By Bradley Garrett
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Under cover of the night, a group who call themselves “place hackers” are committed to reclaiming liminal and abandoned urban structures in a form of playful exploration with liberationist overtones. Social geographer Bradley Garrett shares his immersive documentation of their spectacular subversive escapades with uncube.
All photos and videos: Bradley Garrett.
In 2011, there was a mothballed 15-storey construction site above Aldgate East Tube Station, situated on the largely invisible border between the City of London and Whitechapel. It was owned by an Icelandic company that had gone bust in 2008 and had walked away from its investment in the ongoing gentrification of the East End. Three years after the desertion, a construction crane still remained poised above the empty building like an insect feeding on a carcass. Locals fed on it too, smashing up the concrete to rip out re-bar for recycling, a lucrative illicit trade. The building site was, in effect, turning into a ruin, an apt spatial metaphor for the financial crisis.
Long after the sun had set over the capital, my friends and I, a loose collective of recreational trespassers, could easily slip from the flow of late-night revellers at the intersection of Commercial Street and Whitechapel High Street, down a dark alley behind the site. Sticking to the shadows, it was possible to climb over the back fence, in plain view of a few old cameras that could not see in the dark, tiptoe through the dank, dripping stairwells of the building using a mobile phone as a torch and emerge onto the incomplete roof to ascend the rusty crane.
Looking west from the jib, a herd of glass and metal City skyscrapers could be seen jostling for prominent 24-hour uplighting amidst a forest of newer, more energetic cranes. To the east, Whitechapel was dark and relatively flat. These are the dichotomies of light emanating from the city at night, which are more visible from a height than from the streets in plain sight. Spinning 360 degrees on top of the crane cab, I recalled Charles Dickens’ nocturnal walks to “London over the borders” and was reminded that Aldgate was indeed once an actual gate in the London Wall, a literal boundary. This boundary, though less visible today, is still very much active – as every Shoreditch hipster knows, when you want to have a night on the town in London, you don’t head into the overbearing monumental lumination of Liverpool Street, but into the dark shadows and flickering neons of East London.
Then again, we are not hipsters looking for trendy bars; we are nocturnal trespassers scribing in light – those tungsten spotlights spread into handsome stars during long-exposure photos. My friends and I, the ones who clambered up that crane, have trespassed into and photographed over 300 off-limit locations in eight countries since 2008. We are place hackers, information-leakers, finding and sharing our impressions of the hidden city through blogs and books. Though the immediate experience of exploring is powerful on a personal level, it’s the sharing of those experiences that gives place hacking its political edge.
Like pub- and club-goers, ecstasy-fuelled ravers, and tin-tipping drifters, we are denizens of the dark. Yet where sociologists have written much about the emerging “night-time economy”, we are not interested in the least in the night as a productive economic space.
Like Dickens, we are more preoccupied with the liberty darkness allows – where, as A. Roger Ekirch writes in his 2005 book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, we can find ‘‘freedom from both labour and social scrutiny’’. Here an interesting paradox presents itself, because by the very nature of the city’s all-too-predictable central business district banality, with its brightly lit streets and lack of late-night commercial entertainment, opportunities are afforded for other sorts of social freedom after the corporate workday ends. Though a night out in Whitechapel has its own charms, the financial centre of London, ruled by economics, utility, practicality and efficiency, is a post-gloaming ghost town.
This is when we run wild, speeding around skyscrapers, blasting pirate radio, parking recklessly, popping manholes, climbing buildings, hanging from cranes, and living out a post-apocalyptic fantasy where any notion of rational decision making processes are ripped down from their abstract pedestals, replaced by a carnal desire to be present in the city.
»we are not hipsters looking for trendy bars; we are nocturnal trespassers scribing in light«
»The financial centre of London, ruled by economics, utility, practicality and efficiency, is a post-gloaming ghost town«
We are, in the words of contemporary geographer Tim Edensor, utilising the night as a space for “transgression, fantasy and experimentation”. The city we desire is thus conjured, regardless of the intentions of planners, architects or security forces, and it doesn’t cost a cent. Like the local re-bar-rippers in the Aldgate construction site, we simply feed on what is already there, no judgment required.
And yet the paradoxes compound. What place hackers are performing night after night, in a strange way, is a form of unsolicited labour, a kind of secret city survey. We are at work, photographing the city that most people don’t see, the city most people choose to ignore, “a second city – with its own geography and its own set of citizens”, as writer William Sharpe described it in 2008. We publicise these photos in print and online, at great risk, with purpose – to suggest to Londoners that rather than simply defending “London over the borders” from sprawling gentrification, we can bring our over-the-border desire-ruled temperaments to the city itself every night, re-imagining these cold, stark, unforgiving environments as spaces of play and creativity, as public spaces. Each photo we distribute carries with it a hidden weight of permission taken where it never would have been granted. Often, others also labouring at night, driving street sweepers, patrolling pavements in front of nightclubs and cleaning offices, acknowledge us with a nod and a wink. In the haze of the unsustainable artificial urban glow of the City, empty of pinstripe suits, there’s plenty of room for all sorts of characters.
One night in 2014, after climbing the Walkie-Talkie skyscraper with three other place hackers, we were sneaking back through the shadows to the bordering fence to make our escape after a successful mission to the roof when we saw another black-clad character climbing into the site, not with a camera bag and tripod like us, but with a guitar case. Realising he was obviously a fellow trespasser, we got close enough to ask him, in hushed whispers, what he was up to.
»Each photo we distribute carries with it a hidden weight of permission taken where it never would have been granted«
Bradley L. Garrett is a social geographer at the University of Southampton with a passion for photography of off-limits places. His first book, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Verso Books, 2013), is an account of his adventures trespassing into ruins, tunnels and skyscrapers in eight different countries. His second book, Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital (Prestel, 2014), is a photographic dissection of what lies underneath the streets of London, layer by layer.
References for this text:
Charles Dickens, Household Words: A Weekly Journal, Volume 16, 1857.
A Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close, Orion Books, 2005.
Tim Edensor, The Gloomy City: Rethinking the Relationship between Light and Dark, Urban Studies, 2013.
William Sharpe, New York Nocturne: The City after Dark in Literature, Painting and Photography, Princeton University Press, 2008.
He told us he was “looking for an inspirational place to jam”, and eyed up the roof. After showing him our photos from the top, we wished him luck, shook hands and parted ways.
The architecture of the city isn’t built for play, but that does not mean we can’t play in it. While the shadows offer a hospitable environment for all sorts of dark pleasures, we needn’t steer clear of well-lit business districts rigged up with supposedly advanced surveillance systems. If the fundamental principle of the city of spectacle is that it should be seen but not touched, then by all means, let us touch it. In an age where asking for permission and forgiveness are equally hopeless, unsolicited participation in the closed city is one of our most effective forms of direct action. I
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