ELEVEN
After the long-simmering political eruptions of 2010 and 2011, there followed an inevitable period of no-holds-barred revanchism for the British establishment, a clampdown to end all clampdowns. Within days of the riots, David Cameron was promising a ‘fightback’. June 2012 would bring the Queen’s diamond jubilee celebrations and August the Olympic games, and this ‘Jubilympic’ year saw the nexus of state power, feudal servility and corporate might – in the form of rigid brand partnerships – dominate the London landscape. If the demonstrations and riots had amounted to a ‘return of the repressed’ to the public arena, they were about to return to being repressed: beginning with mass imprisonment of rioters, English courts working through the night, and Conservative politicians happily breaking with democratic protocol to instruct magistrates that they should disregard sentencing guidelines and issue ‘exemplary’ jail terms – in one case, a student with no criminal record was jailed for six months, for stealing £3.50’s worth of bottled water. There was a drastic ramping up of policing and surveillance across London, to prevent the slightest possibility of any security or public order meltdown – or even peaceful protest – in the summer. The state was on manoeuvres, and the city on lockdown.
The Met rehearsed for the Jubilympic summer during an anti-austerity demo in November 2011, with a bit of kit held in reserve in case of a major nuclear or chemical attack: a Transformers-style van that opened out into a 10-foot-high steel wall. They cordoned off Trafalgar Square and christened it ‘the sterile zone’: members of the public could still enter – the entrance monitored by cops repurposed as particularly aggressive bouncers – but only if they discarded any political placards they were carrying. The surprise deployment of what cops called the ‘iron horse’ made sense for the mood of the anxious post-riots, pre-Olympic period. But it was also a sign of the times in a broader sense. In the same way feudal capitalism relied on enclosing the common public land, the ‘commons’, to generate profit for its wealthy aristocratic elite, neoliberal capitalism requires putting up walls in our cities, policing and restricting public spaces, and creating enclaves where access is dictated only by wealth and power: including gated communities, securitised blocks of luxury flats, private roads, and shopping malls instead of street markets. While capital must be allowed to move around the world unhindered by the state, the same freedom does not apply to poor people in the west’s ‘global cities’.1
With the threat of terrorism, along with public order, protest, and general human-traffic management, the Olympics provided the justification for turning London into a half-militarised city. Along with 12,500 police officers from 51 different forces, 13,500 army troops were drafted onto the streets of London, along with 1,000 armed US diplomatic and FBI agents. There were also big pay-outs to private security companies: the controversial firm G4S had a £130m Olympic contract alone. The Royal Navy’s largest ship, the 22,500-tonne helicopter carrier HMS Ocean, was stationed in the Thames. Anarchists were pre-arrested at their homes, just in case they were planning to commit a public order offence. As sweeping government cuts to local council budgets and welfare spending started to take their toll on the poorest families, and use of food banks soared across the capital, the public funds spent on security for the Olympics were £553m in the venues themselves, and over £1 billion overall. All circuses, and no money left for bread.
Most of this security mania was focused on grime’s heartlands, east London’s five official Olympic boroughs. The Olympic park in Newham, where Deja Vu FM’s studio had once stood, was protected by an 11-mile, 5,000-volt electric fence. High-velocity missiles were stationed on the top of strategically located blocks of flats, the closest one positioned on a water tower in the luxury gated community of Bow Quarter, five minutes walk from Roman Road. The Bow Quarter buildings had been the site of the historic match girls’ strikes in 1888, and, a century later, a harbinger of the gentrification of the area – transformed into a private residential complex containing 700 flats, a pool, a gym, 24-hour security and a residents-only bar, its constituent buildings named after luxe New York signifiers like Lexington and Manhattan. These gated communities had proliferated in east London around the turn of the millennium, especially in developments aimed at the wealthy new arrivals working in the City of London or Canary Wharf. It was exactly the kind of walling that keeps richer residents from having to interact with poor locals. ‘As soon as they get past the gates you can almost see a weight come off people’s shoulders, you can almost see them breathe a sigh of relief,’ one Bow Quarter resident said of his neighbours in 2004.2 That same year, Home Secretary David Blunkett had speculated that such gated communities, ‘where people contribute towards the security and order within the enclave in which they live’, were a model that could be extended much further, across British society, ‘for the many’ as well as the wealthy few.
