John Grindrod on the suburbs, the grey plague and post-pandemic architecture
Part one of our conversation with the author and architecture geek
John Grindrod’s first book, Concretopia, (subtitled ‘A journey around the rebuilding of postwar Britain’) was both an alternative guidebook and a sideways history lesson, one that seemed more interested in the paving stones than the beach which supposedly lies beneath them. It was one of those books that made you look at the city in an entirely different way (plus, it was charming and funny).
The same could be said for his second book, Outksirts, which beautifully weaved together John’s story of growing up in a Croydon housing estate and the history of that strange hinterland we call the green belt.
This month, his third book, Iconicon was published, so we met up with John for a conversation that covers everything from how his world view has been forever altered by growing up in Croydon, what constitutes a modern icon in his eyes, and the future of London’s architecture post-pandemic.
This is the first part of our chat with John, the second half is here.
You were born and raised in Croydon. How much did growing up in that kind of post-war, new town environment influence your outlook on life and how you view the world?
I was born in New Addington, right on the outskirts of Croydon and I lived there for about thirty years. And yeah, it’s had a massive effect. There’s that thing that happens to most people where you take for granted where you live when you’re a kid, and you only think about it when you move away. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I began to look back on my time in Croydon and I suddenly realised that it’s a very odd place.
I remember going to Polytechnic and trying to explain to people where I’d grown up and I just couldn’t explain it because it’s a big council estate, but it’s surrounded by countryside. On the one hand you would expect that to be some kind of ‘executive’ new build estate in a lovely location, overlooking all these fields, on a hill on the edge of London. But actually, it was a council estate where all the poor people in Croydon were shoved out to the edge to be ignored. That feeling of being marooned and isolated up there in a bit of a bubble, I think that’s really stayed with me.
New Addington itself has a lot of post-war architecture and I used to work in the centre of Croydon, which is all post-war obviously. Plus my nan lived in Slough and then moved to Aldershot. Sometimes I feel like I spent all of my life going to places that were either Croydon or very like Croydon. So I just thought that was what the world was like. It was only really when I started to travel around a bit more in my 20s and 30s that I realised that not all the world is like Croydon!
So, yes, it has massively influenced the way that I think about the world. And part of that is I’m not dismissive of council estates and the idea of council housing, which a lot of people are. I loved living in a council house. The estate I grew up in had a lot of problems, but the actual council house itself was great. It became fashionable to criticise them when the right-to-buy came in the early 80s, but I’ve always wanted to defend them. So there’s a vein of that going through everything I’ve written.
How much have you seen those areas change over the last few decades? Obviously everyone always talks about London being in constant flux. But does that apply to the suburbs? Are the outskirts gentrification proof?
I think the difference is the suburbs were, generally, already very middle class. People who moved out from the city centre, where the urban fabric was becoming poorer and more knocked about, they moved out to these big, sprawling suburban estates.
So you don’t really get gentrification in the suburbs in quite the same way because they were, by nature, a sort of gentrified phenomenon from the off. But what you do get is waves of fashion happening. So you get your ‘Tudorbethan’ 1930s house but you get it stripped out and grey windows put in and grey bricks out the front and a grey front door. The grey plague! That’s all part of these weird fashions that take over. It’s ironic really that there’s so much criticism of 60s brutalist architecture, with people saying “Oh it’s so grey!” and meanwhile there are people turning their entire beautiful 30s semi-detached houses grey.
What about Croydon, specifically? That’s an area that does seem to go through stages of relative prosperity and optimism followed by terrible dips. Unfortunately, right now, it feels like Croydon is in the middle of its own mini depression.
This is the story of Croydon over the last 120 years. It’s a constant cycle of over-ambitious expansion and putting all the chips on red, which works for around ten years and then something happens and all of that goes away.
That’s what happened with the airport. Croydon airport was the big new thing, it was the Heathrow of the 1920s and 30s. Then, when they said “We’re going to move the airport away” it was all going to be about financial services. In the 50s and 60s Croydon became all about being the big insurance and financial capital of the UK… And then Docklands happened, so that carpet got whipped away as well.
More recently Croydon saw an opportunity when people were being priced out of Shoreditch and Silicon Roundabout. They thought they’d use some of the empty office blocks that had been empty for quite a long time, and rent them out really cheaply to tech startups. That was really very successful for a bit and then there’s a crash and suddenly the bottom falls out of that too.
