I shudder at my veggie burger, which may be free of meat but probably has .... fast food outlets, mechanics or car washe
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Contents SCIBE Dérive: A Manual
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Jeremy Till . Scarce Pickings
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Flora Bowden . Bromley-by-Bow
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Claire Harper . Traces of Scarcity
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Dougald Hine . Dériving Scarcity
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Deljana Iossifova . The Boundary Walk
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Kate McGeevor . Thoughs on a Dérive
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10 February 2011
SCIBE Dérive: A Manual Dress warm (gloves, hat, scarf, and extra sweater).
Bring
*This manual * Several copies of the attached map * A notebook * A digital camera * Some pens * A sound recorder (if you have one, or else a clever phone)
Arrive
At Bow Road tube station at 12.00 pm on Thursday, 10 February 2011. Meet your fellow and receive further instructions regarding your journey through Bromley-by-Bow.
Dérive!
In the words of Guy-Ernest Debord:
4 Guy Debord’s Naked City
One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Remember that you are looking for manifestations of SCARCITY. Everything you see, everything you discover, everything you record will be related to scarcity in the built environment. It is best not to come with preconceived notions of what you are looking for, but to let the capturing of scarcity unfold – and change as necessary - during the derive. The exercise is just as much about ‘why’ you found something interesting in relation to scarcity as to ‘what’ you found.
Meet
Around 3.00 pm, begin to find your way to the Little Driver and meet your fellow dérivees there at 3.30 pm to discuss your impressions, experiences, and ideas.
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Jeremy Till
SCARCE PICKINGS I am slightly nervous about embarking on a derive to identify scarcity in Bromley-by –Bow. This is for two reasons. First we have been given a lot of money in order to research scarcity, and though we have made strides in conceptualizing it, the actualisation of it remains diffuse, in my mind at least. What happens, then, if we all spend an afternoon looking for it, and then just fall back on the commonplace that it is something to with not having enough? Second, although I have in the past instructed students to go out and derive, I have never actually done so myself. This may be because of an uncertainty as to the revolutionary potential of the derive in its situationist guise, and a concern as to its solipsism in the psychogeographical guise. But, because this was my idea in the first place, I feel obliged to play along. I also need to confront my fears about pinning down scarcity. I set out with only one rule: to find an instance as to what might be construed as scarcity and then to follow that particular logic until it unfolds into another.
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Legislated Scarcity The first clue (because this is deriver as detective) comes quickly. A handwritten sign is stuck to a recycling bin. The bin is a violent pink, not the discreet green of most municipal recycling bins, as if to call attention to the urgency of recycling. The sign says: Please put all recycled waste in pink bags otherwise the council will not take them away.
The council provide nice big obvious pink bins, but then introduce barriers to filling them. I start looking in other pink recycling bins, attracting strange looks as I do: none have the waste in pink bags. The council loudly announce their commitment to recycling on the outside (“It’s so easy” is
printed on the bins), but then chuck away that commitment on the inside through the imposition of a rule that is now probably forgotten by the residents but still enforced by the council. It is easy enough to blame citizen apathy for not abiding by the rules of little pink bags, and to celebrate the person who has bothered to make the sign exhorting their housemates to use the bags, but it is the council that has set up the unnecessary condition, and with this has in a small way accelerated the production of scarcity by taking stuff to landfill that could have been recycled. Later on I will see a big pink recycling bin next door to a black nonrecycling bin, the latter overflowing with perfectly good recyclable or burnable material. I am reminded of a quote in a lecture I once attended:
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“Landfill sites will become the mines of the future.” This might well be true, but it does not make it necessary, and these pink bins full of recyclable stuff deemed unrecyclable, are just a small example of how one might be able to intervene in resource flows to mitigate the future effects of scarcity. Building on this first evidence of legislated scarcity, I now go looking for more, turning right off Bow Road into Campbell Road. It does not take long to find, most obviously the endless signs marking territory, the following within a few yards of each other: This car park is the property of Barclays Bank and is solely for the use of employees and authorised users. This site under CCTV operation Private Grounds: 5mph. All vehicles parked beyond this point and not in accordance with the site regulations for this development will be penalised. You are now entering a controlled area and must park with caution. The latter, which suggests an expansive site to be protected, is stuck on a gate leading into a backyard. Later on in my walk, I see one such sign (“Private Property: Contractual Agreement. This land is strictly for the parking of vehicles complying with the terms set out below....”) stuck on a brand new development, in which there is no area for any cars to be parked and minimal space to be occupied, thus making the sign completely redundant, but nonetheless the message is reinforced by the adjacent CCTV camera which
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is pointed at nothing at all. It is as if the signed protection of property has become the default position, with contractors sticking up notices on any spare wall, setting up quasi-legal structures to defend land, whose apparent scarcity value is seemingly increased. Quite who the land is being protected from is less clear. Another series of signs - “No Cycling”, “Play Here”, “Do Not Play Here”, and so on, too many to list - become all too obvious when I start looking for them. I wonder if this proliferation is particular to Bromley-by-Bow, a signal of its marginal status in which the signs are needed to prevent complete societal breakdown or, as Anna Minton argues in Ground Control, they are just part of a wider and insidious patrolling of spatial and psychic territories. Either way, these endless instructions create a web of limits, of unnecessary social scarcities (of sharing space, of playing, of publicly accessible space). It is the
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accumulated effect that is so damning - a gradual tightening of freedoms though the haphazard accretion of regulations; the “no cycling’ sign comes from the 1950s, but its juxtaposition with a sign announcing that under the new rehabilitation 95% of tenants now feel safer in their homes, creates a nagging connection between the two, as if demon cyclists contribute to an atmosphere of fear. “
With this dismal reading of the overseen spaces of Bromley-by-Bow in mind (probably focussed by too much Minton and Hatherley), a sign further down Campbell Road announcing the green credentials of a construction site came as a glimmer of hope. “THINK GREEN. Manage your construction activities to minimise the impact to the environment.” Emboldened by this statement of good intent, I approach some workmen laying an area of hardwood decking
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and casually ask where it comes from, assuming FSC (Forestry Stewardship Council) sources. The response is unhesitating: “Fuck off, you little snooper,” and suddenly all those public sentiments of good stewardship are blown away by a wind of expediency in which the immediacy and price of materials overrides any concerns of running down precious resources.
