Exploring the aesthetic politics of London’s post-war built environment

For the last session before the respite of the Christmas break, the Surgeons were fortunate to hear from two of the Geography Department’s PhD students, Ed Brookes and Tess Pinto, who presented their work on the aesthetic politics of London’s post-war built environment. Focusing specifically on the home and using several examples between them, they painted a potted history of different attitudes and approaches, from the 60’s to the present day, that have shaped domestic architecture in the capital.

Tess began by discussing three different local authority responses to the perceived failures of modernist mass housing estates, which attempted to revive, redeploy and in some cases reimagine ‘the street’ within the new architectural urban schemes of the 70’s. Having been replaced by the largely ‘private’ aerial walkways of the city’s quarter of a million high rise flats, there were serious concerns about the loss of community life and spontaneous neighbourhood activity.

Street deck at Robin Hood Gardens, photo from the Smithson family collection, 1972 (© Sandra Lousada)

First stop, the three-story terraces of Camden; where the Council’s Architect’s Department had sought to reproduce the immediacy of contact with others in the neighbourhood and a connection to the existing fabric of the city through public and semi-private spaces and direct openings onto the public thoroughfare. As Tess explained, Alexandra Road Housing Estate was where this vision was best realised by the Labour Council and their architect, Neave Brown. However, an enquiry into the building design process by Camden’s new Chief of Housing in 1978 – Ken Livingstone – to find out why the project overran on both time and budget led the estate to be known as a wildly expensive disaster and become the focal point of a right wing attack on social housing.

Alexandra Road Housing estate, completed in 1978 (© Historic England Archive DP147536)

Second stop, the dilapidated council houses of Central London; where under Horace Cutler’s homesteading scheme first time buyers could acquire a 100% mortgage to modernise and renovate these neglected properties. By returning to the low-density brick street, preserving the existing fabric of the city and providing the opportunity for ownership, this Conservative Greater London Council administration sought to maintain London as a federation of individual towns and smaller communities.

The third and final stop of Tess’ tour was Walters Way in Lewisham. Moving away from the terraced model, Walter Segal’s ‘self-build’ system was championed by the socialist councillor Nicholas Taylor and managed to create a ‘village feel’ in the South London Borough, with the serendipitous houses interspersed with trees and imbued with a peaceful atmosphere. Similar to homesteading, the owners had a role in the creation of their own homes, and the flexibility of the stilted timber constructions has allowed for continued adaptation and the accommodation of individual taste. The original residents who are still there today recall the camaraderie of the construction projects which laid the foundations for a tight knit community.

A typical self-build timber framed house using the Segal method (© Taran Wilkhu)

Although being the work of architects decades ago, Tess emphasised that all these attitudes and approaches to housing are not relics of the 70’s but continue to shape contemporary ideas and the designs of prominent architects engaged in social housing today, such as Peter Barber and his work on Ilchester Road in Barking.

The work of Peter Barber at Ilchester Road, Barking (© Morley von Sternberg)

The tour guide flag was then handed over to Ed who took us to the Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar, where only the East block temporarily remains as its redevelopment into the luxury flats of the Blackwall Reach estate has begun. Looking instead at the destruction of architecture, he navigated us through the aesthetic strategies that have been deployed to tarnish the old brutalist estate as ‘anti-beauty’ and a complete failure that can only be rectified by its demolition. Although there has been a counter-narrative that has sought to establish the estate as a modernist masterpiece that deserves preservation, it was denied national protection by English Heritage on the grounds of a lack of architectural significance. Three types of aesthetic strategies, Ed explained, played an important part in this decision.

The Blackwall Reach redevelopment (© Blackwall Reach Community)

To begin with, Ed took us through the aesthetics of brutalism. With its origin as an opposition to traditional ideas of the beautiful and a critique of the frivolous and bourgeois architectural movements of the time, this architectural style was vulnerable to being painted as ‘ugly’. Made only worse by the Council’s neglect of the estate which was in dire need of maintenance and investment, the ‘politics of ugliness’ was used to divert attention away from the social and economic needs of those that rely on the estate and justify the reuse of the land for more profitable ends.

Robin Hood Gardens Estate (© Ed Brookes)

Next, it was the aesthetics of disparagement, and the potent post-war cliché of modernist buildings as ‘concrete monstrosities’. Associated with anti-social behaviour and substandard living, this strategy has been used to suggest a failure on behalf of the architect to provide for the residents of the places they designed. Ed demonstrated this with a range of quotes, such as one from the Daily Mail in 2008 that read: “To those unlucky enough to live there, it is a grim, concrete monstrosity blighted by urine-soaked stairwells and marauding gangs of youths who lob rubbish – and worse – from its brutally modernist aerial walkways.”

