Alan Cox and Oscar Pearce in The Divided Laing. Photograph: Adam Bennett
Part of the appeal of madness for dramatists is the way that uncontrolled unconscious appetites and desires are thought to lurk so closely underneath the conscious, rational, socially acceptable world of everyday life, threatening to burst through at any minute.
Against the Apollonian forces of order and moderation struggle the wild and terrible Dionysian passions; behind the flimsy face of every unassuming Dr Jekyll is a ravening Mr Hyde.
Patrick Marmion’s new play at the Arcola, The Divided Laing, turns this fertile dichotomy on its head. It’s 1970, and the doors of perception are wide open: at any given time, someone on stage is either drunk or high on acid, or fighting, or all three.
The setting is Kingsley Hall, the counter-cultural anti-asylum set up by Glaswegian psychiatrist R. D. ‘Ronnie’ Laing as a place where, as Laing saw it, any sufferer of mental illness could come and be treated as “a person to be accepted, not an object to be changed”.
Madness – and its embrace as valid, perhaps superior, experience – is the order of the day. But manifesting at every turn are the Apollonian, Jekyll-style forces of sensible, normal, well-adjusted life, appearing in various guises: as policemen and pub landlords; as the suggestion of new ‘house rules’ for Kingsley Hall; as Laing’s elderly mother, insisting he return to the five children he has abandoned in Glasgow; and as a medical seminar happening in 2015, visited by Laing during an acid trip to the future and which through its multi-disciplinary, detailed, considered and intelligent discussion of the case in question, sounds the death-knell for everything he stands for.
At heart, The Divided Laing (subtitle: The Two Ronnies), is a sort of domestic farce, with Laing and his followers and patients staving off one crisis after another as they await the arrival of Sean Connery, who’s coming for dinner. (According to Marmion, this really happened, and it’s a nice detail – James Bond is British culture’s Dionysian hero, always drinking and chasing girls, never following the rules, always saving the day; Laing as imagined here is similar, and continually introduces himself with the formula “the name’s Laing, by the way. R. D. Laing.”).
It’s a laugh several times a minute, and if some of the historical irony of the 2015 trip stands out as a bit cringe (“they have this thing, what do they call it, ‘Google’”), it’s because Marmion’s good ear for a comic cadence is usually so perfectly shared by the play’s brilliant cast, with Alan Cox, for instance, as Laing, so accurately landing the gulp for air in a resigned, hyper-erudite line like “he means, Mary, is it too late to resist the glacial slide towards medicalised psychiatry and universal state funded compliance reinforced by a fiscal model of the patient as economic unit – or not?” as to make it laugh-out-loud funny.
The real life Laing died 26 years ago, at the same time as Communism was collapsing. Mourning for Kingsley Hall, as for the Eastern Bloc, is misplaced; but it is also foolish to look back triumphantly on both failed experiments and think how naïve their instigators must have been.
That overestimates our own wisdom. Marmion has done us a good turn with this play, as a reminder that all our radical clarity will in its turn appear comical.
Psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Illustration: Paul Coomey
It is 50 years since the Philadelphia Association housed itself at Kingsley Hall in Bow, and 45 years since the Hall closed its doors amid local residents’ discomfort and a sense that things had got out of hand.
For the five years in between, the East End was witness to a radical experiment in treating mental illness, orchestrated by a charismatic group of doctors who eventually attracted the name ‘anti-psychiatrists’ for their rejection of mainstream psychiatric practices, most especially the use of drugs in treatment and the traditional power relationships with patients that characterised the profession.
Doctors and patients lived under the same roof at Kingsley Hall, and were collectively known as ‘residents’. Non-doctor residents were encouraged to make symbolic expressions of their illnesses through art, especially painting, and through talking to doctors in long conversations that respected the way patients used language, and engaged with it on its own terms. In the psychiatric world outside, lobotomies had only recently ceased to be the rage and it was not yet unknown for civil rights activists and feminists to be compulsorily confined to asylums.
The driving force behind the Kingsley Hall institute was the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing. Born into a poor family in Glasgow in 1927, he was successful at school and went on to study medicine, qualifying as a psychiatrist in 1951. Called up to National Service, he served as an army psychiatrist for two years before returning to Glasgow, where he first worked with schizophrenic patients. He developed new approaches to treatment, which laid less of an emphasis on controlling patients and more on doctors and nurses spending time with them.
