Socialist utopians and the destruction of working-class London - “how they fucked everyfink up!”

G'wan - scarper!

Most of the council officials and modernist architects who destroyed traditional working class communities in London in the decades immediately following the last war, are most likely dead by now. I hope gangs of particularly vicious demons are sticking red-hot pokers up their smug, silly, arrogant bottoms as I write this. If you wish to experience industrial levels of rage, take a look at the first episode of BBC Two's The Secret History of our Streets (available here), whose subject is the destruction wrought on poor old Deptford.

The programme is one of the most poignant, infuriating and heartening sixty minutes of television I’ve ever seen. It’s unashamedly polemical: it couldn’t be less even-handed if it tried. But it’s bloody hard to see how anyone could be fair to the self-satisfied pack of fucking fools who, in the name of progress, destroyed practically everything that gave meaning to the lives of tens of thousands of doughty Cockneys even more effectively than Hitler’s bombs.

There’s a telling sequence from 4’45” onwards where a long-time local shopkeeper steps out the front door of his shop, crosses the road and points out where all his relatives used to live, and what they got up to. Their homes have all been knocked down and replaced by pointless open spaces and dreary blocks of flats - the usual depressing modern urban kipple. I particularly enjoyed the old geezer, straight from Central Casting, who strolls past the camera mid-interview and shouts out: “Tell ‘em the truth, how they fucked everyfink up!”

My God – did they ever! Architects influenced by European modernists were determined to tear down old London, with its slums and open-air markets and chaotic, bustling, twisting streets full of life and jokes and noise and argy-bargy in order to re-engineer it, so that each area would have a defined purpose (?).  

“Pubs, schools and churches are all jumbled up together in a hopeless confusion” the narrator of a propaganda film of the time tells us in a patronising, schoolmasterly tone. “… all these bad things must go, and the sooner the better. You see, the trouble is that London grew up without any plan or order…”

Actually, dickhead, it was the lack of planning that made it such a gloriously lively city in the first place. And who exactly was hopelessly confused? Certainly not the people who lived there. As for planning, nothing could be less orderly or coherent than the mess you and your ilk created.

According to the modern voice-over: “A plan for a future, re-imagined London… [the] chaotic random city is to be removed, earmarked for widespread demolition, and the creation of efficient new tower blocks. Chelsea and Kensington and most of West London are to be left untouched… a vast, Modernist socialist experiment is to be carried out in the working class East and South.”

As with practically every single socialist experiment ever visited on ordinary folk in the name of progress, it turned out to be an inhumae, life-destroying disaster.

"Does your Mum sew, Sir Patrick?"

Town planning guru Sir Patrick Abercrombie and John Forshaw, Chief Architect for the London County Council, appear to have been key players in this monstrous assault on the lower orders. Their motives, of course, were pure: they were simply improving the lives of poor people. I hope they lived long enough to see the TV interview with a Deptford housewife whose family had recently been transplanted to some featureless, God-forsaken suburban dump, who had become so depressed she used to go out and “smash things” to relieve her misery. Pity she never got her hands on Sir Patrick Abercrombie or John Forshaw - it's hard to imagine two people more thoroughly deserving of a punch up the hooter.

One old boy, interviewed (one presumes) in the early '60s by a nice lady reporter is asked what he’ll do if a plan to close Deptford Market goes ahead, “Well, I’ll 'ave to go fievin’, won’t I, mate.” (Fortunately, the deranged plan to rip the beating heart out of the community was defeated - the market survives to this day.)

Deptford Stables, Murray's Alley - how confusing!

Yes, there were slums, and yes, there was genuine poverty and criminality, and, yes, it wasn’t very practical for cars – but, nevertheless, it was a lively community, with a thriving High Street, tons of busy pubs and successful shops, and lots of massively extended families many of whom had been living there for several hundred years. It was a genuine, living, working, breathing, boozing, smoking, brawling, bustling community, seething with life. Now that most of the original Deptfordians have been ethnically cleansed, the place looks ugly and desperate and dying.

So how did well-intentioned people get it so wrong? In one of the key works that kick-started the Libertarian movement in America, The God of the Machine, published in 1943, Isabel Paterson wrote:

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends…

Of course, some of Deptford’s housing deserved to be destroyed and replaced – there were lots of genuine slums in the area. But it was a time of relative plenty – people had “never had it so good” – and most residents were proud of their homes and kept them in good nick: many were using their new-found prosperity to do them up. And very few of them wanted to leave. But the planners were so convinced of the rightness of their cause, so proud of their own enlightened compassion, that they happily lied about the state of housing – for instance, deliberately ignoring reports that whole streets were viable – in order to implement their soul-destroying vision.

This sort of neo-fascist thinking persists to this day. Remember Labour’s half-witted communist bully-boy of a Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott’s determination to bulldoze streets of perfectly redeemable terraced houses in Liverpool in the early Noughties, despite everyone telling him that it would make more social and economic sense to do a bit of refurbishment instead? Not good enough, obviously - these self-important wankers demand a legacy.

My reaction to The Secret History of Our Streets was probably magnified by having just read the excellent Building London: The Making of a Modern Metropolis by Bruce Marshall, which is stuffed with poignant photographs of London then and now, including several of Deptford. 

I can’t recommend the book highly enough – or the TV series, which represents genuine landmark television. The Deptford episode is being re-broadcast on BBC Two tonight at 11.20pm, and the next episode, Camberwell Grove, which looks at the fate of one street that managed to escape the bureaucratic blitz, is being shown at 9pm on BBC Two tomorrow (details here).