“Who is this city really being built for?”
Proposed redevelopment of the famous skate park on London’s South Bank led Louis Woodhead to ask who the city is being built for
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In London, one of the most popular heritage campaigns in recent years has been to prevent the redevelopment of the Southbank undercroft, used for several recent decades as a famous skate park. The strength of support for the protection of the undercroft reflects a wider aspiration among Londoners to preserve the juxtaposition of old and new at a time of unprecedented redevelopment. Through opposition to proposals, a strong sense of heritage has emerged in the skating community, as Louis Woodhead explains.
Louis Woodhead, November 2015, quoted on Long Live South Bank blog
Think about how many people have got a deep connection with the space, and the people they shared it with. Think about all the layers of paint on the walls, all the tricks that have been landed, all the photos shot and the footage filmed. There’s not much to put in a museum, but you can see quite clearly that that is heritage. There is genuine culture that is meaningful to and influences a huge number of people. This should weigh very strongly in development decisions. When it does not, it raises big questions as to who is this city really being built for.
Where people have started repurposing a space creatively, whether that involves gardening or street art or skateboarding, there is usually the potential for it to flourish with minimal interference. There is great rhetoric in councils and institutions about schemes coming ‘from the bottom up’, but this isn’t always applied.
This debate, really, is about what we value as a society. Who do we want to cater for? What heritage do we want to prioritise? What future opportunities do we want to prioritise? And are we more concerned with heritage or the future? Heritage can and should be a very positive, forward looking thing.
The mainstream media was a very poor vehicle with which to explore the issue. As much as we tried, it was impossible to talk well about the space that we loved in snappy soundbites. Debates on the issue were reduced to glib statements and point scoring. Everything was dumbed down and, as we adjusted for the media, we probably became more and more entrenched in our positions. Everyone became more guarded. A positive solution became harder to reach. Heavily spun half-facts were spread. People came to the table with ears full of misinformation.
The issue of the undercroft shows how much people care about these sorts of issues. 150,000 people signed a preservation statement. That is more than the Conservative Party have members. Rarely are people asked what they value about their area, or how they want it to look and feel like. If opinions are to be expressed it is usually in a last ditch attempt to stop something, with a rather dull planning permission objection form, or such like. Of course it requires a lot of commitment from a community to have a table up for eight hours every day, for more than a year. But it does mean you can have the debate in the most relevant space, with the most relevant people.
