A New Kind of Bleak. Journeys Through Urban Britain
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A NEW KIND OF BLEAK engineeringwithraj engineeringwithraj A NEW KIND OF BLEAK Journeys Through Urban Britain OweN HatHERleY engineeringwithraj London • New York First published by Verso 2012 © Owen Hatherley 2012 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13 978-1-84467-857-0 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hatherley, Owen. A new kind of bleak : journeys through urban Britain / Owen Hatherley. -- 1st ed. p. cm. Includesengineeringwithraj bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84467-857-0 -- ISBN 978-1-84467-909-6 (ebook) 1. Great Britain--Social conditions--21st century. 2. Great Britain--Economic policy--21st century. 3. Great Britain--Politics and government--21st century. I. Title. HN385.5.H38 2012 306.0941--dc23 2012010811 Typeset in Fournier by MJ Gavan, Truro, Cornwall Printed by ScandBook AB in Sweden …We wanted something new, and we Would sacrifice most anything (Well, decorum definitely) To get our gawky, sky-jostling Ruck with nature set in knifey Portland stone. Of course, I know Time hasn’t widened out the way We reckoned all those years ago. You plan for that, allow for that. I know the building might have housed The odd careerist democrat Or two, and yes, we missed Our chance to make a truly ideal Hive, a fair organic whole. That too was calculable. Facts played their usual role. What niggles like a buzzing clock Are certain Belgian sightseers, How they so leisurely mock Our bid to level with the stars, How smiling artisans can stare Me dead in the eye, ecstatically Perplexed when I say future. We wanted something new, you see. engineeringwithraj – Alex Niven engineeringwithraj Contents INTRoduction Will There Still Be Building, in the Dark Times? xi THE THAMES GatewAY One of the Dark Places of the Earth 1 TEESSIDE Infantilized Hercules 37 PRESTON Nothing Great but Man 59 BARRow-IN-FURNESS Diving for Pearls 81 THE METRopolitan COUNTY OF THE WEST MIDLANDS The Patchwork Explains, the Land Is Unchanged 91 BRISTOL engineeringwithrajThe Tyranny of Structurelessness 133 BRIGHTON AND HOVE On Parade 149 CROYDON Zone 5 Strategy 163 PLYMOUTH Fables of the Reconstruction 177 vii OXFORD Quadrangle and Banlieue 191 LEICESTER Another Middle England 209 LINCOLN Between Two Cathedrals 225 THE VALLEYS I Am a Pioneer, They Call Me Primitive 235 EDINBURGH Capital (It Fails Us Now) 249 ABERDEEN Where the Money Went 273 FROM GOVAN TO CUMBERNAULD Was the Solution Worse than the Problem? 285 BELFAST We Are Not Going Away 311 THE CITY OF LondoN The Beginning is Nigh 333 Acknowledgements 363 Notes 365 Index 367 engineeringwithrajIndex of Places 377 engineeringwithraj engineeringwithraj Introduction Will There Still Be Building, in the Dark Times? Gateway to New Europe It is always difficult to return to Britain. One of the most painful places to arrive is via Luton Airport; or, to give it its full title, ‘London Luton Airport’, demoting a town of over 100,000 people to a mere adjunct of the Great Wen. It’s also one of the main places for processing the thousands of poorly-paid, poorly- housed East and Central European Gastarbeiter, those who largely constructed the ‘New Britain’ promised by the now defunct New Labour movement. The destinations from London Luton are overwhelmingly either the ‘transition’ countries, where it’s not usually holidays that are the purpose – Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and above all Poland – or cheap getaways to the south of Spain or Portugal. One of the operators here, Wizzair, had until recently as its slogan, as you enter the airport, ‘Wizz off to New Europe!’ This Donald Rumsfeld-inspired catchphrase was recently replaced, which is a shame,engineeringwithraj as Luton services quite precisely the European countries which have been most engulfed by the financial crisis, those that fully embraced in all its lunacy the ‘Anglo-Saxon model’ of dereg- ulated finance, property booms and deindustrialization, adding more recently the concomitant of ruthless, punitive austerity programmes. For these reasons Luton is, in its largely unspoken way, a very important place – a fulcrum of the real New Europe, where neoliberalism has created a new and bracingly unpleas- ant landscape, leaving far behind the attachment to making and xi a new kind of bleak crafting that still occasionally rears its head in France, Germany or Scandinavia. This is communicated especially sharply in Luton’s architec- ture, as here you can see that the UK is the very newest part of New Europe, in its total lack of concern for the built environment, in its heedless accumulation of exurban kipple. For instance, if you leave Okęcie