Allan Wes Wilson
Unlit existing urban fabric in the glow of new developments that have migrated into the east end
Old Spitalfields Market after hours
‘the context cannot be captured in a single truth; it is the rest of the world, that which is provisionally ignored but in fact has a bearing on the subject under discussion.There is always a context. It is unthinkable that our cultural artifacts could exist without it. In the absence of a sense of contextuality, there can be no sense of either reality or viable possibility.’ — Ole Bouman & RoemerVanToorn. The Invisible in architecture Immediately west of the Old Spitalfields Market is the corporation of the City of London, a borough which continues to see a dramatic migration of large-scale corporate development projects eastward. Once referred to as ‘trickle down’ schemes, many of the urban plans are remnant of policy changes introduced by the Thatcher government in the 1980s as a regenerative response to both a slumping economy as well as a rapidly degrading quality of life in the city’s peripheral boroughs.The actual long-term effect of the policy however has been the shift from the city as a democratic social state – a failing and financially stagnant post-war utopian idea based on social unity and public sector institutions – towards a neo-liberal utopia in which private development and capital accumulation become the key generators of social prosperity and a renewed communal identity. Almost concurrently, the last part of the twentieth century has seen an aggressive resurgence in conservationism east of the market. Beginning in the late 1970s, a collaborative of architects, architectural historians and artists working under the moniker The Spitalfields Building Heritage Trust, sought to protect the few remaining Victorian and Georgian brick houses in the neighbourhood from development because of their latent importance in the solidification of a more idyllic and pre-industrial image of Spitalfields – essentially a Spitalfields that also ignores the history and politics of exploitation surrounding the east end for two hundred years.This is a major a criticism of conservation, that it petrifies time as a solely retroactive practice.The paradox remains that the more insistently these buildings are preserved, the less authentic they become. It seems then insufficient to necessarily extract an absolute definition of Spitalfields’ identity from anywhere surrounding the market, or to generalise the tension between two literal extremes into a single notion of ‘context’. Rather it must be something composite drawn from a broader field of information, or else remain as something elusive.
41
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator