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95
Review Article The Ruins of the British Welfare State Tahl Kaminer
In Owen Hatherley’s tour of British cities, on which New buildings are built: cheap apartments, yet cool his recent book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great and smartly designed, tailored for the lower-middle Britain is based,1 the author reaches ex-steel city class, a social group with limited choice regard- Sheffield. Here he encounters the Mancunian urban ing the purchase of property. As Nick Johnson, the regeneration specialists, Urban Splash, presiding current deputy chief executive and previous devel- over a dubious project that perfectly embodies and opment director of Urban Splash, described it, the represents the aporia of recent urban development, new buildings express ‘a variety of architectural regeneration, and architecture in Britain and else- styles reflecting the city - a little bit messy here where: the regeneration of Park Hill, the notorious and there, because that’s what cities are like, not council housing slabs overlooking the city from their standardised - with lots of colourful structures and hill-top position, perched above Sheffield’s main water’.2 This is accompanied by an investment in railway station. culture, either by organizing street parties or other events, in order to transform the image of the area The process Hatherley unfolds is fascinating, but in question by infusing it with vitality and vibrancy. his analysis of the material he assembles is lacking. Once a substantial number of lower-class residents Architecturally, Park Hill’s regeneration destroys the have moved out, the lower-middle class moves in, ideas that animated the original architects, Jack and the image is improved through cultural content. Lynn and Ivor Smith (with Frederick Nicklin), such After that, luxury housing, which offers the develop- as ‘truth to materials’, or a simplicity that is about ers wider profit margins, is built. This process is, of ‘the man in the street’ and the experiential. Socially course, gentrification: the banishing of the working and economically, it transfers council flats to the class, the migrants, and the poor from areas with free market and replaces collectivity with individual- real-estate ‘potential’, and their replacement with a ism. [fig. 1] Historically, it annihilates the memory of stronger social group. the welfare state. The regeneration of Park Hill is marred by several While Hatherley encounters the products of the contradictions. As much as it is a paradigmatic gentri- work of Urban Splash on a number of occasions fication project of the 2000s, it is also an anomaly, during his tour, it is useful to outline at this point because of its English Heritage listing in 1998. The the specific process of regeneration this cutting- listing, carried out despite vocal objections by Park edge developer initiated. An urban renewal project Hill’s antagonists, meant that the obliteration of by Urban Splash typically begins with the demoli- the welfare state could not follow straightforward tion of the ‘dullest’ among postwar slabs in an area demolition procedures, as in the case of Robin redlined for regeneration. Residents are driven off. Hood Gardens, and therefore had to take on a very
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The European Welfare State Project: Ideals, Politics, Cities and Buildings, Autumn 2011, vol. 5/2, pp. 95-102 96
different form. Urban Splash had to figure out what because the only alternative for the listed complex aspects of Park Hill prevented its real-estate value was a slow death - a typical choice between two from rising, and how to remove these ‘nuisances’ evils, or, rather, no choice at all. from the complex. Thus, the tensions are positioned within the project itself: between the demand, on The project therefore demonstrates the destruc- the one hand, to conserve the listed council-hous- tion of the welfare state - not just symbolically, but ing complex, and, on the other hand, to increase its in a very concrete manner, by transforming council real-estate value by transforming it into something housing to free-market housing, hand in hand with very different. Park Hill had to remain the same, yet a transformation of the architecture itself. It enables it also had to change. The apparent conclusion was: identifying specific elements of the architecture of that the more current residents were removed, the the welfare state era that are no longer accept- better; that the dour greyness of the concrete and able in a postindustrial, neoliberal order. It explains grime-covered bricks had to be alleviated; that the the relation of architecture to a political economy, monolithic aspect and horizontal repetition of the a world view, an ideology, a specific society at a blocks needed some treatment; and, most visibly, specific moment, unfolding the precise ideological that the robust heaviness