Owen Hatherley - A New Kind of Bleak - Journeys through Urban Britain

A NEW KIND OF BLEAK

Journeys Through Urban Britain

OWEN HATHERLEY

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

eISBN 978-1-84467-909-6

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.

Includes 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 hasnt 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.

Alex Niven

Contents

INTRODUCTION
Will There Still Be Building, in the Dark Times?

THE THAMES GATEWAY
One of the Dark Places of the Earth

TEESSIDE
Infantilized Hercules

PRESTON
Nothing Great but Man

BARROW-IN-FURNESS
Diving for Pearls

THE METROPOLITAN COUNTY OF
THE WEST MIDLANDS
The Patchwork Explains, the Land Is Unchanged

BRISTOL
The Tyranny of Structurelessness

BRIGHTON AND HOVE
On Parade

CROYDON
Zone 5 Strategy

PLYMOUTH
Fables of the Reconstruction

OXFORD
Quadrangle and Banlieue

LEICESTER
Another Middle England

LINCOLN
Between Two Cathedrals

THE VALLEYS
I Am a Pioneer, They Call Me Primitive

EDINBURGH
Capital (It Fails Us Now)

ABERDEEN
Where the Money Went

FROM GOVAN TO CUMBERNAULD
Was the Solution Worse than the Problem?

BELFAST
We Are Not Going Away

THE CITY OF LONDON
The Beginning is Nigh

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. Its 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 its 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, 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 deregulated 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 unpleasant landscape, leaving far behind the attachment to making and crafting that still occasionally rears its head in France, Germany or Scandinavia.

This is communicated especially sharply in Lutons architecture, 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 Okcie 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 investment youre leaving behind a reasonably clean, expensive, airy piece of design. Arrive in Luton, and youre in a carceral, cheap, chaotic place, one that has happened seemingly entirely by accident. 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, theres the posters, designed to intimidate the guest worker and reassure the Daily Mail reader: ASYLUM (dont 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 catastrophe, helpfully subtitled in broken sentences so that you can read as you queue. The sign UK BORDER is over the passport desk, again in another ostentatious gesture of reassurance/intimidation. There is, in proper dystopian sci-fi fashion, a biometric 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 youre in a tin hangar where every available space has been crammed with retail. If youre on your way out of the UK, its 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, youre 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 EasyJet, which almost seems to have been conceived as a visual object, with its huge steel supports visible on the faade. One of the blanker hangars on the runway bears the Harrods logo. Theres 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 distance 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 circulation 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.