yuppies will move

dontasknothing.com

Leon Wansleben has
just completed an Msc
in Sociology at the
London School of Economics

Small Change and Big Profits
Living in Deptford's Postcolonial Ruins

By Leon Jesse Wansleben
(Edited only a bit by, the editor)

Amongst the issues facing artists in Deptford - making art, making money, making tea for the kids - is the threat of being turfed out of your grubby-but-lovely rundown studio block so that some rich developer can turn it into luxury apartments. Or so I understand from people like Andrew Carmichael (Creative Lewisham Agency), Bill Elson (Creekside Forum) and Patrick Semple (Artist). It's called 'gentrification' and has nothing to do with installing urinals (RMutt or otherwise).

In her book Cultures of Cities (1993), Sharon Zukin detected this phenomenon in New York: "Artists themselves have become a cultural means of framing space (…) Their presence - in studios, lofts, and galleries - puts a neighbourhood on the road to gentrification". Similarly, Charles Laundry, (who also chaired the Lewisham Culture and Urban Development Commission), observes in London an inner urban ring, enclosing neighbourhoods like Camden, Chiswick, Islington and Deptford that has "historically proved vital for London as it provides the breathing and experimentation zone...This fringe is now filling up, and there is pressure to move further out."

First indications for this pressure are construction sites at the east of Deptford Creek (Norman's Road), new buildings at Deptford Bridge, plans for a Creekside Village and a planning-proposal for the large Convoy's Wharf area (which still must be approved by the Mayor of London). The direction of Deptford's future development seems to be clear: The yuppies will move in, the artists will leave; it's just a matter of time.

This clarity, in my view, is an illusion. Space is something more complex than can be captured in representations like urban development strategies. In the following description I want to unfold this complexity. I argue that an understanding of Deptford as a lived space gives insights into its creative potential.

The complexity of space is highlighted by the philosopher Henri Lefebvre. In his book The Production of Space (1994), he writes: "Vis-à-vis lived experience, space is neither a mere frame, after the fashion of the frame of a painting, nor a form or container of a virtually neutral kind; designed simply to contain whatever is poured into it. Space is social morphology". Thus, space cannot be separated from the social constellations, sensualities and courses of life that happen 'in' it.
The way we dwell among and with the things and people that surround us, is the space itself. This lived space is revealed for example in the piece (right) from a student at Goldsmiths describing a scene at New Cross Station.

Since lived spaces are always related to specific, complex situations of life, it is difficult to speak about them in general terms. As a sociologist, I assume that such spatialities of life are nevertheless bound up with describable socio-material constellations. I conceptualise such constellations as Deptford's postcolonial ruins.

My point of departure is the area's imperial glory and later decay. Due to its riverside position, Deptford was the site from where Sir Francis Drake started his epic journeys, where the Royal Dockyard was established in 1513 and The East-India Company had its headquarters in 1601. With industrialization, some of the wharfs closed but the warehouses continued as the shop floors of the Empire. The identity and pride of 'Dirty Deptford's' working class becomes evident in a comment by MP Sir Leslie Plummer made in 1962: "We launched ships and brought an empire to Elizabeth I".

After the Second World War, though, "the economic and social order that owed its origin to the riverside industries and dockland activity started to crumble", as Les Back mentions in his book New Ethnicities and Urban Culture. Racisms and multiculture in young lifes (1996). Deptford experienced a process of deindustrialisation, making people, their skills and knowledge, as well as their workplaces redundant and useless. This process can be called socio-material ruination - in the name of economic progress, new spaces, futures and lives are constantly constructed, while what has been rejected and left behind still persists but loses its original meaning.

Socially, this situation of being left behind is reflected in the area's high unemployment and its multi-ethnicity. And this multi-ethnicisation is interesting. As the local historian Jess Steele writes: "Just as the jobs that were available to black people were those not wanted by white people, so the areas in which black people worked and lived tended to be those that white people were already moving away from". There is in a sense a re-use of the space by families, for example from the Caribbean, for whom it was either more useful or more expedient.

