MODERN LIFE IS RUBBISH

The non-news of Oasis splitting up hastens me to respond to Snowball's defence of Blur (and - eek! - the Bluetones). In the case of the Bluetones, it is less a defence than an apology - but in the case of Blur, Snowball claims that there were radical roots which, had the band continued to perform, might have blossomed into something explicitly political.

I can't see the evidence for this. Damon Albarn may speak out against the Iraq War, and Blur's marketing men may choose one image of Bush and Blair and another of McDonald's for the cover of their cash-in compilation. But while these failed Labour councillors, groupie-hos-turned-cheesemakers, overrated guitarists and, aah, promising singer-songwriters are no doubt decent chaps, I'd say the claim that “Blur, and in particular Albarn, were to the left of New Labour and even implicitly anti-capitalist" is pushing it.

There is a sense, especially in this decade, that pop music should be a stylistic compendium, containing everything that has gone before - in other words, a pastiche. Far from signifying "the pursuit of authenticity" as Roobin claims in Snowball's comments box, Blur blindly and blankly gobble up what they consider to be the choice cuts of the Brit Invasion (Kinks, Small Faces, Roy Wood etc) and regurgitate something which, via nasal Mockney vocals, hypermelodic basslines, seaside imagery and the rest, conveys 60s-ness. It is impossible to appreciate Blur (admittedly one of the better Britpop bands) without hearing the thing they attempt to represent.

This is where Roobin's theory of authenticity falls down. Authenticity is not borne from acoustic guitars or time-honoured chord sequences - it is the product of something meaningful, a statement which says something new. Roobin compares Blur's purloining of the past with those 60s bands which ransacked the blues. But this is a false comparison.

Watch this, a cover by the Rolling Stones of Howlin' Wolf's "Little Red Rooster":



To the Stones, "Little Red Rooster" is not a touchstone of authenticity to which they aspire. Obviously they refer to the original - indeed their cover is musically close to it, perhaps even more "authentic"-sounding - but what we get in return is something which stirs an uncanny sense of deja entendu. It does not try to replicate the blues (Jagger's corrupting grin at 1:30 is the point at which even he can keep a straight face no longer), but instead plays on our stereotypes of the blues - and thus creates something entirely new: something as ironic and tainted as Jagger's smile.

Robert Christgau:

Jagger is obsessed with distance. He forces the Stones' music to gaze across (and down) the generation gap and the money gap and the feeling gap and the meaning gap. But then, powered by the other Stones – all of them, like most of the Stones' fans, somewhat more simple-minded than Jagger – the music leaps, so that as a totality it challenges that frustrating, ubiquitous, perhaps metaphysical margin between reach and grasp that presents itself so sharply to human beings with the leisure to think about it. This dual commitment to irony and ecstasy makes the Stones exemplary modernists.

The unearthly force of Mick Jagger's performance means that the Stones's version of "Little Red Rooster" transcends decoration and nostalgia. In it, we can perceive the blues (a world of which most of us know little) and the Swinging Sixties (of which we know a little more), but we can also detect a desire to escape a humdrum whose concrete form we discover, with a little research, was Dartford in the early 60s.

The Stones destroy and renovate history in order to maintain it, and to create something entirely new. By an act of will, they turn their source material into something Utopian. The same cannot be said for Blur, who concoct a recipe (two fifths Ray Davies, one quarter David Bowie, one fifth Steve Marriott, three twentieths Wizzard) which is detached from any context. Despite the attempts, when Blur recently played Hyde Park, of Albarn to remind an unreceptive audience of the day in 2003 when the park was filled with a million people protesting against the invasion of Iraq, Blur can only evoke an eternal version of a byegone age, "beyond historical time", and it is thus impossible for Blur's music to say anything about anything.

TREASURE CLIFFS / CITADELS OF MERCHANDISE

Treasure cliffs! ... monster ships ... phantasmagoric storehouses, citadels of merchandise, mountains of tanned goatskins enough to stink all the way to Kamchatka! Forests of mahogany in thousands of piles, tied up like asparagus, in pyramids, miles of materials! ... rugs enough to cover the Moon, the whole world ... all the floors in the Universe! ... Enough sponges to dry up the Thames! What quantities! ... Enough wool to smother Europe beneath heaps of cuddly warmth ... Herrings to fill the seas! ... Himalayas of powdered sugar ... Matches to fry the poles! ... Enormous avalanches of pepper, enough to make the Seven floods sneeze! ...

