Learning From Whitechapel

On the surface of it, Whitechapel is not the prettiest part of the city. The buildings along the High Road are jaunty and irregular, with occasional gaps here and there as though teeth had been punched out of the mouth of an ageing boxer. The shop fronts are gaudy and bold, and there are an inordinate number of fried Chicken shops. Even the colourful plastic façade of David Adjaye’s well-used Idea Store is a relic of a bygone age of  investment into underprivileged areas like this.

Despite the signs of neglect, an examination of the types of business and shop that make up the beginning of the A11 high street hint that the area has an independent streak. By no means are there the organic cafes and independent coffee chains of nearby gentrified areas, but neither is this a cookie-cutter high street consisting of large chain stores and franchises. In absence of these types of business are numerous indian sweet shops, clothes stores and mobile phone booths mostly run by members of the local Bangladeshi community. During weekdays, on the unnaturally wide pavement of Whitechapel Road you will find a ‘warts-and-all’ street market where you can probably find any kind of fish, green vegetable or headscarf. The presence of a robust, independent street life hint at something that goes beyond the surface of the high street – that Whitechapel has certain ingredients that mean it is predisposed to developing its own local economy.

Curiously, this may largely be a result of the fact that  Whitechapel has always been left to its own devices. Historically, being just outside the walls of the city of London has meant that it has always had to develop its own distinct form of industry and culture, free from the rules imposed within the jurisdiction of the City proper. The breweries, tanneries slaughterhouses and other ‘less fragrant’ activities of the 16th century that were not permitted within the city established themselves here. Similarly In the 19th and 20th centuries, Jewish merchants (who were not permitted to trade within the city of London) established  a thriving clothing and fabric manufacturing industry, the so called ‘rag trade’, that the area is still remembered for.

Currently, although certain parts of Whitechapel have specialist identities, as a whole, the area lacks a certain coherence. If we examine a slice of the neighbourhood that begins at the Whitechapel station, down to the railway arches bordering Cable street in the South, the most prominent strips are Whitechapel road, which specialises in asian goods and groceries, and  parallel to that, Commercial road, which is still the city’s centre for clothing wholesalers. In between these two broad strips are large blocks consisting of mixed social and privately owned housing, broken up by small pockets of light industrial units. These contain businesses that are run by, and serve the local Bangladeshi community, peppered with other small businesses located in Whitechapel for its good connections and proximity to the city. It is not unusual to find  a motorbike tune-up garage next to an Islamic Sunday school, or a halal butcher next to a Jewish clothing wholesaler.

Differences aside, all or most of these businesses are small, owned by families or individuals, or are reincarnations of old enterprises.  Although Whitechapel feels relatively fragmented (by virtue of being left to its own devices) a curious order has evolved that seems particularly suitable to supporting the kind small and fledgling businesses that live here.

Metabolism 

During peak times, the Chapman Street Market is teeming with people and cars that come from all over the local area to stock up on frozen fish, green vegetables, sacks of rice, or any number of assorted edibles. The street emerged as a by-product of the construction of the DLR about ten years ago. A number of business units were created for lease in the infilled railway arches. It is now full of Bangladeshi owned cash and carrys, selling imported fresh and frozen produce. The owner of Bondor Bazaar told us that within the space of a year, all of the arches were filled. Once one shop became established, it blazed a path for many other entrepreneurs to set up immediately after, rapidly generating a critical mass of business. The arches have dual access, facing the residential estate and Watney Street to the north, and loading access to the rear. This mini strip of commerce emerged of its own accord, and is dependant upon being visible from the Watney Street, and its proximity to Shadwell station for its success.

In contrast, across Canon Street Road, a few hundred metres away in the older Victorian Cable street Railway Arches, are businesses with much slower metabolisms, that have been around much longer. Although they are within an almost identical building type, these buildings have little to do with the current local residential population, although they are intimately connected with the longer legacy and history of  Whitechapel. Steinberg’s trimmings and haberdashery has been operating from the same railway arch here for almost one hundred years, a rare veteran of the rag trade. Still owned by the same Jewish family, the business has chosen not to move because the strategic location serves them well. Similarly, J+J cabs, a black cab valet service catches passing trade as Black cabs drop in on their way from the East back down Cable street into the city.