The landscape that forged the grime scene was disappearing from the map: pirate-radio signals faded from the FM dial, legendary record shops were replaced with boutique coffee shops, iconic tower blocks were being ‘artwashed’ by councils and the creative industries, while the less attractive ones were torn down and replaced with luxury flats for the growing influx of young professionals. ‘Bow has changed drastically,’ says Troy ‘A Plus’ Miller from Rinse FM. ‘Obviously, the gentrification is a problem: there’s hardly anything for the younger ones to do, there’s no youth clubs anymore, you don’t really see anyone hanging out. It’s obvious the area’s changing, but who do the changes benefit? It’s not like they put 20 new studios or media facilities for kids in the Olympic boroughs. The landscape’s changed so much, and these establishments are popping up that want to sell you a sandwich for £8. I mean, who’s paying that?’
The Olympics were a huge accelerator to the transformation of east London, beginning when the bid was won back in 2005 – but the engine had been started, and the tank filled up much earlier, by New Labour’s Urban Renaissance plan. Even in 2004 Wiley was saying of Bow: ‘it used to be a very tower block-y area, but the buildings are starting to get knocked down now, so they’re making it into more like a suburbs sort of thing.’3 By the time I spoke to him a decade later about the gentrification of the area, he could scarcely believe it was the same: Labour’s estate regenerations, in the name of making the inner city more ‘mixed’, had taken their toll. ‘All I can see is new-builds being chucked up there,’ Wiley said, while the market culture of Roman Road (‘the nurturer’) had weakened considerably as a community hub. ‘That market culture was massive,’ he said. ‘The difference today is people go to flipping Westfield, or Bluewater.’
As for the estates themselves, many of them had been completely overhauled, as per New Labour’s plan – but as Miller says, for whose benefit? Crossways Estate, ‘the three flats’ where Dizzee and Tinchy had lived as children, where Rinse FM had broadcast, backdrop to many grime videos, was undergoing a complete refurbishment. ‘They should have been doing that when I was in school,’ Wiley said, summing up the entire concept of managed decline. ‘Instead they left it until it was actually on the floor, to go in and fix it.’
Today Crossways stands transformed by a substantial gentrification project which refurbished the three tall towers and re-clad them in pastel shades, planting trees and adding new low-rise buildings around them – and brought in a more affluent class of east London migrant. The council-built Crossways Estate is no more, and in its place stands the re-branded Bow Cross. ‘Bow is washed, rinsed and looking good – and buyers are impressed,’ declared the headline in the Evening Standard’s Homes & Property magazine in June 2011, after 65 per cent of the new privately-owned flats were sold in the first three weeks of sale. Rarely is social cleansing accompanied by such unabashed language about needing to ‘wash’ and ‘rinse’ an area of its undesirables.
Before regeneration it had been ‘an especially menacing part of east London’ the Standard explained, where ‘any outsider who was brave or foolhardy enough to venture on to the decaying estate’ would be ‘confronted by intimidating gangs of youths grouped silently on gloomy walkways, the only sound being the crunch of crack vials beneath their feet’. It’s a text-book example of the almost gleeful orientalism used about inner-city council estates – and much of east London in general – the Standard makes the scene sound like something from Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds. The managing director of Swan New Homes, who took over the estate from Tower Hamlets council in 2004, assured the newspaper that the previous issues, the ‘graffiti, grime and crime’ had been ‘designed out’, and instead, the new residents were ‘a calm and balanced community’. The Standard concluded with the following statement of reassurance to its readers: ‘Only about 20 of the original Crossways residents have opted to return to the estate, so the formerly volatile mix of personalities has been dissipated.’
