he was right – the paved terrain around the skyscrapers was a paradigm for what have become known as ‘POPS’, privately owned public spaces: where private security guards can ask you to leave just based on looking at you. If Detroit techno captured the metronomic industrial rhythms of the city’s car factories, grime’s sonic palette describes the dystopian scene in millennial east London: the view from the decaying tower blocks down onto the de-cluttered spaces and privatised plazas of Canary Wharf – gleaming, futuristic, and glowering with menace.
When the BBC filmed a short profile of Dizzee to be broadcast as part of the 2003 Mercury Prize TV show, they caught him looking out of the window of the Crossways Estate with a less light-hearted attitude to the second City than he would display by the end of a decade, once he’d reached a state of monied grace: ‘That is Canary Wharf,’ Dizzee explained to the camera. ‘It’s in your face. It takes the piss. There are rich people moving in now, people who work in the City. You can tell they’re not living the same way as us.’
New luxury flats and gated residential blocks were sprouting rapidly in the foothills of Canary Wharf throughout the 2000s; like Target, Dizzee was under no illusion about the lesson to be learned from Canary Wharf, malevolent or not. He was asked in the same BBC Mercury Prize interview what motivated him. He stared straight at the camera. ‘Money motivates me. I’m motivated by money.’ A year later, on the B-side to ‘Dream, Is This Real’, he summed up the ethic of the age:
We was kids, we was young, used to love having fun
Now we look up to guns, and the aim’s only one:
Make money, every day, any how, any way
I tried to choose the legal way10
Those rich people who ‘don’t live the same way as us’ (and don’t always choose the legal way, either) arrived in droves, to the point that by the 2010 election, the Tory candidate for Poplar & Limehouse, Tim Archer, an HSBC banker on sabbatical from his office in Canary Wharf, was the bookies’ favourite to win. It would have been the Conservatives’ first victory in any Tower Hamlets seat in decades. Intrigued by this daring incursion of the banking set into their grimy new neighbourhood, I went on the campaign trail with Archer and his team. To the surprise of Conservative HQ, they failed to win Poplar & Limehouse. One of the main reasons for their defeat was that they couldn’t get access to the new blocks of luxury flats; there were so many entry-phones and security gates they weren’t able to canvass and recruit the very people who were supposed to be helping them win. It was almost as if the new arrivals didn’t give a toss about the area they’d moved into. One of those new luxury blocks for the international super-rich, a development called Pan Peninsula, promises buyers ‘a view that few will share’, and that unlike the teenagers gazing up at Canary Wharf’s blinking eye, residents will ‘look up to no one’. The spiel on their website promises you will:
Inhabit a private universe. Where luxury apartments combine with a spa, a health club and a cinema to create an urban resort. Where service is tailored to need, and bends to individual will, effortlessly and invisibly. Where business and play happen high above London. Live at Pan Peninsula, exist in another world.
It perfectly articulates the mentality of Canary Wharf: where everything – and everyone – bends to the will of those who can afford it.
‘Coming from where I come from, you didn’t feel a part of London,’ Dizzee told BBC London in 2010. This is the essence of what it means to be marginalised; on one level, your hometown brings you pride – there are numerous grime songs paying homage to London as a whole, rather than just the local neighbourhood – but you are excluded from its most famous parts, the parts the tourists see, the parts the middle classes negotiate with ease and confidence. In this sense, grime both is London, but also excluded from its official narrative, invisible in the face the city shows to the world.
To prove London wasn’t all ‘teacups, red telephone boxes and Buckingham Palace’ as Dizzee put it on ‘Graftin’’, its music video was shot on top of, around, and beneath the three tower blocks of the Crossways Estate. The estate had been nicknamed ‘the pride of Bow’ when it was built in the 1970s, but bad upkeep of the buildings, untreated poverty and overcrowding meant that the alias did not stick around for long.
The video is shot almost entirely at night time, on grainy analogue film, the Crossways blocks looming over Dizzee’s head, studded with occasional lights. It’s a classic US rap-style ‘hood video’, with Dizzee surrounded by members of Ruff Sqwad, one of the most identifiably ‘Bow’ of crews from grime’s golden age, and assorted other local teenagers. At times he delivers his bars with Canary Wharf’s light blinking in the background. Twice, towards the end of the video, the director splices in a brief, split-second cut-shot of One Canada Square, like a subliminal message – a suggestion that subconsciously, Canary Wharf is always there, when you’re living in and talking about ‘the grime’.11
When vines grow on a hill facing the ocean they pick up the brine on the wind, and the taste of the grapes is suffused with a salty tang. When black British music was pouring, melting hot, into the crucible of a new genre in the early 2000s, New Labour were polling 57 per cent to the Tories’ 25; it was the apex of the blind hubris that led to our current malaise: reckless, wild-west capitalism in Canary Wharf, and New Labour’s carefully controlled vision of modernity and unapologetic social conservatism. This is the tang in the air: tough love, zero tolerance, ever-growing inequality, CCTVs, ASBOs, and an ‘intensely relaxed’ attitude to what was fuelling the economic bubble they said would never burst. In Dizzee Rascal’s first ever interview, he described New Labour’s transformation of the inner city even as it was happening around him. He was only 17 years old in July 2002, sitting on a wall in Bow, with the third of Canary Wharf’s three towers still being finished overhead. ‘There has been bare change around here,’ he observed. ‘It’s all about adapting. Like all the cameras, sly little cameras everywhere, more police, drugs, crime … everything is changing.’12
‘There will be no forgotten people in the Britain I want to build,’ Tony Blair said in a photo call at London’s notorious Aylesbury Estate a month after the 1997 general election, launching the government’s ‘new deal for communities’. British cities were riven by intense geographical inequalities between rich and poor neighbourhoods. New Labour’s concern was that the latter were falling ever further behind the rest. ‘Over the last two decades the gap between these worst estates and the rest of the country has grown. It has left us with a situation that no civilised country should tolerate,’ Blair said in 1998.
Such estates had ‘become no-go zones for some and no-exit zones for others’, according to a government report published that year, which blamed this crisis of bad housing and social exclusion on mistakes by previous governments: in particular, the concentration of the poor and unemployed together in neighbourhoods where hardly anyone had a job. At the time, around 5 million households nationally were in council- or housing-association homes, and the maintenance backlog was upwards of £20 billion. New Labour’s response was to advise councils to seek PFI funding, and to demolish many of the blocks altogether – too many of them were ‘sinking ships’, Blair told the Daily Express:
‘Some estates are beyond rescue and will never be places where people want to live. That could mean moving people to new homes, levelling the site and using the land for something the public wants.’ The idea that the public might want – first and above all – decent, affordable new social housing did not seem to enter into the conversation.
New Labour set up an Urban Task Force, and appointed a Regeneration Tsar, the architect Richard Rogers (aka Lord Rogers, aka Baron Rogers of Riverside – a man with as many alter-egos as a half-decent MC), who delivered a report in 1999 which would shape the future of London: Towards an Urban Renaissance. The report found that one in four people
