Category: Essays

On Istanbul’s Golden Horn, balık ekmek or ‘fish bread’ has been sold since the 1800s. A piece of grilled whitefish (typically mackerel) is served in white bread, with white onion, parsley, pul biber, salt and lemon juice, which, more recently, has often stood in squeezy bottles on low, plastic tables, beside grand, decorated boats.

Initially, the sandwiches were a way for fishermen to make use of an abundant catch, setting up grills on deck and selling the balık ekmek to passers-by. As the city grew in population and scale, trades were industrialised, and the demand for food increased; the fish population, and the health of the water, diminished. Over the course of the twentieth century, an excess of fish was plundered by large-scale fisheries, and the fishermen who’d been offering balık ekmek fought the pressures of poor hauls and an increase in bureaucratic regulations, which resulted in limited access and high location rents. In 2007, independent fishing boats were replaced by a trio of permanent, licensed moorings at Eminönü, an area whose waterfront mostly serves tourists as they pass over Galata Bridge towards Topkapı Palace, the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia. While balık ekmek remained popular with locals, the fresh, low-cost lunch was now harder to find outside of Eminönü; with the exception of the intrepid set-ups of Karaköy street traders. Selling mackerel in lavash, they build tables out of stacked styrofoam boxes and tape, ready to dismantle, reassemble, or start from scratch, whether their stands are removed by officials, or they find a better spot.

The ‘Ottoman-style’ fishing boats were elaborately decorated, trimmed in gold, with proud monuments in the form of exaggerated, almost demonic sandwiches at their helm – fitting more closely with the ‘Disneyland-Arabesque’ tradition than anything faintly historical. Now providing as much a performance as a service, the balık ekmek boats contained fish that was equally removed from the origins of the tradition. Having first been caught by independent fishermen, before they were overtaken by Aegean fish farms, the whitefish was now imported on ice from Scandinavia, and bought in bulk from the wholesale market. In their grand position at Eminönü, vendors were under pressure to keep up with high demand, while maintaining low prices; even as local fish stocks plummeted and wholesale prices skyrocketed.

The three boats were formalised as the Balık Ekmek Turizm Kooperatifi (Fish Bread Tourism Cooperative), but in 2019 were told that their leases would not be renewed, meaning they would have to vacate by 1 November. The Cooperative made a legal challenge, arguing that balık ekmek was not only part of the historical fabric of Istanbul (in both its traditional and neo-Ottoman form), but had provided jobs for, and fed, generations of people. As it stands, the boats remain. As do the street traders selling midye dolma (mussels stuffed with rice), lokma (deep fried dough balls soaked in honey), tursu (sour pickles) and simit (circular bread, dipped in molasses and sesame seeds) from trays, carts and the backs of mopeds; as well as the fishermen who still line the bridge.

The Karaköy Bridge (commonly known as the Galata Bridge) spans the Golden Horn, connecting Fatih (which contains the ancient city of Byzantium, or Nova Roma, Megalopolis, Constantinople, Kostantiniyye, or Istanbul) with Karaköy (formerly Galata) – a link significant both in terms of literal bridging and that which is felt. It encourages the flow of people, connecting international trade ships and industry with traditional marketplaces, solidifying ties between districts, and opening up access to the city. It’s one of two pedestrian bridges that cross the estuary, along with a metro bridge and highway bridge, and its most recent iteration was completed in 1994.

A bridge was first built over the Golden Horn during the reign of Justinian the Great in the sixth century; in 1453, when the Ottomans captured the Byzantine Empire, a mobile bridge was assembled by placing ships side by side across the water; in 1502, Sultan Bayezid II commissioned plans from Leonardo, before inviting ideas from Michelangelo, and dismissing both; in 1836, Mahmud II had one built further up the waterway; in 1845, Valide Sultan, the mother of Sultan Abdülmecid, led the construction of the first bridge at the mouth of the estuary, which was replaced in 1863, again in 1875, and moved upstream in 1912; it was then replaced by a floating bridge, which stood until 1992, when it was badly damaged in a fire.

It is as significant a place to pause as it is to cross: beside the fishermen, people have gathered on the bridge in protest, have sat discussing opposing views over glasses of raki in restaurants on the lower level, played cards and tavla, bought lottery tickets, watched the sky turn bubblegum pink and dolphins leap from the water. It has been the subject of paintings, songs and stories, claimed to bring love or luck, and according to family lore, it’s where my Dede stood as a child selling matches.

Yasef Pepo Muraben would later own a hat factory, Pepo Şapka, where he made and repaired fedoras, on Yüksek Kaldırım (steep hill), Galata, a short walk from the bridge. The hill leads up to the Galata Tower, which was built in 1348 by the Genoese, and connects the upper areas of Pera (or Beyoğlu) with Galata (or Karaköy), which faces on to the Bosphorus.

Beyoğlu, on the European side of Istanbul, was first inhabited in the seventh century BC, during the Byzantine era. Shaped by its many populations (Byzantine, Greek, Genoese, Venetian, Ottoman), by the nineteenth century, its architecture, the markets, side streets, arcades and galleria, Armenian Catholic, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, grand historic mosques and Sephardic synagogues, formed a spatial marker of the many histories it had already encountered. The Grande Rue de Péra, now İstiklâl Caddesi, became home to various embassies and international schools, and was one of the first parts of Constantinople to have telephone lines, electricity, trams, municipal government and the funicular railway, Tünel. The avenue was lined with theatres, cinemas, patisserie and cafés selling chocolate mousse and profiteroles, Turkish coffee and muhallebi — a pudding popular during the Ottoman Empire, which is made with shredded chicken and thickened with rice flour, sprinkled in sugar and rose water. It is the namesake for muhallebici, pudding shops that continue to serve milk puddings with burnt tops, or sprinkled with cinnamon, stirred with mastic, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, or layered with paper-thin wafer.

Muhallebi are among many multi-specific descriptors for communal eating environments, in part because there was no Turkish word for restaurant. While it is fairly common to see adopted, phonetically spelt terms like ‘büfe’ or ‘restoran’, when the first lokanta (‘guest house’, or ‘inn’) opened in the nineteenth century – serving the people working in offices and embassies around Fatih and Beyoğlu – it provided a new opportunity for workers to congregate at tables to eat together. Esnaf lokantası (‘tradesman’s restaurant’) and ocakbaşı (‘fireside’, or ‘stand by the grill’) rose out of Ottoman eating culture; meyhane (‘house of wine’), which had been introduced during the Byzantine Empire, grew in popularity during the Ottoman period. Run by the city’s non-Muslim population in Galata, who could ignore the sultan’s rules on alcohol, they served meze, fish, wine and later raki to jubilant crowds in a ‘white-tablecloth-formal’ setting.

In the nineteenth century, meyhane opened on the Asian side of the city, in Üsküdar and Kadıköy – known in classical antiquity as Chrysopolis and Chalcedon. At the mouth of the Bosphorus where it joins the Sea of Marmara, and directly across from the old city, Üsküdar and Kadıköy hold harbours that, from the Byzantine period on, made them the starting point for all trade routes to Asia. Now, people cross the Bosphorus on ferries and taxi boats, criss-crossing with the freight liners that plough through the water, wooden fishing boats narrowly dodging their hulls.

Kadıköy is home to Hacı Bekir, the oldest recorded maker of Turkish delight; Baylan, a chocolate-maker and patisserie that serves candied chestnuts and kaymak (like clotted cream, but somehow more savoury, with a heavy top) and biscuits layered with jam, among wooden-clad and pastel panelled walls; Çiya, a restaurant once known to move people to tears with Anatolian home-style food that vividly tapped collective and personal food memories; and the place that may or may not have invented İskender kebap (thinly cut grilled lamb with tomato sauce served on pita, topped with melted sheep butter stirred with chilli and yogurt).

The area surrounding the ferry terminal also plays host to some of the city’s ‘dolphones’, scale replicas of dolphins with public telephones protruding from their rounded bellies. The dolphones are a relatively new phenomenon in Istanbul, but the city’s history with animal populations is long: it has been inhabited by huge numbers of stray cats and dogs for centuries, and developed foundations and methodologies for protecting wildlife since the Ottoman period. Although there is a long and lasting legacy of feeding, sheltering and healing animals, there have (and continue to be) cases of cruelty. In the early 1900s, Ottoman sultans banished the dogs to far-flung forests, and attempted to deport them to barren islands on the Marmara. However, archives hold records of organisations established to help street cats, dogs and wolves find food, treat injured horses and storks with broken wings, and build birdhouses, which were often affixed high on the walls of mosques, palaces and fountains. Kuş Köşkü (bird pavilions), güvercinlik (dovecots), and serçe saray (sparrow palaces) provided shelter, drinking water and food for the birds, and were thought to grant luck to the people who built them. They often mimic the design of their host structure, designed according to the principles of Ottoman architecture in miniature: multi-tier, elaborate pavilions with minarets, domes, towers and grand balconies, like wedding cakes cast in stone.

