Recent controversy surrounding the demolition of Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar, east London, has exposed an array of prejudices among politicians, architects, and critics. Margaret Hodge’s dismissive remarks on concrete, and determination to demolish The Smithson’s landmark RHG estate of 1972, have inspired Building Design to launch a protection campaign backed by Richard Rogers, articles in The Observer and reports on Radio 4’s Today programme.

But so far all responses have failed to look honestly at the situation, and focused almost exclusively on architectural heritage. The 213 flats, arranged in two 10-storey blocks, are wedged next to the entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel, and in the shadow of Canary Wharf. Rogers’ likening their arrangement ‘to the great Georgian crescents and squares in Bath’ is disingenuous. Apart from a cursory interview with residents who backed the BD campaign, the voices of the residents who currently live in RHG, have not been heard.

Shopna Khan, 34, who lives with her husband and five children in a two-bedroom flat says that over-crowding and leaking were the main reasons people opted for demolition in a vote organised by English Partnership and Tower Hamlets. ‘Most of the vote that English Partnership got is because of over-crowding – people thought it would be a golden opportunity to be re-housed, and get a reasonably-sized house.’ Shopna has been requesting for nine years to be re-housed. As BD focuses on the fate of the crumbling concrete, tenants are now facing an uncertain future. Initial promises of retaining council tenancy have been revised, and the community has no knowledge of where they will be re-housed.

Nasima Begum, mother of two, and administrator in the local school says of Tower Hamlets’ and English Partnerships’ strategy: “They have their own plan, and gradually will be putting things in front of us.” Residents now feel that the vote was swayed with promises of bigger council properties, but that guarantees are not being upheld.

The Smithson’s design of the estate was based on the philosophy that a sense of belonging was crucial to human happiness. They wrote: “Belonging is a basic emotional need. From ‘belonging’ (identity) comes the enriching sense of neighbourliness. The short narrow street of the slum succeeds where spacious redevelopment frequently fails.” Their ‘streets in the sky’ were intended to foster this spirit. The couple would have been delighted to hear mothers describe how they leave doors open and spend the day outside, or going in and out of each other’s flats.

The Smithons would be less delighted that cracks and leakage are a constant part of these families’ lives. There are other problems with the design. In the duplexes the small kitchens are separated from the rest of the living areas by steep awkward stairs. Shallow ‘balconies’ – no more than a foot in depth – are another missed opportunity.

Housing can’t work as a monument or exist as part of architectural history for its own sake. It has to work now in the present, and is ultimately expendable if it is unfit for purpose. So the question is: is RHG fit for purpose, or could it be made so with the £70,000 investment that has been quoted per unit? And if it was refurbished, would it be maintained as social housing or would it, like Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower be ‘snapped up’ by design-savvy buyers?

The Observer’s Stephen Bayley perceives RHG as a “social calamity”, and compares its failure with the success of Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. “The unintelligent housing policies of Tower Hamlets,” he writes, “populated RHG with the tenants least likely to be able to make sensible use of the accommodation. We have to whisper it, but the Unité d’Habitation works because it is populated by teachers, psychologists, doctors, graphic designers, not by single mothers struggling with buggies.”

This statement reveals a prejudice that is indicative of a large proportion of Britain’s media class. If Bayley knew one thing about the people living in RHG, he should know that the predominantly Muslim community who live there tend to stay married. The ingenious use of limited space which families come up with to make a decent home is impressive; the community, self-empowered and well-supported by a progressive local school, provide a network of friendship, and if anyone – heaven forefend – struggles with a buggy, you can be sure that they are soon given a hand.

The Smithson’s brief was not to provide housing for professionals living self-contained lives, it was for families. The flats in RHG do not provide adequately in size or structure for them. No amount of restoration would change this. Internally they fail the families that live there, and many council flats before and since have done a much better job. The vision of The Smithsons is important but when it comes to practise we can improve on what they pioneered. This should be their legacy. There are new materials at hand to meet the same old human needs, which The Smithsons valued but ultimately failed to serve. RHG should be pulled down, but with the provision that the Smithsons’ spirit endures.

Ruth Hedges is a freelance writer and radio producer. She worked with Woolmore Primary to make a series of podcasts, featuring residents from Robin Hood Gardens and the local area designated for regeneration.

Listen to children from Year 5 on what they would like to happen to Robin Hood Gardens and their school

Children on Robin Hood Gardens

Hear what it was like for women arriving as teenagers from Bangladesh into London’s East End

Life in Poplar

Follow Mary’s journey of evacuation from east London to Bedford

Evacuation

Anri Sala – A Second Look
9 Nov – 22 Dec 2007, Hauser & Wirth, London

Outside it’s teeming. Shoppers in Christmas frenzy hoover up Piccadilly, and all its old-style excesses. Inside it’s dark. Pushing a heavy door of the discreetly labelled Hauser and Wirth gallery, the cold blackness is a relief.

Albanian-born artist, Anri Sala, now based in Berlin, has installed reworkings of two works and one new one. The high-vaulted interior feels like a church, although until recently, it was a Midlands Bank. In one corner, spot-lit on a lecturn are gallery notes – written as part-musical score, part-scientific explanation. The creamy parchment and elegant type provide high-minded accompaniment to the videos that are alternately beamed on opposite walls.