The expanding house

Not too far away in Burslem street is Nilsa Supermarket. Embedded within a shopping parade in a 1970’s residential development, this supermarket supplies the local Bangladeshi community with essential items including halal meat, rice, milk and eggs as there is no commercial supermarket nearby. The owner, a young Bangladeshi, lives locally. He clearly states that his family run business has built up more than just a customer vendor relationship with the locals. The business has expanded several times over the last 20 years, initially operating out of one shop unit, it now  occupies three units on the same shopping parade. The success of the business has allowed his family to open up other enterprises in Leicester, but being rooted in the area, he himself does not have any intention of moving the business away from the Whitechapel. This pattern of incremental expansion and investment is typical of many of the businesses in the area. Once successful they continue to reinvest in their business, indicative of a desire to invest in the area that brought them business success and security.

The Lahore kebab house provides a famous reiteration of this type of business. Located on the busy Commercial road, the business is thriving, serving much more than the local bangladeshi community. The owner, a Pakistani, has reinvested in the shop and expanded four times. He has since then opened stores in the ‘four corners’ of London, but maintains the East London location because it is extremely profitable. Whereas the Nilsa supermarket expanded laterally, the Lahore kebab house has become something of a little empire, occupying all three floors of the Georgian shop house, as well as some newer residential accommodation at the back, to offer three large dining halls and a lunch room.

The dense house

Another building typology that recurs within Whitechapel is the very dense shop house. In contrast to the single occupancy businesses above, these buildings have a larger number of occupants on each floor, and sometimes several on each floor. At 124-126 Commercial road, there are two clothing wholesalers on the ground floor, a college of Sufism on the first floor and another clothes saler on the second floor, and apartments above. Clearly, all businesses thought it would be beneficial to have a shop front on this main road. A glance down the road reveals many to-let signs. The high turnover of tenants indicate that this is the kind of location where landlords permit a fluidity of tenants, that naturally helps along small businesses who often require flexibility in leases.

Proximity 

There are a mismatch of businesses on Hessel street. A number of clothing wholesalers and manufactures, an Arabic school, a motorbike tuning shop, and a sewing machine supplier. Each proprietor has a wildly divergent background. There is a Brazilian ex-motorcross Champion who located here because of the proximity to the city, a Chinese entrepreneur who chose to locate here because it is cheaper than having a Commercial Road address, and a sewing machine mechanic who also retrained as a young persons’ guidance councillor in the 1980s when he realised that the UK clothing manufacturing industry was dying.  The purpose built business units that run along the street are strange and boxy, almost utilitarian postmodernism in character, but can easily be adapted to suit this motley crew of businesses.  The spaces above were clearly designed to host factories or warehouses, with generous ceiling heights and big north facing windows, and on the ground floor there are flexible areas with a parking space that are used by the various businesses as shop fronts, warehouses, offices motorbike tuning areas.

An unlikely model

If we spend long enough studying its streets, homes, shops and spaces in between, we can see what the ingredients are that make Whitechapel an almost fully successful, self sufficient neighbourhood. It has a strong local community whose young people wish to stay and reinvest in their area, a mixture of places to live work and play in close proximity, and good robust buildings that can host industry and business. At an urban scale, the by-product of its happenstance -incremental urban growth- are a number of  yards and backstreets that provide businesses with useful service routes and ancillary spaces. This is not to say that Whitechapel is perfect. Its young people are facing bleaker educational prospects than their older sisters and brothers, families are enduring overcrowding due to a lack of adequate housing, and there is a dearth of recreational facilities. This cannot be remedied if it continues to be neglected and denied opportunities by unimaginative local government interventions and lack of investment. However, if its positive features are recognised and reinforced with some clever investment in the right places, it will have a much better chance of becoming the neighbourhood it ought  to be, and so nearly is.  Moreover, at an urban level we can learn a lot from the area.  In contrast to the isolated industrial estates on the periphery of our cities, or the artificial ‘creative hubs’ of late, Whitehcapel provides a more tangible and accessible paradigm of how we can begin to  nurture small and fledgling businesses, and begin to grow stronger neighbourhoods that with just a little extra attention and intelligent support by local gov, could reinvigorate many of the difficult in-between areas of our towns and cities.

