Article written for the August 2007 issue of Painted, Spoken
"Fashioned
in the
image of the devil": the
Elephant and Castle and regeneration
In
an 1895 article on
"Unknown London" the Windsor
Magazine introduces the reader
to an "English Hades":
"The
first few
minutes of Saturday night spent in
the Walworth Road are filled for the visitor with confused impressions
of
crowded pavements, of people fighting to secure bargains at the
butchers’
shops, and of the evil odours of flaring paraffin lamps and innumerable
fried
fish bars, from which there comes a constant stream of people bearing
pennyworths of fish in bits of newspaper."
The
author then
reassures the reader that,
despite all appearances, the inhabitants of the part of London around
the
Elephant and Castle could "hardly be more respectable". This mixture of
seediness
and honest authenticity has often coloured accounts of the area, which
has
recently drawn much attention due to a large regeneration project. To
this day,
the Elephant is represented as, on the one hand, seething and sordid,
and, on
the other, as a prime locus of echt London
working class experience.
The
Elephant and
Castle shopping centre,
completed in 1965, is one of the most reviled buildings in London. It
is
certainly ugly. There are good (and bad) reasons for reviling both it
and the
last-gasp International Modernism of the Heygate
estate, which sprouted at its rear in 1974. The two large roundabouts
to the
north and south of the retail complex, which squat on a network of
dark,
dangerous, urine-slimed subways, are also usually held to be a damning
example
of the failures of urban planning. The Elephant, in short, exemplifies
the
shortcomings of the postwar architectural imagination: run-down retail
space,
underground tunnels, elevated walkways, system-built housing, poverty
and
endless bullish road traffic.
However,
behind this
modern Hades is an
essentially progressive vision. Even if the end result was the bullying
of the
helplessly poor by idealistic housing professionals, those ideals are
worth
taking into account. They indicate the persistence of a desire to
remake the
world that is now rarely seen either in contemporary architecture or
politics.
The
guiding impulse
behind the Heygate
estate was to provide decent, sanitary housing –
over 1,000 dwellings – for the poor. Some of the first to
move in had never had
a private source of running water. It is a late example of buildings
born of
the hope that large-scale civic intervention might, at the expense of
the
taxpayer, improve living conditions for significant numbers of people.
The aesthetics
were progressive in intent too: there remains a vestige of the
aspiration that
a new, more equitable world would begin to emerge as the hieratic
classicism of
the past was finally sloughed off. It is often forgotten that this
state-sanctioned modernism was once viewed with some pride by the first
generation to benefit from the Welfare State.
It
is true, of
course, that British local
councils generally practised a degenerate modernism-on-the-cheap and
that large
building firms with off-the-peg solutions, rather than architects, were
the
people they usually did business with. However, the impulse to reshape
the
world through the transformation of urban space seems worthy of
nostalgia –
especially as this particular example will soon be demolished (no doubt
in one
of those show demolitions staged to exorcise the bad spirit of
modernism).
The
Heygate
is a late
version of 20th century vanguardist
architecture,
late even as an example of the 'new brutalism' – a tendency
which had its roots
in an early 1950s reassertion of le Corbusierian
values against their populist detractors. The much-criticised elevated
walkways, for example, were an attempt to develop le Corbusier’s
work by establishing connections between separate buildings and between
the
estate and the surrounding area. (It was at one point thought that the Heygate,
Aylesbury and North Peckham estates would all be
linked by walkway – placing a lattice of 'streets in the sky'
across a huge
territory.) Even if the estate is unpleasant in some respects to live
in, there
remains a grand and imposing ambition to such projects. The remorseless
horizontals of the three main blocks are still impressive to the eye.
Many
would argue that the worst features of life on estates like this have
more to
do with entrenched poverty than architecture.
The
Elephant's
endemic impoverishment has for a
long time provoked hyperbolic visions of regeneration. Much of the area
was
blown to smithereens during the Second World War. A desire to remodel
it
emerged very quickly at the cessation of hostilities. In 1945 there
were
redevelopment plans that would "put Trafalgar Square into the shade".
In 1946
London County Council unveiled a scheme, described as the "most
revolutionary
scheme in the country", that involved a three-tiered construction with
a
roundabout raised 12ft above ground and a system of subways. When the
contract
for a shopping centre was touted in the 1950s the winning design
– the one that
is now facing destruction – was billed by LCC as "an
extremely fine architectural
composition". As late as 1963, it was thought that the
centre’s transparent
roof would open gloriously during fine weather.