Circling in slow dizzy-motion, one film hypnotises with meditative surrealism. The scene is the forecourt of a truck park in Arizona. Sala drives around in sweeping circles while listening to Arizona Public Radio – baroque strains and country riffs phase in and out, switching favour on the air-waves. It could be a loop, but the tarmac, dominated by the sleeping red, blue and silver beasts, emblazoned with ‘Landstar’, ‘Air-cushioned ride’, Prime Inc Swift’, dispels this in the presence of the odd returning trucker.

In the lecturn notes, Sala explains the sound phenomenon as ‘cross-modulation’, where the trucks are blocking and opening-up passageways for radio waves. Such physics is transformed into elegiac disorientation in ‘Air Cushioned Ride’, as it is called. But Sala has taken the work a step further. Commissioning a composer to transcribe the sounds into full musical score, the second film, ‘A Spurious Emission’, depicts the live recording. A presenter makes an announcement, lost to a burst of Baroque strings, in turn swept away by a rousing country chorus, and so on. The musicians, positioned together, perform with po-faced seriousness, as if unaware of each-others’ presence. It is the bringing together of ‘ruptures’ that so concerns Sala’s work. Where the randomness of life provides coincidence and gaps that occur with no conceived alignment.

A recent account by Sala of his childhood in Albania, where his mother was director of the National Library, reveals how she gave Sala access to le font noir, ‘the dark store’ – where all the banned books were kept. This illicit introduction to art in a culture that was enduring its own enforced rupture of artistic and political life, helps explain Sala’s fascination for imaginative leaps in the dark, and indeed the allure of darkness itself. Images, he said, were often cut-out, so texts would appear without illustration.

Heading down into the bowels of the old bank, where the safes that guarded gold still stand, Sala’s final work sits ready for play. The tune of an unreleased Franz Ferdinand song has been hummed, and the drum beat translated into words from Joyce’s Ulysses co-written with writer Jeremy Millar. There is a drum kit and a microphone hooked up to a computer, and a Franz Ferdinand-esque gentleman to aid in your task of bashing out a tune.

On boards are the FF lyrics, and then the Joycean drum notation – ‘Bootless’, ‘Lickitup’ – and lines from Ulysses to guide the style: ‘Chords dark. Lugugubrious. Low. Lumpmusic’, finishing with, ‘He hummed, prolonging in the solemn echo the closes of the bars. Low sank the musician and bars.’

Each effort is recorded and Sala and Franz Ferdinand will make something of these attempts to sing and play along to a new tune, directed by words corralled from the modernist legend of the 20th century.

Each of Sala’s work is immersive, and the randomness navigated and brought into alignment with deft mental agility. Sala expresses a sense of beauty in chance, and an intellectual rigour in taking these further and seeing them through into a new life. His art has a restorative quality, and the collaborative nature of this ‘Second Look’ is part of the making links between the material world, music, science, video, literature and art. The choice in road trips, Joyce and Franz Ferdinand, no accident, then.

Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937
The British Library, until 30 March 2008

It was a time of bold declarations and ideology. Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism and Constructivism all came out of this period, breaking moulds and ways of thinking. It is ironic, then, that within such mental and cultural freedom, artists took such pains to define their actions – as if breaking the rules created a hunger for new ones. So much so, that the manifesto became an art-form in itself – worked up through fonts, bolded out words, italicised statements, exclamation marks, underlinings and the all-important bullet point. Definitions are compounded in words and form by El Lissitzsky and Hans Arps’ ‘The Isms of Art’, providing a central motif for the show.

The shapes of letters and words, and the sounds they produce are to be re-conceived in this, the machine age. In Gino Severini’s freeword painting ‘Dancer = Sea’, letters whirl in coruscating circles, and form bold triangles like blades. There is movement, texture and dynamism, blasted as if shot from a gun with a headline banner of TTA TTATA TTATTA TAT. But the balletic beauty of gunfire is given a more sinister twist in Wyndham Lewis’ issue of Blast from 1915, where angular soldiers hunch forward with guns pointing out against a crowded, fractured cityscape.

These are not the posters of revolution or propaganda; the artefacts on display, culled from the British Library’s expansive collection, are less showy, but no less dramatic in their significance. The works’ papery delicacy belies the force of conviction with which they were made. Artists’ self-belief in redefining the cultural landscape, if not the world, is overwhelming.

Marinetti’s radical Zang Tumb Tuum – a poem reportage of the Siege of Adrianople – looks like a scientific diagram. Arrows and math symbols chart the flow and movement in words and columns. Photobooks of Man Ray show the dawning of surrealism, and Brassaï’s nocturnal wanderings reveal a Paris of oddly-lit pockets of humanity – a man behind his newsstand, illuminated in the dark by the glamour and beauty magazines on sale.

Culture had made a definitive conceptual leap, away from harmony and renderings of myth or natural beauty, to intellectual games, challenges and questions. The confidence and exhilaration only ruptured by the extreme repression of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and pan-European trauma of World War 2.

To appreciate the crackle of energy, held in stasis on the printed page, takes some concentration in these dimly-lit rooms. But it is worth it. The years between 1900 and 1937 have had the most far-reaching influence on graphic design in modern times. Politically, the world is unrecognisable from a century ago, but aesthetically and conceptually, the artists, thinkers and designers of this Avant Garde period really did, it seems, write the rule book.

Did you stand there in the traces and let them feed you lies?
Did you trail along behind them wearing blinkers on your eyes?
Did you kiss the foot that kicked you?
Did you thank them for their scorn?
Did you ask for their forgiveness for the act of being born?

