Foundations by Wetherell Sam;

Author:Wetherell, Sam;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

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At the beginning of the last chapter, I asked you to imagine that you were on a train leaving Victoria Station in London, heading south. As the train crosses the river, looking west, passengers can see the sprawling council estates of Wandsworth. Passengers looking east, however, are confronted with a vertiginous wall of luxury housing developments, each containing thousands of units that press up against the side of the railway tracks immediately south of the Thames. Battersea Power Station, whose excess heat had once been piped under the Thames to service thousands of working-class council tenants living on the Churchill Gardens Estate, is now almost entirely obscured by this shield of luxury apartment buildings, all constructed since 2015. One of these developments, Embassy Gardens, boasts a swimming pool suspended in the air connecting two of its blocks, where residents can look down through glass at the pedestrians below. Behind its gates, the development offers residents a “complete London experience”: a café, private cinema, sprawling rooftop garden, “art trail,” and its own private members’ club in which every resident is automatically enrolled. Each home, though, is billed as an “individual experience.” The complex is wildly abstracted, not just from its surrounding neighborhood, but from the entire city. Its promotional material notes that “often our residents live between continents and feel they belong to many cities.” An accompanying video outlining a typical weekend for the residents of Embassy Gardens starts with “international friends” flying in “for the weekend,” illustrated by a single stiletto descending the staircase of a private jet.116

The first round of flats in Embassy Gardens was released for sale in June 2017, each for more than one million pounds. The same month, seventy-one people were killed in a fire in Grenfell Tower, a twenty-four-story block on the Lancaster West Estate, five miles north of Embassy Gardens. The recent history of Grenfell Tower is a familiar one. Built in 1974, it was owned and managed by Kensington and Chelsea Council until 1996. That year, the council transferred all its stock to a tenant management organization, an indeterminate body run by a mixture of residents and council appointees. Grenfell was split between tenant management organization residents and private renters, some paying as much as two thousand pounds a month for a two-bedroom flat. Its 2016 refurbishment had been outsourced to a private developer, Rydon Limited, and Rydon in turn had outsourced the tower’s external cladding, which was likely responsible for the rapid spread of the fire, to another private company, Harley Facades. Seven other companies were listed as playing a role in the management and refurbishment of the tower.117 The year before the fire, it was reported that residents of the tower had repeatedly complained about the tenant management organization’s lax attitude to fire safety.118 What’s more, like most other blocks of its size, Grenfell had been retrofitted with electronic security doors that restricted the access of residents to different parts of the block in the name of crime reduction.

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