The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Last Days of London
certainly better to run the poverty scenario in order to get more resources for
the city, but as a strategy it doesn’t differ that much from the right-wing version
which presents the inner city as violent and degenerate in order to suggest
that council housing produces brain-damaged children.
JK: Although, if you become too self-conscious about appropriating the city
as your subject matter, you give up in the end, don’t you?
PW: Yes, and to write about a place is inevitably to abuse it in one way or another.
I tried to find a way through this by combining historical research, description,
and political polemic with quite explicitly autobiographical
material, which at least revealed something of where I myself was coming
from. If you’re going to write about a world that is so patently, so obviously
not just yours . . . I mean, if you are a rural grandee you might imagine that
the world you see through the window is yours, and perhaps in some technical
sense it is, but in the city you have to realize that your perception is only
one among others, and that from many points of view the way you see this
place may very well be utterly mad, utterly mistaken. You have to allow for
that, so I tried to place myself in the picture, not obtrusively or egotistically I
hope, but enough at least to reveal that I don’t have all the answers either.
JK: I imagine the parallel concern is whether you find multicultural environments
threatening or rather actually celebratory, so that welcoming
other voices becomes important.
PW: This is the crux of the matter. People have asked me where that multicultural
world is in A Journey Through Ruins, to which I’m inclined to reply
that even if there are no pages given over to the celebration of local color, diversity
should be implicit throughout the book. I was trying to demonstrate
how negatively mainstream ideas of national identity, and even ecology, have
weighed on the modern, postwar city, which is obviously mixed and diverse
and poor, but also industrious, energetic, and full of future possibility. But
what I really couldn’t do was to speak for other people. I didn’t feel it was my
role to sit in people’s front rooms and say, “Here is X from Bengal and here’s
this nice person three doors down from Montserrat.” Perhaps I was too nervous
of that, but I don’t think so.
JK: One of the obvious devices employed here is to take a discrete object or
environment as a starting point to develop very quickly into a very catholic
discussion of the entirety of postwar British culture, and you’ve described
Dalston Lane as “a prism through which to view Thatcher’s Britain.” To
what extent do you think that this “method”—if you’re happy to have it