Ewan MacColl’s ‘Ballad of Accounting’ is a rallying cry against submission. While critically referencing those who ‘skim the cream’, it is equally a challenge to the masses who ‘accept the shoddy’. Written for BBC’s Landmarks radio series in 1964, it attacks low expectations, but also inherently a society that abuses its people into passivity.

Ruth Ewan, now based in London, has taken the song as the core of her biggest and most ambitious work to date, Did you kiss the foot that kicked you? Maybe you heard it? Were you in London Mon 8 – Fri 12 October this year, travelling between 8 and 10am or 5 and 7pm? If so, you might just have caught a rendition by one of the 100 buskers in underground and overground stations who slipped this tune into their normal repertoire during these hours: viral intervention for the ears.

Ewan MacColl was born ‘Jimmie Miller’ in Salford to Scottish parents, changing his name to reflect his Celtic roots at the age of 30. He considered pop music the new opium of the people, and believed that folk music, theatre and direct action could change the world. He sang with a Scottish accent, and perhaps ironically hated Bob Dylan for being ‘phoney’; regarding Joan Baez with equal distaste (Dylan admired him). His most famous songs remain Dirty Old Town and The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face. By the time he was 17 in 1932, however, McCall had an MI5 file on him, citing a cause for concern, “his exceptional ability as a music organiser”. It was kept open all his life.

‘They first picked him out at the Mass Trespass at Kinder Scout,’ says Ruth Ewan. ‘It was a protest against the privitisation of land – he wrote a song for the occasion, ‘The Manchester Rambler’’. In March, 2006, Ewan read that the MI5 files on MacColl up to 1955 had been released through The National Archive. She’d had early exposure to his music through her parent’s tastes, and had picked him out for an on-going piece of work, ‘a jukebox of people that tried to change the world’. Ben Harker, a professor at Salford University, was responsible for the files’ release, and Ewan was put in touch with him through contacts at Salford’s Working Class Movement Library. She began to dig deeper into the man that Harker describes as ‘an elusive quarry’.

Ewan went on to win backing by Artangel (the foundation behind Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave and Rachel Whiteread’s House), the Jerwood Foundation and Channel 4 to implement her subversive musical plan. ‘The song will be dropped into the city for two hours in the morning, and two in the evening,’ Ewan explains in the week prior to her busker action. ‘We recruited buskers by advertising and also, fortunately, there was an event on the Southbank [led by Billy Bragg] called ‘Billy’s Big Busk’ where we went and handed out flyers. We had three audition dates.’ Peggy Seeger, MacColl’s third wife, widow and long-term collaborator, gave them permission to use the song on the understanding that they did it justice.

The 100 selected buskers, whose instruments range from the guitar to the Jew’s harp, were rehearsed by The Pogues’ David Coulter, for whom the links go deep: The Pogues did a definitive cover of Dirty Old Town in 1985, and McCall’s daughter, the late Kirsty MacColl, dueted with Shane McGowan on their hit ‘Fairytale of New York’ in 1987. ‘His enthusiasm really motivated everyone,’ Ewan says.

Eschewing tourist spots, Ewan has focused the buskers along commuter routes in the city – Liverpool Street, Bank, and Canary Wharf. ‘It’s quite an aggressive song that asks lots of questions.’ she says. ‘It could be quite disturbing if you hear it through your journey, or it could be a lovely thing.’

What did you learn in the morning?
How much did you know in the afternoon?
Were you content in the evening?
—

Did the place where you were living
Enrich your life and then
Did you reach some understanding of all your fellow men,
all your fellow men, all your fellow men?

To witness the unfolding of this intervention visit www.balladofaccounting.org where you can order a free 48 page booklet produced by Ruth Ewan and Artangel to accompany the project, and download tracks produced by David Coulter.

Ben Harker’s biography Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl is recently published by Pluto Press

It is summer in the London borough of Hackney and the recent heavy rain has made the Manor Garden allotments more fecund than usual. Poppies run riot, jasmine scents the air and fig trees are budding with fruit. Sheds flake, rust and crumble. The make-shift constructions are painter Julian Perry’s subject and obsession.

‘Perry has a feel for inbetween zones, for places were boundaries waver and enclaves are created,’ wrote the critic William Feaver. For the past two years he has driven up through the surrounding no-man’s- land of Balaaj Spare Autos, Club Desire and a bus depot, to enter the enchanted land across the River Lee to paint potting sheds. By the time you read this, however, an Olympic ring will have sealed the area and bulldozers moved in to flatten the sheds. The allotment holders’ resistance has proved futile. Perry is ambivalent. Despite using them as his subject, he says, ‘I find the whole English obsession with sheds faintly annoying’.

Such duality lies at the heart of Perry’s work. Born on the flood plains of Worcestershire, he has lived and worked in the east of London for the last 23 years. Continuously drawn to landscapes that bear marks of human activity, Perry celebrates mankind’s subtle interventions from owl boxes to hubcaps. ‘I would have difficulty going out into the countryside to paint, I think I’d get bored,’ he says. ‘I like beautiful images, but they have to be images with a story to them.’ Wooden walkways or discarded mechanical detritus in the Lee Valley provide such narratives; the contemporary bucolic with a thorn in its side. When it was announced that London had won the Olympic bid, Perry and his cohorts in Leyton did not have time to even register the news. ‘When we heard that “it will be London” it was extraordinary. Within minutes the Red Arrows flew overhead and we knew that in that moment the area had changed forever.’

