Who Dares Wins
Page 37
In January 1981 the writer Jeremy Seabrook went to Sunderland. His journey took him to the suburb of Southwick, on the northern bank of the Wear, where male unemployment was estimated to be about 45 per cent. As Seabrook described it, the area’s narrow brick houses sounded like something from an urban nightmare:
The brick dulls to the shade of dried blood, the green is sparse and faded. The privet hedges spike out in all directions, a broken fence collapses in a fan of creosote planks into a front garden. The neglected grass rustles in the biting wind that comes off the North Sea; an Alsatian dog turns on his chain on a patch of worn earth; a child plays with the rubbish spilt from an overturned dustbin. One house, blackened by fire, had been boarded up, but the plywood at the windows is torn away: inside, the litter suggests kids’ glue-sniffing parties, and there are empty bottles of Newcastle Brown and cheap wine. The roads glitter with splinters of broken glass. Many windows are smashed; rough pieces of cardboard cover the cobweb of shattered glass; newspaper to keep out the draught flutters in the rusting metal window-frames.
Even the interiors struck him as appallingly shabby. In one house, ‘colder than the street’, he found four children huddled around a gas-fire in their coats, one drinking from a bottle of cough syrup. The walls, painted ‘chocolate brown’, were ‘damp and sticky’; the cheap ‘council wallpaper’ was ‘marked and greasy’; the window frames were ‘rusty with condensation’. The television, old and blackened, no longer worked. Even the children’s comics had fallen apart. On the floor lay a tattered cover, ‘a picture of a red and green ape-like figure with an eye gouged out’. As Seabrook watched, the girl with the cough syrup, engrossed by her comic, picked at the sofa’s nylon threads with a ‘half-bitten fingernail’.35
In the early 1980s, almost every visitor to Britain’s council estates emphasized the same things: poverty, vandalism, crime; misery, bleakness, shabbiness. And although travellers like Seabrook often concentrated on estates in northern England, the equivalent estates in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London were no better. In the capital, the concrete estates in run-down Hackney and Haringey had become dumping grounds for the immigrant population, among whom unemployment and poverty were appallingly high. The most infamous was the spectacularly depressing Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, built to hold 3,000 people in 1973 but blighted from the start by vermin, leaks and break-ins. Within just three years, half of all prospective tenants were refusing to go there, while dozens of residents were begging to leave. By the early 1980s it was common knowledge that you accepted a flat on the Farm only if you were absolutely desperate.
Yet despite its national notoriety, Broadwater Farm was hardly exceptional. Five miles to the south in Hackney, the high-rise towers of Holly Street had originally been a symbol of optimism and opportunity. But by the early 1980s Holly Street had become a byword for unemployment, prostitution, drug abuse and racial violence. In just one week in 1980, the estate suffered twenty-one separate break-ins. ‘The corridor is a thieves’ highway,’ one visitor wrote. ‘At the corners where blocks join are dark passages, blind alleys, gloomy staircases. It is easy to get lost in these labyrinths, and easy for robbers to lurk or to lose their pursuers. The fear of muggings is so widespread that people, if they have to venture out at night, stick to the lit areas and walk hurriedly.’ This was not a place, in other words, where any sensible family would want to exercise its right to buy.36
To the writers exploring the dark side of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain, the most compelling symbol of the failures of the recent past – a structure that not only stood for the hubris and naivety of planning and modernization, but seemed to house all the demons lurking at the fringes of the public imagination – was the tower block. Wandering through the decrepit streets of Balsall Heath, Birmingham, Jeremy Seabrook looked up to see ‘the blocks of flats, symmetrical towers on their grassy ramparts … gleaming like marble and regular as tombstones’ on the horizon. Here was the brave new world of post-war Britain, promising a cleaner, happier life for the city’s workers and their families. But ‘when you get close to them’, Seabrook wrote, ‘the concrete base is covered with ugly graffiti, the lifts stink, there is litter and debris everywhere’. The towers had been conceived as symbols of modernity, pointing towards a brighter future. But for Seabrook they were ‘places of defeat’, proclaiming ‘that people have acquiesced in what has been done to them’.37
Not all estates were equally bad. On the surface, the sprawling Craigmillar estate, on the south side of Edinburgh, was one of the most deprived places in Scotland, a depressing concrete jungle with severe drug problems, an unsurpassed level of family breakdowns and an unemployment rate four times the national average. But for years the local Craigmillar Festival Society, founded by mothers from a local primary school, had worked hard to create a sense of community, most famously through an annual arts festival. By 1981 the society ran an information office and a job centre, as well as a community transport service, a second-hand shop, numerous playgroups, support groups for the disabled and a music group with ‘15 different bands, everything from punk to trad’.38
