London had a new City Hall, and a maverick left-winger and newt obsessive in the Mayor’s chair.
Two days after Livingstone’s victory, to the annoyance of maturing dance music sophisticates everywhere, Oxide and Neutrino’s frantic ‘Bound 4 Da Reload’ – with a chorus built around the theme tune from TV hospital drama Casualty, sampling a silly line from gangster flick Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and peppered with gunshot noises – entered the charts straight at number one, flicking a V-sign at the music establishment. The UK garage scene which the two young south Londoners had emerged from had previously prized refinement, romance, aspiration and an urbane multiculturalism above all else. But clean lines, shiny shoes and champagne were being replaced with something much darker, and murkier – just as the city itself was about to start moving in the opposite direction. A new sound was about to muddy the waters of UK garage’s infinity pool, just as the new Labour government, indeed the New Labour government, were hatching grand plans to drastically smarten up the inner city forever.
In the late 2010s, we tend to look at the cranes going up around London and assume they sprouted from the city’s chalky soil, or we gaze wearily upon the prettified glass towers of luxury flats, the pop-ups and the hipster cereal cafes and assume they landed out of the clear blue sky. But urban change is not like the weather, and gentrification is not organic, inevitable or natural. The new millennium began with grime’s inner city on one side, and an entirely different, largely new kind of inner city growing rapidly to take its place: expensive, monocultural, private, surveilled and planned from the very top by Tony Blair’s government.
At the time, inner London was the richest region in the European Union, yet alongside citadels of banking wealth like the City of London and Canary Wharf were some of the most deprived council estates in the country. Long-standing economic and social divisions were intensifying, as the changing winds of late capitalism induced the middle classes to begin moving back from the suburbs and the home counties. They were about to get a big push from the government, who wanted to make the inner city the engine of bourgeois modernity, cosmopolitan culture and aspiration – the essential spirit of what was self-consciously referred to as the New Labour ‘project’.
The reality on the ground as Blair took office was not good. After 18 years of Conservative government, social problems and hardship were thriving in British cities, and in the country at large. By the mid-nineties Britain had more children growing up in unemployed households than anywhere else in Europe, and the highest teenage pregnancy rate. Child poverty had trebled between 1979 and 1995, the number of drug addicts quadruped in the decade to 1996, and the number of homeless people sleeping on the streets had soared.
Since the deregulation of the City in the late 1980s, London’s role as Britain’s primary economic engine had been greatly magnified: by the millennium, earnings in the capital were on average a third higher than the rest of the country. But the divisions were greater, too: Londoners had a higher unemployment rate than the national average, and a much higher proportion of children growing up in households with no income: 36 per cent of children in inner London lived in workless homes in 1999 – compared to 17 per cent nationally. London households were also more likely to be overcrowded: 16 per cent compared to 6 per cent in other English cities.
In east London, the area that will always be most associated with grime, the boroughs of Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham have consistently appeared among the most deprived local authorities in the entire country; in 2000, the government used a new, complex model for analysing different aspects of poverty, from housing to health, which they called Indices of Multiple Deprivation. Across all of England, the grime boroughs were ranked at 1, 2 and 3. A medal-winning podium of poverty.
‘East London is in need’ has been the received wisdom of London local government ever since it was first introduced in 1888. A century and a half ago, Tower Hamlets was home to the disease-ridden squalor, vice, filth and overcrowded warrens of the infamous Old Nicol slum, before it was finally demolished in the 1890s, following the Housing for the Working Classes Act. The slum clearance programmes continued for decades, both before and after the devastation of the Blitz; some residents moved out to the suburbs, others were given low-rent social housing in the modern new council estates being built. Between 1964–74, the last of the slums were demolished and the Greater London Council built 384 tower blocks of ten storeys or more, providing 68,500 new flats. They were accompanied by utopian rhetoric about a new way of living and ‘streets in the sky’, changes that would finally grant the dignity London’s working-class communities deserved, and dramatically lift the quality of life. In 1981, at the peak of the social-housing boom, there were over 75,000 council homes in London, housing nearly 31 per cent of the capital’s population. It is no coincidence that they were heavily concentrated in exactly the boroughs where grime and UK rap would later thrive: 42 per cent of London’s social housing was in ‘Inner East London’: the boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Islington, Haringey, Southwark, Lambeth and Lewisham.
London has historically been a fairly low-rise city, with relatively few skyscrapers, landmark blocks of luxury apartments, or high-end hotels and offices – it has not looked like Manhattan, or latter-day Dubai, Hong Kong or Shanghai. Largely this was by design: planning laws have prohibited tall structures which obscure certain ‘protected views’ of iconic old London landmarks like St Paul’s and the Palace of Westminster, as seen from certain high points on the fringes of the capital, like Parliament Hill, Richmond Park and Alexandra Palace – it’s not the specific views themselves which matter so much, but their utility as insurance against a cluttered skyline.
But at the start of the new millennium, a new kind of high-rise building started arriving in the capital: one much less likely to produce exuberant forms of youth culture, clad in glass rather than concrete. Most obvious amongst them was the Shard – Mordor-upon-Thames, owned by Qatar, an obscene 72 storeys high, built with the enthusiastic support of Ken Livingstone, and the backing of New Labour. This directly contravened the ‘protected views’ regulations; English Heritage objected at a public inquiry, and were ignored. At the time of writing, five years after opening, all ten of the £30–50m flats on the tower’s upper floors remain unsold, and empty. Even a visit to the viewing deck costs more than £30. Since then, the trickle has become a flood: in 2017 a survey found that 455 new high-rise blocks were either planned or already under construction in London: ‘safety deposit boxes’ for wealthy investors, expensive hotels, high-end office space and luxury flats. Blocks like the ickily-named Manhattan Loft Gardens in Stratford followed the Shard’s lead and caused controversy by ruining another sight line of St Paul’s. More importantly, not a single one of the 455 was being built to provide housing for London’s poorest.
The Shard started a bold new trend – building hideous neoliberal obelisks which London didn’t need – but the major precedent had already been set: the planting of Canary Wharf’s towers of misbegotten riches, right in grime’s back yard, in place of the city’s abandoned docks. Today, underneath the white office lights and CCTV cameras of what is sometimes known as the ‘second City’, teem the ghosts of empire, hard labour, hard liquor, opium dens, sailors and sex workers. Even as it enters adolescence, Canary Wharf’s cluster of gleaming skyscrapers still feels like a life-size artist’s impression, rendered in three dimensions; free from clutter, free from litter – and free from heavy explosives, you presume, if the security presence is anything to go by.
Look closer, and some of the police aren’t actually the police at all – they’re private security guards, in uniforms designed to look exactly like real police uniforms. The whole area is unnervingly clean. As close as it is, Canary Wharf is almost completely sealed off from its neighbours to the north, where grime erupted into life – Poplar, Limehouse, Bow, and eventually Hackney and Newham – separated by the huge A13 and A1261 dual carriageways, and a no man’s land of train lines, Docklands Light Railway sidings and buildings, business parks, car parks, blind alleys and dead-ends, all of which act as further barricades. It is almost as if the builders of Canary Wharf wanted it that way. ‘That’s where all the yuppies are,’
