Blairism, The Dogs & Working Death: Wendover, Millennium Dome & New Britain (I & II)
Draft Re-edit
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Outside Wendover House, Blair made his first public speech after New Labour’s 1997 landslide election victory. It was the first image of Blair in action, utilising the image of a ‘Broken Britain’ in the background for a set of new ideas about a ‘New Britain’. Blair’s team told the accompanying estate police officer that there might be ‘a few photographers’, it turned out there were about 300. His speech was headline news at lunchtime. Labelled the ‘Hero of the Estate’, his picture in all morning papers. Blair went on to say:
I have chosen this housing estate…for a very simple reason. For 18 years the poorest people have been forgotten by the government…There will be no forgotten people in the Britain I want to build… There are estates where the biggest employer is the drugs industry, where all that is left of the high hopes of the post-war planners is derelict concrete.
Subsequent to his maiden speech occurring w/ Bobby in tow, the Estate was to be a sort of javelin for his New Urbanism project. The re-investment in Britain’s housing stock was to be named in a strange Orwellian fashion: Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders or ‘pathfinder partnerships’ for shorter, more alliterative purposes. It ensured that the Estate was ‘awarded’ under the Government’s New Deal for Communities scheme – ‘a key programme in the Government’s strategy to tackle multiple deprivations in the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country’ around £57 million. To put this amount into perspective, this was some 2268 dwellings, many of which had left at the expense of cost saving methods during the construction. As several Southwark architects noted during the time:
There is little doubt that the public areas are the least successful part of the Development. The lack of finishes and the poor quality of many of the materials provided has provided a very drab environment…This seems almost to have provoked mistreatment and vandalism. The extensive areas of bare concrete, asphalt, and cheap obscured glass, contribute to the overall feeling of low cost Local Authority housing, and it is almost an insult to the many tenants who are proud of their homes…It is essential that adequate financial backing should now be given to put these deficiencies right. Failure to do so will result in the Estate rapidly becoming a slum.
The Aylesbury Estate, being the largest social housing estate at point of finish, replaced a series of rundown areas of terraces, tenements & old works. Its Jespersen system large panels used prefab concrete slabs to implement ‘Streets in the sky’ as massive elevated pedestrian movement systems were created to corridor the dwellings.
Ben Campkin of The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, noting on the internal layout of the Aylesbury at the time:
Walkways linked the Estate’s blocks – ‘route decks’ at second floor level for movement between blocks which included space for shops and other community facilities and ‘local decks’, with play areas, within the blocks. Garaging and traffic movement took place below.
The reason for this track-padded informational deluge is something to do with attempting to talk about the past 45 years of invented failures to ensure that existing social housing dies under the most auspicious urban policies.
Right to Buy, stock transfer and the Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders programme, New Labour’s Respect agenda & consequent ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards anti-social behaviour & other low-level disorder ensured that the squeezing was unremitting. Blair’s new urbanism was nothing short of punitive ground control. In turn, it located new modes of ‘urban renaissance’ & its equitable Urban Task Force. Richard Rodgers, commissioned by the then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott in 1998, to identify the causes of urban decline rendered out a means to both demonise extant urban spaces for the purposes of re-incorporating middle class flight & ensuring the total monopolisation of extant Dockland & works units.
As Rogers noted on the White Paper:
Towards an Urban Renaissance, published three years ago by the Urban Task Force, marked a major shift in thinking and practice in urban policy. The report set out a vision of sustainable regeneration of our towns and cities through making them compact, multi-centred, live/work, socially mixed, well designed and connected, and environmentally sustainable. It put on the agenda the need to upgrade the existing urban fabric, and to use the derelict and brownfield sites in our cities before encroaching on the countryside.
What this has actually meant, headed by Mr Bowellism himself, would seem obvious now. To have more or less help to invent an architectural modality that focused on externalizing the innards of the building so that it looked like a series of ‘stomachs sitting on a plate. Or bowels, connected by bits of bristle’. Circulation externalised or rather the visual language that concept of flow (and the related notions of code and stock). There are material flows of raw matter/utilities such as oil and electricity, the control of the grid, the flow of commodities, marketing and transport, the flow of traffic; the mastery and control of speed. This but for the local ‘community’; lottery funded ‘centres’, Marina developments, plastic art planted in concrete business district, shopping/eating molluscum, entertainment venues, the local community, housing ‘mixed use’ blocks, Gormleyesque bollards, districts branded ‘quarters’.
BioMed Centre identikit
corporate detailing
the quoin metal black bile
& actual slogans around our heads
into a buzzword of tearing.
