Waterloo
redundant Eurostar -
there
is something uncanny and desolate about the sight of the eurostar
terminal with its promise of glamourous international travel long
departed. Now it seems tawdry, stained, mossy.. a testament to a more
bouyant moment in the life of the south London terminal, always a
dark and menacing place.
I
want to walk round Waterloo, I want to remember those flats, 1930s,
1940s blocks I used to walk through them when I lived in the Elephant. I liked that you could walk from the Elephant into the West End,
away from there..it always seemed strange that the weirdness of the
Elephant, the mosaic labyrinth beneath the roads, the 70s shopping
centre, the subterranean market , the sprawling brutalist estates
should be so close to central London. It seemed so anachronistic,
stranded in another epoch.
Waiting
for the feeling of Autumn to come, now feels like a strange
transitional zone, it feels suspended, as if we are trapped between
times. Gone is the hedonism and euphoria of the heatwave, but the
chill and glamour of a sharp, frosty autumn is yet to come.. we are
suspended in a cloudy, almost humid malaise.. everyone is coughing
and sneezing, it is grey and cloudy but about 20 degrees.
I
remember those melancholy Sunday afternoons, must have been 1996, my
first term on foundation, drivng through Nine Elms . He was
closed to the beauty and horror of the landscpae ..he
would just say he didn't like it, hadn't really thought about it.. I
was horrified by Nine Elms, that menacing silo, the motorways and
huge billboards designed to be seen from the train, and those lines, 12 running concurrently,
the shifting and scithing..
I
remember feeling that the place was forlorn, motorways, roundabouts
and dead zones between. I later learned that the brutal tramp scene
in clockwork orange was filmed in a subway beneath the motorway
intersection here.
New Covent Garden market-- the skips outside,
the
perpetual shift to the periphery..from West end to Nine Elms, from
Covent garden, a wild semi derlict area in the 70s to a heritage
theme park, tourist leisre zone..
now
Nine Elms and Vauxhall subject to intense development...
What
kind of city will it be if it is just housing for the wealthy?
I
often wonder what London will be like if they close all the places
like New Covent Garden market, the industrial areas, when they manage
to decant the last social housing tenants out of the South East and
into the sacrificed zones like Bradford. what will it be like when
we're all shunted out beyond the North Circular and all that's left
are the dreamscapes of the terminally dull, when it's all subsumed
into a bland neoliberal gloss..what then? When our whole city becomes
a heritage trail, a site of history walks, pop up shops and
exorbitant 'street food' markets/
'40s
flats , dark brick , ravine next to railway
Battersea
I
wonder about him, I wonder where he ended up, I know he was living
down here. I want to walk around those big estates, I wonder what the
view is like from the bedrooms at the top.. big 1940s estates, I
imagine boxy square bedrooms, with views out across a gouged
landscape of railway ravines and isolated blocks..
I
remember that train ride from Streatham to Robey, on the Thameslink..
Queenstown
road
Clapham
junction, Winstanley
Wandsworth
town
Railway
arch
Ivy
Roof
terraces and palm trees
Putney,
Barnes
Roehampton
Alton
estate
Modernist
flats dusty forgotten interiors
Twickenham,
earthy
autumn smell
Substantial
town with architecture of stern disposition
Meringues,
waxy cakes in windows..these little caverns, softly lit and
unthreatening create the illusion we are getting closr to something
we want..Costa, Starbucks, Patisserie Valerie..they've identified a
yearning for a sense of belonging, of inclusivity--
Capitalism
makes us feel bad, inadequacy and dissatisfaction reside at its
locus, but it makes us feel temporarily better by giving us comfy
chairs, .milky drinks, sugar and fat,
the
idea of wanting a collective space is there//
but
surely we could do it better.....
..
a whole industry built around this lifestyle, meeting for coffee,
meeting for lunch, birthday presents, gifts for babies..
