Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime

In east London, the area that will always be most associated with grime, the boroughs of Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham have consistently appeared among the most deprived local authorities in the entire country; in 2000, the government used a new, complex model for analysing different aspects of poverty, from housing to health, which they called Indices of Multiple Deprivation. Across all of England, the grime boroughs were ranked at 1, 2 and 3. A medal-winning podium of poverty.

‘East London is in need’ has been the received wisdom of London local government ever since it was first introduced in 1888. A century and a half ago, Tower Hamlets was home to the disease-ridden squalor, vice, filth and overcrowded warrens of the infamous Old Nicol slum, before it was finally demolished in the 1890s, following the Housing for the Working Classes Act. The slum clearance programmes continued for decades, both before and after the devastation of the Blitz; some residents moved out to the suburbs, others were given low-rent social housing in the modern new council estates being built. Between 1964–74, the last of the slums were demolished and the Greater London Council built 384 tower blocks of ten storeys or more, providing 68,500 new flats. They were accompanied by utopian rhetoric about a new way of living and ‘streets in the sky’, changes that would finally grant the dignity London’s working-class communities deserved, and dramatically lift the quality of life. In 1981, at the peak of the social-housing boom, there were over 75,000 council homes in London, housing nearly 31 per cent of the capital’s population. It is no coincidence that they were heavily concentrated in exactly the boroughs where grime and UK rap would later thrive: 42 per cent of London’s social housing was in ‘Inner East London’: the boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Islington, Haringey, Southwark, Lambeth and Lewisham.

London has historically been a fairly low-rise city, with relatively few skyscrapers, landmark blocks of luxury apartments, or high-end hotels and offices – it has not looked like Manhattan, or latter-day Dubai, Hong Kong or Shanghai. Largely this was by design: planning laws have prohibited tall structures which obscure certain ‘protected views’ of iconic old London landmarks like St Paul’s and the Palace of Westminster, as seen from certain high points on the fringes of the capital, like Parliament Hill, Richmond Park and Alexandra Palace – it’s not the specific views themselves which matter so much, but their utility as insurance against a cluttered skyline.

But at the start of the new millennium, a new kind of high-rise building started arriving in the capital: one much less likely to produce exuberant forms of youth culture, clad in glass rather than concrete. Most obvious amongst them was the Shard – Mordor-upon-Thames, owned by Qatar, an obscene 72 storeys high, built with the enthusiastic support of Ken Livingstone, and the backing of New Labour. This directly contravened the ‘protected views’ regulations; English Heritage objected at a public inquiry, and were ignored. At the time of writing, five years after opening, all ten of the £30–50m flats on the tower’s upper floors remain unsold, and empty. Even a visit to the viewing deck costs more than £30. Since then, the trickle has become a flood: in 2017 a survey found that 455 new high-rise blocks were either planned or already under construction in London: ‘safety deposit boxes’ for wealthy investors, expensive hotels, high-end office space and luxury flats. Blocks like the ickily-named Manhattan Loft Gardens in Stratford followed the Shard’s lead and caused controversy by ruining another sight line of St Paul’s. More importantly, not a single one of the 455 was being built to provide housing for London’s poorest.

The Shard started a bold new trend – building hideous neoliberal obelisks which London didn’t need – but the major precedent had already been set: the planting of Canary Wharf’s towers of misbegotten riches, right in grime’s back yard, in place of the city’s abandoned docks. Today, underneath the white office lights and CCTV cameras of what is sometimes known as the ‘second City’, teem the ghosts of empire, hard labour, hard liquor, opium dens, sailors and sex workers. Even as it enters adolescence, Canary Wharf’s cluster of gleaming skyscrapers still feels like a life-size artist’s impression, rendered in three dimensions; free from clutter, free from litter – and free from heavy explosives, you presume, if the security presence is anything to go by.

