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
