Inner City Pressure

Those rich people who ‘don’t live the same way as us’ (and don’t always choose the legal way, either) arrived in droves, to the point that by the 2010 election, the Tory candidate for Poplar & Limehouse, Tim Archer, an HSBC banker on sabbatical from his office in Canary Wharf, was the bookies’ favourite to win. It would have been the Conservatives’ first victory in any Tower Hamlets seat in decades. Intrigued by this daring incursion of the banking set into their grimy new neighbourhood, I went on the campaign trail with Archer and his team. To the surprise of Conservative HQ, they failed to win Poplar & Limehouse. One of the main reasons for their defeat was that they couldn’t get access to the new blocks of luxury flats; there were so many entry-phones and security gates they weren’t able to canvass and recruit the very people who were supposed to be helping them win. It was almost as if the new arrivals didn’t give a toss about the area they’d moved into. One of those new luxury blocks for the international super-rich, a development called Pan Peninsula, promises buyers ‘a view that few will share’, and that unlike the teenagers gazing up at Canary Wharf’s blinking eye, residents will ‘look up to no one’. The spiel on their website promises you will:

Inhabit a private universe. Where luxury apartments combine with a spa, a health club and a cinema to create an urban resort. Where service is tailored to need, and bends to individual will, effortlessly and invisibly. Where business and play happen high above London. Live at Pan Peninsula, exist in another world.

It perfectly articulates the mentality of Canary Wharf: where everything – and everyone – bends to the will of those who can afford it.

‘Coming from where I come from, you didn’t feel a part of London,’ Dizzee told BBC London in 2010. This is the essence of what it means to be marginalised; on one level, your hometown brings you pride – there are numerous grime songs paying homage to London as a whole, rather than just the local neighbourhood – but you are excluded from its most famous parts, the parts the tourists see, the parts the middle classes negotiate with ease and confidence. In this sense, grime both is London, but also excluded from its official narrative, invisible in the face the city shows to the world.

To prove London wasn’t all ‘teacups, red telephone boxes and Buckingham Palace’ as Dizzee put it on ‘Graftin’’, its music video was shot on top of, around, and beneath the three tower blocks of the Crossways Estate. The estate had been nicknamed ‘the pride of Bow’ when it was built in the 1970s, but bad upkeep of the buildings, untreated poverty and overcrowding meant that the alias did not stick around for long.

The video is shot almost entirely at night time, on grainy analogue film, the Crossways blocks looming over Dizzee’s head, studded with occasional lights. It’s a classic US rap-style ‘hood video’, with Dizzee surrounded by members of Ruff Sqwad, one of the most identifiably ‘Bow’ of crews from grime’s golden age, and assorted other local teenagers. At times he delivers his bars with Canary Wharf’s light blinking in the background. Twice, towards the end of the video, the director splices in a brief, split-second cut-shot of One Canada Square, like a subliminal message – a suggestion that subconsciously, Canary Wharf is always there, when you’re living in and talking about ‘the grime’.11

When vines grow on a hill facing the ocean they pick up the brine on the wind, and the taste of the grapes is suffused with a salty tang. When black British music was pouring, melting hot, into the crucible of a new genre in the early 2000s, New Labour were polling 57 per cent to the Tories’ 25; it was the apex of the blind hubris that led to our current malaise: reckless, wild-west capitalism in Canary Wharf, and New Labour’s carefully controlled vision of modernity and unapologetic social conservatism. This is the tang in the air: tough love, zero tolerance, ever-growing inequality, CCTVs, ASBOs, and an ‘intensely relaxed’ attitude to what was fuelling the economic bubble they said would never burst. In Dizzee Rascal’s first ever interview, he described New Labour’s transformation of the inner city even as it was happening around him. He was only 17 years old in July 2002, sitting on a wall in Bow, with the third of Canary Wharf’s three towers still being finished overhead. ‘There has been bare change around here,’ he observed. ‘It’s all about adapting. Like all the cameras, sly little cameras everywhere, more police, drugs, crime … everything is changing.’12

‘There will be no forgotten people in the Britain I want to build,’ Tony Blair said in a photo call at London’s notorious Aylesbury Estate a month after the 1997 general election, launching the government’s ‘new deal for communities’. British cities were riven by intense geographical inequalities between rich and poor neighbourhoods. New Labour’s concern was that the latter were falling ever further behind the rest. ‘Over the last two decades the gap between these worst estates and the rest of the country has grown. It has left us with a situation that no civilised country should tolerate,’ Blair said in 1998.

