The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Sandy McCreery
raced houses built for railway workers and others benefiting from the Great
Eastern Railway’s cheap workers’ trains (forced on the company by the government
as a condition for being allowed to build Liverpool Street Station
in central London). Consequently the area was solidly working class and
lower middle class, and almost all residents would have had to commute
into central London to work. Leyton had very little sense of center, and it
was impossible to know where it started or finished. Any fledgling sense of
place had probably been extinguished by the severe bombing suffered in the
First and Second World Wars.
But during 1994 Claremont Road was transformed into an extraordinary
festival of resistance. The houses were pulled apart and remodeled
with the original components and anything else that could be put to use.
One became the “Art House,” where visitors were invited to participate in,
or view, a constant outpouring of murals, installations, and other artworks.
There was a visitors’ book, just as might be found at mainstream exhibitions.
Another house, converted into the “Seventh Heaven Jazz Café,” was
particularly intended to attract day-trippers to the street—a means of broadcasting
the message. The exteriors of almost all the others were brightly
painted with various images: a floral frieze, which ran along most of the
street; portraits of people in the street; dreamlike celestial horses; and political
slogans. Internally, houses were transformed into a disparate collection
of spaces that fused dwelling with defense. One had a deep tunnel
beneath it, now a favorite device of environmental activists. The road itself
was used as an enormous outdoor communal room, becoming the venue for
much music and dancing. It was filled with sculptures and other structures
intended to amuse or be played with, and furnished with tables and comfortable
chairs. The few trees along the side of the tube tracks supported
several “benders”—lightweight enclosures with walls and floors hung at
startling angles. Rope netting suspended between the trees and the tops of
the houses allowed flexible communication between all parts of the settlement.
Rising out of one roof was a 60-foot-high tower constructed of
scaffolding and other extraneous material acquired from the motorway
construction site. This was Claremont Road’s monument—its very own
tower block and an intentional reminder to the planners of past mistakes. It
was painted pink, just to upset them even more. On another roof was a fully
operational gallows erected by Mick, one of the more prominent activists.
He built it to symbolize the extermination of the street, but he was happy
to encourage the rumor, cultivated among the bailiffs, that he would hang
himself if they ever ventured to evict him.
There was no formal social organization within the street. The vast
majority of residents simply got on with things, in their own time and in