He says he knew that he had to paint the allotments. The urge was to both document the site, but also to continue a project that had previously taken in a bomb crater pond in Epping Forest. In a series of paintings from 2004 Perry depicted a pond formed when a V-2 rocket landed among the trees in 1945. It is one small mark from history which nature has reclaimed, but parallels with humanity’s latest assault on the fabric of east London can be drawn. Indeed it is Perry’s view that the Olympics will alter the landscape of London more significantly and sweepingly than both the Blitz and the Great Fire of London. ‘It is a bit like being run over and winning the lottery on the same day,’ he says. ‘It is exciting, but comes at a high price for a lot of people.’

After spending time among the plots of Manor Gardens, it was the sheds that had him hooked. Their structures captured his imagination, and he says that in addition to what they represent, he is ‘interested in them as sculptures’. To home in on this architectural element within the landscape is a departure for Perry. The sheds are abstracted from their environment and painted in meticulous detail, paying homage to their textures and construction. ‘By editing,’ Perry says, ‘I can distil what they are, which is the opposite of what’s coming. They’re about individuals, often made on a tight budget as opposed to the international money and glamour of the games.’ However Perry simultaneously resists sentimentality. Removing them from the landscape which is inescapably idyllic, and letting them stand free-form on often dark canvasses, imbues the images with a certain coldness. ‘The sensibility is not about the picturesque, it’s about this phenomenon – looking for emblematic and significant images,’ he says.

The Greenhouse Shed for instance, comprises turquoise painted corrugated iron, a mottled glass door and elegant Art Deco-style window frames, which lets the light flood straight in. ‘It’s a complicated amalgam of recycled materials and patterns, and it’s rather precarious,’ Perry says. ‘I like the colour and the glass – most of the sheds are opaque, but this one has the sun shining through.’ On a technical level the range of surfaces appeals to Perry. ‘I enjoy the contrast of elements that stretch me as a painter – asphalt, rotting wood and plastic. There’s also a pleasure of recognition for the viewer. If something has evidence of time, it enables you to travel back too.’ The tangibility of paint prompts the viewer to look at an image afresh. It invokes an awareness of materials that is experienced most intensely and directly in childhood. Indeed Perry refers to the Ladybird book series as something he admires for illustrating the everyday.

There is, however, great sophistication behind the apparently simple image. Perry’s own paintings build layer upon layer of thin oil paint to create the structure of, say, a green Anderson shelter, relocated to Manor Gardens. On another, he has worked out the shingle technique and woven that onto board with fidelity, stripping away the creeping ivy, and getting to the essence of the shed’s wooden structure. Ironically, however, Perry’s abstraction of the sheds makes them anything but everyday. ‘By fanatical description it becomes weirder,’ he says, and refers to the style of the inter-war movement – New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), pioneered by Otto Dix as a reaction against expressionism. Their passionate realism led to oddness in the finest hand. Perry’s removal of context lends the sheds a ‘strange geometry, floating in their own void.’

His influences are consciously diverse. ‘I was looking for subjects that have resonance beyond a specific location, beyond E10. In order to find that resonance I needed to reference the history of art,’ he says. He looked to the tradition of painting hovels by artists such as the 16th century Dutch artist, Jan Bruegel, who painted them as ‘the ultimate in escapism’, and was one of the first artists to paint scenes of ordinary life and people. Perry also took Albrecht Dürer’s lessons of direct and minute observations of the natural world to the studio, where one of his studies is propped up. ‘It is a landscape that is also a still life. Dürer cut up a piece of turf and took it to the studio and painted it against a neutral background. He’s taken a sod of turf and turned it into its own world as opposed to a detail from the world.’

What Perry has done is take elements of Manor Gardens’ world – the sheds and the veg, and turned them into their own worlds. He has painted not only the decaying buildings, but also the flourishing fruits of each allotment-holders’ labour. The painter John Craxton has highlighted this quality in Perry’s work before. ‘ When he stumbles on a collision between industry and Arcadia…he gives [it] an uncontrived enigma,’ he wrote. Giant rhubarbs as seen from a snail’s perspective sprawl towards the viewer; reality is magnified to the point of surrealism.

The contrast between that which is thriving and crumbling is stark. It is brought head-to-head through the paintings’ semi-religious diptych arrangement, where sheds and plants pair up. Monster rhubarb is to be bolted onto Shed 54, a compact cuboid shape that looks sturdy and self-contained, despite being patched together with corrugated plastic and asphalt. The abstraction of both from their environments belie the political context in which the nurtured structures and plots are subjects of forcible eviction. A transformation has occurred. The improvised structures of the sheds, in a mish-mash of materials, so rooted in their environments, are depersonalised.

To create a new life and form for a subject is the artist’s prerogative, and where Julian Perry and the allotment owners find common ground. For making one’s own world, in which the microcosm is more real than the wider world, is what allotments and sheds represent too. The Olympics stands for extreme realities and ideals – the quickest, the strongest, the fastest. But as representations of textures, fertility, growth, personal idylls and peace, Perry’s sheds will be aliens from the past, drifting in their own private, painted space.

Julian Perry: A Common Treasury, 17 Oct – 16 Nov, Austin Desmond Fine Art, London

Greg Girard
Magenta Publishing

Time is the essence in Canadian photographer Greg Girard’s images of a fading Shanghai. Girard’s intensely rich, and yet ghostly still lives capture a moment that will soon be over.

