University of Amsterdam
(Psycho)geographies of inequality:
London's built environment as
wounded palimpsest
Anna Perkins
Student number: 11757612
MA Thesis, Comparative Literature Supervisor: Dr. Niall Martin
June 13th 2018 Contents
Introduction. 3. Chapter 1. London at War: From the Blitz to the Big Bang. 10. i. Deep shelters and defensive ditches 13. ii. From bombsites to building sites: A New Jerusalem? 16. iii. The developmental drive: 1960s-1970s 24. iv. From Class to Capital: the 1980s 30. Chapter 2. The Revanchist City: The Violence of Wealth. 34.
i. Invasion, colonisation, gentrification 35.
ii. The traumatised palimpsest 39. Chapter 3. Zones and Fortresses: The Weaponisation of Architecture and Space. 40.
i. The City as “Zone” 43.
ii. When a house is not a home 45.
iii. “No such thing as society”: gated communities, slums under siege 49.
iv. Wounding spaces: “walls in the head” 53.
Chapter 4. Imagination and Duress. 55.
i. Trajectories of hurt 57.
ii. The death of the postwar dream 59.
iii. “Future ruin”, present imaginaries 66.
Conclusion. “By means of our myths”. 73.
Epilogue. Grenfell Tower: Tombstone to a Vanished Future. 75.
Introduction
The impress (of duress) may be intangible, but it is not a faint scent of the past. It may be an indelible if invisible gash. It may sometimes be a trace but more often an enduring fissure, a durable mark.
Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities In Our Times (6)
Through a reading of London-set objects – principally, Iain Sinclair’s Downriver (1991) and Michael Moorcock’s Mother London (1988) – this thesis traces a history of violence against the capital’s economically excluded, from the postwar years to the present day, which enables us to contextualise and comprehend the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire as the latest incident of warfare waged by the city against its poor. Literary representations of the changing urban landscape can, I believe, reveal powerful insights into how we got here.
A narrative of violence can be read through the history of London’s built environment, into which the socioeconomic divide has been starkly etched over the course of the city’s development. The built environment, in other words, lends itself to being read as layered text, or palimpsest; and the ‘story’ of the social-as-spatial therefore lends itself to a discussion of narrative forms. I will show how this continuum of violence – in its various incarnations – is represented in Sinclair’s and Moorcock’s depictions of the London landscape over time, and of the successive wounds dealt to that landscape.
The importance of these objects lies in their distinctive vision of the city – the counternarratives they generate which speak to the power imbalance (in this case, the
“class war”) implicit in any discussion of the relationship between space and society; and which resonate with critical theories of slow violence (Nixon) and recursive time
(Foucault) to reveal a causality that echoes down through the history of London’s built environment: the cumulative seeds of crisis sowed like tiny grenades into the
palimpsest’s layers. These objects can stand, in other words, as a lens on to Grenfell; and the ‘slow burn’ of events leading up to it.
The political palimpsest: haunting versus wounding
I elucidate the “palimpsest” in explicitly spatial as well as temporal terms, taking it to refer to the city’s architectural layers (dating from the “Year Zero” marked by the Blitz). In conjunction with an insistence on the spatial as socially produced, and by extension highly politicised – this anchored within a radical geography/spatial theory framework – I examine what is at stake in the literary and critical metaphors in which the palimpsest is often articulated. A collective fascination with ‘traces’, ‘ruins’, ‘residues’ – the language of hauntology – lingers around the city-as-palimpsest as theorised by Andreas Huyssen and others. This language, I argue, is not up to the task of – nor does it do justice to – discussion of a phenomenon as brutal as Grenfell (which, like the Blitz itself, burned a new layer into London’s history; and sent working-class lives up in flames).
Mark Hodges, writing on Patrick Keiller’s 1994 film London: “One function this film fulfills is to remind us of the numerous wounds inflicted on London over the past two decades… a city politically, economically and culturally ill” (3). For Keiller’s
contemporary and fellow ‘psychogeographer’ Iain Sinclair, “the truth of a city, divided against itself” lies in what he sees as Keiller’s description of “an absence, a necropolis of fretful ghosts, a labyrinth of quotations: not so much the ruin of a great city as the
surgical removal of its soul” (BFI 6). Keiller’s narrator does indeed pinion the “civic void at the heart” of London, which was the first metropolis, he asserts, to “disappear” (a reference to its origin and growth as a port city).
But does a psychogeographic preoccupation with negation, loss and
phantasmagoria – often couched, with deliberate obscurity, in the arcane and dusty language of real and imagined mythologies – really get at the “wounds” inflicted both on and by the city? London may well be “so full of ghosts” (ML 514); but, in the words of Ann Laura Stoler: “The “haunting” trace seems too easily unmoored from material damages and disseminated landscapes” (5-6). I believe that Stoler’s theory of ‘duress’ can work beyond the framework in which it was conceived – that of postcolonial criticism – to communicate the “material damage” of past ‘attacks’ on the current urban landscape (in the form of policies such as “Right to Buy”1, for example).
Huyssen states of the practice of “reading” the city that: “The trope of the palimpsest is inherently literary and tied to writing, but it can also be fruitfully used to discuss configurations of urban spaces and their unfolding in time without making architecture and the city simply into text. Reading the city of Berlin or New York's Times Square as palimpsest does not mean to deny the essential materiality of extant buildings” (7). An emphasis on materiality – on the imagery of “bricks and mortar” – will be key to my reading of textual (and cinematic) depictions of the built environment, whereby I seek
1 Thatcher's Conservative party policy of offering to the legal tenant of a council-built property the leasehold ownership at huge discount (Murie).
to draw out the politicized implications of the palimpsest, as giving a way into
understanding London as a historic site of visceral wounds, of “clashes”: the palimpsest, in other words, as no delicately-overlaid tissue of “uncanny and ghostly traces of the past hidden within the present of the city” (Hetherington 22); but rather as shot through with violence.
The city, the product of conflicting social, political and architectural legacies, has been reshaped and disfigured in shockwaves whose nature may be varied – causally distinct, even ideologically oppositional – but which have all left the landscape battle-scarred (and this landscape, subject to successive woundings, becomes a ‘wounding space’ in turn). London refers to the “occupation of the city by the armies of banking and
finance”; Sinclair denounces the hatchet job done by Thatcher (“The Widow and her gang had decided that Hackney was bad news and the best option was to simply get rid of it, chop it into fragments, and choke it”) (DR 4). I will draw out the implications of these metaphors as optics onto a city-text into which historic processes of dispossession are violently, indelibly inscribed. London’s socioeconomic divide is engraved into the built environment; and, by extension, writ large in the built environment as palimpsest.
Class war: the city as socioeconomic battleground
War, an organized, often prolonged state of armed conflict (Collins), is the ultimate expression of violence. Among its forms are wars of invasion, colonisation and
aggression, i.e. wars waged for territorial gain and subjugation: such ideas of offensive, “asymmetric” (i.e. unbalanced) war, that is to say war as a sustained attack on a weaker political group, give a theoretical correlative for the process of economic exclusion wrought in the capital: a war, in this case, on the poor (“class war” being the operative metaphor). David Sibley states that: “Because power is expressed in the monopolization of space and the relegation of weaker groups in society to less desirable environments, any text on the social geography of advanced capitalism should be concerned with the question of exclusion” (1). The London palimpsest is a ‘text’ of exclusion, and the violence that exclusion entails; expressed, here, in the language of territorial acquisition in whose name war is waged.
