The Anxious City

British Urbanism in the late 20th Century

Richard J. Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134467426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Responds to current debate about public space in our cities Illustrated throughout with contemporary projects Foreword by Anthony Vidler First study of material written from an historical perspective The first major discussion of Millennium/Lottery projects (Trafalgar Square, British Museum Great Court etc) as cultural history - highly topical A provocative argument (challenges views of urban life promoted by government and major architects)

Chapter 1

The Anxious City

Introduction

During the last decade of the twentieth century, English cities underwent a series of astonishing, sometimes bizarre transformations. Against a backdrop of public squalor, these long-decayed and inward-looking conurbations became self-consciously spectacular, juxtaposing extraordinary wealth with equally extraordinary poverty, modernity with the ruins of the past, urban sophistication with entropic decay. The means of making these contrasts was architecture, in the form of new museums, public spaces and monuments. Such architectural spectacles provided agreeable settings in which to enjoy coffee, food and shopping, and, superficially at least, seemed of benefit to those with the time and money to enjoy them. These people also discovered the pleasures of urban wandering, and they aspired to live in increasingly vertiginous glass high rises, whose appearance of technical sophistication spoke of new ways of being in the city.

Some of these changes occurred opportunistically. Manchester, in the north west of England, used the consequences of a terrorist bombing to galvanise the development of a somewhat decayed central city.¹ Many changes, there and in other cities, were facilitated by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which began operating in November 1994 and produced a sudden boom in cultural buildings. A fashion for short vacations to European cities, facilitated by budget airlines, may have also contributed to change, as no doubt, did a growing economy.² However, I am concerned here not with the reasons for these changes, but with their nature. Everywhere, it seemed, from Hull to South Kensington, got or had plans for some new architectural symbol of modernity and sophistication. A preliminary list of projects might include the following: the Brindleyplace and Bull Ring developments in central Birmingham; the waterfront in Bristol; the Royal Armouries and Millennium Square in Leeds; the waterfront and Ropewalks in Liverpool; Canary Wharf, the Millennium Dome and Tate Modern in London; the Lowry in Salford; the Imperial War Museum in Trafford; the Millennium Quarter in Manchester; the waterfront of the Tyne including the Baltic Arts Centre in Gateshead and the Wilkinson Eyre ‘winking eye’ footbridge; and the National Centre for Popular Music and Millennium Galleries in Sheffield. At the time of writing, a clutch of urban projects in the planning stage included a dramatic expansion of London to the east (the ‘Thames Gateway’), and a true skyscraper in Manchester.³

Now, on the scale of the contemporaneous changes in Berlin, Kuala Lumpur or Chongqing, these transformations were often relatively small.⁴ But they took place in a country with a long established anti-urban culture, whose architecture has tended to the domestic and inward looking, contriving where possible, an accord between the urban and the natural, an aesthetic expressed most clearly in the picturesque. English forms of Modernism, although sometimes exported, represented a compromise with tradition and nature, at odds with the unapologetically urban expression it stood for elsewhere (Pevsner 1964). The English city is therefore in some senses oxymoronic. In English architectural criticism, traditionally the city has only grudgingly existed, meeting approval when it least resembles itself, which is to say when it most closely approaches the condition of nature.

What happens when a nation such as England suddenly wants an urban culture is, therefore, a matter of more than local interest, for it calls into question the meaning of the urban itself. What England does in terms of the way it (re-)imagines its cities is not done in isolation but relates to international practice, principally in the US and continental Europe. It acts as both a local interpretation of, and a form of critical commentary on urbanism in these places, and the way we think about these broader urbanisms ought to be regarded in part through the English example. For despite England’s economic wealth, the continuity of its political traditions and the apparent security of its place in the world, the way it has sought to re-image itself through the medium of urban architecture has put identity questions into play in the most dramatic way. England’s urban changes, when seen against those of China, may be physically small – but ideologically they are not, for they suppose nothing less than a revolution in the way the urban is understood.⁵

