Remember Gentrification?

Remember Gentrification?   

Those of us of a certain age who thought about cities back in the day when cities were supposedly on their last legs because everyone was decamping to the suburbs, and the last person left in New York or Detroit was being reminded to turn off the lights, knew the death of civilisation could be laid at the feet of selfish desires for lawns and barbecue pits. The Devil was the suburbs. I am certainly not going to defend the racism of the post-war years that led to the disinvestment in urban communities that led to the collapsing infrastructure and the declining amenities that pushed everyone who could afford to do so — and the bar was pretty low as long as the skin colour was peachy — into the edenic suburbs where the schools were new and the houses had washing machines. While selfishness and racism can never be discounted, in most cases, I think family decisions have more to do with amenity and good schools.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to the end of civilisation. It turned out there were people who wanted to live in cities; they started buying houses for knock down prices since nobody else wanted them; when rehabbed, they were often amazing architectural gems, and that attracted the interest of more buyers looking for amazing houses at bargain prices. And thus Gentrification was born. Those of us with an interest in cities were offered a new Devil: the Gentrifiers who swooped into a neighbourhood and displaced the residents — who were generally some combination of the poor, the elderly, and the non-white — for a pittance, taking their homes and their communities, and leaving them with no alternatives. 

I studied with some of the major academics who took stands opposing Gentrification, and I do understand that the poor, elderly, non-white residents were sometimes badly treated by incomers, or worse, were swindled or illegally denied loans by banks that red-lined neighbourhoods. However, I could never work up any degree of hostility against Gentrification. If the problems facing cities could be attributed to disinvestment, then how could investment be the enemy too?  

Now we are thirty years on from those days, and we have some answers. The New York that was once on the verge of bankruptcy soaked up investment, and now it's the middle class who are being gentrified out of the city, with the attempts to upgrade middle income mainstays like Stuyvesant Town into luxury units. On the other hand, turning the lights out in Detroit just may happen. The Shrinking City strategy taking hold in numbers of American Rust Belt cities that have lost their economic base and much of their population involves resettling residents into a more compact core and shutting down expensive utility grids and other services in the abandoned neighbourhoods.

What does this have to do with the London Staycation, you may ask. Perhaps the world's biggest gentrification project was the London Docklands redevelopment.  The East End of London was dominated by the docks for hundreds of years as the largest port in the world. The serial development of larger and larger docks in what is not a particularly large river over centuries is fascinating to follow. Everyone knows the docks were blitzed heavily in the war, but they came back afterwards. And then it was all over in a year, in a day, in the wink of an eye, when container shipping needing huge port facilities took over as the industry standard. London has a small container port at Tilbury toward the mouth of the Thames, but hundreds of years of dockland culture and facilities were redundant in a moment in time. What do you do with an old dock? Well in London's case you turn it into a world financial centre at Canary Wharf, an airport, and acres and acres of expensive waterfront housing.

I have been to most of the old docks, but had never been to Wapping the area closest to the City on the North bank of the Thames. St Katharine's Dock and the London Docks were built in the early 19th century to handle luxury goods that needed special handling so their location close to the City was utilitarian. In 1967 these docks were closed and now St Katharine's looks like this

No argument that this is a beautifully realised vista smack in the middle of London, but wandering through was rather dispiriting. There was no soul. An experience not enhanced by the brass plaques posted on every wall and corner reminding us that St K's Dock is private property.

Yes, not public space, not a piece of the urban fabric, but private space where your actions can be controlled and condemned by the owners and more likely their security agents. The old buildings are unique, but their tenants are not. The colonnade you can barely see in the distance is a Starbucks. All the shops and restaurants surrounding this lovely marina are mediocre chains, that would never tempt me to spend money.

Wapping has fared a little better.

A typical street is a mix of old and new buildings. There were more trees and open space than I expected, so the streets were very attractive. Early on, Bob pointed out there were very few shops except for historic pubs in place since the 18th century or earlier. Wapping sits between the City and Canary Wharf so most of the residents of these gentrified developments are probably affluent young people who work long hours and likely spend their leisure time in one of London's entertainment quarters. Beyond the gentrified developments, Wapping has numerous council house estates. The Wapping Project housed in this old engine building has a restaurant with tables set among the old turbines which powered the dock machinery. It was the hot place to eat a few seasons ago, but there is not enough business for lunch so we couldn't have our lunch there. 

Another interesting day, this time in the Borough of Tower Hamlets, just to keep up the running list of London boroughs we are visiting. London's rags and riches borough — some of the poorest neighbourhoods in London are in Tower Hamlets and the international power house of Canary Wharf is here too. London is great for these impossible juxtapositions.