Remaking London

Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture

Ben Campkin

• Editore: I.B. Tauris
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857734167
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoria: Urbanisme et développement urbain

Between the slum clearances of the early twentieth century and debates about the post-Olympic city, the drive to 'regenerate' London has intensified. Yet today, with a focus on increasing land values, regeneration schemes purporting to foster diverse and creative new neighbourhoods typically displace precisely the qualities, activities and communities they claim to support. In Remaking London Ben Campkin provides a lucid and stimulating historical account of urban regeneration, exploring how decline and renewal have been imagined and realised at different scales. Focussing on present-day regeneration areas that have been key to the capital's modern identity, Campkin explores how these places have been stigmatised through identification with material degradation, and spatial and social disorder. Drawing on diverse sources - including journalism, photography, cinema, theatre, architectural design, advertising and television - he illuminates how ideas of decline drive urban change.
Richly illustrated and engagingly written, Remaking London is both a compelling account of contested sites from the capital's recent history and a powerful critique of the contradictions of contemporary regeneration.

1

SLUM SPECTACLE

In Dickens’ day, Somers Town had become shabby-genteel; today it is merely shabby.

Estates Gazette (1930)¹

The housing stock in Somers Town changed so completely over the course of the twentieth century that it is difficult to imagine the experience of living in this neighbourhood for workers and their families in the 1920s and 1930s. Streets now occupied by medium-rise modernist blocks of flats were at that time characterised by rows of overcrowded terraces hastily constructed during the rapid expansion of the capital in the 1820s. For the most part, these fell well short of the standards of housing for wealthier Londoners on the opposite, southern, side of the New (now Euston) Road. One hundred years later, these buildings were extremely dilapidated. Conditions had become particularly dire as a result of ineffective state housing policies, the inactivity of the local municipal authorities and neglectful landlords. The community had to cope without proper sanitation, in dwellings that suffered from rot, and were severely infested with various kinds of pests, including rats, fleas and cockroaches, as well as the minute but severely disruptive common bedbug, Cimex lectularius.

It was in this context that in 1924 the St Pancras House Improvement Society (SPHIS) was established. It is still active in north London, though now in a different form and renamed ‘Origin Housing’.² The founding committee of the Society comprised a group of energetic and committed social workers from various existing welfare organisations, chaired by the charismatic and locally-popular Father Basil Jellicoe (1899–1935), who had been sent to Somers Town in 1921 to lead a Magdalen College Mission settlement.³ The Society’s members were united by a non-denominational Christian welfare ethic, mobilising their work as reformers within a religious framework whereby the slums, poverty, overcrowding and infestations were conceived as the ‘devil’s work’.⁴ Strongly influenced by the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, they resolved to establish a house improvement and rehousing programme, centred initially on Somers Town.⁵

After conducting a damning survey of the existing housing stock in 1925, the Society set out to tackle the evident problems and improve the area’s reputation.⁶ In so doing, they intended to demonstrate that slum clearance and rehousing were financially and practically viable, with the rents for new properties remaining at a consistent level with the old.⁷ They operated as a public utility society – a category specified within the Industrial and Provident Societies Act (1893), and later the Housing Act (1932), as a philanthropic provider of housing for the working classes. In effect, many such societies functioned without any philanthropic motive.⁸ The St Pancras Society was unusual in that it addressed the housing needs of those who lived in extreme poverty, and did so with a commitment to rehousing people with minimal displacement and fragmentation of their communities. Housing grants were available via the state, but the Committee members soon attracted the investment of a range of influential and affluent shareholders, including the Prince of Wales.⁹ Architectural historian, Elizabeth Darling, places the Society as one of a number of voluntary housing sector organisations formed in the interwar period that addressed housing issues for the working-classes, particularly concentrating on those slum dwellers who were neglected by state housing policies that ignored the poorest social stratas.¹⁰

Uncanny nature

Infestations were a problem that had a particular prominence in journalistic accounts of Somers Town, known colloquially as ‘little hell’. One journalist described the area in 1930 as a place of:

vermin-ridden dens … the worst hovels in London … where mothers are afraid to put their children to bed for fear of rats and other vermin of all descriptions.¹¹

By the mid-1920s, when the Society was forming, what we would now call ‘pest control’ was a highly specialised and organised industry offering an array of skills, expertise, new technologies and products. For example, in 1926, ‘expert in sanitary building construction’, Ernest Blake, published a manual for the protection of buildings against vermin, as part of a series of ‘practical manuals for practical men’ aimed at tradesmen in the construction industry and building crafts. In its introduction he observes:

The word vermin is a very comprehensive term, and includes quite a number of different kinds of animals and insects. Some of these are the authors of a great deal of damage to house property, and as they consume large quantities of foodstuffs they are universally detested, while others are objected to, more on the score of their repulsive appearance, and the unsavoury conditions which they are usually associated … The presence of vermin in a building indicates, either that there is a regular supply of food of some kind or other to which they have access, or else, that the condition of the place is so insanitary, that various species of insects are encouraged to breed and thrive in the dirt and filth that ought to be kept down.¹²