Look closer, and some of the police aren’t actually the police at all – they’re private security guards, in uniforms designed to look exactly like real police uniforms. The whole area is unnervingly clean. As close as it is, Canary Wharf is almost completely sealed off from its neighbours to the north, where grime erupted into life – Poplar, Limehouse, Bow, and eventually Hackney and Newham – separated by the huge A13 and A1261 dual carriageways, and a no man’s land of train lines, Docklands Light Railway sidings and buildings, business parks, car parks, blind alleys and dead-ends, all of which act as further barricades. It is almost as if the builders of Canary Wharf wanted it that way. ‘That’s where all the yuppies are,’ MC Breeze from Roll Deep says in a 2003 documentary, pointing up at One Canada Square. ‘We’re just over the road, and it’s one of the worst boroughs in England.’2 On the south side of the skyscrapers, in a part of the Isle of Dogs which used to be known as ‘The Land of Plenty’ during Britain’s colonial heyday, the Anchor & Hope pub (Est. 1829) sits boarded up and unloved, its business perhaps swallowed by the two-storey Thai restaurant next door – the hope is gone and the boat is adrift. Commerce spares little attention for sentimental attachment to the past – even its own.

East London’s past is weighed down with poverty, and weighed down with heavy industry: the docks, of course, but also gas, railways, manufacturing, textiles, mills – and, a rare example which is still clinging on today, the Tate and Lyle sugar refinery. It has always been the city’s working quarter, with an abundance of low-paid, physically punishing jobs, and was not just the arrival point for immigrants and internal migrants, for centuries, but also the place where many of them made their first homes in the capital: always more multicultural than the rest of London, and almost entirely working class.3

East London’s industrial history continued to loom over the area once all the industrial work was gone. Even without the factories coating nearby buildings in a layer of soot, and the industrial pollution and jetsam from the docks, east London remained associated with grime, dirt, grit and debris. The connection between the word, the music genre, and the places where grime came from has always been understood to be obvious. ‘Most grime tunes are made in a grimy council estate,’ MC Nasty Jack told an American documentary crew in 2006. ‘Mum ain’t got enough money, everyone’s just angry. You need a tension release.’4 The name of the genre aside, grime has featured a whole range of lyrical tropes in which dirt is lionised: tunes are praised as mucky – mucktion, as a noun – dutty (dirty); Shystie even proclaimed one of her tunes was ‘muddy’. Partly this is about paying tribute to the sonic ‘bottom end’, the sub-bass, but it’s also a testament to the music’s geographical origins.

The East End had been very literally grimier in the past – as in the great smog of 1952, where coal smoke and bad weather conspired to kill around 12,000 Londoners. Regeneration and grime are oppositional forces in the urban arena: in the recent vernacular of urban planning, the word ‘regeneration’ has always been understood as a response to grit, grime, disorder, clutter and failure or decline. It has a Christian moralistic aspect, a sense that the city too can be born again, that it might – with the right purpose and guidance from above – dunk its head in the water and repent its poverty and sin. Indeed the first recorded use of ‘regeneration’ in English is from the Wycliffe Bible of 1384, describing the kind of rebirth that Jesus’s disciples can expect upon reaching heaven. It was the perfect word for New Labour and the secretly evangelical Prime Minister: grime was old Labour, 1970s, strikes and coal, rubbish piling up in the streets, sin and concrete; regeneration was pastel colours and cheery post-modernism, IKEA urbanism that would make the city look like a kids’ play centre – and entice the middle classes to come and live in it.

The East End’s underdog mentality, marginality, poverty and history of industrial squalor are all interconnected. Macho resilience and physical and mental toughness have long been fetishised as traits specific to east London, and that kind of grittiness is prominent in grime’s vernacular. Dizzee Rascal’s single ‘Graftin’’ addressed listeners inside and outside the capital, and proposed grimy London as a more honest alternative to the scenes on the city’s tourist postcards:

Young hustlers, London city, stand up

L-D-N, they know us in the world

You know what time it is

I swear to you it ain’t all teacups, red telephone boxes and Buckingham Palace

I’m gonna show you it’s gritty out here5

Almost everyone involved in making grime since its early days has, at one point or another, said something along the lines of ‘I don’t know where the name came from, I didn’t really like it, but it just kind of stuck.’ Musicians will almost always do this anyway – disavow all genres and taxonomy, unwilling to let their free-flying creativity be pinned down behind glass and labelled. It’s understandable. But there is another (equally understandable) motive for rejecting the name. Unlike UK garage, grime wasn’t explicitly aspirational in its fashion or its ethos. But all the same, when it first emerged, the word ‘grime’ seemed to undercut a basic need for respect. What you can hear in the disavowals of the name is ‘We’re trying to push ourselves out into the world and show we’re worthy of respect, because we don’t get any – and this word marks both us and our work as unsavoury. Why would you be proud of being dirty?’

