The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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own. These people live in the area in quite large numbers, but while they
are not necessarily averse to signing away a small fortune at a restaurant
table in Islington or Soho, they are less inclined to be seen indulging in conspicuous
consumption right on their own doorsteps. Pamela is in a risky
business, especially during a gathering recession, but the vision is grand.
Come the spring, she wants to throw open her folding doors, and see her customers
all mixed up together on the pavement: Montmartre will meet
Montserrat on dingy Dalston Lane; the plane trees will burgeon and the traffic
will thunder by regardless.
One trader on Dalston Lane has recently found a novel way of
achieving corporate growth. If he was in a “managed workspace,” of the sort
that sprung up in refurbished factories throughout London during the
eighties, he would be able to expand by pushing out the partitions a little,
but he would also have to pay more rent for the privilege. On Dalston Lane
those extra square feet can be had for free. The gentleman in question simply
broke through the walls with a pickaxe and moved into the boarded-up
shops on either side: his thriving emporium is now one-third legitimate,
two-thirds squat. But while occasional success stories emerge from the strivings
of Dalston Lane’s entrepreneurs, the idea that a wider social redemption
might be achieved through enterprise has never really made its way
down this street. Most of the traders on Dalston Lane are too busy making
ends meet to consider raising up the whole area as well, and they have sharp
things to say about the Thatcher government, which banged on about supporting
private enterprise and then turned round and hit them all with punishing
interest rates and, with poll tax, the uniform business rate. A more
dynamic economy would doubtless pull this dishevelled street together in
no time, but it would also wipe out most of its traders at a stroke.
Other hints of improvement can be traced along this undemolished
stretch of Dalston Lane. The public library is named after Trinidad’s revolutionary
historian C. L. R. James, and its windows are plastered with yellowing
obituaries to C. L. R. and a whole host of signs blazing with promised
emancipation over three continents. The rhetoric is ambitious but the activity
on the ground is sadly restricted: indeed, the library is closed most of the
time due, as another notice explains, to funding and staff shortages.
The public sector flounders, but many of the derelict shops have
been taken over and turned into the offices of voluntary organizations,
which try to do rather better. The same pattern of refurbishment recurs from
one organization to the next: the windows are boarded up from the inside so
one can’t see in from the street, and then covered with messages announcing
events or asserting this cause or that. Each one is, after its own manner, a
wayside pulpit lost among the advertising hoardings. There is a whole ar-