- Celine, Guignol's Band

A couple of weekends ago, DV and I went for a walk around Shadwell, Wapping and Limehouse - all stops on the Docklands Light Railway, all names from a lost world. Not a world we should be nostalgic for, no doubt, but an Imperial mercantile world razed to the ground and replaced with ... another mercantile world - of a different, but still Imperial nature.

While you can't see Canary Wharf from Shadwell DLR, a barely-audible, tangible drone emanates from the Isle of Dogs onto places like this. Shadwell was a port from the 17th century until the late 20th century, and its maritime history is inscribed into its present - sometimes fetishistically (aspic-preserved pirate-ships, the undead Tobacco Dock), but also in the different ethnic communities that make up its population.



The Church of St George in the East, between the Highway and Cable Street, is one of Hawksmoor's six churches. Iain Sinclair believes that the positioning of these churches indicates occult forces - indigestible historic nuggets, needled by the Thatcherite visions of regeneration, gentrification and Heritage, which persist to this day. "You can't understand Thatcher," he says, "except in terms of bad magic. This wicked witch who focuses all the ill will in society ... She becomes a godhead to those who want to destroy the city's power. But the godhead is created for a system which destroys her, as always happens. Now she's been banished to a kingdom of whisky and mockery."

In the tranquil gardens of St George's, which were re-opened earlier this summer, sit two roofless cottage-like buildings which, so a faded sign over the door tells us, used to be the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney's Nature Study Museum.





The museum, which was shut down on the eve of the Second World War, contained an ant-hive, a beehive, an aviary, a large Italian toad called Tom and a group of monkeys, who were fond of biting visitors. It was also home to a cockatoo, which the staff regularly washed with benzol. In the summer months, city children - bereft, as always, of nature - would visit in their thousands. In its derelict state, it is more natural than ever - but this is dirty, ratty, cobwebby nature, and there are plans afoot to open it up again as a museum.



Armed with Paul Talling's book on Derelict London, we wandered round the ruins of the museum, pickicked on Tesco's sarnies in the gardens and admired Dave Binnington's Rivera-like mural of the Battle of Cable Street. Following Hitler's remilitarisation of Germany, Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia and Franco's assault on republican Spain, Mosley and the British Union of Fascists had planned to invade this working-class, multicultural district on the 4th of October 1936. Despite an unsuccessful protest to the Home Secretary by local Mayors, the march was sanctioned, and Police beat protestors back in order that Mosley could proceed, but the Fascists were blocked from marching by 300,000 local people under the banner of "no pasaran" - they shall not pass.







We were not the only people to admire Binnington's extraordinary mural - its defiant portrayal of resistance in the face of Fascist violence dominates this part of Cable Street. It has been vandalised by groups of Fascists since its inception, and in 1993 the BNP attempted to deface it permanently by smearing black paint all over it. Happily, Tower Hamlets Council and local groups raised £18,000 to re-paint it and it is now covered with a lacquer, so that any future damage can be easily wiped off.





Tobacco Dock shows the failure of the Yuppie fantasy – a shiny consumerist dream which aimed to turn the grime of labour upon itself. This retail space – once used for the storing of tobacco, wine and spices, more recently neoliberally detourned into a shopping mall – had the misfortune to open its doors during a particularly pip-squeaking recession. By the mid 1990s, only a sandwich shop called Frank & Steins remained.

Now abandoned, Tobacco Dock is guarded by CCTV, cleaners, a team of security guards, two bears (micturating bears, according to DV) and a kestrel to keep the pigeons away. The site is now owned by Messila House who, with a nod to Icarus, have earmarked it for a new hotel and luxury residential complex.

There were some helpful notices outside to ensure our health and safety:



As we passed a Catholic church with an unsavoury anti-abortion flyer stuck to the door, DV reminded me that missionaries were drawn to poor, itinerant communities. The docks at Wapping were opened in the early 19th century, and many of the early dockers were Irish. Today, Wapping appears surprisingly cohesive - many of the wharf conversions are relatively tasteful and nestle among late 70s low-rise Council housing estates. The unity is somewhat undone by the proliferation of private, gated blocks of flats that overlook the Thames (Heritage clearly does not stretch to maintaining the public's right of way along the riverpath). In the car-park of one of these estates sat an abandoned vintage car. Further along was a gate which we assumed was locked, but since another couple found a way through to the Iguazu-like froth of Pelican Stairs, one supposes that this area feigns to be more exclusive than it really is.