and sobriety required differences between the 1950s and 2000s in Britain, some lightness and brightness. The solutions and delineating the manner in which these ideologi- provided: the concrete frame, the skeleton of the cal differences materialize in architectural design original, was kept, the rest emptied; shiny, colour- and built form. ful aluminium panels replaced the sober brick wall infills; [fig. 2] the elevated streets were severed from Hatherley does not engage with these issues the streets below; some additional height for lobbies and questions, and avoids providing a thorough added vertical features breaking the horizontality of analysis. His visit to Park Hill is brief, and after the blocks; many council apartments became free- lamenting the loss of the old housing complex, he market apartments. swiftly moves on.3 A Guide to the New Ruins is a tour of British cities, emulating J. B. Priestley’s In the specific context of Britain in the 2000s, the classic English Journey. Born out of a commission Park Hill complex had few alternatives. As a listed by Building Design in 2009, its subject is architec- building, it could have escaped demolition, but ture and urban development, and it includes some probably would not have undergone large-scale broader cultural, political and economic references, renovation, and would have been left to decay. City as well as personal anecdotes and memories. It councils, unable to take loans since the Thatcher includes many encounters with the remnants of days, cannot carry out such projects without the the British welfare state. Hatherley adores these involvement of private capital, and private capital, old relics of an era now receding from experience including both non-profit and for-profit developers, and sight. As an extension to his blog postings and requires a means of financing projects. Hence, a sequel of sorts to his previous Militant Modern- the necessity to substitute council housing with ism,4 Hatherley’s book sharpens his polemics: his free-market apartments and to adjust the building antagonists here are not so much neoclassicists accordingly. In this sense, Urban Splash’s Park Hill such as Quinlan Terry and their patron, Prince endeavour can be considered both courageous Charles, or postmodernists, but the semi-official and symptomatic: courageous because of the risk architecture of New Labour, which he terms ‘pseu- involved (there are, after all, safer ways for urban domodernism’: an unimaginative, inferior, and, developers to make a profit), and symptomatic in its own specific way, also tacky architecture of 97
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 1: Interior photograph of a new apartment in regenerated Park Hill. Courtesy and copyright Peter Bennett, Urban Splash. Fig. 2: View of Park Hill. Courtesy Isabelle Doucet. 98
white stucco, steel and glass. Within the context memory. Hatherley points out that there is no music of the contentious and often vile debate in Britain being created in this regenerated city; the music about modern architecture, Hatherley’s voice has that the city mythologizes took place in a very differ- been unique in its belligerent defence of the most ent setting, now destroyed by the new Manchester. despised of British modernist architecture. Here, he Hatherley concludes: ‘Hulme Crescents was one attacks the Faustian bargain of Richard Rogers and of the places where Modernist Manchester music his allies with neoliberalism, a pact that produces was truly incubated and created, and its absence the type of compromise the Park Hill regeneration coincides almost perfectly with the absence of truly project perfectly epitomizes: a modernism devoid of Modernist Mancunian pop culture.’5 social content, reflected by the unimaginative, spec- ulation-driven architectural design. While Hatherley The book is littered with smart and perceptive produces the promised indictment of recent British observations as well as misrepresentations.6 Apart architecture, the book is, at the end of the day, from the excessive use of neologisms and the rather primarily a eulogy to the disappearing postwar questionable genealogy he suggests for ‘pseu- architecture he so evidently loves. He discovers domodernist’ architecture,7 Hatherley succeeds in objects and environments that please him in unex- identifying the architectural consensus of the Blair pected places, such as the much disliked new town era. Yet despite his best intentions, the book has Milton Keynes, or in his own Southampton. difficulty in avoiding a slippage into an unproductive debate about taste, which does not go unnoticed by The chapter dedicated to Manchester stands out. the author. With regard to a shopping mall in South- By addressing culture, or, more specifically, popular ampton, he professes: music and the culture developed around it, Hather- ley’s rich tapestry manages to produce a story that I don’t like it, obviously, but the language that is relates