So right now we’re in another hole. We’ve gone back to the 80s and 90s Croydon where nothing really got built, before the trams came along in the late 90s and it began that regeneration that continued throughout the Noughties and Teens.
Do you think there’ll be an upside again soon for Croydon?
It’s a cycle, so we’re probably going have to wait 10 years while the council looks chastened, and looks at its feet for a bit. Then gradually, it will start to kind of come back and it will decide that some new saviour has appeared. It may be wind farms in 20 years time, who knows? There’ll be some random stuff happening to put all the money on. Croydon will transform into something completely different again.
I quite like that Croydon has these layers of history. One thing I do worry about is that people are very keen to erase it all the time because they don’t value it and it’s not old enough for people to quite see the historical significance. And then stuff gets knocked down or changed beyond recognition.
I think maintaining some of that historical memory of a place is really important. For a lot of people that is what Croydon is: it’s a post-war landscape, and to totally change that into something else is a sort of erasure of the identity of the place. But a lot of people would see that as a great thing to do: “Hurray, let’s erase Croydon!”. But I’m not one of those people, I think that would be a bit of a travesty.
What about the the rest of the city? Do you have any thoughts on how the pandemic is going to influence how we live in London?
One of the areas that’s going to be really, really affected by the pandemic is Docklands and the City, and it's very difficult to see how it’s going to bounce back. That landscape of mega-development where you have buildings like the Shard, which is still majorly empty. They weren’t full before the pandemic and they’re building even more towers now so they’ll have even more competition.
I guess the big iconic stuff that’s happening at the moment, an icon of the last ten years if you like, are the ‘austerity flats’. Those flat-fronted, brick flats that you see all around the Olympic park. You see them replacing industrial units all over the place. They’re like the children of Tate Modern. They’ve got steel balconies, brown bricks, they’re very plain, with big Georgian windows, slightly New York looking. They are everywhere now, but they started in London and they were a London Mayor thing.
They’re an icon of austerity in a way. Because they’re very sober looking, very sensible. I think we’ll look back on this decade and those buildings will be every bit as emblematic of this moment as 30s Tudorbethan houses or 80s Barratt homes were.
I think there will be a lot more of that kind of development everywhere. In a way they are an attempt to densify council estates and any bit of open land in London. I think they are a symbol of the current moment and it will be interesting to see how many of those we end up with, because we’ve already got a lot and they’ve happened almost without anyone noticing.
This conversation will continue on Monday where we’ll dig more into John’s latest book and what makes a modern day architectural icon. Until then you can follow John on Twitter or you can catch him at the Wanstead Tap tonight or at Waterstones Piccadilly next weeke. More details on his website.
News bits
Talking of housing… On Monday City AM described the “housing nightmare” that it says “millions of Londoners” are about to slip into thanks to rent going up at the same time bills start to rise and “the UK is set to experience the biggest financial squeeze in 60 years”.
The four people who staged a protest on the balcony of Belgravia mansion owned by the family of Oleg Deripaska on Monday have been arrested. Deripaska is one of seven oligarchs to be sanctioned by the UK and the mansion was purchased for around £25m in 2003 (although he is now saying that he doesn’t even own the mansion).
(And if you haven’t yet seen the video of the guy trying to throw a bag of food up to the balcony, you should take a look).
Over the weekend, the Times (paywall alert) published a long article on the “cancerous rot at the heart” of London’s cultural world. They’re talking about massive donations from Russian oligarchs. For more on this see our ‘Welcome to Londongrad’ issue from the end of February.
Also over the weekend the Observer published this in-depth feature (complete with Kubrickian imagery) on the “megalopolis of engineering” that is the Elizabeth line (still no opening date though).
The mayor is going to light a ‘legacy flame’ on 22 July to mark the 10th anniversary of the London Olympics and to try and “reawaken the ‘feel good’ spirit felt by many across the country at the time.” Think it’s going to take more than a torch at this rate.
In case you’d forgotten, there are some council elections happening in May. The latest polls put Labour at 54% in London, a whopping thirty points ahead of the Tories.
The plans to turn Finsbury Circus Gardens (aka ‘London’s oldest public park’) into a “haven for people and wildlife” have been given the go ahead. The largest park in the Square Mile will be getting an ‘urban forest’ and a pavilion café “nestling in a ‘secret garden’”.
