The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

What is to be done about Dalston Junction? Successive governments have
pondered this question. Their advisers take one look and quickly propose a
road-widening scheme or, better still, a really ambitious new motorway that
will obliterate the whole area. Ministers pretend to be surprised when carping
residents come out against these generously offered “improvements,”
and the blight settles a little deeper. In the most recent case it was Peter Bottomley,
then Conservative Minister for Roads, who provided local campaigners
with their best quotation. When questioned in the House of
Commons on 10 February 1989 about the environmental damage that
would be caused if the roads suggested in Ove Arup & Partners’ East London
Assessment Study were built, he replied for the government by saying:
“We want to improve the environment. If we look at the main spine road
through the assessment study, it goes through the most run-down part of
the area.”
Dalston Junction was under that spine, and a carefully placed rib
also reached out to obliterate the short stretch of road that runs through the
heart of this book. Dalston Lane extends east from Dalston Junction, and we
need only follow it a few hundred yards up to the traffic lights at the next
busy junction—a tangle of dishonoured roads still sometimes called Lebon’s
Corner in memory of a trader who has long since disappeared. This miraculously
surviving fragment of old England consists of a constant and often
choked stream of traffic edged by stretches of pavement that would not be
out of place in the Lake District. The stones jut up like small cliffs, and then
crash down as soon as the intrepid inner-city fell-walker mounts them,
sometimes issuing a great gush of filthy water as they land.
The south side of Dalston Lane starts with an elegant stretch of
ornamented Victorian brickwork, which is all that remains of the recently
demolished Dalston Junction railway station. It then passes a tawdry
amusement arcade, a few shops, and the New Four Aces Club (the site of occasional
shootings and subject of intense Press speculation about the fabled
West Indian Yardies). After a derelict site and an ailing public library, the
street consists of two continuous blocks of run-down Victorian shops, some
in use, others boarded up and abandoned. The first block is owned by Hackney
Council, bought up in preparation for the demolition that appears to
have been imminent for at least half a century; the second belonged to the
now-abolished Greater London Council.
The north side of this unusually dishevelled street is slightly more
varied. There are some shops with offices above them and an old pub, once
known as the Railway Tavern but now a dingy betting shop with a satellite
dish at the back. There is the notorious Dalston police station, a large redbrick
building with an ominously windowless and fortress-like annex that