Practices of care and communion with the city’s animal populations remain a common and integral feature of Istanbul. This focus on care is grounded in a belief in the importance of treating animals well, since we can’t ask them for their forgiveness. Cat houses are commonplace in parks and on side-streets, built by municipalities, charities and local citizens. Wooden structures with gables, adapted cupboards with cut-out round or domed entrances, cardboard and wooden boxes are set up in parks and scattered along streets, with people gathering to feed the cats, stroke and play music to them. Stray dogs are more likely to be found sleeping on grass or pavements, and outside restaurants, often wearing collars to signify that they belong to the area. While the cats tend not to grow beyond their kittenish form, small and fragile in appearance, wily and agile in reality, the dogs take on cartoonish shapes, with breeds crossing chaotically, as if drawn by a child. The animals are rarely adopted, neither domesticated nor entirely stray, living alongside people, intertwined but independent.

Seagull- and eagle-shaped booths accompany the dolphones dotted along the city’s European and Asian waterfronts, some of which replace the haphazard telephones that had been strung to trees, their wires dipping between the elongated trunks like garlands. These improvised design approaches, a sort-of bricolage, are commonplace in Istanbul, and can be defined as halletmek, meaning to ‘sort out’, ‘bodge’, ‘tinker’ or ‘adjust’. Rather than waiting for top-down solutions — engaging in a cycle of constant consumerism, or relying on costly fixes — street traders, shopkeepers and restaurant owners, whole communities and individuals, find ways to circumvent rules, processes and conventions with artful ingenuity.

Empty styrofoam, plaited plastic and cardboard boxes are stacked up to become serving tables; giant plastic bottles are sliced through to become tunnels to hold offerings of cat food; trays are made into bowls by setting rolls of acrylic sheeting around their edge, held within their frame using the material tension of individually packaged hand wipes stuffed between metal and plastic. Outgrown pushchairs are set up as mobile market stands by replacing the seat with a flat tray and boxes of hazelnuts, pistachios and sunflower seeds; stools are fixed with string, tape and tree branches, or their seats balanced artfully on bollards.

The will to sort out or adjust is balanced with a sense of ceremony that feels equally integral to Istanbul. It is found in the architectural grandeur that trickles down from the historic city, to the balik ekmek boats; from the grand cafés that serve people who promenade on the avenues, to the fishing boats set up to sell tea to passersby on the waterfront promenade; from the elaborate bird palaces to improvised cat houses. It is found in the ritual offering of limon kolonyası (an anti-bacterial cologne originally scented with rose water, which has been mixed with bergamot, orange, rosemary and, most often, lemon since the sixteenth century), which is poured into your cupped hands or provided via white and gold packaged wipes, in restaurants, on buses, or when you arrive at gatherings at someone’s home. These seemingly opposing forces cross over in their grounding in an awareness of collectivity, in their generosity. Sharing knowledge and space, making rituals out of practicalities, or ‘something out of nothing’, is a way of acknowledging our interconnectedness — with people, with other species, with our environments, and the things with which we interact — and engaging productively with our histories, the present moment and potential futures, understanding how one impacts the other.

In the final episode of season three of Selling Sunset, realtor and “gothic Barbie” Christine Quinn shows Karamo Brown from Queer Eye around a Richard Neutra house in Los Angeles. Selling Sunset is a reality television show that follows lives of the agents of real estate firm the Oppenheim group, based in an office on Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles. The Neutra home was built in 1949 and according to Quinn, “it has a great Mid-century vibe”, situated within a shaded plot, its wooden beams and floor-to-ceiling windows face onto a kidney-shaped swimming pool. Selling Sunset is high gloss and high drama, with disorientating pacing, bright lights and nondescript ‘luxury’ interior styling making it into every listing. The aesthetic — maybe everything about it — is jarring, but something about the total lack of care for the safely historical Mid-Century Modern feels refreshing.

Although the aesthetic coding is different, the focus on developing a narrative, a context that people can attach to — a lifestyle — is consistent with the approach of Britain’s housing industry, and the desire of property developers and estate agents to masquerade as something both innocuous and meaningful. One of the tactics utilised by Selling Sunset’s producer Adam Divello is to use a still camera, rather than the roving, Gonzo-style filming or surveillance cameras of early reality television. This falsely and tactically situates Selling Sunset in the realm of cinema, as it did with Divello’s earlier shows Laguna Beach and The Hills, framing each scene like a museum diorama, slightly removed from the mess of lived reality.

