Slums in the sky?
Wednesday, 10th January 2007
Park Hill in Sheffield, ‘a giant wall of shoeboxes’ that induce ‘horizontal vertigo’, comes in for a spanking after English Heritage conferred listed status on it before the council turned over the problemsome package to Urban Splash. Between the lines Hanley denigrates this imaginative redevelopment company as some sort of capitalist über-sinner associated with trendy (and expensive) loft conversions for private buyers. In fact if she’d troubled to do her homework properly she would have discovered Urban Splash to be one of the most enlightened outfits in the country, taking, as it does, unloved, unwanted concrete structures like the ‘Three Towers’ in Manchester or the ‘Rotunda’ in Birming- ham and turning them into some of the edgiest, brightest, most sought-after living spaces in our cool Britannia kingdom.
Alas, that’s not what council estates are supposed to be about, as Hanley will keep reminding us. It’s her New Statesmanlike chip-on-the-shoulder that irritates the most in a book that can be (when she’s not bemoaning her disadvantageous beginnings on the Chelmsley Wood Estate in ‘North Solihull’) both illuminating and beautifully written.
Apart from a fairly understandable (and possibly widespread) misconception about the gypsy etymology of the word ‘chav’, Hanley brings us her not inconsiderable talent to turn a phrase throughout the narrative. Briefly, hers is a tale about ‘thousands and thousands of mimsy no-marks’ bedecked in ‘drecky gold jewellery’, many of them ‘jobless boys parping about on put-put-putty little motorbikes’ who live in ‘Battenberg cake layers of one-bedroom flats’ which make ‘cookie-cutter stamps’ on the ‘moony landscape’. These angry young men slob about on their estates stuffing down ‘pot noodles — synonymous with seaminess’ to ease their ‘inner-city cage rage’.
Point made? Of the multitudinous schemes featured — by the end of the 1970s there were 4,500 council-owned tower blocks in the UK — it is the Thamesmead Estate right next to Belmarsh prison in south-east London for which Hanley reserves her most caustic invective. So sink-like had these hectares of reclaimed marshland become that Stanley Kubrick took one look at ‘the anonymous empty expanse of concrete’ and judged it ‘sufficiently dystopic’ to be the real-life location for his film A Clockwork Orange. That’s as maybe. Just after it was built I found myself in need of an eyrie after a prison escape. For six weeks I lay low in a rather elegant town house in Thamesmead, behind which ran (even more surprisingly) an ecologically sound, regenerative ‘greywater’ canal. Every day I watched, bewitched, as a family of swans cruised royally up and down that stretch of man-made heaven. Yet in Lynsey Hanley’s wide and macrocosmic sweep (for she is, quintessentially, a political animal) such intimate details — despite her subtitle — pass quite unnoticed.
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