In the 1970s, tensions between those indigenous folk 'left behind' from the previous industrial framing of the space and those new-comers putting it to good use became strongly racialised, giving rise to events such as the National Front demonstration on New Cross Road in August 1977. But these tensions owe more of course to the process of post-colonial ruination than they do to any sensible racial differences - a witness in fact to the emotive power of the lived space. And this state of living in ruins, 'in the midst of the incomprehensible', is still evident. It is highlighted in the many social and material 'scars' in Deptford's postcolonial landscape: drug-addicts, broken windows of local shops, ruined houses, waste-sites.

The question, then, is: How does one live in postcolonial ruins?
And the answer, I believe, is here in Deptford and perhaps always has been. In the days of the wharves and the ship-builders the waterline was crowded with chip-gatherers, collecting off-cuts of wood and reselling them as firewood or suchlike. There were the mudlarks, boys collecting anything useable from the riverbed and reintroducing it through Deptford's rag-and-bone trade, still evident in the market on Douglas Street.
On Creekside, the APT Gallery occupies a building that was originally built as a rag-picker's warehouse, on the site of an ancient slaughter-house - literally from rags and bones into art. And on New Cross Road, 'Rubbish and Nasty' and 'Prangsta', have turned recycling into the height of chic. The principle remains the same: Those living in the midst of waste find creative ways of re-fabricating abandoned material so that it can be re-introduced into economic circulation.

However, for the cultural critic Walter Benjamin the ragpicker is more than just an trader; indeed, he is a poet. By concerning himself for all those lifes and things which society disregards, he becomes aware of the silent mourning for the world. This mourning, an untranslatable sadness for the passing of time, cannot simply be put into words. Rather, it must be given space in exactly this state of untranslatability and tension. The poetic ragpicker opens up this space through artworks like the ones by Patrick Semple. Here, the world appears in collages of unresolved dialectics, through enigmas such as a child's shoe sprouting bird's wings or a knife with a feather-blade.

But Deptford produces poetic ragpickers, so out of the ruins climb heroes. Heroes not necessarily as famous as the bands Dire Straits or the Athletes who used to rehearse in a basement on Deptford High Street, more, those people who, "despite of everything" provide spaces of community and hope. They are the organisers of clubs, venues, festivals which re-engage the community. Music, as Paul Gilroy describes in Small Acts (2005), can be a powerful cultural form for those who live in fragmented, postcolonial landscapes. Here, where consensus and authority fail, music allows a congregation and venues like The Albany act as a cultural church.

In contrast to what the discourse on 'Creative Cities' often suggests - that creative industries can be imported to deprived areas as instruments of change - creativity emerges exactly at those places where people concern themselves with existential questions like: how to live and feel fulfilled in ways that are not simply confined to consumerism or careerism. In Deptford's postcolonial ruins, such existential challenges are highlighted. And they are always confronted in the here-and-now, in one's lived space.

What then of Deptford's Future?
Are all the old spaces to be razed and replaced by new ones or are we to reinhabit? What is there worth keeping? If one looks at Creekside for example, there is precious little that will win an architectural award or a heritage listing, but it is vital. And it is vital that this vitality is recognised. While Deptford High Street may have a preservation order on it, what of the people who occupy it? Will it inevitably become Deptford Village, awash with city pads, cute conversions and fine art galleries? And is it inevitable that the artists will move out of their grubby-but-lovely studios into the next 'urban creative ring' defined by the sociologists, only to be bought out once again by the next set of developers? Perhaps.

But whilst there will always be people mourning change there will also be people making change. Rather than opposing change might we not see in the promise of a 'gentrified' Deptford all the ongoing banalities and creativities of life? Like the rag-picker who re-animates the discarded we should perhaps seek to re-animate Change in our terms. In other words, Make it Real - accept its implications, influence it, make it livable. Change is a creative opportunity.

Rooves over their heads, on Creekside

From an unrecorded student show at Goldsmith's 2007.
(Apologies if it's you, please let DnA know and we'll put it right)

The theatre in The Albany Centre, Douglas Way, Deptford