Billionaires’ Row and the Haunted Ruins of Hampstead
Name: Thomas Kok Student Number: 6289665 Assignment: Thesis – rMA Cultural Analysis Supervisor: Dr. Niall Martin Date: 15 June 2016
Contents Introduction: p. 4 Chapter 1: p. 6 Chapter 2: p. 16 Chapter 3: p. 28 Conclusion: p. 42 Works cited: p. 49
I feel like I’ve been living in A city with no children in it
A garden left for ruin by a millionaire inside of a private prison (Arcade Fire. “City With No Children”)
Introduction
In the area of Hampstead in the North of London lies a road called The Bishops Avenue. At number 53 in this street there is a house that goes by the name of ‘The Towers’. It is a mansion actually, and was bought by a ‘prominent’ Middle Eastern family in the early 1990’s. Since then it has never been lived in and has been in an
ever-worsening state of decay. Photographs show the inside of the building to be overgrown by plants and moss. Stairs have caved in and water is seeping through the floors. There is debris everywhere, the paint is coming of the walls and animal skeletons litter the floor (Pawle; Booth). This sounds like the beginning of a ghost story, and maybe it is.
The Bishops Avenue is a relatively notorious street in London. It even has a nickname: Billionaires Row. It is said to be the second most expensive street in Britain. What is extraordinary about this stretch of well sought after land is that the state of decay in which we find the towers is not limited to this site alone: at the time, one third of the mansions on The Bishops Avenue stood vacant, and many of them had “fallen into ruin” (Booth). ‘The Towers’ is the most infamous of these abandoned properties, and the most quoted in the press. But there are many more like it on this street.
I first came across these mansions through a photo essay published on the
Guardian website in early 2014. The pictures of these places are eerie and made me think
of other abandoned places like Chernobyl or derelict downtown Detroit. Places where people had to get away from, sometimes in a hurry.
For a while, all I knew of The Bishops Avenue were the pictures of decrepit stately homes. These eerie images had a strong effect on me: an uncanny sensation that was hard to explain and equally hard to shake. Later on more information came my way. What is different about the abandoned sites on Billionaires’ Row is that nobody had to leave. On the contrary: the houses don’t stand empty because people don’t want to live there, but because people do. By people in this case I mean the super-rich. The
‘prominent Middle Eastern family’ for instance is believed to be Saudi royalty. These abandoned mansions are regarded as investments, and prices have been rising steadily for years (Booth).1 This explanation of the abandonment provided by news media left me
with questions and did not account for the feelings these photos instilled in me. Even with this information the pictures were mysterious, uncanny and foreboding.
1 As it turned out, an article and an interactive map accompanied this photo essay. I did not know this at
first. First there were only the eerie pictures. This story then is the original framing supplied by the
Guardian.
What I will analyze in this paper is my initial reaction to the photographs. What am I looking at? Why do they make me feel like I do? It will be an investigation of my response to the images, and an exploration of my experience of looking at them. As a result this paper is structured a bit like a detective story. In it, I will measure my reaction against various possible theoretical accounts of the images. By seeing what languages and discourses are available do describe these places, I will be testing those accounts’
adequacy as explanations of my response. Ultimately we will arrive at the fullest account, incorporating lessons learned along the way.
My very first reaction to the pictures was twofold: the mansions reminded me of haunted houses, and they looked to me like ruins. I will investigate these two associations in the first two chapters. In chapter one the mansions on The Bishops Avenue will be regarded as haunted houses, and placed within (and compared to) the discourse surrounding this subject. The second chapter will look at the theoretical field surrounding ruins. Are these ruins we are looking at, and if so, what kind of ruins?
In the third chapter I will analyse the original narrative as provided by the Guardian and other new outlets. This narrative will then be tied to other, similar discourses. I will research the broader discourse and the concepts it brings with it to see how far they come in explaining the pictures, and my feelings about them. In the end I will combine these three viewpoints and what we have learned to come to a conclusion about the decrepit mansions, the pictures and my reaction to them.
Chapter 1
My first encounter with The Bishops Avenue was in the form of a series of pictures of abandoned mansions. I didn’t yet know the story behind these pictures, or the underlying phenomena that made them interesting enough to publish. I didn’t yet know about the street’s nickname of ‘Billionaires Row’ (BR). What I saw was a photo essay on the
Guardian website about abandoned houses. There were about nine pictures in total: a
run-down staircase, a ruined ballroom, a deserted swimming pool and a few more. I have been interested in urban abandonment for a long time. At first sight these pictures were like many I had seen before: derelict structures; cracked walls, water leakage and nature taking over. I could have easily dismissed them as more of the same, and moved on. But somehow they stayed with me. They were different. They made me
feel different than the other examples I had seen. They made me think of haunted houses.
They also looked like they belonged to the sphere of ‘Ruin Porn’2 but somehow did not
seem to be an exact fit. Unbeknownst to me at the time, theory surrounding ruins and ghosts is linked in many ways. And I will come to that. But for now I would like to focus on my first reaction to the pictures: was I looking at haunted houses?
The concept of haunted houses brings us into the theoretical realm of spectrality. Spectrality rose to prominence in the late 1990’s as an academically viable theoretical concept. Or, as Mieke Bal puts it: an “influential conceptual metaphor”. In 1993 Jacques Derrida published Specters of Marx (The original French version, the English version was published a year later). This has come to be seen as the start of a new wave in academia that is known as the “spectral turn”. In this ‘turn’, the ghost as a possible substantive being (in popular culture and folk tales for instance) was replaced – at least academically - by an analogous being that could be used to explain many things (Blanco and Peeren 1-2, 15). Of course the ghost as a metaphor already existed before this turn. One only has to think of the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto. What was new in the Spectral turn was the way in which the metaphor of haunting was stretched to cover many fields and disciplines. This conceptual metaphor brings with it new discourses and new ways of looking at cultural objects. The spectre could now be used as an “analytical tool that does theory” (Blanco and Peeren 1).
2Ruin porn is a term I will explain in the next chapter. In short: it is the sensationalist version of ruin
photography epitomized by pictures of derelict downtown Detroit. The critique is that it merely deals with aesthetics, and not with the underlying problems and stories (Leary).
It is possible to split the subject of spectrality into two categories: the belief in actual phantom entities, or energies (or narratives that are based on the idea that such things exist); and the spectre as a conceptual metaphor.3 I will use both of these to look
at the pictures of BR and the discourse that surrounds it.
