1 For reasons of already overstuffed space, I can’t say as much here about this impressive building as I would like; I deal with it at considerable length in ‘Zaha Hadid and the Neoliberal Avant-Garde’, Mute, 2011.
2 The MP in question is Nicholas Boles. Toby Helm and Richard Rogers, ‘Tory MP calls for local government planning to be replaced by “chaos” ’, Guardian, 18 December 2010
3 The first of these took precedence in both the campaign’s slogans and the campaign itself, but was usually shortened, inaccurately, to ‘anti-fees protests’, when the abolition of EMA and the 80 per cent cuts to Humanities funding were every bit as much an issue, albeit less easy to present as the whining of overprivileged middle class youth.
4 James Meek, ‘In Broadway Market’, at http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/08/09/james-meek/in-broadway-market/.
5 The North, that is, as defined by Sheffield-based geographer Danny Dorling, in his essential So You Think You Know About Britain? (London, 2011) – a line that begins just below the West Midlands conurbation and Nottinghamshire, and then sweeps down to encompass all of Wales. It is, he claims, the starkest divide in Europe, sharper in terms of wealth and quality of life than North and South Italy or East and West Germany. The problem with Dorling’s definition is that, while broadly convincing, it has to be adapted on close examination into a West Bank-style mass of enclaves and exclaves; Tower Hamlets, Chatham or Plymouth have to become colonies of the North, York, Durham and Edinburgh exclaves of the South.
6 See A Guide to the New Ruins, passim.
7 Peter C. Baker, ‘Eric’s World’, thenational.ae, 1 May 2008.
8 The income required to purchase an ‘affordable’ home in London is usually over £20,000 a year; that disqualifies most of the residents of Robin Hood Gardens. Even more drastically, the coalition government’s definition of ‘affordable’ is 80% of market rent, which definitively disqualifies nearly all council tenants.
9 Will Hurst, ‘New Robin Hood Gardens Residents’ Survey Challenges Demolition’, Building Design 26 June 2009.
10 In Nowa Huta, the Polish steeltown which Mittal bought up and downsized post-1989, artists put up airbrushed portraits of Mittal on the sides of buildings, on the spaces that Communist Party leaders would once have occupied. It’s more apt.
11 A phrase taken from an internal Tory policy agenda briefing, proudly uncovered and publicized by Neanderthal conservative blogger Guido Fawkes at order-order.com, 6 December 2010.
12 See IWCA’s ‘FAQ’ at: iwca.info.
13 My information here comes from an article in Leopard magazine, ‘Aberdeen’s Tower Blocks’, by Mark Chalmers. See leopardmag.co.uk/feats, May 2009.
14 See Andrea Klettner, ‘Diller Scofidio & Renfro triumphs in Aberdeen City Park competition’, Building Design, bdonline.co.uk/news, 16 January 2012.
15 Or, at least, for the town planning competence of local government’s elected functionaries.
16 Quoted in Gordon Murray, ‘Appreciating Cumbernauld’, Architectural Design 76/1, Profile 179 (2006).
17 This is in fact the clock from the demolished St Enoch Station in Glasgow; taken here under Copcutt and proudly displayed in Gregory’s Girl, it was attached to its current nondescript corner when the Antonine Centre was built.
18 My guide made a short film about the graffito, in which the ‘significance of this text is never explained but it is, in essence, the same story that is told about similar plots of land in every city: a story of dispossession, exclusion, privatization and clearance.’ See danieljewesbury.org/gilligan.html and ‘Opposition to Barry Gilligan apartments’, bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland, 18 July 2011.
19 Martin Pawley, ‘From Modernism to Terrorism’, in Terminal Architecture (London: Reaktion, 1997), p. 152.