Nincompoopolis

The Follies of Boris Johnson

Douglas Murphy

• Publisher: Repeater Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781910924570
• eBook ISBN:
  9781910924594
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In a world where the built environment seems ever more shaped by invisible market forces, where modern architecture can seem to dissolve into a generic void, sometimes it takes a very special person to make a difference.Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was Mayor of London from 2008 until 2016, during which time he took a remarkably keen interest in the built environment, commissioning, guiding, and shaping all manner of different projects. With his achievements he showed us all that massive privilege, leaping ambition, no concern for detail and a wasp's attention span needn't hold you back when it comes to creating terrible architecture.Nincompoopolis examines the built legacy of Johnson's tenure, from his embarrassing follies to the folly of his policies, and wonders if there's anything that can be learned from letting someone like him have a go at one the world's great cities.

FOLLIES

“A fantastic new landmark for London”

The Crystal

2008 was easily one of the worst years of my life. I had finished my postgraduate studies that summer, right as the financial crisis was at its height. The prospects for a trained but unqualified architect at this point had fallen off a cliff — projects were being cancelled left, right, and centre, nearly every firm was laying off staff, the entire industry was in turmoil. The year before, graduating students had woken up the morning after their degree show with a hangover and numerous job offers, and I had heard the phrase “bought off the wall” being crudely transposed from artists to architects. But without any real insider contacts, no amount of CV distribution could help me find a job, and so I found myself — after six years of study and training — collecting Job Seeker’s Allowance in the job centre in Hoxton.

Considering what has been the case for the UK since then, the situation at that point was almost relaxed — the job centre was suddenly filled with twenty-somethings from the creative professions: architecture, design, fashion, film, and TV, etc., and there was little sign of the hyper-aggressive sanctioning that has now become normal. It wasn’t quite relaxed however — the influx of temporarily embarrassed young adults didn’t mask the general and consistent misery of the place, and even with the deterioration since, the previous decade had seen the introduction of a great deal of punitive measures against those out of work. Nevertheless, the extraordinary circumstances were palpable, and the eye-roll of the staff member hearing yet another new claimant sheepishly mumble “architect” was telling.

This humiliating state of affairs dragged on, so that by the end of 2009, more than a year later, I was still barely scraping by. Via contacts I had made while blogging about architecture, I had managed to start working as a journalist, and there were occasional scraps of freelance work here and there generating 3D images of luxury houses designed for wealthy Russians in the forests outside Moscow. It was enough to be no longer claiming benefits, but money was a constant worry and my lifestyle was Spartan. But then, not long after the beginning of 2010, a call came through from a university friend who had recently found a job — was I busy? There was a competition, the first sniff of new work for ages, and they needed people right away. I was in no position to refuse.

A few days later I turned up to an office that was situated in a converted warehouse building in the hinterland between Shoreditch and the City of London, and sat down to be given an introduction to the project. The site was a patch of derelict land at the side of the Royal Victoria Dock in East London that had once been the site of a warehouse, long since demolished. To the north was Canning Town, a residential neighbourhood where the Freemason’s Estate once stood, the cluster of tower blocks that included Ronan Point, whose partial collapse in 1968 irrevocably soured the UK’s relationship with prefabricated construction. This neighbourhood, to this day highly deprived, was and is separated from the docks by a long thread of railway lines.

In the years since the dereliction of the dockside, the Docklands Light Railway had been built to pass through, its automated carriages heading off to London City Airport, with its aura of executive travel and its thrilling flight paths over Canary Wharf. The locks that granted access to the docks had been filled in, with the waters barely disturbed except by the occasional use of the equipment at a watersports centre. Nearby the gigantic Excel Centre, one of the largest exhibition and trade-fair venues in Europe, had been completed in 2000.

On the immediate docksides, some areas to the south had been gradually redeveloped as low-rise housing, set back behind rows of Stothert and Pitt cranes, legacies of a time when the pressures of residential development were not quite so overwhelming. Not far away was the derelict hulk of the Millennium Mills, a mouldering fragment of the once overwhelmingly industrial docks, while directly to the north was a pumping station designed by Richard Rogers in the late 1980s. This small industrial building, overly designed with a polychromatic metal crown, was now overlooked by some faceless early-2000s flats, a plethora of cladding materials, none of them in any way convincing.

The brief for the new building that was to take its place there was, well, not immediately clear. It was to be some kind of exhibition or conference space, but the Excel Centre around the corner had more space like that available than you could ever need. There was an idea that there might be some kind of office required, but the building certainly wasn’t to be a conventional office block, and the location was miles away from any of the centres of demand for office space. Overall, the brief, such as it was, said that the building had to be “sustainable”, which wasn’t exactly helpful for anyone figuring out what to design.