Derrida says that “there has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts” (12). And that is not my intention. I do not believe in ghosts. However, on a recent trip to Savannah in the Deep South (a city well known for its ‘haunted houses’) I stayed in what was known as one the most haunted hotels in the United States. It was heavily advertised as such, which might have steered my experience of the place. But the feeling I had while staying there was kind of spooky. I didn’t actually see anything, or ‘feel’ a presence. But it was unsettling nonetheless. Walking around there at night
through squeaky hallways was an uncanny experience. Which leads me to conclude that if I take the concept of haunting seriously at night, in a supposedly ghost-ridden place, I should take it seriously in broad daylight in the comfort of my own home. I will not deal with the phenomenon of ghosts as such. What I will touch upon is the concept of haunting. So, taking my own experience of these pictures as my methodological point of departure, the first thing I would like to do is to see how the pictures of BR hold up to the concept of the haunted house and the discourse that surrounds it.
Haunting
In his book on spectrality and literature Julian Wolfreys calls the haunted house a “stock narrative figure”(5). Both in literature and film it is a well-known trope. Some of the pictures of BR remind me of one of these iconic haunted houses. Maybe this is an example of life imitating art. Or me reading too much into what are essentially news-photos because I have seen to many horror movies, however, as I have noted, the investigation of spectrality must begin with the observer’s own reaction.
There are two pictures that made me think of haunted houses more than the others, although almost all of them suggest something haunted. The first is a picture of the exterior of a villa called ‘The Georgians’, which is in the middle of The Bishops Avenue.
Figure 1. (Photograph: Graeme Robertson)
In it we see a neo-classicist mansion that is in a somewhat derelict state. The lawn is unkempt, and there is moss and grass growing everywhere. On the right side of the entrance (left in the picture) stands what could be called a bush. And although it obscures the view from the rightmost bottom window, it could be a normal bush that needs some trimming. On the left side of the entrance are two young trees that catch the eye. They are not something that you normally see so close to such a nice building. They are too big and out of place. To me they were the first sign that something is out of the ordinary. This house has not seen much upkeeping recently. On further examination there are cracks in the walls; the fountain stands empty and in disrepair; there is dirt and what looks like water leakage on the pillars and the garage door. All the curtains are closed. This is not a house that looks like it is being lived in. In short, it looks a bit spooky. To me, it looks like a haunted house.
The second picture is of a room in ‘The Towers’, a mansion three doors down and behind from ‘The Georgians’.
Figure 2. (Photograph: Graeme Robertson)
Again we see general dereliction and disrepair. The ceiling has come loose; there is debris and water damage everywhere and although outside it is broad daylight, there is an uncanny, dark feeling that creeps up. Something is not right here. The door in the left of the picture gives a feeling of eerie foreboding. Was someone just here? Will they come back?
Uncanny. I’ve used the word twice now. And although it was not my original plan to use this concept, it kept coming up while doing research into haunting and ruins. So I will acknowledge this powerful theoretical being, and work with it.
Uncanny
There is a famous story about a US Supreme Court judge who said that he could not define pornography but that he knew it when he saw it (Vogel). The same goes for the uncanny. It is a feeling very difficult to define but you know it when you feel it. In his 1919 essay on the subject of the uncanny Sigmund Freud explains that it “is undoubtedly related to what is frightening –to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites fear in general.” Of the German word for uncanny, unheimlich4, he says:
“ [it] is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning “familiar,” “native,’
“belonging to the home”; and we are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar” (619-620). Freud of course wanted his ideas on the uncanny to be taken seriously, and consequently didn’t want to be associated with the belief in ghosts. To really understand the uncanny, one would have to have outgrown the “primitive and childish notions” of animistic beliefs (Blanco and Peeren 4). Much to his annoyance, in some languages the German phrase “an
unheimliches house” could only be translated as “a haunted house”. He then stated that a
haunted house might be the most telling illustration of this “quality of feeling” (634). Since the 19th century, the most fashionable location for stories meant to arouse
uncanny feelings is a haunted house. Anthony Vidler, in his book The Architectural
Uncanny, gives us a few characteristics of a ‘classic’ haunted house: it is derelict, isolated,
and empty: “the walls […] marked by the “discoloration of ages” and crumbling stones” and its rooms “gloomy” (17-18).
Nothing in and of a house itself is eerie. A house with all the aforementioned characteristics is not automatically haunted, or indeed uncanny. When reading a ghost story it is the fantasy of the storyteller –and the reader- that makes a house scary (Vidler 17). The same is true of the pictures of BR. It is mainly my fantasies, my associations that produce an uncanny sensation.
Psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch, writing on the uncanny a few years before Freud, ascribed the feeling to a “lack of orientation” and the impossibility of intellectually ‘mastering” a new phenomenon. Furthermore he claimed that the observer’s fantasy, combined with this lack of insight, was responsible for the eerie sensation (7-9). I would now like to show, again, a picture of a mansion’s exterior.
Figure 3. (Photograph Seph Lawless)
This mansion is in a state of decay worse than ‘The Georgians’. Nature has all but taken over. The windows are open or cracked and it seems that the top floor and roof have caved in. From the zenith of the house hangs what looks like a parachute or dress. This house looks even more like a ‘stock’ picture of a haunted house. It was taken by the American photographer Seph Lawless. He has been documenting abandonment for years, producing “haunting images” (Teicher). These images can be said to belong to the ruin porn category: highly aestheticized photographs of abandoned malls, factories and theatres showing the effects of economic crises, globalization and the general de-industrialization of the United States (sephlawless.com). But the series from which this picture is taken is more eerie than his earlier work. As the artist himself explains: “I wanted the images to be cold, crass, and uncompromising. I wanted the viewer to feel awkward and uneasy when they looked at them” (Teicher). For me at least, it worked. I do feel a bit uneasy.
What sets these pictures apart from Lawless’ earlier projects is that they show more than random abandoned buildings. The photograph above is of the Oliver Family Mansion. This family disappeared in the late 1800s, never to be heard from or seen again. People in the neighbourhood say they “can sometimes see the Olivers in the windows of the mansion” (Teicher). What we are looking at here is a picture of a house that some people believe is haunted.
Figure 4. (Photograph Seph Lawless)
The image above (Fig. 4) could very well be documenting the inside of one of the mansions on Billionaires Row. It is not. It is part of the same project as the last picture. This project, called: 13: An American Horror Story, documents haunted houses all over the US. Again, this picture is eerie in its own right, but only when you learn that this is a former bed and breakfast in Texas where “several strange deaths” occurred in the 1970’s does it become truly spooky.