The view from one of the aerial walkways of the Robin Hood Gardens Estate (© Ed Brookes)

Finally, Ed showed us the impact of the aesthetics of marketing used by the developers of Blackwall Reach. In order to sell the new estate to investors and buyers, their speculative images of how it will look and be used are highly idealised, sanitised and sterilised, and devoid of many familiar social activities. Most significantly though, Ed pointed out how, despite the ethnic diversity and prominent Bangladeshi population of the local area, it is only an affluent white community portrayed in these images, revealing their desired clientele.

Architectural impression of Blackwall Reach’s Station Square courtyard (© 2020 Blackwall Reach London E14)

Together, Tess and Ed gave us a glimpse into the complex aesthetic landscape of architectural change and development and the political forces behind its variation and fluctuation. We’d all like to thank Tess and Ed for an engaging and enlightening session that draws to a close a term at the end of a strange and challenging year.

Written by: Will Barnes

Shifting Sandscapes

Our Landscape Surgery session on 24^th November was organised by Royal Holloway’s PhD student William Jamieson with invited guest, Professor Uma Kothari (University of Manchester). The session was called ‘Shifting Sandscapes’ and consisted of Uma sharing her recently published work on Shifting sands: The rhythms and temporalities of island sandscapes, followed by Will’s reading from his body of creative and scholarly writing on sand and land reclamation in Singapore. Both areas of research explore storytelling and creative methods, in their ability to narrate the precarious shifting of sands in differing landscapes, enacted by multiple human and non-human processes which contribute to the looming global sand crisis. For example, the UNDP state that sand is the most extracted material on earth, after water. The session culminated with a dynamic open discussion with the wider Landscape Surgery audience.

Image © Uma Kothari

The session began with Uma’s fascinating account of her research into the shifting sandscapes within and surrounding a Maldivian island. Uma opened the discussion by asking ‘What is it about the idea that within its minuteness a grain of sand encapsulates greater things, that is a metaphor for a grander scale, that has a story to tell? (Welland, 2009: 2). The quote mapped out the direction of discussion, traversing the many temporalities and rhythms of the movement of sand around a small island in the Maldives and the human and non-human entanglements which affect this flow. Sand has remarkable characteristics. As well as existing in suspension both in the air and in water, it also forms the two fundamental materials of glass or cement, giving it unique significance to people. Its multifarious uses have led to increased competition and conflict over it, it has become a new tradable resource subjected to uncontrolled extraction and military ‘sand wars’ and its desirable aesthetic and sensory qualities are mobilised for tourism purposes. Sand is crucial to a sense of islandness, which Uma stresses is not bound to the borders of an island, often conceptualised as disconnected landscapes bound by water. Islands are in fact part of a broader picture of assemblages, their borders are permeable, undergoing a dynamic process and flux, connecting distant people and places.

Uma’s focus on the Maldivian island gives a rich insight into the temporalities and rhythms of everyday shifting sandscapes. The ceaseless movement of grains interconnects temporalities of place and can be influenced by people, weather and non-human agencies. Sand in these tropical ocean regions traverse 30 million years to come into being, bringing this sense of ‘deep time’ into present moments of short term morphological changes, such as beach erosion caused by human building, monsoons, climate change and rising sea levels. Sand is constantly moved and manipulated by the tourism industry and resorts, creating idealised environments for visitors. This intense management is hidden from tourists, involving beach sweeping and sand pumping. The tourist island imaginary encapsulates the myth of the unchanging culture of place. Uma’s research focuses on North Male Atoll, a 1km long island with a population of 1200 people. Interviews with residents were conducted in the form of a ‘sandscape walk’ around the periphery and interior of the island, to encounter place and the rhythms and movement of sand. The resulting narrative is composed of multiple stories and embodied experiences taken from these walking interviews, encouraging interviewees to take part in reflexive attunement with their environment.

The walking encounters opened discussions about island erosion and the fears of the ocean encroaching on residents homes, due to many combinations of human interventions and environmental climate change. The struggles between the human and non-human emerge, as people attempt to mitigate non-human processes by attempting to slow the sands progress along the coastline. The temporal speed and pace varies greatly across the island. The sandscape walks illuminated the emotional meanings attached to the movement of sand and the affective qualities of sand in creating a sense of place and how these are enacted daily. Sand is both cultural and material, differing in the range of emotional and sensory reactions, across temporalities. The performativity of sand means an island is constantly being made and unmade due to human and non-human processes, and is crucial in our understandings of islands in this era of environmental change. This situated narration of sand allows for an insight into its multifarious human and non-human relations.

Image by Deme Group: Jurong Island land reclamation in Singapore.

