5 - Demolishing slums, building up

Summary

Even after two world wars, crumbled city landscapes still largely spoke of a nineteenth-century provenance. Rows of back-to-back terraces built by industry sat next to tenements built for the poor. A window into the appalling nature of living conditions is given by Ron Charnick, a former health inspector in London’s Southwark: “Littered with bomb sites, overcrowded, badly damaged, poorly repaired and much unfit housing … Overrun with rats both within and outside public sewers, needing 12 rodent operatives to control. No DDT so infestations of bed bugs, fleas, lice and cockroaches prevalent … Air pollution heavy” (Historia Sanitaria 1954).

Tenants of slum landlords could count on very little regulation or assistance. On those occasions when health inspectors such as Charnick turned up and followed through with enforcements, many landlords abandoned their property, placing the responsibility for the home or its demolition onto the local authority.

In Chapter 2 we noted that Charles Booth’s nineteenthcentury street survey of London effectively conjoined each class to the space that it occupied such that squalid areas inferred squalid peoples. In Chapter 4 we noted how postwar Commonwealth migration was parsed through the same calculus such that areas populated by Black and Asian peoples were considered squalid due to the racialized demographic. In what now follows we show how a new topography of squalor became integral to the postcolonial political imagination.

In this chapter we examine the politics and strategies of slum clearance in the postwar era, a process that ran parallel to the suburban and New Town building initiatives discussed in the last chapter. We have already noted that slum clearance was always accompanied by a segregation of the working class into “God’s” and the “devil’s” poor, or, those considered hygienic or dysgenic to the imperial and national project of capital accumulation. However, with New Commonwealth immigration, these segregating logics took on renewed and sharpened racial lines.

Thus far we have argued that social and economic development never followed slum dwellers displaced from their habitats, and so squalor merely reproduced itself down the road. But in this chapter, we turn towards a novel vertical answer to the horizontal reproduction of slums – the high-rise tower block.