Legendary UK garage DJ EZ is thought to have – semi-inadvertently – named it on his KISS FM show, describing some tracks as ‘grimy garage’, until the word ‘garage’ eventually fell away. No one’s entirely sure. What is certain is that EZ wasn’t alone: describing the music that way was fairly normal among DJs and MCs in the early 2000s, before anyone agreed that grime was called grime – you can still hear it now, on classic recordings like Slimzee’s 2002 Sidewinder tape pack set with Dizzee and Wiley (often, correctly, hailed as the greatest mixtape ever made). ‘This one’s dirty, this one’s mucky,’ says Dizzee as Slimzee wheels in another tune – Dizzee, of course, named his label Dirtee Stank.

‘East London’s quite a poor area,’ DJ Trend, aka TNT, told a BBC Radio 1 documentary about the still-unnamed emerging scene, broadcast in 2004. ‘So a lot of the kids, they don’t find nothing else to do, so it just leaves one thing: MC and listen to pirate radio stations.’ The music being made by these young people was a reflection of ‘what you see when you wake up in the morning,’ he continued. ‘Most people that’s what they’re seeing: a lot of grime in the area, a lot of grimy things happening.’6

Throughout its history, the East End was the impoverished edge of a wealthy city; but it was also, as the twentieth century drew to a close, the home of the largest piece of urban regeneration in Europe – a project that would help set the tone for all development projects in London in the years that followed. After thriving for centuries, London’s docklands collapsed in the space of about two years in the late 1960s, when the work was moved further east down the Thames, to Tilbury docks in Essex. The standardisation of shipping containers ushered in a new phase of global capitalism – it suddenly became ten times as fast to load and unload ships, and could be done with far fewer hands. 83,000 jobs were lost in the docklands boroughs in the 1960s alone, and as people left in search of work, the area became a desolate post-industrial wasteland: the ‘wild east’ of classic British gangster film The Long Good Friday, filmed around what would eventually become Canary Wharf, during its long interregnum of abandonment and decay. The docklands were indicative of the ‘developing sickness of our society’ Conservative Shadow Chancellor Geoffrey Howe said in 1978, adding that ‘the dereliction is itself an opportunity’. Three years later, the Thatcher government set up a mega-quango called the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) to take charge of what was at the time the largest urban regeneration in the world. After more than a decade of urban planning tug-of-war, and substantial protests from parts of the local community, in the nineties Canary Wharf slowly began to take shape: a district of skyscraper-dwelling superbanks and legally dubious white-collar profiteering, patrolled by private security guards. A new kind of urban space for a new London and a new millennium.

One Canada Square, the actual name of the fifty-storey, pyramid-topped building often identified as ‘Canary Wharf’, was completed in 1991, and became the UK’s tallest building, the most visible legacy of Thatcherism, towering over London. It was not until the first years of the new millennium that Canary Wharf really fulfilled its destiny as ‘the second City’, and took on a life of its own, outstripping the old City of London (the capital’s traditional financial centre, around Bank and St Paul’s, with its antiquated heraldry, liveries and rituals), and becoming the home of the newer, much more dangerous unregulated financial speculation that would be instrumental in creating the global financial crisis of 2008. Peter Gowan called it ‘Wall Street’s Guantánamo’, a lawless bolt-hole where firms like Lehman Brothers could get away with complex debt-repackaging and trading they would never have been allowed to pursue in Manhattan.7