Following Uma’s discussion, Will opened up an alternative narrative account of a differing sandscape, creatively illuminating the political and economic implications of shifting sandscapes in Singapore, as part of his wider PhD project entitled ‘Granular Geographies of Endless Growth: Singapore and the Spatial-Cognitive Fix’. Since Singapore’s independence, in the last five decades, it has continually been expanding geographically through land reclamation and importing sand to construct territory. The sand extraction has occurred informally, by networks of contractors and subcontractors, producing tensions in other areas of South East Asia. Sand commodity chains in Singapore are complex, and by taking a closer look at these networks it gives an insight into the multifarious political, environmental, economic and spatial implications of shifting sands in the region. Sand is the focus of many political tensions and conflicts at the scale of the nation state. Will presents interesting critical creative geo fiction insights at this nation state scale by sharing with us short stories, including the keynote address by Professor Soon, Emeritus of Construction and Engineering, to the Singapore Sand Committee at the first public ASEAN Conference of Transboundary Aggregate Regulation. Will notes, the talk was intended to centre on how to achieve proper regulation within the dredging industry, instead he begins to go off course, almost as if he himself is no longer speaking:

‘You see, it isn’t that there are transboundary issues regarding the construction aggregate market throughout Southeast Asia, problems of its extraction and regulation. It is that the sand itself is speaking to us through these transboundary issues, and it has selected Singapore as its representative, medium, shall we say. As we will see, Singapore is not haunted by sand in some metaphorical sense, but literally possessed by it. In the Sejarah Melayu, it is not the misidentified Singha, the mistaken lion of our nation’s mythical history, that Sri Tri Buana notices first, but the sand of the coast that is white like a piece of cloth, and thus decides to found Singapura within what was then known as Temasek, literally Sea Town in Javanese. Even from that mythical point in our prehistory, the sand was luring men to come here to found cities, against their better judgement, against the judgement of history. Even then the sand of the coast was a blank slate for the inscription of geohistory. Such is the treachery of geohistory, such is the vast conspiracy of sand that we all find ourselves planted firmly on. Sand is more and less than a geomorphological text. It is mediated by the flows of rivers and the pounding of coasts, wrenched from the face of a mountain range by glaciation: but in order to become a text it needs hundreds and even thousands of years of these phenomenon before we can even recognise it in its perplexing abundance. That is Geomorphology 101. Southeast Asia’s difficulties regarding transboundary construction aggregate management can be said to more or less start with this outsized city-state, whose own problems regarding this very issue we can more or less pinpoint to a precise year if not a precise month in time: 2007. That is the year that Indonesia stopped exporting sand to Singapore.’

 Will’s rich account of geo fiction narrative, gives a full picture of the overall affective experience of the address. The sites for Will’s project are in fact impossible to visit, as the construction sites do not permit visitors, therefore these geo fiction creative methods are crucial insights into the conceptualisation of sand in Singapore. Will’s exploration of critical creative methods, provide us with an in-depth insight into the multifarious politics, tensions and power agencies surrounding the shifting sandscapes of Singapore, shaping place and space. Will and Uma’s fascinating sandscape accounts, led to an open discussion on the multifarious implications of the cultural, economic and political manifestations of sand in increasingly precarious and changing environments. We discussed the contrasting creative methods of storytelling, narratives and walking. Acknowledging Uma’s walking methods, as a physical engagement with sand, differed to Will’s geo fiction accounts, which allowed for an imaginative insight into sandscapes impossible to physically encounter. Uma’s use of the mundane, habitual process of walking enabled islanders to be attuned to the distinct qualities of the landscape. It enabled connections and relationships to be formed between the rhythm and pace of islanders, sand and landscape. The open discussion then moved to consider where these differing sand discussions sit in relation to emerging geographies of ‘wet ontologies’, bridging the ontological gap between the land and the sea. Although, we discussed the potential for ‘more-than-wet’ ontologies to include these ‘inbetween’ sandscapes, or thinking beyond terracentric ontologies, to include perspectives from the sea.

Both Uma and Will’s projects, drew on the themes of sand and time, commenting that the forensic scrutiny of sand can reveal the memories it holds, connecting distant people and places. We discussed how sand remembers recent history, holding the rhythms of the sea. This is linked to the innate connection people feel to sand through their own memories and identity, connecting them to place, for example, Maldivian residents always remembering specific shapes and forms of islands. These circulations of memories and affective experience in sandscapes, shape place as a dynamic process of becoming, sand is a meeting point of conversations, both human and non-human. These sandscapes are not only governed by national politics, and economic motives, but non-human processes and emotional affective experiences, everyday interactions at the local scale, and notions of identity, shaping place and space. These differ greatly across nation state scales and at the scale of the body, as depicted by these diverse Maldivian and Singaporean examples. The ever-changing dynamic interaction of these processes, makes up this unique flow of landscape and meaning, shaping and altering our relationships with sandscapes and the materiality of them in the context of environmental change. These accounts perhaps highlight the need for questioning our relations with sand globally, raising important environmental concerns.

References

Welland, M.2009. Sand: A Journey Through Science and the Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Written by: Rosie Knowles