Acknowledging the wide scope of the category ‘vermin’, Blake emphasises the parasitic relationship of these animals to humans and their waste. He also highlights the strong association assumed between vermin, ‘dirt and filth’, and ‘insanitary’ or neglected environments. The manual focuses on vermin that can be found in enclosed areas and inhabited structures: including brown and black rats, the common house mouse, the cockroach, ants and houseflies. The material costs of vermin to property owners are also a central concern. These include damage to the structures of buildings, and the wider economic losses that might accrue from, for example, destruction of stock in a warehouse; or the spread of disease. Reflecting on the manual today, the suggestion that pest infestations and control are bound inextricably to underlying structures of property ownership, building conditions and responsibility for maintenance remains crucial.¹³

Of all the pests in 1920s Somers Town, the common bedbug, Cimex lectularius, caused the most anxiety because of the extent and effects of infestations. Called ‘wall bugs’ in some countries, bedbugs were (and are) a particular threat to the home where, intimately occupying a building’s material core, fixtures and fittings, they ‘hide in cracks and crevices in beds, wooden furniture, floors, and walls’.¹⁴ The degraded slums of Somers Town and their furnishings were riddled with these insects. In the overcrowded and decaying brick and timber buildings, the tenants had to develop tactics to cope with the bugs, such as sealing their clothes in paper bags and hanging them from the ceiling when they arrived home, a strategy the Society documented photographically (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2).¹⁵

Figure 1.1: ‘The Devil’s Architecture.
A typical crumbling and vermin-ridden staircase’.

Bedbugs were already a feature of life in medieval London, but their detection, extermination and management emerged as an increasingly complex industry in the modern metropolis.¹⁶ Armed with gases and chemical solutions, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, modernising reformers sought to control these insects as part of a wider civilising process focused on public health and housing.¹⁷ In the 1920s and 1930s, bedbugs occupied a prominent place in the discourses of reformers and commentators focused on the problem of slum housing, both because of the extent of infestations, and because of their symbolic power to convey, in a more general sense, societal ills, and the abject poverty and suffering in which people lived.

How should we understand pests as a form of unwanted urban nature? In recent research bridging urban geography and architecture, scholars such as Matthew Gandy, David Gissen, Maria Kaïka and Erik Swyngedouw have conceived of the city ‘as a process of transformed nature’, and have examined the networks, conduits and infrastructures that facilitate processes of nature transformation and ‘nature production’ (see pages 14–15).¹⁸ Focusing particularly on forms of nature – such as water – that are commodified and fetishised because of their use-value, and the further cultural, aesthetic and symbolic values they offer within the context of the modern and late-modern metropolis, these authors demonstrate collectively that ‘the production of urban nature is a microcosm of wider tensions in urban society’.¹⁹ This is a helpful framework through which to think about how pests feature in the discourses associated with housing reform in Somers Town, where their presence was highlighted to indicate the impoverished and degraded conditions in which people lived.

Figure 1.2: ‘Mrs Fry and her baby in her old house in Gee Street’, c. 1920s.

For Swyngedouw and Kaïka, in tension with an increasingly physically and symbolically sanitised city environment, unwanted and disorderly manifestations of nature – ranging from rats to polluted water – are an inevitable part of urban life under capitalism.²⁰ Concurring, Gissen refers to such problematic manifestations of nature as ‘subnature’.²¹ These analyses prompt us to consider the relationships of particular species to flows of capital, investment and disinvestment; to other kinds of dirt, waste and urban nature; and to the wider cultural, environmental and political processes that produce particular urban locales. Ultimately, the history of fluctuating pest populations highlights the city as an environment with a nature of its own (rather than a territory defined against nature); and nature itself as a social and cultural product. As unwanted, ‘bad’ nature, associated with dirt, insanitary conditions and contamination, these species threaten in particular to destabilise the security of domestic environments. In such contexts they constitute an uncanny intrusion of nature, lurking in the hidden services and structures of houses, and adversely affecting the perception of the home as a secure place.

George Orwell’s anthropomorphic depiction of bedbugs as soldiers on the march in Down and Out in London and Paris, published in 1933, well illustrates this idea of infestation as a domestic disruption and highlights the prominence of bedbugs in the popular imagination at this time. Mobilising the military and sacrificial metaphors commonly deployed by modernising hygiene reformers, he writes:

The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn sulphur and drive them into the next room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort by having his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty place, but homelike.²²

Orwell emphasises the intimately close relationship between neglected, dilapidated and overcrowded buildings and bedbug infestations. This episode suggests the insects to be integral to the decaying fabric of a poorly built and run-down boarding house occupied by low-income workers. The accretion of wallpapers indexes the landlord’s long-term negligence. Orwell is just one author in a wider literary heritage of using bedbugs to represent the suffering of the abject poor.²³ The passage also emphasises the difficulty of eliminating the bugs permanently – made nearly impossible through a cyclical process of infestation-disinfesta...