Marx famously conceived of the class struggle as asymmetrical civil war
(Boucher 141), giving a model of systemic and structural oppression as proceeding from systemic and structural conflict. Processes of socioeconomic dispossession wrought under capitalism are functions of this oppression, and the form these processes take in the city can be elucidated in terms of what Rob Nixon has termed slow violence, that is to say violence that is “incremental and accretive”, occurring not with the “immediate and explosive violence” of actual war; but rather “gradually and out of sight; (as) a delayed destruction often dispersed across time and space” (2). Although the effects of such processes on the urban landscape may be strikingly visible (and rapid in comparison with the ecological degradation to which Nixon refers), they are not instantaneous; the slow grind of economic exclusion which underpins them does not manifest itself with the ‘spectacular’ instantaneity of a bomb going off. But like war, these forms of violence are acutely political.
On June 14th 2017, Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey council-housing block, went up in flames. 72 residents are known to have died in the fire, their safety concerns unheeded by the firm (and private subcontractors) responsible for the building’s management and maintenance (BBC, “Grenfell Inquiry”). The disaster highlighted socioeconomic divisions in Kensington and Chelsea, London’s richest borough; and in the city as a whole. It was the culmination of a process of slow violence built up over – written into – the very temporal layers of the city; whose effects, when they arrived, were every bit as devastating as a bomb blast. Such slow violence, too, is a kind of war, a war-by-siege; and like war it is institutional in nature: indeed, slow violence, as per Nixon’s
formulation, often occurs in war’s aftermath (2). For this reason, war – with all its actively politicised connotations – gives a better way with which to conceptualise the implications of slow violence than the language of haunting.
The immediate, dramatic horrors of war may detract attention from more long-term and insidious forms of social violence, such as that directed at the city’s
disenfranchised, which in fact merit the language of the former to do justice to the brutality of their impact over time. The very idea of war institutes a temporality of rupture, thereby masking ongoing forms of violence. Ghosts, too, represent a continuity with the past – they are what remain, what linger, what persist – but as a nebulous vestige; in vague, shadowy or evanescent form. Such terminology risks reducing the city’s pasts, like Stoler’s colonial remnants, to “pale filigrees, benign overlays with barely detectable presence” (5). For the illustration of such ongoing forms of wounding as London has been subjected to (which may also, one day, spontaneously erupt), we
need the imagery of conflict (i.e. the language of power); but also the theoretical concepts of slow violence and recursive time.
“Recursive time”, as devised by Foucault, gives a way of thinking beyond the rupture-continuity binary: “recursive” history is “marked by the uneven, unsettled, contingent quality of histories that fold back on themselves, revealing new surfaces, and new planes” (Stoler 26), giving a language for “the multiple temporalities in which people live: what is past but not over; how the articulation of past and present may recede and resurface” (25, my italics). We can find a corollary for the idea of recursive time in Mother London: “Past and future both comprise London’s present and this is one of the city’s chief attractions. Theories of Time are mostly simplistic like Dunne’s, attempting to give it a circular or linear form, but I believe Time to be like a faceted jewel with an infinity of planes and layers impossible either to map or to contain” (521). This concept will be central to my argument, and I will use it to show how recurrent/’recursive’ images arise throughout representations of London’s recent history, which endure as metaphors for acts of harm in the present: the initial rupture of the bombs whose shockwaves resonate on, over time, into the here and now.
To be armed, as in armed conflict, is to be “furnished with weapons” (Merriam-Webster). Extending the implications of the analogy, of the slow violence of economic exclusion in the metropolis – specifically, economic exclusion as perpetuated at the level of the built environment – as a kind of war in itself, we arrive at the idea of architecture-as-weapon, wielded against its inhabitants: how, in the words of Lynsey Hanley, “brutal living conditions can come to brutalise those who endure them” (“Municipal Dreams
the deadliest weapon of all – may wear those inhabitants down little by little (death by a thousand cuts, as it were); or it may, one day, detonate completely.
For Grenfell was not abstract. It did not take place in some kind of haunted vacuum, an echo-chamber of “trapped reflexes” (DR 266) and signifiers pointing to nothing: “an absence, a necropolis of fretful ghosts, a labyrinth of quotations”. I propose stepping back and placing this present-day act of wounding, a vicious slash in the
landscape, within a historical continuum, in order to see it as the logical culmination of a series of wounds. The layered ‘text’ of London itself holds the key to this reading, I would argue: embedded in its history are the seeds of its present – of Grenfell, which, seen through this teleology, unfolded with a certain painful inevitability – of the futures that promised, and failed, to rise from the ashes of the Blitz; and of those that are yet to be written. I look to texts which – when read individually and in tandem – draw on and construct the image of London as palimpsest, revealing the roots of the current crisis; and trace a history of violence through them which enables us to ‘read’ Grenfell as the logical outcome of a city’s ongoing war against its poor.
CHAPTER 1. LONDON AT WAR: FROM THE BLITZ TO THE BIG BANG
According to Peter Ackroyd (qtd. in Hubble and Tew 3-4), London is a city both figuratively and literally remodelled by conflict: from the destruction wrought by the Blitz; to the policy which shaped the city’s post-war inner zones; to the insidious
capitalism of the Sixties which saw the erasure of whole areas in “the age of the property developer”; to the force of Eighties deregulation of the stock market, strong enough to
alter the spatial boundaries of the city. Or, as Iain Sinclair puts it in Downriver: “The ice floe was breaking. Mother London herself was splitting into segments, the overlicked shell of a chocolate tortoise. Piggy hands grabbed the numbered counters from the table. The occult logic of ‘market forces’ dictated a new geography” (345, my italics). In a kind of literary analogue to Ackroyd’s hypothesis, the imagery of conflict echoes on down through London’s chronology as laid out in these texts, tracing a continuum of violence which runs from the Blitz to the ‘Big Bang’ – i.e. the explosion, or bomb-blast, that transformed the post-1986 urban landscape – and beyond.
Specifically, the victim of this conflict is revealed to be the working-class city, a process dating back to the Victorian era: from the eradication of the built-up areas of the East End during the Blitz (when the bombs fell “on the docks and factories of Woolwich, Whitechapel, West Ham, Bermondsey, Bow, Limehouse, Poplar, Stepney and Canning Town”) (ML 247); to the selling off of council accommodation in the Eighties and the decline in public sector house-building thereafter; to the obliteration and displacement wrought in low-income neighbourhoods by speculation, development and gentrification, in a city where, overnight, “The shop was gone… the site had been grabbed by yet another estate agent” (DR 490).
These phenomena, as depicted in the works of Sinclair and Moorcock, feed into the ‘ad-hoc social apartheid’ that is the housing crisis of the present: the culmination of a process of “slow violence” – and not-so-slow violence, given the speed at which the city changes and prices rise – on whose receiving end has always been the capital’s
economically disenfranchised, from the “casualties of the welfare state” depicted in Ken Loach’s 1966’s television drama Cathy Come Home, to a “beleaguered working class”
(ML 405) still failed today by inadequate housing. In the words of Mother London’s Old Nonny: ‘There’s precious little justice in this city” (488).