And that’s gentrification in a nutshell: the most eye-catching cultural manifestations of urban change, the hipster cereal cafes and pop-up oxygen bars, are never the most influential actors in the process. Indeed, they are a distraction from where the most important decisions are taken. It is the less glamorous and headline-grabbing developments that go under the radar, and where the real pain of gentrification resides: the ‘refurbishments’ that become de facto mass purging of poor residents; the choking off of the supply of social housing since the 1980s; the granting of planning permission to new luxury blocks; the cynical redefining of ‘affordable housing’ to mean anything up to 80 per cent of market rate (it used to be more like 50 per cent); developers buying their way out of their legal requirements to build affordable housing by paying cash to struggling councils; the eviction of poor families, most often people of colour, or people with less fluent English, with no access to the media or housing lawyers, and their re-housing further away from the city centre.
Research by Savills estate agents found that, between 2001–11, the most pronounced increases in the proportion of wealthy residents across London were in Stratford, Canary Wharf and Bow, while the London suburbs saw increases in poorer residents and increases in overcrowding in the private rented sector. This ‘banlieue-isation’ – a reference to the poor suburbs of Paris, the banlieues – has been the story of London’s twenty-first century so far. Housing benefit claims were rising every year in outer-London boroughs, and falling in the inner city, as the poor were pushed to the periphery. As the squeeze on affordable housing intensified in inner-London boroughs, poor families were being forced out of their borough more and more: by the end of 2014, 14,000 homeless London households were living in temporary accommodation outside of their home borough – usually in unsafe, unfamiliar, unsuitable hostels or B&Bs, hours away on the outer reaches of the capital, or outside it altogether. This figure had increased 123 per cent in the space of three years, 2011–14.4 ‘No council should be sending tenants en masse to a different part of the country,’ a Conservative government spokesman said in December 2014 – which was unfortunate, as that was exactly what was happening.
Even Tory-run London councils like Westminster were complaining about the government’s cuts to housing benefit, and the chaos it was creating in an already struggling inner city. There were high-profile cases like that of the ‘Focus E15 mothers’ from Stratford, a group of single mums in their late teens and early twenties made homeless by the eviction from their social-housing ‘foyer’ (a building with on-site creche and skills training), whom Newham Council were advising to accept re-housing in Manchester, Birmingham or Hastings, places which they had never even visited and knew nobody – and all while the council marketed, at great expense, huge swathes of the borough to foreign property investment companies as an ‘Arc of Opportunity’, where a ‘Regeneration Supernova’ was exploding across the east London sky.
‘£9 billion on the Olympics and they’re telling us and our babies we have to go live in Hastings,’ lamented Focus E15’s Adora Chilaisha, only 19 years old, asking why they couldn’t be re-housed in the former athletes’ village.5 Although some of the Olympic accommodation was becoming social rented flats for those on the housing register, the overwhelming majority – 1,500 homes – were for private rent, starting at a minimum of £310 per week for a one-bedroom flat.
There were 24,000 people on the waiting list for social housing in Newham alone at the time, but the Labour Mayor Robin Wales wished to prioritise ‘those who contribute to society’, and in doing so ‘drive aspiration and form a stable community where people choose to live, work and stay’. Legally, they didn’t have much choice in whether they would stay: if they refused to accept relocation out of the only city they had ever known, they risked being declared ‘intentionally homeless’, and having all state support withdrawn. And so, the exile of poor families from the inner city continued to gather pace. The critic Jonathan Meades had prophesied the new reality in 2006, as the urban renaissance began to take shape: ‘Privilege is centripetal. Want is centrifugal … in the future, deprivation, crime and riots will be comfortably confined to outside the ring road.’6
Along with the ‘rinsing’ of estates like Crossways, the commercial premises that had been key parts of grime’s London were changing too. Rhythm Division on Roman Road in Bow, the shop where ‘everyone in grime used to congregate’, as Tinchy Stryder put it, as well as the location for Wiley’s ‘Wot Do U Call It?’ video and for countless DVD freestyles, was replaced in 2011 by an artisan coffee shop. ‘The record shops were what brought grime together, what made it a scene – people used to link up and just jam; people from different crews and areas,’ the shop’s former manager, DJ Cheeky told me – and he should know, having been a business associate of Wiley since they were selling vinyl out of the boot of a Vauxhall Corsa. He’d since been back to try one of their flat whites and artisan BLTs. ‘I enjoyed the sandwich,’ he laughed incredulously, ‘but I don’t see many people like me in there. These areas were once the breeding grounds for new music. But the area’s changed so much; where does everyone go to do their stuff? Or where are you inspired by?’