Appropriating Scarcity
By this time, depressed by the combination of rain and pointless legislation, I want to move on from this particular theme. The turning point comes with yet another “No Parking” sign, this one protecting a completely empty wasteland that could so easily be used for something else, while opposite on a salvaged bit of common land outside a small block of flats someone has created a small vegetable plot. Now, it is all too easy to gush about the ameliorating effects of urban farming, and god knows I have seen enough student schemes containing urban food production, whose worthiness normally exceeds their practicality or resolution. But this patch is surprisingly uplifting. It feels improvised and probably unlegislated, unlike examples I will see later: neat little boxes of veggies at the Bromley-by-Bow Centre and very legislated, and very excluding, allotments by the railway line. But these ones, all muddled up, must have taken an effort of persuasion by someone for others to give up, or maybe share, their communal area. Inspired by this little patch, I set myself the task to find moments of opportunism, where someone has subverted legislation or appropriated space in order to address some kind of scarcity. The first instance is a
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straightforward reversal of the scarcity of parking: a down-at-heel pub packs their car park full with Canary Wharf cars for £5 a pop. Further down Devons Road, a company has filled up their backyard with stacked Portacabins, probably initially as a temporary measure but now turned permanent, flouting planning regulations. Then up Purdey Street, to the railway arches, the slackest of all space, just waiting to be filled: with chickens, with semilegal builders stores, with night clubs - all with an air of improvisation and thus impermanence, a provisional architecture for provisional times, literally filling a gap (of need, of space), but in way that eschews the normal systems of exchange.
Further on this claiming of space becomes more overt. In the corner of a patch of open land, someone has surreptitiously extended their garden with a hybrid wall/shed/gate/gazebo. Most sensible of all is the person who has converted the garage from their 1970s council house, included when all houses were deemed to require parking, and converted it into more living space, a straightforward signal that Tower Hamlets has the third lowest car ownership of any Borough in the country.
There is an affirming pragmatism about these examples of appropriation (and more were spotted by others: Dougald’s favourite a garden shed yanked up on to a first floor balcony). They subvert convention in a manner whose adhocism is unthreatening; a gentle claim on what would otherwise be unused.
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Repairing Scarcity By this time, I am hungry. Others noted the lack of food in the area, but I suspect this is more to do with the type rather than the quantity. I must say I shudder at my veggie burger, which may be free of meat but probably has never seen anything else living either, served in a cacophony of cockney girls twisting round their vowels to confuse the uncomprehending Bangladeshi owner. Looking up, I see a heater blowing warm down to fill the gap left by a broken door closer. It would be easy enough to get up on a chair and unjam the door closer, and at the same time switch off the heater. This sets me off on my next search, that for instances where creative or pragmatic repair might relieve the effects or production of scarcity. This hunt is less fruitful. There is the 1960s block under scaffold as it is overclad, but that only deals with one resource (energy) and not others (space, social configuration, openness) as one gets in the brilliant work of Lacaton and Vassal, so that it is likely that by focussing on just one scarcity, one may actually be producing future scarcities in other areas, redundancies even.
At a smaller scale, there is more promise of repairing scarcity. A newly laid area of landscaping has ignored desire lines and so freshly planted shrubs are already getting trampled down: a minor reconfiguration of paving/planting would make only a small difference, as does the action of someone further on placing two discarded bedheads at the end of a parking bay in order to protect a small flower bed, but an accumulation of such actions might nudge the decaying infrastructure in the right direction.
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The most promising insight is in a furniture shop; well, not in it, but in its implications. K6 Furniture, one of the few shops open on the high street, sells desperately cheap and desperately made imported furniture. It looks destined for a short life, maybe to join all the beds, tables, sofas left to rot on the streets around. But, with a bit of care and attention, those beds, tables and sofas could be brought back to life, a system of repair of scarcity that could be enacted if skills were developed and facilities made available.
Immaterial Scarcity
Walking away from the empty centre, I come across signs of attempted gentrification: a row of faux Victorian/Georgian/Neo-Classical houses. Faux because they are still smaller than the originals and completely mash-up any sense of proportion. My eyes goes hungrily to the surplus of lead flashing, there only to protect a meaningless set of decorative accretions. Underneath this is a broken window patched with some chipboard, and all I want to do is
14 redistribute the excess to address a little gap.
But enough of this material representation of scarcity. Other effects are there in the ether: in the smells and noises, in absences rather than the bad presences I have documented so far. So in my final walk up to meet the others, I just talk into my iPhone. Thus: A terrible smell by Bromley-by-Bow station Endless noise Nothing to eat for bloody miles Another closed down pub Bloody nothing to eat for miles A new development announces: “Balconies to most apartments.” Nothing to bloody eat for miles A fake Japanese garden for the new marketing suite, wilting by the side of the motorway A sense of a complete lack of public or social space A team of women clean one showhome whilst next door a team of men drag dirt into the almost finished kitchen ....
And so on and on. It would be easy enough to get overwhelmed by this heaping up of scarcity on scarcity until our middle-class sensibilities are upset by the association with poverty, our liberal leanings assaulted by the restrictions, our intelligence insulted by the sheer stupidity of so much of it. And then walk away from it.
But we aren’t allowed to walk away from it; the grant won’t let us. The most direct route into this apparently hopeless accumulation of scarcities is to take on its very stupidity, to intervene not through creative acts of wonder, but through exercising creativity mundanely on the most obvious fault lines. Sitting in the pub afterwards, Jon identifies the way-in even better. Because the scarcities are indeed so overwhelming, the temptation is to escape them by abstracting them:
15 ‘It is all to do with the flows of capital’ ‘It is all to do with Big Society’ It is all to do with globalisation’ ..and in this forget scarcity’s palpable reality and its effects on people. Jon’s suggestion was to work out from those effects by extracting the impact and reality of scarcity through its human stories, and only then to try to make sense of it at a meta-level through understanding the relational systems that may join the parts together. I am sure this is the right way in, because one thing that the derive told me is that scarcity in all its manifestations is very real and very everyday, and must be dealt with as such.