I trace this trajectory from the Blitz to the Big Bang through Mother London, a novel whose episodic, non-linear narrative spans three decades; and Downriver (Or, the Vessel of Wrath): A Narrative in Twelve Tales, focusing on the latter’s depiction of London’s transformation – its savaging – by market forces during the speculation craze of the Eighties. Read together, the novels give a kind of transtemporal vision of the city’s built environment, as “a transitional landscape that would never achieve resolution” (DR 245): and reading them out of the present moment is doubly revealing, not just for their insights, in literary form, into the contemporary crisis; but for how much has changed and continues to change of London since they were written. In the words of Sinclair: “Only the (street) names survive; riding the tide of history like indestructible plastic” (446).
Above all, their histories of violence enable us to see Grenfell as the expression of a much longer history of warfare. I use them to demonstratethat martial language – more so than that of ruins, traces and phantasmagoria – is intuitive to the narrative of historic and capital-driven processes of violence against the poor which have shaped, like the German bombs themselves, the contemporary urban landscape; and that constitute, in the words of David Harvey, “the accumulation by dispossession visited upon the least well-off and the developmental drive that seeks to colonise space for the affluent” (“Right to the City” 39). I argue that the “massive collision” (or clash, or conflict) which Harvey identifies as focalised on the metropolis is more than a “class struggle”, it is a ‘class war’ (conceptualised, here, as a war of colonisation); and that the metropolis is more than a locale for that war, it is a battleground – “the battleground of the city” (DR 304). The
participants in this war may have changed over the decades, but the victims remain the same: the economically excluded (although their makeup, too, has evolved, reflecting, namely, Britain’s colonial legacy). I will trace this trajectory of “warfare”, of London’s reconfigurement by violence – by fire – from the 1950s to the 1980s, as laid out in these novels, below.
I. DEEP SHELTERS AND DEFENSIVE DITCHES
This is the book of a city which will not be destroyed, the London of ages past and ages yet to come. It is a record of London as it was before the Blitzkrieg and the V weapons scattered death and ruin and fire about its streets… (when) The Londoner, proud Cockney, became a warrior, and London became a battlefield.
Arthur Mee, London: Heart of the Empire, Wonder of the World (qtd. in ML 401)
In Mother London, Mary Gasalee, miraculous survivor of the Blitz and patient at the psychiatric hospital which unites the stories of the main protagonists (and herself one of the few lower-middle class people left in “a square growing daily more gentrified”, for “most of the others had been bought out or evicted long since”) (508), reflects in the 1980s on the “failed dream” of postwar democracy:
Meanwhile there was too much misery in the hives; she was familiar with the great groan, a thousand complaints combined, the dull pain of the hopeless and sick of heart told to anticipate a better world but everywhere observing the evidence of decline while the democratic future they had been promised
had become nothing but two sharply-divided classes of Londoners; between them a defensive ditch of misunderstanding and distrust, of lawless violence and violent authority. There were hardly any gradations in a city become almost feudal again. (508-9)
Mary’s sense of a violent binary division between London’s rich and poor, on two sides of the “defensive ditch”, reflects deepening inequality since Thatcher’s election in 1979 (Dorling), as well as alluding to the spatial/territorial stakes of that inequality, in
referencing the Medieval system defined by landowning. But it also echoes the “us and them” mentality articulated by Josef Kiss, referring to the social divide of the War years, a perceived sense of the comparative safety of the ruling elite in their protected postcodes while the working-class areas bore the brunt of the bombings: “They hardly got bombed at all and any concern they displayed was a fraud… They needed us much more as cannon fodder. They only started fighting properly when their own districts got bombed… It wasn’t their wealth or empty sentiment or their deep shelters we hated, it was their disgusting failure of imagination” (414, my italics). Failure of imagination is constitutive of what Slavoj Žižek (qtd. in Hubble and Tew 2) refers to as the “parallax gap”: the experiential divide, or ‘ditch’, that separates London’s social classes. As Sam Knight puts it with regards to Grenfell Tower: “There are distances within London that are uncrossable”.
This divide is explicitly expressed at the level of the spatial by Josef, in an image of the East End working-class heartland as its own garrison, on defense against ‘the enemy from within’ as much as without: “I hated the Germans but I hated our leaders far more… We were depicted as valiant, chirpy cockneys, taking our hats off to His Majesty.
They didn’t say how they were too scared to let any aristocrat go into the East End for fear they’d be torn to pieces, how Churchill’s life was in danger from the salt of the earth” (414). The West End of the city is psychically as well as geographically remote:
I remember how bitterly people complained of the posh Westminster,
Knightsbridge and Mayfair residents who were able to direct the bombs over working- and middle-class areas of the city. My uncle Jim told me we were sending back false information to the Germans making them think they had struck critical targets when they had actually been devastating unstrategic suburbs. He was not surprised when after the War the Labour Party received such a massive vote from people convinced they had been betrayed by their own government. (373)
The ‘unstrategic suburbs’ in question include Brixton, who “bears her scars as gladly as her sons once sported razor wounds… selected to confuse the enemy, to draw him away from the city’s heart, (South London) takes the V-Bombs… Nobody cared much for Brixton. Brixton was an unimportant target. Brixton could be dispensed with. All Brixton ever spawned was subhuman, violent and greedy. All Brixton ever sheltered was failure and the excluded. Had the Wehrmacht and the Panzers moved upon the city. Brixton would have been sacrificed” (225).
Whether the rumours spread by ‘Uncle Jim’ are historically true or not, this captures a sense, shared by the anti-Churchill, left-wing anti-war faction, that the working classes had been thrown to the wolves by their country; and is highly telling of an attitude – of the class war waged in the mind (“We are all veterans of the psychic wars”, as Kiss remarks) (423). “The ordinary people pulled the city through… It wasn’t Churchill or the
bloody King of England who kept up our morale. It was men and women whose homes and families were bombed to bits discovering our own resources” (413).
This signals a rejection of the romanticised 'myth of the Blitz’: that upper and lower classes ‘muddled through’ together. Richard Overy writes: “As early as May 1940 the Ministry of Information worried that class antagonism might be exacerbated by air raids. Propaganda phrases from Churchill himself fed into films (“Britain Can Take It”) but the reality in the poorest areas was inadequate security and shelter from bombing until well past the months of the Blitz (172-3)… Deprived of deep shelters, Londoners found safety in the London Underground, in defiance of official orders. And in one true act of class war, a large group of East Enders, led by their Communist MP, occupied the deep basement shelter of the Savoy Hotel during a deadly raid” (136-46).
II. BOMBSITES TO BUILDING SITES: A NEW JERUSALEM?
The landscape is destroyed, but the dream of it is everywhere.
Downriver, 43
In Mother London, the viciousness and poison underpinning the British class divide is captured through Josef Kiss’s remark (made in 1977) that: ‘The class system is the most enduring aspect of our culture and will strangle us in the end, sustaining itself when the whole bloody country is in ruins”. “Well… Even ruins don’t last forever,” muses his friend Dandy Banaji (440). Indeed, “London is an ancient city by any measure and yet much of its fabric, geographical footprint and population level are a little over a century
in age” (Phillips qtd. in Hubble and Tew 1). The Blitz, obliterating much of what had come before and leaving a “tumble of damaged and gutted buildings” (ML 287) in its wake, as well as opening up land in what had been densely urbanized areas, established a new layer in London’s architectural palimpsest through the violent erasure of previous ones.