Now in using the word revolution, I am not, it must be made clear, imagining something complete, finished and beyond contestation: rather, the reverse. The new architecture of urban England does indeed suppose a revolution in the way its cities are consumed and inhabited, but it has been only partially realised, and as is the way with so much of English culture, it divides along class lines. It is a revolution very largely of bourgeois taste, which excludes that of the working class as traditionally defined, and also that of the aristocracy, such as it still exists.⁶ It exists in tension with these other kinds of taste, and with the other attitudes to the urban that underpin them. If, for example, one pattern of English urban life in the 1990s has been the boom in central city apartments for the wealthy, this has to be seen against a pattern of continuing population decline, or at best, stagnation. Outside of London, no city has registered significant growth; and what growth there has been in the capital is recent, and not great in historical terms. The English city revolution is visually and architecturally spectacular, but it exists in a state of tension with other existing ways of perceiving, and being in, the city. If the revolution has been supported by capital and by government, it has equally met with resistance. The English city is, it could be said, still contested as an idea. Unlike its counterparts in continental Europe, it is still being worked out.⁷

The word I use to describe the city’s ambiguous condition is anxiety. Anxiety describes the uncertainty of the English city’s current identity, its ambiguity vis-à-vis past and future visions of the city, the lack of resolution about its position vis-à-vis private and public realms, and the competing visions of consumption and residence. Throughout the book, I use the term anxiety in two related, but distinct ways. First, I mean it to describe the realistic experience of being in the city. I mean to suggest that the English city in its current state may often be actually productive of anxiety, for a variety of demonstrable reasons. This is not an architecturally determinist argument, but one based on the notion that the use and inhabitation of cities is learned, and culturally specific. The English, in other words, have learned to be anxious in the modern city. The second sense in which I use anxiety is as a metaphor. I argue that the English city may be described as anxious because its cultural position is so uncertain. The imaginative and material investment in the English city in the 1990s needs to be set against a cultural context in which the city was long regarded as an alien phenomenon, from which those who could, fled. Its present position is anything but resolved. Therefore, throughout this book, I describe the city both as anxious in this metaphorical way, and as productive of anxiety in those who use or inhabit it.

The English Problem

England’s anxieties about the city are unique. I say England here, rather than Britain or the UK, because in respect of urban questions the English experience is distinct from those of the countries it dominates. Scotland’s cities, whatever their material difficulties, have maintained an urban élite, supported by political and cultural institutions, and a distinct body of property law that has helped maintain dense urban habitation (see Gifford et al. 1984). The experiences of Wales, and especially Northern Ireland are different again, with the political capitals and biggest cities resembling English colonial outposts, and the urban élites and political centres that such status implies. The urban cultures of the four UK nations are also legally and politically separate, controlled by different legislatures; the Urban Task Force led by Lord Rogers that reported in 1999, referred only to England (HM Government 1999). England’s urban culture is distinct, and it needs to be treated as such.

England’s distinctness in urban matters is represented by a historic culture of anti-urbanism that has had demographic, as well as artistic, expression. There has been substantial population loss from the biggest cities in the second half of the twentieth century, only partially arrested in recent years. Greater London’s decline has been especially marked; it shrank from a peak population of 8,350,000 in 1939, to 6,700,000 in 1991, a decline of about 20 per cent. The populations of the other main conurbations tended to show similar losses, Greater Manchester and Merseyside in the north west of the country both registering substantial declines. More marked still have been the losses from each of the core cities of these conurbations, 725,000 to 439,000 in the case of Manchester, 850,000 to 460,000 in the case of Liverpool.⁸ Similar, if less marked, patterns could be shown for Newcastle and Bradford. Nicholas Schoon, writing for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a charity that supports sociological research, has claimed that England’s metropolitan regions suffered a net loss of 300 people per day to ‘smaller towns and the countryside’ (Schoon 2001: 6).

