The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Wright
culture. Anthropologists will soon be coming here to study the vanishing
culture and society of the cigarette. It’s not just that people still smoke on
Dalston Lane. They stand around in huddles and offer each other cigarettes
with a reckless generosity that is no longer to be found in more stable society.
Some of this behaviour comes to Dalston Lane direct from the West Indies
or the hills of Kurdistan, but there are more indigenous people round
here who still find the health warning provided by HM Government less
convincing than the caution that emerged from the trenches of the Great
War, and stressed the dangers of the third light.
A broad-minded art historian could wander down this street and
find residual traces of the “unsophisticated arts” that Barbara Jones cherished
against the industrial and technocratic bias of the Festival of Britain
in 1951. 5 As she wrote, “popular arts have certain constant characteristics.
They are complex, unsubtle, often impermanent; they lean to disquiet, the
baroque and sometimes terror.” Dalston Lane has its unnecessary and
slightly excessive touches of ornamentation—exemplified, perhaps, by the
fake and, like everything else round here, unexpectedly permanent ornamental
urns that stand over some of the shop fronts on the south side of
Lebon’s Corner; most of them are full of weeds, but their teasing tribute to
the superior versions that embellish grand Georgian buildings elsewhere is
unmistakable. The best example, however, is provided by the undertaking
firm of E. M. Kendall (“We are renowned throughout London for our complete
inexpensive funeral service . . .”) that, despite half-hearted attempts at
modernization, fits Jones’s description perfectly. The ancient glass sign over
the door still promises “Funeral Feathermen and Carriage Masters,” and the
ornate promise of “Courtesy” and “Reverence” creeps round the side in
gilded copperplate letters. At night, the two main windows are deep-black
squares with the words “Funerals” and “Cremations” lit up in dull purple
and suspended, like souls in the void, at the centre of each. The pall-bearers
may look like ghoulish extras left over from the comparatively recent days
of Hammer horror films, but they too are the unrefurbished inheritors of the
Victorian tradition that Jones celebrated as “a nice rich debased baroque.”
Dalston Lane still bears out Barbara Jones’s assertion that “the colours of
death” in England are “black and grey and purple.”
The whole area is alive with commercial and industrial activity.
Just north of Dalston Lane there are Victorian factories, which resound with
the hissing, snipping, and clacking of the textile trade, and the small workshops,
some of them in a converted mews, of antique restorers, violin makers,
and furniture makers. Dalston Lane itself has its shops and small
businesses as well as its boarded-up voids: indigenous north-east London enterprise
mixed up with a whole array of brave multicultural endeavour. Most