Both the abandoned mansions on BR and the houses in Lawless’ pictures have all the characteristics of a haunted house: derelict, isolated and empty buildings where the walls are marked by the discoloration of the ages and the rooms are gloomy. So what is the difference between them? Of course the mansions on The Bishops Avenue are not said to be haunted, while Lawless’ subjects are. But there is more to it. It is only when framed, or explained, in a certain way that these pictures become more than just images of abandoned places. It is because of the framing5 of the pictures by the storyteller
(newspaper or photographer) combined with the fantasy of the ‘reader’ (in this case me) that the photographs become really uncanny.
Lawless’ pictures, though unsettling in their own right, become more uncanny when a little more information is given. The same is true of the photos of The Bishops Avenue mansions. Part of the reason they have stayed with me is because of the story behind them. They are not houses haunted by an actual entity, but nevertheless they are houses rendered memorable by their narrative frame. These images are remarkable
5 I do not mean literal framing of course, or photographic framing. I mean the information given about
because they are ruins that are increasing in value, because they are on what is still one of the most expensive streets in Britain. Because right next-door to these ruins there are beautiful, clean, lived-in mansions with meticulously tended gardens.
The difference between the two photo series is the nature of the uncanny feeling. With Lawless, one would have to have a strong imagination and to some extent a belief in ghosts to really be ‘haunted’ by them. And although I liked looking at them, and was feeling a bit spooked as one would in a house of horrors, I can’t say they made a lasting impression on me. This then is ‘haunting’ in the animistic sense, pictured. And it doesn’t affect me.6 Even if one believes these places to actually contain ghosts, then you
could still dismiss them after the first viewing: ‘so these are haunted houses, ok. That’s what produces the uncanny feeling’. Case closed. In a sense the haunting is over. Your fantasy has produced the feeling, and the ‘intellectual insight’ (if you could call it that) is that it is because someone was murdered there in the Seventies.
My first reaction to the pictures of BR is rooted in my own fantasy and associations. I could dismiss those after learning more about them. But the uncanny feeling stays, and grows deeper. It is because of the impossibility in intellectually ‘mastering” this new phenomenon that the uncanny sensation is perpetuated. The explanation of it offered by news outlets is not sufficient. The pictures are framed by a moral discourse about cities, capital, value and space. And to me that does not answer everything. I still don’t know exactly what I am looking at. The pictures are still haunting me, in a metaphorical sense. And I have a feeling that the reason behind the haunted look of these places is based more in reality than the ones by Lawless. I have established that I am not looking at ‘actual’ haunted houses. But there is a haunting presence in these pictures. So we can still say these abandoned mansions in London are haunted. But haunted by what?
Metaphorical Haunting
Despite my promise, and against the wishes of Sigmund Freud, I have brushed up against the subject of ‘actual’ ghosts. Theodor Adorno, in his objection to the occult, went even further than Freud and said there was no room for spirits in academia, “actual or metaphorical” (qtd. in Blanco and Peeren 6). But this was all before the resurrection
6 Of course, even if the houses shown were actually proven to be haunted (if such a thing would be
possible), this haunting would not show in the pictures. To fully experience a haunted place, you have to be there, preferably alone and preferably at night. Freud acknowledges this when he makes the distinction between actual and fictional haunting (639-640).
of the spectral by Derrida. So after looking at actual spirits, I will use the spectral as a conceptual metaphor to look at the (pictures of) mansions on BR, and what they might have to tell us.
According to Mieke Bal, a conceptual metaphor can create a new discourse or “system of producing knowledge” (10). Like a ghost, the concept of spectrality can move through ‘walls’ of disciplines, discourses and methodologies. By looking at the pictures of BR -and the underlying phenomena - through the prism of spectrality I hope to do this: to take the pictures out of their context, thus creating a new discourse and ‘produce’ knowledge about them.
There is danger in using specters, or haunting, as a metaphor. It can destabilize a subject. As it focuses more on what is not seen than what is visible, its own discourse and what it actually studies can become vague. Specters are just outside the realm of what can be known. And to investigate something using that as a conceptual basis runs the risk of only clouding the subject. It has been said that after the spectral turn the ghost became so popular as a conceptual metaphor that it risked turning into an academic
“bandwagon”, able to explain almost anything (Blanco and Peeren 9, 15). As such there is need to specify what I mean by a metaphorical haunting.
Tim Edensor argues that ruins7 in themselves are inarticulate and “cannot be
woven into an eloquent narrative.” The allegorical spectres that may inhabit these ruins however “bring messages from outside known discourse and its representations” (Industrial 162-163). Just like an animistic haunting can undermine the stability of a household, the allegorical process of haunting is “disruptive of stabilized
representations” (Wolfreys 5-6). In other words, regarding these mute ruins as being possessed enables us to speak about them, and for them, in other ways. I would like to see how the idea of haunting can alter our views of The Bishops Avenue.
A House is not a Home
I have already touched upon the link between the uncanny and the concept of home. The first definition that Freud uses of Heimlich (the opposite of unheimlich; or uncanny) is “belonging to the house, or family”(qtd. in Vidler 24). The opposite should therefore mean not belonging to the house or family. We know of some the abandoned mansions
7 For the time being I will regard the abandoned mansions as ruins, a choice that will be explained and
on BR that they actually do ‘belong’ to a family. We even know which one. But I wouldn’t call them ‘homes’ in the strict sense.
The word heimlich is related to “domesticity”, “being at home” and “being neighborly” (Vidler 24). Consequently, the uncanny could be associated with ferality (or something foreign or wild), not being home, and not being neighborly. The abandoned mansions on The Bishops Avenue are very much uncanny in that respect. They are feral (as in once domestic but now returning to the wild), clearly no one is home and as such there is nothing neighborly about them. In other words, they are unhomely. You could
say that these mansions are occupied. But not by a family. Anthony Vidler teaches us that “the uncanny movement from homely to unhomely [is] a movement in most ghost stories” (32). And although the story of The Bishops Avenue is not a classic ghost story, this move has occurred. A popular theme in gothic tales is an “invasion of an alien presence” that disrupts a domestic scene (Vidler 3). This is what has happened on The Bishops Avenue. It is just that there is no real presence. These mansions are haunted. They are haunted by an absence whose nature I will investigate in the course of these chapters.
Derrida explains the spectre to be “the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood”. Or, in other words, an “invisible visibility” (qtd. in Blanco and Peeren 33). Schelling famously said of the uncanny that it is “everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden, but has come to light” (qtd. in Vidler 26). The spectral and the uncanny are closely linked to things just out of sight; hidden, perilous and
ungraspable. According to Freud however the uncanny is not something novel or alien, but something that we already know but might have forgotten. At the end of his essay he showed the uncanny to be not simply something eerie or full of mystery, but rather something “familiar”. It is the return of something repressed (634).
