it argues, has the oldest housing stock in Europe, and the most dilapidated, and it is enormously expensive to retrofit—why not just knock it down and build something better? Chillingly for conservationists, Keiller takes for his model the modular, inexpensive, prefabricated construction of supermarkets, although introducing the film in 2009 he ruefully wonders ‘why I thought we should all live in Tesco’. Nonetheless, why be sentimental about substandard housing from the era that coined the term ‘jerrybuilt’?
The idea of destroying and replacing huge swathes of Victorian housing found fruit in the government’s Pathfinder scheme. Designed to ‘revitalize’ the economies of a selection of post-industrial areas from Birmingham northwards, it entailed the compulsory purchase and demolition of (most frequently council-owned) housing not so much to replace it with something better, but for the purposes of, in Pathfinder’s subtitle, ‘Housing Market Renewal’ in northern towns previously untouched by the southeastern property boom. The results are inconclusive, to say the least, and reveal just how little the quality of a set of buildings has to do with its place in the property pecking order. As Heritage campaigners were keen to point out, the streets tinned-up ready for demolition under Pathfinder were just those which, in London, would have been long since the subject of fevered property speculation. In Liverpool especially, Pathfinder’s demolition programmes encompassed some large bay-windowed nineteenth-century houses which would have gone for silly money further south—though they did not stop to ask exactly why their northern equivalents were less lucrative.3 The infill that replaced the Victorian streets, where it appeared, followed the Urban Task Force rules impeccably, albeit that the ‘good design’ element is somewhat questionable.
The architectural argument misses the truly original element in Pathfinder, what differentiates it from the superficially similar slum clearance programmes of the 1890s through the 1960s. It is a programme of class cleansing. The new housing is not let to those who had been cleared, as was the case with most earlier clearance, especially after 1945, but is allocated for the ‘aspirational’ in an only partially successful attempt to lure the middle classes back to the inner-cities they deserted for the suburbs. This is in no way limited to Pathfinder itself, but forms part of the managed neoliberalism which has pervaded New Labour’s approach to urban policy, as to so much else. Instruments brought in after 1945 in order to bypass the interests of slum landlords and landowners legally—Compulsory Purchase Orders, Development corporations—were now used to the opposite end.
In this New Labour were not pioneers. The first to use the instruments of social democracy against its social content was Westminster Council under Shirley Porter, in the 1980s. Concerned that the Council was at constant risk of falling to Labour, the local Conservative leadership found that council tenants, spread liberally across the area by earlier reformers, were more likely to vote Labour. The Council had the legal capabilities to get them out, rehousing them in inferior accommodation out of the borough and offering their—often very fine—flats for sale to upwardly mobile buyers. With an impressive prefiguring of New Labour nu-language, this programme was called Building Stable Communities. Of course, this was gerrymandering, and Porter herself is still essentially on the lam from justice because of it4—but New Labour would do something very similar, without even the rational excuse of ensuring electoral success. Under the banner of making communities more ‘mixed’, council estates such as the huge Heygate Estate in the Elephant and Castle or Holly Street in Hackney were sold off and demolished, their tenants transferred elsewhere or heaped onto the waiting list, all in the name of what Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott would call Building Sustainable Communities.
The main semi-governmental organ of ‘regeneration’, English Partnerships, was designed to bring business and state together, the latter often sponsoring the former to such an extent that it would have been cheaper just to build on its own. It formed part of a weird grey area of almost entirely state-funded private companies—the Arm’s Length Management Organizations to which much council housing was transferred, PFI and outsourcing specialists like Capita and QinetiQ, both of which were formed out of government departments. They embody the phase of neoliberalism described by the cultural critic Mark Fisher among others as ‘market Stalinism’, where state dirigisme continues and grows, working this time in the service of property and land.5 By 2009 English Partnerships had transmogrified into the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), whose immediate task was to respond to the 2008 property crash with a house-building programme. Early on, there was some hope that this would lead to a new wave of council building, particularly given that waiting lists had spiralled after the crash, but instead private enterprise continued to be subsidized by the state, in the form of the Kickstart stimulus programme. This offered £1 billion of direct state funding to private developers and builders for ‘high-quality mixed tenure housing developments’, which would be assessed for said quality by the aforementioned aesthetics quango CABE.
After its first schemes were unveiled at the start of 2010, Kickstart was heavily criticized by CABE for extremely low scores on all their measurements—in terms of energy-efficiency, design quality, public space, access to facilities and public transport and much else. Both bodies refused to state who had designed the schemes that had been assessed or where they were, despite a Freedom of Information request by Building Design—the HCA’s head Bob Kerslake claimed it would damage the house builders’ ‘commercial confidentiality’. At the very end of the New Labour project was a massive programme of public funding for substandard private housing. This was the change we couldn’t see, as we weren’t allowed to know where the schemes actually were—although some of those in this book are likely candidates.
Architecture Becomes Logo: The Rise of Pseudomodernism
In terms of policy, then, an attempt to reform the Thatcherite city has had extremely ambiguous results; but in terms of architecture, the postmodernist architecture that characterized the 1980s and 1990s is, in a superficial sense, very much on the defensive, and has been for most of the last decade. Although it persists as the dominant aesthetic for speculative house-building outside the large cities, it is by now almost wholly absent from the architectural magazines and the metropolitan centres. This decline could be dated to the late 1990s, when two huge postmodernist buildings in London—Terry Farrell’s MI6 building and Michael Hopkins’ Porticullis House in Westminster (although Hopkins absolved himself through the astonishing tube station designed in the building’s undercroft)—were so aggressively statist and weightily bureaucratic in form that the signifiers given out, always important in postmodernism’s sign-fixated discourse, were deeply unattractive. On the contrary, the paradigmatic buildings constructed in London since the late 1990s have been those of Norman Foster, a once vaguely avant-garde technocrat notable for a seemingly Modernist lack of deliberate architectural-historical references and jokes, with an accompanying rhetoric of transparency and sustainability. This leads to what I call Pseudomodernism, which would be defined as Postmodernism’s incorporation of a Modernist formal language. Pseudomodernism has several elements. The cramped speculative blocks marketed as ‘luxury flats’ or ‘stunning developments’, with their attenuated, vaguely Scandinavian aesthetic; the glass towers whose irregular panels, attempting to alleviate the standardized nature of such buildings, have been dubbed ‘barcode façades’; and most of all, the architectural spectacles generated by ‘signature’ designers, most of whom were once branded ‘deconstructivists’ (Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and a legion of lesser lights such as Make architects, who manage to combine formal spectacle and moralistic sobriety).
Michael Hopkins, Westminster Jubilee Line Station
Norman Foster, Canary Wharf Jubilee Line Station