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Flora Bowden
BROMLEY-BY-BOW Scarcity in Bromley by Bow came in various forms: people, busyness, street life, noise (excluding construction), restaurants, places of entertainment or arts venues, shops and the variety of them. While abundance included: scaffolding, building renovations on some old housing stock, boarded-up windows on others, new ‘luxury’ flats, warehouse conversions overlooking the canal, HARCA signs (the housing association), satellite dishes, small, seemingly under-used green spaces, parked cars, train tracks and railway arches.
Another listing part of my derive process entailed logging the land use activities I encountered. Aside from housing, which was by far the dominant typology (usually blocks of flats, but rows of Victorian terraces too) the principle amenities I uncovered were betting shops, kebab shops and other fast food outlets, mechanics or car washes (often near or under the railways), a couple of cafes, newsagents, several churches, usually with community centres or nurseries attached, a few pubs and a few more that have been converted into flats. The dominant trend was towards very local, convenience shops and services. There was little sign of offices or places of work, (other of course, than Canary Wharf looming large nearby), and little evidence of
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attractions that might draw people into Bromley by Bow from beyond the ward limits.
The main exception to this is the St. Paul’s Way Trust School, possibly one of the last completed Building Schools for the Future projects, which surely attracts children from other areas of Tower Hamlets. Since its refurbishment last year the school has offered an art gallery and theatre, as well as football pitch and Internet café to its students and the wider community.1 The new bright white building stands in stark contrast to much of the surrounding residential architecture, and certainly promotes itself as a new community hub. The exact nature of its function as a community connector though, who uses it, when and how, remains unclear and requires a little more digging.
1
Similarly, a consensus among the London group seemed to emerge in the http://www.stpaulsway.org/bsf_main.htm. Last Accessed on 16 February 2011.
18 post-dérive discussion that we now knew much more about the material make-up of Bromley by Bow, but that we were still looking for further insights about the ways of life and activities of the inhabitants. Three broadly agreed group discoveries were:
1. The scarcity of people
Most of the group commented on a lack of noticeable activity and a quietness in the streets, an under-supply of posters for events or other signs of community life in the public realm. We know of course that Bromley by Bow is not at all under-populated: the borough of Tower Hamlets has one of the densest populations in London (642 domestic buildings and gardens per hectare).2 But to outsiders, newcomers to the area, there were few cluesabout that community life or where the residents were working, playing and gathering.
2. There is an excess of instructions on the public realm
Rules and regulations seem to be nailed, stuck or painted on the many walls, fences and boundaries that demarcate private and public spaces. Legislature about what is allowed and forbidden, what can be done here, but not over there, maps out a topography of different activities and freedoms across the open spaces. While there are few posters to advertise local events, the walls feature often-permanent signs from the Council, Housing Association, private property owner or other individual with instructions or information about that space. Most of the group returned with notes or photos of various such examples, ranging from the commonplace ‘No Parking’ or ‘Private Property’, to the more surprising ‘This is Art’ (on some objects not to be touched) and ‘Play Here’ instructing children to play and enjoy themselves in one area, but perhaps also suggesting not to do so in any surrounding area.
3. The strongest signs of life are often in the blurred boundaries of private and public space
In and around the residential areas – the stairwells or garages - there were suggestions of residents slightly spreading out and claiming small pockets of extra space for themselves. In the absence of seeing many people, evidence of them could often be found in the nooks and crannies around their homes, in the communal spaces or forecourts whose functions were not as clearly 2 http://data.london.gov.uk/datastore/applications/population-density-2009. Accessed on 17 February 2011.
Last
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prescribed as the sign-ridden public realm. There was a trend within the group to take note of personal objects, such as a painting leaning against the outside of a house, or of evidence of care and craft, such as an ad-hoc vegetable patch cultivated in an apparent wasteland. These were the signs for the group of the communities that we were looking for; that we are hoping to work with and that we are would like to understand better.
How these points triangulate
It seems that there could be a connection between the three findings and their relationship to different realms of urban space. The signs that instruct and forbid certain behaviours and activities clearly seek to limit the uses of the public realm. Perhaps they do so so successfully that they have also
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removed or discouraged any other kinds of community activity to take place in Bromley by Bow’s public spaces. The community life may have moved elsewhere, to within the homes, within the churches, the mosques, schools or pubs. And perhaps also, this strong imposition of legislature and regulation on the public realm has led people to domesticate, appropriate and manipulate the more ambiguous and less patrolled zones, to use their doorsteps, empty garages or communal gardens to make their mark on the city. Perhaps it is in these ways and in these spaces, with a little more room for manoeuvre, that we can witness the ways in which the population of
21 Bromley by Bow are already creatively overcoming conditions of scarcity and adapting the built environment to meet their own needs.
How to continue
We are now looking for ways to work with and understand more about the communities of Bromley by Bow. We already have some connections into the Bromley by Bow Centre, an innovative community organisation that is helping the local population address issues of health, wellbeing and employment, among others. And with the Council and Housing Association being responsible for 48% and 24.4% of the ward’s housing, respectively; work with these bodies will be vital.3 But it will also be important to look for the informal social networks that exist, to understand the natural clusters and connections between people and how people currently feel and respond to their urban space. In the group discussion, the idea of impromptu drawing classes, or flash-mob styled pavement drawing sessions were floated as a way of getting to know the local residents.