I rolled up my sleeves, got involved, and gradually the instructions coalesced. The building had a tenant in mind — Siemens — who had agreed to take on space for conferences and training. They had been tempted by the prospect of using the project as a showcase of their ongoing work in low-carbon energy and infrastructure. As a result, much of the building was to be given over to a permanent exhibition on sustainability. Exhibition designers hadn’t been brought on at this point, so the competition entry developed as a big shed, folded and faceted to make an iconic form, but with a huge internal space, big enough to hold the world’s then-largest wind-turbine blades, which were seen as the sort of spectacular objects that might well feature as part of the exhibition.

It seemed, from what could be gathered, that this competition was an idea developed by Johnson, who was looking for opportunities to kick-start the redevelopment of the remaining derelict areas beside the docks. He had apparently managed to talk Siemens into the project, which would be a joint venture with the London Development Agency, with the promise that it would be complete in time for the 2012 Olympics, with, presumably, the opportunity to use the building for promotional activities during this time. There was clearly a strong political momentum behind the project, but it didn’t seem all that clear that anyone knew what it was actually for.

Eventually, the competition was won by the collaborative team of two architecture firms that I had assisted, although I played no further part in the project beyond that point. The scheme that went into planning in mid-2010, and was completed only a short time after the Olympics, described itself as an “urban sustainability centre”. The original big folded shed idea had been reduced in scope, but had now been rationalised as being derived from crystalline forms, with the entire development being christened as “The Crystal”. One half of the building was to be given over to a large auditorium and surrounding office space, while the other half was the aforementioned sustainability exhibition. The whole building was to be an exemplar of low-carbon technologies, including photovoltaics, recycled construction materials, rainwater harvesting and the like, with the intention that it would be the most advanced building of this type in the UK.

The Crystal - ‘Iconic’ regeneration, speculative housing, spectacular infrastructure. Johnson’s London. (Image author’s own).

The result sits rather incongruously in its landscape, but is a perfectly acceptable building, with a certain charm to its folds and facets, wilful though they are. But The Crystal is certainly not one to take its place in the list of major London attractions, and apart from one major example it didn’t encourage much new development in its surroundings. But in many ways this slightly purposeless architectural object, in whose production I played a small part, is a perfect example of what I would come to understand as Johnson’s attitude to the built environment. A large source of investment — whether an institution or an individual — would be encouraged to put money into a project for which there was no real need, in exchange for branding and promotional opportunities. This funding would be topped up by the public purse, without any significant oversight. The new project would be portrayed as a vital part of maintaining London’s position as a global city, with any opposition condemned as hopeless negativity, even if the object ended up making London into a laughing stock.

The Crystal, despite its cringe-worthy name, has suffered no major humiliations since its construction, instead just sitting puzzlingly at the side of the docks. To its north, a forlorn-looking derelict pub has been demolished, and some more speculative flats, their cylindrical forms decorated by waving ribs of balconies, are, at the time of writing, almost finished. But this muted acceptance is not the case for every Johnsonian project that has been foisted upon the city and its landscape. Some of them have been damp squibs, others are innocuous enough, but some are affronts to urbanism, attempts to infantilise the landscape to the point of incoherence.

“It would have boggled the minds of the Romans”

The ArcelorMittal Orbit

When the crisis hit I had been living in London for a few years, first moving down in the summer of 2005 after finishing my undergraduate degree. I had a job waiting for me at an architect’s office in Shoreditch, in yet another converted old warehouse building from the early 20^th century. Not knowing what to do about living, I had taken an A–Z and drawn a circle depicting a half-hour’s walk from my new workplace, which determined where I wanted to live. Using “Loot”, the London listings paper, and “Moveflat”, a then-popular website for room lettings, I found a room in an ex-council flat in Shadwell, an area of East London traditionally tied to the docks. In the decades since containerisation moved the port downstream, Shadwell had declined, and was by then one of the most deprived parts of London, with a patchwork landscape of estates and older housing largely defined by the destruction left by the Luftwaffe.

The room had a small circular sticker in the corner of the window, already faded from the sun: “BACK THE BID”, it said. When I arrived, it was the week after the 7^th July tube and bus bombings in London, and the whole city was on edge. The tragedy and horror of the attacks, and their grim inevitability during the height of the “war on terror”, completely overshadowed what had happened only the day before, when the IOC had awarded the 2012 Olympic Games to London.

The madness surrounding the bombings went on for weeks, not least when another set of bombers attempted identical attacks two weeks later, followed the next day by the mistaken-identity police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes. There were constant alerts, and my hunt for a room had involved numerous disrupted journeys as the underground was evacuated yet again after a bomb scare. I indulged a little in strange magical behaviours — only getting on at the very ends of trains, thinking the middle carriages were a more obvious target, for example — and in one surreal and disturbing incident I saw a tube worker and a policeman, nerves completely frayed, getting into a fist fight in front of an emptied Kings Cross Station.

