a wholly new, tabula rasa district of the capital.
I ought to be brief, or as brief as possible, on the subject of the Olympic Site. Being based south of the river I try and avoid the place, but architectural correspondents who live and work in East London, like Douglas Murphy, Kieran Long or Oliver Wainwright, have all written superb and detailed indictments of the place, have buried it time and again, although admittedly without managing to shame the Olympic Delivery Authority into the hoped-for mass resignation. By the time you read this it may all be over, the fireworks, the pageants, the unmanned drones, the stationing on-site of US missiles, the enormous police and army presence, the medals or not-medals, the terrorist attacks or not-terrorist attacks. That doesn’t matter. It’s all about the Legacy. Ken Livingstone admitted as much several times – the point was not to have a sports event in London, the point was to extort some funding for the redevelopment of a massive swathe of derelict London, a light-engineering swathe along the river Lea that had long since gone to seed, a typical stretch of Thames Gateway post-industry.
And why not? Many writers have mourned the demise of the Lea Valley, London’s last great wilderness. I remember it well, the paths along the outfall sewer, the random collections of industrial waste, the abundant and unusual bird and plant life; there are still a few similar spaces on the other side of the Thames, and practically dozens outside of London. Nonetheless, there was a uniqueness to the Lea Valley Zone, and the effacement of it by an enormous project of speculation and imposed redevelopment is hard to conceive as a victory for the people of London. Just imagine, though, if the GLA was the GLC, a well-funded, powerful body able and willing to stand up to the City and the government, and they proposed to redevelop this area. Imagine that they too used an Olympics as a pretext, and connected the new suburb to the DLR, the Jubilee Line, Crossrail and even the railway to the Continent. Imagine that the country’s most famous architects were hired, by subterfuge or otherwise, to design its public buildings, while an immense landscaping project provided a new public park. Imagine that a rigorously planned new housing development with a secondary school as part of it was an integral part of this new district. I can’t say I’d protest. More than that, I can say I’d be the first to hail the bloody place as everything London desperately needs, especially impoverished, overcrowded, overstretched East London. I’d be declaring Ken Livingstone the greatest living Englishman, the man who used running, swimming and shot-putting as the pretext to build a magnificent new city for the masses of London. It isn’t a particularly useful thought experiment, as this isn’t what is happening. All of the above features in Olympian Stratford in some manner, but all of it is coming into being as an act against London – the creation of yet another security-obsessed, enclosed, gated enclave set up to mock the idea that we could become more rather than less equal.
The new Stratford is really several different sites, all of them distinct, fitting into a larger plan. There is the redevelopment of Stratford High Street into a series of speculative high-rise towers; there is the ‘town centre’, a huge enclosed Westfield shopping mall; there is the Olympic Village, a housing development to accommodate the athletes, their PAs and associated bureaucrats; and there is the Olympic Site itself, a flowing park dotted with sports facilities by various architects. They don’t fit together terribly well, but all of them are in their own way extremely ambitious. The biggest, although in design terms by far the worst part, is Stratford High Street. Under the laissez-faire jurisdiction of the London Borough of Newham, a half-dozen or more towers have sprouted atop an already congested and miserable thoroughfare. Lower buildings, of so poor a spatial standard and build quality that they resemble clumsily re-clad council estates rather than new buildings, occupy the spaces in between. The towers are nearly all by the same firm, Pseudomodernists Stock Woolstonecroft, who were surely as surprised as anyone when they were essentially allowed to build an entire Mini-Manhattan of buy-to-let hutches with catchy names – Aurora! Icona! Each tower is clad in multiple tacky materials, the usual trick for hiding the fact that there’s no orientation to the sun, no double-aspect flats, and a whopping great big dual carriageway just below your pink aluminium balcony.