Two photographic projects sprang to mind throughout these discussions: Richard Wentworth’s Making Do and Getting By records the minor adaptations that people make to the city and hints of human life that have now moved on. As the Photographer’s Gallery wrote about his 2001 exhibition ‘It’s [the city’s] pavements are a “stage” for social activity, and its physical details, however fleeting, full of meaning about the nature of an urban society - and what the individuals within it, own, do, make and improvise.’4 Artist Gillian Wearing’s photographic series Signs also investigates the cityscape, but focuses more directly on the individuals inhabiting it and quite literally draws out from them their thoughts and feelings to reveal them to the audience. The full title is in fact Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, which maybe says enough. It is a way of finding out what citizens are really thinking and feeling, and perhaps in Bromley by Bow, could be a lesson for how to deeply engage with the community and their opinions of scarcity. 3 Bromley by Bow ward 2001 Census information available online at: http://www. towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgsl/351-400/367_census_information.aspx. Last Accessed on 17 February 2011. 4 Richard Wentworth and Eugene Atget. Faux Amis. The Photographer’s Gallery, London, 2001. Information available online at: http://www.photonet.org.uk/index.php?pxid=149
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Claire Harper
Traces of Scarcity Taking the right-most path at the first junction, and then straight and then… a brick wall. The railway viaduct that delineates the western boundary of the ward was the first in a series of dead-ends. Each blank-wall, locked gate and access-only sign contributed to a feeling of the site as an island, physically separated and accessed determinedly. The permeability anticipated in the free-moving pattern of the derive was not to be found. Thus, the right, straight- straight, left and left again pattern soon became a compromise, limited by restricted access and cul-de-sac moves. The derive is organised for the purpose of beginning a conversation about the exposure of scarcity in the built environment. Scarcity of what, I wondered? It is not the custom of the derive to seek either particular spatial events, or symptoms of particular social causes, and even if I had tried, I would not have known what evidence to look for.
These findings therefore relate to the experience of the site as encountered on a very wet, 10th February 2011 and are framed as conditions of ‘scarcity’ where it acts to limit opportunity.
These scarcities are explored in relation to Michael Sorkin’s ‘Bill of Rights’; a covenant of twenty rights that he ascribes to residents of the hypothetical
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24 Far left: Railway viaduct western boundary.
along
Left: ‘No Access’, ‘Residents Only’ signs on new apartments, outside of the site, but limiting access through the cemetery to the other side of the tracks
City. The rights establish a type of agency, describing freedoms that an individual should have. The ‘scarcities’ that I have attempted to describe are a series of observed restrictions to these freedoms.
Sorkin sets out twenty ‘rights’ in his Bill. My mapping refers to six of these; the right to privacy and non-participation including chosen anonymity, the right to free movement, freedom to live any chosen social arrangement with scope for individuation, the right to hygiene, and finally permanence.
A. The right to anonymity
Observing the communal garden area north of Devons Road the following encounters were observed and recorded.
The maisonettes enclose a square which has a communal garden area. It is grassed, enclosed by a low-level hedge. It has benches and some trees. It prompted me to stop because for the first time I could hear voices. They were disturbing what became apparent as the absolute silence I had become used to. Two men were talking over the fence, one had a dog. The silence was apparent because I could hear their conversation. A few moments later a man arrived in a car. He went to ring the bell of the maisonettes, two other bells sounded, not quite in unison, but from the other end of the garden I could hear evidence of an encounter. The silence precludes the freedom of anonymity.
25 1. Three people come to the car, two women and one older man - the two women get in, the man returns indoors. 2. Two men are chatting over the fence. They do not stop when I walk past with my camera. 3. A man walks past, quickly (it is raining). 4. One of the chatting men walks away with his dog. Their goodbyes are heard from the oger side of the garden. 5. The man exercises his dog on the garden. The dog is not very energetic. The man cannot throuw ver far (there are cares and gardens around). 6. A man arrives in car. He parks and walks to the stair door. He rings the bell - two other bells in the building sound at the same time. There is no other sound. 7. The man and his dog return to where the two men had been talking. The second man comes to the fence - they continue chatting. 8. Another man comes from Devons Road and walks along the south edge.
B. The right to free movement Physical barriers prohibit free movement. The barriers are all physical and robust, but their appearance is also a deterrent.
Locked gate restricts access through the site to Devons Road station. Barriers to defend existing steel gate.
26 These gates to prevent unauthorised traffic. Multi-lingual signs.
The same building had four England flags displayed across the front. Adjacent gardens; one very neatly maintained and fenced. The gravel bed on the left has garden lamps for up-lighting the plants.
C. The right to live according to chosen social arrangements Demarked territories suggest tensions over space, use of space and conflicting social and spatial practice.
The freedom to live according to chosen social arrangements might be limited by space. Overspill from dwellings is evident across the site, where balconies and private gardens are frequently used for storage. It may be a symptom of a shortage of space, over-occupation of the dwellings or inappropriate arrangement of space.
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D. The right to individuation Repetitive occurrence of the same gated panels, enclosing the communal stair wells signifies continuity (even monopoly) of ownership of the housing across Bromley-by-Bow. The screens are robust and utilitarian. The buildings are ‘tagged’ – property of the Management Organisation.
E. Hygiene
The dumping of waste is unhygienic and prohibits other use of the space. No resident of Sorkin’s hypothetical city should be confronted by the detritus of another.
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F. The right to permanence A large area of the site is shrouded in scaffold. Large signs declare that in 100 days, Bromley by Bow will be better because of these improvements. However, the upheaval is vast and the physical extent of the works is debilitating.
The works are a signal of change; they threaten residents’ right to permanence. The experience is one of impermanence, transition and foreboding. The works are a consequence of, (amongst other factors), a transfer of ownership of the buildings. The tenancy of the residents does not supply agency sufficient to control or affect this period of change (left, bottom).
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Dougald Hine
Dériving Scarcity Under each railway arch along Arnold Road, you can get a different part of a car repaired or replaced. Tyres, exhausts, side panels - you could work your way from arch to arch, cobble together a whole vehicle by the time you reach the corner with Bow Road, where the valeting service under the final arch promises the “best hand-job in London!”1 I carry on in the other direction, into Bromley-by-Bow, thinking how neatly the economy of private transport nestles in the underbelly of an older collective infrastructure.