Most of these people have gone to suburbs just outside the boundaries of existing cities, and in this respect, England’s experience is not unique, as urban population decline is a fact of the developed world. The same phenomenon can be seen in cities such as Washington DC, New York or Berlin.⁹ However, what is specific to the English case has been a highly cultivated anti-urban culture, expressed at all levels of society. Despite its condition as the second most urbanised nation in Europe, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin could declare in the 1920s ‘England is the country’ (Wiener 1980: 6).¹⁰

The English city since the nineteenth century has been a place of darkness that is essentially foreign, a site of alienation and estrangement. The industrial novel is perhaps its most familiar cultural expression. In the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell constructed a sense of urbanity that is, in terms of national identity, other, despite the fact that by the time they were writing England was in population terms already predominantly urban. D. H. Lawrence did the same in the twentieth century.¹¹ This anti-urban cultural tradition was reinforced by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fictions by William Morris and H. G. Wells, in which urban life was seen to dissolve. In Morris’ News From Nowhere, industrialised London vanishes, to be replaced by an enlightened state of pure air, greenery and unalienated labour. The industrial epoch signals its presence by the ruin of the Houses of Parliament, which to the city’s new inhabitants is a ‘silly old building’, mysterious but essentially benign (Morris 1984: 209).

Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City made clear for the first time in an academic context the weakness of the position that the city occupies in English culture (R. Williams 1973: 1–8). In both Williams’ work and the literary texts he discusses, the city is always alien, a place that is both unnatural and unreal. Real life must take place somewhere else, in Williams’ own case the Black Mountains of his Welsh childhood. The works he describes in The Country and the City are all profoundly anti-urban in which the narrator is always alienated from the city. This position would not matter if it was presented as one aspect of English literary culture, but anti-urbanism is presented as its true condition. The city in English cultural life is the place from which one traditionally escapes. For the political left there is an equal, and complementary anti-urban tradition, that of the city as a symbol of capital, which is fought against. Williams relates a story about H. G. Wells: exiting a radical political meeting in London, Wells looked around and declared that the city was ‘a measure of the obstacle, of how much must be moved if there was to be any change’ (see R. Williams 1973: 5). Williams’ work, now thirty years old, has been widely read and continues to inform academic discussions of English culture including the present one.

A commentary on Williams by the cultural historian James Donald has made clear the extent to which Williams’ own position underwrites his thesis. Williams’ background in the Black Mountains of Wales is rural, and for him, as Donald demonstrates, the life of that place always has a greater sense of reality about it than the life of the city. It is real specifically because it is there and nowhere else, whereas the city’s cosmopolitanism (at least in Williams’ understanding of it) means that it has no such deep roots. Cities might as well be anywhere. Donald’s study therefore makes clear the extent to which this well known study of cultural anti-urbanism is itself anti-urbanist; the power of anti-urbanism extends to ostensibly even-handed discussion of it as a phenomenon (Donald 1999: 148–9).

Anti-urbanism is not only responsible for the production of literature, but also, as Martin Wiener argued in 1980 and Will Hutton elaborated in 1996, a political phenomenon that literally forms England’s cities. In his English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1980), Wiener wrote that England’s post-1945 industrial weakness resulted from a nineteenth-century failure to modernise socially as well as industrially. Industrialisation, as manifest in Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds, was achieved with relatively little social change, leaving the established class structure more or less intact. In particular, industrialisation failed to weaken the power (both cultural and economic) of inherited wealth. ‘The rentier aristocracy’, he wrote ‘succeeded to a large degree in maintaining a cultural hegemony and [. . .] in reshaping the industrial bourgeoisie in its own image’ (Wiener 1980: 6). This had two specific consequences, Wiener argued, first, that the bourgeoisie aspired to the aristocratic cultural model, investing in land and a life of gentlemanly leisure rather than industry and the town, and second, that it provided ‘legitimacy to antimodern sentiments’. Both tendencies legislated in favour of the country rather than the city, with the general result that England now lacks an established urban bourgeoisie of the types found in the US, Northern Europe or even, to a lesser extent, in Scotland.¹²

Wiener’s thesis of 1980 can be said to have been elaborated and updated by the economic journalist Will Hutton in The State We’re In (1996). ¹³ Wiener’s analysis ends in 1980, but Hutton has pointed to the continuing attractiveness of the gentlemanly ideal, which made the development of an English civic culture unlikely: ‘Educated apart and socially apart’, the English establishment

have no republican sense of civic responsibility. Their world is private. Their manners are cultivated. A studied and amused disinterestedness is their hallmark [. . ...