Such estates had ‘become no-go zones for some and no-exit zones for others’, according to a government report published that year, which blamed this crisis of bad housing and social exclusion on mistakes by previous governments: in particular, the concentration of the poor and unemployed together in neighbourhoods where hardly anyone had a job. At the time, around 5 million households nationally were in council- or housing-association homes, and the maintenance backlog was upwards of £20 billion. New Labour’s response was to advise councils to seek PFI funding, and to demolish many of the blocks altogether – too many of them were ‘sinking ships’, Blair told the Daily Express:

‘Some estates are beyond rescue and will never be places where people want to live. That could mean moving people to new homes, levelling the site and using the land for something the public wants.’ The idea that the public might want – first and above all – decent, affordable new social housing did not seem to enter into the conversation.

New Labour set up an Urban Task Force, and appointed a Regeneration Tsar, the architect Richard Rogers (aka Lord Rogers, aka Baron Rogers of Riverside – a man with as many alter-egos as a half-decent MC), who delivered a report in 1999 which would shape the future of London: Towards an Urban Renaissance. The report found that one in four people living in urban neighbourhoods thought their area had got worse in recent years, compared with only one in ten who said it had got better; and that unemployment levels in Britain’s inner cities were more than double the national average. The Urban Renaissance strategy proposed to tackle inner-city poverty and ‘sinking ships’ by doing what has now become the norm, and a euphemistic byword for gentrification: they would ‘create neighbourhoods with a mix of tenures and incomes, including opening up council housing to more of the population’. Rogers’ report also called for faster Compulsory Purchase Orders (to get people out of blocks they wanted to demolish), ‘streamlined’ planning procedures, and greater access to PFI funds. Make it easier, make it quicker, and bring in the private sector.13

New Labour promised a ‘lasting urban renaissance’ to ‘stem urban decline’ brought on by the neglect of previous governments. They quoted Tsar Rogers: ‘People make cities but cities make citizens,’ which, like most New Labour slogans, sounded clever without saying anything of substance. The strategy was framed around the goal of arresting and reversing middle-class flight to the suburbs: ‘encouraging people to remain in, and move back into, our major towns and cities’ would be central to the Labour plan, said another report in 2000. These were complex, big government strategies – the Urban Task Force made no fewer than 105 recommendations: one of them was estate renewal, using the private finance initiative. From the outset, New Labour’s plan had been to ‘modernise’ (or indeed, dismantle) the welfare state as it stood, to introduce private finance into everything on the basis that, as the Home Secretary David Blunkett said in 2001, ‘government could never do it all’.

Not everyone was impressed. Two academics at the annual Royal Geographical Society conference called New Labour’s Urban Renaissance strategy a ‘gentrifiers’ charter’. Leading academic expert Loretta Lees agreed, and suggested the strategy might be called ‘the cappuccino cave-in’. The Blairite view was that government had lost control of Britain’s inner cities under Tory rule, who had made urban environments uninviting and unloved.14 Their proposed solution was to encourage the middle classes to move back into the inner city, ‘drawn by a lifestyle where home, work and leisure are interwoven within a single neighbourhood’. Rogers’ report envisioned new middle-class enclaves, populated by people with more time ‘to devote to leisure, culture and education’, wealthier communities that are more mobile and flexible – freer. ‘In the twenty-first century, it is the skilled worker, as well as the global company, who will be footloose. Cities must work hard to attract and retain both.’