What is this ‘absence’ that is haunting the Bishops Avenue? And is it maybe something we as a west-European culture repressed? I will deal with these questions in the third Chapter. This secretive and maybe perilous entity will be brought into the light. I will try to make the invisible visible. According to Paul de Man this process in itself produces an uncanny feeling (Royle 108). So we are not out of the spectral woods yet. Before exploring this however, I will investigate the other part of my initial reaction: are these ruins I am looking at? And if so, ruins of what exactly?
Chapter 2
In his essay on the uncanny Freud states that his investigation belongs to the subject of aesthetics. He divides this subject into the ‘theory of beauty’ and ‘qualities of feeling’, the latter being the one that entails the uncanny (619). This quality of feeling has been dealt with in the last chapter, and although it has been explained to a point, it has not been ‘explained away’. The uncanny feeling remains when looking at the pictures of BR.
Freud himself did not use the theory of beauty to explain the uncanny. In order to continue investigating the feeling evoked by the photographs, I will venture into this aspect of aesthetics. To analyze my other association with regards to the pictures I will consider the mansions on The Bishops Avenue as ruins. Historically, ruins have close ties with aesthetics. As such, and again unlike Freud, I will use the notion of ruins, and the theory of beauty, to come to a better understanding of the effect these pictures keep having on me.
As I have mentioned earlier, theory surrounding haunting and ruins is linked in many ways. What links these two concepts is the notion of the uncanny. We know now that the movement from homely to unhomely is a common theme in ghost stories. And all ruins, or at least the ones that were once domestic, have made this move. By the look of it, the mansions on BR are no exception. It has also been shown that the houses on BR are not haunted houses in the classic sense. But could they be considered ruins? I will now investigate the other part of my initial reaction: are these ruins I am looking at? And if so how do they fit into the discourse surrounding this concept?
The Uncanny and the Ruin
The popularization of gothic ghost stories and the ‘fascination’ with ruins came about at the same time; namely in the late nineteenth century. This is not a coincidence. It is even claimed that the advance of archeology and the evolution of the theory of the uncanny went hand in hand. One on the most famous archeological sites in the world is that of Pompeii. This ancient buried city prompted an interest in the beauty, or even ‘erotics’, of the ruin. Pompeii is considered by many to be the epitome of unhomeliness. But it also gives the visitor a “sense of having intruded on a domestic scene not long abandoned” thus creating a “dramatic confrontation between the homely and the unhomely”. As such, Pompeii is a “textbook example of the uncanny” (Blanco and Peeren 2, 397-405).
If this is the case, can this be said of all ruins? Is this why the pictures of BR do not lose their effect on me?
According to Anthony Vidler the uncanny “has found its metaphorical home in architecture” (11). And ruins can bee seen as examples of this. Just as the enchantment with haunted houses, the fascination for ruins has its origins in the Romantic period (Vidler IX). As opposed to Freud, the Romantics regarded the uncanny as both a psychological and an aesthetic concept, and architecture played a crucial role in the aesthetics of this feeling (Vidler 27-28). Tim Edensor teaches us that the “[h]ighly aestheticized ‘picturesque’ representations derived from Romantic perspectives have dominated writing on ruins” ever since. The Romantic representations tended to focus on “classical” and “archaic” ruins: Greek and Roman temples, medieval castles and so on.8 Edensor further claims that these iconic images “sustain an iconography of
dereliction which largely bypasses contemporary urban ruins” (Industrial Ruins 10-11). For a ruin to be aesthetically pleasing to a Romantic it had to be “well enough preserved (while retaining the proper amounts of picturesque irregularity) to produce the desired mix of emotions in the beholder” (Roth qtd in Edensor, Industrial Ruins 11). In other words the building had to be somewhere between a newly abandoned structure and an accumulation of bricks. The portrayal of these ideal ruins (in Romantic art) was bound to a set of ‘rules’: it “should stress ‘variety and contrast of forms, lively light and dark interplay, rough textures, and above all, rather busy foregrounds with assorted irregular trees or rambling shrubbery in one or both corners of the picture, between which a few figures and/or animals appear’” (Hawes qtd. in Edensor, Industrial Ruins 11).
All this emphasis on the picturesque (and its usual bedfellow the sublime) in portraying Romantic ruins served a purpose. It was thought to evoke a feeling of melancholy. This melancholic sensation “tempered the optimism of modern industrial development, for ruins signified the transience of all earthly things despite the utopian promises of endless social advancement”. An ideological memento mori of sorts, spurred on by moral tales that “warned of the futility of amassing riches and power”. Ruins were considered to symbolize forthcoming decay on a bigger scale, even the “inevitable demise of empires” (Edensor, Industrial Ruins 11-12).
The advancing industrialization of that time brought with it another feeling: nostalgia for the past. Anything that made one think of –what was considered - a simpler, more just time in (recent) history was cherished. The ‘classic’ ruins were perfect
for that cause(Edensor, Industrial Ruins 13). Nostalgia, described as a “vague collective longing for a bygone era” (Davis qtd in High and Lewis 41) is closely tied to the aforementioned melancholy. Just as the picturesque and the sublime, they go hand in hand. More than that, for the Romantics they were all tied together. Romantic paintings of classical ruins “evoked a sense of the picturesque or sublime” which gave the viewer a feeling of nostalgia, which then made one feel melancholic (High and Lewis 41). The modern era is not entirely void of these feelings either, and again the ruins have a role to play in all this.
The Romantic ruin implies a critique of industrialization, and consequently nostalgia for a world before this industry, before capitalism: a world of unalienated social relations. These ruins also represent the sublime: the idea of endless (human) progress gets curbed, if not halted altogether. In his article on British Psychogeography, Alastair Bonnet argues that nostalgia “can actually be radically critical” (Legg qtd. in Bonnet 50). Unlike in the political world of today, in the time of the Romantics to be nostalgic was a part of being critical and radical. Bonnet tells us that nostalgia can still be useful as a critical and even revolutionary tool. But do the pictures of the Bishops Avenue evoke nostalgia?
Ruin Porn
One of the first associations that the pictures of the Bishops Avenue brought up was with ‘Ruin porn’. The nostalgic and the melancholy also play a big part in this modern day interest in ruination, and although the emotional impact of the ruins has not changed, the ruins themselves have.
