Tracey Emin is leading the battle to save the ‘cultural heart’ of East London from developers
For Tracey Emin, it’s less a case of “not in my back yard”, more “not in my Brick Lane”. This month, she joined many of Britain’s leading artists in sending an open letter to the capital’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, deploring the redevelopment of what they call the “cultural heart” of east London.
Emin and fellow resident artists - among them Dinos Chapman, Rachel Whiteread and Gary Hume - claim plans to build a cluster of towers around Brick Lane, Bethnal Green and Shoreditch are “a latterday gold rush” that represents “corporate plunder of the most cynical kind”.
So it is with trepidation that I point out to Emin - who has lived in the East End since 1982 - the whiff of nimbyism surrounding the Save Shoreditch campaign. Thankfully, her famous temper is directed at Livingstone. “I’m sure he wouldn’t like it if it was happening where he lives,” she fumes. “These plans have been developed with no regard for the community whatsoever. I’ve tried to discuss [our complaints] with him and he was totally dismissive. He said that people like me, snobby people, are stopping progress.”
Emin, 44, first moved to the East End to study at the Sir John Cass school of art, media and design in Whitechapel. The area was still, quite literally, a bomb site. “Most of Brick Lane was derelict. There were still a lot of Jewish fabric shops, with only 10 Bangladeshi restaurants,” she recalls. In the early 1990s, when the original Spitalfields market closed to move to new premises further east in Leyton, empty market buildings could be rented for next to nothing.
The Young British Artists (YBAs) - painters, sculptors and conceptual artists, named after a series of exhibitions of their works staged at the Saatchi Gallery in the early 1990s - were quick to seize their opportunity. Abigail Lane lived on Curtain Road; Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume had studios just round the corner. A few years later, Emin recalls, “we all had studios in Wentworth Street and Brick Lane: me, Mat Collishaw, Sam Taylor-Wood, Jake and Dinos Chapman”.
As rents started to rise, less fortunate artists were forced to move further east, to cheaper Hackney Wick or Stratford. Thanks to Charles Saatchi’s patronage of the YBAs, however, their reputation soared, and in 1993 Emin and Lucas rented a shop on Redchurch Street, at the top of Brick Lane, to showcase their wares. Everything for sale had been made in the studios upstairs, from T-shirts and badges to posters and tiny sculptures.
Since then, Emin - who achieved notoriety with her tent entitled Everyone I Have Ever Slept with 1963-1995 and My Bed, which was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 1999 - has amassed her own property portfolio in Spitalfields. In 2001, she bought a five-storey Huguenot townhouse for £900,000 - a house on her street recently sold for £2.4m. She has also acquired a former weaving works, Tenter Ground, for just under £4m. Those who bought at the start of the influx of artists have fared even better: the artist duo Gilbert and George, who live around the corner, bought their weavers’ townhouse for £22,000 in the 1970s.
Emin is justifiably proud of her Grade II-listed house. It is, she claims, one of the oldest townhouses in Britain, built in 1729. “You’re living inside an antique - it has all the original floorboards and staircases - so you have a responsibility to keep it functioning and running properly,” she says. “I’m constantly repairing the wood-panelled rooms, clearing the guttering, mending the slate roof.” She has tried to reflect the Huguenots’ sense of style in the house, using a Farrow & Ball palette of “murky off-whites, greeney-greys and a couple of wilder colours, such as blue-black”.
The Huguenots - French Protestants who coined the term refugiés when they were driven out of France by the Catholic king Louis XIV in the 1680s - were silk-weavers and artisans. Theirs were some of the first brick townhouses, after the destruction of wooden houses by the Great Fire of London in 1666. According to Emin, they also invented wall paint, replacing dour English plaster with muted whites and greens.
“The Huguenots understood about building and about terraced houses,” she says. “They are much bigger than they look from the outside, but they’re on a good human scale, so you don’t feel like you’re rattling around. Mine has 10 rooms - some people could have 15, depending on the layout - and they’re proportioned well, with beautiful light that goes through both sides of the house.”
Emin vows never to sell the house or the weaving works, but intends instead to preserve them as a piece of history. Tenter Ground (named after the tenterhooks the weavers used to hang their fabrics out to dry) will be renovated in the same style as her house, keeping all the original fittings and floors. And it will be used as a studio, in the tradition of the weavers who first inhabited it.
“It’s brilliant, the last building of its kind,” she enthuses. “It needed to be bought by someone like me.” It went on sale at £1.5m, but Emin is believed to have paid more than that again to buy out the leases of the current tenants. It will be 8,000 sq ft when she has completed her extension.
Emin says that her problem with the developers is not about regeneration, but about the local residents’ right to daylight. “I am pro-commerce, I welcome regeneration of all areas and I really like new architecture. What I’m against is blocking people’s light in residential areas.”
The proposals are for a group of buildings providing commercial and residential units, ranging from four to 25 storeys, on Bethnal Green Road, in the low-rise heart of the Brick Lane area. The local authority, Tower Hamlets, has approved the plans, which Emin says will mean that many of the East End’s historic streets will be shrouded in perpetual shade.
The developer, Telford Homes, says: “This regeneration, creating new homes, new jobs and positive mixed-use redevelopment, is designed to revitalise the area close to the cultural quarter of Brick Lane.”
Local campaigners argue that the approval of these buildings will open the floodgates for developments at Bishopsgate Goodsyard, in Shoreditch. They believe plans are soon to be submitted by the developer Hammerson for a group of towers up to 50 storeys high, covering an area of 13 acres.
Emin claims developers wouldn’t get away with it in urban hot spots such as Soho or Clerkenwell, but says the East End is still thought of as “slummy”: “They think there aren’t people there who care. That’s why it’s important that we artists sign this letter. We care about the way things look.”
While admitting she is using her celebrity to speak up for the area, Emin insists she is not singling out her coterie for special treatment. “I’m not saying artists should have a welfare state,” she says. “I’m saying it would be good if some of the original infrastructure could stay. That’s what makes the area special. Commerce should come in and have an understanding or sympathy for the area, not bulldoze and destroy what was beautiful about it.”
For Emin, the East End is of almost mythical importance. The Romans used the area east of the city walls as a burial ground; in medieval times, a hospital, St Mary Spital, was built on the site. “In the ground just near my house, there is apparently a runic circle,” she says.
“The whole area is supposed to have a healing quality, which is why the hospital was built here.”
It is, Emin acknowledges fate to discover cheap, spacious areas with interesting history and good aesthetics, only to see the developers move in. Shivering away in their freezing cold shop in the early 1990s, she and Lucas had always known they were on to something. “We used to say, ‘In 20 years’ time, this place will have bijoux cafes with umbrellas outside, and the secondhand car lot will be long gone’,” Emin recalls. “We were absolutely right.”
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