When
finally
realised, the shopping centre was
less appealing. The place soon became a cipher for precisely the urban
misery that
it had been designed to replace. A low-budget revamp in the early 90s,
which
entailed painting the centre
bright pink, only underlined
the building’s shortcomings. Yet the area
continued to attract grand schemes. In 1996, architects proposed a
1,000 ft
long 'Brighton pier', made of timber, across the roundabout to replace
the
subways. The current regeneration scheme dates back to 1997. Plans are
now well
advanced for the complete redevelopment of the whole site. A timetable
that
extends until 2014 will see traffic rerouted, a new 'civic square', a
43-storey 'eco-friendly skyscraper' and shops. There is a familiar
hyperbole to the
regeneration rhetoric: "one of the largest regeneration programmes ever
seen in
Europe" says the website. The errors of the 60s and 70s are dismissed
as easily
by council spokespersons as were the old tenements by their postwar
predecessors. The politics of regeneration are now very different,
though: the
area needs to "feel the pulse of the City and share in its success"
says the
head of the scheme.
****
I’ve never lived on the Heygate and I'm glad of that. However, the Elephant has often been near at hand. In 1991, I commuted by bike most evenings from New Cross to Kings Cross. One night I was knocked over by a car on the Elephant’s north roundabout. The impact destroyed the joint at the base of my left thumb and the Elephant, like the fused joint, has nagged at me ever since. Shortly after the accident I moved to Camberwell, clocking up many hours waiting for buses outside the shopping centre. Then, in the late 1990s, I lived for a couple of years on an estate on the Blackfriars Road, north of the Elephant. In 2006, I found myself in Kennington, again close to Walworth.
What interests me now about the shopping centre is its sound. In the late 1990s I began to admire its peculiarly roomy, dreamy acoustic. I made some recordings then and I’ve made many more over the past year or so. In the shopping centre you get, of course, voices speaking many languages – the second level, for example, has many Latin American businesses. But more important is the combination of overlapping human voices with piped pop songs. Often you catch some ancient love tune – the Commodores, the Bee Gees, Roberta Flack – floating by. Perhaps some of the more worn-down users of the shopping centre went for those songs once. For me, the romantic love hymned decades ago by these tarnished old hits tallies with the pathos that now marks the hopes of betterment expressed in the architecture of the area.
In 1849, Charles Dickens wrote a bitter letter to the Times after witnessing the execution of a Mr and Mrs Manning at Horsemonger Lane gaol, midway between the Elephant and Borough's Marshalsea prison (in which his father had served time for debt). The hanging took place in the early morning and it was preceded by a riotous all night gathering of local people. Dickens arrived at midnight:
"As the night went on, screeching, and laughing, and yelling in strong chorus of parodies on negro melodies, with substitutions of 'Mrs. Manning' for 'Susannah', and the like, were added to these. When the day dawned, thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians, and vagabonds of every kind, flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police, with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment. When the sun rose brightly – as it did – it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil."
His language betrays fascination as well as disgust. The vitality of the ghoulish collective makes itself strongly felt. The "zest" with which the dual execution is celebrated infuses Dickens’ prose. The Devil, as ever, has the happening tunes: it is remarkable that the spiritual “Oh Susanna” should have had a vigorous life in London’s popular culture so long before the age of mass-distributed recordings of American music. This was 24 years, even, before the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a black American choir, had given a hugely popular performance at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, just opposite the current shopping centre. Hundreds were turned away on that occasion. The Fisk Singers sang "Go down Moses", "John Brown's Body", "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", and many spirtuals. Charles Spurgeon, the Reformed Baptist 'Prince of Preachers' who hosted the event, was cheered as he spoke of the ending of slavery in America and of a "real mystery and deep theology in this singing that we can hardly understand".
The "Oh Susanna" that Dickens heard had somehow made its way from ante-bellum North America across the water into the ports of London. This journey is, for me, emblematic of the spread of cultural motifs by acoustic means. In my own work on the Elephant, what I'm aiming for is an encryption of the acoustic environment and a recovery of the ethic of renewal that animated its architecture. I'm putting selected field recordings online along with photographs of the area. Next, I want to reorganise the field recordings – processed, this time – into a larger piece of electronic music.
For Walter Benjamin, the street is the "dwelling place of the collective" and the shopping arcade the "drawing room" of the masses. For us, numerous incursions on the idea of public space – CCTV, laws governing assembly, gating, ASBOs – have thoroughly trashed such aspirations. Even taking photographs inside the shopping centre is prohibited these days. When the Heygate's 33,000 cubic metres of concrete and 2,200 tonnes of reinforced steel come tumbling down, I hope that its failure is not all that is remembered of it.