Revisiting Hanworth's Largest Outdoor Street Art Gallery 2020

It may not be the lanes of Melbourne or the east end of London, but I keep returning to the stunning work being produced in this outdoor space beside a crematorium in south west London.

Most appealing to me is the large number of artists incorporating characters into their work.

Some are far more reminiscent of cartoons than "traditional" graphotism with its elaborate sense of design.

 

Hanworth's largest outdoor (unofficial) Street Art Gallery

An unofficial gallery of street art can be found in a derelict train yard. The site itself has been re-colonized by wilderness over the years, and recently has found itself slowly being transformed into an official Nature Reserve between Pevensey Road, Hanworth and South West Middlesex Crematorium.

Here are a few examples of the works on display by local artists. As is traditional, new works are painted over old. Presently you will find a nice mix of figurative and typographic. I'm afraid I do not know any of the artists whose work is presently on display, as I only became aware of the unofficial outdoor gallery when first attempting to walk the full Crane Valley, and I would caution anyone seeking to view the art in person to be careful as there is a lot of broken glass on the ground. Presumably some kind of interactive conceptual piece using found objects...

Strangely like home

Whenever Jane and I visit the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda, I always feel at home. My brother-in-law lives in this area, and it is just down the road from Elwood where he and Jane grew up. I don't know if he was consciously looking to get back to his roots, but strangely it is my own roots in Ladbroke Grove that St Kilda reminds me of the most.

There are other elements that contribute to this beyond the presence of family. The architecture is more low-rise, but it is rooted in the same late-Victorian period. The local train service through this part of Melbourne is an overground service, just like the kind that runs through the part of west London where I spent my childhood.
This simple confluence of elements - of nineteenth century architecture and an overground train network - always makes this place feel familiar to me when stepping off the train at Balaclava station. There is also graffiti art everywhere, not unlike the kind I used to see around the Westway and Portobello Road areas (much of Melbourne and its suburbs are covered in graffiti, mostly by fairly skilled hands), and this once working class area has been subject to the same process of gentrification as I have seen in London. How many people around the world, I wonder, if you say "Notting Hill" to them immediately think of such bourgeois icons as Hugh Grant or David Cameron? The image of the area constructed over the last two decades does not describe the multicultural area I knew as a child, nor the working class slum known by a colleague of my dad who knew the area in the 1950s.

In many ways this is a description of the way random similarities can evoke a similar feel in otherwise disparate regions. There are obvious differences between Notting Hill and St Kilda, not least the latter's close proximity to the beach, the presence of the Melbourne tram network, a free community bus, backpackers hostels, ice addicts stumbling around the streets instead of winos, and the fact that one of the largest local communities is not Afro-Caribbean but Jewish. These are subtle differences, but they don't alter the curious manner in which, perhaps more than any other part of Australia I have seen so far, this area always feels to me the most strangely like home.
Why should this be? Why should I feel such familiarity for somewhere on the other side of the world?
It could be tied up to the way communities help shape places. The impressive new high rise architecture you find along the Yarra River likewise has a feel to me not unlike modern developments along the Thames here in London, or indeed those in cities like Dubai and Singapore. The feel of these landscapes understandably stems from their functionality, being designed for business and commerce rather than for people to live in, so naturally it is harder for individuals to put their own unique stamp on the character of an area.
The majesty of the new global riverside architecture is for me offset by a certain coldness, an aloofness which could be related to this very aspect of their nature. They are a spectacle, designed to draw people in and help them forget the mundane and messy landscapes of their ordinary lives and neighbourhoods, whilst forgetting that there is a beauty to the mundane and messy, and the landscapes that people make their own, etched with the lines of many daily struggles, over many years and lifetimes. (This is not to say that modern developments cannot be appropriated by ordinary people, as the skaters mecca along London's Southbank proves.)

What I experience in St Kilda is as much a feeling as a visual perception, tied up with my memories of the landscape of my childhood, which may be entirely separate from the reality of what that landscape has become, or is becoming. It is a nostalgia so subtle yet so specific that it can be evoked by the random assembly of elements in a city on the other side of the world.

The independent micro state of Sweetstopia 2015

This is a very well put together little 16 minute documentary by the Drift Report about last years' occupation of the Sweets Way Estate in Barnet, north London. Sweets Way has been one of the many frontlines in the gentrification of London, which has been transforming the city from a place where ordinary people live into a mere investment opportunity for the global super rich.

The Sweets Way occupation lasted many months, as vulnerable social tenants held out against eviction by private developer Annington Homes, supported by young and seasoned housing and land rights activists. As time went by the site developed into "Sweetstopia", which had aspirations to be an independent micro state, a desire rooted in contemporary history with its echoes of Frestonia (the community that occupied Freston Road in west London back in the late 1970s).

Its a good short film, well worth a watch, as it features some beautiful and inspiring murals, along with a brief explanation of practical DIY permaculture. 

In the autumn of 2015 bailiffs finally succeeded in evicting the last tenants and occupiers (including a disabled father), and the area has become a fenced off ghost town. It is inspiring how long they held out, and how much support they received. I think some supporters may have moved on to running the nearby Dollis Valley Resist Community Centre.

