The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Last Days of London
looking kind. There isn’t a single totalizing overview that can clarify all that
without in some sense also denying it.
JK: But the totalizing city story doesn’t exist anyway, does it?
PW: Well, I’ve never come across one that works—unless one sees the city as
a novel. But the unique thing about the city, which I hope is there at least in
the method if not in the explicit text, has to do with the way urban perception
operates at its best. If you think about the rural areas of England as they
have been defined by prevailing cultural expression, these are places that exist
in a single perspective—deeply settled with a common outlook. Well, you
can’t get far into the inner city on that basis, which is why I called that chapter
“Around the World in Three Hundred Yards.” Everywhere you go, somebody
lives in a different world; every shop is on a different continent. People
raised in the rural view of England have long been coming to East London
and seeing nothing in this but disorder and degeneration, hybridity as miscegenation.
But there is actually this great sophistication in ordinary urban
perception. It occurred to me when I was writing A Journey Through Ruins, I
think I got the idea from Richard Mabey, that this stuff that was happening
on the mixed urban street was rather like a recovery of the idea of “common
rights.” If you were a commoner of old, you had the use of that land, and you
used it to gather firewood or graze your animals in the full knowledge that
other people would be using that same piece of land in a completely different
way, because they too had rights of common. So for me Dalston Lane
came to hint at an alternative to homogenizing collectivism, a late-twentiethcentury
reprise of common rights in which we make our own use of the public
domain of the street, but always in the knowledge that others are at the
same time using and seeing it differently.
JK: And inevitably that overlapping usage is also about conflict.
PW: Of course there’s room for conflict there and that’s how conflict breaks
out, and that’s where racism comes into play with its monocultural insistences.
But the best of possibilities lie here too, and we make too little of the
fact that people aren’t always yelling and snarling at one another. This positive
aspect of the city as a place of loosely structured difference, if I can put
it that way, still finds too little recognition.
JK: In writing about this strangely familiar piece of London, you marshal
much evidence of the past to comment critically on the present, but do you
feel able to comment about the future prospects of these utterly ordinary urban
environments, given the huge potential changes in the political and
economic climate that we are experiencing?