The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Around the World in Three Hundred Yards
tainly have been better). It also provided a key date for future historians of
the monetarist experiment: it was on 5 May 1982 that the first coinoperated
automatic public convenience to be fitted in Britain was installed
by Westminster Council in Leicester Square. 11
Nor should we overlook the Free Form Arts Trust, one of the organizations
that founded the “Community Arts” movement in the sixties and
has been based on Dalston Lane since 1973, when it gained a short-life lease
on a building earmarked for demolition. The Free Form Arts Trust helped
to pioneer the ideas taken up later by the big community-architecture practices.
They offer design and “technical aid” services to schools, community
groups, and developers, always seeking to work with people in a “participative”
manner. The founder, Martin Goodrich, has watched the political
framework shift around his practice: in the late sixties his ideas and activities
were considered radical to the left, but in the eighties they seemed to
find favour with the radical right. The Free Form Arts Trust has survived
schisms, break-away movements, and the criticisms of those who want to be
“storming the citadels” rather than decorating the hoardings around capitalist
building sites or joining “the kindly folk who do good without ever
causing trouble.” 12 Martin Goodrich is full of enterprising ideas for ‘projects’
and, in his time, he has had plenty for the miraculously enduring street he
calls “Dusty Dalston Lane.” There was a brave attempt to form a Dalston
Traders Group: Goodrich remembers putting up Christmas lights at Dalston
Junction while people passing below cursed and moaned at the folly of
it all. There was a project that aimed to turn the derelict vicarage of St.
Bartholomew’s into a workspace for community organizations, and another
that hoped to landscape and put a few seats on the derelict site behind the
bus stop up by Dalston Junction. But though Dalston Lane has proved intransigent,
Free Form has been more successful up in North Shields at the
mouth of the Tyne, a near-derelict fishing port, where a vestigial regatta has
been transformed into an amazingly successful Fish Quay Festival, now attended
by over a million people each year, which is being used to “catalyse
change and community development.” That’s not “storming the citadels”
either, but it’s one of Dalston Lane’s better stories nevertheless.