ON. nothing Londinium vapour
wrenched quiet
to my scrying door plate,
post paralysis hands
drivers vandal-proof lights O
construction workforce, mixed-use
the sugar pill, —the clerical sales,
to Marina developments micro segregation
blood fielding
in treacle-like gloss paint;
plastic art planted in concrete
business district winding down
the Era Two is more optimistic,
its spec boasting holes a ‘Transversal Space’,
The post-Good
remains in a Quango fortified,
stock-brick-clad ground-floor blast walls
scratching the edge forevermore
In many senses, Blairism & its concomitant ‘Urban Renaissance paper’ was written as valedictory neoliberal urban policy to rectify the ‘mistakes of the 1960s’ implementing nothing short of a paranoid, militaristic blend of urban design with the new affliction of carving out deviancy permanently from the stock-brick-clad ground-floor blast walls (Anti-Social Behaviour Order). Slowly but surely these social ailments will be eked out leaving just a wealthy urban core.
‘The island is a state of mind’, or the Expansion of the Visitor Economy. The Millennium Dome, as I recall smaller and smaller snippets, was terrifying, it was also very realistically my first expressive sense of being a Child of Blair. I am going to talk about it in the most fragmentary way I can recall. I was 6/7 again. Child of Blair. It was terrifying, then & to some extent is exciting now (terrifying & exciting I now know are cousins of sorts). It represents the premature cultural implosion of Blair’s entire ideogram.
His soon corrupted (realface) dropping to the pulpit floor; bungling his New Britain erected from the aggregate contributions of the poor through the National Lottery. His marquee (literally) made of spin, remains a massive pantheon to the human ego, the ‘Ozymandias of its time.’
The Millennium Commission was the public body, was set up to celebrate the turn of the millennium & of the many commissioners Peter Brooke, Baron Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, Thomas "Robin" Valerian Dixon, 3rd Baron Glentoran, Richard Walter John Montagu Douglas Scott, 10th Duke of Buccleuch and 12th Duke of Queensberry, KT, KBE, CVO, DL, FSA, FRSE, FRSGS. The whole lead up to the Dome was clattered with dismissals, resignations and general managerial disarray.
A large white marquee with twelve 100-metre-high (330 ft) yellow support towers. Observable from the moon. The architect was Richard Rogers (a joint venture company, McAlpine & Laing). Spot a theme. Land reclamation. The land was previously derelict and contaminated by toxic sludge from East Greenwich Gas Works that operated from 1889 to 1985. The clean-up operation was seen by the then Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine as an investment that would add a large area of useful land to the crowded capital. The by-products of the gas industry; ‘the tar; sulphate of ammonia; the trains; the phenol’.
Increasingly, it appeared that this blighted Greenwich Peninsula was somehow cropping all of its Creative Directors, as one noted; ‘then I was told we could not have foreigners! It got worse, and I left after six months of high-pressure misery, deceit and bungling…Peter Mandelson was moaning the other day that the millennium had left no permanent remains worthy of note, neglecting to add that it was entirely his fault that this was so.’
A triumphalist pomp of New Labour, a polymer tent supported by tensioned cables arranged radially around a dozen 100m masts made of open steelwork subdivided into 14 zones: "Who We Are" (Body, Faith, Mind and Self-Portrait), "What We Do" (Work, Learning, Rest, Play, Talk, Money and Journey) and "Where We Live" (Shared Ground, Living Island and Home Planet). Years of slovenly processing activity by British Gas had left the area irredeemably polluted by carcinogens. Trucks leaving the site had to pass through wheel-washers to cleanse their tyres of contamination. Breathing apparatus was available for contractors.
Blair said the Tent would be on the first page of his second manifesto, later economised. A white elephant at a disused gasworks in Greenwich. Sun, May 1997. The remote location helped minimise the humiliation. A social and environmental disaster of which the state government of Amazonas would be proud. George Monbiot, Guardian, June 1997. Proposals of different levels of reality came and went. We will say to ourselves with pride: this is our Dome, Britain's Dome. And believe me, it will be the envy of the world. Tony Blair, February 1998. Even God doesn't like the Millennium Dome... Daily Mirror, June 1999 when it was hit by lightning.
Peter Mandelson, now an East German Stalinist, both the Prince of Darkness & presider in Chief of Cool Britannia grapheme. The opening night happened, 31 December 1999. Zaha Hadid refused to come unless by limousine. Thousands of VIPs. Newspaper editors and the CEOs and chairs of sponsoring corporations, of which there were hundreds. In the winter cold, at the tube station in Stratford, east London, from where they were to take the train to the dome. “You could blow it up,” said a certain columnist later in the year.
I, though not a columnist nor a PR dissident, experienced the thing as a child. Child of Blair. My notions or ideas, being shrunk to the scuttling experience of the new, as New. It was a bereft spectacular container, attachment to vacuous statements of modernity, hammering focus groups to deliver meaningless platitudes & all with the biting tokenism to regeneration. This was not the decamping venture of Bankside, the former liberties of the Clink and Paris Garden. Bankside Power Station being the true, singular convertible success of that era. Tate Modern. Whatever is said in the gantries of criticism, it remains free to enter; seeing Richter’s CAGE series remains a coveted instance in many other European countries. So amongst the carcinogens; the line of Prime Meridian will be converted as a cultural event. GMT..