But Craigmillar was the exception, not the rule. More typical was Fort Beswick in Manchester, an estate of more than a thousand homes, built at a cost of some £5 million between 1969 and 1973. Like many such estates, Beswick was part of a massive concrete package bought from the construction giant Bison. The residents, who came from Manchester’s dilapidated brick terraces, hated it from the very beginning. Almost from the day the first tenants moved in, the council had been deluged with complaints about cracks, leaks and damp. As early as 1974, the area’s Labour MPs, Gerald Kaufman and Frank Hatton, publicly denounced the developments in the House of Commons. ‘Ugly blots … monstrosities … insects and vermin … young children are trapped … litter and debris … fouled by people and disfigured by graffiti … victims of an architectural vogue’: their litany of complaint could hardly have been more familiar. Indeed, by the early 1980s Manchester’s housing committee was already planning to raze Fort Beswick to the ground and start again. To get the estate into ‘some kind of reasonable condition’, explained the chairman, would cost at least £10 million. Almost incredibly, it was cheaper to knock it down and build hundreds of old-fashioned council houses instead.39
Today it has become fashionable to stick up for the estates of the 1960s, to swoon at their concrete ambitions and dismiss their critics as narrow-minded reactionaries. But the plain fact is that most people loathed living in them. In estate after estate, residents complained that they felt lonely, frightened, abandoned and betrayed. The historian Peter Shapely, who has studied Manchester’s public housing in the 1970s and 1980s, shows that the council was beset almost from the beginning by complaints about ‘decay, dampness, vandalism, noise and condensation’. On Manchester’s catastrophic Hulme Crescents estate (‘Colditz’), the largest public housing project in Europe, more than nine out of ten residents said they wanted to be moved elsewhere, with many saying they preferred the old slums. And when, in November 1981, a reporter asked the residents of Fort Beswick about the plans to demolish it, he found them queuing up to complain about the ‘boredom, loneliness, fleas, cockroaches, cold and damp’. ‘There is no atmosphere here and the kids are always fighting,’ explained 21-year-old Pamela Burke, pointing out the streams of water pouring down her walls and the mould growing on her ceiling. ‘We have had our house fumigated three times to get rid of bugs. I hope they pull the lot down.’ Her neighbour, 24-year-old Nuala Murphy, agreed with every word. ‘The toilets are blocked and the lift never works,’ she added. ‘There is a horrible smell on all the landings. It is a horrible place to live, and I am delighted to hear the buildings might be pulled down.’40
The backlash against concrete modernism naturally played into the hands of the Conservatives. To oppose tower blocks was to champion smallness, privacy, individuality: precisely the values that Mrs Thatcher associated with home ownership and popular capitalism. Later, the Marxist sociologist R
uth Glass claimed that criticism of the tower blocks was ‘part of a general scheme to turn social objectives upside down’, with their detractors portraying them as ‘the work of the devil; peopled by the zombies of the welfare state’. But this is just not true. The criticism of Fort Beswick was led by local Labour MPs, while Jeremy Seabrook was a Marxist who specialized in writing about some of the very poorest people in Britain. Writers and politicians who pointed out the dreadful conditions in Hulme Crescents and Broadwater Farm were not part of some Thatcherite plot; they were simply reporting the grim reality for thousands of ordinary people. Even Tony Benn, canvassing for his son Stephen in London’s local elections in May 1981, was horrified by the ‘awful’ condition of one council block, where ‘people were terrified of coming to the door’. The idea that Seabrook and Benn were reactionaries trying to cast poor tenants as ‘zombies’ is simply ridiculous. Quite the reverse: they saw them as victims, betrayed by the architects, planners and councillors of the post-war decades.41
Even though the tide of opinion had turned by the beginning of the 1980s, the time lag between design and completion was such that some housing projects were still being finished after Mrs Thatcher had taken office. Perhaps the most infamous was the vast barrier block along Coldharbour Lane in south London, officially called Southwyck House but known locally as ‘Brixton Nick’. The block had been designed in 1970 to shield residents from a planned inner-city motorway, with a fortress-like wall and depressingly tiny windows. By the time the GLC scrapped the motorway, Lambeth Council had already set aside £20 million, so they went ahead and built it anyway.
