Head Space Daily Words...

These past few weeks I have been working in Docklands. Every morning I visit a café at Shadwell station and after drinking my coffee I catch the DLR to Crossharbour. I always try and grab a seat in the end carriage closest to the window and watch the train track and its backdrop panorama reveal itself in front of me. When the train stops at Limehouse station, the image framed before my eyes really hits home. In the foreground, poking up amongst the local housing is a typical church spire, from a typical British church, common to every British town or village. To the left of this church, prominently set back in the distance, overseeing the skyline, is a spire of a very different nature, all gleaming glass and metal – The Shard. A sinister, all seeing eye and a symbol of our times.

Religion has diminished. I am not a religious person but appreciate that a church denotes community, a sign of local togetherness. Society has dictated that we all now worship at the temple of wealth and decadence, inequality and disappointment, with the masses living their lives vicariously through X-Factor mockery, overpaid footballers, the brutal escapism of computer games, and the desperation of Black Friday. It seems to me that the important factors, which make society vital, are being lost and that we have no power to reassert it. This is why the victory of the New Era Estate residents over Westbrook Partners, an American Investment firm who were attempting to buy the estate and force out the tenants by raising the rent to extortionate levels, to let the properties at market value, is an absolute victory. Venture capitalism has no morals. It doesn’t care if it makes families homeless and forces them to move away from where their family has lived for generations. There is no humanity in finance and capitalism, which is why New Era defeating Westbrook is so important, showing what can be achieved when people pull together. The corporations and economic bully boys can’t always get their own way by flexing their financial muscles. An indomitable human spirit can gather momentum when people fight for a common cause. As the New Era leaders said after saving their homes, “if you don’t fight, you won’t win.”

If the London property market keeps moving at its current pace, no one will be able to afford to live in the city. It will become a ghost town of empty properties owned by filthy rich foreign investors.

The area in which I have been working is called Cubitt Town, right next to Milwall dock, with a long and extremely proud working class history. The DLR – an elevated rail line – cuts along East Ferry Road, bisecting the old from the new. It is literally a dividing line. On the one side you have low rise council housing, local shops and a communal square but cross the tracks and you have modern shiny high rise blocks of accommodation and office space. This side appears to be constantly under construction. It reminds me of the scene in the animated film Up, where an old couple indignantly dig their heels in and refuse to give up their home as gigantic blocks are built around their property, dwarfing their house. I have used the post office in Cubbit Town many times and people say hello to you. There is a strong sense of generations having lived there through thick and thin. Looking skywards from the old side of Cubbit Town it seems that if the building work continues on the new side, the sun will be permanently blocked out.

The shiny new high-rise side of Cubbit Town and the gleaming towers of the Docklands area in general, have a soulless, plastic feel. You walk past these blocks and peer into ground floor gyms as the residents blankly stare out from treadmills, arms pumping, sweat dripping. I sincerely hope that the relentless construction and change doesn’t sweep across the tracks and take away the old town. It is very hard to prevent change but as New Era has shown, if you stick together, fight your corner and don’t give up, the tiny spire of community can still overcome the huge temple of capitalism.


In case you haven't seen it yet, check out my top ten albums of 2014 from my post of December 5th...