Mark Chalmers

Mutuality – our ability to help one another – depends on opportunity and altruism, but at its root lies shared values.  A willingness to find common ground, whether through education, the quotidian of working alongside someone for years, or friendships struck up through a common interest, is the thing that matters.  Maybe that’s why the Big Society is struggling to catch on.  It’s an paradoxical notion, this edict from the top down to be “bottom-up”, especially as it comes from the political right who not so long ago declared there was no such thing as society.  In fact, if you are prepared to go out into the world and live, show your worth and share what you have, then you will always find people happy to help you in return.  Sometimes politicians become blind to the fact that they’re human, too.

Perhaps the epiphany came when I was hundreds of miles from home in a suburb of Manchester, where I’d crashed out on a futon in the spare room of a redbrick terrace.  We spent the evening sharing experiences, then pasta for breakfast, sweep the Rizlas from the ashtrays and thanks to our samaritan.  Everyone was a little bit richer for having shared the things we held in common, then after the morning showers cleared we thought about hitting the motorway – maybe stopping off en route to have a look at a huge rotting seminary somewhere deep in Lancashire.

Today, the Young Turks coalesce around internet movements, keen to challenge the risk-averse world we live in, to seek out some kind of imagination and adventure in a world which increasingly holds us back.  In the 20th century, it was politics that fired people up: Kropotkin’s plans for Mutual Aid; the Red Clydesiders during the Great War, the Jarrow Marchers during the Depression, the French radicals of the late ‘60’s, the UCS Work-In during the 1970’s.  Earlier this year, I mentioned the last of these, to mark the passing of Jimmy Reid.  Another notable who wasn’t around to see in 2011 is Colin Ward, who was referred to as an “anarchist philosopher” in many obituaries.  He may have been seen as such by his obituarists, but most of all, he was the man who put into practice what the Situationists and other radicals of Paris ‘68 talked about, argued about, and chain-smoked Gitanes about in Rive Gauche cafes. 

Ward’s ideas may not have begat the “The Big Society”, but they had everything to do with mutual aid and cooperative self-help.  He believed that social policy should be conceived from the ground up.  His interest in housing issues led him to support squatting movements, housing co-ops and self-builders – he promoted practical, grass-roots action over utopian dreams of revolution.  “Anarchy, for Colin Ward, is simply any social space in which the techniques of mutuality predominate. It is a social space which people enter and leave freely; relate as equals; and do something creative, to solve a problem, meet a need, or just enjoy creativity for its own sake.  And the aim of anarchism is to try to push and shove society in the direction of greater anarchy in this sense.  Thus, Ward emphasised that anarchy is, in fact, already very much part of our social world.”

On a recent trip to Bristol, I spotted a housing co-op in practice: a relatively rare thing in the UK, but which makes up for the fierce poverty and dereliction in the city, summed up by the burnt-out concrete shell of the Parcelforce depot which glowers over Temple Meads station.  In any other British city, land values for such a prime site would have seen it re-used or cleared long ago.  The housing co-operativists took a tract of waste ground with a derelict workshop on it and built their own houses there, with a minimum of state or council interference.  They follow a quiet tradition.  Immediately after WW2, displaced people squatted recently-vacated military camps, organising their own communal services.  Then, in the 1970s, a similar movement erupted across vacant local-authority properties, starting out as inner city squats which evolved into the long-term housing co-operatives which still exist.

Out of all the things I’ve written about for this website, or in print for various magazines, the idea of buildings springing from a “systematic anarchy” is the most deeply-rooted.  It was planted some time in the 1990’s, and underlay my Honours dissertation, which saw me set off in search of a sustainable architecture rooted in low-tech salvage and re-use.  Arguably it was spawned by the casual recycling which has always gone on in the farms and woodyards of Angus, which is the antithesis of the architect’s dream of the walled city as a self-sufficient environment, a city-state on its own as a cyberpunk setting, dystopian hive city, or an overpopulated arcology.

Years ago I knew an old guy called Jim Murray who lived in one of a row of cottar houses that lie behind Dundee, at Burnside of Duntrune.  He made his living by fixing up old bikes – he had several sheds full of them – and the most he would charge for one was a tenner.  They weren’t bonny to look at but they were mechanically sound, and affordable for folk on a low wage, or a laddie saving up from his paper round.  His culture of salvage and repair is alien to the portrayal of cycling these days – the advertising and editorials in bike magazines shows shiny modern 24-gear bikes with carbon fibre frames and suspension forks.  The bikes cost over £1000, and represent the technological, consumerist fix which I’ve discussed before – but there’s no point in encouraging people to cycle if they can’t afford a bike. 

The same argument should be applied to buildings.  By 2008, British society had reached a point where many people were latched to houses they couldn’t afford, and this affected both home owners and people renting in the private sector, too.  The more “systematic” of the anarchists offer an alternative: they follow a tradition of folk who still believe in the notion of society as a two-way process, although I suspect they read mainly Tolkein and Hesse in their youth.  Many adhere to a very conventional non-conformism, in Jonathan Meades’ apt phrase – and certainly some of the buildings created by them at Findhorn, and the C.A.T. in Machynlleth, have more than a passing resemblance to hobbit houses – but the underlying principles are sound even if the resulting buildings don’t appeal to architectural sensibilities.

Lucien Kroll is one of few architects to actually build in this way – not only carrying out the social engagement which Ralph Erskine did at Byker, or enabling people to muck in with construction, as in Walter Segal’s schemes – but providing a matrix within which people can change everything about their houses, using whatever materials they have to hand.  Kroll’s scheme at Alencon is the opposite side of the sustainability coin to the “bolt-on High Tech” approach based on expensive photo-voltaics, aero-generators and electric cars which our Big Government seems keen on.  Lucien Kroll took on the doctrinaire approach of Belgian bureaucrats because he realised that, rather like this Big Society caper, there’s no point in discussing any kind of “society” unless you can provide a roof over heads at a price people can pay.

I’ll carry on this train of thought in a future article…