‘Ruin porn’ is a derogatory term used to describe ruin photography of the late 20th century onwards that has been accused of being sensationalist to an almost
“pornographic” extent (Leary). The best-known example of this is to be found in the depiction of derelict inner city Detroit in post-Fordist, post Industrial times. The critique of this style of –mostly art – photography is that it “aestheticizes poverty without
inquiring of its origins” and also “dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them” (Leary). Detroit, seen as the “Mecca of urban ruins”, is the most quoted in art and press alike, but this surge in aestheticized depiction of urban dereliction is a lot bigger than this city alone. A quick search online finds numerous sites, blogs, books and movies dedicated to this subject all over the world. So much so that it
prompted one scholar to say it “sometimes seems to take up half the Internet” (Clemens qtd. in Strangleman 24).
What is most catching about this new form of Ruinenlust is that almost all ruin porn depicts derelict industrial sites. Where the Romantics were nostalgic for ruined mansions, castles and temples, the ‘urban explorer’9 of today is nostalgic for the very
thing these Romantics wanted to escape: factories, mills, plants and warehouses. Interestingly, a critic of these urbexers accuses them of an “elite disposition” rendering them “oblivious to the social and economic problems manifest in the ruins they explore” (Clemens qtd. in Strangleman 24). Another critic likens these modern day aesthetes to “eighteenth century elites on the European Grand Tour.” (High qtd. in Strangleman 24) It looks like history is repeating itself, and it seems that not much has changed but the actual objects of the lust for ruins.
So if we were to consider the abandoned mansions in Hampstead as ruins, would they fall into any of the two categories mentioned? Can they be regarded as ‘classic’ ruins in a modern era, or can they be filed under ruin porn? I will now conduct a close reading of some of the pictures from the Guardian website to see if either of these two framings work. I will also consider the discourse and critique surrounding these two forms of ruination to see how the mansions on BR hold up to them.
Modern Day Classical Ruins
The first thing I would like to do is to see how some of the mansions on BR compare to the idea of a Romantic ruin. There has already been mention of some of the characteristics that a ruin has to possess in order to be pleasing and useful to the Romantics. Most of the ruins depicted by this sensitive group were derelict classical and archaic buildings like temples, castles and churches. Buildings furthermore that are somewhere between perfectly intact –albeit abandoned - and a heap of rubble. These structures were pictured in a highly aestheticized way that was bound to certain ‘rules’: a mixture of forms, the use of chiaroscuro and “busy foregrounds with assorted irregular trees” between which, ideally, “a few figures and/or animals” could be seen (Hawes qtd. in Edensor, Industrial
Ruins 11). Apart from the figures and/or animals, the photograph of ‘The Georgians’
mansion (Fig. 1) shown in the last chapter seems to come close to an ideal Romantic
9 An urban explorer is what they call the men and woman who go out to these derelict sites looking for the
“Industrial Sublime” (Strangleman24-25). In his article on the “Smokestack Nostalgia” that drives these people, Tim Strangleman explains that many of the art books and other writings on these subjects are “related to, or the products of, the urban explorer movement” (Strangleman 24-25).
image of a ruin. The only problem would be that ‘The Georgians’ mansion is neither a temple nor a castle. And it is archaic only in its architectural influences. However, Edensor shows that besides derelict castles and temples there was another sort of site favored by the Romantics: that of “decrepit stately homes” (Industrial Ruins 11). The mansions shown in the Guardian photo essay are very much that.
Although Edensor states that the Romantic way of looking at ruins is “wholly unsuitable” for regarding the modern industrial ruins that his book is about (Industrial
Ruins 11), I wonder if the same goes for the buildings we are investigating. The houses in
the pictures are modern, could maybe be regarded as ruins, but they are definitely not industrial, more on which later in this chapter. Edensor also claims that the
aforementioned archetypal Romantic images “sustain an iconography of dereliction which largely bypasses contemporary urban ruins” (Industrial Ruins 11). But does that include the villas on Billionaires Row?
It has been shown that the ideal Romantic ruin is somewhere in between a completely intact building and a heap of rubble. Furthermore, decrepit stately homes were among the Romantic’s favorite subjects. In that sense at least some pictures of BR seem to be depicting ‘classic’ ruins. Also, the two photographs shown in the first chapter look like they conform to some of the Romantic aesthetic ideals, but somehownot entirely. They show us derelict imperial looking houses where nature is starting to take over, but hasn’t taken over yet. Now let us look at another picture from the same series.
Figure 5. (Photograph: Graeme Robertson)
This is an interior photograph of one of ‘The Towers” mansions seen earlier in chapter one. It shows a staircase, or what is left of it. Again we see water-damaged walls, plaster coming loose and mold. What is different in this picture compared to the interior in chapter one is that we can see actual plants growing inside of the house. The staircase is totally covered in moss and what appear to be tropical plants. Of course I am not a botanist, and we know it is in Hampstead, London, so they are probably not tropical. Even so it reminds me of certain Romantic paintings of ruins in warmer climates. What is important to note here is the fact that nature is -very visibly - slowly taking over a man-made structure. And more so than in the earlier pictures, it looks like nature is winning.
A critical aspect of the Romantic view on ruins is the interplay between nature and man-made things (DeSilvey and Edensor 466). The “softer aesthetic” of the picturesque favored “idyllic natural landscapes” (my italics) that were then “blended together” with ruins of human production. The sublime was many times added to this mixture to produce an “intensity” of feeling (High and Lewis 52). The focus was on nature first, and in a way human production played a secondary role. The aim was to instill a sense of the grandeur and omnipresence of the natural world in the viewer. The ‘sublime’ quality of a painting made one aware of his or her own mortality. In the picture shown above there is nothing discernibly sublime, but there is the idea of nature taking
over, an idea of a world where the natural world once again reigns. One could regard this image as being picturesque. What is key here however is the ‘feral’ quality that the
depicted mansions posses, and, more importantly, to what extent. By feral I mean something domestic that has returned to the wild,10 at least partly.
The Feral Scale
One definition of a ruin is “the disjunctive product of the intrusion of nature without loss of the unity that man produced” (Hetzler 105). So somewhere between nature and culture. This resonates with the Romantic’s wish that a ruin is between newly abandoned and totally derelict. Ideally it should be somewhere in the middle.
The French philosopher and urban theorist Henri Lefebvre devised an ‘urbanization axis’. On this axis, ranging from zero to a hundred percent, one can establish just how urbanized an area is. On the zero side of the line there is “pure nature”, not meddled with in any way by man. On the other side is the “achievement of process”, or the pure urban (Elden 130). While I can make an image of pure nature (deep rainforest, glaciers, the north pole etc.) the other extreme is harder to imagine. It
probably does not exist. In any case, he believed this axis to have both a spatial and a temporal dimension. Over time progress makes the world more and more ‘urban’, and this process “extends in space”. What is noteworthy about this process is that it is “not a strict linear progression” (Elden 130). Lefebvre uses this axis to explain urbanization as a process. In our case it might be productive to apply it to the ruin.
