The Measures Taken

Manufacturing a Past in London’s ‘Regeneration’



Heritage has, for some time, been a pivotal part of the process of gentrification. A kind of Fred Dibnah nostalgia for long-decommissioned industry, combined with a revulsion for 1960s style comprehensive development, has meant that factories and warehouses up and down the country have had internal walls knocked through and beige furniture shipped in. There is rather more to the use of heritage than these simple acts of conversion. Heritage itself, as a term, is deeply linked with Thatcherism: English Heritage as an organisation was created as an acquiescent quango in 1983 by the Tories, and their model of dewy-eyed longing for a pre-1960s England combined with rapacious neoliberalism has had much influence on the use of heritage in urban planning.

Heritage should be disassociated as much as possible from history, from which it borrows a few methodologies and a focus on the past. The facts, the lived experiences and struggles, are not a factor in heritage, the way they are or at least ought to be in the practice of history. However, it does have at least some affinities with art history specifically. In the 1998 book Terminal Architecture, the late Martin Pawley claimed that the 1980s saw a one-sided battle between art history and Modernism, a battle wherein cities and interiors replicated the past, frequently using extremely high-tech means, as a libidinal weapon against the socialist and futurist aspirations of Modernism, winning public affection for a politically and aesthetically retrograde project. This battle, for Pawley, ended with Art History swallowing Modernism, drawing it into its maw, with Bauhaus or Brutalist design becoming matters for the connoisseur as much as Biedermeier or the Baroque.

Accordingly, heritage is now able to take in all kinds of different and seemingly hostile forms, from military buildings to council tower blocks. The important point is that in every instance the process remains the same: places of working class labour or dwelling are transformed into housing for the upper middle class. I’m going to run through a few particularly choice examples here.

Case 1: Arsenal in Disguise



Woolwich is a London suburb best known for its contribution to warfare, as it was devoted to the production of armaments for some 400 years: although since the 1960s its Arsenal has been largely decommissioned and dormant. Today it’s a bustling, shabby, overcrowded and impoverished place, with a large West African population. It has a certain weirdness and independence that you don't get in most South-East London areas, and a large amount of council stock, which has mostly discouraged middle class settlement. It’s a place, on the whole, fairly un-'regenerated'. I read in an article by Tristram Hunt, who seemed to think this far preferable to the usual riverside blocks, that the former Arsenal, a huge complex of factories and warehouses by the river that churned out materials for maiming and murder for centuries, had been tidied up and made into a little enclave for the more comfortable. I live not far away, and had been past it a couple of times, not bothering to venture inside. So I had no idea quite how large-scale, how jarring, this project would actually be when I visited it. You cross the vastly unpleasant arterial road that runs alongside the river and the ferry, going past some fairly standard Victorian warehousing and a sign saying 'PRIVATE ROAD' - then you're in the Arsenal, and a hotchpotch of infill pokes out among the industrial utilitarianism - some designed in an achingly precise Quinlan Terry style neo-Georgian, some in the more familiar Ikea Modernism idiom of stock-brick and plastic.

What makes it so very peculiar, though, is the Arsenal buildings themselves, with their brooding darkness, their air of menace, something made all the more unnerving by the way in which the Portland stone strips and columns are still utterly smoke-blackened – in the Royal Arsenal, Heritage has decided not to be as Disney-tidy as is usually insisted upon. The plan has guaranteed all kinds of squares and public spaces, yet I've never been in a council estate precinct so empty and intimidating - literally not a soul about, all the traffic and shouting of Powis St and environs seeming miles away rather than a 3 minute walk. This is one of the most clever elements of the development: the road literally marks a border between the new area and the working class town around it, and the new DLR station being built is very convenient for ensuring the two groups never have to meet. There is, in the Arsenal area, the obligatory bijou café, in which I overheard a conversation between some new Arsenal inhabitants, one confessing shamefaced to using the local free ferry, which she called ‘poor people’s transport’.

At the end of the development, as you approach the main road and sounds other than the birds can be heard, the obligatory public art awaits. Or, at first you think, the Men In Black loom into view, consulting with each other about some sort of covert operation. Then you realise what we actually have here: iron men, with huge Neanderthal heads and hollow bodies, clipped together like the guns in the nearby museum, which is given the macho name of Firepower. With war as a part of heritage, here is the luxury development as place of terror.

Case 2: Deco is Back!



This is Wallis House, the first of the interwar factories on the Great West Road’s Golden Mile. This is in prime J.G Ballard country, where in the 1920s and 30s an attempt was made at creating a little America at London’s edges, replicating the LA formula of arterial roads, diffuse suburbia and lushly ornamented, semi-Modernist design. Many of the art deco factories built for American businesses in the 1930s still cling to this seemingly endless road, Brentford’s own little Gotham. The tallest of these has been under scaffolding for some time, during which a poster declared ‘DECO IS BACK!’ atop a drawing that reminds me somewhat of those Hed Kandi sleeves for 'chilled' 'beats', depicting a woman with a hairstyle more Jackie Kennedy than Louise Brooks. Art deco has always been a fairly slippery concept – a term invented in the 1970s by the art historian Bevis Hillier to refer to design inspired by the Paris Expo of 1925, which combined over-ornamented eclectic structures with Modernist buildings by Le Corbusier and Konstantin Melnikov. Accordingly, deco can mean pretty much anything you want it to, although it tends to refer to elements – streamlining, jagged and machine-imitating ornament, chrome and concrete as materials – that were disparagingly described at the time as ‘Moderne’ or ‘jazzy’. Unlike Modernism, which still has connotations of social housing and all that entails, deco always equals glamour: Joan Crawford, ocean liners, Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel.