Other erstwhile social hubs were melting into the air. The Phoenix Arms, a Wilehouse and Roll Deep crew pub on India Dock Road, was closed in 2012, and replaced with a private block of flats. The Stratford Rex, site of some legendary grime nights in the early days, and only a stone’s throw from the Olympic site, was repossessed and closed in 2010. A reopening was proposed under new ownership in early 2012, but the Rex’s reputation still lingered, and some local residents objected. In an attempt to assuage concerns, a spokesperson for the new owners made it clear it would not be a grimy reopening: ‘Don’t brand us with the brush of the people that were here before,’ she said, ‘because we are nothing like them. We are not looking to put on all night hip-hop raves – all clubs will be members only and will target the pop and indie market.’7
While working-class people were being decanted from the estates of inner london in the name of the urban renaissance, a strange thing was happening to some of the once-unfashionable concrete blocks they were being forced to leave behind. Erno Goldfinger’s 27-storey Balfron Tower and its neighbour and partner, 11-storey Carradale House are five minutes from Langdon Park School, where Dizzee had met his inspirational teacher Tim Smith. They had been left to decline like many post-war brutalist blocks, and in 2007, the council gave up ownership to Poplar Harca, the organisation that would take charge of its long-postponed makeover. Initially, the social-housing tenants were assured they could have right of return, once the lengthy refurbishment was complete – this has failed to materialise, and the homes have been sold off for private purchase; it’s a pattern repeated across London’s major estate regenerations in the last decade. The heavy involvement of artists in the process of the Balfron and Carradale regeneration has led to accusations of ‘artwashing’ – both buildings are of architectural interest, and Grade II listed, and a long series of artistic residencies, exhibitions, ‘vertical carnivals’, artist tours and installations brought further bougie attention. This process reached a nadir with a 12-hour immersive theatrical production of Macbeth, and an entire Balfron Season in the empty tower, featuring talks, workshops, an evening of ‘East End bingo’, a supper-club with a six-course tasting menu, and a Wayne Hemingway-designed retro restoration of one flat in ‘authentic’ 1960s style.
‘We get tourists coming to look at the block every day,’ one social-housing tenant said in 2013, as she prepared to be evicted from the Balfron Tower with her five-month-old daughter.8 ‘It feels like you’re living in a zoo, [with them] peering through your window and then going back to their nice posh house in the suburbs. They do a little tour round the area – Robin Hood Gardens, Balfron Tower, go look at the Banksy – and then I think they get on the DLR and get out of there.’
Artwashing was not confined to the Balfron, even among other east London estates which had not been listed – Bow Cross had its own artists’ residencies, while sections of another huge, decaying Tower Hamlets estate, Robin Hood Gardens, were bought by the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2017, prior to its demolition, as ‘an important piece of brutalism, worth preserving for future generations’. Working-class families had no chance of being able to live in any of these mummified husks of affordable social housing, but at least their social betters could study how life used to be before they were displaced by luxury flats and ‘mixed communities’. Brutalist estates like the Balfron, and its matching partner in west London, the Trellick Tower, backdrop to many low-budget grime videos in the early days, began cropping up in mainstream pop videos too, as the post-war architectural style became ever more fashionable; you can buy Trellick Tower mugs, plates, T-shirts – even a £150 model for your mantelpiece.