The result, not surprisingly, was a disaster. When the journalist Polly Toynbee went along to have a look in November 1981, the block was still unoccupied. Squatters had already taken possession of some of the flats, and many people on the waiting list had made it clear they would do anything to avoid living there. Gazing in horror at its ‘colossal and fearsome’ dimensions, Toynbee could understand why. ‘What wouldn’t we give now’, she wondered, ‘for a bit of mock-Tudor or mock-Gothic to counter the visual deprivations of the slab-block era?’ Buildings like Southwyck House were
the worst kind of municipal housing, an example of the ghetto mentality of planners, grandiose and authoritarian. Driving past it on the road out of Brixton to Camberwell, one can only shudder and ask who built it? What kind of insensitive megalomaniac could have dreamed up such a scheme, even now, when we might have learned the lessons of such vast estates, desolate, impersonal and crime-prone?
Gazing on what the planners had wrought, Toynbee was so cross that she wanted to ‘find the architect and challenge him with the suffering he would be imposing on generations of wretched council tenants’. To her surprise, the architect was not a him but a her: a young Polish architect called Magda Borowiecka, ‘gentle and thoughtful’, whose parents had come to Britain during the war. As an idealistic student, Borowiecka had taken a job with the Greater London Council before going on to work for Lambeth Council. The barrier block had been her first assignment. Now, as she stood on one of the parapets, looking down at her creation, she admitted that she had changed her mind. ‘I was a lot more Left-wing’, she said, ‘when I started out.’
Borowiecka no longer designed gigantic Brutalist blocks. Her most recent project, the Dunbar-Dunelm estate in suburban West Norwood, had been much smaller and more nostalgic: two winding streets of ‘little yellow brick houses with dormer windows and steep, sloping, black slate roofs, each with a garden … full of character, corners and surprises’. Walking around the Norwood estate, Toynbee thought that it felt like ‘a bourgeois estate … private, not municipal. There are no communal areas, everything is partitioned into little separate lots’. But that, Borowiecka insisted, was what people wanted: ‘They don’t want to be council tenants at all.’
Indeed, Borowiecka now thought the state should get out of building houses altogether. ‘We should be subsidising people, not houses,’ she explained. ‘Give them the money and let them go out and buy their own houses on the open market, choose what they want for themselves.’ But what would she think, Toynbee asked, if the tenants chose to buy the little houses she had designed in Norwood? Wouldn’t she be ‘sad that they no longer belong to the council’? ‘No,’ Borowiecka said. ‘I would be most flattered.’ There spoke the spirit of the age.42
11
She’s Lost Control
How will the economy climb out of a recession so deep? … Who can believe that a spontaneous industrial regeneration will result from the policy of squeeze, squeeze and squeeze again?
Peter Jenkins, Guardian, 19 November 1980
Alan Clark (Plymouth) felt … that the level of unemployment was what was holding the Party activists steadfastly together in many constituencies. For better or for worse it was seen as giving the Trades Unions their deserts.
