The Backyard of the Olympics, an interview with Iain Sinclair

Samuel Michaëlsson: In the first chapter in Ghost Milk you are talking about Stratford and East London and how it used to be. What makes the area so special and how should architects and urban planners relate to this?

Iain Sinclair: Stratford in the time that I worked there, in the early 1970’s, was special because it still had the quality of an independent town, separate from London as such. It was a staging post on the road out to Essex. It still had a distinct flavour of being a part of Essex and the Essex mindset, as it was of London. It had a sense of its own history as an industrial place, and has a railway hub because there was so much heavy goods being transported through the area.

Coming to work there, the interesting thing for me was to see this totally provisional landscape, it was partly made up of its decaying industrial past, and partly made up of marshlands and wild nature as it still survived. It was a very mixed and unresolved place. I think that was why so many slightly subversive businesses got into the area, scrap metal dealers, travellers, and then on a large scale the Chobham Farm operation we were involved with. It was an attempt to circumvent the docks and the Union regulations on the docks by bringing container loading inland and not having to employ dock labour and doing it very cheap, and using using the closeness to the rail link and to the road links to operate there, which was kind of a prevision of the mindset of the Olympics but on a much grander scale; this idea of taking a run down area because its cheap, and because its slightly off the map and making it into a new city to regenerate the capital.
 
On the first instance when I was there, there was no notion of creating legacy or subverting the entire district, it was just about one business in one particular place. Now this is one total vision imposed by global capital. To me it’s an invasion, it’s like going into Baghdad or something because now you have got this huge level of surveillance (there will be more troops employed than in Afghanistan, for the security of the Olympics). You have made public land private in the sense of creating check points and customs barriers and I have already been asked to provide my passport to go on to the site by water. If you get a boat in Old Ford Lock you have to turn up with your passport and have to go through security checks. This is on your own doorstep, so it feels very strange and peculiar. 

It’s a piece of captured land underwritten by series of competing descriptions about what the future might be whereas really nobody knows, it’s juggled on a day to day basis. One day the stadium is going to West Ham, the other day it’s not going to West Ham, then it’s going to be multiple use that may come down and this and that may happen. And the reality that you end up with is this is sort of satellite attached to an enormous Australian shopping mall. The overwhelming sense of it at the moment is this gigantic mall that is immediately connected to the station and allows you access to the Olympic site, it’s a bit of parkland attached to a major commercial development. Now it also seems more of a city than Stratford itself, because Stratford when I was there was still an old fashioned high street with pubs that had been there because they served the road as it passed through and a lot of small businesses, and that slightly changed into a shopping area that was there before this one (Westfield) a sort of minor series of interior markets and malls. They were pretty low budget and have been totally overtaken of what is happening right now. As a generator of employment all it’s doing is creating low level shelf stacking jobs, giving jobs that really seem very artificial. It’s not like where you could before had learned printing or you could have been part of an industrial process that actually became something significant. Now you are just employed at the lowest possible register.

The architecture as it evolved seems to me almost post-industrial, you don’t get a sense of even an architect working. And the one building that is worthy of note, the Aquatic Centre (by Zaha Hadid), has been boxed in so much that it could have just as well been a concrete factory now. The curve and the style of it as you see in the original drawings, because of the Olympics you have got these two claddings (spectator’s seating) on either sides to hold the spectators and it does not look like anything at all, there is no sense of that sweep or scale. And it does not relate to the Olympic Stadium, it does not relate to the art work which is simply there really for its size. Kapoor or Anthony Gormley get these big art works become the icons of a zone, but it looks like an argument with itself because the nature of the steel the structure seems to argue with this necessity to have this safe viewing platform that people can go up. The two elements pull against each other.

All of the site is like that, there are so many different competing zones done by different people that there is no integrated architectural vision compared to the similar zone in Athens which is very striking architecturally, even though it is now an abandoned wasteland. There is nothing that relates to the area. There is some talk about regenerating the waterways around the area but even when that is looked at it’s not really true because somewhere like Pudding Mill River which came through where the Olympic site is was already being regenerated by planting carefully around the turn of the century and now that is completely enclosed and the water table is more polluted, it has got thorium that has run off all the radioactivity on the site and damaged the waterways in the same way. 

SM: There is a short term thinking at play?

