Housing Estates, London, and Dystopia

Just went to see the Broadwater Farm exhibition, portraying the story of a massive council estate complex in Tottenham made infamous after it's 1985 riots.


Held at Bruce Castle Museum, an interesting site in itself, a strange piece of history nestled in one of the more socioeconomically challenged areas of London. The power of the exhibit was in it's honour of the local people who made Broadwater a success. But underlying it all was the sense that the brutality of the civic system not only crushed a momentum of people's movement but left it dead on the curb.

Broadwater was one of those massive efforts at post-war social engineering, meant to deal with poverty and rising immigration. The huge complex was built and then basically left to decay and within a decade had fallen to such a state of disrepair that it clearly reflects a planned state of structural violence against a community by a council. The failure of these large-scale housing estates was studied by the Land Use Research Unit at King's College in the late seventies. The research of this group influenced Coleman's book Utopia on Trial: vision and reality in planned housing, which featured Broadwater Farm as an example (she was head of the research unit at the time).

The Centre for Spatially Integrated Social Science has a great article on this: Design Disadvantagement.

I also recommend the film Utopia London, which outlines the Labour vision of modern social housing and how in many ways it failed at the hands of politicians and urban planners with no foresight into community and culture.

Finally if you're in London a cycle up to Tottenham to see the exhibit takes you past the smashed windows and boarded shops that mark the result of the recent riots caused by anger over police brutality. Guardian: 'Tottenham in flames as riot follows protest'. 26 years on and history repeats itself, as we move faster towards a social dystopia fuelled by mind-numbing solutions by those in power: BBC: 'David Cameron back councils planning to evict rioters'. Russ Swan has some amazing photos he shot there in 1985 and an good article on his blog entry: Cat and mouse on Broadwater Farm, 1985

To not end on that note I channel the thoughts of Jane Jacobs and her research into the existence and importance of community at the street level and the failure of urban planning to respond to that community in her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, something that seems to have not been accounted for in the early planning of Broadwater and most other estates across the country. History doomed to repeat itself....

Press Release:

In 1985 Broadwater Farm experienced one of the worst nights of civil unrest anywhere on mainland Britain. It shocked the nation and nearly destroyed a community. Just months before, Diana Princess of Wales visited to congratulate the Broadwater Farm Youth Association on its success. Today Broadwater Farm is seen as a model of social housing, attracting visitors from around the world. This exhibition will explore the heroic achievements of a community who from the very beginning fought against all the odds. October 2010 at Broadwater Farm Community Centre. Now on at Bruce Castle Museum June 2011 to March 2012

Hoods, Freedom & Dancing

I love the Hackney Gazette. Mostly because it comes free through my postbox, its local and not stapled, meaning I can read it page by page as I walk my dog and use it to scoop his poo off the pavement. I dont though agree with it's big brother policy of posting photos of looters so that we can all pretend to be hey-diddly-doo neighbour vigilantes in Fahrenheit 451. Reminds me of the graffiti I saw in Greece, 'WE WEAR OUR HOODS UP SO YOU CAN LOOK US IN THE EYE'

A friend of mine just wrote to me: 'the only forces who feel empowered to express themselves in our society r the yobs who riot for flatscreens. the rest is divergence...'

As usual I find myself somewhere in between all stances and I still go with Emma Goldman's philosophy, if I can't dance I dont want to be part of your revolution:

'I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to be beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.' (Goldman 2006)

Memory Walking and Nostalgia

Just returned from Crete, visiting a friend who grew up in the capital Heraklion. We were given an amazing tour of the city centre that was based on her memory of what was there when she lived in the city during a variety of different ages. Seeing past the numerous cafes and bars a new city began emerging. Hidden under the parasols and flat screen tv's of the multiple venues, were beautiful facades of stately homes that housed a variety of characters who came to life among the cobbled lanes. The white noise of chatting people and buzzing phones, became the ghost sound of a child's bicycle racing down the slanted alleys, or the old woman chasing them with a pot of boiling water.

A new city emerged, like Raban's Soft City, one of histories and stories, one which seemed much more local as a social network. Raban tell us 'the city, our great modern form, is soft, amenable to a dazzling and libidinous variety of lives, dreams and interpretations'. It was this soft amenable city that came alive with the bench behind the square where lovers once met now empty, the popular hair dressers studio where the scraping of chairs being pulled out for customers was heard around the corner but is now turned residential, the childhood home transformed into a health spa yet retaining the original tiles and doors, allowing the phantoms of nostalgia to continue to inhabit the hard city. The hard city that retains its shape while the soft city lives and dies within it. 

Going on this walk around Heraklion opened up a past, re-awoke a memory, like Lazarus it brought to life a narrative that once was but had died. The deep nostalgia that punctuated the derive was palpable and I felt a strange sense of both belonging to the place and envying the memory. Somehow wanting to be a part of that which was never mine. It reminded me of Boym's The Future of Nostalgia and her rich analyses of the workings on memory on society and city. She tells us 'the past of the city... is not entirely legible; it is irreducible to any anachronistic language; it suggests other dimensions of the lived experience and haunts the city like a ghost.'

This was an alternate ghost tour of a city, a rich and vibrant walk down memory lane that made me really truly appreciate Heraklion and see it for what it was and had once been.