His scenes are of a Shanghai that has steadily been demolished under the relentless march for progress: documenting the ramshackle alleyways and crowded, chaotic housing of bricks and wood cleared for slick highrises.

His long exposures bathe in the half-lights of twilight and soak up the coloured glow from street lights, lending hues of pink, purple, green and blue to many of the images. Figures are predominantly absent, appearing often as a dark blur, most movingly in Scrap Collectors, Zhongshan Nan Lu. In a great pile of rubble, beneath a dormant digger, people rake through the pickings of another day’s demolition. In the distance are the bright lights of the modern city, as if the battle is for dominance of the night sky and what can be salvaged in the shadows.

Electricity is a current that runs throughout the book. Within the old housing, where narrow spaces are cramped with pieces of furniture, towels, flasks, brooms, fly-swats, pots, pans and baskets – the basics of living – cables run precariously up the walls, dangling and tangled into loose order. In one close-up shot, we see a spaghetti mess of wires fixed to a grubby wall, thick with grime and peeling with damp. The make-shift nature of life within these walls clearly draws Girard in; lured by the mystery and human stories that have adapted their needs to the environment with necessary inventiveness. The windows glow warmly and invitingly from the pavement.

Outside, electricity cables score against pale blue skies, running along streets, echoing the spindly branches of trees. These solutions which have served the millions living on the cusp of old and new, will soon be eradicated for efficiency and uniformity: capitalism and communism in perfect synergy.

There is a sense of loss and melancholy that permeates the pictures, something inherent in any place where people have been forcibly moved on. Think of deserted crofter cottages abandoned in the Highland clearances or the mining towns of California, left to crumble when the gold ran out. By taking the majority of images in the evocative dusk Girard takes the risk of erring on the side of romanticism or nostalgia. However, the interplay between natural and neon light serves a purpose beyond just atmosphere – it captures the transitory nature of these homes, shops and buildings on the edge of their destruction. Twilight is the very state of these communities.

Girard takes us inside to show the details of lives that constitute the buildings. In clear, crisp interior views, he frames a wooden cabinet on which stands a ghetto blaster, draped with a lace doily and topped by three souvenir koalas; a family picture hangs above where the group are dressed in Communist-style shirts. Modest possessions that represent day-to-day living and personal histories; in essence, a home.

There is an evident stubbornness – a “we shall not be moved” stance. Girard reveals structures where residents have refused to budge, despite being surrounded by rubble and their imminent demise, until the last moment when electricity is cut and the bulldozers move in. Sadly, the “benign neglect” of Communism in the latter part of the 20th century is not mirrored with any sort of benign restoration post-globalisation. Girard’s collection is an elegant document of a world that no longer holds a place in Shanghai’s heart, though it clearly does in his own and for the many people whose home it is and was.

Phantom Shanghai by Greg Girard, Magenta Publishing

Design and Technology at secondary level is in a state of flux. The subject is no longer compulsory and it’s harder than ever to justify trips to see D&T applied in the real world. Ruth Hedges asks D&T teachers how they foster creativity and what they need to make the subject flourish.

The Design Council’s recently published report, High-Level Skills for Higher Value, outlines a ‘plan for the future of UK design’. The long consultation prior to publication mooted several ideas which would enhance the design profession in the UK.

These included protecting the professional description of ‘designer’ and limiting the number of places on university design courses. In the final report, facilitated by the Design Skills Advisory Panel and supported by the Design Council and Creative and Cultural Skills, these had either been removed or diluted. What remained was a strong emphasis on the need for the design industry to work with schools, plus recommendations for a schools’ design mark and a teacher development scheme.

This sounds fantastic, but what of the pressures facing those who teach design and technology, What does it mean to the people charged with inspiring students each and every day, and who have to persuade school heads to cough up for yet more expensive kit? When the National Curriculum was introduced in 1990, design and technology was made compulsory (as well as losing the word ‘craft’ from its description). In September 2004, its status was changed to an entitlement subject. In other words: all pupils were entitled to study it – if they wanted to. The landscape was further complicated by the introduction of specialist technology and engineering schools that must offer the subject at Key Stage 4 (for children aged 14 to 16).

And what of the Design Skills Advisory Panel’s description of a teaching body with a hugely disparate set of skills? The Design and Technology Teachers’ Association, the body representing the profession, has some of the highest membership numbers for any subject area, and professional development through Advanced Skills Teacher training is gathering momentum. With the design industry well canvassed by the panel, what about the teaching profession?

We have asked some of the UK’s most innovative D&T teachers about design and technology in their school, how they feel about its opportunities and challenges, and the best ways forward.

Donna Trebell, 38
Head of Design and Technology,
Mascalls School, Kent
Specialist Arts College

I’ve been in teaching for 18 years. First, I went to art college in Carlisle and then went to Thames Polytechnic to do design and technology. I went on to get a master’s in technology education and I’m now completing a doctorate.

We are definitely working with technologically literate children, but I think they still need and enjoy the rounded experience. When I started you didn’t have the internet in schools. When it came to the research section, it was always hard work, and it was a question of looking through all the old books and doing lots of photocopying. So actually getting children on the internet is brilliant.