But gradually, as time went on, the bombings began to fade into memory, and the normal London routine set in again. This is, of course, the dynamic of how terrorism and the response to it works — in sophisticated urban scenes it is practically impossible to stop low-complexity violent attacks, and the only basic practical response is to maintain normal functions and habits. The response of ordinary Londoners to those events was in many ways exemplary, in part fashioned by the long years of the Irish Troubles, which at some points during the early 1990s involved bomb attacks almost weekly.

In fact, it was the events of 6^th July 2005 that were to become far more a part of the day-to-day life of the city in the years to come — the question of the Olympics, and the massive transformation of East London that they were due to effect, gradually became part of the ambient London hum. I left the Shadwell flat years before the Olympics took place, but while I was there, that sticker was a constant little reminder of what was going on in the background.

The proposals for the Olympics went through phases and developments. Beijing was to host the games in 2008, and it was clear the Chinese were intending to go all out on a display of their new-found prowess.

Having to follow that example, based as it was upon the euphoria of mass urbanisation and years of double-digit economic growth, not to mention experience of massive amounts of highly planned public works, was never going to be easy, even before the onset of the financial crisis. An early masterplan for the London site, the valley of the River Lea as it passed between Hackney and Stratford, worked on by the now-defunct Foreign Office Architects, showed swoops and flourishes crawling across the site in a digital animation. This attempt at some kind of experimental landscape was typical of the self-proclaimed radical fringes of architecture in the early 2000s, designed by an avant-garde architect whose Shoreditch office stood directly across from Vice magazine’s pub the Old Blue Last, but little of this initial approach found its way into later designs.

Johnson’s attendance at the Beijing ceremony, one of his first major mayoral outings, included some of his quintessentially half-informed monologues (such as his lecture to the Chinese about the real origin of table tennis being an English game called “Whiff Whaff”)³, but by and large, he was slow to assert his authority on the development of the Olympics themselves. By the time that “austerity” had been asserted as a dominant political concept for the coming years, the Olympics were ready to play their role in asserting that story — the London Games would not be profligate, nor wasteful, they would not fall into the trap of constructing boondoggles that no one would subsequently use. Instead, the Olympics were to be focussed on sustainability and “Legacy”, on the creation of a functioning, integrated new neighbourhood and facilities that would seamlessly become part of the London fabric.

The designs developed for the three main venues reflected these ideals to differing degrees. The athletics stadium, rather than the bombastic “Bird’s Nest” of steel from Beijing, was considered more as a temporary construction, and was designed (by HOK Sport, now known as Populous) as an adaptable and lightweight affair, to be converted cheaply into a football stadium afterwards. Hopkins Architects were commissioned to design the Velodrome, whose cable-net roof also subscribed to the logic of efficient steel construction. However, this minimal, “flat-pack” approach was somewhat undermined by Zaha Hadid Architects gaining the commission for the Aquatics Centre, wherein they used their computers to generate a sweeping formalist swoosh performing an impression of a marine animal, whose headachingly complex structure weighed ten times as much as the cycling venue’s.⁴

By the time work on the Olympics began, the area around the Lea Valley had long become a somewhat forgotten zone. The Stratford Works railway depot had been there since the late 19^th century, but the area along the Lea River had remained undeveloped right into the 20^th. Gradually it became a “liminal” zone, home to factories and warehouses and other light-industrial uses, but generally unvisited by the wider population. The Abercrombie Plan of 1944 envisaged the Lea Valley as part of a linear park reaching all the way down to the Thames, a proposal whose long-delayed realisation was part of the pitch for the redevelopment of the Olympic site.

The area also played a small role in architectural history when at a point in the late 1960s it was to have been the location of Joan Littlewood & Cedric Price’s project for a “Fun Palace”, an interactive entertainment venue, something like a proto-Pompidou Centre, that is one of the great unrealised 20^th-century architectural projects. This particular legacy would exert a gentle influence on the Olympic Stadium itself, as Peter Cook, once a member of architectural provocateurs Archigram (for whom Price was a primary influence), was enlisted to bring some of this cybernetic magic to the design of the stadium itself.

By the end of the century, the Lea Valley and surroundings were becoming known, however partially, as sites of imaginative reconstruction — Hackney Wick nearby was home to a growing live/work population of artists, and figures involved in “London Psychogeography”, exemplified by the author Iain Sinclair, were known to explore its overgrown landscapes of canals, factories, pylons, ruins and other such melancholy sights, such as the famous “fridge mountain” made up entirely of discarded white goods⁵. A booming property market, alongside estate demolition and legal restrictions on squatting, meant that many neighbourhoods of the city were becoming far more prosaic than they had been in the 1980s, and the Lea Valley, with its associations with rave culture and other subversive a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Follies
• Folly
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Copyright