Oli Lowrie on: Demolition Shoreditch.
09 June 2011
Walking through London is like walking through a canyon of sedimentary rock; you can see the different layers of cultural strata laid down over time. East London in particular, is a place flowing with culture. The beauty of Hackney is that these layers are from all over the world. Turkish, British, Jewish, Asian, Chinese, Industrial, Hippy, Rich, Poor, Grand and Scruffy all have their monuments on the pavements of the East End.
The anthropologist Marcel Mauss defined place as a “culture fossilized in time and space”. Hackney is a wonderful fossil to analyze. Its surface is littered and scarred with a thousand crystallized cultures. The decrepit Bishopsgate viaduct, that once served the largest industrial depot in London now snakes its way, not through the bags of coal and iron ore, but past Indian restaurants on Brick Lane and Hipster hangouts on Old street. Each time another society is accommodated into the body of Hackney, another layer of cultural skin is deposited on its pockmarked surface. The sheer variety of solidified cultural artifacts ensures that Hackney’s population, more so than most, is forced to interact socially.
However, there is an incoming tide that is washing this sediment away. The dam was burst when Spitalfields market was ‘redeveloped’. The dimly lit chaos of Dickensian Dens were illuminated by the neon lights of La Senza. From their encampment in the city, globalized legs have strode into East London; feet crushing fragile cultural sandcastles. The development that has sprung up around the East End represents the qualities of global consumer brands. It is repetitive, poor quality and mass produced.
It is the society that inhabits these spaces that will suffer. These tower block developments meet the ground badly. They are gated, inward looking. They separate us into identikit little flats elevated above the streets. Many of them have a Tesco local at the ground floor with flats above. There is no public space. Society cannot interact in the sterile CCTV atmosphere of an over-lit shop floor. We cannot establish our identity in environments that carry the branding of the global highstreet. And if we are unable to make our mark on the environment in which we live, if different cultures are not able to come together and line up their landmarks side by side, then the cultures of London will never integrate.
Bold Creative contributor: Oli Lowrie, local architect
Why we listen…
Re-development plans within the community can prove positive, if they are approached in the right way. Bold Creative worked on a consultation with young people to decide how to make best use out of a recreational area in their community. Local youth were involved through every stage of the project and the developers considered their input and ideas in their final re-development plans.
M.L
1 Comment
I’ve lived in Bethnal green for the best part of 27 years. I remember when the shop All Saints was Ghandi’s cash and carry. I remember when the Sunday market used to go up both sides of Bethnal green road from Brick Lane but the new developers of the Tea building stopped people setting up outside “their” building. And what is it that they do in there anyway? Doesn’t seem like a welcoming place for people like me. And let’s not forget the private members’ club Shoreditch House on the same road. They don’t seem to do much for integration or offer many amenities to the local community.
Jago Action Group objects to the plans because the “TOWER BLOCK is completely out of keeping with the current scale” and “There is ZERO affordable housing proposed on the Huntingdon Estate”.
All the buildings around Arnold Circus, which will now be in the shadows of this building, were completely out of keeping with the slums that were there before and the old residents couldn’t afford to live there even thou it was meant to be the first social housing development. And how many of them are affordable now?
People in that area have never integrated. I hardly see people coming out of the mosque on Brick lane and pop down to one of the bars or vice versa. Walk down brick lane and the ‘Asian’ part abruptly stops and the ‘white’ part starts.
I don’t oppose this development. There hasn’t been much for me to do, or anything I can afford, in that area for some time. It’s full of rich people that moved there 10 years ago complaining about richer people moving in and changing it while forgetting about the time they moved in there and how the locals used to complain about them changing the area. Now they are complaining because the area isn’t like what it was when they moved there 10 years ago. And the cycle continues.
And that Rich Mix place is a joke. Complete waste of tax money.