Amid the animal gifs, new baby photos and political rants on Facebook, two stories have been cropping up on the feeds of my friends, from journalists to old college buddies and older civil servants.
With the closure of Fabric, the Islington venue more institution than nightclub, alarms were being raised that the night tube, heralded as a way to make London nightlife easier and safer, was bound to be a waste of time and effort. The second story is about Justine Simons, London’s deputy mayor for culture, committing to securing “artist zones” in the city, predominantly in Hackney Wick and Peckham, where artists can be guaranteed low-cost, secure studio space.
Most young, or underpaid, artists would struggle to find fault with the idea. Simons pointed out: “If you look at the average salary of an artist, it’s about £10,000 a year. The average property price in London is about £600,000 a year. There is real pressure on affordability. We’re predicting we’ll lose 30% of artist spaces in the next five years so that is a particular pressure area.”
Anyone who struggles to get by should be paid more – we are one of the richest countries in the world and wealth inequality is a huge problem.
But affordability is an issue for millions of people in London, taking up huge swaths of their mental energy. The cleaners, carers and retail assistants I meet in the course of my work are paid a pittance, but have not been singled out as needing special protection to be able to avoid eviction and being forced out of the area they’ve lived their entire life.
The argument from city hall is no doubt that artists make cities “vibrant” and create an edge that attracts tourism with cultural capital then converted into hard cash. But artists don’t live independently of everyone else as envisaged by a siloed, city hall-mandated “artist zone”. The infrastructure of London, and of every other city, town or village, is dependent upon the work of everyone to keep things functioning, trains running, shops open, hospitals providing care, and cash flowing through the local economy. If artists can live somewhere with subsidies, but the only other residents are the hyper-wealthy, then the system breaks down.
Recently, I bought a friend’s child a copy of Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?, believing that no child is too young to learn the importance of social reproduction. In one scene, a picture of a farmer, firefighter, police officer, doctor, mother, teacher and baby appears with the firm slogan: ‘Everybody Works’. The value of people is not rooted in commerce – the mother caring for the child is labouring as much as the doctor.
City hall would do well to remember this: singling out small areas for artists to work in with loose protections from the claws of property developers is a sticking-plaster solution. A far better response would be to realise that affordability is a problem that faces everyone, so perhaps solving it is the best way forward.
We may need more studios in London, but we definitely need more social housing – and urgently, if we don’t want our schools, hospitals and transport systems to struggle.
People might travel from far-flung destinations to queue for a chance to gawp at exhibitions in the Tate Modern, Serpentine, Whitechapel or any number of London’s galleries, but without staff to let them in, serve them in the cafe, drive their buses, or clean the streets, the experience is diminished.
London feels as though it’s being hollowed out: that’s a far greater problem than a few more studios can solve.
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