The Blitz hastened slum clearance, but it was post-war reconstruction that
degraded working-class environments. This could be seen to represent the beginning of a process of “slow violence” that, as theorised by Nixon, can occur in the immediate aftermath of war. Initially, Local Authority housing was made from brick (UWE); but not enough was constructed to meet demand, and concrete proved a cheaper and faster material, fuelling a building boom in tower blocks from the 1950s to the late 1970s (of which Ernö Goldfinger’s Brutalist projects are notable examples). As Peter Larkham (qtd. in Watts) states, this 'new' concrete architecture was never built to last; and, despite the futuristic (and civic-minded) ideals which informed them, high-rises soon became “slums in the sky” in the words of Lynsey Hanley (2017: 97), reproducing and
intensifying social stratification. Mary innocently ponders the ‘mistranslation’ of the postwar dream, which has died a decisive death by the late 1970s:
At the beginning of the Blitz she remembered some people saying how it was a good thing that the bombs were landing mainly in crowded slums of the East End which could be rebuilt after the War with wonderful new houses containing every modern amenity in green and airy surroundings. Wren’s vision had been no better translated, but even he had not suffered the concrete high-rises of Tower Hamlets, Haringey, Fulham and Kilburn, warrens even more depressing than
those they replaced. In the slum streets where she had been raised it had been possible to enjoy a certain sense of freedom in the sky above you and the earth beneath you and you could always see the landlord coming, but she felt sorry for the tower-block dwellers, with feet overhead and heads below their feet, forced to submit almost every domestic function for a committee’s approval. (508-9)
“Warren”, here, is an echo of “hive”, conjuring up the densely-populated living
conditions of the poor: animal habitats, not fit for human habitation (in Downriver, the “stairs that went nowhere, connecting only with other stair systems” of the decayed Bracken House, a Brutalist – and brutal – relic, also reflect this maze-like quality) (311). The repetition of ‘head’ and ‘feet’ in the chiasmic device of “Feet overhead and heads below their feet” evokes the sense of stacking end-on-end that defined the 1960s system-built estates’ utilitarian approach to housing the poor as cheaply as possible. The giant Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, built on what was left of bombed Sayer Street, was an example of a new council housing development in this mould: “Bleak, poorly-built and badly-maintained” (Watts), it did, however, house many of London’s poorest, before being sold off to private developers and demolished in 2014, having lasted a mere 37 years.
Peter Watts draws a direct line from the bombsite of 1940 to the building site of 2015 (“Developers and planners are still working round decisions made when London was rebuilt”). An understanding of this trajectory is taken to the extreme in Downriver, an almost post-apocalyptic vision of 1980s London, heir to the dividing up of the postwar landscape by opportunistic developers that had been taking place over successive
skin from your hands, chained wolves” (197). This echoes a reference to developers themselves as “muzzled sharks” (205), predatory animals hunting for lucrative sites, whose bloodlust is only masked by the ‘civilized’ trappings of suits and ties; and reinforces the barely-repressed violence behind the seizing of the “numbered counters” (“The comfortable Monopoly tokens of the Power Station, the Pub, and the Custom House.”) (407)
Mother London describes housing as surviving the Blitz only to fall prey to the first of several waves of new development which shaped the modern city. 1957: “The ornate red mass of a Victorian public house, standing alone amongst rubble and
hoardings and fresh-dug pits, which had survived every form of German bombardment but was soon to be brought low by concrete banks for here the city was redeveloping on land where the rubble of War was only recently cleared. Already the great pub’s brick and stucco was threatened from across the street by grey crowcatcher’s walls, by clean, unfeatured glass” (61). In 1955, Mary awakes from a coma, which she has been in since carrying her child to safety from a burning building during the Blitz. She finds herself in a “baffling world building itself great white towers” (a reference to the ‘futuristic’ concrete as it was originally envisioned, before it became discoloured, stained by pollution to a dull grey) and “layering all that was prewar with pale plastic and polished board” (35). The description of the architects of this new world as “postwar Young Turks” conveys the idea of a revolutionary – and militant – ideological crusade. They:
Identified cornices, railings, old leaded picture glass, finials, corbels, ornaments of every kind with the sub-Wagnerian posturing of Nazism, the corrupted romanticism of the Right, so they smashed the pretty tiles of
Victorian villas, boxed over the fancy fireplaces, ripped the picture rails and ceiling roses from their plaster; but Mary, who remained a prewar child, saw only a continuation of the Blitz and grew afraid of their fierce practicality and their puritanism. (36)
Having been in a coma for fifteen years, Mary is in many ways outside of linear time (she still looks like a ‘girl’ when she wakes up, in her thirties); and as such functions as a narrative touchstone for the notion of a continuum of violence between past and present. Having not witnessed the end of the war, there is no ‘before’ and ‘after’ for her, no war and postwar: “neither abrupt disappearance of the one nor clean and clear emergence of the other”, in the words of Stoler (28), writing on the problem of the
‘colonial/postcolonial’ distinction. Thus, the eradication of remnants of the Victorian built environment may as well be a run-on of the bombs of the Blitz for her, regardless of the ideology informing it: the actors have changed, but the outcome is the same, waged in the same spirit of violence. This idea is common to the representation of London as a whole; an example of the continuum of violence that structures and underpins these texts, just as it runs through the successive chapters of the city’s history.
From the bombs of the Blitz to those of the IRA (which, conversely, tended to target London’s financial and administrative centres), to the figurative ‘bomb-blast’ of deregulation, images of violence resurface and recede. In London, Keiller could be seen to draw a parallel between skyscraper construction in the City, as representative of the aggressive takeover of the capital by international finance, and terrorism: in a description of the scene of the 1993 IRA attack on Bishopsgate, the narrator states that the demolition
caused “was difficult to distinguish from the building sites which had been so numerous a few years before”.
Sinclair, meanwhile, uses the German aerial bombardments as an analogy for development-as-destruction in East London in the era of railway privatization: “The viaduct blitzkriegs the market gardens of Deptford” (DR 204). The direct line from the Blitz to the “unrecovered desolation” of the present is made explicit here, in an image of a train as cutting across a spatio-temporal axis, a missile fired through time itself:
The train is a projectile fired through damage and hurt. The unrecovered desolation of Stratford. The fire raids. Phantom bombers dropping below cloud cover to follow the quisling ribbon of mercury that is the Thames: to target destruction on the wharfs and refineries of Silvertown and Custom House. Gaunt churches stand in fields of ruin. The dead chatter like starlings in the flight path of rockets. The purgatory of George Gissing smoulders around us. (227)
The ghosts of psychogeographic preoccupation are present in the “phantom” bombers stalking the skies, and the chattering dead – who haunt a wasteland peopled by skeletal churches – but a palimpsest of pain is evoked, a sense of Jameson’s ‘history that hurts’ (1983: 88). There is no nostalgia for the ‘smouldering’ squalor of Victorian London. This layering of past and present corresponds with Kevin Hetherington’s assertion that “the city lends itself to being read as an archive built up over time as a collection and a record of the past that continues to resonate in the present” (18) – but again, the city-archive as “a collection of artefacts, signs, sedimented patterns of activity and practices embedded in the fabric of the built environment” is too static and museum-like an image.
engagement with present furies. It removes itself, with condescension, from the debate of opposites; remaining an attractive fossil” (227).