This is where the millennium would begin. (Again, a pedant speaks: the millennium actually started on Caroline Island, Kiribati).
With regimental ties for wicks
the Molotov Prince of Darkness Astras speaks:
Moving forward as a beacon to the world,
the richness of the British character.
Ergo. UrCreative. UrCompassionate.
Outward looking.
A triumph of confidence over cynicism,
boldness over blandness
excellence over mediocrity.
One harped, cupola withering blimp
settled at the mouth of the peninsula,
a vanished complex tangles
to dragging strays over shingle
what invented future means
in shining leaden water?
Blair had publicly aligned himself with a vision of Britain as a creative, dynamic country: food and furniture by Terence Conran, buildings by Richard Rogers, art by Damien Hirst, music by Oasis. The dome & its contents would be its expression. Major corporations would sponsor different elements – a process that had started under Heseltine.
New Labour was chum to capital, business was part of one that BIG NATIONAL FAMILY.
Back under Enterprise Culture
its scrying glass extruding deadlands,
the last Council-Operated High-Rise
contains within itself indemnified
& everyone is left on carcinogenic marshes
under what mild oath unrevoked
the Committee members haircut
congealed in Tip-EX
& the Sun dances
just like in the moonlight
O & when that moon is big & bright
it’s a supernatural delight,
when everyone is dancing in the moonlight!
Molotov Astras people sized
& you go down with the building inside
you’re holding the bottle at its neck,
you chuck it hard at the window,
at the base Index Multiple Deprivations,
a regional quota breeds out vapour trails
Public Consultations Hedonic Pricing
Montego Estate, 1997. British Leyland. Rover. Driven by Tony Blair into 10 Downing Street. Listening to Bitter Sweet Symphony by the Verve. Over & Over again. Until Cherrie decides the only salvation is Angels by Robbie Williams. Euan in the back. Aged 13. Now an MBE businessman who runs Multiverse. It provides internships for school leavers. Nine apprenticeship programmes that range from Level 3 (the equivalent of three A-Levels) to Level 6 (the equivalent of a university degree). The company was judged to be "Outstanding" in its most recent (July 2021) inspection by Ofsted.
Inside a skull is a set by Tommy Cooper. Laughing brains with fez’s on. He died in 1984. Surely there is going to be an episode of My Parents are Aliens in the next room. No. Okay. Don’t worry, Quantum Cloud outside by Gormley. The steel sections were arranged using a computer model with a random walk algorithm starting from points on the surface of an enlarged figure based on Gormley's body that forms a residual outline at the centre of the sculpture.
Gormley is Blairism par excellence & it is obvious & clear that this is the case as to be somewhat whimpering in the delivery. Of course he is. From points on the surface of an enlarged figure based on Tony Blair.
Cost £43m, covers 87,000 square metres; less than 20kg per sqm, the lightest building in the world. Spawning the Jubilee line & definitely decontaminating the land. Around 120 tons of benzene and other hydrocarbons was removed from the soil. Following its opening there was a public apology; "management problems".
The faith zone, possibly the most quintessential of the various ‘management problems’ suffered in large part due to being one of many stratigraphic groups used to compose it. The Lambeth Group, a commission of clerics. Curving plasterboard wall indented with crosses, each one carrying a TV screen in its centre. But one element I do remember, was the animatronic pubic lice that scaled the inside of the dome. Supposedly, during a meeting between Hirst & Mandelson, he remarked that body zone louse was his favourite. He loved how it moves on its metallic joist. It's allure being that is worked. In the catalogue it was identified only as ‘a parasite.’
Some years later when the disassembly of parts went to auction, the pricings also appeared. Giant hamster and cheese £3,000. "Time cogs" engraved crystal dish £1,700. Piaggio Vespa scooter, (incomplete) £1,250. Mannequin wearing England football shirt, head in hands £900. A brain, from the body zone £700. Heart from the body zone £1,500. "Time machine" brass-faced clock and two Blackadder paintings £650 The eye from the body zone £500. Front half of a flower power Mini ("no tax or MoT") £450. A snowman costume, hat and scarf £180. A spotted glass floor tile £120. 10 hamster cages £25. "Theo" millennium show costume £20. Oversized metal chair £15. Prices exclude 10% buyers' premium and 17.5% VAT.
& the plastic-clad buildings
of TMO’s Client aspirations
on big sorry reams the stated aims
cantilevered platforms
narrowing logarithmic scales
where you go to grow concrete, disappears
as flashes of your behavioural map discrete
micro-billeted polymers that count as a skin
new entrepreneurials again
but the best picnics are on Agars Plough,
& how could you forget massive gazebos
& Moët out the proverbial bucket!
the tête-à-têtes in the garden
shelters on the grouse moor,
a nice isocost in the eyrie
blood coursed through the night rain opposing
the broadfields beneath them
its private equity in brownfields
to cashflow cowabunga
there are perks in
chains of lead you can feel it