I pass under another railway bridge - so many lines splitting and crossing each other, so many people carried over these streets each day - and turn right off Campbell Road, along one side of a park. I stop to take a picture of a building whose double doors still stand under the wrought-iron letters: PUBLIC LIBRARY. The doors are closed, though, and the buzzers indicate that it has been converted into flats. This is the first in a series of encounters with buildings whose former
1 This piece was a result of my first outing as thinker-out-of-residence with the Scarcity & Creativity in the Built Environment project led by Professor Jeremy Till at the University of Westminster.
30 “public” status remains highly evident - there are the closed-down pubs on street corners, and later, when I drift off the bottom of the map as far as Chrisp Street market, the brick bulk of the old Public Baths. (A newer sign warns trespassers of the danger from deep excavations.)
Maybe it’s just the rain getting to me, but I begin to read something more into these signs. The way they have been left in place seems to flaunt the closure of public life, even where this is not strictly true. So the old library retains its name, while its replacement is branded an “ideas store” in which “you can choose from 900 learning courses.” There are so few people on the streets this afternoon. Except for one encounter with an old man sitting on his porch, I am left to devise my own
meanings from the place. “Move in For Spring 2011,” announce the posters below one new-build apartment block. “Hurry!! Over 90% Sold.” Another developer is more blunt: MASSIVE SAVINGS ON BRAND NEW APARTMENTS! TAKE ADVANTAGE OF PREVIOUS BUYERS FAILURE TO COMPLETE These signs read like an induction manual for the new scarcity. They tell us how to inhabit this freshly private world: go shopping for learning, scramble over each other for a bit of desirable space. (How are they getting on, selling all these flats, I wonder? Do the urgent signs reflect a scarcity of buyers - or, at least, buyers in a position to complete?)
On the other side of Devas Street, straight across from the block with “Over 90% Sold”, a banner hangs two-storeys high on the stained wall of Broxbourne House: Poplar HARCA
100 Day Promise Brighter Cleaner Safer As a visitor, wandering through the area for the first time, something
31 about the promise unnerves me: its fragments of bold language, not quite connected, offering a non-specific crackdown on darkness, dirt and danger. If the property developers address me as an individual in an economic war of all-against-all, what do I become in front of this set of initials? Something to be tidied up?
In 1998, Tower Hamlets began transferring its council housing to the Poplar Housing and Regeneration Community Association, a new social landlord created for the purpose. A year after the first transfer, residents on a second round of estates voted against the transfer of their homes to the HARCA. They were then consulted until they changed their minds. Perhaps if I lived here, the banner would have me looking forward to a brighter, cleaner, safer Bromley-by-Bow. Like motherhood or apple pie, these are hard things to be against. Or perhaps that is part of the trouble? If the HARCA stands for motherhood and apple pie, what ground does that leave for those who still have Defend Council Housing posters in their windows? I find myself thinking about another kind of ground, the dirty, untidy, fertile patches from which things grow. Because the aspiration to brightness and cleanliness, even as it responds to real fears and real desires for a pleasant place to live, is always at risk of leading to sterility.
I notice this in the signs which police the usage of the walkways and patches of park I come across. As in any neighbourhood, these are overwhelmingly forbidding. Spaces are defined by the games we can’t play there, the activities which won’t be tolerated. “Occupied homes,” reads a sign on a building site. “Please refrain from using obscene language at all times.” That one redeems itself, because I can’t read it without imagining that it was put up in response to actual incidents, the inevitable abrasions when people rub up against one another. As with most of this genre of signage, though, I’m reminded of Slavoj Zizek’s observation that the rights regarded as inviolate today are all versions of the right to be left alone, to isolate ourselves, to remain unaffected by each other. Where are the suggestive signs, I wonder - the signs which invite you to try something you might not otherwise have thought of? (Answer: on the bus stops, advertising things which cost money.) Even the sign at Prospect Park which reads “Play Here!” feels like a command, rather than an invitation. (The detail on this sign is fascinating: play is illustrated with an image of a rainbow under construction, little people pushing wheelbarrows, toy-like cranes hoisting blocks of colour onto the scaffolding.)
32 Play, or its absence, may offer an angle from which to bring scarcity into focus. Pat Kane - in his book The Play Ethic – suggests that play requires “the assumption of abundance”, the feeling that there is plenty of pleasure to go round. To get the sense of this, I draw a line between two ways in which people talk about “abundance”: as an unrestricted supply of resources; or as the sense of having “enough, and then some”. My friend Tom, who goes foraging in the woods of the Black Isle, tells me that in a hard year, the mice will squirrel away every nut they find at the first opportunity; but in a good year, he has noticed them playing with the nuts, rolling them around or making heaps in full view. So long as abundance is understood as “enough, and then some”, play can break out in the simplest spaces and moments. Once it has been framed as “an unrestricted supply”, the world becomes a domain of scarcity, life a constant, unplayful struggle to take advantage of each other. I brought these ideas with me today, like the bag which is too heavy on my shoulder and the umbrella which almost keeps the rain off. If I had brought other ideas, I would have noticed other things. With that caveat, what I am seeing - what I am reading into these streets - is not a polarisation between the public and the private, nor a subjugation of one by the other, but a publicprivate partnership to construct a domain of scarcity.
The promise of a brighter, cleaner future; the urges to “hurry, while (housing) stocks last”; the forbidding signs; the ostentatious closure of older, commoner kinds of “public” space, which were not defined in terms of consumption - all of these seem to drive towards an experience of the world which has little room for play, because it insists that we are surrounded by scarcity, constantly looking over our shoulders. And yet this is never quite the case, the reality falls thankfully short of the rhetoric, because there is something else I have been noticing all afternoon. Unsignposted, in pockets, neglected or secondary spaces, or on the boundaries between the private and the public, there are little outbreaks of growth and improvisation. Plants, naturally, provide the first examples, because everything which grows speaks of the possibility of abundance. Back at Rounton Road, I stop to take a picture of a tree whose roots have worked loose the bricks planted around it, subverting their pattern. Behind the railway line at Purdey Street, a set of allotment gardens are order patched with chaos, the fencing cobbled together from all kinds of reclaimed metal, railings capped with a row of old plastic bottles for reuse inside. (It looks like passersby have been adding
33 their own empties to the bottle collection.) I doubt that the damp pile of rugs and carpet ends in the corner conforms to the HARCA vision for a brighter, cleaner Poplar, but they seem to have found another use, like the materials from which the lean-to shacks at the back have been constructed.
