politer, more reliable way of making money – the City. Wiener scornfully quotes one Rolls-Royce executive in the 1970s who tells him that he is in the motor industry for pleasure, not for profit; if he just wanted to make money, he says, he’d be in the City. And from Spinningfields in Manchester to Canary Wharf in London, former industrial sites now house the trading floors of banks that had to be bailed out like the lame-duck industries of the ’70s. And where industry really did transform rather than disappear, it took new, discreet forms – the exurban business park, the BAE Systems airfield, the container port, all safely nestled far from public view, enabling the fantasy of old England to continue unimpeded.
Wiener’s heirs are those, sometimes to be found on the left, who try to separate out finance and industrial capitalism, as if they could be prised apart. Britain is more obsessed than ever with an imaginary rural Arcadia which bears less and less resemblance to the places where we actually live, yet the profit motive has been strengthened in the process, not limited. It seems amazing at this distance to imagine anyone could have thought otherwise – a counterfactual Thatcherism which revived industrial, urban Britain. The Garden Festivals that Michael Heseltine bestowed upon Liverpool or Ebbw Vale, with their enormous exhibition hangars, were presumably the new Crystal Palaces. But what is especially bizarre about the current orthodoxy – from which none of the main parties are exempt – is that Wiener’s attack on all but ‘useful’ moneymaking activities is continued, without the concrete industrial products or technological advances that there was once to show for it. There is a counter-theory, which has it that neither speculators nor small businesses are the real ‘wealth creators’, but rather the masses who have nothing to sell but their labour. Their voice wasn’t heard in Wiener’s book, and it is scarcely heard in the current political debate.
Society against the Big Society
There is an awful impasse in contemporary Britain, a failure of imagination or intellect, producing a manic-depressive society locked into what Ivor Southwood calls ‘Non-Stop Inertia’, while the free-market ideology that seemed to be mortally wounded by the bank bailouts has managed, somehow, to thrive and become even more extreme. This is a book about architecture and town planning, or at least a book about architecture and town planning that uses these as a way to talk about politics (or vice versa). It might be thought that these areas of reflexion and practice, based as they are on positive proposals for space and place, might have some contribution to make. They may, perhaps, be able to offer some ways out.
One suggestion made by some on the libertarian, anarchist end of the left, recognizing the manner in which the Tory–Whig coalition has inadvertently used ideas not massively different from the anti-state-planning ideas of anarchist architect Colin Ward (although radically against their original intent), entails using the Big Society against itself; taking literally the notions of ‘localism’, voluntarism and ‘community-driven’ development against quangos and government agencies. This is perhaps not as implausible as it might sound. To take one, highly-charged example, we could look at the change in management in a council estate in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The Byker Estate, designed by a team led by Ralph Erskine, begun in 1969 and abandoned, unfinished, in 1981, has long been both an architectural and social cause célèbre. Looked at coldly, it’s hard to see why. First, it’s a council estate, and a big one, the product of post-war comprehensive redevelopment, and the comprehensive demolition of terraced housing. No ‘mixed tenure’ here. Second, it’s full of winding paths and walkways, some of them in concrete; there are no ‘streets’, not much in the way of the privately-monitored ‘defensible space’ now considered indispensable in all housing estates. There’s a lot of communal in-between spaces – parkland, squares – which have no clear ownership. Architecturally, it’s hardly ‘in keeping’, with bright colours, abstract forms, and a modernist sense of sublime scale. It’s as poor as it is ‘iconic’ – it even had its very own famous crime case, the duct-living miscreant ‘Rat Boy’. It breaks every conventional rule for house-building and town planning in the UK over the last thirty years.
It’s not too far, in fact, from Sheffield’s gutted Park Hill, which was redeveloped under New Labour into a ‘creative class’ showcase, with its council tenants expelled and forgotten. But instead of Byker’s tenants being the object of class cleansing, they have just been given effective control over the estate through a ‘Community Land Trust’, and the debt the estate has accrued over the years has been written off. Housing Minister Grant Shapps has hailed this as ‘the Big Society in action’. So what’s the difference? Walking around it, the differences are a matter of upkeep, planting and care, rather than architecture. The bright, inorganic colours of the original scheme are still present and correct; the communal areas are lush, not scrubby; there’s no sign of any ill-considered or stingy later additions to the estate. It looks coherent, confident, totally modern. Maybe that’s a legacy of the extraordinary care taken in the planning and design of the estate itself, with residents involved from the start. Development was famously incremental, with tenants’ reactions to each phase influencing the next – but even so, by the 1980s it had attained in local hearsay as fearsome a reputation as any big estate. But somehow, those ideas haven’t gone away. The estate is now run by a charitable body, entirely controlled (in theory) by its tenants, which surely means the foundational principle of residents’ active participation has produced a real legacy.
There’s little doubt that lack of democratic control and management was a reason (if not the sole reason) for the failures of some high-profile estates. But whether or not the new Community Land Trust will grant that control or not, the real irony is that this place is being hailed by the housing minister at the exact same moment that all its ideas are being destroyed, all over the country. This sort of giant city-centre estate is the very thing that the coalition’s Housing Benefit proposals aim to eradicate. Its careful, slow, bespoke (and expensive) state planning is the antithesis of the Enterprise Zones and the Free Schools. Perhaps, the anarcho-Big Society contingent might argue, we should demand many Bykers, spaces owned by the Community in which we could develop anti-state and anti-capitalist forms of urbanism. It falters on an obvious point, though – that a place can be taken into real public ownership in this manner, but no new space can be created using these methods; all that can happen, at best, is a situation where some older spaces are radicalized. During an acute, national housing crisis, where there are millions on the council waiting list, it can only be a holding operation.
Architecture and/or Revolution
Architects have not been conspicuous, lately, in coming up with new planning ideas. That’s not too surprising, as they were the hardest-hit of any profession during the Great Recession – unemployment of young architecture graduates was at one point running at 75 per cent. The solution many resorted to was moving abroad, often to ‘emerging markets’ in the Middle East and South East Asia, where British firms have made a killing; this has led to embarrassing moments, such as when the Libyan crisis caught all of the main British firms with their finger in Gaddafi’s city planning schemes. However, the architectural orthodoxy of New Labour has been very definitely challenged, at least on architecture’s conscientious fringe. The buildings built in that era, often encouraged and abetted by the rulings of CABE, were all about the cladding. Stuck-on aluminium balconies, stapled-on slatted wood, brightly coloured render, clipped-on covering materials such as the ubiquitous industrial material Trespa, green glass tacked on at random, metal extrusions that look like they serve some sort of screening purpose but which are really just a form of ornament, wavy or tilted roofs, staggered ‘barcode façades’ which hide the basically regular proportions, wild and crazee angles with no apparent rationale, wonky pilotis holding up the whole thing … Underneath there was usually either a concrete frame or a load-bearing wall of breeze blocks, while the dwellings themselves were tiny, single-aspect flats. This created, as if by accident, an entire new architectural style, which elsewhere I’ve tried to describe as ‘Pseudomodernism’, for the way it reverses the old function-over-form morality of modernist architecture while rejecting the direct traditionalism of ‘vernacular’, neo-Tudor, neo-Georgian or neo-Victorian styles. That era has ended, at least in architectural design, although its products are still limping to completion. The fashion, at least, is changing.
