In fact, the war accelerated a process of decentralisation which had been in existence for some years beforehand, primarily through local authority-led slum clearance programmes and the de- velopment of the London suburbs by private developers. However the war’s aftermath inevitably and irrevocably changed both the nature and the extent of the problems brought about by Lon- don’s continuing expansion. A deliberate policy of balanced decentralisation of both population and industry from London had been set in motion as a result of the 1940 Barlow Report and the 1943 County of London Plan, and this, combined with the effects of the war, served to galvanise the authorities into taking action to address the issue (LCC, 1951:111). The East End slum, even in the 1920s and 30s when conditions had improved dramatically over those of five decades pre- viously, still most commonly comprised mean rows of over-populated terraced housing, grouped around dirty and insanitary courtyards. The late 19th and early 20th century tenements built by bodies such as the Peabody Trust or the East End Dwellings Company which replaced some of the worst slums, although more solidly built and having better sanitation, were themselves cramped and gloomy places for which the landlords charged above-average rents (Moye, 1979:22). Lavatories and washing facilities were still frequently communal, and the space pro- vided was still too little to cater for the typical family—the East End Dwellings Company for ex- ample averaged 1.6 rooms per dwelling, while the Peabody Trust averaged 2.3 rooms per dwell- ing (Munby, 1951:81).
The war, then, destroyed many of these areas, and many Londoners simply left the capital either as evacuees or to help the war effort. But even though many did not return to London once the war was over, overcrowding remained rife, with an estimated 250,000 families still waiting to be housed at the end of 1950. Of these, 30% needed to be housed as a matter of urgency (ibid). Some 11,500 houses were earmarked for slum clearance at this time, displacing an estimated 17,300 families, although the requirements of the rebuilding process meant that a total of 14,000
houses would have to be cleared, displacing some 20,000 families (ibid:112). Overall, it was es- timated that 113,200 families, or over 0.4 million people, would need to be rehoused in the five years from 1951 (ibid). The solution proposed by the LCC had two phases—from 1951 to 1956, when roughly 62,000 dwellings would be built in the Administrative County, and from 1957 to 1971, by the end of which it was envisaged that over 185,000 dwellings would have been built (LCC, 1951:113–114). These then were the targets which the LCC felt that it could realistically attain in the given time periods, but even so, there remained an envisaged and unsolved shortfall of over 0.25 million dwellings, or 0.75 million people, who would have to be accommodated outside London (Hall, 1963:86).
Within the Administrative County the redevelopment was intended to reflect the commu- nity structure of London as Forshaw and Abercrombie had described it in the 1943 plan. Indeed, their proposals for developments, which would respect the old community structure but provide a decent physical environment were, in some measure at least, carried through. The main focus of house-building during the 1950s however, remained the rehabilitation of the existing housing stock, although new housing completions, mostly in the form of prefabricated bungalows, aver- aged some 25,000 per year (Tennant, 1998:26). Even so, the housing shortage continued rela- tively unabated—in 1951 there were over 480,000 more households than dwellings, while by 1961, although this figure had fallen, it was only to 300,000 (ibid). In 1955, the Conservative Government launched a massive slum-clearance programme which would run until the mid- 1970s, while the high-rise tower blocks originally championed by Le Corbusier, and subse- quently by both the architectural profession, and the Government, who offered a subsidy for a flat in a tower block three-times that offered for a house, began to proliferate (Hall, 1988:223–224).
The reservoir of sites cleared by wartime bombing had dried up by the mid 1950s, and al- though slum clearance could continue, it was becoming painfully clear that the capital’s housing problems were unlikely to go away in a hurry. And it had by now become quite apparent that Patrick Abercrombie’s 1945 population projections for the County and the London Region as a whole were appalling underestimates, based as they were on 1930s assumptions that the birth rate would continue to fall (ibid:91–92). The London County Council was drawn to the con- clusion that it would have to look beyond its county boundaries to the outer boroughs if it was to house its population (Tennant, 1998:27).
