Britons are increasingly aware of living in a society plagued by fear and unhappiness. Even when actual levels of crime are reduced, the fear of crime is up. In Ground Control Anna Minton sets out on a journey around Britain to answer the questions, how did this happen and what could we do about it?

From Manchester, which hands out more ASBOS than other city, to Liverpool, 'City of Culture', gated communities to sink estates, this is a frank and excoriating look at the effect that property and planning have on our lives - often in unexpected ways. More new spaces are being created in British towns than at any time since the Second World War. But they're all privately owned and privately controlled, and they are changing not only the very fabric of our cities, but our understanding of public space, of citizenship, of fear and of trust.

Anna Minton reaches out to all those affected by these changes. From home owners to kids on ASBOs, policemen to estate agents, Ground Control explores the psychological effects our shared spaces have upon us, and shows us how alternative models produce cultures of greater happiness.

1
Docklands: The Birth of an Idea

This book was conceived in a boom and written in a bust. It is about the
emotional impact of an environment created during the 1990s, a period
when Britain’s unregulated economy built an architecture of boom and
bust. Apartments in gated developments, security, private streets and plazas
are its motifs, sitting side by side with enclaves of poverty. In the 1980s,
when I was growing up, this cityscape, fuelled by the soaring value of private
property, or ‘real estate’, as the Americans would say, barely existed in Britain.
Now, a generation later, this way of doing things, which was pioneered
in London’s Docklands, has taken root in towns and cities around Britain,
changing the physical fabric, the culture and the government of the places
we live in. It’s an approach that owes a lot to American ideas, yet has a peculiarly
British twist.

In 1979, when Mrs Thatcher came to power, Britain’s industrial base was
in the throes of collapse. All around the country industrial heartlands were in
decline, nowhere more visibly than in Docklands. Once the largest port in
the world, Docklands was reduced to a largely derelict wasteland, bereft of
its economic base and identity. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost, factories
were abandoned and the riverfront was crumbling. In 1989, as the Cold War
came to an end and the political economist Francis Fukuyama declared ‘the
end of history’, Canary Wharf, the emblem of Thatcher’s free-market revolution,
was going up.

The foundations of the landmark tower, One Canada Square, the tallest
building in Britain, were laid at the height of the boom. It followed the
deregulation of the fi nancial markets, which was the catalyst for the exponential
growth of the global fi nancial services industry in Britain. The 1980s
established the physical, technological and regulatory framework for an
unfettered financial services industry in the UK, to replace the failing industrial
economy. This ‘new’ economy was powered by the abolition of
exchange controls and the 1986 deregulation of the stock exchange, an
event known as ‘Big Bang’ because of the increase in market activity. It not
only changed the culture of the City of London for ever, it brought with it a
boom in property development which created a new corporate architecture.
Small fi rms, with their personal connections, made way for global
investment banks, which required very large electronic trading floors, trading
in abstract and complex fi nancial instruments like options, derivatives
and futures. As the 1980s progressed, ‘Big Bang’ architecture saw two new
fi nancial centres emerge: in Docklands, and at the nearby Broadgate Centre,
also in east London.

These places were quite unlike any others in Britain. Not because they
were centres for international fi nance, but because they were privately
owned. The Canary Wharf Estate and the Broadgate Centre are private property,
in the same way that a country estate, a shopping mall or someone’s
house is private property. The rules that govern the rest of the city do not
apply. Rather than being unconditionally open to the public, like the rest of
the city, it is up to the owner to decide who is allowed in and what they are
allowed to do there. As a consequence, private-security guards police and
control the area, making sure the rules are enforced.

Alongside the private estates where employees went to work, shop and
enjoy themselves in waterfront bars and restaurants, a new type of high-security
living behind gates and walls mushroomed across Docklands. It introduced
a way of life based on living in gated communities; very popular in
America, it was virtually unknown in Britain. As former warehouses were
turned into waterside apartments overlooking the old docks, Docklands
became one of the earliest places to build large numbers of gated developments,
providing homes for the high-earning professionals who worked in
the neighbouring steel and glass towers. Because much of the area remained
among the poorest and most deprived in Britain, the gates and high security
were marketed to offer reassurance to the fi nance professionals who were
the pioneers of the new economy, living on the frontline.