Here, it is the hole torn through these temporal layers by the speeding bullet of the train that reveals the still-burning embers (rather than the ‘dusty traces’) of “true archival pain” (361). This passage shows how fire is vividly burned into London’s history: even the firebombs of the Blitz harked back to an earlier fire, the Ur-fire. “Reaching her bedroom, she looked across the city at the wall of flame, certain that the entire East End must be ablaze, like a second Great Fire” (ML 250). Three centuries previously, the Great Fire led to the Building Act of 1707 (Emmitt 72). And as late as 2017, the homes and lives of London’s poor went up in flames again.
Out of the fire-storms had come industry; out of ruin, imagination. We were promised a life of marvelous change: no more poverty, no mean and pinched lives.
Downriver, 245
“We took advantage of everything being blown apart and started from scratch. In a few years’ time the problem will be what to do with all our holidays and cash! Ordinary kids are going to university. It’s the classless society now.”
Mother London, 355
The opportunity that the Blitz was thought to represent, to replace “The purgatory of George Gissing” with a brave new world, is alluded to again in Mother London. Mary Gasalee, singing along to “Jerusalem” in church in 1985, “could see with Blake that
vision of a perfect London, where slums and misery were abolished and God’s perfection touched every building, every grassy park and spinney. It was how others visualized Heaven; it was what many had hoped to see after the bombing” (131). In the end, the 1942 Beveridge reforms, on the strength of which the 1945 Labour government was elected, were heavily compromised: “It became clear that the lumbering machinery of economic planning could not deliver what the voters had demanded and Labour had promised: full employment, secure jobs with fair wages, an end to wartime rationing and – above all perhaps – decent homes for all” (Brown). One reason for this, aside from the huge national deficit, was that “British economic class structures – and bitter enmities – survived the war unscathed” (ibid): we recall Josef Kiss’s remark about the class system “Sustaining itself when the whole bloody country is in ruins”, like some kind of toxic weed.
But if the execution of the postwar dream was flawed, if it did not see Jerusalem “builded here among these dark Satanic mills” (139), at least the “well-meaning
technocratic modernism” (Hatherley xiii) to which it gave rise had stood for something. The concrete towers that went up in the 1950s and 1960s, in an attempted emulation of Le Corbusier’s ideas, may not have delivered that Jerusalem – far from it – but they were built by the State to house the poor2. At least, in other words, they were built as part of a belief in an ideal: an optimistic vision of a “futuristic, socialistic new London” (Hatherley 325). By the time we arrive at the 1980s of Downriver, we are met with, in the words of Niall Martin: “Despair at the dissolution of the post-War consensus underpinning the
2 In contrast, Isabell Lorey argues that a key feature of neoliberal society is governance through insecurity and destablilisation, the subjection of the vulnerable to increasing ‘precarisation’ via erosion – and weaponisation – of institutional safety nets: “welfare as warfare”, so to speak (“The Precarious Minimum”, New Inquiry).
ideals of the welfare state – a despair which extended from the consequences of
monetarist policy for the fabric of social life to a more general loss of conviction in the possibility of belief itself” (93).
To better understand this arrival at a kind of nihilism, coinciding with
“neoliberalism’s most naked phase” (Hatherley xxiv), it is important to gain a sense of the changing warriors of London’s battleground, as illustrated by Mother London and The Long Good Friday: how the “young Turks”, those postwar idealists, were succeeded first by the “muzzled sharks”; and then by the increasingly faceless forms of Big Capital. Or, the story of how the State receded and the Market rushed in to fill the gap, dancing on the ashes – or, as Downriver has it, the “killing fields” (309) – of the welfare state.
III. THE DEVELOPMENTAL DRIVE: THE 1960s-1970s
“Neoliberalism has stripped out the social ideology from our country and led to a ruinous economy with ruinous housing.”
Neave Brown, interview with The Guardian, 2017
Peter Ackroyd states that capitalism encouraged and appropriated the energies of the “Swinging Sixties”, whose rhetoric of ‘peace and love’ operated within a larger narrative of rupture which served to mask a continuum of violence: constituting an ostensible break with what came before and after, the Sixties in reality saw the birth of
neoliberalism and property speculation that sparked the deregulation of the Thatcher years.
The age of the boutique and the discotheque was also the age of the tower block, of public vandalism, and of increased crime. They are not unconnected. It was the age of the property developer, trading off development land to the LCC for permission to build on sensitive sites... It was a form of vandalism in which the government and civic authorities were happy to acquiesce” (Ackroyd qtd. in Hubble and Tew 3).
In Mother London, Josef Kiss alludes to the peripheral existence of a quasi-Ballardian, 1960s world of “Idiotic urban ugliness… horrors of every type”, surrounding a group of Paddington mansion flats: “motorways, grey blocks of flats, hooligans” (364). This panorama of alienation is suggestive of how, as the high-rises deteriorated, they would become a byword for undesirable low-cost housing, fuelling rising crime levels which increased their stigmatisation further: a vicious circle of the spatial and the social as mutually-reinforcing.It could almost be seen to anticipate Sinclair’s dystopian vision (similarly Ballardian in its bleakly isolationist imagery – e.g. the capitalised “Island”) of the total ghettoization of welfare dependents under Thatcher: “the only surviving council-owned towerblock on the Island: the last refuge of society’s lepers” (424). Alongside these social housing projects, which to Josef Kiss are already beginning in the 1960s to resemble the “barrios of despair” of Sinclair’s London (95), coexists, as Ackroyd states, the burgeoning ‘developmental drive' of the decade.
Mother London, 1968: Josef Kiss learns that the run-down North-West London land surrounding a bucolic cottage belonging to his friends, the Scaramanga sisters, is now “a choice area for redevelopment” (445), given that the nearby Kilburn gasworks is closing down (symptomatic of the decline of a, by now, ‘half-abandoned’ industrial
landscape). Dandy Banaji’s reflection that: “This fits in with the schemes to privatize the Westway bays and make the place a fashionable shopping arcade. Can South Kensington speculation work in North Kensington?” (446) reinforces the socioeconomic
heterogeneity contained within London’s boroughs, the multiplicity of ‘places’ that exist, side-by-side, within one administrative ‘space’ (Massey 131): South and North
Kensington are worlds apart. But the latter is not safe from circling sharks, in this case the criminal Fox siblings, who have their eye on land which, although “not the ideal site for a block of bijou residences” (92), will continue to grow in value, as Reeny Fox boasts: “The beauty of a site like that is that you never have to build on it” (541). (Downriver: “Investors shuffle the deeds to other investors, and take their profits. The empty spaces appreciate”). (69)
The attempted eviction, with the Council’s backing, of the Scaramanga sisters from the cottage that has been in their family for generations – under the shady auspices of the “John Fox partnership” – suggests the increasing violence of property speculation in an era that saw people, often the elderly, targeted for their desirable occupancies (or rather the land on which these stood) and threatened if they did not sell up and move out. The link between the state-sanctioned “vandalism” which Ackroyd speaks of, and
outright criminality, is made explicit in Mother London: “It was possible John was getting into property speculation, in common with a lot of the East End villains” (92). Downriver also evokes the existence of an organised mafia, referring to “the
encroachments of cartels, and deal-makers who were sharp enough to sense that something was about to happen in this place, and to demand a piece of it: any piece”
(200). In other words, we gain a sense of property development as bound up with the culture of mob violence of the decade, as epitomized by the Krays’ reign of terror.