These allotments are only the largest eruption of an improvised, organic, hacked-together approach to making spaces which I meet throughout the afternoon. It’s there in the backyard structures, held together with planks, corrugated plastic, part of a bedstead or the wheel from an old trailer. It’s there in the garden shed which someone has erected on a first floor balcony. (Because - among other things - the unexpected use of space is always a kind of joke at the expense of power, the architectural equivalent of a moustache drawn on a portrait.)
I wonder about the parallels to the Jugaad culture of improvised technology in India which has begun to catch the attention of western designers. There’s a similar sense of making things work from the materials which happen to be to hand, in ways no one would think of if starting from a blank canvas. These outbreaks are not the dominant or the defining characteristic of this built environment, but there is a spirit to them which stands out from their surroundings. By contrast to their tangled playfulness, they bring into view the uncreative consensus between the public and private forces which appear to face each other across these streets. Looking back along Devas Street, now, I seem to see a humourless symmetry between the HARCA and the private developers. At which point, I realise again how little I know this part of London. And when we are gathered in the pub, warming ourselves with cups of tea, I wonder if these playful hacks which caught my attention might offer us some starting points, some stories to enquire into, as we try to understand the intersections of scarcity and abundance, restriction and creativity in the lives of the people who live here.
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Deljana Iossifova
The Boundary Walk Thursday, 27 January 2011. I set out to explore ‘scarcity’ on the edges of Bromley-by-Bow. Having arrived at Bow Road tube station, I decide on a set of rules to guide me in my search: I will walk the official ward boundary in clockwise direction, stopping every five minutes to take four photographs: (1) one of the view in front of me, in the direction of my walk;
(2) a close-up of the closest building to my left;
(3) a photo of the first person that crosses my path;
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(4) a photo of the most obvious signifier of ‘scarcity’: evidently ‘not enough’ or ‘too little’ of something.
Quite soon, I realise that following the official ward boundary will not be possible everywhere (light pink dotted line, left). Between points 03 and 08, the routes I take lead me to the gates of construction sites, factories, or film studios, where officers send me away. It takes more than two hours to complete this walk.
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01. I exit Bow Road tube station – it is freezing cold. My walk begins as I approach a railway bridge, the view of a pub right next to a gas station in front of me, and signs advertising ‘best hand and car wash & valeting’ posted everywhere, accompanied by rather uninspired graffiti. Across the street to my left a plant and tool hire store, one of eleven in London alone: ‘all your equipment needs….one company’. I find the closest signs of scarcity to my right: the facade of the small eatery is missing parts of its cladding, and only the ‘o’ and ‘p’ of the neon ‘open’ sign in the window flicker sadly to invite customers in – not without warnings that the ‘premises are protected by closed circuit television’, that smoking is not allowed, and that dogs are not welcome.
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02. ‘Bow Church’ in front of me sits surrounded by Bow Road on all sides. Like little islands, too, pavement repair works are fenced off, seemingly forgotten. The ‘Kings Arms’ to the left used to be a pub - at least since Victorian times - but closed its doors recently, like many other pubs in the area . Of the more than twenty
known pubs around, only a hand full remain functioning: the Blue Anchor, the Bow Bells, the Distillers Arms (now a night club), the Little Driver, and the Widow’s
Son. Among the closed pubs are the Duke of Wellington, General Havelock Arms (demolished), Imperial Crown, King’s Arms, Moulder’s Arms, Old Duke of Cambridge, Pearly King (formerly Seven Stars), Priory Tavern, Queen Victoria, Rose & Crown, Tenterden Arms, and the now demolished Three Cups. The Bombay Grab closed in 1992 and was converted into a Muslim cultural centre and mosque.
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03. The Bow flyover in front of me. Just steps away, what is left of the factories along the river Lea, crowned by a chimney; further away bigscale advertisement for an isotonic drink that promises maximum energy from zero calories; and in the background the residential high-rise towers of the neighbouring borough of Newham. To the left, rotting factories and warehouses, the view framed by the elevated highway and the columns supporting it. ‘HAND CAR WASH’ signs, again, calling for customers. First encounter with one of the many officers and workers on site, visible from far away in their neon wear. Gates to industrial yards left open, little sheds that used to house guards, forgotten.
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04. It is impossible to stay on my route, so I keep going, down the main road. Construction cranes on the horizon, road and pavement works omnipresent. I pass another construction site as I try to find my way to the river, and back to my route; workers drinking tea and coffee, smoking cigarettes, or chatting on their mobiles. Close to no chance to reach the other side of the road, where the Porsche Centre East London has settled; on my side of the highway – just the seemingly endless string of car repair shops. Most have closed for good. Boarded-up places behind broken windows.
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05. Another unsuccessful attempt to reach my intended route leads me to Sugarhouse Lane – officially in Stratford. The atmosphere here is rather gloomy, as demolition is going on behind almost every gate, surprisingly, despite the declaration of Sugarhouse Lane as a conservation area in 2008. The London Development Agency (LDA), London Thames Gateway Development Corporation (LTGDC), London Borough of Newham, English Heritage, and Lea Valley Regional Park Authority are working together with Stephen Taylor Architects to elaborate a masterplan for the area. Start-ups such as Urban Development (supporting artists, producers, songwriters and industry professionals) cluster in ‘business centres’ in the Lane, right next to established businesses like 3 Mills Studios.