airport in Warsaw – Poland being admittedly the ‘transition’ economy least affected by the crash, due to ‘old’ methods such as a strong industrial base and public capital invest- ment – you’re leaving behind a reasonably clean, expensive, airy piece of design. Arrive in Luton, and you’re in a carceral, cheap, chaotic place, one that has happened seemingly entirely by acci- dent. At the same time, no other European country, not even the Russian Federation, makes as much fuss about itself at its entrance as Great Britain. First, there’s the posters, designed to intimidate the guest worker and ‘reassure’ the Daily Mail reader: ASYLUM (don’t even think about it). HUMAN TRAFFICKING (you probably are, or the friendly man next to you in the queue is). TERRORISM, too, is a constant visual presence. On little screens above the concourse, Sky News broadcasts a perpetual loop of horror – economic crisis, natural disaster, environmental catas- trophe, helpfully subtitled in broken sentences so that you can read as you queue. The sign ‘UK BORDER’ is over the pass- port desk, again in another ostentatious gesture of reassurance/ intimidation. There is, in proper dystopian sci-fi fashion, a bio- metric passport gate through which the lucky few can pass, though the nightmarish future is postponed by the fact that it is seldom working. Get through all that, past a sign informing you that Alistair Darling MP opened the building in 2003, and you’re in engineeringwithraja tin hangar where every available space has been crammed with retail. If you’re on your way out of the UK, it’s even more extreme; the waiting room is a cramped, low-ceilinged, badly- lit shopping mall, where the visual gestures – a curved, swoopy roof, Vegas light fittings – are just so much extra clutter. Then, you’re out, into the forecourt, where you can see some more architectural things; fragments of the earlier, 1970s Luton Airport, such as the concrete watchtower, some dour brick offices for the airlines, and most interestingly an orange hangar for xii introduction EasyJet, which almost seems to have been conceived as a visual object, with its huge steel supports visible on the façade. One of the blanker hangars on the runway bears the Harrods logo. There’s no way to walk out of the airport, obviously, so you must take a shuttle bus (another £2, please) to the railway station in order to escape; on the way you pass under a heavy concrete bridge – this is here because the runway actually passes overhead, an impressive piece of heavy engineering. You also pass a factory – this is General Motors’ Luton branch, a complex of some size, a reminder that things are made here, after all. In the near dis- tance is the skyline of Luton itself, with its Arndale Centre and its multistorey car parks. Then, the station, which uses the same architectural language as the airport – metal panels that are filthy with accumulated muck, despite the fact that they are designed to be wipe-clean. The small station has to hold many more people than it was planned for, and gets around this by a bizarre circula- tion system of multiple escalators, each with a barrier to ensure that heavy baggage is not dragged through. Here, you can wait for the most expensive, lowest quality trains in Western Europe to take you somewhere. The End of the Urban Renaissance We’re here as an appropriate entry into a country which, from 1997 to 2010, was supposedly going to create a new and better landscape, but produced instead the purgatory around Luton Airport, and the many places like it. In the near-decade-and-a- half of New Labour hegemony there were certain changes slated to be introduced, after the Thatcher-Major years of underinvest- mentengineeringwithraj in the cities in favour of out-of-town retail parks and exurbs, when entirely unplanned ‘Enterprise Zones’ were the vehicles for any new development. New Labour didn’t quite break with Thatcherism, but rather attempted to realize a version of the European social democratic city, fundamentally via Thatcherite means. Labour politicians like John Prescott, Richard Leese or Ken Livingstone, urbanists and architects like Richard Rogers and Ricky Burdett, all seemed to want to create Barcelona or Berlin using the methods of Canary Wharf. Rather than xiii a new kind of bleak leaving everything to the market, there would be ‘public–private partnerships’ for directing the market into the places it had hith- erto neglected – public services, inner cities – which it soon found were profitable enough in their way, especially when underwrit- ten by the state. I wrote about the consequences in 2010 in a book called A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, in which it’s fair to say I was scornful towards the results.