The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Notes
1 “Behind Closed Doors” was the title of a
Time Out special issue on what it described as
“London’s most private parts” (front cover,
10–17 August 1994).
2 These examples may be followed up in
books by Andrew Duncan, Secret London (London:
New Holland, 1995); William J. Fishman,
Nicholas Breach, and John M. Hall, East End
and Docklands (London: Duckworth, 1990); and
Stephanie Williams, Docklands, ADT Architecture
Guide (London: Architecture Design and
Technology Press, 1990).
3 See Williams, Docklands, p. 136.
4 Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro, and
Jane Rendell, introduction to Strangely Familiar:
Narratives of Architecture in the City, ed. Borden,
Kerr, Pivaro, and Rendell (London: Routledge,
1996), p. 9.
5 Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919),
in Penguin Freud Library, trans. under the editorship
of James Strachey, vol. 14, Art and Literature:
Jensen’s “Gradiva,” Leonardo da Vinci, and Other
Works, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1985), p. 359.
6 For outstanding readings of architectural
practices and the uncanny, see Anthony Vidler,
The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern
Unhomely (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992),
and of the uncanny and urban practices, see Jane
M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the
City (London: Routledge, 1996).
7 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 6.
8 Freud,”The ‘Uncanny,’” pp. 363–364.
9 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 79.
10 In part, my essay is “secretly” a response to
one of Lefebvre’s provocative assertions about
psychoanalysis and the existence of an underground
or repressed life to cities. See Henri
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p.
36, and my brief reference to this in Steve Pile,
The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space, and
Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 152 n.
8. Explaining the whole of modern urban life
through the workings of the unconscious mind
is, of course, intolerably reductive, but it may be
The Un(known) City . . .
the case that there is an underground and repressed
urban life and that this is strangely
known.
11 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 242.
12 On this point see also Richard Sennett, The
Flesh and the Stone: The Body and the City in Western
Civilisation (London: Faber and Faber, 1994).
13 See Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its
Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1961), and Rosalind
Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on
Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).
14 Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman, London
under London: A Subterranean Guide, new ed. (London:
Murray, 1993), p. 7.
15 R. Williams, Notes on the Underground, p. 21.
16 Vidler, The Architectural Uncunny, pp.
117–146.
17 R. Williams, Notes on the Underground, chapter
3.
18 MI5 is tasked with internal security and intelligence
gathering, and it has recently taken a
role in countering the activities both of the Irish
Republican Army and of organized crime and
drug syndicates.
19 Kenneth Powell, Vauxhall Cross: The Story of
the Design and Construction of a New London Landmark
(London: Wordsearch, 1992), pp. 25, 10,
60.
20 Somewhat bizarrely, it is well known that
this building is the headquarters of the British
secret service. In the James Bond movie Goldeneye
(1995), there are external shots of the Vauxhall
Cross building. Similar images appear in
Patrick Keiller’s film London (1994), at a point
when the narrator says that an air of secrecy pervades
London life. It would be interesting to
know whether MI6 permitted pictures of the
building to appear in these films. More paradoxically,
the latest Bond movie, The World Is Not
Enough (1999), was refused permission to use exterior
shots!
21 Powell, Vauxhall Cross, p. 75.
22 Lefebvre, Production of Space, chapter 3.