The fact that there’s now 2D Design and ProDesktop is absolutely superb, in the right place. I just think that what you need is the right tool for the job throughout the design process. Now that we have those available to us, it’s proving to be a very, very powerful tool.

There would be benefit from more interaction between the industry or professionals and education as long as it’s the right people. If it’s just to come in and talk, I think it’s a waste of time. But if you’re doing a unit of work and you know specifically what you want and brief them properly, then it can be really good.

D&T’s going to become more technological, just by the nature of the beast – the whole world is. But I also think there has to be an emphasis on the design side, because that’s where the higher-order thinking and problem-solving comes into the subject. For me, that’s the bit that needs emphasis.

If you can get really good designing going on with all that thinking, all that research and problem solving then that’s where the quality is in the subject, and we can really hold our heads up and say that we’re doing great things for these children.

Stuart Douglas, 34
Head of Design and Technology
Ripley St Thomas C of E School, Lancaster
Specialist Language School

I did a design degree at Liverpool university in 1993, then worked in the music industry for Pete Waterman and Pete Tong. I did my Postgraduate Certificate in Education at Huddersfield University and took a job at Ripley School in 1998.

There’s a big emphasis on designing at our school – concepts, prototypes and working it through. We follow the principle, like a lot of big companies, of producing lots of creative design sheets and going into CAD, developing it a little bit, then going back to designing, drawing and sketching over the design and so on.

I would absolutely love it if someone like Richard Seymour would come into school and talk to the pupils, but then also do a little masterclass.

Ten years ago we were still doing very traditional projects, but it’s evolved, using the technology that’s available to us such as CAM, laser-cutters, rapid prototyping. And lots more girls are doing the subject.

Unfortunately, it’s increasingly difficult to get out of schools. We used to go to the New Designers exhibition every year, but it got to a point two years ago where it was going to cost our students £90 to go for the day. The students miss out. There’s nothing like seeing it for yourself.

Here we’re trying to foster international projects which we can work on collaboratively, like a real design team would. My ultimate goal at the school is for big companies to come in and say: ‘We’ll set a design project and will work with the group for the next year.’ The prospect of working on a live project for a company is immeasurable.

A lot of government ministers have a view of D&T from when they were at school – probably of making a bird box. These are the people that are making funding decisions and saying that D&T is no longer compulsory. D&T is the most creative subject in school, it’s the one that brings in more from any other areas. It teaches the kids to question everything.

All the time we’re trying to get in more modern projects and switch the kids on. You see it sometimes in Year 7 when their eyes light up, and you think ‘I’ve got you’. It’s like a revelation, like a ‘Wow – I know I want to do this subject for the rest of my life.’

Helena Jedlinska, 50
Textiles teacher
Langley Park School for Girls, Bromley
Specialist Technology School

I did a two-year foundation at Leeds School of Art, three years at St Martins in fashion and textiles, a two-year MA at the Royal College in knitted textiles, and then worked as a freelance in the industry. In 1997 I went to Goldsmiths to do a postgraduate certificate in education.

I’m lucky enough to teach just my subject, textiles. Basically the girls can make anything they like. We use SpeedStep software and we’ve also just got a laser cutter. They work in a sketchbook from secondary sources. I used to take them to the V&A, but that’s been cut because it ‘interrupts continuity of learning’.

There’s a lot of talk that D&T should be taught at primary school and I’m increasingly of the persuasion that unless we do that, we’ll just teach it piecemeal.

I think children’s awareness of design is limited because of the curriculum. Essentially, we are working to a timetable, we’re working to a bell, to exam results. There are serious curriculum constraints. We see them for two hours a week at GCSE, then they pack up their lovely work and we don’t see them for another three days.

Everyone’s talking about more creativity and I see a lot of teachers who are very committed and really working hard to keep the subject developing. I think the curriculum could be broken down. When the girls have a whole day they love it and they get so much done. But we have to really make a case for that.

Unless there’s more flexibility in the curriculum, the vocational subjects in a school situation just aren’t going to work. There needs to be more flexibility for teachers – maybe an enforced sabbatical after five years. It’s a crying shame that those people who are innately creative, with real skill and real belief in the subject, aren’t allowed to keep that fresh.

Paul Gardiner, 54
Head of Electronics, within D&T
Finham Park School, Coventry
Maths and Computing Specialist School

I started as an electrical engineer and worked in industry. In 1978 I went into teaching physics and science, then moved into computers and electronics.

Now I have a workshop where each student has a computer of their own. People would say that’s above average, but half the system is pretty much eight years old, and not really up to the task of running the software that we’d prefer to use. I have problems convincing the management of the need for updated resources. We don’t have a laser cutter, we do have CAD/CAM equipment and I’ve just acquired a second-hand PCB cutter.

At the moment we are involved in a project with a few others schools working with IKEA on How people live in Coventry. They design themselves a new bedroom using IKEA furniture, and IKEA designers will be visiting us to work with students on their designs. The best one will be created in the new Coventry IKEA store.

Things have definitely changed since D&T was no longer compulsory at Key Stage 4. I’m now down to about 14 students at GCSE. Technology is one of the most popular KS3 subjects, but the problem we have is convincing parents and students that there’s a future in studying it, and that’s a public perception problem.

I’m definitely in favour of bringing in outside expertise and inspiration, but I think it’s a mistake to think that D&T departments exist to fuel the design industry. Technology in schools is the platform for delivering problem solving, or showing maths, science and computing in action. It gives students a context and a relevance. That aspect is completely unappreciated.