Having moved to London to study psychoanalysis, he published The Divided Self, an account of his new theories, in 1960. The book presented case studies of some of his patients and argued that mental illness could be seen as the outcome of a struggle between a ‘true’ inner self and a false self presented to the world, and that madness, far from being a medical condition, could be a logical response to the contradictions of the surrounding world. It’s still in print.
“Is love possible?” he asked in a BBC interview. “Is freedom possible? Is the truth possible? Is it possible to be one’s actual self with another human being? Is it possible to be a human being anymore? Is it possible to be a person, do persons even exist?”
Kingsley Hall was to be a place where people could live without these contradictions. The most famous resident was Mary Barnes, a prolific and accomplished painter who developed her artistic career at Kingsley Hall in the sixties and continued to produce work until her death in 2001. With Joseph Berke, her therapist, she produced a book, Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness, and Laing contributed copy to her exhibition catalogues.
“There was a lot of colour there,” says Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail theatre critic and author of a new play opening at the Arcola this month about the closing months of the Kingsley Hall experiment. “Laing styled himself as a Glaswegian street fighter almost, a really colourful, charismatic person who was ferociously bright. And he gathered around him some extraordinary characters,” explains Marmion.
Joe and Shree by Mary Barnes, painted in Kingsley Hall. Image courtesy of Dr. J Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop
Marmion’s play is set in the Hall’s last crisis days, Laing’s administrative headaches exacerbated by the return of one of his colleagues from “an acid trip to the future” in which he has seen how low the reputations of everyone involved are to sink. Laing became a symbol for a new counter-cultural approach to mental illness throughout the sixties and seventies, and it is as a symbol that his legacy has been judged.
Despite distancing himself from the term, it is he who has become most closely associated with the label ‘anti-psychiatry’, although better candidates might be his colleague David Cooper, who coined it, or Thomas Szasz, the American psychiatrist whose books include The Myth of Mental Illness. Anti-psychiatry has been widely and justly debunked, most forcefully by the left-wing academic Peter Sedgwick in his 1982 book PsychoPolitics, in which he pointed out that the movement’s critique of established mental health services was being used to justify huge cuts to funding. By the eighties, mentally ill patients were at much greater risk of neglect than of over-zealous medical intervention.
However, the symbol of Laing is changing again and being disentangled from anti-psychiatry. He is increasingly celebrated now as an early champion of compassionate treatment for the mentally ill, and also as a poet (his book of dramatic verse Knots was made into a play in 2011, while the half-centenary celebrations have recently seen live performances of his other well known collection Do you love me?). Marmion’s play is in this mode. His favourite Laing quote, which appears in the play, is Laing’s saying that patients were “not objects to be changed but people to be accepted”. The time may have come for us to again accept R. D. Laing.
The Divided Laing is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL from 18 November – 12 December. www.arcolatheatre.com
Protesters at the wake for Dalston Lane terraces in January 2015. Photograph: @TimePlaceE8
Every year, more than 10,000 people from around the world descend on Minneapolis, in the United States, for the international Internet Cat Video Festival. They gather in gigantic auditoria to watch the pick of the year’s crop of Internet cat videos, and chat about them afterwards.
For Loyd Grossman, the pasta sauce maker and broadcaster who is chairman of the Heritage Alliance and Churches Conservation Trust, as well as president of the National Association of Decorative & Fine Arts Societies (NADFAS), the annual vid-fest is a good omen for the future preservation of England’s built heritage.
“People actually like something tangible, and they like something that involves other people,” he said at a recent talk for the East End Preservation Society (EEPS). “This is the power of reality, and if heritage doesn’t represent reality, what else does?”
Elaborating, Grossman posed and answered the obvious question on the cat-and-chat convention: “Why do they do it? They do it because they want to do something with other people. There’s this tremendous resurgence of social interest, and this is something that we who work in heritage need to harness.”
Grossman’s observation about the “power of reality” can be applied as much to William Morris and Octavia Hill as it can to the various campaigns to save heritage buildings in Hackney over recent years. From OPEN Dalston to the Save the Chesham campaign, these are campaigns that always rely on “social interest” in buildings people feel belong to them, even if they’ve never done more than look through the keyhole.
The Chesham Arms
In the case of Save the Chesham, many of the campaigners had looked inside a great deal more, frequently spending whole evenings at the popular 150-year-old pub on Mehetabel Road, Homerton, until it was closed in 2012 after being purchased by developer Mukund Patel, who converted it into an office space with a flat above.
