The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Last Days of London
JK: Of course by doing this, you transform the understanding of the object
itself, don’t you? For instance your discussion of the red telephone box in a
later chapter quickly becomes a discussion at the level of national politics,
which then in turn transforms how we understand the telephone box.
PW: Until they were politically activated in the eighties, I knew nothing about
phone boxes, and would have laughed at the idea that they were significant
icons of the time. But with privatization, those kiosks were defined as a national
issue, not by me but by the political circumstances of the time. With
privatization, the red telephone box was suddenly on the front line of a conflict
that developed within Conservatism, between the patrician and overseas
image of Britain as a land of red telephone boxes and a government devoted
to an asset stripping of the public sector, which had led to them being sold
off. So you dig around a little, and find within this apparently trivial argument,
a perfect demonstration of the truth of that time. Basically, the book
was my response to that thing called Thatcherism. It is focused through a
street rather than a curriculum called cultural studies, and is trying to get
into the everyday nature of things. If one can do that in a manner which reveals
the vitality of a fairly nondescript area of East London, then so much
the better.
JK: The chapter in question is one which provides an apparently “authentic”
description of just one street. But from what you have told me certain
details of this apparently meticulous survey are deliberately invented.
Given this, what do you imagine a reader’s attitude to this text as a highly
place-specific account might be?
PW: It is quite true that I combined objective description with occasional disappearances
into rhetoric and even fiction. I never faked the archive, but I did
sometimes allow my perceptions to override reality or to twist it a bit. I would
justify that on several grounds. To begin with, it is a way of saying that this
street, in this incarnation, doesn’t exist except as I put it there. In a sense, I’m
taking my distance from those grand urbanists who think they’ve mastered a
street because they’ve written it into some sort of macro plan: it’s fixed,
they’ve got it. Obviously, you can’t fix a street. The minute you’ve finished it
is gone, although actually it is you that’s gone, not it.
But there is something else here, connected to the climate on the
Left at the time. There was a curiously silencing concern with “ideological
soundness” on the Left in the early eighties—one that preceded the importation
of the notion of “political correctness” from North America. I knew
this from the conference circuit, and I also saw it in many of the London community
and voluntary organizations I worked with at that time. Collective endeavor
was good, and individual expression dubious at best. There was a lot