The new public space: how Britons have reclaimed the streets

This article titled “The new public space: how Britons have reclaimed the streets” was written by Andy Beckett, for The Guardian on Friday 20th August 2010 19.00 UTC

Last month, on one of the rare hot mornings of the school holidays, I risked going out with my small children for the day without making a plan first. We walked, slightly blinded and grumbling, through a parched, high-summer east London. After 15 minutes, approaching a particularly infernal road junction, I remembered I had read about a new park nearby. We found the entrance between a building site and a battered old wall, and stepped inside.

The traffic noise receded; immediately in front of us was a broad wooden deck with tables, a roof, and a huge blackboard covered in children’s chalk drawings. Beyond the deck stood young trees and flowerbeds in hopeful rows. An elderly orthodox Jewish man was inspecting the plants, while at the tables some twentysomethings were chatting and laptopping. After one had offered my children some chalk, I asked him how the park had come about. “Oh, this bit of land is owned by Hackney council,” he said, pointing at the deck, “and that bit”– he indicated the flowerbeds – “belongs to the shopping centre around the corner. But they’ve never used it.”

In recent years, almost unremarked, a new confidence has crept into how the British use public space. As George Monbiot argued in these pages recently, and as Owen Hatherley shows in his forthcoming book on the built environment created by New Labour – A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain – this is a country ever more dominated by roads, shopping malls and other uncivic private developments. Public space, in much of the media at least, means CCTV, windswept pavements and 24-hour drinking.

Yet, in the crevices the developers have left behind, there is a counter-trend at work. You can see it in the guerrilla gardening movement and the boom in music festivals; in the vogue for temporary “pop-up” shops, restaurants and cinemas in empty urban spaces; in the artists occupying disused high-street stores from Durham to Margate; in the sudden appearance and popularity in London of outdoor ping-pong tables; and in the Edinburgh crowds last summer queueing to see spooky late-night art installations in the city’s usually staid Royal Botanic Garden.

There is a growing appetite for transforming our apparently prosaic, profit-led landscape into something else – more playful, less predictable, even slightly utopian. Walking through some arty inner city areas, unsure what improvised event or amusement you’re going to find round the next corner, can feel like some faint fulfilment of the famous slogan from revolutionary Paris in 1968: “Beneath the pavement, the beach!”

Of course, you can dismiss some of this as a rather boutique, urban phenomenon. But a lot of Britons live in cities, and their enthusiasms – whether for trouser turnups or gastropubs – have a habit of spreading. And the new adventurousness about public space has deep roots. For at least half a century, Britain has been a centre for experiments in land use: city squats in the 60s, rural free festivals in the 70s, raves in the 80s, anti-roads encampments in the 90s. What the American radical writer Hakim Bey calls Temporary Autonomous Zones – short-lived environments full of alternative social possibilities – is something we do well.

These experiments have often been an irritation to the authorities, but they have also subtly shifted official thinking about public places. In the 90s, it felt daring for the anti-car group Reclaim the Streets to block traffic and forcibly pedestrianise London highways. Now there is a traffic-free day on Oxford Street for Christmas shoppers every December. “Reclaim the streets with pedestrian power,” urged the listings website Viewlondon last year.

Official attitudes to edgy arts events in public spaces have loosened up, too. In 1976 the confrontational rock band Throbbing Gristle performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and were infamously denounced as “wreckers of civilisation” by the Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn. In 2007, they performed in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall – one of the showpieces of the new, almost anything goes urbanism – and were sponsored by the Swiss bank UBS.

The frequent involvement of commerce and officialdom in such happenings may leave counterculture veterans suspicious. And in a way, they would be right to be. An art exhibition in an empty building, say, is more often a prelude to development than a statement of opposition to it. Property firms have learned the big lesson of gentrification: where artists go, estate agents follow.

Nor can local councils necessarily be relied on to remain enlightened about public space. Their budgets are about to be slashed, and when the good times return, selling off spare land to developers may be more appealing than letting artists test their ideas on it. Directly across the road from the little park I went to with my children, a fat tower of recently completed flats already looms.

Yet my hunch is that how many Britons treat public space has changed for good. We have a limited amount of countryside and indifferent weather, so there is only so much mileage in our natural sublime. It is in the built environment that much of our potential lies. And one based on driving and shopping, besides being environmentally disastrous, will always be a bit too boring to keep us all occupied.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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