Save the Chesham, a group of residents and former customers, formed to restore the pub and succeeded first in having it designated an Asset of Community Value and finally in having a highly unusual ‘Article 4’ direction served on the premises, which meant that any future change of use from being a free house would require planning permission. The Chesham Arms is to re-open as an ‘East End boozer’ this summer.
Mine’s a pint: Victorious Chesham Arms campaigners. Photograph: Save the Chesham
Save Dalston Lane
Less happy is the fate of 48-76 Dalston Lane, a terrace of Georgian buildings where demolition work has begun following a decade-long struggle. The planned development of ‘heritage likeness’-fronted non-affordable flats which will take its place was tenaciously opposed by conservation group OPEN Dalston, upon whose blog the ins and outs of the story are painstakingly documented by Bill Parry-Davies, prominent Hackney lawyer and OPEN Dalston founder.
The Dalston Lane buildings were bought by Hackney Council from the Greater London Council in 1984 and sold to an off-shore company in 2002. Severe structural damage followed, including fires, with the new owner subsequently applying for planning permission to demolish the buildings and replace them with shops and flats. In 2010, the council bought the terrace back for twice the price it had sold it for and promised a ‘conservation-led’ development scheme to preserve it. In January 2015, final approval for demolition of the terrace was given by a judge who turned down OPEN Dalston’s final appeal.
Bishopsgate Goodsyard
Looming on the horizon is the greatest heritage battle to have been fought in East London for a generation: the proposed Bishopsgate Goodsyard development (“the biggest thing to hit the area since the plague,” in the words of one campaign group) by firm Hammersons and Ballymore.
Hackney Council launched a campaign back in February to ‘save Shoreditch’ from the £800 million scheme for two high-rise luxury flat complexes to be built on the site. Pointing out that the development would stand almost as high as the Canada Place tower in Canary Wharf, Pipe warned it would threaten the “local, creative” tech economy in Shoreditch and “do nothing to help London’s housing crisis”. A heavily redacted financial viability report explaining why the developer had found it was only possible to make the scheme only 10 per cent affordable flats rather than the original 35 per cent was released under a Freedom of Information request in February.
David and Goliath
But what can three dozen people gathered in a church hall do about any of this? Grossman believes the struggle is intense. “Often David does slay Goliath, but you’ve got to remember that after David slew Goliath, he took the day off. Which is something that we can’t do, because we go to war every day, you know it never stops. It never ever stops.”
The resilience and sheer enthusiasm of heritage supporters is, Grossman believes, why the sector’s activities have managed to survive swingeing financial cuts, which have been inflicted by “governments of both colours”. “Exceptional individuals you know who often at great sacrifice, often with no resources, have gone in there and defended and protected the heritage – they’re the people who should be inspiring us,” he said, unveiling a Photoshopped “What would William Morris do?” poster, adapted from the more famous Jesus type.
Jonathan Meades – architecture critic and, like Grossman, a former restaurant reviewer – had a good line on Morris when he said Morris believed the world could be saved through expensive wallpaper. One wishes for a better inspiration when the slip from conservation to a reactionary anti-urbanism can be as easy as Morris proved it to be. Grossman is aware of the need for “dialogue” with developers, but during the whole of his talk there was little about what positive development might look like.
On the other hand, there was a proposal for positive cultural and civic engagement: “London isn’t crying out for more visitors, it’s not crying out for more inhabitants – it’s crying out for citizens. Citizens who feel that they belong and whose lives have joy and meaning and significance and pleasure, because they are citizens of London, because they belong to this place. And for me the most tangible sign of our citizenship is the way we care for our heritage.”
A skeleton found at the Liverpool Street site. Photograph: Tom Lawson
No one talks much about the bathos of the Crossrail project, the mismatch between the grandeur of its design and the drabness of its ultimate function.
For all that the widely publicised story of its construction has gone heavy on the sublime – high-viz figures dwarfed by machinery in the underground caverns they have dug and now gaze at in wonder – and for all that it is the largest project of its kind in Europe and will cost £14.8 billion, there is no getting away from the fact that its true purpose, the reason for its existence, is that if you live in (say) Reading, you will be able to get to Central London that little bit quicker. The intended product of all the staggering toil and ingenuity is to facilitate more efficient commuting.
Which is not to take a disparaging view of the project but just to observe that the line between the marvellous and the everyday is thin. Crossrail is still in the future, so we are still far enough away to be able to see what lies on the marvellous side of that line. As we get closer to it and begin to use it, only the hum-drum aspect will remain in view: it will take an imaginative leap to see the system’s magnificence and complexity once we come to speak of it only as a form of transport that may be late, crowded or broken.