In a neat example of the laissez-faire capitalism which led to the financial crisis itself, the building of Canary Wharf itself benefited from special government exemptions on rates, tax and a speeded-up planning permission process. No questions and no regulations. It was to be the Big Bang of urban regeneration – creating not just the bankers’ skyscrapers that watched over the grime kids, the yin to the estates’ yang, but also a new airport aimed at business-class customers (London City Airport, opened 1987), the Docklands Light Railway (1987), the Jubilee Line Extension (1999) and the ExCeL conference centre (2000). The LDDC was the flagship of the hyper-gentrification that would follow across British cities, legitimising New Labour’s urban renaissance, of which the renovating and demolishing of council estates was also a vital part. Canary Wharf’s tower blocks were barely a couple of miles from the council blocks where the pirate radio aerials were going up, but ‘the second City’ was never designed to have a relationship with its neighbours: the attention was turned towards its rival and parent. Canary Wharf was deliberately laid out so its ‘central axis’ – a gap in the two tower blocks facing One Canada Square – looks out across a fountain, and lines of trees, towards the City of London.

The arrival of Canary Wharf coincided perfectly with changes in the financial world, as greater deregulation, coupled with new technology, created new markets for global capital and financial services. London was especially well placed to take advantage of these – not just because of Britain’s historic global and colonial power, and the corollary dominance of the English language, but also because it was in a critical time zone between New York and Tokyo. The likes of the Bank of China, Bear Sterns and Morgan Stanley moved into One Canada Square, while next door, the Lehman Brothers were housed in the 30-storey tower at 25 Bank Street.

It is largely forgotten now, but there were protests against the LDDC throughout the eighties and nineties by local people, especially in the Isle of Dogs, as well as alternative ‘people’s plans’ for developing the area in a way that benefited the communities who lived there, rather than itinerant hedge-fund managers who would move in for a couple of years, before going on to Hong Kong or Frankfurt. The locals were ignored. ‘There may well have been other ways in which the regeneration of the area could have been secured,’ admitted the LDDC in 1997, but these ‘would have perpetuated rather than solved the problems of east London’.

The ‘problems of east London’? Social housing and social housing’s fellow traveller, poor people, who unfortunately placed ‘added pressures on the resources of the local authorities’. Instead, the regeneration had transformed the area from somewhere previously ‘isolated both physically and emotionally from the rest of London’ and placed it ‘well and truly in the mainstream of metropolitan life’.8

The LDDC spent £3.9 billion of public money on the Canary Wharf regeneration, only to seal it off from its disproportionately sick, unhappy, overcrowded, addicted, jobless and impoverished neighbours.

For those Londoners too young to remember the area before the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, it feels like it’s always been there, with One Canada Square’s blinking top-light our city’s modern lighthouse. Canary Wharf is less than two miles from the notorious 25-storey, three-tower block Crossways Estate where Dizzee Rascal and Tinchy Stryder lived as children (‘the three flats’), and less than a mile from Langdon Park School, where the former wrote the beginnings of Boy in da Corner in music class. Interviewed in 2010 for a BBC London radio programme about ‘the best and worst of the capital’, Dizzee was asked to nominate his favourite building in London, and unhesitatingly chose One Canada Square:

‘It means the most to me, I could see it from all angles as a kid. That was the highest building I could see from my bedroom. And when I see it from south London, when I’m coming over from the Blackwall Tunnel, it always gets me excited, especially at night – it feels special. I love that and the buildings around it – you see a little mini metropolis being built up … It’s not quite as impressive as New York or Japan, but it’s ours, innit? I remember when we were little, we had a conspiracy, we thought that thing on the top of it was like aliens, and they were about to fly off – loads of little theories like that. We’d blink and think they had lasers up there.’9

It’s not a stretch to suggest that Canary Wharf was the source of grime’s unique incarnation of Afrofuturism; the African diasporic aesthetic that takes science fiction as a tool for discussing oppression and freedom – where spaceships might be a metaphor for slave ships, subverting the journey to make it one of escape, not damnation. It’s a futurism you can hear in the constant injunctions in grime to ‘push things forward’, to ‘elevate’, to make music – and to be – ‘next level’, and it dovetails with the competitive rhetoric enshrined in Canary Wharf’s giant totems to late capitalism. Contrary to American hip-hop’s rootsy rhetoric about being ‘real’ and knowing and respecting your history, grime is a year-zero sound, which – in its early days, at least – asked only what’s next, and sought to get there first.