Let us take a look at another picture from the Guardian series on The Bishops Avenue.
10 This is a definition used when applied to animals. The OED also gives us the following definition: ‘Of or pertaining to the dead; funereal, gloomy.’
Figure 6. (Photograph: Graeme Robertson)
What we see here is the entrance hall of ‘The Towers’ mansion. Again we can discern debris, holes in the wall and general disrepair. What stands out is the difference between the stairs on the left and those on the right. While the one on the right looks pretty much intact and even brand new (save some rubble on the floor), the one on the left is partly caved in and moss-covered. I am almost certain that the left one is the same as shown in figure 5. It is photographed from the other side and with a wider scope, and now we can see it in context. If one were to take figure 5 as being representative of the whole
building, than it would come very close to a Romantic ruin. In truth however, that close-up is only an aspect of a bigger reality. While parts of the building are decaying rapidly and returning to nature, other parts look like they could do with a bit of vacuuming but are otherwise ok.
When you compare the pictures of BR to ‘iconic’ Romantic paintings of ruins, the villas in Hampstead are further to the right on the urbanization axis so to speak. They are less decrepit than most subjects in Romantic painting, and thus less in the sphere of nature. As a consequence the awe of nature and fear of demise they instill in the viewer is not as strong, or even absent. But they are still within the ‘realm’ of the ruin: somewhere in the middle between nature and culture, between an intact structure and a pile of bricks.
What this picture shows is that on the whole this building is not as ruined as would be ideal to the Romantic sensibility. There is something peculiar about this picture. It is between nature and culture, between derelict and intact. But besides the
scale tipping too much to one side, it is the division of these extremes within the building that is meaningful. It seems to be an image of maintenance; a building being preserved as a structure rather than a residence, allowed to deteriorate into a semi-ruin and then perhaps, in the future, restored to a commodity. The image seems to show us something that is flickering between wreck and commodity.
The idea that the process of human progress (big and small) is not a linear one is what I think produces the feelings of nostalgia and melancholy in the Romantics. This is where the “optimism of modern industrial development” gets “tempered”, and ruins as the symbol of “the transience of all earthly things” come into play (Edensor, Industrial
Ruins 11). The subjects of Romantic ruin painting were perfect for that cause. They were
more often than not in a far worse state of decay than the mansions shown in the
Guardian. In the case of the Romantic ruins nature had really taken over: the structures in
Romantic art typically do not have roofs and look uninhabitable for man. If that is the case, the optimism for progress and development is indeed tempered. I’m afraid that in that sense the mansions on BR are far less likely to symbolize decay on a bigger scale, or make one think of the transience of all earthly matters.
If we look at figure 5 once more, you might notice something in the bottom left corner. Although it was not immediately obvious what it was, I am quite certain it is a construction light. Which means that this ‘ruin’ might be a construction site.11 On closer
inspection, these building site lamps are visible in more photographs in this series, among which figure 2. These derelict mansions still contain in them the idea of progress, and as such cannot be used as ideological memento mori’s regarding the futility of amassing riches and power.
One could conclude that although the depiction of these mansions by the
Guardian comes close to a Romantic view, and to an extent their subjects fit into the
classic ruin-discourse, they are far from a perfect fit. Where it goes wrong I think, is the effect these pictures have on the viewer. They are picturesque images of decaying
structures to be sure, but they do not make me feel melancholy or nostalgic for anything. They also do not seem to be warnings against amassing riches. At first they do instill an idea of transience and decay but on further inspection this gets negated: the lamps suggest something different. This is not a battle won by nature. These ‘ruins’ are too intact. And it does not seem like they will only continue to decay. The promise of
reconstruction is present in these places. So there is no nostalgia or melancholy, and no real reminder of the inevitable demise of all things. But they are still uncanny.
Pornographic Ruination
We have now seen that the mansions in Hampstead come close to being Romantic ruins but are not feral enough. They also don’t make the impression that the decay will be ever worsening. Consequently they do not have the same effect on the viewer. They can still be considered ruins however: they are somewhere on the scale of ruination. As I’ve mentioned my first association when seeing the pictures was with ruin porn. Can the
Guardian pictures be considered ruin porn? And how do the buildings they depict
compare to the usual subjects of this genre?
The ‘return of the ruin’ -of which ruin porn is an example – has an uncanny quality. This modern day obsession with ruins, or Ruinenlust, is a recurrence. The recurrence is a strong uncanny motif (Blanco and Peeren 410). What is also recurring is the fact that the picturesque and the sublime are once more sought out (High and Lewis 52) to evoke a sense of nostalgia and melancholia. (Strangleman 9, 23) When it comes to ruins there are strong similarities between the Romantics and their modern day
counterparts the urban explorers. There are also differences however: differences in their subjects and their relation to nature.
Ruins of Industry
Ruin porn, seen as the visual product of the urban explorer movement, concentrates its efforts on sites left in the wake of deindustrialization. These post-fordist spaces and the ruins that inhabit them are visited in search of the “industrial sublime”. Just as with the Romantics, this produces a feeling of nostalgia; “one aspect of this “smokestack nostalgia” is the growing number of coffee table books and other publications on abandoned industrial plants and buildings” (Strangleman 23-24). It is of the pictures in these books that the photographs of BR reminded me.
So once again the central concept is nostalgia. This “melancholy feeling of dispossession” (Fritzsche qtd. in High and Lewis 41) is recurring, this time focusing on the great age of industry. Most of the time, the term nostalgia has negative connotations. It is seen as an “uncritical and over-sentimental view of the past” or a “nice type of sadness” aimed at an “imagined past” (Strangleman 28). Whether or not one ascribes to
these negative associations, it is certain that nostalgia is aimed at the past, imagined or otherwise.
These industrial ruins, evoking a sense of the inevitability of death and decay, are “at the end of things” (Stewart qtd. in High and Lewis 41). They do not point to the future but are seen as mere remnants of a bygone era. They are symbols of “failure and abandonment, social stagnation” (DeSilvey and Edensor 475). These sites of dereliction, at one time “proud symbols of human progress and modernity” (High and Lewis 2) are now identified with “crime and deviance” (DeSilvey and Edensor 474).
If a building is seen as the materialization of “human organization” then the ruin of that building is the product of the “most disturbing event” that can befall a man-made structure. Logically and historically a ruin is “associated with breakdown and loss” (Dale and Burrel 107-112). If architecture is a victory over nature, then a ruin must be a battle won by mother earth.