IS: Yes, there is political convenient thinking, short term thinking. All the stuff about preserving natural habitats is total nonsense in terms of bio region. You have to have a permeability for natural wildlife to move through zones, you can’t say that this zone belongs to such and such. It does not work like that, by creating barriers you absolutely killed it in terms of its ecosystem because it is a sealed off zone. I don’t see any way it’s going to work other than creating an imposed structure which will take years and years to be absorbed into the nature of London. Which will happen eventually, because whatever done is done and essentially the city and its nature and people will come to terms with what is there and find ways of using, it adapts, but there is nothing really to boast off because you can’t really create it in advance.

There were these schemes that were previously created like Victoria Park which is nearby. In the mid 19th century it was made as a ‘People’s park’ rather than a Royal park because there was so much poverty and overcrowding in the East End. To create an open space, a green lung, was very valuable and that park has been partly destroyed by these overlapping developments from the Olympic site. So much of it has been closed off, the lake has been drained and the wildlife has been driven off. A lot of the Olympics is doing the opposite of what it says it’s doing.


SM: The London Olympics is claiming to be a more sustainable and legacy driven than previous games.

IS: It only seems to me to be sustainable by the permission of an enormous development. If Westfield was not there the whole thing collapses. It’s not self sustaining, it’s sustaining by the patronage of a commercial entity that you will have to give very special permissions to. 

SM: Sustainability is also such a word that will have to be scrutinised alongside with successful. Is it commercially or socially successful for example.

IS: You can never tell if it’s going to be socially or humanly successful until that happens. If you look back at other examples it has not been born out, the Millennium Dome in terms of financing was a disaster, it was a structure created that was supposed to regenerate this piece of land but it did not work and the thing itself had not content, so you end up spending millions and millions of pounds for essentially an empty tent until it’s taken over by a completely commercial entity. An American right wing fundamentalist millionaire opens it up as a showbiz hub, which inside feels really like any other mall with coffee outlets and the usual global franchises scattered around and a venue for rock events. This has all happened with enormous amounts of public money. The original remit was that there would be no car parking there, you would have to come by public transport, but once it that was taken over by this entity all that became car parks. That is a kind of scale model exactly of what is happening here (Stratford) and there is a certain element of housing, but it feels like an absolute island in the middle of nowhere because you can’t get around the fact that the only crossing of the river is through the Blackwall Tunnel so there is traffic pouring out, almost to the point of breakdown every single day. Then you put this thing right next to it, pouring more people in. If you wanted to sustain or develop the area they would have to build a bridge across Beckton, but they never did.

Already for the Olympics you will have to close down roads and persuade people not to come to work in London, universities (London University) are going to be given to athletes. All of these things happen that are socially destructive, theoretically for a short period of time but I think for a much longer period of time. 

SM: The Olympics has since the 1970’s been a tool of regeneration. Wouter Vanstiphout wrote in his article Back to Normal:

“...urban politics and hence planning and urban design are too often treating the city with ulterior motives, instead of actually working for the city itself. The city has become a tool to achieve goals, political, cultural, economic or even environmental. Treating the city in this way means that we are constantly passing judgement on what the city should be, and who should be there, and what they should be doing, instead of trying to understand what the city actually is, who really lives there and what they  are doing. This produces a dangerous process of idealisation, denying whole areas, whole groups their place in the urban community, because they do not fit the picture”

Do you feel that this is the type of regeneration that is happening in Stratford?

IS: That seems very accurate to what happened in this area, because that whole Lower Lea Valley and Hackney Wick area was exactly that, it was a zone whereby all the slightly undefined or anarchic or libertarian groups settled. There were a lot of people living on boats on the river, who now have been put under pressure to pay and to move and to become more formally adjusted to the city. There were travellers who were actually often living under motorway bridges and scavenging for scrap metal out of the river and keeping the river clean by doing so. And there were people who just wanted to form communities that were living in small tower blocks there much cheaper because they were way off the scene and those have been pulled down and destroyed. All of these arbitrary and random communities who grew up in an edge-land have been pushed away for a much tidier narrative that is imposed from above. It’s very theoretical, and can never born out in actual practise, because you can’t manoeuvre huge tranches of people in this area just because you have got the area right for them to do it. The housing is often too expensive, and the public housing element is often the worst flats that no one would want to live in because they are in the middle of the road.

