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As the last Woolworths closes, and as the last cut-price CD and cheap plastic toy leave its grey metal shelves, this may not be an obvious time to look on the bright side. And as Marks & Spencer closes 27 stores, and Next considers a sales drop of "only" seven per cent a triumph, it might seem eccentric to proclaim an opportunity for the future development of London.
Yet a bright side there is. The shrinkage of high street shopping - probably, thanks to the internet, never to return in the same way - brings back something London has recently lacked, and once had in abundance and to its great benefit. This is what could be called slack space: spare, hard-to-let property that allows creative and ingenious people to experiment and set up new businesses. It is the fallow land of a city, allowing it to renew itself.
In the Seventies London had slack space many times the area of all the lost Woolies put together, and it generated cultural capital that has fuelled the city for a generation. Then it was created by the collapse of the docks and the receding of industry, leaving warehouses, factories, workshops and power stations with no obvious use or future.
The first colonisers were typically artists and students, people with no money but a wish to live and work in the city, and a willingness - a desire, even - to tolerate discomfort. They took pleasure from freezing in vast, impossible-to-heat spaces, from the picturesque stories they could tell of struggles with vermin and damp, or conducting their sex lives in the shared, open floors of warehouses. They got a frisson from the danger and frontier spirit of it all, and they had a freedom from paying high rents which allowed them to experiment.
By the Eighties the appeal of warehouse living had spread, and building society ads started featuring laid-back yuppies in their daring ex-industrial pads. In the recession of the early Nineties - another time of opportunity - "loft living" was invented as a commercial concept. A new kind of home, and one that made the idea of living in cities desirable, had been invented. In the process whole areas, such as Clerkenwell, Butler's Wharf and Wapping, were completely changed.
Slack space enabled design businesses, production companies and publishers to start up. Out of one small, rickety, rat-infested slum in Marylebone, shored by wooden props and now lost beneath the back part of a Waitrose, emerged the magazine Blueprint, the influential 9H Gallery, two design companies and David Chipperfield Architects, which is now one of the most celebrated British practices, employing 180 people.
At a larger scale, slack space gave us the Roundhouse, a structure designed for housing steam engines which became a centre of cultural energy. Camden Market was created from land vacated by the decline of canal-side industry. Covent Garden and more recently the foodie haven of Borough Market were formed out of obsolete wholesale markets. The rip-roaring crowd-puller of Tate Modern was hollowed out of an old power station, as was the smaller but more charming Wapping Project.
Abandoned structures in the docks created settings for film-makers from Derek Jarman to Stanley Kubrick to Cubby Broccoli. The multi-million pound business known as BritArt was launched in the Freeze exhibition of 1988, in a former building of the Port of London Authority in Surrey Docks. At the largest scale of all, the empty land of the Isle of Dogs made possible the building of Canary Wharf with its dramatic effect on the East-West balance of the city.
Derelict and redundant space has, in other words, created places and activities that define what modern London is, as well as earning billions of pounds. They were essential to both its imaginative and its financial economies. Camden, Covent Garden and Borough have long been darlings of the tourist business and are perennial subjects of in-flight magazine articles. A city without the Roundhouse or Tate Modern would have been an emptier place.
The phenomenon is not unique to London. The lofts of New York spawned Andy Warhol's Factory, among other things, and the thriving 798 Art District of Beijing occupies a former weapons factory. The restaurant/gallery/flat hollowed out of a warehouse/factory became a modern cliché. London, with more redundancy, did well, while tidier, more compact cities like Paris found it harder to renew themselves.
Over the past few years slack space almost disappeared in London. There was no such thing as an overlooked building, and as in Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic, we all knew the price of property but not its value. Everything was bought up, commercialised, squeezed for maximum return. The lament until very recently was not about losing retail but about too much of it taking over the city.
Meanwhile, Berlin, a city built too grandly for its use, an oversized suit of a place whose inhabitants have never quite grown into it, started rising as a cultural centre. It had plenty of left-over spaces and cheap rents to be exploited. I know one young group of artists and architects who found it economic to live in Berlin and shuttle via budget airlines between there and here, working in both cities.
The sites that will be released by the death of Woolworths and the decline of other shops will not be on the same scale as the Docklands, but they will still loosen up a city that was becoming horribly constipated. It is also hard to see what you would do with the neutral, largely windowless expanse of an old store but then old warehouses would have looked equally daunting in the Seventies. Ingenuity will find a way.
One might even hope that the perennial, unsolvable headache of Oxford Street might sort itself out. Monorails, or diverting all buses through streets to the north, are proposed from time to time to relieve its congestion but if there is simply less shopping there, the problem might go away. Slackness can make cities more liveable.
I realise that none of this is much comfort to those who have lost their jobs in retail, any more than ex-dockers could benefit from bohemians having wild parties in their former places of work. The ecology of slack space, from nurturing artists to generating businesses to creating jobs, takes time, decades in fact. But it will happen and, eventually, London will be better for it.
Reader views (2)
This is all very true.
I noticed a similar effect in Islington in the early nineties. Recession hit, chains closed and empty shops abounded. Within two to three years most had been filled by shops run by locals with ideas. Humbled landlords would rather take lower rents than nothing and many a fine business was kicked off. Some thrived, others disappeared under competiton from the chains and estate agents that moved back in as the next boom got going. Still, the area was richer and more diverse than before.
Saw a similar thing in Marylebone High Street too. Though there the major landowner there has had the rare good sense to encourage small, individual businesses and ensure a good balance bewteen these and the chains.
- Robert, London, England, 01/02/2009 17:51
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A superb piece of journalism displaying deep insight, understanding and imagination as well as being very interesting!
Well Done Sir!!
- Andi-M, London, England Innit!, 10/01/2009 02:14
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