The contractors had parcelled up the docks and were trawling for names that would mist the eyes, suspend disbelief, and sell the proud owner a share in our maritime heritage: the Anchorage, Silver Walk, Sir Thomas More Court, Pageant Steps, Tobacco Dock. Paid researchers burrowed in the files; they plated nostalgia.
Downriver, 61
You could rebuild Silvertown from this midden. You could excavate the names of all the eradicated villages.
Downriver, 245
The diminishment of the docks and industrial activity in London during the Sixties paved the way for the development of Docklands, opening up what has been called London’s “eastward corridor” (Ackroyd qtd. in Hubble and Tew 3). This would later become a lynchpin in the deregulated London of Downriver, wherein the ideal monument to crown the deindustrialised “City of the Future” (a very different beast to that imagined under the postwar consensus) is conceived of as “a phoenix rising out of the ruin of the Docklands” (304). In the 1969 of Mother London, Josef Kiss stands looking out over the Thames, and complains: “Not a ship in sight… save those forever anchored… What on earth are we to do with all these unused docks and warehouses?’ (447)
Over the following decade, that proleptic question was at least partially answered. “This used to be the greatest docks in the world at one time”, muses The Long Good Friday’s Harold Shand, in an echo of Josef Kiss’s lament; but, unlike Mother London’s conservative protagonist, Bob Hoskins’s cockney gangster sees “the future” in these relics of dying industry. The violent foray of the “East End villains” (and the
international mafia who backed them) into ‘connected’ property deals is nowhere better depicted than in the seminal 1981 gangster film (dir. John Mackenzie), portraying the real estate mania of the late 1970s – a time when the social movements which had succeeded the optimism of the Sixties were in their final death throes – whose logic was “that abandoned docks are simply development opportunities waiting to be activated” (Sinclair, “Cinematic Mythology”).
The desolate docklands landscape is remarkable for how low-built it looks by today’s standards; but the cranes reflected in the windows of Harold’s yacht are like a ghostly prefiguring of the “swampland Manhattan” (DR 361) – “High-profile offices, lit to be photographed… unsullied by human occupation” – that will rise in the decade to come; and against which is contrasted Sinclair’s mythologized vision of an ancient marshland: an ‘authentic’, “unviolated site”, beyond corruption by the market forces that first bought up the wharves, then erected their “crystal synthesis of capital” (361) upon “this swampland hill, this bone-mound” (225).
In The Long Good Friday, against the backdrop of “mile after mile and acre after acre” of abandoned waterfronts, bloody, brutal violence plays out in the form of gang warfare, the escalating result of a misunderstanding with the IRA. This mob turf war is bound up with the return of a wider, disavowed war to the capital – one whose
bomb-blasts will reverberate on into the London of Keiller – with the Troubles epitomising the violence and power involved in the naming of ‘war’, and intimately connected to ongoing colonial violence in the form of British rule in Northern Ireland. Mob violence and political violence is mirrored in – and inextricable from – the violence wrought upon London’s fabric by development.
Here, bombs detonate; men are strung up on meathooks and crucified; the camera pans over a disused warehouse filled with explosives. This is a lawless London, run on terror – a power struggle between villains jostling for supremacy and territory (with the “proud Cockney” Shanks finally forced to concede to the far mightier force of the IRA) – and where change does not come about through natural, organic process; but rather through violence and rupture. Described by John Patterson as “eerily prescient about the forthcoming Thatcher dispensation”, The Long Good Friday sets the stage for the
ruthlessness and excess of the Eighties. And part of its lawlessness is the phenomenon of “instant planning permission”, the cancer of neoliberal London as portrayed in
Downriver: a post-industrial void churning out cynical pastiches of its industrial past, and where “nothing is made – except the deal” (371). By 1979, the deal was replacing the i-deal entirely.
IV. FROM CLASS TO CAPITAL: THE 1980s
‘Spitalfields’: the consiglieri liked the sound of it, the authentic whiff of heritage, drifting like cordite from the razed ghetto. But please, do not call it ‘Whitechapel’, or whisper the dreaded ‘Tower Hamlets’. Spitalfields meant Architecture, the Prince, Development
Schemes… And bulldozers, noise, dust; snarling angry machines. Ball-and-chain demolitions. Sold!
Downriver, 117
In Sinclair’s diabolical vision of “The Isle of Doges” as a PLC (Vat City, “Deregulated Isthmus of Enterprise”):
The Isle had passed from the hands of the simple bullion thieves who first
correctly identified its present malaise, its untapped potential, bought the wharves cheap, and laundered their grubby millions… Now serious predators with
multinational connections moved in, grabbed their percentage, and let the place collapse: skins tore from the buildings, radiation-sick lizard flesh. Many were never completed. (346-7).
The players in the development game have graduated from the hard-hatted opportunists and wide-boys of the early days – the devil you know – to a darker, more sinister threat: that of International Capital.
Market forces, “deregulated energies”, and “The City” are the abstracted laws unto themselves which are now transforming – running riot on – London’s fabric, during a time when “large parts of the city were visibly altered by a political force which was shocking, especially after the stagnation of the 70s” (Keiller 2014: 72). (Keiller’s London of the early 90s continues to be “a city under siege” by the government, with power carved up between the Tories and the City). By the 1980s, the class warfare of Mother London has become a war waged nakedly against the least affluent – through
deindustrialization, demolition, financialisation, gentrification, all in the service of Capital with a big C.
Thatcher’s election in 1979 marked the start both of 18 years of policy which placed market forces at front and centre; and of “an all-out assault on the pillars of working-class Britain”, which “dismantled”, “trashed” and “shattered” its institutions, industries and communities (Jones 10), sweeping away values like solidarity and
collective aspiration in favour of individual self-enrichment. Public utilities and services were privatised; trade unions and workers' power destroyed; and the finance and media industries deregulated. The reification of Capital disadvantaged those who weren't ‘good at greed', and a newly-disenfranchised class emerged on the basis of their exclusion from a “property-owning democracy” (Thatcher 1975), rather than their profession. I will expand on the evolution of Capital as, to some extent, the heir to class, below (as supported by Owen Jones’s statement that “the ‘working class’ became a taboo concept in the aftermath of Thatcherism”) (8) – but the centrality of property ownership (i.e. its fetishisation) to the new world order reflects to what extent the triumphant occupation, and hostile takeover, of London by market ‘forces’ – Capital’s conceptual victory – was mirrored in, or rather materially engraved into, the urban landscape.