In the 1960s, Betjeman rented a house near here which hovered over the river: "I put my bed on the river side of the room and it was delicious to go to sleep to the solacing sounds of water." Wapping was the site of the first enclosed dock on the Thames, and Brunel and his father built a tunnel under the river to connect this isolated area to Rotherhithe on the south bank.

By the end of the 60s, the Docks were in decline, due variously to their dilapidation, the advent of containerisation and the disintegration of Imperial markets. By 1981, all upstream docks had closed and the local economy had collapsed.

The Port of London Authority, which owned the docklands, and Tower Hamlets Council, which administered them, pursued profitable development opportunities. Newham and Southwark Councils, to the East and South, explored ways of investing in local housing and neighbourhoods. Either way, draining and cleaning the docks and restoring the land was estimated to cost around £1bn in early 1970s money.

A consortium of local Councils and the GLC proposed massive public investment over two decades, but following the structural adjustment programme imposed by the IMF in return for its bail-out of the British economy, public funds were in short supply.

An early piece of Thatcherite planning legislation, the Local Government, Planning and Land Act of 1980, enabled Urban Development Corporations (publicly-funded bodies tasked with finding market-led solutions to urban regeneration) to compulsorily acquire land from Local Authorities and then sell it to the most profitable bidder. The newly-formed London Docklands Development Company got its hands on 600,000 acres of land via the Act – this was land originally intended for public housing, but the LDDC, seeking market solutions to maximising profit. The docklands were granted the status of Enterprise Zone (the equivalent of China’s cotemporaneous SEZs), and enjoyed liberal tax-breaks.

Local people could no longer deliver their verdicts to local elected Councillors; UDCs were not accountable to the public, except insofar as they were appointed by the Secretary of State. Tenders were evaluated on the extent to which they draw in capital to the area; any effects, deleterious or otherwise, on the local community were disregarded.

In Urban Process and Power, Peter Ambrose notes that “between 1981 and 1989 the number of new lettings available in the London boroughs fell by 41%, new building fell off by 91% and 17% of London’s public housing stock was sold off.” As a result, £223m of rate-payers’ money passed over to landlords of bed and breakfast and other temporary accommodation.


Riverside Mansions, Wapping, whose residents were told to leave in the early 80s. Now redeveloped, they now sell for up to £300k (from this Flickr sequence)

We had a drink in the Prospect of Whitby, formerly the Devil's Tavern, where Dickens and Whistler and Turner got merry with smugglers and pirates. An anonymous band from the late 90s (Starsailor? Seahorses? Anyhow, something with a maritime theme...) played anaemically on the jukebox. It was dark and oaky inside, and DV was excited by the prospect of piracy, but we could find neither the foghorn on the shelf nor the newspaper report on Scarface Sanders.

Wapping High Street once contained nearly 150 pubs, and several brothels. The closure of the docks in 1969 left Wapping empty, a spectre of its former self. After Rupert Murdoch moved his media empire from Grays Inn Road and Blackfriars to new, high-tech, automated facilities at Wapping, many manual printers lost their jobs. As much as the Miners' Strike, the Wapping Dispute between Murdoch and the print unions showed that in the post-Fordist economy, traditional industrial jobs were no longer safe.



Free Trade Wharf - a gated community with a form apparently cribbed from the Habitat 67 complex in Montreal - was completed in 1990. It has a 24-hour concierge, a swimming pool and gym, sauna and spa, and landscape gardens. The cheapest flats were sold in 1990 for £107,000, the most expensive for £190,000.

The estate is typical of late 80s housing built under the auspices of the LDDC. From 1982 to 1988, 2,819 units of housing were built on the Isle of Dogs, of which 22 were shared-ownership and 60 were available for rent. As the decade progressed and land prices increased, the proportion of “affordable” housing built decreased. By the end of 1987, only 42% of new-builds were below £40,000 (1987 money) and only 12% of that 42% were sold to former Council tenants. Around half of house-buyers were well-paid City workers. We should be reminded of Ruth Glass's counsel against gentrification:

One by 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 [...] Once this process of 'gentrification' starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.