This is a world away from the original purpose of Wallis House, whatever its mannerisms. It was designed by Thomas Wallis, and used first for Simmonds Aerocessories, then for munitions, and finally for pharmaceuticals. The factory as a place of fashionable living has become so familiar since the early 80s that this barely merits comment, but for the way in which that Wallis’ particular machine glamour is used as an explicit selling point. What is happening in the Great West Road is somewhat atypical of London’s gentrification process: rather than the litany of vibrancy, public-spiritedness and poverty fetishism that drives the Eastern version, in the far West the proximity to motorways and Heathrow are paramount, rather than a romanticised idea of the slums. Wallis House is the centrepiece of the ‘Great West Quarter’, in which a large area will be turned by Barratt Homes into executive housing. It’s almost inoffensive if they do this here, rather than force out inner-urban communities – but whether the appeal of the flyover and the airport corridor, regardless of the art-deco dressings, will have the same appeal for the aspirant bourgeois as an ex-council flat in Hackney remains to be seen.

Case 3: The Croydon Bauhaus



If you can stomach the antiseptic parade of stunning developments, loft conversions and suchlike, a great place to find out what is really happening in London urbanism is in property supplements and the free papers. This, which I came across in a Telegraph supplement, is what describes itself, with frankly rather admirable chutzpah as the Bauhaus building, Croydon. The skeleton of this building is one of the many office blocks erected in the southernmost outpost of London, when it was a brief proto-Canary Wharf, ‘London’s Mini Manhattan’, ambiguously featuring in the pre-Sex Pistols work of Jamie Reid, Suburban Press. These Wilsonian speculative towers were rather lacking in the colour and flash required by their distant successors, and have long been synonymous with the apparently alienating town planning of the 1960s. Accordingly the building has been given what would once have been called a ‘jazzy’ façade, declared by the developers to be ‘Constructivist’ in inspiration, and opened up to the young couples and media professionals.

For a building to have been described thus in the 60s would have been eccentric, a rare look backwards. The renaming is one of the many signs of a resurgence of interest in an ahistorically considered ‘utopianism’ in the interwar period, a nostalgia not for a rusty industrialism but for the apparently more idealistic, socially concerned ethics of the Weimar Republic. Of course, what distinguishes the ethic of this block is an act of straightforward facading, untruth to materials, the bizarre spectacle of the 2000s dressing up the 1960s to look like an imagined 1920s: there could be few things more alien to the Bauhaus’ ethos than this place. It’s hard to resent this too much, as really this is a sort of aesthetic blag, designed only to make a quick killing before the building is remade again in 20 or 30 years time. The building is interesting more as a symptom of how Modernism has become another source of heritage, another space for gentrification. This has more sinister uses outside of former Croydon office blocks.

Case 4: An Eldorado for the Middle Classes



As can be seen with the Croydon Bauhaus, the return as heritage of Modernism is beginning to have an effect on the process of London’s gentrification. The hugely successful V&A exhibition Modernism- Designing a New World a couple of years ago had an obvious appeal to a depressed, Blairite culture industry and its young professionals, as could be seen by the proliferation of spin-offs and broadsheet supplements, plus further exhibitions on Alexander Rodchenko, Josef Albers, Lazslo Moholy-Nagy, Erno Goldfinger and so forth. The idea of design promising, rather than mere comfort or style, a new and better world, a utopia, a social conscience, has a great pull for a generation who have never imagined such things might be possible. There was even for a time an estate agent called UTOPIA. Emblematic of this is the sell-off of the Peckham Pioneer Health Centre, a pivotal early Modernist building and famous 'experiment' (a social engineering/health scheme which had overtones alternately of socialist health care and of eugenics), reconstructed as a gated community, 'Pioneer Buildings'. This has also led to a revaluation as heritage of numerous former council blocks. There are several examples of this where it merely results in a shiny façade being placed over a concrete tower so that it resembles a new-build stunning development – the notorious recladding and letting to bankers of one of the Pepys Estate towers in Deptford, for instance. Another version seeks at least a formal fidelity to the Modernist event. Keeling House, Denys Lasdun’s Cluster Block in Bethnal Green, is a particularly egregious example. The arrangement of the building was intended as benign social engineering, encouraging the retention of the close community links of the old East End when they were re-housed in more sanitary conditions. The very same features were a factor in its popularity with city bankers, after Hackney Council’s sell-off of the building, as it went from engineered community to gated community. Other well-known examples of this include the enduring popularity with the wealthy of Goldfinger’s Trellick and Balfron towers.

The deregulation and selling-off of so much local authority stock means that nowhere is immune from the process of a council building being first found to be actually quite idealistic and attractive, then gradually emptied of its tenants as the idealists muscle in on it, a slower and more protracted method than the simple subterfuge and class cleansing behind the new Keeling House. For instance, Tecton’s Sivill House now has its own website, wherein ex-council flats are offered for outrageous amounts of money and the commanding views of the city of London are emphasised – and this, lest we forget, is in one of the most overcrowded and badly housed areas in the country, and one which still maintains a long council waiting list.



One of the advantages of the emptying out of lived, concrete history by heritage and its art-historical appendages, is that the past becomes something tamed, defanged, regardless of the occasional frisson at the brutal, aesthetically or socially. One doesn’t have to think about the fact that children toiled themselves to death in a Manchester mills after Urban Splash have done it up, and one doesn’t have to think about the fact that architects like Tecton considered their aim to be ‘an eldorado for the working classes’ rather than the production of all purpose space for stockbrokers(as Berthold Lubetkin put it) when moving into their flats. Via heritage, art history becomes the destruction of history in the service of capital.