The narrator of London alludes to the “encroachment” of the territory of the City – another ‘big C’ entity – on to Bishopsgate and Spitalfields, a reference which functions like metonymy: the geographical zone stands for the wider concept of the City as
financial centre; and the expansion of its boundaries is both a literal and figurative metaphor for the occupation of London by the “armies of banking and finance”. This idea of capital itself as ‘encroaching’ (at its most subtle) and, more explicitly, as invading, is
heavily deployed in Downriver, as per David Harvey’s notion of ‘colonising’ space: for example, “‘Deregulated’ energies frolic like Vikings, boast and ravish” (204). Here, the anthropomorphising simile, comparing the free market forces that spawned the
speculation drive of the eighties to Viking invaders, evokes these forces’ unstoppability, their autonomy: “Your house comes down that morning” (289). And the ‘overnight’ carving-up of the London territory into “demarcated zones” – into the ‘measured squares’ of wealth on a map (213) – evokes the division of colonial territory, with Capital
wielding the violent, arbitrary pen of Partition:
So everything was cleared to make place for a dystopia of fenced-in goods yards, coldstores, bonded warehouses. Railways replaced rivers. Now ‘docks’ could be anywhere that capital chose to nominate. This demarcated zone was made ready to service the latest panacea, the concept of ‘The Hole’; a tunnel that would connect these infertile swamps with the threat of Europe and future prosperity. On this wild gamble, all regulations were suspended. Today was too late. Dig it first, discuss it later. Steel jaws ate the earth, with all the frenzy of orphans searching for their fathers. (246)
Here, again, the verb “chose” ascribes a human agency to the faceless, abstract but omnipotent concept of “capital”. The repeated use of the passive (“was cleared”; “made ready”; “were suspended”) reinforces this sense of facelessness: of inhuman,
insurmountable forces, mechanically churning up and redistributing the territory with monstrous “steel jaws”. This is compounded by a description of the actor Roland Bowman’s house in Fournier Street, “a ruin that had become a valuable property”:
place. The human element was optional” (122). This again recalls Josef Kiss’s remark about the class system, like a cockroach after a nuclear holocaust, “sustaining itself when the whole bloody country is in ruins”. Class – which, like the City, like Capital, may as well be written as a proper noun, with a big ‘C’ – is conceived of as another autonomous, living entity. And fitting that these concepts should take the same initial: as traced
through these texts, Capital is in some ways the heir to Class.
This is shown by the fact that the traditional ‘class struggle’, as played out on the battleground of London, has been further complicated by the presence of (global) capital: Russian and Middle Eastern money has moved into the traditionally upper-class havens of Mayfair and Knightsbridge, whilst destitute economic migrants lie at the other end of the income scale. And a “newly-dispossessed” demographic has moved out beyond the M25 (Hubble and Tew 3), in the wake of the working classes who long ago decamped to the “ultimate boneyards” (DR 84) of Essex. In other words, capital has priced out
traditional representatives of both ends of the class spectrum. The “class struggle” is now understood more properly, or at least more broadly, as a socioeconomic struggle. But it is the same battle, by a different name, that continues to define the ‘late-capitalist’
globalized age in which we live: the age-old divide between rich and poor, inflated under the neoliberal laboratory conditions of the London metropolis to a divide between levels of obscene wealth and chronic deprivation. The ‘defensive ditch’ between two classes of Londoners, as imagined by Mary Gasalee, has widened so far in terms of income
inequality between the top rung and the bottom as to become almost meaningless as a metaphor.
CHAPTER 2. THE REVANCHIST CITY: THE VIOLENCE OF WEALTH
The idea of the “revanchist city” as coined by Neil Smith, who transposed the concept from19th-century Paris to late 20th-century New York, is a phenomenon “common to the restructured urban geography of the late capitalist city” (Slater); and has been, in the neoliberal era, “characterised by a discourse of revenge against minorities and the
working class” (which manifests itself in, for example, the surveillance, privatisation and commodification of public space, as well as gentrification). An exclusionary vision of society which attempts to banish (or “cleanse”) those who fall outside of it to the urban periphery, revanchism – which takes its name from a policy of seeking vengeance for a previous military defeat, with a view to reversing territorial losses (Collins) – gives a powerful expression for the hostility, tantamount to a declaration of war, visited on the metropolis’s excluded.
I. INVASION, COLONISATION, GENTRIFICATION
Accordingly, the metaphor of invasion (“incursion of an army for conquest or plunder”, Merriam-Webster) is a useful way by which to track the Class-to-Capital trajectory which can be read through Mother London and Downriver. Sinclair’s satirical observation of “a village under siege from marauding misfits, razor-gangs, crack dealers, and fast-breeding aliens” (95) – criminals and immigrants, in other words, as depicted by a hysterical press – is echoed in the lexical field created through descriptions of the ‘frolicking’ Viking
energies of deregulation; the ‘ravishing’ of the Isle of Dogs by the “here-today-gone-tomorrow boys, laundering their blagswag” (evoking a kind of petty criminality, echoed in the assonant “river-spivs”) (306); and the ‘barbarians’ of the free market (93). Capital, in all its guises, its complex, evolving network of manifestations – money-launderers, bankers, estate agents, Development Schemes – is the real ‘marauding’ invader of Downriver. The Isle of Dogs, namely Canary Wharf, was the flagship for the neoliberal dream (now standing, as Jane Martinson puts it, as a microcosm of the social revolution that has changed the face of Britain): it “became for a while so much a symbol of the transformative impact of Mrs Thatcher's government that she began her 1987 election campaign there” (Massey 121), and represented her 1988 promise to turn redundant docks into a gleaming financial citadel.
Massey, in her 1994 work Space, Place and Gender, reflects on this yuppie (i.e. private sector middle class) “invasion” of the violently-contested space of the Docklands. She is wary, however, of essentialist definitions of place, i.e. one community’s
‘inalienable right’ to an area, pointing out that claims for “timeless authenticity” are, firstly, fallacious; and secondly, have been called upon in the service of political agendas, such as the exclusion of ethnic minority groups, by an ‘embattled’ white working class for example (121-2).
This is recognized, and subverted, by Michael Moorcock. In Mother London, the right-wing, Thatcher-era rhetoric of the ‘immigrant invader’ (as well as that harking back to ‘Arcadian’ values) is turned on its head in a section set in 1985, one year before the Big Bang came into effect. Josef Kiss is walking with Dandy Banaji through streets “so upwardly mobile there was scarcely a house without the scaffolding, the knocked-through
downstairs, the dormer window which indicated the new optimism, the optimism of appreciating capital, replacing the old optimism of ideals which had ceased to be in vogue by the late ‘70s” (403). Here we see the built environment, specifically
modifications to houses, as a touchstone for the preoccupation with status that is part of the social current of the age, in a way that is present, also, in John Lanchester’s Capital, set prior to and during the 2008 financial crisis. In response to his friend’s question of “Where are all these wealthy people coming from, old man?” Kiss uses invasion as a
sustained metaphor for gentrification:
From the damned Home Counties, always London’s bane, her worst enemies, her potentially deadly parasites. They’re driving out most Londoners and taking over our houses, street by street… Complaining all the time, these
half-educated drones are filling up Fulham and Finchley with their stripped pine and snotty little ill-trained babies, taking over our resources, creating
ghettoes as they go. London will soon cease to be cosmopolitan. Those pale-faced parkers are all the bloody same, Dandy! They should be kept in reservations, limited to South Ken and to Chelsea, not encouraged to move into Clapham and Battersea and God knows where else. You hear them moaning about the people who were born there as if those were the interlopers! It’s classic imperialism. (403-404)
His withering invective against this perceived takeover by Sloanes – the “rural blight” from the Shires – extends to yuppies more generally (stockbrokers, estate agents, investment counsellors, “TV producers”) (405), and is summarised by Banaji, the voice of moderation, under the broad umbrella of “middle class settlers” (411). The
acceleration of gentrification in the 1980s is also alluded to in this description of Mary Gasalee’s neighbourhood, Hammersmith:
She turned at length where some of the (recent immigrant-owned) shop-fronts began to appeal to the young middle classes slowly taking over the bijou terraces around Star Road which for almost a hundred years housed a clientele poorer than the ones the original developers had envisioned. Indeed, only now were the brick villas achieving that dreamed-of respectability. (40)
1985 is a world on the brink of change. Many of the hooray Henry-types despised by Kiss were driven further afield than South Ken and Chelsea (although Fulham and Clapham remain the stamping ground of the Sloane and the estate agent respectively), or back out of London altogether once the Big Bang and globalization brought in foreign petrodollars with which English old money couldn’t begin to compete (York). In some respects, Kiss’s incitement to “repatriate” the “settlers” to Kent or Surrey (405) has actually come to pass (as for the “yummy mummy” heirs to the stripped pine, Laura Ashley frock-wearing yuppies he describes, they are concentrated in areas like Crouch End, Stoke Newington and Dulwich).