The decrepit mansions in Hampstead are of course no examples of
deindustrialization. They are houses in an upscale London borough, and once upon a time they were homes. They belong(ed) to the domain of the domestic. If you look up antonyms for ‘domestic’ you will find ‘Industrial’, ‘Foreign’ and ‘Business’ among them (thesaurus.com). In that sense industrial and domestic are mutually exclusive, and our ruins could never fit into the category of ruin porn. I also would not see these pictures as being sensationalist to a pornographic extent, mainly because they do not aestheticize
poverty but a weird form of opulent wealth. Modern Ruins of the Economic Sublime
We have seen that nature does not play a big enough role in the houses on BR to evoke the sublime, but we might find a different form of the sublime in the outlook on ruins by the urban explorer movement. The ‘industrial sublime’ is where ruin porn and BR might meet. In their book Corporate Wasteland, Steven High and David Lewis define the
industrial sublime as “being swept away by the beauty and terror of economic change” (11). Furthermore, “urban explorers regularly compare industrial ruins to the natural world” (56/57). If a ruin itself might be a form of nature, and if the beauty and terror it evokes are linked to the economy, then the ruins on the Bishops Avenue might be a perfect candidate for bringing about the – industrial- sublime.
On the whole, we can regard the derelict buildings on the Bishops Avenue as ruins. While they look the part, they are too intact to be considered perfect Romantic
ruins, and they do not make me feel particularly nostalgic or melancholic. On the other hand, while they seem unable to fit into the ruin porn category, they can have the same effect that these industrial ruins have. The ‘beauty and terror of economic change’ could be what is lurking behind these structures. They are not pure symbols of deterioration. But are they symbols of progress?
I have started this chapter with the example of Pompeii. This village of ruins gives the visitor a “sense of having intruded on a domestic scene not long abandoned”, while also producing a very unhomely feeling. This then creates a ‘dramatic
confrontation between the homely and the unhomely”. As such it is a “textbook example of the uncanny” (Blanco and Peeren 403-405). After reviewing different ideas on
ruination, I do not think that this goes for all ruins. Romantic ruins for instance are too unhomely to be uncanny, and we have seen that industrial is an antonym for domestic, so most ruin porn would not be uncanny either. The ruins in Hampstead however do give the viewer an image of a domestic scene not long abandoned while at the same time being very unhomely. Consequently the uncanny feeling remains, and still remains to be explained.
For the Romantics, ruins were all about the –glorification of the – past. For the urbex movement, besides the past, they are also very much about the present. It is about the dwelling in these places, experiencing them in the ‘now’ (High and Lewis 55-56). The pictures they take could be regarded as a mere byproduct of this. My interest in the ruins on BR on the other hand has to do with the (possible) future. I have a strong feeling that these places are not ‘at the end of things’ but at the beginning. They look like Romantic ruins and thus symbols of failure, stagnation and abandonment. But they are actually symbols of something else. What this ‘something else’ is will be analyzed in the next chapter. It has to do with economic change, crime and deviance, foreign business and allegorical specters. Whether or not they are symbols of progress or deterioration remains to be seen.
Chapter 3
At the start the pictures I saw of the abandoned mansions on The Bishops Avenue were just that: pictures. There were no words to accompany them, and thus the how and why were still a mystery. As we have seen in the last chapter, these pictures were framed in the sense that they show only (or mainly) one side of the story. That ‘story’ however was unknown to me at first. When I returned to the photo-essay a while later it turned out that it was accompanied by an article. These derelict mansions were placed within a moral discourse about the city, capital, value and space. The difference between owning and using was stressed, as well as the fact that while the buildings rot they could still make a profit for their owners. This discourse, while entirely valid, left me with questions and did not entirely account for the feeling the pictures instilled in me.
I would now like to dissect this narrative. Through association and analysis the original discourse will be both broadened and deepened, to see if in fact this specific moral tale is the only story to tell. I want to see if the meaning of the pictures may change, and ultimately if my feeling about them can be explained.
News Stories
The articles that are actually about The Bishops Avenue all sing the same song. Many houses on BR are owned by foreign buyers who more often than not remain anonymous. These people use them not as homes but as “extreme investment vehicles”.
Consequently most of these places are empty and unused while some of them are in a state of decay. Some sources go so far as to say that 95 percent of the people on this street do not live in the house they own. Making it, as one actual resident says; “a terrible place to live” (Booth).12 To own a house on this street is a “statement of wealth”,
apparently whether or not you actually live there. Furthermore, The Bishops Avenue “has long been a landing pad for wealthy investors in developing countries undergoing geopolitical chaos” (Pawle). Most of these lavish villas are bought through companies in “tax havens” and as such most of the owners are not known by name. This story is then tied to the housing shortage in London (Booth), thereby steering the discourse towards a question of morality.
12 The figure that seems to be the most accurate is that one third of the properties on BR stood empty at
the time the Guardian article was published (Booth). Whether or not the owners of the more intact buildings are actually using their property for living in is less easy to determine.
As such this is a narrative concerning (foreign) investment, value, waste and corruption (or fraud). These are of course valid points to make, and everything that the
Guardian article and others talk about surrounding these buildings seems natural enough.
The specific moral question at the heart of it however left me wondering. The author of the article actually uses the word ‘immoral’ in reference to the phenomenon of empty and rotting villas. He does this when connecting them to the housing shortage in London. To me, one should not have to link it to a housing shortage for it to be
immoral. The question of morality would still be evident even if there was ample housing in the rest of the city, maybe even if these gigantic homes were occupied, as it is related to the idea of waste as a category which is inherently ‘moral’. What makes this story bigger, or more complex, than other similar stories (to which we will get soon) is still the fact that these places are ruins. The moral and economic tale in which the ruins are placed is important. But the fact that these places are derelict and eerie in their own right gets left to the side. While these ruins are the starting point, they get woven into a narrative that does not account for all that we see.
This moral and economic narrative does rub shoulders with other discourses that might be useful in explaining the empty villas in London. The aim of this paper is to investigate my reaction to the pictures of the derelict mansions. The initial framing is important in that analysis. If we leave alone the pictures and the details of the original story for a minute, and focus on the surrounding discourse, there is a couple of words, or concepts, that come up: Investment, waste, inequality, fraud, ghost town and morality for instance. Some oppositions also come to mind: city/citizen, foreign/domestic, rich/poor and progress/deterioration. I would now like to research this broader discourse and the concepts it brings with it see how far they come in explaining the pictures, and hopefully also my feelings about them.