The Olympic Village itself would be entitled to look down its nose at such things. Although the development was widely ridiculed for the fact that the athletes’ dormitories were so small that it would be difficult to sell the flats on, even in the country with the lowest space requirements in Europe, this publicly-funded development has been bought up in toto by Qatari Diar, who can presumably knock through the partitions in these concrete-framed blocks. They are as uniform and ordered as Stratford High Street is chaotic and headstrong; mostly of around eight storeys, often masonry clad with expensive materials, with individual plots let to some fairly respected architects. The result is uniform in a rather scary way. From the Westfield car park, it resembles the peripheral estates of the late Soviet Union, which also stood in public squares at eight-to-ten storeys, and which were also often surrounded with an indeterminate kipple. Nearly every architect has taken the same approach to softening that sense of regimentation, and unfortunately it’s the biggest cliché in the contemporary architect’s book – the barcode façade, the staggered fenestration that apparently makes a big building look less monumental, which of course means that you do not perceive that bigness as a virtue, but rather as something that the designers are embarrassed about (to see how it’s done, take a trip to the Brownfield Estate). Only one architect has tried to have a bit of fun with his very limited parameters – Niall McLaughlin, who has covered his eight storeys in prefabricated panels taken from casts of the Parthenon Frieze, an elaborate and almost amusing joke about the dichotomy here between prefabrication and craftsmanship. Next to all of this is a very large, AHMM-designed City Academy, so that wealthy parents don’t have to worry about their kids mixing with the most multiracial and multicultural place that has ever existed in human history. Who knows, they might have learnt something.
As there is a school, so there is a local shopping centre. There was and is already a big covered mall in Stratford, the deeply unlovely Stratford Centre, an overdeveloped and overscaled brick-clad monolith that one of the Olympic site’s public sculptures is specifically designed to hide. You can’t quite hide it from Westfield Stratford City itself, though, as it is directly opposite. The Westfield is a typical example of the Mall as it is now practised. There are ‘streets’ outside as well as enclosed passageways, and there is an office-block skyline on top to try and make it look more like a place. Inside is an unpretentious consumption factory, which has made none of the AA-student deconstructivist gestures that the cousin mall in Shepherd’s Bush condescended to provide for the roving eye. It’s just a big mall, like every other big mall, but with a few little concessions to contemporary taste. On the lowest level is the ‘market’, where dun-coloured tiles let you know that you’re somewhere homely; lots of boutique chain shops, the Guardian-reader sort that you might otherwise see outside the Festival Hall or inside St Pancras International. This bit is obviously for the residents of the Olympic Village; the rest services and/or leeches on the more workaday tastes of East London and Essex. On the way to the toilets, a wall features several photographs of old East London Markets, an appeasing of the slain ancestors that is even more profoundly evil than in Bluewater.
What of the Olympic site itself? Everything is dominated by the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a shocking pink entrail laterally curved around an observation tower, famously commissioned by Boris Johnson in the toilets of a fundraising dinner from steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, who provided the metal in return for the monument being named after him. There’s a faintly sick irony in this ex-industrial zone being overlooked by an edifice dedicated to a prolific downsizer and asset-stripper of factories10, but that aside, there are buildings to enjoy, if you can keep from your mind the town-planning abortion that has been wreaked upon Stratford. You can enjoy the way that Michael Hopkins’s velodrome manages to be far more impressive and flowing a space than Zaha Hadid’s similar, but far more expensive Aquatics Centre, with its ungainly temporary wings. You can admire the economy of steel members in the Olympic Stadium itself. There’s a good brick substation by Nord. If you think that’s enough, good luck to you. Counterfactuals aside, when sticking to the neoliberal orthodoxy it’s hard to imagine that this could have been different. Some of the buildings might have been better, the social condenser for the new suburb might not have been a big box mall, there might have been more ‘affordable’ housing, but hold them to their own terms and that’s about all you can really throw at the GLA or the ODA. This is why they are not fit to even begin to speak about their forebears in Poplar. They conformed, they fell into line, and they even seem to feel proud of it. Someone else has to fight for the forces their Party once claimed to represent. In the meantime, there’s a ready-made, enclosed yuppie New Town here just ready to be used as a post-apocalyptic film set. Dystopia for rent. No DHSS.