Twickenham
Was
called underground scene
Attitudes
crosed over, Gay lib , Black power ,Women's movement ,
a
lot of stuff was free, squatting houses, looking for alternatives
Prominent
figures, Editors of Oz
See
them everywhere pubs and cafs
Electric
cinema portobello finches epicentre
Finches
pub, there were people on the street , characters, groups of kids
who must have been about 10 in 1966, might have become punks, you
start to see where it came from, the momentum, the energy, where it
was being fired from,
the
street.
Finches,
used to be Duke of Wellington.
People
on the street, dozens and dozens..the absence of shoppers, carrier
bags..everyone out, drinking, entertainment, buskers.. blind
accordianist, boozed up black geezers, saturday luunchtimes.. you
don't see the shopping as leisure thing..this is what strikes you.
There
is a smartness, no sportswear anywhere or casual attire.. jumpers and
shirts..jackets, proper leather shoes.. the younger ones not wearing
hats and long hair yeah but still better dressed--
the
pub doors open, the atmosphere was kind of licentiousness, the
street as theatre.. a site of entertainment, ..
encounters and collisions,, noise and shouting..
kids
about , groups of hippies..
it
looked really good then.
Also the anti vietnam stuff going on.
A
flight from boring places like Upper Norwood and Heston to Portobello
where the street dynamic was intense... disordered.. porous..not like
the regimented stiffness of the houses in Heston or the starched
curtains and matronly influence of sunday lunch in Upper Norwood..for
the kids in Heston the sound of the ice cream van was an exciting
event.. you can see why they flocked to Portobello when they became
teenagers seeking adventures.
It
became magnetic like Haight Ashbury, people drifted there from all
over London, all over Britain..from everywhere..
There
are scenes from Brentford market in late 1960s, they are ramshackle,
sheds and wagons and old blokes with hats and coats trading.
Sunday
speakers Hyde park meet up there
free
gigs/
Twickenham
Artisan
cottages, thought Twikenham would be more rustic and hippyish, it still is a bit along the Thames from here where the squatters have
their barge encampments .. but the town has big stern buildings ..
Reminds
me of how places of social and historical significance where there
has been conflict and social unrest are always perceived as somehow
other.. Like South central ,Compton and Watts, or Brixton , Tottenham
and St Paul's
But
they're are not monstrous, alien, brutal or weird but extensions of
the cosy, the domestic ---
It
is the homely that strikes fear..the recognition, the
familarity,,when it erupts..opens, a chasm appears, a chasm opens in
time..
the
sacred has been blasphemed against.. property, that ultimate law..has
been transgressed.
In
Twickenham..the squats on Eel Pie island are evicted and the
squatters cross the bridge and come over to the town finding rows of
empty houses on Grosvenor Road.
Grosvenor
road squats.. I thought of the images I had seen of the squats in the
70s, I recognised the road but unlike Eel pie there are no traces at
all of any kind of countercultural occupation. I saw a checkerboard
paving pattern in a front yard..i thought of freemasonry and the
occult. There were gaps in the housing where I imagined the squats
must have been.
The
only people I saw were those types with white shirts and Next suits
and plastic id badges on a ribbon around their necks..i don't like
this new phenomenon, you see people moving purposefully through
spaces with a territorial air, implying your presence there is
somehow open to suspicion. ID cards by stealth.
It
was difficult to imagine it being magical here because it seemed so
cold and corporate somehow even though there were trees behind the
houses and hollyhocks rampaging in small front gardens..
When
I was standing by the Thames I was imagining it without the tourist
and heritage aspect, without the yummy mummy boutiques, the kath
kidston influence leeching along those narrow streets.. without the
cars and the new, super expensive housing developments on the island
itself.. I could sense how magical it must have been because the imprint was still there, the church, the street patterns, the old pubs,
the trees and the river..i imagined the mists, the amber days of
Autumn, the intoxication--..