It’s the other way round with a human skeleton face-down in the mud outside Liverpool Street station. Since last year, many such finds have been uncovered during the excavations for Crossrail to the east of the City. Photos of encounters with human remains – including plague victims and inmates of St Mary of Bethlem (Bedlam) asylum – joined the high-viz hero shots in Crossrail’s publicity archive.
Map of Liverpool Street area by John Ogilby and William Morgan
Everything that is sensational or horrific about such an experience is up-front and centre: the imaginative leap required in this case is to see the bones being used the way we usually use bones – to hold our bodies up as we conduct our daily lives.
It’s a leap that Crossrail lead archaeologist Jay Carver has no trouble making. “I must say that if I hold someone’s jaw or skull in my hand I can’t help but feel connected,” he says. “This is an individual who lived all those hundreds of years ago.”
Time is important. “With prehistoric remains you are so far detached from those individuals and the lifestyle they led,” says Carver. “Whereas dealing with the human remains from the Bedlam burial ground is so much more immediate and recent – we can imagine these everyday Londoners like ourselves who are buried there. There’s a lot more of a response to those modern remains.”
Some of the post-medieval remains are being studied for further insight into the biology of the virus that caused various London plagues, but all will be re-buried in the Willows Cemetery on Canvey Island, continuing Londoners’ tradition of extramural burial. The dig is now down to the Roman layer, the time at which London first became a major population centre.
It’s a rare opportunity, according to Carver: “We know quite a lot about Roman London from excavations undertaken over the last 50-60 years,” he explains. “But at the moment down at Liverpool Street it’s a part of Roman London that’s not been previously under investigation, so whatever I find is going to be new there.”
Empathy with the bones’ original owners has in some cases been made more difficult by the people who put them there, such as the “gruesome” find of an old cooking pot full of bones. “We don’t really understand necessarily, you know, the attitudes in the Roman times towards death and burial,” Carver says. “It became quite standardised over the centuries but there are also quite a lot of strange things going on – decapitation, the reburial of skulls in different areas; you don’t quite understand the mindset but I think these discoveries are really interesting.”
There is always something to learn from the deposits, in other words. But Carver points out the bones’ intrinsic value is, like that of art, down to their one-of-a-kind nature. He warns: “Archaeological heritage is an irreplaceable asset, you can’t get it back one it’s gone.”
The everyday life of humans has not always been lived in the same way. Finding and imagining different ways of living is fascinating. Far in the future, if other societies replace and forget ours and dig up the old tunnels, Crossrail will gain a new fascination as being part of the daily life of people long dead. It will be marvellous again, and people will talk about its pathos.
“Civilisations rise and fall,” says Carver, “and in some cases in the past have just disappeared into the jungle. We don’t know if that’s going to happen to us.”
Lonely at the top: The now empty Balfron Tower. Photograph: Joe Roberts
Dozens of previously unseen documents which shed light on the recent controversial private sale of listed former social housing block the Balfron Tower have been posted online by a UCL researcher.
As well as forming a comprehensive archive of the architecture, history and living community of the brutalist Docklands building, the cache also raises new questions for Poplar HARCA, the housing association behind the sale deal.
The online collection – www.balfrontower.org – has been assembled by David Roberts, a doctoral student in Architectural Design at UCL and member of the art collective Fugitive Images, who has been studying the Balfron Tower for several years. He has made his research public in order to “contribute to an informed public debate on key issues” about the Tower, including its complicated sale.
Balfron’s social housing tenants, who previously occupied 99 of its 146 flats, voted to transfer to Poplar HARCA in 2006 on the understanding that their flats would be upgraded to the Decent Homes Standard and they would continue to live in them. They were progressively “decanted” from the block between 2010 and 2015 to allow refurbishment to take place. Following a series of setbacks to the project, it was announcement in February that Balfron would be sold as private flats through a joint-venture with developer LondonNewcastle.
The documents on balfrontower.org cover everything from Hungarian-British architect Ernő Goldfinger’s original designs to German-language reviews of the block and the coverage its sale received in the East End Review.
Also included is a financial viability document from 2012 which states Poplar HARCA’s intention that the Tower become a “leaseholder only block”, made up exclusively of privately-owned flats.
