Exhibitions 1
Message to the Mayon Don't Sterilise Our City!
(Museum of London, till 20 February)
London: discuss
Alan Powers
Museums don't usually express politi- cal opinions, still less in the language of extreme emotion, but the visitor entering the Museum of London until the middle of next month will be faced by a striking state- ment in relation to the election of the Mayor of London on 4 May. 'The Museum of London is increasingly infuriated at the lack of serious debate surrounding this momentous political change,' it declares. Where is the discussion about London?'
. Congratulations to the museum and its director Simon Thurley for saying it. A dis- play in the entrance area, now well worth Watching throughout the year for small issue-based exhibitions, expands on the theme. The photographic panels and mod- els from the museum's collection contrast the tedium of planned architectural spaces, specially those represented in Sir Patrick Abercrombie's 1944 plan for the County of London, with the chaotic bustle of streets full of shops and traffic, celebrated in Charles Lamb's famous passage about shedding tears in the Strand 'from fullness of joy at so much life'.
A recently rediscovered model built in 1943 to display a section of Abercrombie's plan for the area of Bermondsey now known as Butler's Wharf shows hardly a single old building surviving in a bland and Stalinist-looking array of housing blocks with hygienic green areas between them. One thinks gladly of the reconstruction of the warehouses in Shad Thames Street that happened instead, now the height of faux- continental chic, as no doubt Abercrombie himself would be were he alive to see the result. How unwelcoming, by contrast, despite the efforts of good architects, is the museum's high-principled Barbican hinter- land.
Abercrombie's plan was based on a pro- jected reduction of London's population, which was already falling before the war, and on a greater provision of open spaces in parts of the city where they were lacking. Industry and shopping were to be rigorous- ly zoned. Some of the good aspects of his plan were realised but we tend not to acknowledge their origin. To step back into the London of 1939 would, nostalgia apart, be a nightmare even by today's far from perfect conditions, but the concept of large-scale planning is now as fashionably unfashionable as modern architecture was 20 years ago, and the Museum of London has spun its very justifiable call for a discus- sion about London in the direction of anti- planning propaganda.
As a basis for getting started, this presen- tation is pretty thin. A photographic panorama from Canary Wharf Tower pro- vides exactly the kind of detached bird's- eye view that made Abercrombie's models so dangerously seductive, while a view of the underside of the Westway, painted in 1987, is less an adverse comment on urban motorways than a premonition of the aes- theticisation of the supposedly ugly which now sends photographers scurrying round to find the last unimproved tower blocks as backgrounds for fashion shoots or album covers. A set of contrasted photographs of 'I need to work on my pecks.' shopping streets makes a simplistic point about the danger that pedestrianisation reduces the appearance of life.
Not far away, on a set of three plinths, wastepaper baskets hold copies of Aber- crombie's plan, the Greater London Devel- opment Plan of 1969, and the Urban Task Force report of 1999. The latter is under suspicion of wanting to nanny us into a well-behaved future, although it contains none of the genuinely useful things of the previous two plans, such as the major roads into London which strain to permit some exchange with the rest of the country. Hat- ing and despising rural life (or at least pre- tending to) is a necessary part of being against planning. Abercrombie took the opposite view that London was a necessary evil whose effects should be ameliorated. There must be a middle way somewhere that leaves variety and choice.
Accepting the fallibility of grand designs, one is left wondering whether neglect in a place as large and complex as London can ever nowadays be benign. It is supposedly to remedy the results of such neglect since the abolition of the GLC that the post of mayor has been instituted, although it shows every prospect of making things worse. Perhaps what is needed is not so much an absence of planning but a differ- ent kind of planning, which does more to encourage and protect the interesting trades and shops that we recognise as important to the vitality of the city. Such a planner would be more like an urban ani- mater, with a wide range of intentions and ways of achieving them.
There is a fine line between such well- intentioned protection (such as supports the apparently 'natural' commercial anar- chy of Bangladeshi Brick Lane), and the theming that results in the slightly ersatz quality of Gerrard Street's Chinatown, but each owes its existence in different ways to the planning system, and are forward mod- els of other things that could be achieved by an inspired mayor.
The current fashion for urban chaos depends heavily on the economic inferiori- ty of others to provide its picturesque kicks. The car and the lorry, boring and brutish, have an unfair advantage in the battle for the streets over the unmotorised citizen. The social justice which the urban chaotics also demand seems, sadly, to be intrinsical- ly anti-urban (discuss). According to today's catalogue of urban pleasures, the just city is the dull city, so something must be wrong with the theory. In the age of Starbucks and Gap we need a different urban sensibility to Charles Lamb's. Despite globalisation and the commodifica- tion of just about everything, the poetry of the everyday is still being enacted all about us and needs only to be allowed a stage on which to be seen. The need for a visionary grasp of the almost incomprehensible com- plexity of London has never been greater and the Mayor of London, if not a museum curator, ought to be a poet.
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