A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley
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post4 on parallel Hackneys mentioned China Miéville’s recent science fiction novel The City and the City, where two cities literally do occupy the same space, with all inhabitants acting as if they don’t. He set it in Eastern Europe, but the inspiration is surely London.
All of us, all along, if we were honest for a microsecond, knew this was a ludicrous way to build a city, to live in a city. I, like most of the people who were waving brooms in the air post-riot and claiming to represent the ‘real London’, was not born in London, and I know only two or three people who were. In the earlier of the twelve years I’ve lived in the city I’d often idly wonder when the riots would come, when the situation of organic delis next to pound shops, of crumbling maisonettes next to furiously speculated-on Victoriana, of artists shipped into architect-designed Brutalist towers to make them safe for Regeneration, of endless boosterist self-congratulation, would finally collapse in on itself. Like most thoughts of this sort, it stayed in the back of the mind, and I’d almost forgotten about it when it finally happened.
If you look at the looted, torched places, many of which are in this book, you can see they have certain things in common. Take Bristol, a port where you could walk for miles and wonder where its working class had disappeared to, which seemed to have been given over completely to post-hippy tourism, ‘subversive’ graffiti, students and shopping. Well, those invisible, young, ‘socially excluded’ (how that mealy-mouthed phrase suddenly seems to acquire a certain truth) people arrived in the shiny new Cabot Circus mall and took what they wanted, what they couldn’t afford, what they’d been told time and time again they were worthless without. Look at Woolwich, where the former main employer, the Arsenal, is now a vast development of luxury flats, and where efforts to ameliorate poverty and unemployment centre on a giant Tesco, just opposite the Jobcentre. Look at Peckham, where ‘Bellenden Village’ pretends to be excited by the vibrant desperation of Rye Lane. Look at Liverpool, where council semis rub up against the mall-without-walls of Liverpool One, whose heavy-security streets were claimed by the RIBA to have ‘single-handedly transformed Liverpool’s fortunes’, as if a shopping mall could replace the docks. Look at Croydon, where you can walk along the spotless main street of the privately owned, privately patrolled Business Improvement District and then suddenly find yourself in the rotting mess around West Croydon station. Look at Manchester’s city centre, the most complete regeneration showpiece, practically walled off from those living outside the ring road. Look at Salford, where Urban Splash sell terraces gutted and cleared of their working-class population to MediaCity employees, with the slogan ‘Own your own Coronation Street home’. Look at Nottingham, where private student accommodation looming over council estates features a giant advert promising a ‘Plasma screen TV in every room’. Look at Brixton, where Zaha Hadid’s hedge-funded Academy has a disciplinary regime harsher than some prisons, and aims to create little entrepreneurs and budding CEOs out of the lamentably unaspirational estate-dwellers. Look at Birmingham’s new Bullring, yards away from the scar of no-man’s land separating it from the dilapidated estates and empty light-industrial units of Digbeth and Deritend. This is urban Britain, and though the cuts have made it worse, the damage was done long before.
With his customary haplessness, Ed Miliband said during the riots that ‘there must be no no-go areas’. But these places are nothing of the sort: they’re parallel areas occupying exactly the same space, and any urban theory stuck in the problems of an earlier era, fulminating against the evils of mono-class estates and rigid zoning, is ill-equipped to even begin to describe what’s going on. That isn’t to say that all insights from history are useless. During the riots, an assortment of ex-punks, chroniclers of rebel rock, ‘Situationists’ and ‘leftists’ decided that these riots were somehow different, somehow apolitical, compared to those that went before. The bizarrely romanticized ‘no poperie’ Gordon Riots. The Watts Riots of 1965, where local shops were burned and ransacked with as much intensity as they were in August 2011, only with more firearms. The UK riots of 1981, when corner shops were not spared. The 1992 LA riots, where innocent truck drivers were dragged from their vehicles and killed. Riots always start with an immediate grievance – a hugely corrupt police force shooting a man to death, this time – and become a free-for-all, where people exploit the absence of the law, in which the people who suffer are often innocent. Rioting is a politics of despair; but to claim that these riots are somehow different, somehow ‘neoliberal’, because of the allegedly novel phenomenon of mass looting, is asinine. It would have been wrong to cheer on rioters against corner shopkeepers trying to defend their already small livelihoods; but it is equally wrong to pretend that this had nothing to do with the demonization of the young and poor, nothing to do with our brutally unequal society and our pathetic trickle-down attempts at palliation. Then we line up with those who think that looting Foot Locker is worse than the looting of an entire economy.
Something snapped in August 2011, and it was a long time coming. If you listened to what those few rioters to have got near a journalist had to say – ‘The whole country is burning, man’; ‘We’re showing the rich people we can do what we want’; ‘They’re screwing the system so only white middle-class kids can get an education … everyone’s heard about the police and members of parliament taking bribes, the members of parliament stealing thousands with their expenses. They set the example. It’s time to loot’ – what you heard was an excuse, sure, but also a truth. Over the last few years, the ruling class kept trying to commit suicide – financial crisis, expenses scandal, News International, the Met, financial crisis mark two – and most of us wouldn’t let them, we’d rather Keep Calm and Carry On. These kids, venal and stupid as some of their actions obviously are, don’t want to carry on. They want to see the whole bloody thing burn.
Back to Business
Not that this seems to have had much immediate effect. I live in Woolwich, where among the burnt-out (or in one case completely destroyed) buildings appeared a hoarding headed ‘BACK TO BUSINESS’, promising a mega-Tesco, a Travelodge, and imminent Royal Borough status as panaceas for the poverty and frustration that led to the riots. It may as well have been headed ‘WE REFUSE TO LEARN ANYTHING’. It could be a cipher for the way the country has responded to the crisis at large; from city councillors to homeowners, there appears to be a widespread hope that if we can get the property bubble reinflated, 2007 will be here all over again and the whole bloody cycle will start up again. You can feel this especially acutely in London, where the property crash was so brief that in the city’s richer areas, it’s impossible to detect any change between London-in-Recession and London-in-Boom. That, at least, is the main thing that, say, Knightsbridge has in common with, say, Woolwich. So change is happening, if it is happening, very slowly in British cities. There is still a feeling of inertia and hopelessness that has not, yet, been entirely shaken off. This book is about an interregnum, a time in which the new has not yet been born. The Tory–Whigs have not created a specifically new space; nothing has been built in the new Enterprise Zones, few Free Schools have been planned, no Localist housing schemes are on the drawing board. These may well emerge, but they are unlikely to even begin to rival the urban changes wreaked under New Labour. I attempt to search for the coalition’s space, to some degree, although there is much more evidence for the effects of their negligence of existing space, their deliberate strangling of the cities, and more than anything else evidence of the swift dereliction that has overtaken the spaces of the outgoing regime. However, this is a book much more concerned with looking for previous urban alternatives, partly as possible inspiration, partly as a reminder that things now considered impossible were once considered normal.
Like the earlier A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain it is based on ‘Urban Trawl’, a regular feature I wrote for the architectural magazine Building Design, a series of architectural travelogues through British cities during the Great Recession. In these essays those cities are seen as political spaces subject to the changes in the British economy from the post-war settlement to the Thatcher-Blair consensus, as spaces where the movements in architectural theory from modernism to postmodernism and back have had profound and complex effects, and as spaces where the self-image of rural Albion can be tested against the urban and suburban reality. This book is entirely a continuation of that project, though I hope I can be understood without prior acquaintance. The first