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06. I finally get back ‘on track’, or, at least, I head toward the right direction. I get down to the river on a path that I was introduced to a few weeks earlier when I went on one of the Olympic Walks organised by the Institute of Tourist Guiding. The path, so I was told, had once been used by horses towing barges on the river. On my side of the water, the path leads me along fences and walls, covered and green, and behind them hidden family homes in comparatively good condition; most guarded by alarm systems. It seems hard to find signs of ‘scarcity’ here, and rather, this time I am overwhelmed by ‘abundance’: cars, clean and well-kept. On the other side of the water, however, more derelict factories and warehouses are awaiting decisions on their fate.
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07. The first glimpse of Canary Wharf way in the background. 3 Mills Studios right in front of me, and to my right, to be reached by the gated bridge over the water – which reaches a particularly shallow point here, exposing the variety of stuff that had been thrown into it: bottles, shoes, bags, shopping carts – apparently from the near-by Tesco Superstore. To my left, more of the construction works going on, this time: the redevelopment of the public park. I am told work is being done to create play areas for children, in line with work on the Lea River Park project, and especially in view of the Olympics.
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08. Maybe because it is a cold and rainy day; maybe because it is a Thursday, a work day; or maybe just because people have better things to do than to walk along predefined routes: there is not a person in sight. The river walk is deserted, and the benches along the water remain unused. There are, however, birds on the water, and the occasional squirrel. I pass the Three Mills landmark to my left: an industrial area since the 11th century, first gunpowder and corn, then grain for gin had been milled here. It takes ages before, finally, another person comes my way. Across the river, I see the Barratt Homes construction site, taking the place of the former St Andrews hospital, in the background. But closer, scaffolding stored in masses in what looks like an empty parking lot. And a bonfire in the middle of it all.
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09. Canary Wharf is moving closer as the Bow Locks appear in front of me. The Locks were rebuilt in 1930, when the nearby Prescott Channel was completed (the new Three Mills Lock (or Prescott Lock) was completed as recently as 2009 by British Waterways, to allow barges carrying building material to two major construction sites: that of the Olympic Park, and Australian Westfield Group’s Stratford City – ‘Europe’s largest urban shopping centre’). Construction workers, of course, are the only people far and wide. ‘Scarcity’ can be found in the ‘design’ of the industrial buildings to my left. The little house nearby makes me wonder why, on earth, one would have security grills on a little house with a chimney in need of repair and lacking, at least from the outside, pretty much everything else.
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10. I reach the Limehouse Cut and pass underneath the highway. As I emerge back into light, I see the Berkeley construction site of a new residential development – the Caspian Wharf - and to my left another giant advertisement, urging me to ‘flaunt those jeans’ with the help of Special K. Right next to it, my ‘scarcity’ find: the Tweed House. Boarded up, the council block is awaiting demolition of 47 existing flats and redevelopment into 115 residential units arranged in a 13-storey tower and 6-storey lower-rise (never mind the resemblance to the nearby St Andrews development) – by the ubiquitous housing association Poplar HARCA, of course.
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Kate McGeevor
THOUGHTS ON A DÉRIVE Scarcity in Bromley by Bow came in various forms: people, busyness, street life, noise (excluding construction), restaurants, places of entertainment or arts venues, shops and the variety of them.I arrive in Bromley by Bow the second time, by bus, which stops outside the Tesco superstore. A friend who works at the nearby Bromley by Bow Centre has recommended a visit to the Tesco, to see the community noticeboard inside. While a supermarket might not seem the most obvious place to spot the ‘manifestations of scarcity’ with which I’m briefed, two examples appear immediately in the form of large empty noticeboards: there are no ‘Current employment opportunities’ nor ‘Healthy food tips’ on offer in Bromley by Bow Tesco it seems. What there is instead, on an adjacent board advertising items for sale, is an indication that all is not well in the local housing market; ‘We buy houses fast for cash. Stop repossession now. Sale completed in 28 days. Completely confidential’ assures the handwritten sign. I wonder what price the houses sell for.
The community noticeboard that I’ve come to visit has more on offer, advertising local youth activities, bingo nights and – through the medium of photo montage - the ‘transformation’ of the Tesco Community Garden, from a rough grass verge on the side of the teeming A12 to a less rough grass verge
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labelled ‘work in progress’. Outside, I cross over the road to see the garden for myself. Mother nature has returned with her pitchfork and is reclaiming the space as her own (1). What is striking as I walk towards Bromley by Bow is just how hard it is to get to. The A11’s slip roads knot with the Northern Approach to the Blackwall Tunnel, encircling the northern and eastern borders of Bromley and preventing all but the most determined of pedestrians from actually finding a route into the area. Surrounded by the blur of traffic one can only imagine what it must be like to be the Church of St Mary’s (‘Bow Church’). Despite finding itself surrounded on all sounds by automobility, the Church founded in 1311 – still maintains an air of tranquillity in its small, well-kept graveyard. Further along the Bow road, a small grocers stands housed in the former Stratford Cooperative and Industrial Society. A beehive – a popular emblem of the co-operative movement – crowns the building (2). Further still, I pass the Bow Business Centre, whose website (revealed on returning to the office) boasts ‘secure private offices’ for small businesses. Not quite a hive of cooperating bees.
On the other side of the road, Bromley High Street opens out onto a desolate open space that looks no better in the winter’s sun than it does the rain (3). Built in the hope it would become a thriving centre of shops, the high street is resolutely a failure. A sign in one of the few shops that isn’t boarded up warns that police will be removing people from an area identified in the poster as a result of ‘numerous complaints about alcohol-related antisocial
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behaviour’. The red outlined area which delineates this zone matches almost exactly the pedestrianised area of Bromley High Street (3). Opposite the shop, four drinkers begin their day, cans in hands and dog in tow. A large Poplar Harca sign shows an artist’s impression of ‘Stroudley Walk as it could look from here’. No ‘will’, only ‘could’.
