Saffron crocus is unknown to the wild.
An island city in between suburbia, built for cars, proud of its multi-storey car parks: Croydon, the space-age city prided itself in a Utopia that never happened.
Post war optimism got its golden child in Croydon. Lunar House, Apollo House, semi-brutalist structures, the sister to the Royal Festival Hall, the Future.
https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-new-croydon-1963-online
The National Trust backed tour ran by the RISE gallery is a love song to that intention but also to a different future that now might be waiting. It was refreshing to hear people knowledgable about and loving towards where they live.
A place snubbed by many, is now a place changing; old buildings are resurrected, office blocks are turned into housing showered with promises of affordable prices and no foreign investor interference.
The Saffron flowers are sterile. They reproduce only by human intervention.
As with all gentrification-suspect projects, you wonder if changing the built environment is a way to alienate some and make an area unaffordable to even more so there is more space for the wealthier to move in.
BoxPark. A temporary, precarious state of prosperity, while a woman sitting on its steps keeps screaming ‘save me’ in distress. Parallel lines, worlds that will never meet.
There seem to be a ripple effect stemming from, I believe,a genuine wish to improve the everyday life of residents by this entwined group of developers, councils, art patrons.
For instance, the public art endorsed and produced is impressive, intriguing and insightful.
Yet, I wonder if it somehow feels too conceptual and detached from the majority that views it. Like in a way a superficial paint, that doesn’t fix a wall, just makes it more appealing to outsiders.
Is it the middle class ‘Saviour Syndrome’ that is the driving force behind Croydon’s reformation process, even if there is good will? Are these efforts making any of the established population there happier or is the middle class making itself more comfortable thus inviting more middle class people to move in? The tour, we were homogenous. Some had SLR cameras hanging from their neck. Though with no exploitation agenda, still, Tourists.
Sometimes when reality is crushing, those affected are left with no energy. So why not that the ones that can afford it, offer their energy for a positive, as they believe, change. ‘Don’t be ashamed of your privilege. Just use it to help others’.
Croydon allegedly has got its name from the Crocus, the Saffron flower cultivated there. I love thinking of Croydon as the Saffron producing town of the past. And I love to think of it as the post-war optimistic project it was.
Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all I’d say to those that believe it is a project failed.
The more time I spend in East Croydon, the more I see it as London at its truest; the same embrace that also took me in as well as the immigrants, the destitute, the new middle class families, the kid with his hand inside his pants trying desperately to show off, the screaming woman, so many that try their best, all in pursue of a better life. Many visiting:
South London ICE,
Home Office
Lunar House, 1st Floor
40 Wellesley Road
Croydon
CR9 2BY
or
Electric House.
Home Office
UK Border Agency
3 Wellesley Road
Croydon
CR0 2AT
An electricity showroom of mid-war years, then an immigration office. With cells. An art deco facade, futurism turned into authoritarianism and, now, to desolation. The building might rot or might get a makeover. People passing by are surprised by our interest, given that its front is covered in garbage. It’s hard to see beyond this. Garbage is the reality now and maybe that should be the future of any Immigration Office.
In a London increasingly gentrified, beautified, streamlined, a Soho where LGBT people and sex workers are edged out by eateries, a Hackney/Shoreditch where artists, minorities and the working class are pushed out by fashion trends, where Elephant and Castle is to be torn down for luxury flats in the sounds of Nine Elms, maybe it is imperative that people like the RISE strive to strike a balance.
Naked of all above sub context, their tours and exhibitions are a unique, excellent opportunity to visit a place that is repeatedly saturated with Modernity. While there, be respectful. To the eye safe from harsh everyday struggle it is a place easy to dismiss or look down upon. And yet it is of the most truthful of realities London is.
Let’s celebrate it and breathe it as it is, before it is irreversibly gone.
Photos by Globbie Dcw.
more info:
https://www.rise-gallery.co.uk/exhibition/a-journey-through-brutalism/
http://jonathanmeades.co.uk/Artwork.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croydon
https://thecroydoncitizen.com/culture/event-review-launch-journey-brutalism-exhibition-rise-gallery/
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