The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Wright
tionality might be, however weird, and one of the things you have to think
about really carefully when writing about a place like East London is the habitual
condescension of the better-placed onlooker.
I found out more about this when I started writing for the Guardian
myself after the book was published. I would be asked for an article whenever
anything ghoulish or disastrous had happened in Hackney—the place
could only achieve national interest under the rubric of monstrosity. I wasn’t
aiming to minimize the horrors that do indeed occur in the inner city, but if
you’re looking for a place where tolerance and reciprocal humanity are to be
found at their best, you would probably do better in Hackney than in Tunbridge
Wells. Yet the national culture seems unwilling to bring these innercity
areas into focus except as sinks of depravity. This is also a problem for
writers or filmmakers who would use the state of the inner city to attack bad
or neglectful governments. I wrote about this with reference to Mike Leigh’s
television films and also Paul Harrison’s book Inside the Inner City, 2 which
was written partly in order to establish that “third world” levels of poverty
were to be found in Thatcher’s Britain. You could see what he was doing. He
was trying to shock mainstream, affluent, Tory-voting Britain into some
sense of remorse and shame. Maybe he had some effect somewhere out
there. But what you actually got in Hackney was an application of deprivation
theory to every aspect of urban life—right down to the street markets
like Ridley Road, a diverse and sometimes exuberant place where Harrison
saw nothing but grinding poverty. There’s a risk of “place abuse” here. It is
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