Talking tall buildings, sky pools and kebab fiction with novelist, Will Wiles
Part two of our conversation with the author, journalist and Shard fan
This is the second part of our chat with the author and journalist, Will Wiles. In part one we talked Mounds, Plazas and Psychogeography. In the second part of our conversation we dive into sky pools, tussle with tall buildings and the issue of ‘poor doors’, and discuss Will’s new book as well as his latest bit of tasty short fiction.
Let’s talk about London’s skyline, because there’s been quite a bit of back and forth about this recently, with a lot of new planning permissions granted, but also some people worried that London’s ‘character’ is being eroded. Where do you stand on all this?
I'm not against tall buildings, per se. I think they can be useful and beautiful things. London mostly did not build tall for a long time. That changed around the turn of the century, and Ken Livingstone introduced what he called ‘clusters’, which was his way of trying to reconcile lots of tall buildings with the argument against them, which is that they create congestion at ground level.
The solution to that was to put clusters of tall buildings at major transport interchanges, and the earliest places proposed for that were London Bridge (where the Shard is the most visible legacy of the whole idea) and Stratford was also proposed, although those plans changed quite a lot as a result of the Olympics.
Ironically the biggest legacy of this ‘clusters’ plan has been Nine Elms, where there isn’t a transport interchange particularly. It is getting the Northern Line extension and so on, but there was no public transport there really, apart from Vauxhall which was already horribly congested. What we've ended up with is this pretty shocking collection of buildings at Nine Elms. While they’re not all ugly buildings themselves, as a cluster it's incoherent.
Tall buildings are often appreciated (or not appreciated) from a distance and they have an impact on environments from which they’re quite far removed, so they have to be considered in those terms. Towers have individual merits as architecture, but how they work in relation to each other must also be considered. The Shard, in magnificent isolation, is a success I think. It's a landmark. It helps orient you in the city, its profile on the horizon is no more or less offensive than a church spire. It’s perfect in a lot of ways. We can argue about its uses, a hugely expensive hotel and a lot of empty apartments, but as a presence on the skyline I think it's actually really good. I’m a Shard fan!
When I was writing Plume there was a plan at one point for it to end with a fist fight at The Building Centre, during which the then Mayor, Boris Johnson would be impaled on a model of the Shard. It would spear him in the bottom. But I had someone speared in the bottom in a previous book…
You can’t do that in every book can you, really?
Well it could become a kind of trademark!
We can’t talk about Nine Elms without talking about the ‘sky pool’ can we?
I feel a bit more ambivalent about the sky pool than a lot of people. It's not the first building in London to have a swimming pool in it, but it is the most visible swimming pool in London. And it’s perhaps its visibility and its in-your-face quality that rubs people the wrong way.
I’m a sort of 20th-century, gee-whiz technophile at heart (hence my liking for tall buildings), and I’ve also got a bit of a soft spot for things that bridge between tall buildings at height. I like that Futurist élan. Obviously, having a transparent pool filled with water (as pools tend to be) strung between skyscrapers makes me nervous.
To be fair, it probably makes everyone a little bit nervous.
But it’s not being in the pool that worries me. I wouldn’t particularly like to be in the flats immediately below the pool. I can't really imagine what that’s like, and if I was going to write a JG Ballard-type, Nine Elms story (which I might yet do, although I’m sure I wouldn’t be alone) I think one of the flats directly below the pool is where I’d start.
I think maybe I feel a bit more ambivalent about it because I’ve met Hal Foster, the architect who did it, and we talked about it long before it was built. I thought it was a very interesting idea then, and it's still quite fun.
It's not a very London thing in lots of ways though. That kind of ostentation is more associated with places like Dubai or Singapore. I wonder the extent to which people disagree with it as a pool, or disagree with it as a symbol. I mean it is a very powerful symbol. The question is ‘of what?’. Inequality, for many. It’s suggestive of a floating, carefree class of citizen, removed from the rest of society.
What about the idea of segregation at Nine Elms? There’s been a lot of discussion about ‘poor doors’ and the like.
I feel a bit ambivalent about some of the arguments about ‘poor doors’. I can understand why there's a gut reaction against people being treated differently. It immediately feels unfair. But in the building we live in (which is a new build apartment building), we don't have access to the shared garden because our flat opens onto the street. As a consequence, we don't pay for the shared garden. That strikes me as being pretty reasonable. It would be unreasonable to land social housing tenants with huge bills for maintaining suspended swimming pools and all the various other dining clubs and private cinemas and all the other facilities that these blocks have, just in the name of fairness.
