The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Port Statistics
The United Kingdom’s production of desirable artifacts is certainly
lamentable (and confirms the stereotype of a nation run by Philistines with
unattractive attitudes toward sex), but any perception of the demise of manufacturing
industry based on its failure to produce technologically sophisticated,
attractive consumer goods is bound to be overstated. Most U.K.
manufacturing is unglamorous—intermediate products and capital goods
are not branded items visible in the shops. Intermediate products, in particular,
are often produced in out-of-the-way places like Sheerness or Immingham—places
at the ends of roads. The United Kingdom’s domestically
owned manufacturing sector is now small, but its most successful concerns
are efficient, highly automated, and employ only a few people, many of
whom are highly specialized technicians. The United Kingdom’s foreignowned
manufacturing sector employs comparatively larger numbers of people
in the production of cars, electronic products or components, and other
visible, but internationally branded, items: many GM cars built in the
United Kingdom are badged as Opels, Ford now produces Mazdas (Ford
owns 25 percent of Mazda) at Dagenham, and the United Kingdom now has
export surpluses in televisions and computers. The big export earners in
manufacturing, like the ports, have a tendency to be invisible.
The juxtaposition of successful industry and urban decay in the
landscape of the United Kingdom is certainly not confined to the north of
the country. A town like Reading, with some of the fastest growth in the
country (Microsoft, US Robotics, Digital, British Gas, Prudential Assurance)
offers, albeit to a lesser degree, exactly the same contrasts between corporate
wealth and urban deprivation: the United Kingdom does not look
anything like as affluent as it really is. The dilapidated appearance of the visible
landscape, especially the urban landscape, masks its prosperity. It has
been argued that in eighteen years of Conservative government the United
Kingdom has slipped in a ranking of the world’s most prosperous economies
in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per head, but it is equally likely
that the position has remained unchanged. In any case, this is a ranking
among nations all of which are becoming increasingly wealthy. If the
United Kingdom has slipped in this table, it has not slipped nearly as much
as, say, Australia or Sweden, or even the Netherlands. The United Kingdom’s
GDP is the fifth largest in the world, after the United States, Japan,
Germany, and France. What has changed is the distribution of wealth.
In the United Kingdom, wealth is not confined to a Conservative
nomenklatura, but the condition of, say, public transport or state-sector secondary
schools indicates that the governing class does not have a great deal
of use for them. People whose everyday experience is of decayed surroundings,
pollution, cash-starved public services, job insecurity, part-time em-