The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Joe Kerr:
This discussion is accompanying a chapter from your book A Journey
Through Ruins, 1 because its distinct evocation of the city has had a strong influence
on our own practice. So could I ask you to explain something of the
way you researched and wrote the book?
Patrick Wright:
A Journey Through Ruins is an episodic book in the sense that it accumulates
through bits of history, territory, and events. That’s the polite way of putting
it. It was written at the end of the 1980s, a time when the whole city was being
shaken by a triumphalist Thatcherism, and when the London of the postwar
settlement really was in its last days. I didn’t want to do a historical
overview of fifty years of social policy in the East End of London and I wanted
place to be fundamental and not just as a setting, picturesque or otherwise.
I was living around the corner from Dalston Lane, a hard-pressed street that
was often choked with cars. I walked along it thousands of times before realizing
that this road, which normally one would see only in the perspective
of urban deprivation, was actually very interesting and serviceable too. It has
never been a grand street—its nineteenth-century buildings are undistinguished
as well as fallen—but I realized that I could use a three- or fourhundred-yard
stretch of it as a general metaphor. I was impressed by the
extent to which, within a couple of miles of the City of London, you could
have a place as battered and contrary as Dalston Lane, a street that defied
belief by its mere survival.
The 1980s was a decade of “design,” when retailing was going to
be the answer to all social problems, while urban planning gave way to the
market and the Docklands-style enterprise zone. The characteristic symbol
of municipal intervention was undergoing miniaturization—from the tower
block of the early seventies to the litter bin, street-cleansing machine, or heritage
bollard. And the urban texture was diminished too: stripped of memory
and rendered comparatively uniform by a pseudo-ecological form of “concrete
managerialism” which, as we were finding out, can turn any place into
its own kind of “non-place.” And in the midst of that you had this stretch of
Dalston Lane that was chaotically resistant, a curiously posthumous street
that had been scheduled for demolition for nearly fifty years, and which had
certainly never been visited by “design.” Only a shortage of funds had
stopped the Greater London Council (GLC) putting roads through several
decades previously, and when I started writing the government was busy
planning to bulldoze it again. So here was this disheveled street where the
raw ends were exposed: it was the underside of all the transformation that
was going on. I was trying to show another form of urban texture, the stuff