The main changes for D&T will be how we make things in the classroom, and that has implications for how we design them and what tools we use.

I would expect to see more equipment available such as rapid prototyping, and in many schools it has gone that way already. If that doesn’t happen, I fear that design and technology may disappear altogether from school as and when the perceived cost effectively wipes out aspects of the subject. I have seen evidence of that happening already.

David Hayles, 61
Advanced skills teacher in D&T
Saltash Community School, Cornwall
Specialist science, mathematics & computing college

I trained in craft and design at Goldsmiths college and started teaching in 1967.
In the late Sixties it was still very much traditional woodwork, metalwork, technical drawing. All pupils did the same projects, the design was already done for them. Materials and drawings would bein a cupboard and you took
them through it step by step.

After 18 months, I went to Hornsey College of Art and lectured. It was a very exciting time because it was when design education was in its infancy and there was a move away from pure handicraft towards design. It was all being generated by the teaching profession and was something that we were all very interested in. Fantastic, it was. I went back into secondary education in 1991.

My particular interest is promoting creativity in D&T and I’ve done quite a lot of work with Goldsmiths in this area. For a long time we’ve been hampered by adopting a particular linear model of designing. I started giving pupils a design task that they could tackle in any way they liked. The creative ideas and the progression was quite phenomenal.

We did a very successful project on designing a seat for an art gallery which had to fold up – they were working as teams, or in pairs, or individually. I’m lucky. If I ask for a group to work for two days as a block, the head says: ‘Do it’. The school’s very supportive.

The Technology Education Research Unit at Goldsmiths wanted to see what I was doing to get creativity going. They came down to observe and devised some assessment procedures. Then, we did a second project together and that has now been adopted by OCR (Oxford and Cambridge examining board) in its new Product Design GCSE.

In the past, I’ve taken my A-Level group to places such as Disneyland in Paris for a design week. You can’t overestimate the impact of something like that. I would fight as hard as I could for students to be able to get out and see what’s going on around them.

Following another London gang killing, Ruth Hedges – who worked with youngsters on the estate where the shooting occurred – describes the frustrations and alienation behind the headlines.

The news headline came through: fatal shooting of young boy in Stockwell. My heart sank and I quickly looked at the TV.

Instantly the red bricked, quad-shaped flats of Stockwell Gardens Estate were recognisable. The white tape fluttered, and my heart sank lower.

Once a week for six months between November 2006 and April 2007 I ran a journalism project in this estate through the organisation, Headliners. I worked with a group of teenagers aged 13-18, exploring issues important to them and trying to get their voices heard. Now the TV crews were there alright, but for the worst possible reason.

Over the six months that we met in the Old Laundry, it amazed me that after a day at school or college, people would turn up. It was tough finding things to keep the group engaged safely in the winter evenings, but they were often inspiring and made it work.

They took what was thrown at them, had fun, argued their points and produced some good things. But there was nothing else to do. It was cold and dark and they wanted to be out of their flats and to see their friends. They also needed for someone to take their points of view seriously.

Young men would regularly come in agitated from having been stopped and searched; one guy missing a college exam because of it. Three of the girls experienced murder in their school and family, having to attend funerals. Two sisters came in late once saying they’d had to go to their dad’s and godfather’s birthday. It took me a few seconds to realise this was the same person.

One 17-year-old, whose questioning of the media’s use of the word ‘gang’, would triumph any Question Time debate, revealed in a rap that his dad had died of cancer. His mum had recently re-married and he didn’t get on with his new step dad. None of the group had a mum or dad who were still together, and the vast majority lived with their mums. For an early-morning shoot, one of the girls was tired because she’d been hungry at midnight and so had gone off on her bike to get some chicken.

While there was never an overt threat of violence, there were occasional instances where I witnessed money changing hands, and older men would walk unannounced into the group to have a word with the younger ones. There were undoubtedly pressures to get involved in a sub-culture of drugs, but what real enticing alternatives were there?

It might seem that for these teenagers and many others like them, that they would be beyond wanting sports, games or activities to do, but that’s wrong. The thing that they wanted more than anything was a youth club. There is one down in Brixton – we did some interviews there – but they wanted one for their estate.

They had the space – the Old Laundry – and there were even facilities (a locked backroom of pool tables, deflated footballs, a stereo), but there was not the money for the necessary staff to run a regular youth club. It was possibly the most frustrating set-up I’ve ever witnessed.

I will never forget the first time I went to meet the group. Hyde Housing, the estate’s management, held a regular youth forum where ‘decisions’ about the estate could be made. After mumblings of disquiet, when asked what they’d been promised, one of the younger boys looked dejected and said “ping pong”.

After a few more offerings from the floor, the chief housing officer from Hyde got up to give an illustrated talk. He showed a series of stills from CCTV footage of young people around the estate ‘hanging out’. The point of this seemed to be to say, we’re watching you – and even if you’re just hanging out with the wrong people, by association, you’ll be under suspicion. The ridiculousness of this was extreme, and I was as bemused and annoyed as the assembled group were.

Next up was me, a young white woman, to pitch a journalism course. Every person in the room was black, and one of the young boys asked me what I would think if I saw a group of them standing on a street corner? What I wanted to say was that I saw a group of tired-looking young people, some with puffy eyes and scuffed-up clothes who were justifiably pretty disenchanted with what had been presented with so far.