From 2010 Poplar HARCA has maintained it would need to sell some of the block’s flats to pay for refurbishment works, but claimed in public until this year that it did not know exactly how many, insisting, when asked, that there was a possibility – however small – that social tenants might be able to return.
Asked about the financial document which suggests this possibility had been ruled out as early as 2012, a Poplar HARCA spokesperson said: “There are significant costs associated with restoring a Grade-II listed building, particularly one in as poor a state of repair as Balfron and the final decision on residents returning could not be taken until the JV [joint venture] was formed in December 2014.
“As has always been the case – and as tenants have always been advised – had funding become available prior to that to allow Poplar HARCA any other option it would have taken it.”
David Roberts hopes the site will allow people to explore the subject for themselves. “As a researcher I have the time and access to information that many others don’t,” he says. “The documents I’ve encountered can be intimidating, difficult to access, or difficult to grasp because of bureaucratic, academic or legal language.
“The website aims to open these documents and processes to the public and help contribute to a more informed public debate.”
Roberts’ research focuses on social housing in East London and emphasises first-hand testimony. He began his research project because a Balfron resident got in touch with him. “She was interested in doing an oral history project with her neighbours before they all leave,” Roberts explains. “It is their voices, from inside, that are rarely heard.
“As we worked together we met more and more residents that spoke frankly about living in the tower – frustration with unreliable lifts and the lack of sufficient funds for repair, joy at the light and space it offers and an unanticipated spirit of neighbourliness, and anger that these cherished things may soon be lost to them.
“One former resident said, ‘On the 23rd floor we felt magnificent. I think for social housing tenants to lose the view is such a terrible theft of experience. You live in the space in a different way.
It affects your being. And that’s critical to your entire existence. And for poorer folk like myself it’s a great loss.’”
Flat whites: stirring up a revolution in the economy. Photograph: Flickr
Douglas McWilliams first found out about hipsters by monitoring the number of passengers coming through Old Street tube station every day. He thought the huge spike in Oyster swipes he saw by 2012 must be some kind of recording error, but on further examination found it was in fact the thunderous beeping and banging of thousands of people rushing to join a new kind of economy.
The “advanced techie people, marketing people and creative types” McWilliams and his staff at economics consultancy CEBR increasingly had to wade through to get to their own Old Street offices had their odd collection of new industries christened by McWilliams’ colleague Rob Habron as the ‘Flat White Economy’, after the beverage the workers consumed in the largest quantity. The name allegedly stuck in economic circles and, thanks to McWilliams’ zippy little book on the ‘FWE’, may well catch on in other circles too.
Its headline finding is this datum: 32,000 businesses were set up in the postal district EC1V (i.e. Old Street) between March 2012 and March 2014. The book is about how this astonishing level of entrepreneurial go-getting got going, where it’s got to and where it might get us: by 2012 there were 114,500 FWE jobs, and McWilliams argues that if its success can be replicated elsewhere the Flat White Economy may lead to a bright future for the UK as a whole.
McWilliams tells the story of the City Fringes’ transformation into Tech City through lots of stats, international comparisons and aside observations about the lives of young workers. There were three main drivers of the FWE’s development: relatively cheap rents (at least to start with); an existing substrate of art, media and communications business; and a lot of high-skilled immigration, mainly from afflicted Eurozone countries. McWilliams’ general point about immigration is that having lots of people from different backgrounds working together makes for more creative thinking, which is a hearteningly cosmopolitan thing to hear in a time of increasing parochialism.
The book’s optimism may occasionally grate. There’s little room for what has been lost to the FWE’s creative destruction: the closed galleries and priced-out tenants. It’s not that kind of book. And McWilliams – as an economist – should be fulsomely praised for writing about young people without emphasising their importance as a mysterious and fickle market needing to be advertised to in complex ways.
Instead, a generation closely associated with recession, austerity and student debt is given economic agency and seen as having the potential to transcend the beards, fixies and craft beers – and maybe change the world.
The Flat White Economyis published by Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd. RRP: £16.99 ISBN: 9780715649534
Arts charity IdeasTap has announced it is to close. In June the South East London organisation will cease its work helping early-career artists, filmmakers and writers to find funding, work experience, training and jobs in the creative industries.
The Peter de Haan Charitable Trust, which funds IdeasTap, has run out of money and attempts to secure alternative sources of funding from government or corporate sponsors have failed.
IdeasTap has nearly 200,000 members across the UK receiving its services for free. The charity has given away more than £2.3m in funding and mentoring to its members since it was set up in 2008.
