The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Around the World in Three Hundred Yards
chaeology of voluntary endeavour on Dalston Lane. To begin with, the
British Red Cross Society has its Hackney Centre up at Lebon’s Corner—a
large Victorian house with a flag-pole over the porch and a prominent red
cross superimposed on a white circle painted on the side wall. This institution
dates back to 1917, but its spirit belongs to the forties. Indeed, it goes
back to the “improvised staffing” Richard Titmuss saw emerge in the early
weeks of the blitz before the official relief effort was organized: the British
Red Cross Society was there with its volunteer ambulances, first aid, and
“light relief,” and other more anonymous figures also stepped out of the
crowd—people like “Mrs. B,” the Islington beetroot seller who, as the raids
started, “left the first aid post where she was a part-time volunteer, walked
into Ritchie Street rest centre and took charge.” 6
That red cross on the corner of Dalston Lane speaks of the blitz, but
it is also a more general memorial to the spirit of “Voluntary Action,” as
Lord Beveridge conceived it during the founding years of the Welfare State:
Voluntary Action as a trail-blazer for the emerging State (“It is needed to pioneer
ahead of the State and make experiments”) but also—and Beveridge
didn’t need a latter-day think-tanker to tell him this—as the self-willed and
self-managed activity that defines the proper limits of the State and serves
as the “distinguishing mark” of a free society. 7 I sometimes look up at that
recently repainted red cross and think of the remarkable, if now sadly disappointed,
vision with which Beveridge signed off after the war against
Hitler: “So at last human society may become a friendly society—an Affiliated
Order of branches, some large and many small, each with its own life
in freedom, each linked to all the rest by common purpose and by bonds to
serve that purpose. So the night’s insane dream of power over other men
without limit and without mercy shall fade.” 8 That was long before any alley
cat dreamt up the idea of Britain’s perestroika.
Like so much else, the dwindling spirit of “Voluntary Action” has
to struggle for life on Dalston Lane (following the example of the C. L. R.
James library, the British Red Cross Society’s charity shop is frequently
closed due to a shortage of volunteers), and there is little sign of relief from
Douglas Hurd’s more recently enlisted “active citizen”—that implausible
hero of the think-tanks who, far from blazing trails for the expanding State
as Beveridge imagined, sets out, wearing an inner-city Barbour jacket and a
grin as wide as Richard Branson’s, to compensate for a few of the more visible
failings of a contracting and mismanaged one.
What comes after Voluntary Action on Dalston Lane is really still
Ken Livingstone’s GLC, and the efflorescence of community organizations
that thrived under its wing—even when not directly supported by it. Hackney
Cooperative Developments is based here, proudly advertising the alter-