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