Peter de Haan, the businessman who founded IdeasTap, wrote in a letter to members: “I am the bearer of sad news. On 2 June 2015, IdeasTap will shut its doors. It is a painful day for me, and for the whole IdeasTap team.”
He added: “If running IdeasTap has taught me one thing it is that we have an incredible pool of creative talent in this country who – given the chance – have an enormous amount to contribute to our culture, our society and our economy.
“It is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss.”
De Haan’s Trust was not intended to last forever. Constituted in 1999, its reserves were meant to be spent gradually over a 20-year period.
Since the closure was announced in March, IdeasTap members have rallied round in a display of support, gratitude and sadness.
Writer Kirsty Logan tweeted: “Very sad to hear that IdeasTap is closing. I got my first literary agent and my first columnist job through IdeasTap. They will be much missed.”
Big names in the industry have also got involved on Twitter. BBC economics editor Robert Peston tweeted: “The closure of arts charity IdeasTap a huge blow to young artists, was important leg up for many.” Theatre critic for the Guardian, Lyn Gardner, added: “Such a pity; given a helping hand to so many artists, writers and more at crucial point. So hard to get started.”
High life: The Balfron Tower. Photograph: Joe Roberts
Last month’s announcement that the Grade II-listed Balfron Tower in Poplar will no longer contain any social housing but will instead be sold as luxury flats put an end to speculation about its future that has been going on since 2010. But questions remain about its recent past, particularly around how more than 120 family-sized East London flats have passed from the social to the private sector without anyone being evicted.
For all that it is a gigantic and imposing concrete structure, Balfron is also delicate, with spindly, human-scale walkways connecting the service tower and main building. Six flats broad and one flat thick, it is endearingly awkward-looking; broad and slim, tall and squat, rough and rectilinear all at once. All bedrooms are on the eastern face, placed for the sunrise, with balconies to the west for its setting. Designed in the brutalist mood by British-Hungarian architect Ernő Goldfinger in the late 60s, it is touched by many such small elements of genius. The view is of London, from the Thames Estuary to Hampstead Heath.
For the better part of five years, Poplar HARCA, the housing association which owns the block, has maintained that the people who used to live there – social tenants who were “decanted” to allow refurbishment work to be carried out – might in theory be permitted to move back in. It stated several times that they “possibly but not probably” had a “right of return”.
This “right” wasn’t about law but about money: whether Poplar HARCA could afford to have any social housing in Balfron Tower. Until recently it was still unsure. In an interview conducted in January, Paul Augarde, head of Creativity and Innovation at Poplar HARCA, insisted he still did not know whether or not the budget for the Balfron project would have space for some social tenants to move back in. “It’s never great,” he said of what was then the possible total sale. “You don’t want to sell stuff.”
Poplar HARCA has a lot going for it. It owns and manages 6,000 social rent homes in Poplar and has built over 1,000 homes (social and private) in the last 15 years. It has refurbished all its social lets. It helps jobless residents into work, supports social enterprises in the area and even employs its own small police force. It persuaded Barclays to open the first non-charging cash point in the whole of Poplar and caused a bridge to be built over the four-lane East India Dock Road to connect estates together. It is making physical improvements to the area of a different magnitude to anything the council ever did.
Which goes some way to explaining why residents of the Brownfield Estate, of which Balfron and its neighbour Carradale House are part, voted for ownership and management of their homes to be transferred to Poplar HARCA from Tower Hamlets Council in 2007. But what has happened at Balfron is very different to what they actually voted for.
View from the top of the Balfron Tower. Photograph: Joe Roberts
In 2006, residents were sent a booklet about transferring to Poplar HARCA, two pages of which were of special relevance to Balfron and Carradale. Poplar HARCA would be contractually obliged to refurbish substantially both blocks, and two options for their tenants were proposed: they could remain living in their flats while the refurbishment was carried out, or they could move, as priority tenants, into new homes Poplar HARCA would build elsewhere on the Brownfield Estate. If they took the second option, their current flat would be sold privately to help pay for the project.
Poplar HARCA anticipated around 130 tenants from across both blocks would choose to leave in this first instance. Balfron had suffered from an historic lack of maintenance and anti-social behaviour was a serious problem. Many tenants took Poplar HARCA up on its offer; but many others opted to stay.