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This article was written by Amanda Rashid. The research for this project was carried out as part of the Resilient Urban Morphologies Project, run by Professor Howard Davis and The WorkHome Project run by Francis Hollis. Photography by Amanda Rashid, Priscilla Fernandes and Josie Venning.

Unité d’Habitation

As an architect, visiting the Unité is like coming home. So much of it feels familiar. Yet there’s a continuing sense of absolute wonder at how on earth Le Corbusier brought myriad different threads and uses together into this perfect synthesis. It’s magic.

This visit is my fourth and I’m sure I’ll be back again. I first came 15 years ago with my partner, Robert Sakula and our children but had a long time before been enthused by Peter Carl, my tutor at Cambridge. Le Corbusier was out of fashion at the time and people were getting excited about postmodernism. Peter Carl was more interested in the symbolism and Orphism of Le Corbusier rather than in modularisation, modernity and machinery, and he taught me that you could make your own Corbusian mythology and take from it what you wanted.

The Unité feels like a very special crucible in which people can live, work and play together. It is so much more than the sum of its parts. That first visit was memorable. We encountered it first as tourists; then it seemed as if the building took us in when we made friends with one of the residents as our children played on the roof and she invited us all down to her apartment for lunch. We sat out on the balcony and felt rather blessed. It was fantastic sharing her enthusiasm for the smallest details of her flat — how clever the storage arrangements are in that complicated bit in the middle of the plan that you can never quite get just looking at it on paper, or how thoughtful the variety of alcoves in the stainless-steel splashback behind the sink were.

What’s interesting for me is its ambition to be full of ways that people might meet and knit together. It’s a complete town in the air — there’s the sense of each domain being a very regulated piece that’s repeated to make up the facade. You have a double-height and a single-height apartment module that toggle together beautifully in plan and section. But for such a simple diagram, it feels very complex. It can keep catching you out as you walk around.

Added to this arrangement of apartments are many other uses. The commercial floor halfway up for shops and hotel has such a particular allocation of spaces, for example the fish counter or the place where you could pick up ready-prepared meals or have them delivered to the gorgeously-sculptural grocery deposits outside your front door. There is some very forward social thinking here to lighten the burden of housekeeping — it’s maybe what leads the Le Corbusier expert Flora Samuel to call Le Corbusier a feminist. You could drop the kids off in the nursery then have your hair done, go to the shops, go to the gym, commune with nature and the sky on the roof: the ocean liner ideal of lofty individualism and simple community. It very nearly worked. Only a few years ago when I visited it felt both surreal and straightforwardly obvious to find a working supermarket halfway up the building.

The roof feels like a vast room. You go up one step from the perimeter running track and you get a lot more of the view of the sea and the mountains over the parapet. People come up to walk, to sunbathe or to read. Everyone has their favourite place. In the summer, the pool has water in it and the children come up from the nursery, use the roof as a beach. Residents bring their lunches and the roof acts a hearth or hub for the whole community. Corbusier designed areas for picnic seating and also the “camel hump” forms for children to play on, which mimic the contours of the landscape so perfectly. There’s a lot of light and shadow to play with — it keeps giving. It’s difficult to drink it all in. I think of the roofscape as being almost mythically timeless in the generosity of its sculptural forms.

The Unité housed 1,600 people. When Fry, Lubetkin and others tried to do similar things in London, they lacked the critical mass to achieve the same palpable sense of a whole community. Le Corbusier started from the big concepts of how people might live together then drilled right down into the detail, which then informs the concept. There is a sense, as I think he puts it, of continually moving from the general to the particular and from the particular to the general.

When it was built, the Unité was practically in the country and it must have seemed like a brilliant dream to float its immense mass of béton brut above the trees. Unlike the undercrofts of most brutalist buildings that feel so desperate, here there is enough light. These amazing columns that take down the enormous load of the building and conceal the service runs start off massive and then taper to become quite delicate tip-toes before plunging underground, where they spread out again.

