A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley

love letter to the great cities of the North5 – Cardiff, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Glasgow – and the many criticisms I had were offset by a genuine awe at these often wonder-filled cities. The places discussed in the second Urban Trawl are not, often, quite of the same order. There’s a lot more of the South and the Midlands, a lot more in general of the ‘Middle England’ that all politics in the UK is based on courting. Britain’s First and Second Cities receive return journeys, but the rest have mostly been virgin territory for me.

      Because of this it may often seem a grim book, one that concentrates perhaps overmuch on the gory details of some extremely unlovely places, though it is my contention that it’s often here where ways out may be found. As a counterbalance to Middle England, there is a lot more focus on Scotland, a seeming alternative space within the United Kingdom itself, which accordingly may not be in the Union for too much longer. Large cities do feature in this book, but they are not its principal focus. Edinburgh, Bristol, Birmingham, London, none are places that hold out a great deal of hope, in my account; but we could find glimpses of potential new worlds in Leicester, Cumbernauld, Lincoln or Coventry. This book is in roughly chronological order, taking as I took them journeys undertaken between October 2010 and February 2012. Given the indigestibility of these investigations into Britain’s urban space, it may be best to approach the work as separate portions – discrete journeys to the North’s second-rank towns, to the West Midlands, the South West, the extensions of London, the East Midlands, and then the ‘Celtic Fringe’ – rather than trying to swallow it whole. The earlier Urban Trawls were accompanied by photographs from a Bradfordian friend; his photographs are here replaced with my own less professional efforts, along with biro drawings by a fellow denizen of the West Riding, Brighouse’s Fra Angelico of Brutalism, Laura Oldfield Ford. She also put herself through a few of the journeys.

      While the first Urban Trawls were mostly undertaken with a man who often knew British cities better than I did, around half of this book is based on travels with my partner Agata Pyzik, a Polish writer whose prior expectations of proper European urbanity were a constant source of shame, as I faced her incredulity at the chaos we’d made of our cities, her shock that Empire and First World wealth had managed to create such squalor. I tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to convince her that urban Britain does have certain qualities of its own, and if I failed with her, I hope to have better luck with the reader.

      We will begin, as befits a period of indeterminacy and interregnum, with a monument to the old regime, to its most sweeping project of recolonization, redevelopment and the production of new space. After that miserable, abandoned present, we will try and find some solace in both the past and the future.

      Chapter One

      The Thames Gateway:

      One of the Dark Places of the Earth

      You Can Do What You Like, but You Must Do What

      You Like Here

      Though their innovations should not be discounted, many of New Labour’s experiments with managed neoliberalism were anticipated by the caring, sharing Thatcherism of the John Major government. The return to some form of planning and urbanism was the distant consequence of Major’s curbs on out-of-town shopping centres, brought in partly to assuage the shires, but extended under Labour into a more positive focus on the cities. The Private Finance Initiative and the Millennium Dome were both late Tory policies that Blair executed with great enthusiasm, to the point where both are now indelibly associated with his reign. Likewise, the most extensive experiment in urban planning undertaken by New Labour was the Thames Gateway, which was begun in the early 1990s during the Tories’ twilight years. It’s here that you can really detect the way that there was a subtle shift in the market dominance of the ’90s and ’00s, a shift which is now being repudiated. The ‘Thames Gateway’ was a gigantic dollop of land between London and the North Sea; an area which should really be described as the Industrial South. It begins with the disused wharves of the London Borough of Greenwich6 and the Isle of Dogs, extends up the River Lea to the industrial estates of Stratford, then along the Thames past Silvertown, Barking, Erith, Dartford, Gravesend, Tilbury, Sheerness, Basildon and Canvey Island, finally departing up the Medway to Chatham, Rochester and Gillingham. It passes London’s internal organs, the places that keep the capital going but which property development and conservation have long since expelled from the metropolis itself: container ports, factories both closed and thriving, petroleum refineries, sugar refineries, several power stations, marshes and nature reserves. It is the estuarine path described by Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the riverside journey taken by the Romans to the blasted, uncivilized, inhospitable edges of the known world. It can still feel just a little like that.

      Since the 1980s London has not expanded east so much as westwards, past Heathrow and out towards Swindon and Oxford, bringing in its train lucrative property development and business parks – the Thames as a Silicon Valley, the motorcade from Notting Hill to Chipping Norton. Pure, unadulterated laissez-faire would have meant the further incursion of volume housebuilding, microchip factories and tech parks out across the Home Counties into Oxfordshire and Wiltshire; and that expansion is what the reforms to the planning laws are designed to create now. This westward movement meant the continued decline and dereliction of Conrad’s easterly riverside stretch, and that is what the Thames Gateway ‘plan’ was intended to reverse. There are reasons for this, not insignificant among them the fact that these places are marginal constituencies, populated by the people who decide elections. Working-class and fucked-over enough to be inclined to vote Labour, patriotic, atomized and flag-waving enough to vote Tory, they make the area a political battleground, which is weird for somewhere so seemingly uncommitted. In order to rescue the estuary, laissez-faire was tampered with in an interesting way. Development would continue its expansion of London westwards only under fairly strict control, within the planning system’s strictures; but developers were given complete free rein over the industrial and post-industrial wastes of the East End and South Essex, South East London and North Kent. There would be very little in the way of public infrastructural improvements, at least until the forever deferred completion of the ambitious Crossrail scheme, and there would be little planning or co-ordination, with competing Regional Development Agencies and local councils bidding for their piece of the pie. There would be housebuilding on an enormous scale, without the state, local populations or local government able to stand in the way. It was, in short, an Enterprise Zone larger even than London itself, a New Metropolis that resembled the incremental, speculation-led and car-based development of Los Angeles more than it did any of the Bilbaos, Barcelonas or Berlins bandied about by planners and politicians.

      The Thames Gateway has recently often been a locus for M25 flânerie or exurban poetics, but it is seldom written about as a coherent entity. This makes sense, because there are few places less cohesive. It is a slippery zone, its very name implying that it is merely the way into the real event, the Metropolis itself. The name seems to have been chosen by a sadist, determined to ensure that the development always sounds pinched, substandard and suburban; but the area covered by it is absolutely enormous. This chapter is far from definitive, and will try instead to detail a journey that you can take, if you want, over a couple of days, rather than visiting every single part of the vast exurb. We will start on the Thames’s south side, or rather from the Medway, then go through North Kent, crossing the river via an imaginary bridge to Barking, where we will gradually make our way to the Metropolitan Enterprise Zone of Canary Wharf, and, eventually and reluctantly, end at the posthumous Blairite utopia of Olympian Stratford. In this route, you can find a place that is absolutely fascinating, with unforgettable landscapes, freakish buildings and marvellously pugnacious people, but it always defeats you in the end. The Industrial South can be contrasted, unfairly but unavoidably, with the Industrial North, in a way which does not credit the Wen and its outgrowths. There are few places in Britain where man has fouled his nest so comprehensively, with the sad concomitant that he is absolutely obsessed with that fouled nest. In fact, he thinks it’s an investment.

      Under the Lines in Chatham

      So, imagine that a boat has dropped you, as it may once have