A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London

by Patrick Wright

A unique evocation of Britain at the height of Margaret Thatcher's rule, A Journey Through Ruins views the transformation of the country through the unexpected prism of every day life in East London. Written at a time when the looming but still unfinished tower of Canary Wharf was still wrapped in protective blue plastic, its cast of characters includes council tenants trapped in disintegrating tower blocks, depressed gentrifiers worrying about negative equity, metal detectorists, sharp-eyed estate agents and management consultants, and even Prince Charles. Written half a century after the blitz, the book reviews the rise and fall of the London of the post-war settlement. It remains one of the very best accounts of what it was like to live through the Thatcher years. This reissue includes a new introduction revisiting the book's East End starting point in Dalston Lane, four additional chapters, and an insert of photographs taken in and around Dalston in the year of the book's
first appearance.

Genres: History

428 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Patrick Wright FBA is a British writer, broadcaster and academic in the fields of cultural studies and cultural history. He was educated at the University of Kent and Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this book not long after it came out, so some time in the early 1990s and found Wright’s critique of urban design, trends in development, the state of late Thatcher-era England and London’s East End compelling. But, I knew little of the place other than book learning – something I know to be of limited value in making sense of urban experiences. Most notably, I had no real sense of Dalston, the section of east London and part of the Borough of Hackney that Wright uses as much of his source material and launching pad for many of his wider discussions. At the heart of the assessment and case being made is Dalston Lane – in which Wright seemed to spend at least some of each day. So, reading this just under 20 years later while in Dalston – an area I have come to know since my son moved there to live – has given me a new sense both of the place (despite the essays being about 20 years old) and a different sense of the book; more so I suspect because I was able to walk some of the streets as I was reading the book and see what they have become – and it certainly is a mixed sight.

The first 15 of the book’s 17 essays do not, for the most part, roam far from Dalston Lane – a busier street than its name suggests – with essays that focus on the Docklands (once also better known as part of the Isle of Dogs), Homerton (focussing on Sutton House), Brick Lane, London Fields as well as more closely located places, not that any of these are more than about 3 or 4 km away. The essays, however, give us a fine set of examples of the general in the specific – and as such as close to model pieces of the sociological imagination. The Sutton House essays (it appears twice) for instance allow Wright to open up discussions of public housing policies and programmes, explore the images and visions of the city associated with the 1950s and the 1980s, and launch a sustained critical evaluation of the National Trust and more broadly a nuanced assessment of the ‘heritage’ industries (issues at the heart of his previous book On Living in an Old Country).

The final two essays do venture far from Dalston, but keep coming back to this anchor point of his analysis. The first takes in Trump Tower (in New York, that is), the management theory of the 1970s and ‘80s that emphasised ‘excellence’ in all we do, the impacts and place of such Thatcherite models and Compulsory Competitive Tendering – as an example of this management theory – in place such as Hackney Council (Dalston’s political home). The second considers the problematic place of Prince Charles in urban debates (and is surprisingly sympathetic to some of his positions through critiques of the defenders of the modern and modernism), is extremely harsh about architecture schools’ failure to address adequately issues such as public housing, and softens the sympathy for the prince through a critical reading of his Poundbury project in Dorset.

Although some of the pieces have not stood the test of time as well as others, the collection still holds up well – even more so as I have watched the problematic Olympic redevelopment of east London that has concentrated development in a very small area, seems to have had little sympathy of the residents, and seems to have had little impact elsewhere other than some enhanced transport services. The direction of Wright’s critique of urban policy, design and architecture, and especially of the National Trust remains, for the most part, sound. This is a collection that merits re-reading 20 years after publication alongside work by Owen Hatherley, Jerry White and Iain Sinclair whose work runs alongside Wright’s to set up productive debates about London’s history (White), East London (Sinclair) and urban space (Hatherley) in contemporary England. Well worth the revisit – and I know much more about Dalston as a result.

[Rachel Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ian Sinclair must have had this book on speed-dial when he wrote That Rose Red Empire. That particular non-fiction/fiction was based on the premise that everything significant that had ever happened in Hackney had taken place within a mile radius of Albion Drive, where Sinclair resides (I told you it was fiction). Wright's premise is to take Dalston as a centre and radiate out, invoking the Crichel Down affair, in which land compulsorily purchased in the war was not sold back to its aristo owners: the ensuing scandal ensured its re-privatisation. Wright uses this as a starting point for the way the Thatcher government(s) have justified the privatisation of public services. In his essays on George Lansbury and the history of the National Trust, metal detectors, the Bryant and May factory being turned into luxury flats, the new Georgian renovations in Spitalfields, Prince Charles and Poundbury, Rodinsky's room in the Princelet Street synagogue, the (mis)fortunes of Sutton House, crumbling council housing, the marketing of the privatisation of water, the (re)development of Docklands, and the Gilbert Scott phone box, Wright explores, in a wholly tangential way, the government's re-privatisation of the state in a recession and what this means for London, for Britain. He points out time and time again that the failure of towerblock housing isn't equal to the failure of the welfare state, and was not, as is posited by the right wing, a betrayal of the people who lived through the Blitz. The post-war rebuilding of Britain was supposed to be an embodiment of that spirit, and the welfare state – protection from cradle to grave – showed that the war was not in vain, and reminds his readers that it was actually the Conservative government of the '50s that (almost literally) threw up the high-rises: Macmillan's election pledge was 300,000 new homes – it was felt that the preceding Atlee administration was building too slowly.

The book was published in 1991 and seems hilariously dated (London Fields is described as “dismal”, Broadway market as “blighted” and Dalston as not on any tourist’s map), yet at the same time prescient and zeitgeisty. We may think that now is the time of insane right wing views and deliberately fictional tabloid articles, but t'was always thus. In a chapter on fluoridation in the water, the anti- brigade rail against “experts”. The right wing complain about the welfare state bureaucracy as Breixeers now moan about EU bureaucracy. The Spectator is singled out as holding various opposing views at once – pro-BT privatisation, yet disgusted at post-privatisation services, plus wanting technological advancement at the same time as keeping the red phone box. There is a chapter on Donald Trump (“a smudged deadbeat” - Wright has a way with a pithy description; he describes Class War as “the anarchist group that spent the late 80s trying to redirect east London's indigenous racism into the more refined solidarity of its mug a yuppie campaign.”) and much about how the advertising campaigns for privatisation of public services harked back to a mythical England. He devotes a chapter to slagging off Martin Amis (“Hormonal mid-Atlantic prose”, “The Nasty Young Man of English Letters”) and one to praising the aforementioned Iain Sinclair.

[Candy Wood]

First published in 1991, this 2009 edition has a new introduction and some added chapters but is otherwise not updated, so it provides an interesting picture of parts of the East End just as the 1980s property boom was collapsing. The book isn't so much a developed argument as a loose collection of opinions and ironies. Wright would like derelict old mansions and churches to be preserved, but not in the National Trust model; he attacks projects like the Spitalfields Trust for focusing more on architecture than people. Chapters about rivalries between archaeologists and metal detectorists and between advocates and opponents of fluoridation emphasize not only public suspicion of government-backed projects but failure of the opposing groups to listen to each other. A typically wide-ranging chapter is one called "Remembering London's War," in which potshots at Theo Crosby, Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair are followed by examples of a couple living on the Isle of Dogs who don't need elaborate monuments to remember the war: real history versus theme park. Much to think about.