Local and national politicians, when they talk about gentrification, often speak of the need to create ‘balanced’ or ‘mixed’ communities. Mixed communities sound good, don’t they? They sound diverse. They sound like they would welcome everyone, and that everyone would benefit from the mixing – by class, by race, by age. No fair-minded liberal would advocate for the opposite: because the opposite is an enclave, or a ghetto. And that’s exactly how – when you push them to reveal themselves – architects of gentrification characterise the inner London that is being rapidly dismantled: a series of social-housing ghettoes, holding back the people living in them – held back not because they are poor, but because they are surrounded by other people who are poor. They’re a bad influence on each other. Bring in the middle classes, and everyone will learn from one another, and thrive. The problem with all this, the deception buried in the rhetoric, is that urban regeneration is almost always a zero-sum game: for some people to ‘come back’ to the inner city, others have to leave.

A decade later, I asked a leading property developer whether building blocks of luxury flats in previously poor inner-city areas was the essence of gentrification. ‘Hopefully we are getting blended communities,’ he replied. ‘In the poor parts of London where we’ve been working in the past, they have been – and I use this term politely – but they have been social enclaves. No one buys homes there, because your money will probably depreciate. But that’s changing. It’s not gentrification, it’s just becoming a more balanced community.’15

In one sense, New Labour and grime should have been allies from the start. The elevation and intermingling of culture and business was integral to the Urban Renaissance strategy: regenerated, modernised cities would be created in part by monetising art and culture. The nature of work was changing faster in London than anywhere else in the country, as the last of the factories disappeared. Following the flag-draped nineties nonsense around ‘Cool Britannia’ that was synonymous with the early years of New Labour, their Cultural Manifesto for the 1997 election was called ‘Create The Future’. ‘Creativity’ became a crucial signifier of Blair’s entire political project, and the New Labour vision of modernity.16 Treating culture as a business connected New Labour to their Thatcherite predecessors, and this ‘creative’ enterprise culture was bound up with urban regeneration, in part by stimulating tourism. As Britain’s de-industrialisation rapidly continued, New Labour was determined to ‘modernise’ everything – from the Labour Party itself, to the NHS, to the workforce, to architecture – and free the party from its electoral reliance on the industrial working class, ‘a class rapidly disappearing into the thin air of the knowledge economy’, as Robert Hewison put it in Cultural Capital.

‘Most of us make our money from thin air,’ wrote Charles Leadbetter, a friend of Mandelson and Blair, capturing the spirit of the times – as music switched from heavy pieces of wax and shiny plastic discs to the intangibles of mp3s, and capitalism moved on from buying physical products with coins and notes to buying and selling complex, abstract ‘financial products’ like collateralised debt obligations, futures and derivatives. By 2007, the character Jez in the sitcom Peep Show would be summing it up in more day-to-day language: ‘I’m a creative. We don’t make steam engines out of pig iron in this country anymore, yeah? We hang out, we fuck around on the PlayStation, we have some Ben & Jerry’s, that’s how everyone makes their money now.’17

But even while New Labour were placing culture and creativity on a pedestal and garlanding it with £50 notes, other government changes were making it harder than ever for working-class people to develop careers out of their creative impulses and talents. In March 1998, changes to unemployment benefits that came in with the New Deal made it much harder for artists to live on the dole while honing and improving their craft – a part of the welfare state that had historically been a lifeline for working-class musicians. The NME ran a cover story about the threat to grassroots music, arts and culture these changes posed, with the banner, ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ Inside, Jarvis Cocker recounted that, without the dole during the eighties, Pulp never would have made it as far as the nineties, and their vastly better and more popular albums. There were countless other musicians, artists and writers like him. Free education, a strong welfare state and affordable housing had given working-class creativity the space to breathe in the post-war years. For New Labour, it was too much like a hand-out: money for nothing.

The grime kids went without those state subsidies – but still never succumbed to the rampant individualism of their neighbours in Canary Wharf, or their political masters. For all that we should celebrate their independent, DIY spirit and sheer self-motivated perseverance – teenagers with nothing, making something more dazzling and millennial-modern than anyone could ever have imagined – they did so with the help of youth clubs, school teachers, and a collective, communitarian spirit that was being pummelled by a government determined to dismantle it, in the name of remaking the inner city.