In other words, the sale of some flats in Balfron was always on the cards, but so was the prospect of social tenants continuing to live there indefinitely. This initial proposal, on which tenants voted, made no mention of a “decant”, permanent or temporary, nor indeed of any need to leave Balfron at all.
How did we get from this state of affairs to last month’s announcement that the whole of Balfron, now empty of tenants, is to be sold privately?
Crash
Poplar HARCA blames two things: the 2008 financial crisis and the refusal of planning permission for a “linked” proposal for several separate developments it submitted to Tower Hamlets Council. Approval of this proposal would have given it a solid financial resource and lowered its reliance on the sale of unwanted Balfron and Carradale flats to fund the refurbishment and other projects. Forced to apply for new developments site by site, and sell homes at post-crash prices, these flats became one of its few solid sources of money.
Since these events occurred, tenants have been “decanted” and the uncertainty of their “possible but not probable” return promulgated. If – from 2008 onwards – Poplar HARCA strongly suspected it would need to sell Balfron, why didn’t it just make a clean breast of it?
Paul Augarde argues it was simply communicating the truth of the situation, which was that Poplar HARCA did not know what was going to happen. “We were very straight,” he says. “If we’d given an absolute answer” to residents’ questions on returning, he says, “it would have been no. It would have been easier to say no.”
Decant
Poplar HARCA did not attribute the need to remove tenants in 2010 to the need to sell Balfron, instead citing a report which detailed safety risks to their remaining while work was carried out. It decided on this basis to “decant” all tenants. This makes sense – quite how people could remain in flats while their bathrooms and kitchens were renovated has never entirely been made clear. But the “decant” also meant that the sale of homes would from then on always be connected to the prospect of tenants moving back in, not to their being moved out. The question of the sale of homes would be framed around a “right of return”, not a “right to stay”.
This was the manner in which the issue was presented to tenants, who were briefed by Poplar HARCA at the end of September 2010 on the need to leave their homes. The briefing could have been clearer: “Up until reading about the process of decanting I thought we were going to temporary housing and then return,” says Michael Newman, a tenant of Balfron for many years. Printed communications, however, boded ill: “The document that I looked at was on the process of decanting, and it made no statement that I could find on returning.”
The omission caused such alarm that by October it was the subject of an FAQ on a fact-sheet distributed by Poplar HARCA. “Can I move back in when the works are complete?” was “one of the questions we just don’t know the answer to yet”, the sheet stated, before raising the prospect of selling more Balfron flats than originally intended: “We have had to re-think how we pay for the works.”
In November 2010, Newman wrote an eloquent and moving letter to Andrea Baker, Director of Housing at Poplar HARCA, asking if there had been a misunderstanding: “[I] see my flat, my home, as a safe haven with memories of my brothers, and an inspirational, poetic view that has helped me through very difficult times,” he wrote. “I have lived for the past few weeks with the worry of losing my home.
“I am writing to ask you to reassure me about my home and our community.” Baker wrote back the very next day. But she was unable to offer anything further by way of reassurance than the “possibly but not probably have a right of return” formulation.
“Right of return”, not “right to stay”
From 2010, Poplar HARCA worked with residents on relocating. Building work was (and still is) yet to start. As years went by, the realistic option for waiting residents was to cease to pursue even a moral “right of return”.
“I have been treated very well by HARCA in the decant and do feel gratitude for how they supported the move,” says Michael Newman now. He has resettled in Carradale House. “I am now happy where I live. I can see my old flat from the balcony of my new one, and I am starting a new life.”
So is Balfron Tower. Now that all tenants have been re-housed, physically and psychologically, Poplar HARCA has finally applied for planning permission for the refurbishment and has formed a partnership with developer London Newcastle to sell the flats.
What comes of all this? It’s astonishing that a social landlord started with the plan of refurbishing a listed building for its social tenants and found that it was able to do so only if it sold the building into private hands – while still being contractually obliged to carry out the work. Other housing associations may well be put off by this from pursuing such ambitious projects, and it is a shame, to say the very least, that Poplar HARCA, for all its achievements, could not set them a better example.
I am Here installation at Haggerston Estate 2009–14. Photograph: Fugitive Images
Looking at some of the other guests at a recent launch event at Hoxton’s PEER Gallery, you got an eerie feeling: the inkling that you’d seen them before, somewhere, but that on the previous occasion their heads had been several orders of magnitude larger and perched some storeys off the ground.
This is because they were the subjects of person-size portraits which used to be installed in the windows of Samuel House, a Haggerston housing block (now demolished). These portraits are included in Real Estates, a six-week project at PEER curated by Fugitive Images, the art collective that made them along with a film about Samuel House called Estates: a Reverie.