I just said I would see a group of young people standing on a corner. They let me off with a few disbelieving laughs and jeers. Their perception of how they were seen by the media and wider society was acute.

So we started. The group had an energy and verve, and an anger that was impressive. They laughed a lot, discussed issues, and grilled a local councillor with smart, well-researched persistence. Their needs were in many ways complex, yet in some ways very simple – a secure outlet, a focus and a challenge. When there was yet another false hope with the youth club, and they were told it was going to happen, the lad who had mentioned ping pong asked: “Will there be a tuck shop?” When the reply came in the affirmative he threw both arms up in the air and cheered.

By the time I left, there was still no youth club. Wouldn’t it have been so much of a better headline, even just in the local press, to say: “Stockwell Gardens Estate Opens Youth Club” or “Lambeth Council Opens Sports Centre”, rather than: “Boy Gunned Down as he Cowers Behind Tree”?

What a waste. What heartbreak. Why should the young of this estate have to deal with that loss and that trauma, and keep trying to better things for themselves – to get the odd bench put in where they can sit down?

There is only so long you can neglect people, to not listen and not provide any alternatives, and expect them to bounce back or just keep their heads down. As one of the young men said, “They need to make a place for us to chill. That’s the most important thing, because if they don’t, that’s when people resort to doing crime. It’s a proven fact that idle hands are the worst hands. I feel like an animal here. Everything’s closed off, it’s like they’re caging us. People might think that’s not affecting them, but subliminally, when the mind keeps on seeing gates and railings, the mind is going to act like its got to put its hands up and have protection.”

It is tragic that his prophetic warning has come true. When I heard about the shooting, I texted one of the girls whose block it was directly in front of to see if she was OK. She texted back: “Thank you ruth im alrite now he was my friend”.

They were just looking forward to the summer when I left in April. I’m truly gutted for them that it has started this way, not to mention for the boy’s family.

There has to be serious, intensive investment in youth services, subsidised sports and cultural facilities if we’re going to turn things around. It’s wanted and needed, and in a country and capital where the divide between the haves and have-nots is so pronounced, where one set of kids demand focaccia and olives and the other are worried about being taken to Nando’s because to them it’s expensive, there’s got to be some attempt to offer a rebalance.

If there’s not, a portion of our young people will continue to grow up on the defensive nursing bridling frustration, and the message goes home loud and clear: no-one cares about you, so how are you going to feel like a someone?

– Ruth Hedges is a freelance journalist based in London

Hounded by the press and bullied by his own party, it’s no surprise to discover that Charles Kennedy is enjoying his political sabbatical. Ruth Hedges catches up with him and finds a man at ease with the world again
Charles Kennedy has spent over half his life as an MP. In June the 47-year-old celebrated 24 years at Westminster which, by simple deduction, means it all began at the tender age of 23. To rise and fall and keep your head, as he has done over the last 18 months, is something of an achievement. The nasty spectacle back in January 2006, where his party ‘faithful’ turned the knife after he returned the highest proportion of Lib Dem votes for 80 years, was not pretty. In the face of leaks detailing treatment for alcoholism, he was forced into a public confirmation, and statements of being dry for two months did nothing to quell the unrest.

‘It’s only when you stop doing it that you realise how unremitting they were,’ he says on the pressures of being party leader. Kennedy recalls Tony Blair saying to him, ‘The difference between being leader of the opposition and becoming Prime Minister was that the leader of the opposition wakes up in the morning and thinks, “What have I got to say today?” and the Prime Minister wakes up in the morning and thinks: “What have I got to do today?”’ Kennedy adds: ‘If you’re leader of the Liberal Democrats, you wake up in the morning and think, “What have I got to say today and how do I get anybody to pay attention to it and report it?”’

Despite Kennedy’s bruising treatment, a certain respect for him has remained within and beyond politics. Today he is relaxed, calm and apparently not bitter. ‘At the moment I’m enjoying a healthy, settled family life for the first time ever,’ he notes. ‘We have a two-year-old who was something of a stranger to me for the first nine months of his life.’ Now he describes the bond as ‘rock solid’. Indeed, ‘Taxi Kennedy’ as he was known in his days at Glasgow University for his predilection for the minicab, says that ‘taxi’ was one of his son’s first words. ‘He is obsessed with London cabs. It’s uncanny.’

Kennedy has been doing a parliamentary fellowship at St Antony’s college in Oxford as well as making a BBC documentary looking at the influence of the Act of Union. He’s called it A Chip on Each Shoulderand explains, ‘It ranges from talking to learned academics to chatting in a bar outside Hampden with the Tartan Army on their relationship with England.’

Kennedy seems to be revelling in having more time to pursue other projects, whether academic or in the media. However, the political sidelines are not, one senses, going to satisfy forever. The ‘snowball’, as he describes it, of proportional representation, may soon grow to encompass Westminster and he believes that, ‘The experience of pluralistic politics in Scotland is one that is going to have some degree of impact or influence.’

With the SNP controlling the Scottish Parliament, two of the three Westminster party leaders representing neighbouring constituencies in Fife and Gordon Brown tasting his longnurtured dream of power, who says politics is boring? Not Kennedy. For his event, he’ll be in conversation with the parliament’s presiding officer about his life, career and thoughts on politics today, and it couldn’t have come at a more interesting time. Taxi!

Scottish Parliament, Holyrood Road, 0131 473 2000, 24 Aug, 11am, £5 (£3).