for the masses of London. It isn’t a particularly useful thought experiment, as this isn’t what is happening. All of the above features in Olympian Stratford in some manner, but all of it is coming into being as an act against London – the creation of yet another security-obsessed, enclosed, gated enclave set up to mock the idea that we could become more rather than less equal.
The new Stratford is really several different sites, all of them distinct, fitting into a larger plan. There is the redevelopment of Stratford High Street into a series of speculative high-rise towers; there is the ‘town centre’, a huge enclosed Westfield shopping mall; there is the Olympic Village, a housing development to accommodate the athletes, their PAs and associated bureaucrats; and there is the Olympic Site itself, a flowing park dotted with sports facilities by various architects. They don’t fit together terribly well, but all of them are in their own way extremely ambitious. The biggest, although in design terms by far the worst part, is Stratford High Street. Under the laissez-faire jurisdiction of the London Borough of Newham, a half-dozen or more towers have sprouted atop an already congested and miserable thoroughfare. Lower buildings, of so poor a spatial standard and build quality that they resemble clumsily re-clad council estates rather than new buildings, occupy the spaces in between. The towers are nearly all by the same firm, Pseudomodernists Stock Woolstonecroft, who were surely as surprised as anyone when they were essentially allowed to build an entire Mini-Manhattan of buy-to-let hutches with catchy names – Aurora! Icona! Each tower is clad in multiple tacky materials, the usual trick for hiding the fact that there’s no orientation to the sun, no double-aspect flats, and a whopping great big dual carriageway just below your pink aluminium balcony.
The Olympic Village itself would be entitled to look down its nose at such things. Although the development was widely ridiculed for the fact that the athletes’ dormitories were so small that it would be difficult to sell the flats on, even in the country with the lowest space requirements in Europe, this publicly-funded development has been bought up in toto by Qatari Diar, who can presumably knock through the partitions in these concrete-framed blocks. They are as uniform and ordered as Stratford High Street is chaotic and headstrong; mostly of around eight storeys, often masonry clad with expensive materials, with individual plots let to some fairly respected architects. The result is uniform in a rather scary way. From the Westfield car park, it resembles the peripheral estates of the late Soviet Union, which also stood in public squares at eight-to-ten storeys, and which were also often surrounded with an indeterminate kipple. Nearly every architect has taken the same approach to softening that sense of regimentation, and unfortunately it’s the biggest cliché in the contemporary architect’s book – the barcode façade, the staggered fenestration that apparently makes a big building look less monumental, which of course means that you do not perceive that bigness as a virtue, but rather as something that the designers are embarrassed about (to see how it’s done, take a trip to the Brownfield Estate). Only one architect has tried to have a bit of fun with his very limited parameters – Niall McLaughlin, who has covered his eight storeys in prefabricated panels taken from casts of the Parthenon Frieze, an elaborate and almost amusing joke about the dichotomy here between prefabrication and craftsmanship. Next to all of this is a very large, AHMM-designed City Academy, so that wealthy parents don’t have to worry about their kids mixing with the most multiracial and multicultural place that has ever existed in human history. Who knows, they might have learnt something.
As there is a school, so there is a local shopping centre. There was and is already a big covered mall in Stratford, the deeply unlovely Stratford Centre, an overdeveloped and overscaled brick-clad monolith that one of the Olympic site’s public sculptures is specifically designed to hide. You can’t quite hide it from Westfield Stratford City itself, though, as it is directly opposite. The Westfield is a typical example of the Mall as it is now practised. There are ‘streets’ outside as well as enclosed passageways, and there is an office-block skyline on top to try and make it look more like a place. Inside is an unpretentious consumption factory, which has made none of the AA-student deconstructivist gestures that the cousin mall in Shepherd’s Bush condescended to provide for the roving eye. It’s just a big mall, like every other big mall, but with a few little concessions to contemporary taste. On the lowest level is the ‘market’, where dun-coloured tiles let you know that you’re somewhere homely; lots of boutique chain shops, the Guardian-reader sort that you might otherwise see outside the Festival Hall or inside St Pancras International. This bit is obviously for the residents of the Olympic Village; the rest services and/or leeches on the more workaday tastes of East London and Essex. On the way to the toilets, a wall features several photographs of old East London Markets, an appeasing of the slain ancestors that is even more profoundly evil than in Bluewater.
What of the Olympic site itself? Everything is dominated by the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a shocking pink entrail laterally curved around an observation tower, famously commissioned by Boris Johnson in the toilets of a fundraising dinner from steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, who provided the metal in return for the monument being named after him. There’s a faintly sick irony in this ex-industrial zone being overlooked by an edifice dedicated to a prolific downsizer and asset-stripper of factories10, but that aside, there are buildings to enjoy, if you can keep from your mind the town-planning abortion that has been wreaked upon Stratford. You can enjoy the way that Michael Hopkins’s velodrome manages to be far more impressive and flowing a space than Zaha Hadid’s similar, but far more expensive Aquatics Centre, with its ungainly temporary wings. You can admire the economy of steel members in the Olympic Stadium itself. There’s a good brick substation by Nord. If you think that’s enough, good luck to you. Counterfactuals aside, when sticking to the neoliberal orthodoxy it’s hard to imagine that this could have been different. Some of the buildings might have been better, the social condenser for the new suburb might not have been a big box mall, there might have been more ‘affordable’ housing, but hold them to their own terms and that’s about all you can really throw at the GLA or the ODA. This is why they are not fit to even begin to speak about their forebears in Poplar. They conformed, they fell into line, and they even seem to feel proud of it. Someone else has to fight for the forces their Party once claimed to represent. In the meantime, there’s a ready-made, enclosed yuppie New Town here just ready to be used as a post-apocalyptic film set. Dystopia for rent. No DHSS.
Chapter Two
Teesside: Infantilized Hercules
Railway Valhalla
Certain parts of the UK, according to the eminently sane, stable and sustainable south-eastern government, are a problem. Something has happened to them. They have become ‘dependent’. At some point they had industry, and then they lost it. How that happened is of no concern of us, but we note that many of them today are either unemployed, or employed by the ‘public sector’. Both are signs that these areas are parasitic. They are not standing on their own two feet. None of these places are in the South East England that the government (partly) represents, but we will find many of them in this book: Northern Ireland, South Wales, the industrial West Midlands. One of the places most often mentioned in this connection is the conurbation centred on the river Tees, in North East England, a smaller, younger, even less favoured cousin to the more northerly Tyne and Wear.
Teesside’s largest town, Middlesbrough, was thrown up with great speed in the second half of the nineteenth century, and was based around metalworking and shipbuilding, and later chemicals. These three industries were spread across older towns like Stockton or Redcar or even younger ones like Billingham, where their remnants can still be found. Labour couldn’t or wouldn’t reindustrialize the place, but they did expand various kinds of public-sector employment, which partly filled the gap. Accordingly Teesside is now often held up as the double-dip recession’s ‘worst-hit’ area, with its already fairly low levels of employment decimated by public-sector cuts; a report by credit rating pests Experian described it as the ‘least resilient’ place in the UK. Middlesbrough, when it was young and thrusting rather than an apparent industrial relic best left