Community participation is key to Fugitive Images’ work, which takes a particular interest in what they call “the social organisation of urban space”. And given the chance to organise their own small piece of urban space at PEER they have done so in a decidedly social way, inviting a host of other artists, campaigners and local people to join in over Real Estates’ six week duration, dividing up the time between different exhibitors.
Combined with PEER’s only being open three days a week this can make for a rather fleeting schedule, but also means high variety along with cultural air-time and direct participation for groups that might otherwise be sidelined or made purely passive contributors.
Thus March will see Bekki Perriman’s The Doorways Project, exploring “homeless culture”, the generally ignored day-to-day activities and stories of people living on the street, accompanied by work from Cardboard Citizens, a group which has been making theatre with homeless people for over 20 years, for homeless and non-homeless audiences.
The E15 Campaign – who came to national prominence last year as the ‘E15 Mothers’ protesting their eviction from social housing in Stratford – will exhibit visual art and film about their campaign as well as running “eviction resistance” workshops, while the DIG Collective, a social housing campaign group, will have their own slot in mid-March. Smart Urhoife, a fashion designer who grew up in Haggerston, will be exhibiting work from 25 – 28 March.
As well as exhibitions open throughout the day, Real Estates will host evening talks, discussions and films. It’s got the potential to be a kind of short-course in where social housing and the campaigns around it are at in 2015. There’s a full schedule and an online continuation of the project at real-estates.info.
Real Estates: Fugitive Images residency is at PEER Gallery, 97 & 99 Hoxton Street, N1 6QL until 28 March peeruk.org
Mary Barnes. Courtesy of Dr J. Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop
The Nunnery Gallery on Bow Road, hosting the first show of Mary Barnes’s artwork since the major 2010 retrospective at Space Studios, isn’t far from Kingsley Hall in Bromley-by-Bow, where Barnes spent 1965-1970 covering the walls with her paintings, using her own faeces and later grease crayons.
Kingsley Hall was briefly home to anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s Philadelphia Association, which sought to provide spaces where people suffering from mental illness could live without being treated as insane. Barnes admitted herself in 1965.
Laing contended that madness, rather than being an illness, was a reasonable response to chaos and injustice in society, with ‘anti-psychiatry’ in its more extreme forms coming to glamorise insanity, the mentally ill seen as exceptionally perceptive. Art was encouraged, both as ‘treatment’ and as a way of communicating such perceptions.
“My first paintings were black breasts over the walls of the Hall,” wrote Barnes in 1969. “Joe gave me a tin of grease crayons. ‘Here, just scribble’. I did, on and on.” Joe – Joseph Berke, Barnes’s doctor at ‘the Hall’ – was also known to Barnes as ‘Boo-Bah’; the Nunnery show is named in his honour.
Untitled by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy Dr J. Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop
Barnes made and exhibited paintings until her death in 2001. Perhaps surprisingly, the Boo-Bah paintings are disciplined and composed. Small Figure, an early work, is made up of hurried, smudgy lines, but they are deployed deftly to reveal a little girl whose hunched awkwardness is expressive, moving and characterful, not clumsy.
The row of colourful Untitled’s on the opposite wall bear similarly visible artefacts of their creation but their connected flow and intricacy of pattern have all it takes to trap a viewer’s stare.
Barnes’s later works, done in oil pastels, have more solid blocks of colour and more figuration. They feature vividly drawn personages whose psychedelic colouring adds to their mystery, as though they were figures from an unknown religion.
Small Figure by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy of Dr. J Berke, photograph: Ollie Harrop
The exhibition is informative about the institutional origins of Barnes’s career and raises questions about untutored art, and art used as therapy. Do you look at Barnes’s paintings as symptoms of her illness or as one would a standard art-show? In this respect, some of anti-psychiatry’s eliding of distinctions is refreshing and brings clarity.
‘Outsider art’ – graffiti, ghost bikes, Christmas lights – is often more interesting and informative about contemporary culture than gallery shows. To see a suggestive blending of the one with the other, get thee to the Nunnery.
A discussion of Barnes’s work, including Dr Joseph Berke on the panel, will be held at the Nunnery Gallery on 24 February.
Mary Barnes: Boo-Bah is at Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, E3 2SJ until 29 March www.bowarts.org/nunnery
Volcanic Eruption by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy of Dr J. Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop
