on the success of woke, alternative,
disruptive business branding, but there's
one simple reason developers shouldn't
use this approach: unless you are a
genuine not-for-profit or ethical business,
with real estate everyone smells bullshit.
We already know too much to swallow
such corporate swill. The anger and angst
in Britain today runs too deep; we can all
see our democracy is weak, our identity
is fragile, our basic social fabric is under
immense strain, and every countercultural
or revolutionary move we make is
immediately subsumed by capitalism,
transformed, packaged and sold back
to us. It is inconceivable that anyone from
the target demographic of Coal Drops
Yard would read the description and
b elieve a word of it. Personally, I don't
know anyone who would both consider
shopping there and accept that the honest
ambition of a mall is not to sell you
a product. If, as they say, 'the experience
is everything', it is only because our
attention span has become a natural
resource to be violently exploited.
The cultural events at Coal Drops Yard
are presented under various brands.
In reality, they are a subset of a massive
nine-year-long arts programme called
RELAY, intended by developers Argent
to 'enliven the new public spaces' and
transform King's Cross into 'a destination
for discovering international contemporary
art that celebrates the area's heritage and
its future'. There is an even-handed,
unexciting melange of photography
exhibitions, pottery workshops, free music
gigs and temporary art installations.
It is at least a point of difference from
the majority of 'faceless, endless mass
supply-and-demand' venues.
Without a doubt, Coal Drops Yard
is more culturally engaged than generic
malls such as Westfield. That is because
it is significantly more expensive; the costs
for all the free events are met through the
charging of prime rents for a higher
construction cost and material finish,
in turn justified by greater footfall at
a better location. There may be smne
outreach by Coal Drops Yard, but there
is no reason to think its cultural
programming is intended as a form of
social mobility. Poor people can't spend
at their shops. The ultimate message is
not altruistic or anti-capitalistic at all,
but one t hat Dickens or t he J!Iedicis might
have recognised (and 1!I:achiavelli certainly
·wTote about): culture belongs to the rich.
That experience is everything.
Unsurprisingly, the development has not
been a commercial success. I n fact, footfall
is low enough to pose an existential threat.
I n Drapers magazine, one retailer said:
'I don't think we can last much longer t han
the first year if t hings don't p ick up
considerably. I haven't got the luxury
to wait for two years until it becomes a
destination'. This hits at the heart of t he
fantasy: you can't engineer authenticity
and you can't design urban resilience.
Ecosystems are mind-bogglingly
complicated meta-organisms, and they
take several generations of adaptation
to achieve delicate stability. The mistake
made by Argent at Coal Drops Yard is just
a localised example of t he folly of
'sustainable' capitalism itself. Once a city's
environment has been destroyed, it cannot
be reconstructed - only repaired t hrough
deep t ime.
Homogeneous ecosystems are
structurally fragile. Anything created in
a single act is 'already finished' and
therefore immediately out of date, simply
waiting for market trends to shift and
leave it abandoned. Ironically, t his was t he
lesson of J\!Iodernism t hat has n ever been
learned by corporate real estate and retail.
Le Corbusier's Unite could not become
a universal model because it was fatally
inflexible. The same is true for the
American mall, and the British out-of-
town shopping centre - with their big-box
mass retailers, cineplexes, food courts,
video arcades and bowling alleys, it only
took Netflix, Deliveroo and Amazon to lay
waste to an entire vision of life. And this is
also true for t he many cities like London,
which have been systematically denuded
of all vitality by developers aiming to
replace residents with consumers.
The death of the high street is a direct
consequence of their attempts to
centralise all economic activity within the
rigid boundaries of their own properties.
As Coal Drops Yard p uts it, t he urban
realm is understood by real estate as
a place where the only possible activit ies
are to 'eat, drink, shop'. Argent's
superficial reflection that the missing
component in developments such as
1\!I:ore London, Stratford and White City
is 'culture' has simply extended its
authoritarian r egime, not contributed to
underlying resilience. Argent's dedication
to t he 'street-market experience',
s1not hered by an ill-defined 'community
spirit', is a Potemkin urbanism; no wonder
the whole venture is failing, as is right.
There is no route out of this conundrum
apart from collapse and progressive
recolonisation. Developments like Coal
Drops Yard might succeed in t heir second,
third or fourth iterations, but not in
anything resembling t heir current form.
I take no p leasure from this prospect,
which will wipe out many livelihoods.
Non etheless, as climate change forces our
societies to radically adapt in t he coming
decades, the erasure of late capitalism is
something to which I am sincerely looking
forward: that experience is everything.Sitting between Wilkinson
Eyre's development of
Gasholders London and
Stanton Williams'
refurbishment of the
Granary Building for
Central Saint Martins, the
high-sheen, post-industrial
polish of Coal Drops Yard
promises safe and sterile
servings of urban grit