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
