Sounding the Heygate estate
2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 15; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13604813.2011.595114
ISSN1470-3629
Autores Tópico(s)Urban Planning and Governance
ResumoAbstract The Heygate estate at London's Elephant and Castle is a highly visible relic of Southwark Council's vigorous housing construction programme in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now almost empty and facing demolition, it is to be replaced by a private development. The estate is a late example of the modernist style in British social housing: a style that is widely perceived to have failed and to have engendered numerous social problems. This paper draws an analogy between the radical impulse in modernist architecture and the aesthetics of sound art. One method of catching a momentary echo of the suggestion of alternative worlds hidden in the fabric of such buildings, it is argued, is through an investigation of the acoustic environment. The paper closes with a description of a sound art project undertaken by the author in and around the Heygate estate. Keywords: architectureBrutalismcouncil housingElephant and CastleLondonmusicsound artSouthwarkUtopia Notes One ironic corollary of the estate's ambience of gritty decadence has been its use in several films and pop videos (including Madonna's ‘Hung Up’) in recent years. The council, according to the South London Press, took out £700 million worth of post-war loans to fund construction and is currently only able to service the debt. See the council's housing strategy document for 1999–2016, available at http://www.southwark.gov.uk/downloads/download/1993/housing_strategy For a sceptical account of the ‘trickle-down’ effects on the local economy of such private developments, which flourished in the New Labour era, see Minton Citation(2009). The Guardian's Stephen Moss, in one of several articles on the Heygate carried by the newspaper in March 2011, described current visions of engineered social mixes as the degenerate successors to 1960s visions of social change. The architectural critic Owen Hatherley Citation(2011) wrote more bitingly of a process of ‘class cleansing’. ‘All Change at the Elephant’, The Star, 10 October 1945. The area has for more than a century drawn the aspirational tag ‘the Piccadilly Circus of south London’. ‘3-Level Roundabout Plan for “Elephant”’, South London Press, 13 December 1946. The documentary concerned was ‘The Writing on the Wall’, BBC Horizon, 11 February 1974. Coleman's research team visited all the estates in Southwark and Tower Hamlets in London, and Blackbird Leys in Oxford—developments containing a total of 4099 blocks. Local authorities were also prevented from the early 1980s from using this income to subsidise rents or even to refurbish existing stock (Ravetz, Citation2001, p. 202). Ravetz notes that the right to buy was so popular that it was adopted as policy by the Labour Party in 1985. When MA photography students at the London College of Communications, sited a few hundred yards from the Heygate, produced a book, Community, ed. P. Sutherland Citation(2008), on the Elephant regeneration project it contained an epigraph and several quotations from Coleman's book and a foreword by Chris Horn, director of the project from 2000 to 2007. Southwark Council was among the book's funders. The council has also funded an oral history project to document the community it has dismantled. It was at one point thought that the Heygate, Aylesbury and North Peckham estates would all be linked by walkway—placing a lattice of ‘streets in the sky’ across a 3 km stretch of territory (Coleman, Citation1985, p. 150). Even Newman concedes the centrality of wealth differentials: ‘The only difference between a low-income and a high-income development is the presence of fences and guards in the upper-income project, or a doorman provided for each of its buildings. These slight but expensive additions, however, are what make the one a workable habitat and the other not’ (Newman, Citation1972, p. 23). The popular philosopher John Gray, for example, writes polemically against utopian experiments in his book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Citation2007). See also Pinder Citation(2005) and Harvey Citation(2000) for discussion of utopian theory and architecture. Pinder notes the authoritarian currents in le Corbusier's thought and Harvey argues for a new ‘dialectical utopianism’ (2000, pp. 83–85). Coleman uses Darwinian natural selection to put the case for ‘defensible territory’—individual, garden-like parcels of land adjacent to the dwelling as an intrinsically human need (Coleman, 1985, p. 18). P. Jones, ed., Imagist Poetry (Citation1972), is an anthology that collects some key documents of imagist theory, written by Pound and others. I am thinking in particular of the work of Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen. For a useful account of the muddled genesis of Objectivism and Pound's role in it, see O'Leary Citation(2008). See the online supplementay file for this article for a selection of close-up photographic images of the fabric of the Heygate estate, at: www.tandfonline.com/ccit See also Marcuse Citation(2010), which urges the continuing relevance of a critical theory ‘grounded in an analysis that constantly contrasts the actual with the possible, that constantly places centre stage the possibility of alternatives’ (p. 366). This composition is relased on vinyl, as part of a split release with sound artist Rob Curgenven, by the Winds Measure label in autumn 2011. See http://windsmeasurerecordings.net/catalog/wm25/ for detail and an audio excerpt.
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