The creative industries had been fetishised by New Labour as the engine of the urban renaissance, as a modernising break from its historic associations with lower-case labour, the unfashionable aesthetics of trade-union banners and Jarrow marchers – and now they were playing a part in powering a ‘renaissance’ which amounted to little more than out-and-out gentrification. Property developers and estate agents love creatives even more than politicians do: ‘It’s that magical something that [London boroughs] all want,’ leading property developer Richard Fagg told me. ‘They all want IT businesses and they all want creative industries, because it gives them that young, hip vibe. People take it very seriously, because it creates value.’ Council blocks were recuperated as sites of artists’ installations and rendered hollow objects of aesthetic appreciation, rather than places where poorer families could live their lives.
Arguably there was a similar process of detachment and depersonalisation happening in grime, in a phase where MCs had largely disappeared from view, and a more carefully produced, experimental instrumental form was developing – the first wave of grime MCs were all reaching their thirties, and most had either given up the mic, or their hearts weren’t really in it: their chaotic, youthful exuberance was disappearing along with the London that had produced it. By 2012, even the Brrap Pack’s moment of electro-pop grime hits was passing its peak – Wiley finally got a number-one single, with the summery pop song ‘Heatwave’, but he was the only one, and 2013 saw grime’s mainstream pop moment fading from view. A small instrumental underground scene of bedroom producers was beginning to emerge, via club nights like Boxed and label/club-night Butterz, but the MC culture was undeniably waning. ‘There is both a curatorial and hauntological dimension to today’s grime and the way in which it deploys MC voices,’ wrote academic Nabeel Zuberi in 2013, describing the ‘cavernous tracks of instrumental grime producers such as Visionist, Wen and Logos, which often feature samples of MC vocal fragments or recall the sonic palette of a decade ago.’9
Grime’s wild early energy was haunting the new music being made, just like the scene’s heartlands and the musicians’ childhood homes had been historicised and reduced to museums of its former glory. East London had been haunted by its industrial past for decades, since the factories and docks started to close down. It was there in the place names of the garment district created by immigrant Huguenot weavers (in Shoreditch nightlife hubs such as Curtain Road), and the ‘wharves’ and ‘docks’ around Canary Wharf that had not seen a boat in decades. This trend was given a twenty-first-century twist by the cringeworthy co-opting of blue collar work by parts of the emerging ‘Silicon Roundabout’ in Shoreditch: most notably the so-called ‘White Collar Factory’, a pretentious office space for tech start-ups and creative young professionals with portfolio careers.
The way east London housing was developing – or rather, being developed – Crossways was never going to remain as dilapidated as it was during grime’s youth, especially given its location: Bow, it bears repeating, stands sandwiched directly between two quintessential twenty-first-century sites of opulence and aspiration, the two biggest regeneration projects in London, two sites that tell the story of our times: the Olympic Park (with its partner in retail, Westfield Stratford), and Canary Wharf. Both were created by government diktat, with piles of tax-payers’ money, and managed by arms-length super-quangos (the LDDC and LLDC), but have overwhelmingly benefited private capital: not small-scale local businesses, but some of the richest international property developers on the planet, from the (Australian) Westfield Corporation to the China Investment Corporation, which now owns most of Canary Wharf. A fat lot of good the developments have done for the piggies in the middle. In 2012, schools in Tower Hamlets still had more pupils on free school meals (a reliable poverty indicator, because only low-income families are eligible) than anywhere else in England: 54 per cent compared to a national average of 16 per cent.
London 2012’s official slogan, complete with trademark, was Inspire A Generation. (The Team GB follow-up slogan for the post-Olympics period was the equally sports brand-like Better Never Stops.) Four years after the games’ closing ceremony, BBC Newsnight invited the former Minister for the Olympics Tessa Jowell, a former Olympic athlete Kelly Holmes, and the London 2012 Director of Sport Debbie Jevans to debate the legacy. Presenter Emily Maitlis put to this panel statistics showing that black and minority ethnic and lower-income groups – both over-represented in the Olympic boroughs – had shown a sharp decline in sporting participation since 2012; the guests had little to say in response. More people were playing handball, they said; terrific – £9 billion of public money well spent. Meanwhile, use of food banks doubled from 2011–12, and a survey for the London Assembly found that 61 per cent of the capital’s teachers had fed hungry schoolchildren out of their own pockets – and 41 per cent said they believed hunger had led to fainting or other illnesses. Inspiring a generation only really becomes a possibility when the generation in question have come around from their poverty-induced dizzy spell.
