Property and Finance on the Post-Brexit London Stage

We Want What You Have

Michael Meeuwis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367548032
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000297447
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

A guide to the contemporary London stage as well as an argument about its future, the book walks readers through the city's performance spaces following the Brexit vote.

Austerity-era London theatre is suffused with the belief that private ownership defines full citizenship, its perspective narrowing to what an affluent audience might find relatable. From pub theatres to the National, Michael Meeuwis reveals how what gets put on in London interacts with the daily life of the neighbourhoods in which they are set.

This study addresses global theatregoers, as well as students and scholars across theatre and performance studies—particularly those interested in UK culture after Brexit, urban geography, class, and theatrical economics.

1Typical girls; or, the privately owned punk squat

• Fran and Leni by Sadie Hasler
• Old Trunk Theatre Company
• King’s Head Theatre, 115 Upper St, London N1 1QN
• 1 August 2017

By my lights, the best charity shop in London is the Cancer Research in Islington, near Angel Station. A certain kind of charity shopping requires a local population willing to throw away expensive things. I’ve found Maison Martin Margiela jackets discarded for one reason or another by their owners; Visvim, once, although it didn’t fit. I flatter myself that I’m keeping to the thrifting tradition of fashionable art students, even though my own tastes are considerably closer to Miss Piggy’s: “if it’s expensive, it fits.” In their London incarnations, charity shops offer the chance to dress a couple of economic orders above one’s own station. You want to shop somewhere like Upper Street: a place that, as Tim Butler notes, has “been lifted out of the local economy into the global one,” stocked with donations from those existing outside of the normal value scales of the nation.¹

There is in a sense only one story these days about most of London’s neighbourhoods: how expensive they are to live in now, relative to whatever point in the past, whether the 1970s, the 1990s, or five years ago. Regarding Islington, Charles Dickens Jr.’ Dickens’ Dictionary of London (1879) notes that “Houses here are very cheap.”² The subject of considerable wartime damage, Islington has risen from the ashes to become a much-researched gentrification case. The sociologist Ruth Gass coined the term in 1959 to describe neighbourhoods like this one:

many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes—upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages—two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. Larger Victorian houses, downgraded in an earlier or recent period—which were used as lodging houses or were otherwise in multiple occupation—have been upgraded once again.³

As Lees et al. note, “Pioneer gentrifiers began moving into [the area] in the late 1950s.”⁴ The process was intensified in the 1960s by increased access to mortgages, in the 1970s by government funding for house improvements, and post-1980s by a wave of “Super-gentrification, or financialization,” in which

a further level of gentrification … is superimposed on an already gentrified neighborhood, one that involves a higher financial or economic investment in the neighborhood than previous waves of gentrification and requires a qualitatively different level of economic resource.⁵

The major controversy may simply be whether “gentrification,” with its connotations of inherited English social forms, can adequately address property values driven upwards by these realisations of international finance.⁶ What we who flow through the area have gained in the sort of people who are willing to throw out a £1,500 cotton jacket, we’ve lost in, well, what happens when those people enter a rental market. My friend, the corporate lawyer, kept occupied by 90-hour weeks, talks of being well past buying here—“it’s what Chelsea was in the nineties,” I’m informed. This is to say, suddenly unaffordable for the merely affluent.

Angel Station is still in TFL Zone 1. Islington is now practically central London, although this was not always the case: like most of the map of London, it began life as an independent village. Slightly uphill from the City, many of its locations are associated with water—indeed water sources in the area used to service much of the rest of the city. Sadler’s Wells, now a dance venue, was named for the springs found on the property. Clerkenwell, named for Clark’s Well, passed in and out of being fashionable. Justice Shallow allegedly brags about getting laid nearby.⁷ In George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889), the nearby Clerkenwell slums hosted the lowest levels of the Victorian poor. Gissing’s actress heroine is disfigured in an acid attack—a form of attack back in the news in the summer of 2017, one taking place not far away at Highbury Corner. This latter attack bespeaks the area’s continued proximity of extremes of poverty and wealth.

Pub theatres are a surviving Victorian form, an entertainment of the very poor. So-called penny gaffs, named for their low entrance fees and lower-class entertainments, were often just rooms in the backs of pubs, where broad comedy, agreeably patriotic violence, and even simplified versions of Shakespeare were performed. The King’s Head’s current iteration, as a pub theatre, is an invention of the 1970s. Dan Crawford, a visiting American, had the idea to open a performance space in a déclassé area. As Adam Spreadbury-Maher, the theatre’s current artistic director, notes, 1970’s Islington offered “hardly any restaurants. The roads off Upper Street were populated by musicians and artists because the rent was so cheap.”⁸ It was possible to do theatre in a tiny room to tiny audiences. Many famous careers intersected with the place: Tom Stoppard, Jennifer Saunders, Richard E. Grant, and Alan Rickman.⁹

The 1970s were also a different time for Islington. London as a whole still had a superflux of unoccupied housing. Squatting was, in parts of the city, a viable option—indeed one seeking to establish itself as a route to permanent settlement made possible by radically different laws about property ownership.¹⁰ The Squatters Handbook, a by-product of this era, recommends the appearance of domesticity to prospective squatters. It is, for example, “a good idea to have some furniture with you when you occupy a house. It helps to show the police and the nieghbours [sic] that you are squatters and not burglars or vandals.”¹¹ Squatters are advised to “always tidy up after you have entered,” and, if possible, to improve the property squatted in. At least as the Squatters Manual describes it, it was possible to imagine squatters as essentially respectable neighbourhood members.

