If we abandon an urban neighbourhood which has become uncongenial, this constitutes middle class ‘flight’ depriving the area of material and human resources. An even greater sin is to move into a community which might not otherwise be prospering, sociologist Ruth Glass defined the latter as gentrification.
Urban renewal has been contentious since at least the 1930s, although Herbert Morrison never admitted that the real objective of his scheme was to ‘build the Tories out of London’. The political left has few doubts of what should be done. It must be funded through ruinous taxation and mediated by technocrats. We should be grateful for what we’re given, even though the result is often a miserable and impractical architectural banality or a fiscal black hole.
In November the council-owned company Homes for Lambeth, having built a total of 65 residences in five years, at an overall cost of £30 million, was shut down. Last year, its top 25 employees were paid more than two million pounds between them having completed just 20 dwellings. Over 38,000 people are waiting for accommodation in the borough, including 4,500 children. The company was supposed to run at a profit as were similar schemes too numerous to catalogue … Merton … Newham … Cambridgeshire … and not forgetting Croydon Council’s celebrated Brick by Brick, which has accumulated debts of £229 million on behalf of local taxpayers, £25 million in its most recent year.
Even worthwhile projects managed by competent developers can be defeated by civic fashions. Few regretted the late 1960s clearance of Victorian slums from the St Ann’s district of Nottingham. The first residents were reported to be very pleased with the modern, low-rise homes that were built on the site by Wimpey. But the faddish ‘Redburn’ lay-out of the estate, with the backs of houses facing the street and the fronts facing each other, soon proved a nightmare of social isolation and crime. Philip Cox, the architect responsible for introducing the concept in Australia, eventually admitted: ‘Everything that could go wrong in a society went wrong …. It became the centre of drugs, of violence and eventually the police refused to go into it.’ His Rose Meadow estate has been demolished.
Violence was endemic in the streets and alleys of St Ann’s by the late 1980s, when self-proclaimed anarchist Lisa McKenzie decided to live there. She had been a sociology research student at Nottingham University and set about compiling an account of the place and found that almost anyone who could leave had done so, including people in any kind of lawful employment. Many of the properties were derelict while the remaining population was of mixed ethnicity. The women often found worthwhile activities, particularly around childcare, but the men were listless and with few prospects. When not engaged in various forms of crime, they spent their time devising conspiracy theories to account for the misery of their circumstances.
One might expect McKenzie to welcome an injection of enterprise and investment into such moribund districts but she insists, contrary to the popular understanding of anarchism, ‘I hate individualism’. The anarchist group ‘Class War’, having organised a number of ‘bash the rich’ demonstrations in the 1980s, was revived as a political party around 2015. McKenzie, by then a fellow at the LSE, stood as one of seven Class War candidates in the parliamentary election that year. They garnered 526 votes fewer than the Monster Raving Loonies. Their demonstrations were now called ‘F*** Parades’ and were aimed more at the middle classes than the rich. SR.
Iain Salisbury.
