Thomas-Bernard Kenniff
View of Barking town centre from the south with the Town Square project in the centre.
Barking’s publics During the last decade, Barking experienced some of the highest immigration rates in the country.This influx was concentrated in the town centre, where the Town Square is located and which traditionally has been the area with the highest turn-over in the borough. As one local resident told me, the town centre is where people with little money move in to the borough only to move out as soon as they can afford it.This trend continues to this day firstly because most of the regeneration efforts in the borough are concentrated on the town centre, and secondly because the majority of the new apartments has been bought up by buy- to-let agencies in a sense ‘re-generating’ a highly transient and heterogeneous community. Given these changes it is not surprising to find out how little the ‘public’ of 2000 has to do with the ‘public’ of 2010. If we then wonder today whether the public has been consulted or involved in the development of the Town Square we should bear in mind this significant transformation. Which ‘public’ are we speaking of? One crucial question in this case is whether it matters if the public was consulted in 2000 for a scheme completed a decade later. It does, but only if the overall project makes a point of addressing these changes.The critical idea might just be the reconciliation of shifting identities with the notion of architecture as a process. For if we understand architecture not only as a ‘thing in itself’ but also as a socio-economic, cultural, and political process then the identity of designers, architectural objects and publics should be conceived of similarly. g
Architectural identity The identity of the architecture itself similarly shifts over time. The winning scheme of 2000 presents a more compact and homogeneous development than the final built project. Its formal identity struck, at that time, a chord with some of the resident population who recalled Barking’s glorious fishing past. The Barking Recorder claimed that the ‘Town Square will be all ship-shape’ and the council leader at the time projected it would be known as ‘the Barking boat’. The built project is more fragmented, colourful, orthogonal in form and significantly taller than the original, and apart from having buildings nicknamed after defunct local industries, does not have overt aesthetic links to local iconography. In many ways the resulting scheme expresses the aesthetics of urban regeneration linked to the politics and economics of the last five years: the tail end of the Blair government and a push for public-private partnerships. In January 2000 the finalists’ schemes were exhibited and the public were invited to vote on the one they preferred. But the transformation of the architecture over ten years means that those who lived in Barking in 2000 wonder why the finished scheme has so little to do with the one they voted on or saw represented in the media. On the other hand, residents recently moved to Barking wonder why they were never asked for their opinion.
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