Red London

Few tourists strolling the south bank of the Thames in London realize that they are going through a carefully constructed showcase for what Owen Hatherley describes in his new book, Red Metropolis: the structures and programs put in place when the political left ran Great Britain’s largest city. On one end of the procession sits County Hall, the massive, longtime home of the London city government, until the national government eliminated home rule and sold off the building. At the other end is a new City Hall, designed by Norman Foster, housing the current incarnation of the London government. In between lies a series of city-built cultural venues—the Royal Festival Hall, National Film Theatre, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Hayward Gallery, and National Theatre—and Oxo Tower Wharf, a mixed-use complex in an old power station, developed by a nonprofit cooperative with local government backing. Nothing is named after Marx, nor is the architecture a tip-off to the socialist vision behind it, but at least in its heyday, the South Bank announced to the world an alternative to capitalist urbanism.

In recent years, as Washington swings between gridlock and reaction, U.S. progressives have looked to local government as an arena for attracting followers, trying out social programs, and improving the lives of constituents. Seattle passed a $15 minimum wage law seven years ago, followed the next year by Los Angeles (with both laws mandating phased increases), while the federal minimum remains a measly $7.25 an hour. The Chicago City Council now has a six-member socialist caucus. Next year’s election almost certainly will bring a crew of socialists to New York’s City Council as well. But there has not been much systematic thinking, at least in the United States, about the possibilities and limits of municipal progressivism, let alone municipal socialism.

Hatherley dives deep into the issue in his lively, opinionated account of what the left did when it had control over London’s government. It is an eye-opening story of extraordinary accomplishment. During long stretches since the late nineteenth century, leftists or left-liberal alliances have directed the administrative structure for London, the Greater London region, or the boroughs within it. With the capital city often at odds politically with much of the nation—never more so than now, with the Labour Party in firm control of the region but floundering elsewhere—municipal leftism not only filled a vacuum in social provision when Conservatives ruled nationally; it also served as a model for what socialists might do if they won control of Parliament.

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Housing and architecture figure large in Red Metropolis. Hatherley has a longstanding interest in the relationship between politics and the built environment, evident in his earlier books, including A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain and Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings. But more importantly, from the late 1880s through most of the past century, housing has been at the top of the left agenda in London, as working-class families, generation after generation, have found it difficult or impossible to afford decent, sanitary living quarters. Though Hatherley’s purpose is ultimately political, he provides a wealth of information and insight about design and planning. (Red Metropolis includes many photographs of the buildings under discussion, but readers unfamiliar with London geography might want to keep Google Earth open as they read.)

Hatherley begins with the Progressives, an assortment of liberals, trade unionists, and socialists, including George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, who prefigured the yet to be founded Labour Party. The alliance ran the elected London County Council from its creation in 1889 until 1907. Among the LCC’s legacy is what is considered by some the first municipal housing project anywhere, the Boundary Estate, a solidly constructed and architecturally distinguished cluster of buildings just a mile from the Bank of England. That project and others that followed were designed in-house by the LCC’s Architects’ Department and built by its Works Department, a publicly owned construction company...