Notting Hill Carnival, 1999

TWO

IN THE ROOTS

The irony of grime being derided as antisocial by its critics – all that clatter, hostility and bad attitude – is that it has always been community music: invented and developed collectively and collaboratively, by people whose lives and roots are deeply entwined, and who made music because it was the sociable thing to do. Community can mean a lot of different things, but whichever way you draw the diagram, grime emerged from a spider’s web of intergenerational influences, schoolmates, neighbours, friends, family, and people who knew people – from school, from the estate, from the local area.

The more you dig into its past, the more you realise grime’s social networks precede the music entirely, not just by years but by generations. Grime is black music (even if it’s not always made by black people), and its roots spread across London, and the world. While east London has for centuries been one of the most multicultural parts of the country, and a first port of call for new arrivals, the generation of Caribbean migrants who began arriving in Britain after the Empire Windrush docked in the Thames in 1948 tended to settle in Notting Hill in the west, and Brixton in the south. But with east London depopulating rapidly in the post-war decades, owing to decay, bombing, slum clearances and degeneration, housing became relatively cheap. Manufacturing jobs in places like the Dagenham Ford car plant, and Tate and Lyle, Unilever and ITT around the docks, encouraged newly arriving Caribbean nationals, now British citizens, to look to the east.

In the tightly bound geography of working-class inner London of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, many of the grime kids’ parents, and in some cases grandparents, knew each other before the kids even arrived – and as a result some of east London’s most important foundational MCs actually played together as children. D Double E’s dad went to school with Jammer’s dad. Jammer’s dad and Footsie’s dad were at Sunday school together. Footsie’s dad was in a reggae band in the 1980s with Wiley’s dad, and taught young Richard Cowie Jr how to play the drums.

‘We’ve known each other before before,’ Footsie says.1 A ridiculous number of MCs, DJs, producers and key behind-the-scenes figures met as children, at school or a playscheme; or playing football, or in someone’s aunt’s house, or at a party, or night fishing in the Hertford Union Canal, between Wiley’s estate and Victoria Park. Roll Deep’s first paid job was working for Wiley’s dad’s patty factory (they were subsequently fired when Richard Cowie Sr caught them having a food fight). ‘It’s so deep,’ Footsie continued. ‘Sometimes I think I’m not doing nothing special, other than carrying on what was already done.’

Grime’s lineage is suffused with this sense of kinship that precedes any sense of desire to make music – of being mates first, and lyrical sparring partners second. It’s easy to romanticise, but not easy to romanticise well: Kano’s nostalgic 2016 album which signalled his return to grime, Made in the Manor, does so brilliantly, telling sincere and evocative stories about his youth in his childhood home, 69 Manor Road in Plaistow, E15. On ‘T-Shirt Weather In The Manor’, Kano vividly describes multigenerational summer barbecues where the kids are listening to UK garage titans MJ Cole and Heartless Crew, and ‘the olders want some [reggae singer] Dennis Brown’, a prelapsarian community idyll, before fame, beefs and adulthood came along and complicated everything.

That kinship was formed, in part, out of marginality. Crazy Titch says he knew brothers Mak 10 and Marcus Nasty when they were children because ‘there was like three black families in Plaistow when I was growing up, and theirs was one of them’.2 In parts of inner London with more substantial black communities, grime’s originators were bound through pre-internet social networks formed by geography and background, by a sense of being marginalised by poverty, or racism. ‘It was a nice little community here,’ Kano recalled, smiling, in a short documentary accompanying Made in the Manor. ‘There was definitely a feeling that we weren’t supposed to be shit, or have shit, or become anything great. An underlying attitude that people grow up with, from around here.’3 Those narrow horizons enforced by poverty keep people down, but they bind people together, too – and when the kids at those barbecues started making music, by themselves, for each other, those bonds provided the foundations for something powerful, and lasting.

