The White Building: Integration or Commodification of East-London Culture?

A key aim of the London 2012 ‘Regeneration Games’ was the integration of deprived and marginal working-class areas of East London into the global city London. Urban regeneration in Hackney Wick, a neighbourhood directly adjacent to the Olympic Site, embodied this goal of direct intervention into everyday cultures. The neighbourhood was re-defined as a ‘cultural quarter’ and is now experiencing a culture-led urban regeneration strategy, as a solution for post-industrial decline. Emphasis is on preserving the everyday vernacular culture of the area, once a thriving industrial hub of light industry and warehouses, but now commonly referred to as ‘housing the densest concentration of artists in Europe’.

The White Building in Hackney Wick provides a lens through which these tensions can be analysed. It is a valuable case study for scrutinising the complex processes of urban transformation, specifically the relationship between a surge of Olympic-led investment and existing structures, cultures and communities. The White Building - located at the heart of ‘local’ urban regeneration - once provided local residents with factory employment, but has recently been renovated and now houses a gallery space, artist studios, micro-brewery and restaurant.

This paper argues that despite planners’ attempts to integrate existing local residents (The Bingo Ladies, The Rowing Club, The Trowbridge Estate) into the regeneration plans, the commodification of industrial heritage for the mobile and transient ‘creative classes’ has served as an instrument to sharpen the neighbourhood’s inequalities: polarising those who can and cannot afford to consume in its space. The paper draws on research conducted in Hackney Wick over the past 3 years. It has a strong empirical grounding, with over 40 interviews with residents, planners, politicians and activists. Additionally, visual methodologies (photographs and mapping), walk-along interviews and oral histories are used to provide rich narrative basis to complement formal planning documents.