The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Wright
native shopping centre it has made of a battered Victorian row of shops in
nearby Bradbury Street (“A stone’s throw from the High Street but miles
ahead in style”). Then, in sharp contrast to the unachieved and often corrupted
universality of conventional State provision, come the differentiated
organizations of the rainbow coalition: the Asian Centre; Africa House with
its special Advice and Community Centre and, Sir Alfred please take note,
a Supplementary School; Hackney Women’s Centre; Hackney Heatsavers;
Hackney Pensioners. ...
A passing think-tanker would be inclined to dismiss this collection
of organizations as so many “QUALGOs” (‘Quasi-Autonomous Local Government
Organizations’), political fronts accountable to no one and serving
only to gouge the salaries of their well-connected and far-from-voluntary
workers out of left-wing local councils. 9 There were certainly problems with
the way the GLC and other Labour councils funded voluntary organizations
in the early eighties. Money went into agencies that simply couldn’t cope
with it, and staff numbers were built up in a way that could hardly have been
better designed if it was intended to kill off the old spirit of “Voluntary Action.”
Voluntary committee members found themselves faced with an everincreasing
complexity of work and, in some cases, with a highly articulate
and educated staff who were full of talk about their own collective rights as
employed workers. Some organizations disappeared into themselves spending
years fighting out the problems of the world internally, while others
proved incapable of achieving in practice anything like what they promised
in words. 10 When these organizations failed there was just another body of
articulate professionals widening the gap between the State and the citizenry
it was meant to serve; but when they worked, groups that had been
stuck at the margins without effective representation within the Welfare
State were suddenly enfranchised and a whole agenda of new concerns,
whether cultural, political, or ecological, was brought into focus. The rowdy
exuberance that followed was quite something.
Some of this energy continues to produce results in Dalston. The
Women’s Design Service has recently issued a well-received critical handbook
on the design of public lavatories for women. The authors insist that
“women do not conform to standard sizes or requirements,” comment on the
“implications of the loss of the GLC for the state of London’s public toilets,”
and disclose that “the building of women’s public toilets was linked to the
growth of feminism in the late nineteenth century, since it was largely the
increased visibility of women working in the capital that persuaded the authorities
to make provision for them.” This admirable manual found quite a
lot to praise in the underground lavatories left over from the Victorian era
(although, as it points out, working conditions for the attendants could cer-