WELCOME TO SHADWELL!

Many of the LDDC's developments generated a 500% return within three years, so that a property bought for 40k in 1984 would sell for up to £200k in 1987, although prices went down just as steeply after the stock market crash.



Twenty years on, Tower Hamlets Council are planning to flatten houses along and around Linehouse Cut and the River Lea to make way for London 2012. It was getting dark and the Cut didn't feel like the cosiest place to spend a summer's evening. Escaping the pull of the Blackwall Tunnel Approach, we climbed the steps up to Cotall Street.

1-94 Cotall Street backs onto Bartlett Park in Limehouse. Like Robin Hood Gardens, it stands in the shadow of Canary Wharf, and the local Council are in the process of knocking it down. Its residents had their tenancies terminated at the end of December 2008, and all have now left. In April 2009, around the time of the G20 summit, the seeds of a squat were born, and now (apparently) all 94 flats are being used. One of the new residents pointed out that Tower Hamlets had tried to make the flats uninhabitable so that squatters would be put off:

“Loads of the flats had been totally gutted - the electricity cables ripped out, doors ripped off their hinges and windows smashed, the plumbing all pulled apart and the toilets hammered into pieces. Some of the flats were a real project to get sorted, but it's been fun because everybody here mucks in and helps each other out. A couple of days working on a place and it becomes totally hospitable ... The vibe here is really friendly. Pretty much everyone gets on well. We're having more and more communal barbeques and we're starting to screen films in the communal flat. Now that the weather's picking up people hang out on the roof, just sharing stories and learning from each other.”



A couple of weeks ago, the Sun reported that couples living in the Cotall Street squat have the temerity to make love on the roof (or "perform sex acts," as the Sun salivates with typically prudish hypocrisy). Weighing into the debate, local MP Jim Fitzpatrick says: "There's no proper solution bar demolition." That’s the spirit! Streets's the best place for 'em!

Alas for poor Nu-Labourite Fitzpatrick, the squatters may be a thorn in the side of the developers. Where Tower Hamlets could issue their tenants en masse with notices of eviction, each of the 94 squatters must be treated separately. Which means 94 separate court cases, and 94 separate headaches for the Council's lawyers. Recall what Iain Sinclair said - "the godhead is created for a system which destroys her" - and understand that the Cotall squatters have a very different kind of God on their side...

THIS IS MY TRUTH, TELL ME YOURS

The collective principle asserts that... no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

— Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear



The American ultra-Right is fighting off defences of the NHS on all fronts - even the Tory leadership (whose defence is hardly impassioned, but still). In their lazy, illogical, psychotic way, conservative opponents of Obama's healthcare reforms have portrayed the NHS as evil (managed as it is by sinister, Iron Curtain bureaucrats) and Obama as both a socialist and Hitler.
Quoting the Fabian Society blog, Lenin demonstrates the disparities between the health of British people and their American counterparts. In high-income groups, as well as low-income, Americans experience worse health in virtually every part of their bodies:

The US population in late middle age is less healthy than the equivalent British population for diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, myocardial infarction, stroke, lung disease, and cancer.

People in the UK live longer than people in the USA; well-educated Americans are just as likely to suffer from diabetes or heart disease as poorly-educated British people; 61 million Americans have no or insufficient health insurance (20% of African-American citizens in the US have none), whereas all British citizens have access to healthcare which is free at the point of entry; political decisions in the UK are based primarily on the needs of its citizens and medical research, whereas in the US they are dictated by the bottom lines of Pfizer and Grover Norqvist; and - here's the crucial one for right-wingers who bemoan the NHS's "Stalinesque inefficiencies" - per capita spending on US healthcare is around three times that of the UK, which suggests that directing money at a free-market system delivers negative rewards.

What is at stake here is nothing so rational as the health of a nation; it is the American principle that each man is responsible for himself and nobody else, and that if this principle is applied to everyone, health and prosperity will naturally follow. The fallacy of the neoliberal position - of course - is that it prevents people from starting from an equal footing. And as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson have demonstrated in The Spirit Level, unequal societies have lower life expectancies, higher child mortality, more people addicted to drugs, higher crime, and poorer physical and mental health.