Lifestyle estate agents such as The Modern House and its sister agency, Inigo, Aucoot and Brickworks, play similar ‘tricks of the light’ — both literally, and metaphorically — adjusting the brightness and contrast on their pictures according to the target market, making something appear as it is not. Generally, estate agents use warmer and muted tones for those who ‘have’ cultural capital, and brighter and colder for those with (or projecting) cash capital. They seem to be as focused on catching and holding our attention, as they are on booking viewings or hosting open houses (with ‘burgers and botox’ if you’re Christine Quinn, and probably with artisan croissants and CBD-infused drinks if you’re in Hackney). They want to sell a story — of the house, of the brand, of your life — as much as they want to sell bricks and mortar.

The impetus to “get on the property ladder” has been shoved down the proverbial throat of people in the United Kingdom for years, mostly since the mid-1970s when Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party and declared her belief in a ‘property-owning democracy’. As Prime Minister, Thatcher eroded what she considered to be the “nanny state”, with the Right to Buy policy encouraging council tenants to buy their homes at reduced prices, and Thatcher’s larger policy, the Housing Act, making it so that councils could no longer build council housing. The job now sat within the housing market, with property developers buying land and building a percentage of so-called affordable housing in luxury developments. This lead to an immediate, and continuing, lack of actual affordable (or available) housing, a fact exacerbated by the ‘bedroom tax’ introduced by David Cameron at part of the Welfare Reform Act in 2012, which meant that people deemed to be “under occupying” their housing would have to pay a tax and ultimately move (but where to) — a policy deemed to be discriminatory and incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, but still enacted.

As the pressure to own a house has increased, it has become more and more difficult to not only “get on the property ladder”, but to live anywhere securely, as the possibility of living in a council owned or privately rented property long-term has declined. And as the potential for a house to become a home has diminished, it’s somehow become increasingly important for where to live to project not only how ‘successful’ we are, but how interesting we are, too. We’re not just making aesthetic choices, we’re making meaningful choices; establishing a narrative that simulates a home.

The pressure for the interior and exterior of your home to project an abstract vibe of success (à la Hyacinth Bucket’s Keeping Up Appearances) has been in the ether for a while, however you’ve come to live there. What those codes are might depend on the specifics of what your neighbours are up to, but it’s increasingly likely that they will be a reflection of somehow both broader and more specific trends — ‘variously local’ lifestyle fads that proliferate globally online, into the homes of particular types of people who draw their reference from particular types of places, establishing a mirage of culture and taste, served up by the algorithm, via Zara Home and AliExpress.

In the thirty years prior to Thatcher’s premiership, the government had built close to half of all homes in Britain, and in her focus on home as property — something you own — rather than where you live, a basic human right became a competition. Between the 1960s and early 2000s, the number of people in England who lived in a home they owned rose from around 40% to just under 70%. A particular balance of housing stock, shifting rates of interest and inflation, and precarious money lending policies, created a climate that encouraged people to buy. You could get 130% loan-to-value mortgages with low interest rates, and if you were lucky and held onto the house, the rate of inflation could mean that a house bought in the 1980s for £30,000 is now worth over £1,000,000. But since 2008, and the global financial crisis triggered by excessive speculation and lack of regulation in the housing market and its surrounding financial institutions, what was known as the “housing bubble” has burst, and the “property ladder” collapsed. The principle, if we can call it that, relies on people moving house often, buying increasingly expensive houses, with bigger and bigger loans that they can take out against their ever increasing salaries. Rather than seeking to keep moving, literally, but also in the sense that Thatcher and John Major, and Tony Blair’s New Labour encouraged through rhetoric that “things can only get better”, for most people, the focus is more on being able to stay put.

Against this backdrop, agents’ photographs and property descriptions are uncannily optimistic: editing the sky to make it Mediterranean blue, stretching rooms out with a Fisheye lens, and describing a cupboard as a bedroom. Or showing people around a flat with a kitchen entirely made of paper and describing it as “a new Japanese trendy thing”, which plays out in a scene from the first episode of The Armando Ianucci Show in 2001, but it could easily be a scene from life.

Perhaps even more insidious, in terms of false optimism and manipulation, is the presentation of house-hunting or house-window-shopping as culture, as entertainment. Something that offers value, rather than something that gobbles up huge amounts of money, and lulls people into an addictive para-social relationship with estate agents that feeds off of their desires. It’s clear that estate agents want people to buy into a sort-of simulation of house-hunting (not even home ownership), turning house listings into content, ‘editorialised’ (through interviews, or contextual research on the history of the house of flat), and served up as something to consume and be consumed by.

