Interview by Rob Wilson
The focus of your talk is Poplar in East London, which you describe as “the most unequal landscape in Europe”.
Yes. Poplar is one of the poorest UK urban areas by any measure, yet it’s adjacent to the financial district of Canary Wharf – established by the Thatcher Government in the 1980s on the demolished docks. It’s an interesting spot: it was a very progressive area in terms of social reform and poor relief in the early 1920s, when a protest movement against unfair rates started there – known as Poplarism. It also has a great density of celebrated buildings and council housing schemes: the Lansbury housing estate – basically 3D socialist propaganda, the Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens and Ernö Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower. The whole area was an extreme prototyping statement in architectural terms. All those later concrete buildings: it’s lush! Gaze in awe at the Goldfinger building!
But now there is massive redevelopment. Canary Wharf, previously separated by a gigantic dual carriageway, has kind of spilled over into the area; Robin Hood Gardens is due to be demolished and the developers are quadrupling the housing density. Council housing is being replaced by so-called social or affordable units. But rents will increase, and there are questions as to whether these units are going to go to those who originally lived on the estate. The precedents for this suggests that they won’t: affordable now often just means studio flats – useless for most current residents. What is happening here is a classic case of class cleansing. No one is ever willing to say: we have council housing that works and it’s staying council owned, so fuck off.
You have been almost more critical of New Labour and Tony Blair’s continuation of the laissez-faire market-driven policies of Thatcherism, in creating the present situation, than of the Tories themselves.
Well, take Canary Wharf. When I moved to London in the late 1990s, it was a failure – great days! Just this one building, Thatcher’s cock, with this lone flashing light on top of it. Almost all of what is now Canary Wharf was built under Blair. London kind of had its chance in 1997 with New Labour. They weren’t socialists but they had a big mandate, and this idea that they would create a more socially democratic, more European, city.
There was Richard Rogers saying let’s have squares like they have in Stockholm or Barcelona. And this became policy for a while, under the first Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. This is what New Labour could have been like. Because Western European cities work – they do not have the divide between rich and poor, and people like living in them. They tried it and they fucked it up. But Blair really did not want to build Barcelona. He wanted to build Phoenix or Alberqueque.
Owen Hatherley is a writer and journalist based in London who writes on architecture, politics and culture.
His first book Militant Modernism (Zero Books, 2009), was a defense of the modernist movement, reclaiming its revolutionary credentials. Subsequent books have included A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon (Zero, 2011), a book on the pop group Pulp, A New Kind of Bleak (Verso, 2012), and Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012). He writes regularly for Architects’ Journal, the Architectural Review, Icon, the Guardian and New Humanist, and has authored several blogs including Sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy (2005-2010).
He is currently working on a book on architecture and communism.
How do you compare the situation to that in Berlin?
In many ways London is a cautionary tale. Whenever I come to Germany I think: you have no idea how bad this can get. Take the proposed Media Spree development in Berlin. Compared to Canary Wharf it’s such small beer. But the Germans are much more willing to fight, which is why it stays piddling. If something on the scale of some of the schemes proposed in the UK was proposed, it would probably result in half of Berlin being burnt down.
Where do you see London in ten years?
Well, three years ago my guess would have been riots. And I remember thinking when there were riots in August 2011: this is going to be a thing, this is going to be a fixture, people are not going to take this. But since the riots, things have got worse. There was an explosion and then everyone lay down. People are willing to fight, but there is a long history of laissez-faire in the UK: basically the periods of higher State intervention after the First and Second World Wars were anomalies, blips.
And despite most of the UK economy being in a terrible state, London is seen as a safe place to put your money by people fleeing various crisis-ridden countries. So this can go on indefinitely: the only way to prove the bankruptcy of the whole system is people stopping it, making it stop. But the housing market keeps people scared. Fear is the security of the system. I
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