Sometimes grime’s ancestral links didn’t become apparent till years later. Footsie recently told his dad who Wiley’s dad was, and he responded that they’d played together as children. ‘I was there with Will, running around as kids, I just don’t really remember it.’4

Sitting in a pub beer garden in Bethnal Green in 2017 with Roony Keefe, creator of the seminal Risky Roadz DVD series, he told a story about Devlin, who he first filmed for his DVD in 2006, when he was a teenage MC from Barking, still only 16:

‘I’ve known Devs all these years but … my dad went to this funeral last year, and he was talking to one of his old mates there, and he said, “Oh, how’s your boy?”, and he said, “Yeah all right, still doing the music.” My dad was like, “Oh yeah, what music does he do?” Turns out my dad grew up with Devlin’s dad in Hackney, they’ve been mates all these years. But we didn’t know that until last year. It’s a really tight-knit kind of thing.’ Devlin wrote lyrics to describe this story of their dads drinking together in their favourite Hackney pub, before its gentrification-makeover, in a freestyle for Keefe’s YouTube channel: ‘Oi Roony, do me a favour and let ’em all know we’ve been around from day: like mine and your old mans, down the Kenton pub before it sold grub, just beer and grams. Funny how it all turns out … damn.’5

Wiley would watch his dad’s VHS copies of famous Jamaican sound-clash events like Sting, where rival sound-systems (with a team of engineers, hosts and selectors) would compete by offering up their biggest dubplates – also known as dubs, or white labels, because the vinyl was freshly cut from a new recording, and specially made for the occasion, rather than released to the general public by a record company. These did not have a sleeve or any artwork, just the naked simplicity of the record, its title inscribed on the white label in marker pen.

‘I sometimes heard my dad listening to Sugar Hill and the Gang,’ Wiley recalled in 2016, ‘[there was] some American rap. But it was minimal compared to all the reggae.’

Wiley had already learned to play the drums, and began to try and copy some of his dad’s reggae jams, using a Yamaha CX5, ‘the one with the big stick-in cartridge thing on top. I would go on there and see if I could play what he had just been playing.’ Reggae suffused the general atmosphere that the grime generation grew up in, tracing direct ancestral links from Britain’s pre-acid house reggae culture, some of it imported from the Caribbean, some of it created by black Britons. South London grime and dancehall MC Doctor – known for his ‘yardie flow’ – was managed by one of London’s most famous sound-systems, Saxon. Dreadlocked grime icon Jammer – a stalwart behind the scenes, a pioneering producer and a zany presence on the mic – grew up in a house immersed in this culture: his parents ran the ELRICS (East London Rastafarian Information and Community Services), which helps Rastafarians with housing, and incorporates work with young people (Jammer himself has spoken at schools and colleges, and been involved in their mentoring programmes). Iconic black British dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah was a family friend. The connections go on: Spyro’s dad is St Lucian reggae singer Nereus Joseph, Scorcher’s dad is jungle MC Mad P from early nineties crew Top Buzz.

It’s not just a family connection, or an abstract component of the musical bloodline: grime echoes its Jamaican reggae heritage in its structure, in its tropes, in its slang, in the way it’s performed, and stylistically: particularly harking back to the ‘fast chat’ reggae style of the likes of Smiley Culture, a black British MC who made it into the charts two decades before Dizzee Rascal did the same. Grime is a direct product of Caribbean sound-system culture. The legacy is more implicit than explicit a lot of the time, but it’s there in so much of what is integral to grime: in the dubplate white label culture of exclusive new tracks, in the competition of rival sound-systems or crews, in the MC responding live to the selector or DJ’s choices of instrumental tracks, or riddims. It is there in the song structures, in the sense they often do not have clearly demarcated structures: rather than the verse-bridge-chorus-verse architecture of the traditional three-minute pop song, MCs begin their careers ‘riding the riddim’, usually a steady tempo from beginning to end, that only changes when the next one is faded in.

Academic Nabeel Zuberi makes the point that MCs are middle points between the music and the audience – they have to ride the rhythm but also ‘conduct the choir’ on the dancefloor, and move the crowd to respond. In this sense the MC’s voice is ‘a social voice that includes the voice of others’, Zuberi writes.6 The performance function is more complex than simply, ‘I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen’.