However, it was also clear that the existing metropolitan structure was inadequate to the task of making these changes, geographically wide-ranging as they would necessarily be. A Royal Commission was charged with the task of “considering the case” for reform of London’s government, and in 1960 presented its conclusion that 33 new boroughs should be formed which would subsume the outer suburban districts to create a new “Greater London”. The new bor- oughs, now the principal units of local government, would have considerable autonomy over lo- cal housing and land use planning. Overseeing the new administrative area would be a Greater London Council, better reflecting the physical extent of the capital, for which it would produce a
new strategic plan. Both the LCC and the boroughs resisted this plan, and fear was expressed that the tensions which existed between a new, centrally organised GLC and the vociferously inde- pendent outer boroughs could polarise London’s Government, leaving it reliant for its power on the suburbs, but with a political vacuum at the centre. Nonetheless, the Conservative Govern- ment acted on the recommendations of the Commission and passed the 1963 Local Government Act which, two years later, brought into being the Greater London Council (ibid).
In 1965, the idea of having a strategic authority functioning at a metropolitan level was quite novel, and inevitably problematic. Far less stable than the LCC, which saw just two changes of political control in 76 years—the last three decades were entirely under Labour—the GLC had changed control twice before it reached its first decade (Young, 1977:12). Any at- tempts by the new GLC to develop and implement a coherent housing plan—a necessarily long- term project—were as a consequence foiled by short-term political battles (ibid). So although the 1965 Milner-Holland Report identified the GLC as the appropriate body to assist decaying areas of London through a process of redistribution of population, both the GLC’s Housing Needs Re- port of 1970, and the Strategic Housing Plan of 1975 made little headway (ibid). The 1964 South East Study meanwhile, and the 1967 report by the South East Economic Planning Council, projected massive increases in the region’s population which would require significant increases in house building both within and outside Greater London (Tennant,1998:29). And of course the population of London had not declined to the extent predicted by Abercrombie in the 1944 Greater London Plan, although this and the 1943 County of London Plan still informed the basic principles of post-war planning in the London region (ibid).
The suburbs, which had vehemently, and in the end unsuccessfully fought the imposition upon them of a metropolitan structure, were now faced with the possibility of an influx of people displaced from the Administrative County. The nature of the transition from the LCC to the GLC had served to confuse matters further as the GLC found itself the unwitting inheritor of a broad swathe of moot issues and temporary powers which served merely to underline the contradiction between the role which the GLC was intended to serve, and the statutory authority available to fulfil that role. By 1967, it was already clear that the GLC could either pursue the power it re- quired, or simply cut its strategic coat to suit its statutory cloth (Young, 1977:11).
Horace Cutler, incumbent from 1967 to 1970, therefore sought to shift the strategic empha- sis. Instead of new council housing, housing associations—“quasi-public” organisations (ibid:14)—would be encouraged, and a programme to sell thousands of council houses imple- mented (ibid). Again though, time was too short to get the policies properly off the ground, for while getting expanded aid to housing associations was not particularly problematic, more time than that available was needed for the housing association sector to mature enough to be able to deal with a programme of that magnitude (ibid). But notwithstanding the split which tore the London Conservatives apart between 1970 and 1972, the root problem remained the same:the GLC was now a decade old, but appeared to have failed in its task of solving London’s housing problem—a problem which refuses to disappear over two decades later. Ken Young, writing in
1977, noted almost despondently that:
…The resource deficiencies of the GLC are not statutory, but arise from a lack of infor- mation on local housing and land-use situations, combined with a lack of appreciation of lo- cal political conditions.
…[The] GLC was dependent on the boroughs for much of its data collection and provision, but lacked the political muscle to demand it. …The years 1965 to 1975 were then for Lon- don’s metropolitan policy-makers a decade of frustration. The alternatives in London Housing policy and the recurrent offensives against the suburbs have served to heighten the awareness of the basic conflicts of interest between the differing social areas of the conurbation, and in- crease both the sensibilities and the abilities of the defeated suburbs.
…The pace and scale of employment and population loss in the inner city is already shifting attention from housing conditions to broader based measures to maintain the vitality of the urban area (Young, 1977:19–24, italics in the original).
And what he was referring to, one suspects, were the decline of the London Docklands, dis- cussed above, and the concurrent phenomenon of “gentrification”.