The irony of this is obvious, though the various factions and lobbies who so virulently oppose Obama's healthcare reforms, are too blinded by prejudice to see it. Countries with more-or-less socialised healthcare are, to a nation, more equal than those which don't, which means their citizens are less likely to require acute healthcare. Conversely, countries with little-or-no state-funded healthcare are more unequal and their citizens are therefore more likely to need the very services they are denied. The NHS continues to be the best preventative health service we have.

THE AWESOME POWER OF ELECTRICITY

Feel the voltage on this raucous (if not rather ridiculous) paean to the silent electric car. The album, in which Young romances energy-efficient hatchbacks, hot-rods and runabouts, and berates the bail-out, is his best since ... well, I stopped buying his albums years ago, so I wouldn't know ... since before I was born?

ORDAINED CONTINUOUS BECOMING

The first theories about extinction and evolution came out of Revolutionary France, that new and secular republic which had deposed its monarchy and sought a rational explanation of humanity's development from the natural sciences. The French naturalist Georges Cuvier, in particular, had compared the bone structures of existing animals with fossils and proved the extinction of species.

Yet ironically, it was in Britain that the seeds of palaeontology and the public fascination with dinosaurs were sown. Perhaps even more ironically, they were first sown in the reified, bourgeois setting of the Great Exhibition of 1851. And, rather wonderfully, these seeds still exist in giant concrete form on Sydenham Hill.



The artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins had been commissioned to prepare a number of models of extinct mammals and reptiles for the Exhibition, with guidance from the great Victorian biologist Richard Owen. Owen had worked alongside Darwin in the 1830s, and his research into the extinct land reptiles of the Mesozoic period (which he named “dinosaurs”) had influenced Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Owen was a conservative and, with one cautious eye on the radical activities of the proletariat, he feared that Darwin’s theories of transmutation and his assertion that humans were descended from apes would bestialize men.



The Dinosaur Court at Crystal Palace is easy to dismiss; the models are now accepted as being quite inaccurate. The iguanodons, in particular, are depicted as thick-set, hooved animals that walk on all fours. But in 1854, when the Court opened to the public, no skeleton of a dinosaur had ever been constructed, and these models remain magnificent in their own way, and gigantic too (upon completion, Owen held a dinner-party inside an iguanodon’s shell). Dr Angela Milner of the NHM describes them as “shambling, bear-like mammals” but recognises that the genesis of a public fascination with dinosaurs lies in these malformed sculptures.

Our favourites were the megatherium (a tree-hugging mammoth that would be terrifying if it weren’t an antecedent of the sloth), the megalosaurus (a jagged-toothed, rather confused-looking thing, forever destined to question the value of a life spent among the lilacs), the splendidly rubber-necked ichthyosaurs and the bloated iguanodons themselves. I liked the psychedelic-eyed reptile poking its head quizzically out of a manmade suburban lake, but I can’t remember what he was supposed to be.







The history of the Dinosaur Court has been shrouded in deceit and dereliction, and is inextricably tied to that of Crystal Palace. Despite the commercial success of the Great Exhibition and the relocation of the Palace to Sydenham, the Court proved too expensive to complete, and Hawkins was ordered to stop building before the 33 planned models could be completed. After Crystal Palace burned down in the 1930s, the dinosaurs were abandoned; in the 1950s they were restored and now form part of a hotch-potchy, faintly pointless (the ruined sphynxes, statues and aquarium poke out of the weeds and attend to an overgrown space where a Palace should be) and gloriously unregenerated park. Under the beady eye of Margaret Hodge, the dinosaurs were awarded the status of Grade 1 listed buildings in 2007.

The fates of the Court's architects were largely unhappy. Owen went on to found the National History Museum, but became embroiled in a bitter dispute over Darwinian theory with T.H. Huxley. Hawkins, meanwhile, moved to the USA to lecture and even planned a dinosaur museum in New York, before the Democratic Party demagogue Boss Tweed shelved the idea and pocketed the money. Tweed was later convicted of stealing the equivalent of $8bn of public money, and Hawkins’ models were pilfered and now lie buried underneath Central Park.