London...where resistance is fertile!

Radical History: The (Occupied) Cambridge Arms Pub

There used to be a pub at 42 Cambridge Road in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey (overlooking the Cambridge Estate) which ceased trading sometime around the millennium. It was called, imaginatively, The Cambridge Arms. All you'll find there now are a small block of modern, fairly unremarkable looking flats.

However, in its fallow period, which probably would have been in about 2004 or so, the pub was squatted, the ground floor painted red with the words "BUY SECOND HAND" painted in bold white letters across the front.

Although I never met any of the residents, I understood the message, and this may have been what made me decide to take a photo while passing by one day.

The image above is an embellished rendition made using some image manipulation software like Photoshop. I have included it here to create a semi-permanent record of a highly transitory and easily overlooked period in history. If anyone passing by this blog has any memories of the building as a pub, or even as a squat, you are welcome to share them below.

Commoning and Commons Rising

"Gentrification" is a term used to describe the process whereby a previously low rent neighbourhood sees a shift in the core demographics of its population, usually driven by a combination of factors, including increasing numbers of affluent, middle class professionals moving to the area, pushing up rents and providing the economic basis for a more consumer-driven local economy. Other factors usually play a part as well however, not least among them may be decisions made by local councils to make planning decisions which deliberately allocate more land for the construction of luxury flats and none for genuinely affordable, social housing. The result of this process is what many people have described as a kind of 'social cleansing' in which indigenous members of the community find that they can no longer afford to live in the area and are eventually forced to move away.
This process is simply the end result of what happens when individuals, businesses, and government, simply accept the individualistic, acquisitive nature of capitalism as a given. It isn't, of course, and the predominance of this way of life hasn't stopped committed groups of people coming together to build alternatives. It simply makes it a bit harder.

There's always alternatives, often difficult but always worthwhile

What are the alternatives though? I have always been keen on searching out practical examples of living alternatives, in the hope that I may find a kind of reverse process, a "de-gentrification," an attempt (to borrow an old legalistic term) to un-enclose the enclosures of an increasingly privatised world, a world of individuals and nuclear families, competing against each other in increasingly gated off communities filled with surveillance cameras and private security guards.
Sometimes groups of people band together to live communally, not so much like a student residence, but like an extended family, sharing meals and resources, and offering practical and emotional support to one another. But if you are still paying rent to a private landlord you remain subject to rent rises and lack control over how you maintain your own property, so some people form housing cooperatives, becoming their own landlords. The Sanford Housing Co-op in New Cross, south east London is a good example of a large project which has been around since the 1970s. Of course, unless you have a large sum of capital to begin with, you will likely still have to deal with banks and building societies though.

Other approaches are more radical still. Squatting dis-used land is an old practice which challenges one of the very fundamental assumptions of capitalist life - the nature of private property. It is a   practice that has made possible community centres like the Bonnington Cafe in London's Vauxhall, played a significant role in protest movements, and led to the creation of entirely off-grid communities like the threatened Runnymede Eco Village in Surrey.
Of course, living together in a shared house with shared resources, whether by forming a housing cooperative or by squatting it, is really only one manifestation of a broader trend which has had many different names over the years, but which increasing numbers of people now choose to call "commoning" - a handy term which describes the process of either reclaiming the old commons, or creating new forms. 

The most effective approach seems to be to build stronger, more resilient communities, capable of protecting their own interests. A good example may be the way residents of the villages to the north of Heathrow airport have worked together to oppose a third runway, which would have meant the destruction of their homes and communities. The key to their success lay in the very broad-based nature of the campaign. While the locals fought for their homes, environmental activists set up community protection camps in the area to create hubs for the local community whilst highlighting the negative consequences for the climate of expanding the airport. The first of these was the Camp for Climate Action, soon followed by Grow Heathrow, which remains to this day. Even the inhabitants of neighbouring wealthier boroughs opposed the expansion on the grounds of increased noise pollution.

During May, following the general election result which returned the Tories to power with a slim majority (a party seemingly committed to destroying all alternatives), I found it quite rejuvenating to be able to pay a visit to the community of my colleague Earthian in the east end of London, just prior to his setting out on the latest leg of his peace pilgrimage, advocating for world peace and a world without borders. Three months into their latest occupation of a surprisingly clean and modern former primary school, the community were having an open day with talks and music, including one given by a speaker from the group Commons Rising, which has helped clarify and give structure to a wide range of different projects I had discovered over the last few years, and many I had not.

So what is the commons and commoning?

Put briefly, the commons (or 'commoning') is a term we can apply to anything that involves ordinary people coming together to create something which serves a communal need, rather than someone's personal profit. In the commons, the only rules are those that ensure everyone profits. But rather than being a form of charity (where the 'haves' give to the 'have-nots' and thereby uphold an essentially unequal relationship) in order to build a true commons, our basis must ideally come from a feeling of equality and solidarity, of shared struggle and shared interests.