Minutes of the Conservative backbench finance committee, 11 November 1980
In the early hours of Sunday 18 May 1980, a young man called Ian Curtis hanged himself in the kitchen of his terraced house in Barton Street, Macclesfield. An introspective, bookish character, the 23-year-old Curtis had until recently worked as a civil servant in Macclesfield’s Employment Exchange. As a boy he had won a scholarship to the local King’s School, and in 1979 he had voted for Mrs Thatcher’s party. He had married young and had a 1-year-old daughter, but suffered from deep depression, exacerbated by his severe epilepsy, for which he was taking extremely strong tranquillizers. On top of all that, his marriage was breaking down, partly because he was by nature a solitary, brooding man, but also because he had started seeing another woman. In April, Curtis made a first attempt to kill himself, but failed. The second time, after sitting up all night watching television, drinking spirits and drafting a suicide note, he succeeded.1
For the previous three years, Curtis’s chief interest had been his role as lead singer in a local band, called Joy Division after the Auschwitz sex-slaves in the pulp novel House of Dolls (1955). At the time, Nazi and Holocaust imagery was par for the course for aspiring punk bands. But there was something about Joy Division that marked them out: a hint of David Bowie in the music, a despairing fatalism in Curtis’s lyrics. When Joy Division released their first album, Unknown Pleasures, in June 1979, admirers talked of its pain and beauty, its ‘eerie spatiality’, as if Curtis were howling into a void of suffering. ‘This band has tears in its eyes,’ wrote the NME’s reviewer, something nobody would have said about the Sex Pistols. But it was not just a performance. To an extent that not even his bandmates realized, Curtis was in the depths of an existential crisis.2
A few weeks after Curtis’s death, Joy Division released the single ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. With its ‘raw and exposed’ sound, and desperate, self-lacerating lyrics, writes the critic Simon Reynolds, it was ‘taken as Curtis’s suicide note to the public’. Yet within weeks it had reached number thirteen. For an obscure post-punk group on an independent label, this was success almost undreamed of. A month later, Joy Division released their second album, Closer, which made it to number six and attracted ecstatic reviews. The cover, a classically pure black-and-white image of statues in a Genoa cemetery, had been chosen before Curtis’s death; now it seemed morbidly fitting. Sounds praised the record’s production as ‘the aural equivalent of a rich marble slab’, while the NME thought Closer ‘as magnificent a memorial as any post-Presley popular musician could have’. To this day, Joy Division’s admirers invariably use the same words to describe it: glacial, claustrophobic, ethereal, narcotic, angular, chilling, serene, hypnotic, ghostly … the language of death.3
Although Joy Division’s obsessions with love, pain and suffering struck a chord with listeners across the world, theirs was a music rooted in a particular place and time. Even the band’s keyboardist, Bernard Sumner, thought that ‘some of the darkness of Joy Division’s music’ reflected the landscape in which they had been born. He had grown up in a terraced street in Salford, with a chemical factory at one
end and ‘a strong sense of community’. But then the council demolished the terraces and moved his family into a concrete tower block across the river in Manchester. ‘The place where I had used to live, where I had my happiest memories, all that had gone,’ Sumner said. ‘For me Joy Division was about the death of my community and my childhood.’ To thousands of working-class youngsters in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a very familiar story.4
Sumner, Curtis and their bandmates had reached adulthood in a city that seemed to be dying. They came from skilled working-class families and had been to aspirational schools, two of them at Salford Grammar School, the other two at King’s School, Macclesfield, a former direct-grant school that had been forced to go independent. But by the time they came of age, Greater Manchester’s economy was in deep trouble, factories were closing and youth unemployment was rising fast. This was not Liverpool in 1960, let alone Carnaby Street in 1966. The very air seemed charged with defeat and loss. And even at the time, some listeners thought Joy Division were reflecting a wider picture. In May 1979, just days after Mrs Thatcher’s election victory, one NME critic wrote that they were producing ‘withering grey abstractions of industrial malaise … Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever lived in the low-rent squalor of a Northern industrial city will know, their vision is deadly accurate’.5