The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Wright
als”—nothing so orderly was turning up in East London by the late eighties.
However, it does include a lot of wild urban thinkers: anti-fluoridationists,
nutty politicians, metal detectorists, fundamentalist vicars, frustrated tenants,
a blimpish and idealistic prince, and other exemplars of the ways of
thinking, utopian or morbid, that flourished around the expiring edges of the
welfare state. As for The Village That Died for England, 3 the rural sequel to
A Journey Through Ruins, that is in some ways modeled on the imagination
of the metal detectorists—hunt for metal in the shires of deep England, and
you’ll start uncovering tanks as well as used cars. But I think you are right.
One should use whatever theoretical tools help to elucidate the situation at
hand, and to keep a sense of interest and possibility alive.
JK: This is obviously very difficult, but in writing about the city there has
to be some sense that you actually feel what you are doing might be useful
to the city, don’t you think?
PW: Cities are built of arguments as well as bricks and mortar, so I hope it is
always useful to elucidate those, draw them out, give them new settings, and
make them available for discussion. That’s another argument for staying
close to the street. But the motivation for this kind of work needs constant
reinvention, and I am not sure that anything like that has been happening in
the universities recently.
JK: But you must remember that for those of us teaching in the university,
our new intake of students were only just born when Thatcher came to
power. They certainly aren’t children of the welfare state.
PW: That confirms the importance of being explicit about your own formation
and about the extent to which you are talking about the experience of
your own generation. I can’t claim ever to have been inspired by the welfare
state when I was a child, perhaps because I was never in urgent need of its
provisions. I was raised in a middle-class world that had a certain austerity
about it. There was no conspicuous consumption, but no dependency on welfare
institutions either. I recall the dentistry, orange juice, and cod-liver oil,
but by 1970, when I went to university, that whole world seemed pretty uninspiring—hard
to invest your passions in its defense. I remember the Marxists
of that time being especially unimpressed by the unrevolutionary limitations
of “welfstate man.” By the eighties, however, there was good reason to think
that history through much more carefully. One had to define what all that institutional
endeavor had meant if only in order to have a better than sentimental
sense of what you were trying to defend. But I accept that students
nowadays live in a different world, and there is no reason they should come
to the same conclusions. However, if as teachers we are trying to help them