Autumn
1992..travelling around the country,
paths
leading then not to Ladbroke grove which by then had become subsumed
by a coke fulled media scene..
In
1992 the muddy paths of the Thames were leading not to the simmering
underground pads and boozers of Ladbroke grove but the squatted dole
offices and empty factories of Peckham. The Archduke Charles, the
squatted North Peckham estaes.. Sensor, RDF, the mob of itinerants,
the militant reconfiguartion of the 80s convoy traveller scene.
military surplus, special brew, super strength lager, dreadlocks,
animal rights activism, acid and speed..
Once
you start to wake up , they are everywhere..the signs..
you
begin to hear the quiet buzzing of power , you notice where it lies,
where it is held//
where
it resides..encoded, encrypted..
it
is distributed, power is dispersed..
not
concentrated in one bombastic location like the City of London or the
towers at Canary Wharf,
here
it pulsates though Italianate gardens, the checkerboard patterns
in extensive grounds.. the columns and neoclassicalfacades..
here
one is transported to a rural idyll, a labyrinth by the river..a
perfectly ordered and managed encounter with nature.
Inner
city areas and the wilds of the Brisith Countruside have both been
locked down and bought up by the wealhty.
This stretch of the Thames,
Kingston, Teddington, Eel Pie, Twickenham , Richmond
is a sequence of controlled landscapes , each
square inch pulsates with symbolism and intent. In the sacrificed
zones, the contemporary London suburbslike Croydon, Catford and
Hounslow places become contingent, they unravel under a confusion of
ownership, the interstices between boundaries become sites of
conlfict,entropy and confusion. there are conflicts, encoutners, the
slamming together and splintering of ideologies, beliefs and desires.
There are mutations, the sliding and morphing of images and
projections
..here
there are blocks of power, landscapes buzzing with control,, money
sitting contentedly in moats, ornamental lakes, crenellated walls and
the curlicues and twisting vines of wrought iron gates..
but
this is a war isn't it..CLASS WAR—they wage it on us.
their
entire existence is based on powerful cliques, landownership, power mongering architecture--
the age old
tactics of the ruling class,, inversion, sleight of hand,
projection....
the
suburbs are self medicating..
It
used to be the inner cities where you could experience breaks in a
landscpae of bland conformity..
The
suburb is the new inner city, a reversal has taken place. Once
maligned areas like Brixton, Hackney and Clapham have become the chic
residences of a new bouregoisie; spaces once open for experimentaion
and drifting have been locked down and sealed off; squatting has
become illegal, being on the dole means attending endless time
wasting courses constructed only to please Mr and Mrs Ukip in Middle
England...time has been co opted, we no longer have time to wander
and dream in a city where exorbitant rents take all your wages.
The desirability of investing
in a brand, London World City , of
having a santised hertiage industry and cultrual emblems ( the last
remnants of an appropriated psychogeogreaphy) means that the working
class of inner city London have been pogrammed out, subjected to an
intense campagin of social cleansing.
Where
do we end up? Is London becoming more like Paris, with a wealthy
centre and an outer circle of ravaged banlieu? In London it feels as
though the inner city has shifted to the periphery.
The
suburbs emerge as two distinct catergories, zones of refuge and zones
of sacrifice. The zones of refuge are the sites where bankers
frazzled with siphoning public money go to relax and dream of
heritage England, of Tolkein, of homes and gardens. These zones are
places like Thames Ditton and Teddington, the constructed idylls
where a banker can base the wife and kids while he blows his bonus in
the strip clubs and drinking dens of the City.
The
zones of sacrifice are the areas that have been allowed to decay
amidst sites of gentrification, one such example is Streatham which
is held captive on all sides by gentrification as Balham, Brixton and
Tooting are swept up in the ghoulish horror of Cath Kidston and cup
cake baking.
Often
these areas sit side by side, Twickenham and Hounslow for example, or
Windsor and Slough.