Ghost Towns
There are other news stories I came across that are closely linked to that of our street in Hampstead. They offer a similar story, and The Bishops Avenue is even mentioned in a few of them. These stories are about so called ‘ghost apartments’, or even modern ghost towns. While most of them are set in New York, they describe a problem that is going on in many major cities in the world, including London. (Metz; Booth and Bengtsson).
It’s the story of how the global financial elite is buying real estate, “not to live in but to store their wealth” (Johnston). This is happening in cities all over the world. Cities
that Saskia Sassen would call ‘Global Cities’ (Expulsions 134). What is more; many of these houses are bought by people from “unstable countries” “whose income depend on dubious business”. It is regarded as a sort of “private insurance” (Johnston). This relatively new form of acquiring real estate has negative implications for local residents. The billionaire’s financial one-upmanship means that the rents in the vicinity of these
properties go up. Because the owners do not actually -or continuously- live there, shops, restaurants and the like, disappear, and with them communities, or a sense of
community. According to global real estate advisor Knight Frank a billionaire typically owns 10 properties, which would mean that “statistically, […] each of those residences sits empty 47 weeks per year” (Metz; Johnston). This is of course a simplification of the matter but it does show a worrying phenomenon. The result of all this is so called ‘ghost-apartments’, or in some cases, ghosts towns.
Just as with the ruins in London, we are once again in the realm of the spectral. These are not haunted houses, but they are ghost apartments. And they make for places that are “partly or completely devoid of its inhabitants”(OED), or ghost towns. To introduce the term (or concept) ‘ghost’ once more may be tricky. And it is used here in a slightly different sense than before. What I mean by it exactly, and what this implies for our analysis, will be explored below.
What is also ghostly about these “warehouses for foreign capital” (Croucher) is the way in which most of them are acquired. In the Time Warner Center, a skyscraper overlooking New York’s central park, “a majority of the owners have taken steps to keep their identities hidden” (Story and Saul). This is one building in one city, but it is
exemplary for the way in which the global financial elite conducts real estate business. Through a vast network of enablers, these people are able to buy houses with money that is “largely untraceable” because of the use of shell companies (Story and Saul). Their names never have to appear on any document. So not only are they spectral entities in the places they own, on paper too they are invisible, lurking in the shadows. It is a bit cheap maybe to make this into a simple ghost story. The analogy is apt, and we are dealing with invisibility, but the developments behind these allegorical specters and the effects they have on the world are very real, and very visible.
So far, the story of these ghost apartments seems to match that of the derelict mansions on The Bishops Avenue. But there is a difference. The ‘empty’ apartments that feature in the news discourse on New York are “vacant almost all year”(my italics). Most of them are furnished and ready to be occupied at any moment (Clarke; Satow). Which
makes them more like personal hotels than ruins. This goes for most of the property the mega rich own all over the world. While they are not exactly occupied, they are by no
means ruins of anything. I am not saying that this is more just or entirely besides what is happening on The Bishops Avenue, but it is a different story, and less dramatic or photogenic. Having said that, the story behind these luxury ‘ghost apartments’ in New York takes place within the same moral framework as the Guardian piece on BR. It is about growing inequality, waste, global versus local –or foreign versus domestic- and maybe even the beauty and terror of economic change. I would now like to broaden the scope and venture into these discourses and concepts surrounding the discourse.
What (a) Waste
What I would like to talk about first is the concept of waste. While reviewing the articles on the empty apartments of the mega rich the word ‘waste’ is used in reference to these places (Clarke). And of course it is ‘a waste’. But is there a difference between these apartments and the decaying structures on The Bishops Avenue when looked at from the perspective of this concept?
Waste, as Niall Martin points out, is always relative. It “lacks any intrinsic, material dimension and becomes waste only in relation to a use, or exchange value” (209). Having said that, there is a scale of waste, and some waste is more visible or extreme than others.
When the concept of waste is tied to the concept of value (as is done in the discourse we are discussing) the ideas of Marx are never far away. In his Grundrisse he states the following: “ [a] product becomes a real product only by being consumed”. In this specific case it means that “a house where no one lives is in fact not a real house”
(Marx qtd. in Martin 210). If we regard the buildings and apartments we are talking about as commodities (which of course they are), then the ‘ghost apartments’ around the world are not waste, though it could be said it is a waste how little they are being used. The abandoned mansions on BR on the other hand, seen from the perspective of their use value, can certainly be regarded as waste. There is a difference in considering something a waste, or as waste. You could claim that the abandoned mansions on BR are both.13 While
the first approach takes us into the realm of morality (a waste, wasteful, a sin etc.), the second steers us towards something else. A sub-title in the first chapter of this paper said
13 Martin even calls them a “spectacular waste” (210) and in the Guardian piece there is talk of a ‘wasteland’
of the derelict mansions on BR: ‘A house is not a Home’. Apparently, seen through the prism of their use value, these houses are not even houses. And they are not. They are ruins14: that is the big difference between ‘normal’ ghost apartments of the super rich and
the derelict villas in Hampstead.
The other important value –probably more so- in the original discourse around
BR is exchange value. The derelict mansions are regarded as investments after all. In his article on capitalist waste Stephen Horton talks of “a structural preference for exchange value over use value” in the capitalist system. He uses the ideas of Marx to show that “the value of a commodity is finally dependent not on its (individual) use but its (social) ability to be sold” (128-130). In the case of the ruins in Hampstead it is true that the “totality of the commodity consist of buildings/structures and the land occupied by the structures”. The land and the building can represent different values. Buildings can ‘use up’ their use value so to say, after which it is financially more interesting to destroy them and use the land for something else. This is what Horton calls the “marked tension between use value and exchange value” that exists in the built environment under capitalism (135-136). It is a game where, just like the proverbial Germans in football, in the end the exchange value always wins. The building is demolished and the land used for bigger and better things. This “creative destruction” is seen as “the essential fact of capitalism” (High and Lewis 26). In line with this argument, one article on The Bishops Avenue claims that to focus on the dereliction “is probably to miss the point”: it is about the value of the land on which they stand (Croucher). In terms of investment this may be true, but for my analysis it is precisely the dereliction that is interesting.
As was already hinted at by analysing the photographs in the last chapters: the abandoned mansions are somewhere between a commodity and waste. They cannot seem to choose. They exist in a liminal state: a transient existence between two worlds: they look like ruins but are symbols of appreciating value. But not just because of the land on which they sit. As figures 5 and 6 for instance show; the buildings themselves may still be patched up. In the case of the ruins in Hampstead it is not the exchange value that is winning, but the use value is not victorious either. These ruins are the result of a capitalist stalemate.
14 It may be interesting to note here that Tim Edensor makes a strong case for regarding ruins as waste
