Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime

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

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