The organic communities that have evolved and been developed for a very long time have been scattered and destroyed. Something like the Manor Garden allotments which was a big patch of allotments on difficult land that had been reclaimed and built up over many years, it also formed a community of all sorts of different cultural backgrounds who managed to get along together because they shared a common interest in gardening and the whole thing was just bulldozed aside for a future theoretical idea of building up a community exactly like the one you had. It grew up of its own steam not imposed by somebody from above deciding what the community should be. The bottom of it is all commercial, and therefore social engineering backed by commercial and political imperatives which actually destroyed, to me the nature of what a real organic city should be, and it is also a big destruction of the specific differences between the localities which were very strong in the 1970’s. The difference between being in Stratford and Hackney back then was quite considerable, there were different kind of people. By working there you got to know the different communities and people, how each of those areas worked, and this is now destroyed and that is a painful process. I’ve meet people that have been expelled from places where they have known all the pubs, the workplaces and areas to move around and they can’t do it anymore. It’s been like an exclusion, like the agricultural enclosures that happened in the 19th century when suddenly common land disappeared, fences were put up and you could not wander through the areas that you had wandered through all of your life.

SM: It seems like one of the problems with the Olympic regeneration is that it is too grand and trying to achieve too much in a very short period of time.

IS: Yes, but it is also trying to arrive at what is required without really knowing who is going to require it. You cannot have people in Westminster deciding that this piece of ground in East London will require x, y and z, and then commission architects and planners to decide how that is going to work because it’s the opposite of what is an useful reality. 

SM: In The Guardian article ‘London Fields’ you were walking the perimeter of the Olympic Park in the Lea Valley with Robert Macfarlane and at some point you described the area as “the Zone”. Interestingly in Tarkovsky’s Stalker the zone is both depicted as a rural and empty area with ruined buildings but there is also ‘the Room’ where ones deepest and innermost wished can be granted to anyone who steps inside. In my eyes this could be read as a metaphor for the Olympic Zone and Westfield, and for many ‘the Zone’ could be viewed as a nightmare whereas for others ‘the Room’ is equally as terrifying.

IS: My way of reading what is going on, walking from the Olympic Park up the high street to Stratford, all of the official versions were telling you, narrating the story of what you were seeing in that area. I wondered what happened what happened if you went away from the official story and turned right into the other side of it. Going into the other side of it suddenly revealed this amazing area that looked exactly like Tarkovsky’s ‘Zone’. It wasn’t part of the story so it was left to its devices and what happened was there was a big creek where the sewage is coming out and millions of old shopping trolleys were being dumbed in there and they are all now covered in mud and have become organic form and it looked just amazing, like animals. Behind it there was all kinds of industrial wasteland and enormous razor wire fences surrounding the [Joseph] Bazalgette sewage pumping station. You got this fantastically strange and surreal zone just a couple of hundred yards away from all this gleaming new architect designed stuff at the other side of the road.

The Lower Lea Valley was quite important in the second industrial revolution, and the ruins of all that were still there, and to some extent are still there. But now they are also joined by these future ruins of things that have been built without any purpose. At least the industrial buildings emerged with a direct purpose, they were making things that were using the landscape to do that, they were using the fact that you can get down onto the Thames and bring stuff in on boats and all that was working to some purpose. Now you are creating something much more like a set for a movie, which you think that you can predict.

Westfield is another set, but more of a set of a street whereas earlier malls were an enclosed zone. Now they have gone a stage beyond in the architecture and created the illusion of an open street so that you have sky above you to make you feel a little bit better. You’re not really in a street, it’s an entirely artificial construct and with very high security. It only exists because it’s right next to the station which loads of public money is poured into which brings people to come and shop in your mall (Westfield) rather than in the high streets which die off and become dead zones.

SM: Westfield has undoubtedly changed the area and has brought a lot of people to come and visit, but how does this effect Stratford as a borough?

IS: Very badly I think. Essentially, if people are visiting Westfield they are not visiting Stratford. The earlier period when I was working there, one of the reasons people who didn’t live in Stratford came there was because there was the Theatre Royal, one of the best theatres in London putting on more left wing or interesting productions. People would travel to Stratford just for this, but then people also travelled to Stratford because it had a street market and shops that were busy. It was a centre, but more of a centre as a town. Similarly to a country town where people would come in from smaller settlements further east. They didn’t just go to one thing, they might have gone to a number of shops, pubs or cinemas. It was a social entity as a town with everything that goes with that. Gradually that is removed into being just this one big entity which is controllable. When you are in there you would have to obey this particular place, it’s not like wandering up and down the high street and going off at random, they can control where you go and you are watched all the time. 

SM: There is a quote in Ghost Milk from Westfield (Shepherd’s Bush) where there was a sign saying: ‘Botique restaurants, eat anywhere in the world without leaving Westfield.’

