some very melancholic spaces indeed: the Tate Institute, a boarded-up Arts and Crafts building that has met a very different fate to the sugar baron’s more famous cultural endeavours upriver. The memorial to the Silvertown explosion, a First World War accident that destroyed much of the area. Lyle Park, a small green space tucked in between foul-smelling chemical works, which has the former gates of the Harland and Wolff shipyard left as ornament. Looking over it all is a church by S.S Teulon, the wild proto-Brutalist mid-Victorian architect. It now houses the geographically absconding ‘Brick Lane Music Hall’, and it’s still a staggering work of architecture, a freakish monster of banded brick and thuggish stone, rising to a squat, monstrous tower, bursting with an uncanny, guttural power. It’s a surrealist church for a surrealist landscape.
After this, redevelopment begins. Sandwiched between the Royals and the Thames is one of the best of the yuppiedromes, at least for its sheer scenographic quality – Barrier Park, and its adjoining housing, Barrier Point. The park overlooks, as the name implies, the technology that has saved London from more than one flood; its placement is an admiring gesture, imploring you to gaze upon it and boggle. The park itself has been taken relatively seriously as a piece of design; a cubic pavilion café sits in the centre, and a sunken garden where the dock used to be is a collection of abstracted topiary which perfectly accompanies the sheer bloody weirdness of the surrounding landscape. The flats have a stepped section down to the park, which makes them much more well-mannered than is customary – they’re best on a foggy day, when you can’t see how penny-pinchingly cheap the detailing is. They’re a project by Barratt Homes, and were pretty pivotal in making clear that volume housebuilders could adapt to the new aspirational privatized modernism with some ease. Pass under the DLR bridge, and you pass through their earlier work in the Dockside Enterprise Zone – Prince-friendly closes and cul-de-sacs, with lots and lots of parking space for very big cars. A gaunt concrete grain silo is a hint that there are remnants nearby, a whisper which becomes a scream when you reach Millennium Mills. This magnificent inter-war Flour Mill was always lurking here to demarcate where regeneration stopped; Sir Terry Farrell was hired to come up with ideas for it, and proposed flats combined with an aquarium, to be called ‘Biota!’ A very high, spindly, wobbly and bracing cable-stayed bridge now brings you to the more fully yuppified part of the Royals.
This revolves around the ExCel conference centre, the favoured heavily-guarded location for an annual Arms Expo. The building’s first stage, a giant hangar with a Rogers-esque external frame, has recently been extended by Nicholas Grimshaw, meaning that ExCel is now roughly the size of a small town. In its train are heartless, overdeveloped, architecturally nugatory luxury flats, many of them high-rise and higher, plus hotels for conference delegates and a small bit of re-used Victorian warehousing. I’ve only managed to get inside ExCel once, for an event called ‘EcoBuild’, where various destructive multinationals show off their experiments in green technology, but mainly exploit the occasion as an excuse to promote and sell other more or less sustainable wares to the building industry. Various countries have their own stalls, where they tell you a little bit about how they’re lowering carbon emissions and a lot about how you really ought to invest in them. Surrounded by motorways and pylons, just under an airport, it’s a little hard to take. Get on the train here at Custom House DLR, try not to be frisked by security, and then make your way to a place that should, in theory, be very different.
Poplarism Revisited
The Borough of Poplar, absorbed during the 1960s into Tower Hamlets, gave the political lexicon the phrase ‘Poplarism’. It describes the stand against central government made by Labour councillors under the later Labour leader George Lansbury, when they continued to improve working-class health and housing no matter how much the screws were put on them. ‘Better to break the law than to break the poor’ was their slogan and defence. Every muncipality that has tried to take on the government since has appealed in some way to their example. The LCC that tried to ‘build the Tories out of London’, the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, Militant Liverpool, Livingstone’s ‘loony left’ GLC. Some on that list were more successful than others, and ‘Socialism in One Borough’ was always a bit of a stretch, but Poplar did win significant victories. Labour might not have taken the whole of London in the 1930s without their example, and the huge amount of public housing in Poplar today is surely evidence of how seriously they took their task. Some might feel it a shame that none of the old, seedy, dockland Poplar survives today, but the Poplarists would have seen that as a resounding success. Their determination to take on the government contrasts with the current craven stance of councils forced to implement the most extreme cuts. The option to fight is there, if they are willing to risk the court cases and prison sentences. The fact that the current Mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, presents himself as a left-of-Labour diehard, suggests that there may be contemporary potential here too, though Respect, the left-of-Labour party that once nearly took control of the council, has disintegrated almost completely, with some of its councillors even joining the Tories.
Poplarism’s built legacies are not always well treated by Tower Hamlets council, it must be noted. Poplar Town Hall, an art deco building with a Socialist Realist frieze of local trades and workers, is now Bow Business Centre, a gratuitous but typical insult. Poplar Baths are derelict. The estates are often very good indeed, whether the mansion flats or incongruous cottages built under Lansbury himself or the Cockneyfied modernism of the Attlee government’s Lansbury Estate, but the boarded-up or rotting high streets in between them are not models of a surviving socialist enclave. The DLR runs up, down and across, trying gamely to make the place more coherent. The work of Tower Hamlets itself, the later 1960s system-built estates, make a depressing complement to the yuppie fistulae that have shot off from the bowels of Canary Wharf. And the Mini-Manhattan there is an entirely inescapable presence. If you really want to see the London that neoliberalism built at its Brazilified worst, at its most brutally segregated and stratified, if you want to make yourself unconscionably angry, you must go to where Poplar meets Canary Wharf. The Docklands Light Railway, several car parks, the Blackwall Tunnel approach and the Crossrail building site slice the area in two. On one side, towers of trading floors and ‘luxury flats’; on the other the crumbling remnants of public housing. Among these remnants is Robin Hood Gardens.
This estate of two long, curving blocks was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson in 1969, and is scheduled for demolition by owners Tower Hamlets Council. When it was built, it was already seen as dated. It derived from the Smithsons’ ideas for the Golden Lane bombsite just outside the Square Mile, where rather than just dropping blocks in parkland, they would try and design something that had the intuitive, dense, warm communal life of the areas that had been bombed and that were being cleared as slums. These ideas were properly implemented by largely unheralded architects at Sheffield City Council; the Smithsons’ own version was, curiously, far less tectonically or socially convincing, for all the architects’ relentless theorizing and self-promotion. Park Hill is a world-class masterpiece, Robin Hood Gardens its slightly gawkier, provincial cousin. However, you don’t demolish somewhere just for being somewhat architecturally unresolved. When Tower Hamlets announced their intention to pull it down, Building Design launched a petition and a very high-profile campaign – a brave move on the part of editor Amanda Baillieu, one which put them out on a limb when rivals like the Architects’ Journal sniffily disassociated themselves from the campaign, aligning themselves with the advocates of class cleansing. It’s here that things get complicated.
Tower Hamlets has a massive shortage of council housing, which should be enough to make the case for the buildings’ renovation. Yet signatories to the petition, ranging from self-help philosophers to property developers, were all too keen for it to be restored in a similar manner to formerly council-owned buildings like Denys Lasdun’s Keeling House, where ‘restoration’ meant privatization and the expulsion of tenants, or Bloomsbury’s Brunswick Centre, where a majority of the inhabitants are actually designers. Accordingly Tower Hamlets were able to play people’s champion, claiming that their proposals – selling off the site and increasing density sevenfold, with no guarantee that tenants could return bar a vague commitment
