The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Journeys on the Caledonian Road
street for probably fifteen or twenty years (and this is done every day). These
white parapets are built up each morning and dismantled at night, day-in day
day-out.
JK: You’ve got shops here which actually want to be a market, don’t they?
They set out their market stall every morning.
RW: I think that is the history of the street. They say that on a Sunday before
the war this was somewhere you could come and buy absolutely anything. In
a way it is like a disarranged Brick Lane [a famous Sunday secondhand market];
but there is something in the street which is deeply informal, unlike
Brick Lane, which has a time to begin, a time to end, it’s relatively structured—all
anarchy will meet there for six hours. The Cally is in a much more
flexible state.
Probably the undeclared fact of the street is that these were actually
gardens and got paved over—so to the general user of the street it’s all
pavement, but in fact you can see it contains a legal demarcation: it’s got
crap care of Islington Council on one side, and crap care of the shopowner
on the other side. And some people colonize it this way.
I often photograph this man’s wall—he always makes these patterns,
tries to order materials in this way. He has to try and arrange the fridges with
the bed, with the bookshelves, but he always ends up with this row of fridges
and cookers. I suspect it is their cubic-ness that’s doing it—it’s not that it’s
the kitchen section. It is the kind of order which could as likely be “cooker/
cooker/fridge/safe” as it could be “cooker/cooker/filing cabinet/safe/fridge”
23.5 | The city of fridges.