A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley
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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, replaced by a DLR extension and, putatively, Crossrail. This disused railway offers a view of 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