A New Kind of Bleak. Owen HatherleyЧитать онлайн книгу.
of a thoroughly modern dwelling.
This Building Kills (or Abets) Fascists
At this point on our progress towards the Wen we leave Kent altogether, finding ourselves in London, Zone 4 to be precise. This is Outer London, not one of the areas that was part of the original Greater London Council (unlike Woolwich, just over the river), but it is geographically London, and votes for the Greater London Authority. From here the route is different – more on foot, and more by London’s own, far superior public transport – the Docklands Light Railway, not Fastrack Buses. It is, it would seem, an even darker place than North Kent. The northern side of the Thames Gateway, once one of the few Labour strongholds in southern England, had a tendency during the boom to vote for fascists, and elect them as councillors. Thurrock, Tilbury, but especially Barking and Dagenham, appeared to be defecting en masse to the British National Party. Their Barking base was unexpectedly destroyed in the elections of 2010, and far-right politics have returned to the Plan A of cracking heads, in the form of the Luton-derived English Defence League. A week before the General Election I had a wander round Barking, and though thankfully the election proved the town had far more decent people in it than broadsheet commentators may have assumed, many of the points made about its built environment still stand, I think.
Barking was thought likely in spring 2010 to become the first place in British history to elect a fascist MP. East End sentimentalists don’t like to remember that Mile End was once one of the three places in Britain to have elected Communist MPs, which would imply that local political identity once extended beyond pearly kings and costermongers, although there’s no doubt that the consignment of Phil Piratin MP to the memory hole has worked effectively. Although electing fascists is considered normal in much of oh-so-civic continental Europe, especially after the financial collapse, in the UK it is often still, rightly, considered alarming that such a thing could potentially occur. I won’t pretend the following is much more than a light skimming of the (architectural) surface, but hopefully a few insights can be gained from looking at Barking. We walked there from Canning Town, through East and West Ham, a workaday, multiracial London interrupted by flyovers and creeks that make the demarcation with Barking itself particularly clear.
The area we saw was Barking Central (in the regenerator’s terminology). This is as opposed to Becontree, the huge inter-war ‘homes for heroes’ estate which by many accounts was where most of the BNP support is concentrated. I grew up somewhere similar, cottagey council houses overlooking a giant Ford works, so I suppose I already know the territory. The centre of Barking was not untouched by the boom – in fact, it was subject to a very ambitious regeneration scheme, which local MP and spectacularly philistine ‘culture minister’ Margaret Hodge has described as ‘my kind of architecture’. This is hardly a recommendation, but the comprehensiveness of the scheme is at least impressive: the redevelopment encompasses housing, leisure and public space, on a very large scale. Already as soon as you pass under the flyover, the difference between the terraced density of East Ham and Barking’s sprawling suburbia is noticeable, with a straggling collection of dodgy pomo, Victorian factories, 1930s semis, tower blocks and wasteland announcing it. This then fades into a quite pleasant town centre, marked by medieval remains, pedestrianized shops and town-centre office blocks, all on roughly the same scale as, say, Dartford; though significantly more multiracial, and with much more character than the latter. BNP-voting areas do not, on the whole, have very high rates of immigration – Barnsley and Thurrock are not Burngreave or Poplar – but Barking is a partial exception. Customarily, this is presented as being at bottom a question of housing. In 2010, no new council housing had been built for decades, though a large 1960s estate had been demolished. Right-to-buy had warped the perception of what exists, so that considerably more agency was attributed to council housing allocations than actually existed. However, to suggest that, well, racism has nothing to do with it would be foolish. The fascist sympathizers in places like the Isle of Dogs didn’t disappear in the 1990s – they went somewhere.
The edges of the town centre are where the tensions lie. One side features a large, derelict shopping parade, which has flats at the back, curving around a car park and some lumps that might or might not have been public art of some description, or mere traffic-controlling blobs. There’s no disputing that leaving a load of housing derelict in the middle of a housing crisis is rather grotesque, especially in a place this charged. It’s hard to decide which side is the more depressing, the empty flats – which are very likely of decent Parker-Morris proportions – or the shops, bookies and recruitment agencies that were no doubt even more depressing when they were open. The eye is drawn, though, to two pieces of very jolly architecture. First, the Town Hall, proof that there are simply no uninteresting town halls in London, a Dudok-Georgian mash-up with a wonderfully unscholarly approach to historical styles. The bell tower is full of suspicious-looking telecommunications equipment, and Bobbies On The Beat walk back and forth in front of it at a more regular rate than I’m used to seeing. Then there’s Alford Hall Monaghan Morris’s Barking Central development. AHMM are a paradigm of Blairite architecture at its most thoroughly developed, a glossy, brightly-coloured neomodernism that feels like CGI even when you touch it, the Weimar Republic colourfulness of Bruno Taut relocated to DOSAC from The Thick of It. Their tendency to the rictus grin conceals architectural talent and presence, but if there’s a better exemplar of New Labour architecture than their bright, jolly Pseudomodernism then I don’t know what it is. Their buildings here, very dense low-rise blocks and towers, hinge on the contrast between what you see – the fun façades – and what you don’t, the grimness of the small, single-aspect flats.
A percentage of Barking Central is ‘affordable housing’, that all-purpose get-out-clause, and it bears constant repeating that affordable housing is not council housing, but is usually shared-ownership or slightly-cheaper-to-buy, and so makes virtually no difference to the problems that were purportedly stirring up the BNP vote. Let’s imagine for a moment, irrespective of the crappy space standards, what a gesture it would have been if a development this large, this shiny and optimistic, were let to council tenants – how many political arguments would then be won at a stroke. As it is the place is not altogether hideous, for all its fiddling-while-Rome-burns nature, and part of that is due to extraneous things, extras on the architecture which are surprisingly clever, and suggest how much more could have been done here. The colonnades (courtesy of landscape architects muf) are great, the size of the site letting the architects do something they couldn’t have squeezed into a tight plot of inner-city CABEism; it’s an actually quite pleasant and successful public space. The main occupants so far are pigeons, but that need not remain true.
Across from this is – honesty here, at least, in the choice of name – ‘The Folly’, designed by muf. It’s rather asking to be judged as a description for the entire project, stigmatized as an act of expensive futility, and yet the sheer menance of it marks this out as something perhaps more interesting, one of the few built instantiations of the recent ruin-mania of any consequence. It’s a brick edifice that presents itself as an instant pagan ruin, from the headless creatures lined up and inset into it, to the gates that lead to nowhere – there is after all a ruined abbey nearby. The suggestion that it might be some comment or satire on the surrounding scheme, or on AHMM’s refusal to imagine the possibility of ageing or weathering in their buildings, seems a bit much, although placing a sheep atop the whole thing has at least some tongue-poking symbolism. However, the massive return to the Labour fold here in the 2010 election has evidently provoked the party’s gratitude; not far from here is now a small estate of stock-brick houses, masterplanned by sober brick austerity types Maccreanor Lavington, with a terrace by AHMM themselves – moving sharply away from the bright shiny cladding of Barking Central to a robust interpretation of an early Victorian dockside terrace. For once, provided you forget that this is an only partial replacement of the houses they demolished, it seems the local Labour Party realized who they were supposed to represent. It’s not complicated, and neither is the architecture.
The usual way into or out of here is another indication that a quite exciting town could be made here, if the will existed. Barking Station is a rare fine British Rail building with an angular roof in concrete so richly, darkly shuttered that it’s hard to remind yourself it isn’t wood; a bespoke