You can hear this Afrofuturism most of all in the sonics of grime production – the stark, unfiltered minimalism of the kick drums, the interplanetary weight of the bassline, the sleek raygun zaps and zips of a synth, the way the whole edifice shines sleekly like a spacesuit. It’s the sound of the future kids have dreamed of for decades, even while grime’s lyrics describe with molecular detail the dirt of the MCs’ vividly quotidian lives; MCs who were not universe-traversing spacemen, but teenagers growing up in the poorest boroughs in the country. The real meaning of Canary Wharf, rather than its laser-shooting sci-fi potential, was not lost on Dizzee’s peers in the east London grime scene.

‘Canary Wharf is like our Statue of Liberty,’ Roll Deep’s DJ Target told the Guardian in 2005: ‘It pushes me on. It’s like all the money is there and it’s an inspiration to get your own.’

Target is now a BBC 1Xtra DJ, which might seem like a token victory for the twin myths of trickle-down economics and climb-up philosophy that Canary Wharf and Britain’s political classes so aggressively pushed. New Labour’s architect Peter Mandelson infamously defined what was ‘new’ about the party when he said, in 1998, he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. British politicians have long perpetuated fallacies about social mobility, the ‘aspiration nation’ (a favourite slogan of David Cameron when he was PM), or the £9-billion 2012 Olympics ‘inspiring a generation’ out of poverty, but there is no clearly articulated British equivalent of the American dream – for which US rap music has been such a strong shill. In the UK, the relationship is less overt than the familiar American alliance of multimillionaire ‘ghetto’ musicians and multimillionaire financiers: the kind crystallised in The 50th Law, the self-help book by 50 Cent and best-selling ‘power strategist’ author Robert Green. But it is there. For the teenage Dizzee, Canary Wharf’s blinking white light held the potential for an alien getaway, but it was also perhaps east London’s version of the green light at the end of the dock in The Great Gatsby, a symbol of ‘the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us’, the tantalising dream of escape into a brighter tomorrow.

Slimzee, perhaps grime’s greatest ever DJ, with his childhood friend Geeneus one of the founders of Rinse FM, tells me they had other dreams for the tower. ‘We always used to look up at Canary Wharf, when we were growing up, and I wanted to go up to the top and put an aerial up there.’ He pauses, amused at the obviously flawed teenage ambition. ‘But you couldn’t: it’s got that sloping pyramid roof, it wouldn’t work.’

Tinchy Stryder, who grew up in the Crossways Estate, says Canary Wharf dominated the skyline. ‘When I was growing up you could see it everywhere. We felt like, “Oh, wow, do we get to go there one day?” It felt really close, but far away at the same time; like, it wasn’t really anywhere for us to be. Everything felt fresher and cleaner than where we grew up; it felt like a different world. It felt like when you go there, you had to be on your best behaviour.’ And he was right – the paved terrain around the skyscrapers was a paradigm for what have become known as ‘POPS’, privately owned public spaces: where private security guards can ask you to leave just based on looking at you. If Detroit techno captured the metronomic industrial rhythms of the city’s car factories, grime’s sonic palette describes the dystopian scene in millennial east London: the view from the decaying tower blocks down onto the de-cluttered spaces and privatised plazas of Canary Wharf – gleaming, futuristic, and glowering with menace.

When the BBC filmed a short profile of Dizzee to be broadcast as part of the 2003 Mercury Prize TV show, they caught him looking out of the window of the Crossways Estate with a less light-hearted attitude to the second City than he would display by the end of a decade, once he’d reached a state of monied grace: ‘That is Canary Wharf,’ Dizzee explained to the camera. ‘It’s in your face. It takes the piss. There are rich people moving in now, people who work in the City. You can tell they’re not living the same way as us.’

New luxury flats and gated residential blocks were sprouting rapidly in the foothills of Canary Wharf throughout the 2000s; like Target, Dizzee was under no illusion about the lesson to be learned from Canary Wharf, malevolent or not. He was asked in the same BBC Mercury Prize interview what motivated him. He stared straight at the camera. ‘Money motivates me. I’m motivated by money.’ A year later, on the B-side to ‘Dream, Is This Real’, he summed up the ethic of the age:

We was kids, we was young, used to love having fun

Now we look up to guns, and the aim’s only one:

Make money, every day, any how, any way

I tried to choose the legal way10