Placing Politics: Home and the Right to Habitation in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Zadie Smith’s NW

Abstract

In April 2013, four decades after Robin Hood Gardens welcomed its first residents, the process of removing the concrete housing complex began in Poplar, East London. The proposal to demolish had been controversial: Robin Hood Gardens was a landmark brutalist building designed by Alison and Peter Smithson that housed a heterogeneous community of some of the capital’s poorest residents, but by the beginning of the twenty-first century it was in a state of significant disrepair. On one side of the debate were those like Stephen Oliver, Bishop of Stepney, who in a letter to Andy Burnham — then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport — decried the complex as a ‘massively bad place to live’ and argued that ‘it would be […] a social disaster to preserve these buildings at the cost of much needed and long-term regeneration’ (personal communication, 16 March 2009). On the other side were those such as the editorial staff of the periodical Building Design, who considered Robin Hood Gardens to be an architectural masterpiece that was eminently capable of being refurbished and retained. Along with the Twentieth Century Society, a conservationist organisation that campaigns for the recognition of architecture in Britain since 1914, Building Design lobbied to establish a case for granting the complex protected status, eliciting endorsements from high-profile architects such as Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid. However, this coalition of significant figures from the architectural establishment was defeated when Burnham issued the verdict that ‘on balance, Robin Hood Gardens was not successful housing and consequently not a particularly good example of housing design’ (cited in Hurst 2009: n.p.). Four years after this judgement was issued, the Smithsons’ housing complex was torn down.