Le Corbusier talked most about the dual-aspect, E-type apartment where you enter below and the main bedroom is on a balcony over the living room but its opposite variant with the double-height living room/bedroom and small upstairs entrance/dining room/ kitchen also works beautifully. He was interested in having a space with perspectives that are internally dramatic and play with light at different times of day — a fantastic contrast with the perpetual twilight of the corridors. Your eyes can travel and feast — you don’t ever feel like you’re just staring at the walls and want to get out. In the apartment plans, the two children’s rooms seem oddly narrow but in reality they include so much territory inside and out for making things and experimenting, playing, or working. They are divided by a sliding metal screen with a full-height blackboard for drawing, or doing homework on. We drew on a lot of this when we did a competition for a Child’s Room for the Twenty-first Century, incorporating lots of different scenarios in a single space that could adapt and change as the child grew up. Le Corbusier was interested in letting the clutter of life play with the interior landscape. The original built-in furniture and fittings are amazing — he even designed in a baby-changing table. The cupboards have such a presence and the handles are very organic — almost like antlers.

It’s very fertile — it’s hard to think of one of our buildings that hasn’t referenced it in some way. We won a competition a few years ago called High Rise to improve a 15-storey tower in Newham and copied the Unité in many ways, in particular the idea of how a building can be a whole town. The existing tower was a bit of a stump so we proposed adding another 10 storeys and creating duplex flats with double-height wintergarden spaces like at the Unité and with a rooftop garden with both indoor and outdoor communal spaces. Our Peabody apartments in Silvertown have a communal life to them that also owes a lot to the Unité — we were thinking about shared space externally and internally and about how we could reinvent things that were important about family life. Instead of having a big open-plan living space we argued that families need as many separate spaces as possible, and designed a couchette-like living room that can become a guest room or a home office while most of the living takes place in the much larger kitchen. At the Hothouse art and community centre in Hackney we thought a lot about the Unité when we were creating a sort of shanty-town on the roof for artists’ live-work studios, a tray of objects to be seen speeding past on the adjacent railway viaduct.

The Unité has built an enduring fan base among residents — the diminutive 80 year olds we met on the roof during their regular 300m arm-in-arm promenade around the track say it’s impossible to get lonely there. The leak through the kitchen ceiling is just “c’est la vie”.

Some of the facade is a bit difficult, there is a Travelodge moment and new uses need to be found for the empty commercial spaces. But buildings often need reinventing for new audiences. And if, as at the Unité, the architecture is generous and the original programme has vision and ambition, then new life will grow on the old wood.

Post by Cany Ash in conversation with Pamela Buxton, with all photography by Gareth Gardner. Please Click Here for his website and more beautiful work.

Halloween Shard

Cany Ash gave the image at the bottom (the Shard) to Article 25′s charity auction of architect-made images of the City of London. The narrative below tells the little tale of how, through a series of strange architectural encounters amidst the hustle and bustle of the Square Mile, she came to make the image that went to auction.

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In a ruined church, all grown over with plants, just metres away from the grinding greyness of a City street in the middle of the day…

I stumbled across some kids prancing around, taking pictures, dressed-up, painted-up and camped-up to the nines.

Happy Halloween monsters, celebrating being looked at and looking at each other, oblivious of whatever dullness was marching on outside their little stage set.

Characters in a City Halloween play, another protagonist from which I found across the street, also dressed up in gloomy glam, leering over me all gothik, with fake Dracula’s teeth and pointy pinnacles and even the bloody horses of the apocalypse, a right on bet for best costume at the party, but with some stiff competition down the road…

where, like the other try-hard across the room, framed by a jumble of hobbling little characters, be-speckled, clocked and spired, stood in contrast the biggest, shiniest, most ritzy monster id ever layer my eyes on.

It was a brilliant costume, flamboyantly evil, gigantically dark, toweringly neon… I couldn’t quite capture it when I was there, the photo was like the body without the outfit, so I took it, dressed it up, put its make-up back on, and there you have it, a snapshot of the secret queen of the Halloween ball that goes on in the City every year… we just don’t notice it…

Post written by Cany Ash & Adam Nathaniel Furman