architecture to the music of early 1980s used to attack it is remarkably similar to that which Manchester in a manner that, despite being mostly is used to attack some of the architecture I love. It’s associative and by no means ‘tight’, is nevertheless out of scale, it’s too monumental, it’s fortress-like, impressive. Here, Hatherley is at his best, tying the it’s Not In Keeping, it leads to abrupt and shocking bridges and skywalks of Hulme’s Brutalist Crescents contrasts, it’s too clean and too shiny […]8 to Joy Division’s gloom and edginess. Many of his arguments, despite the romanticism lurking in their Hatherley frequently ridicules polemics in televi- shadows, are sound. Hulme’s devastated cityscape sion programmes, newspaper articles or books that offered the kind of freedoms found in contempo- savaged postwar architecture ‘in the name of the rary urban areas such as London’s East End or people’, and cites residents’ and former residents’ New York’s Williamsburg. While the relocation of approval of the same buildings.9 Consequently, one students and artists to the latter areas eventually of the questions A Guide to the New Ruins raises brought about gentrification, in the absence of real is whether a ‘public opinion’ or ‘public taste’ actu- estate pressures in the late 1970s, Hulme’s artist ally exists, or whether it is, rather, manufactured. community was not implicated in such processes, at Was it indeed the public that turned against postwar least not directly. However, regenerated Manchester modernism, or was it an opinion constructed by a did have its musical legacy - Factory Records, The conservative media masquerading as ‘the voice of Fall, the Smiths, the Hacienda, Madchester, Oasis the people’, in a manner similar to Prince Charles’ - tattooed into the names of the streets, the build- rebuke of modernist ‘carbuncles’ supposedly at the ings, the entire regenerated city and its collective behest of the public, but from the heights of British 99
monarchy? Ample evidence can be provided to So what went wrong? Did the problem begin with corroborate and support each of these arguments, ideology? Was it caused by the complete subordi- though it seems Hatherley believes the latter is the nation of urban development and regeneration to correct conclusion. Yet the author is also aware of the logic of the free market? Or could it have been the complexity of the question of taste. FAT’s design the fault of badly structured technocratic bodies for homes in Urban Splash’s New Islington devel- and policies? And if the ‘pseudomodernist’ city- opment was based on patterns found in a local scape was produced primarily by the market, then resident’s interior décor, but, as Hatherley points why in tandem with New Labour and not earlier, out, the resident replaced his tacky interior with Ikea under Thatcher? The different answers supplied furniture when moving into his new FAT-designed by Hatherley are partial and incomplete. The over- home - an ironic comment on the trickiness of the whelming evidence he collects, as in the Park Hill issue.10 case, is never completely parsed and analysed. The inferred conclusion is that the policies and Rather than focus on issues of style and taste, programmes in question prioritized business inter- Hatherley attempts to relate architecture to society ests at the expense of civic society and the welfare and politics in several manners, such as citing the of society’s weaker segments. But that is only part specific social intentions of the architects of Park of the story. Hill, or identifying postmodernism with Thatcher- ism. Throughout the book, such a relation is mostly The major shift at issue is the transition that began taken for granted; the argument is primarily delin- even before Thatcher’s ascent to power: from eated in the introduction, laid out in a confident industrial to postindustrial society, from Keynesian manner, though with only limited rigour, avoiding to neoliberal economic theories and policies, from an in-depth engagement. Here, Hatherley indicts welfare state to free market, from Fordism to post- New Labour’s policies in the built environment as Fordism. Hatherley, exclusively focused on British an ‘attempt to transform the welfare state into a architecture and politics, avoids engaging this giant business’.11 He identifies the specific policies broad and general transformation. Yet approached and organizations involved in the effort, including in this manner, the scale and totality of the shift the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), the Urban Task becomes perceptible. The aporia of Western cities Force, Pathfinder, English Partnership, and the in the 1960s and 70s was necessarily related to Commission for Architecture and the Built Environ- their de-industrialization, a process that already ment (CABE). He claims that bodies such as CABE began in the 1920s and 30s with the relocation ‘enshrined in policy things which leftist