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.
Chapter 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