Manifestations of commoning does not even need to exist in physical space, like a housing co-op or community cafe. Online projects like Wikipedia and the Internet itself are good examples of the commons taking other forms.

For more information, check out: 

http://commonsrising.ning.com/

Amended: June 28th 2015

There is hope for the homeless of London...just not in Parliament

A brief overview of some of the positive things happening in London recently.

It has been an inspiring sight to see such an upsurge of activity around the issues of housing and homelessness in the UK over the last few months. For the time being, most of this work has been happening entirely at a grassroots level, and (so far) only in London. This makes sense, as London is by far the most expensive place to live in the country, and is rapidly undergoing a process of being transformed into little more than a playground for the super rich, a process our elected representatives seem all too happy to facilitate. It is worth noting that even high ranking members of the Labour party have spoken repeatedly, not about achieving meaningful and sustainable economic justice, but about being “intensely relaxed” about the idea of people becoming filthy rich. No wonder voter turnout is so low!).

To a certain extent this is an inevitable by-product of leaving basic human needs like shelter to the whim of unregulated market forces, something that all of the mainstream parties still accept without question. Naturally most people who own even the smallest bit of property in London don't mind anything that contributes to the hyper-inflation of the property market as long as it makes them “feel richer”, but for a growing number of people on medium-to-low incomes (those who do most of the real jobs) or on little to no income at all (the unemployed, sick, under-employed, especially those trapped in zero hours contracts) this evolution is turning London into a city increasingly difficult for ordinary people to live in.

It was a pleasing surprise therefore when the residents of estates like the New Era Estate in London's east end fought back (and won) against the council's decision to sell off their homes to a private developer. These examples of self-organised working class action have lit a fuse which has sent sparks flying through other communities in the city, inspiring others to get organised and preserve working class homes against the threat of creeping gentrification of poor, ethnically-diverse, working and lower middle class areas.

As I touched upon above, local councils in London, no doubt driven by the prospect of being able to charge higher rates of council tax, have been entirely complicit in this process, happily arranging the sell-off of publicly-owned land to private developers whilst completely ignoring the thousands who languish on council waiting lists. They make small, token concessions to what remains an urgent and growing need by merely requiring that developers provide a handful of 'affordable' homes in any new development of over-priced luxury flats.

We can see how this approach tends to work out in practice if we consider the case of 1 Commercial Street in Aldgate. In a throwback to the old, two-tiered Victorian 'Poor Doors', the developers have created a separate entrance for social housing tenants to use...in an alley around the side of the building near the bins. The wealthier, private tenants and owner occupiers get to use the more luxurious front entrance, complete with chandeliers and a concierge service, without having to suffer the indignity of rubbing shoulders with the proles.

The Aldgate/Whitechapel area has always been a predominantly working class area, with a large, ever-shifting immigrant community and has always had a very vocal and well organised community of libertarian socialists who have formed the backbone of resistance to this particular luxury housing development, organising weekly protests every Thursday night since last summer, in which they block the posh doors with their banners. Sometimes the police turn up to protect the wealthy inhabitants and find themselves forced into the position of having to form a cordone which serves to block the doors anyway.

The problem with pricing ordinary people out of the market is that if you can't afford to pay private rents or to commute from the outskirts of town everyday there is a very real risk, with benefits cuts, that you will simply be forced onto the streets. This is why the parallel upsurge of activity by and for the homeless, which occurred around the holiday season, is so desperately needed. This activity was mostly centred around the actions of grassroots groups formed of primarily homeless people (and some Occupy people too) like the Love Activists, who occupied the empty, former HSBC building in Charing Cross to highlight how many buildings there are in the city sitting empty while homeless people freeze on the streets, subject to increasingly harsh measures like the notorious anti-homeless spikes, designed to discourage rough sleepers (and fortunately removed after a large public outcry).

Following their eviction from the former HSBC building some members of the Love Activists created the Homeless Kitchen London, a form of DIY self help/political action which operated throughout much of January, culminating in the March for the Homeless, and an ongoing occupation of the derelict Aylesbury Estate in south London. Another March for the homeless will be taking place in London on April 15th, whilst occupations by threatened residents like the one at Sweets Way estate in Barnet continue.

With related campaigns to protect the musical culture of Soho from a kind of cultural cleansing, there is clearly a great deal of popular energy among Londoners to fight for our immediate housing needs and protect the unique cultural heritage that has made this city so much more interesting and vibrant a place to live in than deserts of steel and glass like Dubai.

Unfortunately, it remains a depressing fact that, despite there being so much grassroots activity going on against the transformation of London into a vapid and soul-less yuppie playground, and even with a General Election on the horizon, the pressing issues of housing and homelessness in London are nowhere on the party political agenda. This clearly demonstrates how divorced the majority of politicians are from the needs of the people they are supposed to represent, but perhaps also how desperately we need to build new, more genuinely democratic and representative institutions that can protect the interests of ordinary Londoners more than the old trade unions and political parties ever did.

When it comes, it will come from those very people who are beginning to prove that when we organise together we can win important victories for ourselves and our communities, with or without political representation.