A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley
holidays that are the purpose – Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and above all Poland – or cheap getaways to the south of Spain or Portugal. One of the operators here, Wizzair, had until recently as its slogan, as you enter the airport, ‘Wizz off to New Europe!’ This Donald Rumsfeld-inspired catchphrase was recently replaced, which is a shame, as Luton services quite precisely the European countries which have been most engulfed by the financial crisis, those that fully embraced in all its lunacy the ‘Anglo-Saxon model’ of deregulated finance, property booms and deindustrialization, adding more recently the concomitant of ruthless, punitive austerity programmes. For these reasons Luton is, in its largely unspoken way, a very important place – a fulcrum of the real New Europe, where neoliberalism has created a new and bracingly unpleasant landscape, leaving far behind the attachment to making and crafting that still occasionally rears its head in France, Germany or Scandinavia.
This is communicated especially sharply in Luton’s architecture, as here you can see that the UK is the very newest part of New Europe, in its total lack of concern for the built environment, in its heedless accumulation of exurban kipple. For instance, if you leave Ok
Then, you’re out, into the forecourt, where you can see some more architectural things; fragments of the earlier, 1970s Luton Airport, such as the concrete watchtower, some dour brick offices for the airlines, and most interestingly an orange hangar for EasyJet, which almost seems to have been conceived as a visual object, with its huge steel supports visible on the façade. One of the blanker hangars on the runway bears the Harrods logo. There’s no way to walk out of the airport, obviously, so you must take a shuttle bus (another £2, please) to the railway station in order to escape; on the way you pass under a heavy concrete bridge – this is here because the runway actually passes overhead, an impressive piece of heavy engineering. You also pass a factory – this is General Motors’ Luton branch, a complex of some size, a reminder that things are made here, after all. In the near distance is the skyline of Luton itself, with its Arndale Centre and its multistorey car parks. Then, the station, which uses the same architectural language as the airport – metal panels that are filthy with accumulated muck, despite the fact that they are designed to be wipe-clean. The small station has to hold many more people than it was planned for, and gets around this by a bizarre circulation system of multiple escalators, each with a barrier to ensure that heavy baggage is not dragged through. Here, you can wait for the most expensive, lowest quality trains in Western Europe to take you somewhere.
The End of the Urban Renaissance
We’re here as an appropriate entry into a country which, from 1997 to 2010, was supposedly going to create a new and better landscape, but produced instead the purgatory around Luton Airport, and the many places like it. In the near-decade-and-a-half of New Labour hegemony there were certain changes slated to be introduced, after the Thatcher-Major years of underinvestment in the cities in favour of out-of-town retail parks and exurbs, when entirely unplanned ‘Enterprise Zones’ were the vehicles for any new development. New Labour didn’t quite break with Thatcherism, but rather attempted to realize a version of the European social democratic city, fundamentally via Thatcherite means. Labour politicians like John Prescott, Richard Leese or Ken Livingstone, urbanists and architects like Richard Rogers and Ricky Burdett, all seemed to want to create Barcelona or Berlin using the methods of Canary Wharf. Rather than leaving everything to the market, there would be ‘public–private partnerships’ for directing the market into the places it had hitherto neglected – public services, inner cities – which it soon found were profitable enough in their way, especially when underwritten by the state. I wrote about the consequences in 2010 in a book called A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, in which it’s fair to say I was scornful towards the results. Even when writing the book, it was abundantly clear that New Labour and its peculiar form of ‘social Thatcherism’ was coming to an end, although it was not entirely clear what it was going to be replaced with. A new Keynesianism, as favoured by the likes of the current Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls? A new One Nation Toryism, under a Conservative leader determined to lose the bad smell associated with the ‘nasty party’? Or something else?
What we got was, as we now know, something considerably worse: a Tory–Whig coalition committed to an extremist revision of Thatcherism with the New Labour fig leaf stripped off as no longer useful. Yet it won’t do to present this, as Labour apologists are fond of doing, as a phenomenon which owes nothing to the outgoing government. What with the likely production of a double-dip recession by cutting off the stimulus programmes brought in under Gordon Brown, not to mention the ex-PM’s startling and passionate attack on Rupert Murdoch and News International, some act as if the man was the greatest prime minister we never had. Harriet Harman is reincarnated as the scourge of benefit-cutters (does anyone remember her first move as Social Security secretary, slashing disabled and lone parent benefits in 1997? Thought not). Though the Labour Party in 2010–11 briefly showed signs of actual life and debate for the first time in a decade, any amnesia is dangerous. Andrew Lansley’s health care reforms, moving towards an authentic part-privatization of the NHS, build on the Foundation Hospitals, Private Finance Initiatives and ‘market discipline’ brought into the health service by Blairite fiat. The ‘free schools’ run by pushy middle-class parents are City Academies taken to their logical conclusion. The punitive cuts to disabled and unemployment benefits were anticipated by Work and Pensions secretary James Purnell, likewise in the face of rising unemployment. The Browne Report on education that paved the way for the elimination of humanities funding and introduction of £9,000 per annum tuition fees may have been enforced and defended by Tory minister David Willetts, but it was commissioned by the Labour government. The slashing of Housing Benefit and the ending of lifelong council tenure on public housing estates, combined with ‘Right to Buy Plus’, aimed transparently at emptying potentially lucrative inner-city areas of their remaining poor, are possible only because of New Labour’s refusal to build new council housing, its demonizing of estates and their inhabitants, and its attempt to break up ‘single class’ estates in favour of a ‘mixed tenure’, in which a mainly private estate would be, in the parlance, ‘pepper-potted’ with a tiny percentage of ‘affordable’ flats for the deserving poor. The rhetoric of ‘austerity’, the ludicrous notion that a luxuriantly rich Western nation cannot afford its welfare state any more, was a staple of New Labour’s more macho ministers. Nevertheless there are real differences, and it’s in the governments’ respective attitude towards planning, the cities, and by association architecture, that many can be seen.
The Tory–Whig coalition declared, very early on, an end to the ‘Urban Renaissance’ that allegedly characterized the New Labour era, with the production of new inner-urban space and the apparent favouring