architects of factories and their skilled labour to suburbia, in like Rogers had been demanding throughout the line with the Fordist ideas of the time. This reloca- Thatcher years - building was to be dense, in flats tion, which commenced long before the general if need be, on “brownfield” i.e. ex-industrial land, de-industrialization of the West, meant cities lost to be “mixed tenure”, and to be informed by “good their role as the locus of industrial production and design”’.12 In other words, good intentions and what as regional centres. The solution offered by the new seemed to be decent ideas, ended up produc- order emerging in the 1980s was in the form of inter- ing the ‘pseudomodernist’ cityscapes the author national hubs hosting the headquarters of major loathes. Pathfinder, as an instrument of gentrifica- multinationals, and bringing into the cities a new tion, receives particularly scathing critique, and is class of white-collar employees. These employees, called ‘a programme of class cleansing’.13 in turn, had to invest long hours of work and were compensated via lifestyle options absent in subur- 100
bia but offered in gentrified neighbourhoods.14 This progressive social agenda, if at all. ‘Pseudomod- is, in a nutshell, the process in question, described ernism’ is similarly a development of - ‘Thatcherist’ in the most general sense. Landmark buildings, - postmodernism via deconstruction, emphasizing the mobilization of the ‘creative industries’, and the progressive aesthetics but voiding the progres- emphasis on the tertiary sector are all part of this sive social content. The modernism salvaged - or story. Not all cities could follow the same path: in the deformed, according to Hatherley - by deconstruc- contemporary neoliberal, postindustrial globalized tion and ‘pseudomodernism’ is specifically an condition, there is need for only a limited number aesthetic modernism - work that expresses the of global hubs. The politicians’ world view, and to autonomy of the singular building as well as the some extent their specific ideology, is based on the architect’s and client’s creativity, rather than an consensus that emerged in the 1980s: free markets attempt to merge city and building. This reflects the mean individual freedom, an argument trumpeted rise of the creative industries and their economic by Milton Friedman and adopted by Thatcher; the and symbolic importance in contemporary society, desires of the public can be satisfied via consump- visible by the mid-1990s, the era of ‘roll-out neolib- tion in a free market, based on a belief in ‘choice’, eralism’, but still under-developed and a second-tier however limited it may be in reality; individualism sector in the 1980s, the era of Thatcher and ‘roll- trumps collectivity; difference is a virtue, repetition back neoliberalism’. and sameness a vice;15 class has supposedly been replaced by social groups defined by their cultural The policies of the current British government, identities. These dictums are the outcome of a post- which already announced the abolishment of stra- political era, in which economics were freed from tegic planning in its coalition agreement, will not the dictates of politics and society, and ‘culture’ reconcile Hatherley. But in the postpolitical age, replaced ‘society’ as the horizon, benefitting from a change in government is no recipe for finding a the belief, argued already in the 1970s by the new trajectory for society; the governments’ ability neoconservative Daniel Bell,16 that ‘culture’ can be to steer society is limited. To satisfy Hatherley, and understood as an area autonomous from political to reignite socially responsible architecture and economy and thus open to diverse manipulations urban development, what is needed is no less than and desires, however idiosyncratic or perverse. a major shift in the political economy, a shift which contemporary politics are not delivering, but which The very general and schematic explanation the crowds in Barcelona, Athens, Tel Aviv, Santiago above does not, of course, account for the specifici- de Chile, and New York are loudly demanding. ties of the new-built environment shaped by local contexts and considerations, nor does it explain why the ‘pseudomodernist’ architecture emerged Notes in the 1990s and not already under Thatcher. 1. Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Hatherley, focusing on the political aspect, claims Britain (London: Verso, 2010). Blair’s government was neither a simple continu- 2. Peter Hetherington, ‘Manchester Unveils Plans ation of Thatcherism nor a return to ‘Old Labour’. for a Radically New Islington’, The Guardian, New Labour is characterized as the merging of the Tuesday 17 September 2002, available at
Happening in Sheffield’s Park Hill is Class Cleansing’,The Meurons, the Sejimas, or the Peter Zumthors. A sharp Guardian, Wednesday 28 September 2011, available at angle, an idiosyncratic corner, a weird materialization