Heading south through the Devons Estate I remind myself again that my hunt is for scarcity and stop to consider the building site I have wondered into. Signs apologies for any inconvenience caused. Looking around, it’s hard to see how any part of what is going on in the Estate could be convenient. The low drumming and high pitched screeches of saws, drills and hammers fill the air, builders swear into mobile phones or shout down from rooftops to workmates near the van, buckets full of cement, sand and tools block doorways and hallways, metal fences lie piled or propped, and green netting wraps buildings and drapes from scaffolds while skips occupy parking spaces. Inconvenience is definitely not scarce. On my first visit, on a grey wet day, Bromley by Bow seemed lacking in colour but my second visit is brighter. Blue boardings encircle spaces of redevelopment, pastels provide lowlights to new housing blocks (mint green or lilac wall panelling anyone?), and bright pink bins request recycling. High vis fluorescent jackets strut through the streets as yellow bin chutes snake from on high like the slides at the Rhyl Sun Centre. Yet for all this brightness, it is only in the grounds of the Bromley by Bow Centre and the neighbouring Kingsley Hall that I notice natural colour – purple and yellow crocuses
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peeping through the lawn. February is hardly a colourful month but there are few early signs of spring on show.
It is in the grounds of these centres that I really feel it is possible to connect with nature. (Tesco Community Garden doesn’t qualify). Green space, literally, is not lacking in Bromley by Bow but the manicured grass of the area’s few community gardens and parks, and the small tracts of tufty greenery that surround estates, give little sense of the truly natural. Houses seem to lack their own green spaces - front ‘gardens’ more often than not exist as brick drives, a patchwork of paving slabs or simply tarmac paths. Back gardens, when prevalent, remain hidden behind wooden fences, contributing little to the community’s natural beauty.
With the exception of the allotment gardens (off Devons Road), there are only a few signs of food being grown by residents. Walking along Grace Street, I spot a make shift lean-to supporting what look like vines, a small attempt to grow a food from a foreign clime perhaps. A woman passes as I take my photo (4).
Mess init she says.
Do you think so? What is it? I think they’re vines of some sort, aren’t they?
Dunno, a right mess. Probably coriander or somet she sniffs.
I recall my friend from the Bromley by Bow Centre telling me that the
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racial tensions in the area often emerge very subtly when talking to people, tensions that arise from a lack of social interaction between different groups. At Rainhill Way, three blocks of flats tower over the area, like the before and after of a reality makeover show. It’s amazing what a bit of make-up and plastic surgery can do (5). I pass a ‘play area’, obviously created as part of the area’s regeneration. A sign-writer (prone to erratic capitalisation) warns children not to bring ‘dogs, glass or Alcohol’ into the area, reminding ‘This is your play area, please help us keep it in good Condition’. It strikes me there are few areas for teenagers in Bromley by Bow, though the graffiti in one underpass I walk through does claim ‘drugs in here’. Looking at the tarmacced play area, I can’t see why teenagers would hang out in here in the evenings. If they wanted a dark, concrete space, they’d be better off on Bromley High Street. At least that has a few sparse trees.
Continuing south along Violet Road, I pass swathes of new development that are a far cry from the Devons Estate. The vast new Caspion Wharf promises the ‘new height in luxury city living’, with a collection of apartments and penthouses located in suitably exotic sounding blocks: ‘Adriatic Apartments’, ‘Aegean Court’, ‘Pacific Court’. I try to work out whether the residents of these new apartments will be able to look out over the estates of Bromley by Bow from their windows and decide they might not. On the bridge nearby, a plaque proclaims ‘This bridge was opened for the use of the public for ever by Walter Hunter Esq. on the 19th day of May 1890’. Looking up at the shell of Caspian Wharf, it’s hard to imagine a stonemason etching such
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a hopeful, long-term commitment to public utility nowadays.
While the literal definition of a dérive is a ‘drift’, drifting along anything other than the main roads and thoroughfares of Bromley by Bow is surprisingly difficult. Both old and new developments maintain strong defenses; metal railings border houses and gardens, blocks of flats are guarded with gates and entryphones (6), while steps and walls separate streets and estates. Neighbourhoods are aggressively delineated rather than welcoming to newcomers and the lack of connection between neighbourhoods, the sense that even very small blocks of housing are private, cut-off spaces, is strong.
On the junction of Violet Road and Devons Road, a large red brick chimney
watches over the Bow Enterprise Park, where a list on the entrance gates suggest much that is enterprising is afoot (7). I ask an elderly woman at a bus stop whether she knows what the chimney was used to be for.
Thirty years I’ve been here, it’s always been here on its own.
Do you know what it was for?
No idea, they were going to pull it down.
The chimney?
Well the buildings over there behind it, pull them down, but I can’t believe it. They’ve only been there ten years. There [she points an empty-
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looking building opposite] used to be furniture…
A furniture factory?
Yeah, furniture. And down there [further down Violet Street] it was toffee, a toffee factory, and there, that’s where they gave them power, you know, Thatcher, to buy their homes. Half of them lost them in the end though.
They lost their homes? [the bus arrives]
That’s the story I’ve heard. There’s lots of good stories round here.
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As an outsider, having spent less than a day walking round Bromley by Bow,
it is difficult to comment on what is scarce, or how scarcity manifests itself, within the homes and lives of the people that live in the area. What I can do is to identify what my brief wonder left me feeling was missing, something that I can sum up in one word: connection. Bromley by Bow is a fragmented place, lacking connections - or so it seems - of many sorts. A connection with nature, alluded to by existing public ‘greenspaces’ but amounting to little more than the opportunity to walk or
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play on a patch of grass, is scarce. A connection with neighbouring wards, cut off by planning decisions which have prioritised transport needs over the everyday needs of local communities, is also lacking. Strongest of all however, for me, was the lack of connection within the area itself. While racial differences and language barriers are no doubt at play, there is little about the built environment that encourages integration. Gates, walls, railings, fences, steps, stairwells… At every turn it seemed that barriers marked where one building or block or estate began and another ended, with little to suggest that movement between them was encouraged or even welcome. Opportunities for social connection, it seemed, are scarce.
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