Building without End

‘Even blindfolded,’ Emanuel Litvinoff wrote of the interwar East End in Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), ‘I’d have known where we were by the smell of the different streets – reek of rotten fruit: Spitalfields; scent of tobacco warehouses: Commercial Street … Hanbury Street and the pungency of beer from Charrington’s brewery. Then Brick Lane, with half the women from our street jostling among the market stalls.’

The smells have changed – now it’s mostly spices, novelty coffee and vintage mothballs – and the brewers have long moved out of Spitalfields. The market stalls are still there, although the locals no longer come looking for bargains. What’s left of the Truman Brewery, besides its tall brick chimney, is a mixture of cafés, bars, shops and music venues on both sides of Brick Lane. The owner of the site, Truman Estates Limited, plans to demolish much of it and build a shopping mall and several office blocks.

Activists objecting to the proposals launched a campaign to Save Brick Lane in 2020. Concerned about potential rent increases and losses to local businesses, they went door-knocking to let people know about the plans. Many residents had been unaware of the applications, Jonathan Moberly told me, as he showed me around an exhibition that chronicles the history of the place and outlines the envisaged changes. It’s free to visit at the Kobi Nazrul Centre between 12 p.m. and 4 p.m. every weekend until the end of the year.

Tower Hamlets has more than 23,000 households on its waiting list for social housing. The developer’s only nod to the problem is a block of 39 ‘luxury units’, five ‘affordable homes’ and six council flats. A model of the building in the exhibition looks tiny compared to the gated corporate enclosure next to it. The latter ‘offers nothing to the resident community’, according to Nijjor Manush, a group representing Bengalis and Bangladeshis in the UK. One of its founders, Fatima Rajina, told me that the residents and traders of Spitalfields ‘would benefit from being included in such major plans’.

The application for the mall was approved at a council meeting in 2021. Only three councillors voted: Kevin Brady and Kahar Chowdhury for the proposal, and Abdul Mukit against it. The other four committee members were not allowed to vote. One was excluded for attending online, and the others because they hadn’t been on the committee at the time of an earlier meeting. Believing the council’s restrictions on voting to be unlawful, the campaigners took them to court. The High Court and Court of Appeal rejected their case. A Supreme Court decision is expected soon.

There are reasons to believe that the dull multi-storey blocks and chain stores would spoil the character of the surrounding conservation area. Another historic building in Tower Hamlets, the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, recently got the green light for redevelopment. It’s currently sitting empty, accumulating graffiti, despite all the pledges to revive it.

In September, Tower Hamlets Council came up with an alternative master plan for the Brick Lane site, with 345 new homes and improved public spaces. It had been part of Lutfur Rahman’s manifesto for the 2022 council elections. ‘We will end the slow destruction of our local heritage,’ the mayor wrote, ‘most grimly represented by the Truman Brewery… being handed over to luxury developers.’ The master plan may reflect the community’s interests, but it carries no legal weight. Neither do the developer’s promises. Bangla Town Cash & Carry, for example, is supposed to move to the ground floor of the new residential block, but the campaigners wouldn’t be surprised if a branch of Waitrose appeared there instead.

‘Everything’s OK,’ Rafique Miah, the director of Bangla Town Cash & Carry, told me. The grocery shop has been around for 29 years and serves three to four hundred customers a day. Whatever happens, Miah said, it will survive.

‘The building was without end,’ Monica Ali wrote in Brick Lane (2003). ‘Above, somewhere, it crushed the clouds … Nazneen, hobbling and halting, began to be aware of herself. Without a coat, without a suit, without a white face, without a destination. A leafshake of fear – or was it excitement? – passed through her legs.’ The novel’s heroine, walking through the City of London in the 1980s, is both scared of and fascinated by what will soon become, in the campaigners’ words, a ‘tsunami of crude corporate development’.

The area became associated with the YBAs in the late 1980s and early 1990s; Gilbert and George have lived and worked there since 1968. Moberly once approached the duo in the street, offering campaign leaflets. ‘No thanks,’ they said. They are not the only locals unwilling to support the campaign. Walking down Brick Lane, I talked to several restaurant workers, who sounded positive about the future. A man running a bookshop around the corner told me he didn’t mind change: ‘Sometimes it’s necessary.’ At a nearby pub, a woman behind the bar said: ‘It’s nothing to do with us.’

Before considering the proposals, Tower Hamlets Council was meant to consult those living or working within twenty metres from the site, but then the distance was reduced to ten metres, apparently because of high postage costs. Nevertheless, the planning department has received more than seven thousand letters of objection. Across the road from Spitalfields, another controversial plan – a giant scheme threatening to swallow Liverpool Street station – met with resistance from heritage groups. Last week an alternative proposal was announced; it looks more sensitive to the station’s appearance.

Save Brick Lane, Rajina told me, wants ‘the entire site of the Truman Brewery to be used for social housing’ and have ‘green spaces, community centres with childcare provision … resources for the youth in the area and a GP surgery’. The campaigners hope for wider effects too. If the Supreme Court decides that the council had no right to limit its members’ ability to vote in meetings, other local authorities may also have to amend their constitutions.