Of course it was East London which was the focus for much of the concern about slum clearance and housing, and it was there too that the process of gentrification first took hold in the capital. Much of the slum clearance and house-building in the post-war years was the product, however flawed, of a political will to address a social problem which was itself the product of a particular juncture in capitalism—the industrial era. Gentrification—a term originally coined by the sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964—referred to the systematic upgrading of turn-of-the-century residential property, and the consequent displacement of a relatively poor community by a wealthier one (Glass, 1964:xviii). We might now include certain obsolete industrial building types in that general description. It is a product of a particular juncture of capitalism—what has been called the “post-industrial” era (cf. Castells, 1996; Savitch, 1988; Young & Mills, 1983; Zukin, 1982).
Indeed it might be argued that gentrification is the link between the artist and the old indus- trial district, although, particularly if you are an artist, you will more likely be arguing the case that the artist is the link between the old industrial district and gentrification. And of course art- ists, gentrification and old industrial districts might simply be three sides of the same triangle. The point is that they are linked, so we must discuss all of them.
Gentrification is in essence an international phenomenon, common in the western in- dustrialised world in cities both big and small (Smith, 1986:17). It has tended to be treated as some new urban frontier, primarily economic in character, and a “process led by pioneers and homesteaders whose sweat equity, daring and vision are paving the way for those among us who are more timid”, although as it turns out, it is the “banks, real-estate companies, the state or other collective actors” who generally get there first (ibid:18–19). It is also just one of several frontiers
in a geographical space which is differentiated across a number of scales—local, city-wide, re- gional, global—for example (ibid). But, as previous sections in this chapter have made abun- dantly clear, the restructuring of urban space is hardly a new phenomenon.
Smith argues that there are five main factors involved in the process of gentrification: first, suburbanisation and the emergence of the “rent gap”; second, the decentralisation of advanced capitalist economies and the growth of white-collar employment; third, the spatial centralisation and simultaneous decentralisation of capital; fourth, the falling rate of profit and the cyclical movement of capital; fifth, demographic changes and changes in the nature of consumption (ibid).
Of these five aspects, the most important for us, as we shall see in chapter nine where we develop a theoretical model, is Smith’s notion of the “rent gap”:
[The] outward movement of capital to develop suburban, industrial, residential, commercial and recreational activity results in reciprocal change in suburban and inner-city ground-rent levels. Where the price of suburban land rises with the spread of new construction, the rela- tive price of inner-city land falls. Smaller and smaller quantities of capital are funnelled into the maintenance and repair of the inner-city building stock. This results in what we have called a rent gap in the inner-city between the actual ground rent capitalized from the present (depressed) land use and the potential rent that could be capitalized from the “highest and best” (or at least a “higher and better” use), given the central location (ibid:23).
Smith continues:
At the most basic level, it is the movement of capital into the construction of new suburban landscapes and the consequent creation of a rent gap that creates the economic opportunity for restructuring the central and inner cities (ibid).
Smith also argues that deindustrialisation helps explain the nature of the land-use and building stock typically associated with gentrification, and where we might expect it to take place (Smith, 1986:25). “The transformation of old industrial areas” he notes, “…did not simply begin with the conversion of old warehouses into chic loft apartments; much more significant was the early ur- ban renewal activity which, although certainly a process of slum clearance, was also the clear- ance of ‘obsolete’ (meaning also devalorized) industrial buildings (factories, warehouses, wharves etc.) where many of the slum dwellers had once worked” (ibid).
Beauregard acknowledges the general validity of Smith’s thesis, but adds that an “emphasis… must be placed on contingency and complexity, set within the structural dimensions of late capitalism” (Beauregard, 1986:35). In fact, Beauregard chooses to describe gentrification as a “chaotic” concept (ibid:40). It should be noted here that Beauregard uses the terms “chaos” and “complexity” loosely, as descriptions of the general nature of the process, rather than in the
strict technical sense in which they will be used later in this thesis.
Gentrification, then, does not simply terminate a chain of cause and effect: it is just one of several possible outcomes, and there are parallels here with the evolution of the East End artists’ agglomeration. First both gentrification and the evolution of the East End artists’ agglomeration have been reliant on a fluid and unpredictable urban context which has come about through the collapse of the East End’s industrial base, and the lack of any obvious replacement for it. Sec- ond, Beauregard’s assertion that contingency plays a part in gentrification is also applicable to the East End artists’ agglomeration. These observations are discussed further in chapter nine.