The official narrative across the entire media during the summer of 2012 was ‘who could possibly complain about this unalloyed good?’ – and any concerns or objections were swaddled in Union Jack bunting and the official logos of the games’ corporate partners. In 2017 the London Assembly published a report looking at the impact of the Olympic legacy. Its findings were as predicted by only poorer locals, and a few of us in the media: the gap in most quality-of-life indicators between the impoverished Olympic boroughs and the rest of London had not been closed; incredibly, the gap in terms of sporting or physical activity rates had actually got worse. The earnings gap was greater than it had been in 2009: and Tower Hamlets, Newham, Hackney and Barking and Dagenham retained some of the highest levels of child poverty in the entire country.10
A full nine years after his clash with Crazy Titch in the Deja Vu FM rooftop studio, Dizzee Rascal returned from Miami to pick up the mic in the same spot – give or take half a mile – for an altogether less humble performance: in the 80,000-capacity, £486-million Olympic Stadium. He was there to perform his number-one party-pop mega-hit ‘Bonkers’ as a key part of the London 2012 opening ceremony. The ceremony cost £27 million in itself: an arirang mass games-style extravaganza of elaborate choreography, extravagant props and dazzling pyrotechnics, with a supporting cast of 7,500 volunteers, and it was broadcast live to an estimated global TV audience of 900 million people. Dizzee stood proud in his embroidered ‘E3’ baseball jacket, a single piece of thread connecting this international TV spectacular to the forgotten people and forgotten genre that emerged mere minutes away.
Dizzee was also asked to record one of five official Olympic songs: his contribution, ‘Scream’, was the kind of thumping sports anthem the situation demanded – ‘I feel like Rocky on the steps’ – but buried in the final verse of the song, he found room for a fleeting tribute to the roots he had become estranged from, living in Miami: the area he still felt intensely conflicted about, and conflicted about leaving: ‘Boy it’s lonely at the top, but it’s overcrowded at the bottom/And where I come from’s overly rotten, I’m from the east side, I ain’t forgotten.’11
Across the history of the modern Olympic games, there has usually been a fractious relationship with the urban area they land in; even while the official PR rhetoric, parroted by inane broadcasters across the board, always purports that the games make ‘a great advert’ for that area to the world. The games flatten the reality of everyday life in the host neighbourhood with cheery inspirational slogans, mimicking the sports brands who are the official corporate partners – all smiles, thumbs up, logos and trademarks. Never mind that so many of the people Dizzee had grown up with had been displaced by gentrification, or swept up in the tumult of the previous summer’s riots. As a school-aged teenager at the time, the reality of what the games meant for residents of Stratford was not lost on grimy Afrobeats MC J Hus – he and his friends noticed a marked intensification of police harassment. ‘They needed to clean things up for the Olympics,’ he recalled. ‘And about 20 of us, we didn’t fit their definition of clean.’12
What a great advert for east London, said the talking heads, over and over again. Maybe the statement was true, in and of itself. In May 2013, Newham Council and Mayor Boris Johnson succeeded in selling off a key part of the borough’s Arc of Opportunity, the derelict Royal Albert Dock just east of Canary Wharf. The sale was made to a Chinese investment consortium, for £1 billion – so that they could turn the huge, empty site into ‘London’s third financial centre’, after the City of London and Canary Wharf: and create a new 3.2-million-square-foot ‘Asian Business Park’.
What a great advert for east London. The question is, what good did the £9-billion advertising campaign – or the £1-billion sell-off of public land – do for the people already living there?
‘Now you want to make it a nice, white area, but what happened to the last ten years?’ MC Chronik from Slew Dem said, shooting clay pigeons from his sofa on an Olympics computer game.13 ‘It was stabbings here, stabbings there – no one wanted to clean up the area then.’