IS: There is this idea, like an airport, that you can travel anywhere you want in the world without leaving this street. All the Mexican, French and Italian restaurants right next to each other in this one strip of a shopping mall. This meant that all the small restaurants that existed in town before were loosing there custom. I know for a fact that people who worked in BBC across the road, started to come to Westfield to eat for convenience rather than going to the neighbourhood restaurants which they had gone to before. Now you have got this franchise instead where the food really isn’t as good but it’s just more convenient.

SM: What effect do you think that the regeneration of East London will have after the Olympics are finished, socially and community-wise?

IS: It’s difficult to say because you would just be guessing. What you can see already is that it had a profound effect on demographic. There has been a huge tribe of incomers that have come who are much richer and have changed the culture of certain parts. There is a lot of housing, but it’s mostly generic flats that are being sold at very high prices and has no connections to the nature of what the place used to be. It was either a working area, a place that people came in to because it was relatively cheap or where immigrants from every possible kind of community came. It was a very mixed area and that is kind of changing already into an area that is much more moneyed and related to the city and Docklands. It has become a staging post between the two and most of the new development seems to promote that.

SM: There is a negative aura around the whole Olympics and it has met a lot of criticism.

IS: In the current economic situation, I don’t see how it can work. It seems like a grotesque mistake from first to last, pouring money vast amounts of money onto the opening ceremony and all kinds of amorphous things, only generating enormous wealth for some of the big time promoters. The positive aspects are paradoxically also the negative aspects, because a lot of people have reacted to what is happening, and this has reforged a sense of community and people having to seriously think about where they are and what they want and how much they will have to support their interest as a locality. You have had a large questioning of this mega project that has been imposed on them and if this should happen again I think there is more chance that they would respond to it early on. I don’t see any positives directly emerging from it at all, it has just been loss all the way along. You have lost dozens of local facilities, sport centres etc, to go into the big stadiums which even if it works will not be of much use to the people living in the neighbourhood.

In China for example, the scale and wealth of the country is so immense that you can afford to do one of these projects as a PR-exercise and Brazil, where it is going onto, is an emerging economic power who wants to re brand itself and this is a tool for doing that. But for Greece it was a total disaster, they were economically unstable anyway and were doing the Olympics as a smokescreen for what was happening, it pushed them over the top to mega debt and was definitely one of the elements to create the present crisis which is threatening to bring down the whole Euro’s finances. People are ambiguous about Barcelona, some think it did help to regenerate the city and I heard others say that it destroyed quarters that had a cultural identity over a long period of time and were being destroyed by it.

Getting involved with the Olympics and that people are prepared to pour money into that while at the same time saying that the country is at the stage of economic collapse, jobs are going to be lost, factories are shutting down, hospitals need to close down etc; it’s insanity.

SM: How would you go about regenerating East London, a more careful and sensitive mindset?

IS: Again by locality, and by looking at each particular zone, what the problems are and what is required. You need to work much quieter, subtler and responsive to the actual situations rather than creating one grand, epic sweep that demands all of this in one go. There were little bits and pieces that were happening already that could have been supported that were making things better bit by bit. Instead of this we have had this absolute blanket that has destroyed it for 50 years, you can’t get around that.

You have got the Manor Garden allotments community for example, a very successful community of people who are self regulating, and if they had a bit more support they could have been more of these kind of areas. Areas that you set aside and are let to evolve by their own need. Work with the people already there instead of attacking them.

You would have to take the ideas and by talking to people who are deeply embedded and had a distinct relation in what was there already and help them to promote the vision which they have. You should not deliver a structure on them, it’s the opposite process that I think would be valuable. For example there is an amazing house that American poet Gary Snyder, who lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains, created which he and a lot of other people were going to live. Going there and knowing the landscape very well and getting people to join in they built this house from the wood that was around there and made something that was slightly Japanese and cabin like and also a whole series of other buildings around. A lot of the people working with him were architecture students who then later on became fully qualified architects, and were doing something that they were involved in, one in making and secondly they were responding to a community that was setting itself up by its own choice in a particular place rather than accepting a commission imagining a future community. You can’t imagine a future community, you need to work with the community that is already there and get them to express what they need and work with that. If you evolve a city in that sense, organically, it is a very different process. 

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Iain Sinclair was interviewed by Samuel Michaelsson in his house on Thursday 29th December 2011.

All photos are taken by London born photographer Robin Hayes. See more of his work on his website.