The idea of having an ‘economy class’ strand of residents, where you don't get all the bells and whistles, but at the same time you don't get hammered with service charges; that doesn't strike me as being inherently unreasonable. Where it gets tricky, is the stigmatisation. Which I do think is very unreasonable; these tiny little grotty side entrances, fenced-off rat-runs by the bins, and all those very visible signs of division and exclusion in some developments.
[Note: two days after we spoke to Will, Inside Housing ran an article in which resident of the Embassy Gardens development claimed their requests to access basic services such as post collection had been refused.]
Is there an alternative solution do you think? Something that could avoid dividing people in that way?
This situation arose because of a New Labour-era compromise, whereby local authorities would meet social housing targets via the planning system, by obliging private developers to include a certain percentage of affordable housing in new developments, which leads to these stark divisions, and also leads to a great deal of kind of dodgy accountancy in terms of what gets counted as social housing. If local authorities were empowered to build housing for themselves, and the problem wasn’t just palmed off onto reluctant developers, we’d get better social housing, and more social housing. And it could be planned properly.
In terms of improving social housing delivered by developers, I do have a particular feeling that 100% of the facilities for children should be available to 100% of the tenants. I mean playgrounds and so on. It seems to me sharply unfair to exclude children from the social housing portions of developments from shared playgrounds. That should be mandated by law.
Being excluded from the private cinemas and dining clubs and floating swimming pools and so on seems a little bit more arguable in expense terms. But I think children should be regarded as universal citizens. There are so few secure places for children in the city, it seems acutely unfair to exclude them from playgrounds as you do see in some developments with great big galvanised fences screening off the entrances.
Let’s finish by talking about your work. What’s the new book about?
It’s called The Last Blade Priest and it's an epic fantasy adventure for adults. It's a pure pleasure project. I started writing it just for my own amusement, because I wanted to do something different after Plume, which is sort of a ‘doomy’ and personal novel. I wanted to do something next that was filled with adventure and excitement. Battles and monsters! So I started writing it while I was still writing Plume.
That sounds like fun! Are you going to write nine of them as a giant cycle now? Is this going to be the rest of your life?
Well I will if they pay me to do it! No, I mean I’d like to write three of them, and this one ends with an opening for the next. I think it works as a self contained story too.
And you wrote some short fiction in lockdown too, right?
Yes, for Pit magazine (above). During the lockdown I found I didn't have the concentration to write novels, so I started working on horror stories instead. Kind of ‘weird tales’. Pit magazine got in touch to ask if I wanted to write anything for them, and said that their forthcoming issue was about kebabs. I said, “Actually I have a horror story that with a few tweaks could fit really nicely”. I don’t produce a lot of short fiction, but I’m very proud of it, so I hope that people enjoy this really gross story about meat coming out of the television.
Sounds very Cronenberg-esque. Like body horror, but with chilli sauce.
Yeah. I think it’s definitely influenced by Videodrome, but with extra greasiness!
You can pick up issue 10 of Pit magazine (which contains s sh’s short story The Meat Stream) via their website. And if you want more Will, follow him on Twitter and sign up to his newsletter.
And the rest…
The tube strike that was planned for tomorrow is no longer happening. According to the RMT “there are sufficient grounds to suspend” the strike action but “we remain in dispute and will be engaging in further discussions with a view to reaching a settlement.”
The mayor’s office has denied claims that they sacked women’s campaigner, Joan Smith, after she raised concerns about transgender women using domestic abuse refuges. Smith claims she was fired from her role as co-chair of the violence against women and girls (VAWG) board by email after she wrote to to Sadiq Khan saying that “female victims of male violence should not have to share safe spaces with ‘individuals who have male bodies’”.
Maxima Kitchen (a professional kitchen supplier) has “analysed thousands of food hygiene ratings from the Food Standards Agency” to find out which London Boroughs are the most and least hygienic. Kensington and Chelsea came out on top, with 82% of food businesses receiving a Food Hygiene Rating of 5. Waltham Forest (where 13.2 per cent of businesses have a rating of 2) came bottom of the list.
Plans to redevelop an abandoned Edwardian furniture store in Seven Sisters have been abandoned after protests from local traders. In the Guardian’s Comment is Free section Aditya Chakrabortty celebrates the decision, saying it sends “a clear message that the old model of regeneration is broken”. While over at OnLondon, ex-Guardian journalist Dave Hill has a different view: “This is a classic case of a coalition of protesters, assisted by politicians and journalists who ought to know better, pursuing private agendas against neighbourhood improvements because the changes proposed offend their ideological prejudices, personal ambitions and bourgeois snobberies”.
Time Out has an article on #MyBodyIsMine, the shop on Carnaby Street set up by three London tattoo artists in partnership with ActionAid with the aim of combatting violence against women and girls.
Vice has profiled Armin Loetscher (AKA Sweety), the 83-year-old club owner who is “keeping Soho’s spirit alive”.