Street life: The theft of Britain’s public space for private profit

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City

Anna Minton, updated 2012

Penguin Books, £9.99;

Kindle, £5.99

Review: Tommy Barker

Let the Games begin — and the fun and games will follow after the anticipated Olympian blood, sweat and tears, as London comes to terms with the post-2012 legacy of its investment of billions in sporting infrastructure and facilities.

Almost all of which, incidentally, will be privately retained, and publicly restrained, a continuation of the lock-down mentality of these super security-conscious games, coming soon to a stadium or large TV screen near you.

The forthcoming summer games, in a major world-class capital city beset in the past year by riots, and occasional extremist attacks, will take the journalistic security cliche of a ‘ring of steel’ to new heights.

They’ll be part-policed from the sky, by unmanned spyplanes or drones, notes writer Anna Minton, whose book Ground Control details the level of surveillance now commonplace in British life (Britain is the undisputed CCTV capital of the world, there are more cameras in the country than in the rest of Europe) and more than partly mirrored on Irish shores.

It has been stated repeatedly that London’s Olympic ‘dream’ (apart from a haul of medals, presumably) is to leave the city with a renewed public-built legacy. Things promised to rival the civic glories of museums and parks, from the likes of the Great Exhibition of 1851, or the 1951 Festival of Britain and which bequeathed to Britain its wonderful Royal Festival Hall.

As a dream, it’s about as idealistic as Olympian “amateur status”.

Security is of course paramount: no-one wants another Munich, and the Games is as big a stage as any attention-seeker could wish to gate-crash. What’s notable about London’s security dragnet is the privatisation of its security and, after that, how privately-controlled the ‘public’ spaces created for the Games will be post-2012.

London’s post-games legacy has yet to unfold, of course. But on the evidence of the quangos that mushroomed in its build-up, the diminution of promises of thousands of affordable homes among the 11,000 houses built, and things like the sale of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to a company headed by Qatar’s royal family, it looks like the benefits will be gobbled up by private interests, for private gain.

Notions as quaint as ‘the public good’ seem to have gone out since the early days of 1980s Thatcherism: the 2012 Olympics is the apogee of the Iron Lady’s legacy.

That’s the 2012 updated verdict of writer Anna Minton’s book Ground Control, which looks at the effects of ‘the death of public planning’ in Britain, and the theft or appropriation of its streets for private profits rather than community gain, spread across three complementary, seminal, dispassionately argued theses about the way public space is used, abused and annexed in Britain

Now an insightful commentator and observer, and policy think-tank researcher, the former journalist (FT, among other papers) Minton explores trends like the anonymity of spaces designed to engender a sense of ‘security’, the contrast between gated communities and ghettoisation, the paradox of how fear levels can rise as security measure intensify, as well as polarisation and privatisation of ‘gentrified’ public space.

British planning, for good and ill, isn’t the same as how we fail to plan things in Ireland, in our own sweet way, though Britain has its share of unfinished apartment towers and half-baked, quarter-delivered Utopian dreams.

To an Irish reader, already fuming about how we got thing so wrong here, there’s an irony: we got in our mess by greed and short-sightedness; they got in theirs by greed and by design.

The story of Britain’s recently abandoned Pathfinder (housing re newal) policy is extraordinary; for example, like the 1960s’ efforts to clear slums (and which we had parallels with on this island when we built Ballymun, and Knocknaheeny, and Southill), it was a plan to renew housing stock in “cold” property markets, up to 1 million homes to go, mostly serviceable Victorian house in the northern cities, on the naïve assumption that rising property values will lift all boats.

The upshot in Britain of this flawed, debt-based property economy and drive to lure in the ABC1 demography was mass demolition of settled communities, uprooting of neighbourhoods and then — abandonment, many replacement homes never got built.

Streets got boarded up. Residents literally died of stress in some cases, as Minton finds (and we’ve got our own, lesser examples here as the Irish property market crash slammed the brakes on Limerick’s regeneration, or Ballymun’s).

Combining a journalistic nose and drive to follow leads, with a bit more academic rigour and time for considerable research (several themes were developed for reports for professional bodies such as the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, this book covers a huge span, from the slow creep and pounce of surveillance, to the erosion of local government and abdication of democratically-arrived at policies.

Right wing, conservative or just market-driven agendas from the US like Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) have been adopted in Britain almost unquestioningly, this book’s knowledgeable author finds. Often, they’ve been accepted in Britain with less debate than in the US. Some will find/have found their way here to Ireland too, after all, we are more Boston than Berlin, or more shopping mall driven than gentle, Continental piazza inclined.

As a contextualising primer for concerned and just-curious Irish readers (even those au fait with our own native failings) there’s a lot of eye-opening, anger-stirring being done, albeit in a measured, articulate way. The economic crash slamming on the brakes on some pell-mell societal changes at odds with Victorian ideals of the common or public good just might bring some good.

On a positive final note, Minton’s Ground Control ends with a description of the growth of the “shared space” movement, where actual safety is measurably increased , when things like traffic lights, street barriers and even road markings are removed, altering people’s perceptions of risk and resulting in altered, more aware, yet ultimately relaxed, behaviours.

And, in a note which strikes a chord with this reviewer, she endorses the European ideal that cities aren’t just for shopping, they’re for hanging around in.