TWO FIRES, pt. 1
Harry Brown had it good
i.m. the 72+
Two art pieces, two fires.
Art piece one: I’ve been teaching Will Montgomery’s sound piece Heygate, recorded on the now-demolished housing estate in Elephant and Castle. Will writes that his intent is “to offer, through the endless plasticity of sound, a distant echo of the otherworldly potential encoded in some 20th-century social housing.” Since technically the sound vibrations we hear come from the buildings, it’s almost as if Will has made a sonic cast of the place, a fossilised skeleton left after the soft parts of their inhabited life have decayed.
Art piece two: Also recorded on the Heygate estate is Harry Brown, a 2009 vigilante film where Michael Caine exacts revenge on behalf of elderly British white people by going apeshit on hooded teenagers and lumpenproles, guaranteed to please any gammon who has ever posted ‘send in the army’ in the comments. “Harry is then seen walking towards the underpass, which is now quiet and gang-free.” The film somewhat bizarrely anticipates the “urban regeneration” of the estate, albeit directly through social cleansing / murder. We expect these processes to be indirect, except that they are not — but more on that in a moment.
Fire one: Nothing could be more emblematic of the decline of British social housing in the 21st century than Grenfell Tower. If anyone remembers the Andrew O‘Hagan article, he more or less claims local residents overreacted to the mass death of their neighbors (yes really). I believe this was his attempt to defend social housing in its contemporary neoliberal incarnation as the council and TMO. It certainly wasn’t only their fault: cladding manufacturers knew their product was the equivalent of soaking the walls in petrol. The people who died came from nearly 20 different countries, but, The Guardian wrote, “There were few white-collar workers among the victims and only seven white Britons.” Foreshadowing?
Fire two: In the riots last summer multiple people started fires trying to burn down Holiday Inn Express hotels in Rotherham and Tamworth which were being used to house asylum seekers. Despite the semiotics of “hotel = nice,” this is a bold sign of decay in the government’s capacity to house anyone properly. It’s not just asylum seekers in hotels. Councils’ lack of social housing stock has led them to pay to put tenants into hotel rooms. They may be there for a while; there are over 1.3 million people on waiting lists for social housing, leading to wait times for a 3-bedroom home of up to 107 years. In the meantime, check out the Feltham Travelodge — I stayed there about seven years ago, and according to reviews it’s still the same (“Avoid floor 5! Looks like being used for social housing. Kids running around until 1am and then a domestic from 6am”).
The brutalist housing estate as a symbol of immiseration is badly out of date. We’ve now reached hyper-immiseration, where the dogshit that is having to live full time in a Holiday Inn Express room with your entire family provokes ressentiment, not only rage but envy (putting them up in hotels?) among the would-be Harry Browns of the world.