For Mrs Thatcher and Michael Heseltine, who was instrumental in kickstarting
Docklands as secretary of state for environment, the deprivation of
the area was a central justifi cation for what was being created. The develop-
ment slotted in perfectly with one of the defi ning concepts of Thatcherite
economics: ‘trickle-down’. This is the idea that the creation of wealth in an
area will ‘trickle down’ to the poorer parts which need it the most.

‘Trickle-down’ justified the new private estates, which are underpinned
by the idea of being very profi table ventures in themselves, pulling in high
rents and billing high service charges. Most important of all, they promised
to transform places by increasing not only their own property values but
those in the surrounding area, bringing in so much wealth that it somehow
fl ows out of the gates of the gated properties and ‘trickles down’ to the surrounding
poor. This was the idea of ‘regeneration’, a word which came into
use during the 1980s, and means ‘rebirth’ in Latin. Rather than the more prosaic
‘redevelopment’, it conjures up the image of the phoenix of Canary
Wharf and the new economy rising from the ashes of Docklands and Britain’s
industrial past.

Yet despite the pioneering zeal of their supporters, when they were built
Broadgate and Canary Wharf were controversial, perceived as high-security
enclaves of wealth surrounded by some of the poorest communities in Britain.
They were also exceptional places – areas where business modelled the
area in its own image in what are, after all, fi nance districts. Now, a generation
later, what began specifi cally to serve the needs of business, has become
the standard model for the creation of every new place in towns and cities
across the country. Previously, the government and local councils ‘owned’
the city on behalf of us, the people. Now more and more of the city is owned
by investors, and its central purpose is profi t. The credit crunch may have
slowed the sell-off, but every former inner-city industrial area is trying to
emulate this model, from the waterfronts of Salford Quays and Cardiff to the
controversial demolition programmes of the old industrial northern cities.
This is the architecture of post-industrial New Labour, a government which
witnessed the largest amount of construction in Britain since the post-war
period. But just as the tower blocks and arterial roads of the industrial 1950s
and 1960s sliced through cities and communities and failed to stand the test
of time, the consequences of many of these grand schemes are disturbing.
Because this book is based on a journey around Britain, Docklands, where
the architecture of extreme capitalism fi rst began, seems like a good place to
ask how this happened.

Can you explain the title, Ground Control?

One of the central themes of the book is the growing control of the environment. The book argues that an increasingly controlled environment undermines our personal and collective responsibility, dilutes trust and increases fear and unhappiness. So, I wanted to get control into the title as well as the idea that the book is about place. Ground Control seemed a perfect fit. But ultimately, I’m sure the fact that ‘Space Oddity’ was one of my favourite songs growing up meant the phrase easily came to mind.
 
Is urban planning as fundamental to social happiness as for example, health and education? If so, why do you think it does not get as much air time as these other issues?

The real reason no one takes any notice of planning is because there’s no power there any more, as the checks and balances of the planning system are systematically dismantled. Instead all the power is in property, which fuelled the economy over the last decade, with such disastrous consequences.

There's a real sense in the book of rallying people to know more about the urban spaces around them. Are you angry about the way we live?

I am angry about the head in the sand mentality of policy makers and their determination that there was no alternative other than to copy American policies towards our cities. Those policies have been very controversial in the US, but over here we’ve accepted them almost without question.

Should we be worried about how set ups like gated communities and privately owned shopping malls erode our civil liberties?

Absolutely. The governance of these places is not democratic. It rests on legal contracts and membership and creates places which are not for citizens and society as a whole.
 
Towards the end of the book, you talk about the European approach to shared public space. Which European towns or cities do you have in mind, and how do they differ from those in the UK?

European cities, from Athens and Palermo in the South, to Berlin and Copenhagen in the North, have a more open and free public life and street culture. There is far less emphasis on private security and CCTV, yet crime and fear of crime is also much lower.
 
If there was one thing which you would like Ground Control readers to have lodged permanently in their brain, what would that be?
 
Markets, left to their own devices, cannot create healthy places.