when they were open. The eye is drawn, though, to two pieces of very jolly architecture. First, the Town Hall, proof that there are simply no uninteresting town halls in London, a Dudok-Georgian mash-up with a wonderfully unscholarly approach to historical styles. The bell tower is full of suspicious-looking telecommunications equipment, and Bobbies On The Beat walk back and forth in front of it at a more regular rate than I’m used to seeing. Then there’s Alford Hall Monaghan Morris’s Barking Central development. AHMM are a paradigm of Blairite architecture at its most thoroughly developed, a glossy, brightly-coloured neomodernism that feels like CGI even when you touch it, the Weimar Republic colourfulness of Bruno Taut relocated to DOSAC from The Thick of It. Their tendency to the rictus grin conceals architectural talent and presence, but if there’s a better exemplar of New Labour architecture than their bright, jolly Pseudomodernism then I don’t know what it is. Their buildings here, very dense low-rise blocks and towers, hinge on the contrast between what you see – the fun façades – and what you don’t, the grimness of the small, single-aspect flats.
A percentage of Barking Central is ‘affordable housing’, that all-purpose get-out-clause, and it bears constant repeating that affordable housing is not council housing, but is usually shared-ownership or slightly-cheaper-to-buy, and so makes virtually no difference to the problems that were purportedly stirring up the BNP vote. Let’s imagine for a moment, irrespective of the crappy space standards, what a gesture it would have been if a development this large, this shiny and optimistic, were let to council tenants – how many political arguments would then be won at a stroke. As it is the place is not altogether hideous, for all its fiddling-while-Rome-burns nature, and part of that is due to extraneous things, extras on the architecture which are surprisingly clever, and suggest how much more could have been done here. The colonnades (courtesy of landscape architects muf) are great, the size of the site letting the architects do something they couldn’t have squeezed into a tight plot of inner-city CABEism; it’s an actually quite pleasant and successful public space. The main occupants so far are pigeons, but that need not remain true.
Across from this is – honesty here, at least, in the choice of name – ‘The Folly’, designed by muf. It’s rather asking to be judged as a description for the entire project, stigmatized as an act of expensive futility, and yet the sheer menance of it marks this out as something perhaps more interesting, one of the few built instantiations of the recent ruin-mania of any consequence. It’s a brick edifice that presents itself as an instant pagan ruin, from the headless creatures lined up and inset into it, to the gates that lead to nowhere – there is after all a ruined abbey nearby. The suggestion that it might be some comment or satire on the surrounding scheme, or on AHMM’s refusal to imagine the possibility of ageing or weathering in their buildings, seems a bit much, although placing a sheep atop the whole thing has at least some tongue-poking symbolism. However, the massive return to the Labour fold here in the 2010 election has evidently provoked the party’s gratitude; not far from here is now a small estate of stock-brick houses, masterplanned by sober brick austerity types Maccreanor Lavington, with a terrace by AHMM themselves – moving sharply away from the bright shiny cladding of Barking Central to a robust interpretation of an early Victorian dockside terrace. For once, provided you forget that this is an only partial replacement of the houses they demolished, it seems the local Labour Party realized who they were supposed to represent. It’s not complicated, and neither is the architecture.
The usual way into or out of here is another indication that a quite exciting town could be made here, if the will existed. Barking Station is a rare fine British Rail building with an angular roof in concrete so richly, darkly shuttered that it’s hard to remind yourself it isn’t wood; a bespoke station which suggests a local centre far from Zone 1 which nonetheless had a sharp, defined identity for itself, which wasn’t reducible to being just another notch in the commuter belt. Opposite this is something that speaks much more of what Barking is today – a shopping mall, a glass and fibreglass atrium that resembles the iron-and-glass canopies of Leeds City Markets relocated to Thorpe Park, picked out in pink, with a false top-floor and an interesting selection of shops. Here you can find Freedom Mobility Barking (Grabbers, Folding Commodes, Scooter Bags and Capes, Overbed Tables, Walking Sticks, all at ‘Low Low Prices’) and on the upper floors there’s a Job Shop which offers ‘jobs for local people’. At least they don’t use the term ‘indigenous’. Aside from the tacit racism, it doth protest too much – the implication is that there’s something to prove here, that when they aren’t loudly pointing it out, housing and jobs might not be going to ‘locals’. But in light of the way a huge swathe of Barking has been redeveloped neither in the interests of council tenants nor of the incomers pushed here by rising rents and housing clearances in Tower Hamlets and Newham, and looking too at how large-scale and blaring the private development was, you have to wonder who is fooling who here.
Enterprise Interzone
Getting yourself onto the Docklands Light Railway – a bus to Beckton will do the trick – you can now explore the effects of the Enterprise Zones of the 1980s and 90s, and their remnants and extensions today. The first notable place you will come across is the University of East London, whose tubular, brightly-painted halls of residence you could not fail to notice. Get off here (Cyprus Station, evocatively) and you can find a place which sums up very well the New Labour approach to Higher Education. You’ll notice first of all the things about it that are reasonably laudable. ‘UEL’ is a very long way from University College, and its proportion of working-class students is second-only to the far less coherent and definable London Metropolitan University, scattered from Holloway to Minories. It’s a campus, very much on the pattern of the ‘plate glass Universities’ of the 1960s, with all possible amenities, so that in theory you would hardly need to leave, which is helpful given the location. The masterplan and the design are courtesy of ‘organic modernists’ Edward Cullinan and Partners; Mr Cullinan worked with Denys Lasdun on the University of East Anglia in the 1960s, the most architecturally impressive of the Wilson-era universities, and some of that ability to create a strange and distinctive integration of architecture and place can be felt here. The public squares and undulating classrooms, offices and ‘simulated trading floors’ of UEL open out towards the runway of London City Airport; in fact, the Library has a direct view of planes taking off and landing. It’s easy to attack this as the effect of planning policies that don’t give a damn about where they dump the lower orders, and yet there is something deeply special and haunting about this place – the University at the end of the world. Given that the funding cuts to the universities are mainly a frontal assault on expanded ex-polytechnics like UEL, it is also the last of a species on the verge of extinction. If it were not such an epitome of a segregated education system, it’d be easier to mourn it.
The airport and the University are both the direct consequence of the closure of the Royals, the last docks within ‘official’ London; we have passed on our route through North Kent several docks and wharves operated by the Port of London Authority, but they’re safely out of sight and unremarked. The Royals – the Royal Victoria Dock, King George V Dock, and Royal Albert Dock – were gigantic engineering undertakings, designed to take ocean liners, that were finally made obsolete by containerization as late as the early 1980s. Because of their vastness – wider than the Thames itself at times – they cannot make up a pretty marina, in the same fashion as the more narrow stretches of water in Rotherhithe or the Isle of Dogs. Whatever happens here has to factor in the prodigious scale of the Royals, something which usually leads to an obvious recourse – the Really Big Shed. The most interesting place to explore the Royals, aside from the disconnected enclave of UEL, is via a long path through the district of Silvertown. The place to begin, which is helpfully just outside the DLR stop for City Airport, is the Tate & Lyle refinery. This must be the largest extant industrial complex left in East London. It still makes Golden Syrup, and scatters its sweet, sticky smell across tiny terraces and system-built GLC tower blocks. You are very close here to the wealth of Canary Wharf, but trickle-down has, surprisingly enough, failed to take effect. The best walk is along the former route of the North London Line, the overground railway that was closed less than a decade ago,