Considered 40 years on, punk and squatting—far from synonymous, although often overlapping—can be seen as part of the negotiation of who gets to live where in London. White squatters faced none of the racial barriers to housing market entry experienced by the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants. The cover of the 1978 edition of the Squatters Handbook foregrounds a well-scrubbed white child while her extended family tends to a Victorian arch. It’s easy to be cynical about this kind of image, which, after all, was trying to make squatters seem as agreeable to the English mainstream as possible, down to its reliance on traditional gender roles (men reconstruct masonry, and women paint and rear). Their hair might be a bit longer than yours, the image suggests, but the neighbourhood was nevertheless gaining by its squatters some decent dinner parties—the sort of place where haloumi might have been served 30 years before you could get it at Nando’s. It’s not coincidental that by the 1970s England’s councils were building less and less housing. This handbook announced an attempt to play nice within a city whose housing shape was more or less going to stay the same for a while. Home possession has a complex relationship to self-representation in the area—one that has continued even as property prices have become some logarithmic parody of what a middle-class economy can scale to.

Punk, the music and the attached lifestyle, attempted to give the finger to all of this bourgeois nicety—if without any particular structural commitments to political change.¹² Yet its concerns were the ying to the handbook’s yang: what to do with disused space; what sort of non-traditional household to live in; how, broadly speaking, to fit into society. To burlesque “God Save the Queen,” as the Sex Pistols did, was to keep the established set of figureheads in place: to at least agree to the same playing-field as those you were trying to piss off. Rather than imagine a different future, punk’s most commercial face denied one: “there’s no future,” rather than a better one, “for you.”¹³ Several punk subcultures genuinely attempted to make better societies—and still do, to this day. This is not the story of punk, however, with which we’re most familiar. Instead, punk’s most superficial elements—teased hair and agitated guitars—quickly became its calling card.

I’m on my way to the King’s Head, an Islington pub theatre, to see Fran and Leni. I would love to report that some of the best nights of my life have been spent at a pub theatre—like the man behind me at another show the previous week, declaiming loudly to his friend that the best thing he’d seen last year had been at the Hen and Chickens. These recent years of pub theatre programming, however, have left me agnostic. My theatregoing friends believe that overall the best years of London’s pub theatres are for the most part in the past. On the one hand, pub theatres do grant as much awkward immediacy as anyone not actually a sociopath can reasonably be expected to handle. Some venues carve out particular niches: the Finborough Theatre in Kensington, for example, is consistently one of the highest-quality theatres in London, with a particular focus on reviving older plays. On the other hand, there’s a wide variety of these venues, and quality control varies enormously. The seats are never comfortable. The actors are close enough that you wonder about their lives: what brought them to (say) a pub theatre on an overcast evening in August, while many of London’s actors had decamped to Edinburgh.

There has been a King’s Head Tavern in the present location on Upper Street, since 1543; one lost his, in other words, since the institution was founded. The current building, like frankly most of London, is Victorian—and charming, to boot. Brexit be damned, there’s a developed wine list (A Spanish Valdemoreda, “Soft Stone Fruit-Floral”) and a £16.50 Cheese & Charcuterie Board “served with toasted campaillou.”

London is a city where social boundaries are rigorously enforced. And yet, three florid, well-heeled Islingtonites sit down at the table with me, without asking, and within moments are loudly ignoring me. Their faces suggest confidence, security, and, by the time the performance starts, alcohol. Something in their confidence has overridden the alleged English horror of invading someone else’s space. The pub portion of the King’s Head self-fashions with an analogous confidence: Alan Rickman on the wall, Rioja on the wine list, and John Lewis clothing on the clientele.

The theatre, in contrast, seems frail—frailer than I would realise, in fact. Before the performance, an employee reads us a five-minute riot act: they receive no money from the pub—indeed they have to pay a licencing fee; change in a bucket would be appreciated. I admire entirely the young theatre manager who gives this speech. She is calm and self-assured and wise in a way I would not be for another decade after her age. She tells us fiercely that the King’s Head is the only pub theatre in London to pay Equity—that is, the agreed-upon union rate for their services—to those who work for them.

Good for the King’s Head. There will always be people willing, for a few years, to make a go of a life in the theatre, before circumstances push them out. A certain amount of risk might even be encouraged among 21-year-olds. Equity, however, is what sustains careers. Anyone who goes to the theatre regularly is, if they’re being honest with themselves, a big aghast at how solidly mainstream theatres skew towards youth. It can sometimes feel, frankly, like theatre provides a respectable stream of young bodies for the well-heeled to og...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction: rooting for the house
• 1 Typical girls; or, the privately owned punk squat
• 2 Brexit’s dispossessed
• 3 Transnationalism
• 4 Village feel
• 5 Croydon versus the world: Malteaser threesomes and entrepreneurial sweatshirts in the shadow of Grenfell
• 6 Yerma on the internet
• Conclusion: wanting more
• Afterword: estate of the nation, Jerusalem to Albion
• Index