In his stunning, controversial recent article for the New York Times, author China Mieville describes the London Docklands, the definitive Thatcherite regenerated playground of the rich as “a thuggish and hideous middle-finger-flipped glass-and-steel at the poor of the East End, every night a Moloch's urinal dripping sallow light on the Isle of Dogs”. London is a city being overbuilt for the advantage of someone, but that someone doesn't appear to be the people who make London breathe. As Mieville writes, “Everyone knows there's a catastrophe unfolding, that few can afford to live in their own city.”
In his recent review for Eye Magazine, it is within this population that Rick Poynor locates the author of Savage Messiah, Laura Oldfield Ford. "She tells East Enders sick of being 'pogrommed' out of their estates by yuppies that the solution lies in their own hands: Wreck it! Loot it! Burn it!" he writes: "Embedded at ground level, Ford exposes a dispossessed, deeply disaffected alternative London to which out-of-touch political masters should have paid more heed."
Via the Verso blog.
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