Gentrification as described by both Moorcock and Sinclair is dated in many regards, with those high-street hallmarks of standardisation, Blockbuster, Abbey National and “Our Price”, a laughably distant memory (ML 406); but the underlying phenomenon remains the same. The colonising tribes and the signifiers of gentrification change: “their new security-guarded estates… built on the torn-down homes of ordinary Londoners” (405, my italics) might now belong to oligarchs and Saudi royalty – and the maligned East End wine bars (418) long ago became juice and pop-up bars – but the cycle of the
affluent displacing the less-affluent rolls on, until, in the prophetic words of Kiss, by now so indignant he barely pauses for breath:
The rates go up and the rents go up and the prices go up until the indigenous population is forced to trek to our city’s outskirts, to massive industrial estates by buses which take an age just to get food at these monstrous Asdas because they can no longer even afford to buy groceries in their own territory! (406)
In this evocation of the figurative and literal marginalization of the poor, pushed out to the peripheries by wealthy ‘interlopers’, the concept of an ‘indigenous’ population is once again subverted by the social warrior Kiss – taken to mean not ethnically
indigenous, but rather indigenous on grounds of class. As Keiller states, “the people most characteristic of this cosmopolitan city… are usually among the first to be pushed out when regeneration occurs and values rise” (2014: 95).
II. THE TRAUMATISED PALIMPSEST
The metaphor of invasion feeds into a wider analogy of the built environment as a present-day (that is to say, Thatcher-era) battleground, as emphasized throughout
Downriver. In Mother London, the Blitz is the trauma which reverberates down through
history, as narrated episodically by way of its damaged survivors, who, in the words of Groes, “are traumatised by and protest against the numerous acts of destruction enacted on London by the Blitz and the post-war governments” (57). I would extend this to say that the city itself is traumatised, by the air raids of 1940 to 1941, and by the successive battles waged on its fabric in the decades to come.
We can see the non-linear narrative of Mother London as suggestive of David, Mary and Josef’s psychic trauma, which Cathy Caruth, paraphrasing Freud, describes as a breach in the mind’s experience of time, something ‘fundamentally unassimilated’ into the normal chronological ordering of experience (4). Mary Gasalee, a kind of exile from linear time, is the best expression of trauma as atemporal phenomenon. Given that the titular city is also configured as a “she”, bestowing upon her the status of a subject in her own right – a “sentient, conscious character” (Gardiner qtd. in Groes 64) – her narrative is by extension scrambled along with the protagonists’. We do not gain a linear sense of her history, but one which jumps around. ‘Her’ suffering is inferred in the apocalyptic vision of an air raid: “The city was actually shrieking” (ML 262).
London’s identity is comprised of smaller parts, sub-identities: the injured “she” is Brixton one moment, “South London” the next, and “the dying city” (262) at the level of the whole. “The bombs fragmented her (Brixton’s) identity as they have broken up so much of London… When the news came that Hitler was beaten South London began to stir again; then came the rockets. The rockets almost finished her. The rockets threatened to drive her mad” (226). This sense of fragmentation could be seen to mirror, at the level of the environment, the schizophrenia of the protagonists; like theirs, London’s
‘madness’ has its roots in the Blitz. The V-2 ‘vengeance’ rockets launched by Hitler in 1944 arrived without the warning sound of an engine, sending people running in terror wondering where and when they would actually strike: rocket attacks over London were responsible for some 8000 deaths and serious psychological damage (Overy 193-4).
CHAPTER 3. ZONES AND FORTRESSES – THE WEAPONISATION OF ARCHITECTURE AND SPACE
The London described in Mother London and Downriver is fragmented, broken up into territories which might as well be other countries, given the notorious (and historical) tribalism of their occupants. Most obviously, the River Thames physically delineates a mental divide between Londoners north and south of its banks. Forces of urban change have led to an increase in both class and area divisions (Barker 365): and the one as corresponding explicitly to the other. The increasing fragmentation of the city at a socioeconomic level – and the spatial compression of that fragmentation, i.e. the proximity of rich and poor – can be seen as the cause of further trauma in the form of inequality.
The palimpsest can therefore be intimated as an “archive of pain”, in which can be read the trauma inflicted both to and by a wounded/wounding city, crisscrossed with divisions, or “fault lines”, that resemble unhealed scars. Like Stoler’s colonial archive, it is not sealed, settled, ‘sedimented’: its pain cannot be contained within “guarded frames” (5). The once-active dockworkers of Downriver may be ‘entombed’, but the forces
responsible for the “wrecked apartments pushed too high in worthless materials, held together with bandaids and unbounded cement” (361), beneath which they lie, are not: a variation on this chilling image was reactivated in the news of June 2017, when the tenants of Grenfell Tower were encased in flames as a result of the local authority's 'cost-saving' imperative - a 'principle' which has left thousands of tenants living in poorly constructed social housing throughout the UK, exposed to the hazards of fire (Inside
Housing report 2017 qtd. in Hardy). The “dusty traces of true archival pain” (361) have
not been ‘overwhelmed’ – hurting history, they spill over once more into the catastrophe of a present beyond pastiche.
And if the Spitalfields weaver’s loft, or the country house, wistfully rendered in a
mouthwash of Piper twilight, staggered on as icons of a vanquished civilization, then the fire-blackened cityscape of the Blitz was the setting increasingly evoked by the
barbarians of the free market. Downriver, 93
The story of the built environment of London as scored through with violence is
embodied by the reactivation of the Blitz as metaphor in the setting of Downriver, which, in a nod to Moorcock, recalls the fragmentation described in Mother London: “The ice floe was breaking. Mother London herself was splitting into segments, the overlicked shell of a chocolate tortoise” (345). This reference creates a kind of intertextual
continuum, implying, once more, a direct line from the Blitz to the 1980s: an extension of London’s splintering by bombs into the present context, which is that of chopping her up and meting her out in chunks (“investment opportunities”) by the disembodied ‘piggy hands’ of speculation (again, evoking faceless forces of greed).
This recourse to the imagery of the Blitz on another temporal plane is in keeping with the notion of recursive time, if, as Stoler goes on to note, “(Post-colonial)
reactivations and traces… can cross thresholds, occur at different levels, cut transversal swaths on a diagonal axis” (Deleuze qtd. in Stoler 30). Elsewhere, the Blitz is called upon
