‘Justice’ Comes to Islington: A London borough makes townhouses available to the poor.
‘Justice’ Comes to Islington by Theodore Dalrymple
An interesting experiment is about to be conducted in London. A public-housing authority has constructed exact replicas of elegant early-Victorian townhouses on one side of Union Square in Islington, of the kind much coveted by bankers and lawyers in the nearby financial center, the famed (or ill-famed) City. The authority will rent these houses to relatively poor families at a steep discount. The scheme is revealing from at least three points of view: architectural, social, and politico-economic.
Architecturally, the houses are a reproach to the criminal stupidity, barbarity, and incompetence of postwar British architects, who made so much of urban Britain a visual hell. Whoever built the houses has followed the Victorian pattern exactly, without the need to leave his trace on it as a dog does with a tree. Recognizing that he could do no better, he has done the same; the result is more important than the architect’s need to prove his originality. Such replication might have been the dream of the population, but it has been the nightmare of architects, with their egoistic need to prove their supposed artistry.