These
zones of sacrifice are areas seemingly starved of investment and set
aside for those who are deemed necessary to the economy but regarded
as undesirable, the workforce who subsist on zero hours contracts in
the service sector, in precarious work, the jobseekers, call cente
workers, those driven to the brink of madness by payday lenders and
ATOS. There are few places left to rent in London that don't exeed
the housing benefit cap. The overheated south east property market,
the welcoming of non domiciles, the auctioning of new developments in
Singapore and Hong Kong and local authority housing policy is driving
working class people out, into the zones of sacrifice, into the
suburbs. Those ending up in the fraying edges of Croydon, Hounslow,
and Streatham are the lucky ones, others get decanted to the north,
to the vast zones of sacrifice up there, like Bradford.
These
suburbs are the new transient zones, where architecture is
provisional and lanes behind rows of semi detached housing reveal
gardens sprawling with camps and dormitories. The inner city has
become about ownership, about property investment, even decrepit
flats in once notorious housing estates have been sold off and are
rented out at ludicrous rents. The suburbs have become the temporary
homes of migrant workers, of the low paid, of the work force in the
service and construction sectors who, in their high visibilty vests
have becomne largely invisible.
What
happens when you're forced to spend hours immersed in stultifying
work? What happens when you're working split shifts at a Mcdonalds
in the middle of a traffic island near Heathrow airport, when you're
living in a travelodge in Sunbury working on the construction of some
luxury development, or stuck in a call cetre in Croydon hassling
people all day about loan repayments. Some seek solace in marginal
political ideologies, the EDL, Al Muhajiroun, the comfort and
camaraderie of faith with the thrill of violence to puncture the
boredom.
But
mostly you self medicate. The suburbs are hallucinating, England is
hallucinating. Monster Ripper and Smirnoff, Brandy Boost, oversized
glasses of chardonnay at Weterspoons monday club, valium scored for
a few quid in the pub , the stink of weed drifting from portakabins ,
red eyes and yellow bibs.. The pharmecuticals indiustry is one of UK
Plc's biggest success stories ( along with arms dealing and loans
companies) as prescriptions for anti depressants are kept on repeat.
We're
all hallucinating, in a landscape that has become more surreal and
more authoritaruan in equal measure. The physical landscape has
become infantilised, we are spoken to in baby voices by cereal
packets and drinks cartons and are subjected to the ubiquitous sight
of cartoon characters looming down from billboards offering us
payday loans. And yet life in this country has never seened more
coercive. More consumer choices than ever before, 'have it
your way', but always within the
narrowest set of parameters,,the moment you step out of line and
express your anger the weight of the law comes crashing down, four
years for nicking a bottle of water,
the 2011 riots loom large in the suburban pysche.
In
2011 it was the suburbs that saw the most dramatic dispalys of
collective violence. Croydon, Edmonton, Catford, Streatham, these
towns, these suburban sites have become thr repositories of a class
anger that for most of the time stays pent up in the cellular
strucutres of housing estates. In rooms where you sit drinking
supermarket lager in front of flat screen tvs, smoking weed playing x
box, anger and frustration is sucked inwards..it is sublimated in a
cascade of pahamecuticals and self help platitudes. Fluoxetine,
citraloporan, CBT, it's all about fixing the individual. To be happy
in the face of this disaster neoliberalism has wrought would surely
be the pathological response?
In
2011 the barriers broke down, the estates and streets of the suburbs,
instead of being selaed corridors suddenly becmae porous,
terrirtorial markers melted, the streets became the site of
collective engagement with the spectacle of consumerism. The anger
was directed twoards pawnbrokers, retail parks and high street stores
, places taunting us every day.
In
the new suburban enclaves, in the zones of sacrifice, there resides a
surplus work force moving in a precarious fashion between flats in
condemned buildings and camps under mortoway flyovers and patches of
wasteground. There are buried channels, plots and cells.
The
suburbs, once the site of order and domesticity are unravelling.
