A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley
movement, declaring: ‘We won’t have Richard Rogers designing your school.’ This he linked to the cancellation of the Building Schools for the Future programme, one of the ambitious late New Labour stimulus projects, which he declared was just a machine for enriching architects, though as ever the real beneficiaries were the consultants brought in to manage the labyrinthine Private Finance Initiative contracts. BSF, as it is called in the trade, entailed a massive expansion of the two-tier state education system, with most of the money earmarked for the transformation of ‘bog-standard’ comprehensives into City Academies; its preference for wholesale destruction over refurbishment of serviceable Victorian board schools or 1960s steel-and-glass comprehensives was not driven by any particularly educational motives. The new schools, when they emerged, were mostly bland, mock-modern structures which on occasion had major structural flaws; a few were allowed to be ‘exceptional’, such as the steroidal Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton, designed by Zaha Hadid for ARK, the educational charity run by Hedge Fund manager Arpad ‘Arki’ Busson.1 But the cancellation of BSF was unconditional – no serious school-building or refurbishment programme would replace it. And what of the coming Free Schools, what might they look like? A clue can be found in the fact that Gove’s advisers on their design were former chairmen of Dixons and Tesco. Richard Rogers will be replaced with strip malls.
There are many similar stories. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the state-funded body that assessed new developments on their architectural quality and planning coherence, was wound up by the coalition with all funding cut off – a rump was merged with the Design Council, its already limited powers further circumscribed; at the time of writing, it plans to become a private consultancy, for the local authorities that can spare extra cash for ‘good design’. CABE was a quango of a deeply cliquey sort, with little ability to enforce its advisory role, but it was also regularly critical of developers, especially in the last years of New Labour, when the ‘Kickstart’ stimulus programme threw money at the worst kind of volume housebuilders. At the same time, the Regional Development Agencies were abolished. These were not, it must be said, particularly noble institutions. They were quangos set up to administer what would once have been the province of the elected Metropolitan District Councils (Merseyside, Tyneside, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Greater London, all abolished in 1986 as a threat to central government); state-funded bodies that threw money at redevelopment projects in depressed ex-industrial areas. They were an inadequate substitute, with no public accountability – but their abolition leaves a near-total vacuum, filled only by the dozens of competing, inimical and underfunded local authorities. The list goes on and on – Pathfinder, the highly dubious ‘housing market renewal’ scheme that demolished acres of decent, viable housing in northern cities in order to engineer a property bubble in areas without one, was discontinued, and a good thing too; but the cities thus scarred have no major source of funding to replace or reconstruct what was needlessly destroyed under New Labour. The more general funding squeeze on local government, hitting poor and inner urban areas disproportionately, means that cities will be left to do what they did throughout the 1980s and 1990s – contract, decline, and slowly die.
Planning, and not just of the urban sort, has been a major Tory–Whig target. The planning reforms of the new government aimed to finally cancel the remains of the 1945 Labour government’s still-just-sometimes-extant attempt to create a vaguely humane city and country. In the process, the coalition have found themselves attacking some of their natural allies – conservationists in the shires, alarmed by the imminent presence of Barratt Homes on the green belt, this being among the few areas now where developers can build and make a safe profit; or the National Trust and its supporters, exercised by the putative sell-off of state-owned forests. The extent of their disdain for any attempt to think about, or design, or care for the human environment can be seen in the government’s declaration in 2011 that they were considering withdrawing funding from UNESCO. This multinational body has a tendency to side against developers, in its protection of heritage sites like Liverpool Pier Head or Greenwich Market. Anyone standing in the way of laissez-faire is being taken on, in a startling, deliberately shocking assault on what remains of a planning system or safeguards against perverse development. In a telling phrase, one adviser to the Prime Minister publicly claimed that in local government, ‘chaos is a good thing’.2
The reasons for this are straightforward enough. In order to at once conform with the increasingly psychotic free-market ideology and cut the deficit (even though it is not particularly large historically), all possible restrictions on development must be removed, in a desperate attempt to get one of the few still lucrative departments of the British economy – that obsessed-over property market – back to speculating, building and selling, irrespective of the fact that it was a housing bubble that triggered the current worldwide crisis in the first place. The same logic underpins their one real alternative model of development – the Enterprise Zone. These were a major feature of Thatcherism, brought in across various former industrial areas – zones where taxes, planning regulations and such did not apply, where the ‘non-plan’ once favoured by lefty urbanists would be deployed in ultra-capitalist conditions. The results did little but lead to the relocation of some offices, malls and houses to ex-docks and steelworks; the counter-example which ‘worked’, London’s Docklands, succeeded largely because of two unusual factors – first, the City of London expanding to the point where it needed a second centre, and second, a large degree of public investment, including the construction of a light railway. Even then, the radically inequitable landscape created on the former London Docks can only be seen as a success in a very limited fashion. The main result of Enterprise Zones in the past was the likes of Luton Airport; there’s no reason to think it will be different this time.
The existence of a Tory–Whig coalition is apt, because ever since Thatcher the genuinely conservative, traditionalist, ‘One Nation’ breed of Tory has been conspicuous by its absence; she remade the Tories into Manchester Liberals, ruthless, modernizing free marketeers. That the old Whigs, especially their Orange Book neoliberal wing, should join with them finally reunites the two split fragments of the nineteenth-century ruling class. The entrance, however circumscribed and compromised, of the masses into British politics, via the Labour Party, no longer forms a real part of the political landscape, Labour having long since thrown in their lot with the new Manchester Whiggism. However, it is not a simple matter to run a country in so unromantic a fashion, especially a country so obstinately traditionalist as the UK. To use the useful phrase of Deleuze and Guattari, the Tory–Whig coalition has to always ‘reterritorialize’ in order to make up for the radically ‘deterritorializing’ effects of laissez-faire; its bonfire of old certainties, destruction of communities, and creation of new and hideous landscapes. So there are other ideas doing the rounds, aside from the total assault on the public sphere; the ‘Big Society’, or the ‘localism agenda’, both remnants of David Cameron’s brief, pre-crisis ‘One Nation’ phase. One entails the voluntary running of public services in theory, with Serco or Capita running public services in practice. The other is a directly reactionary appeal to the old ways of life that neoliberalism destroys, via Housing Minister Grant Shapps’s advocacy of ‘vernacular’ designs using local materials; an attack on the ‘garden grabbing’ that allegedly occurred during the urban-based boom of the 2000s, where densification policies ostensibly caused overcrowded, overpacked environments; and an apparent withdrawal of central government edicts from local government – something which might have more genuinely democratizing effects were it not combined with drastic central government cuts to local government funding. These two sops aside, the Tory–Whigs have no ideas. No ideas about the city, no tangible notion of the sort of country they want to build, no conception of the future, no positive proposals whatsoever. By comparison, the dullards of New Labour start to look like the visionaries they all so evidently thought they were.
Garden Festivals as Crystal Palaces
There is, I admit, one positive proposal on which the leaders of both of the main parties seem to agree. It is expressed in different ways, and with different degrees of sincerity. For Ed Miliband, it’s a question of rewarding the ‘producers’ in industry rather than the ‘predators’ of finance capitalism; for George Osborne, ‘we need to start making things again’. Yet there’s no doubt that both the Conservative Party