Whether it’s via Instagram, or through digital and print publishing, estate agents, property developers and ‘place-making’ agencies manufacture content that supports their perspective and financial plans, and present it as a newspaper, a magazine, or a beautifully ‘curated’ social media profile. They establish a false sense of security — of not ‘consuming’ at all — and swipe the rug out from underneath you when you realise that you are reading, or walking in, or scrolling through a manufactured, marketed version of reality. In 2010, I lived across the road from a branch of Foxtons and it took me a few months to realise it wasn’t a cafe. Now, an estate agent could pull off being a whole ‘lifestyle brand’ — whatever this means — a cafe, a shop, a publishing house, getting us addicted to the idea of property ownership, caught in a loop of supply and demand, but just of the simulation version of things.

There’s always been a relationship between publishing and the market, whether it’s interiors magazines suggesting the tap, or wallpaper or chair to buy, or showing the reader what their kitchen should look like. But they also show the many different ways that people live, homes that aren’t aspirational in terms of things you could have or should want, but aspirational in terms of fulfilling what those people want and need from their surroundings.

House & Garden was first published in America in 1901, and in 1947 in the UK, with the very similarly titled Homes & Gardens first published in the UK in 1919; The World of Interiors, Country Living and Elle Decoration had their first issue released in the UK in the 1980s, and Living Etc in the 1990s. Each magazine fulfilled different remits within the world of shelter magazines, from DIY tips and recipes, to product features, interviews, and more artful representations of how people live. They appeal to our curiosity about how people live, they present archetypes and alternatives, traditions and innovations. I edit an interiors magazine, Ton, and it is a privilege to be trusted with someone’s home — writing about the lives lived within those walls, standing in a stranger’s bathroom talking about the pictures above the loo. It’s a strange and intimate experience, and at their best, the stories communicate the many different ways that people can make a house a home. Whether it’s to do with how they’ve come to live there — through squatting, guardianship, renting, social housing, subletting, buying, or inheriting a place — the choices they make, and how it reflects the needs and desires of the people who live in a home and their community, what makes the interior of a home interesting is rarely the aesthetic, it’s how it expresses the character and experiences of those who live there.

But it is often the case, due to financial pressures and by design, that magazines function to project aspirations and encourage people to buy, or at least tell the reader that what they have isn’t enough. The founding of many of the interiors magazines that still hit newsstands crosses over with the same developments in politics and culture that lead to the development and popularisation of home-as-identity television, which made a voyeuristic spectacle of people making bad decisions about housing, with several programmes in British television becoming renowned in generating this melodramatic genre. The commissioning and enjoyment of these shows was a consequence of the economic recovery in the 1990s, Blair’s Thatcher-hangover policy of largely letting the market decide when it came to broadcasting — desiring cheap-n-cheerful television that was both easy to run and non-critical —and the resulting rise of reality TV, with its heady mix of escapism and schadenfreude.

Through the Keyhole – a celebrity panel show hosted by David Frost and Lloyd Grossman where people tried to guess “who lives in a house like this”– first aired in 1989, and was one of the first examples of ‘housing as entertainment’. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that Changing Rooms, and Linda Barker’s Changing Rooms Teapot Disaster (you can imagine, or watch on YouTube), was commissioned. Changing Rooms was swiftly followed by the first house buying television show, the short-lived Hot Property, in 1997. Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs first aired in 1999, the description for episode one set the tone for what was to come: “A couple in Newhaven face a race against time as they build their dream home on a windswept cliff-top site in time for the birth of their baby”. In 2000, A Place in the Sun and Location, Location, Location first broadcast, followed by Property Ladder in 2001 and Escape to the Country in 2002.

In Location, Location, Location, two pre-Righmove ‘property searchers’, Kirsty Allsopp and Phil Spencer search for properties. The show narrates the changing housing market according to the deposits, requirements, and choices of predominately middle-class nuclear families making the essentially government-endorsed choice to move to the suburbs, grow the future workforce, and stimulate the economy. Allsopp lobbied for changes to the way houses were sold in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 2007, and worked on a home buying review with then-shadow housing minister Grant Shapps. Since then, she has suggested in The Times that young people are exaggerating when they say they can’t afford to buy a house, and that it would be possible through “enormous sacrifices” such as not going on holiday, eating out, or buying avocados.

In 2000, when Location first aired, 20% of young people in England owned their own homes; by 2014, that figure had fallen to under 10%, where it remains today. In 1991, 35% of 16-24 year olds owned their own home; in 2024, that figure had dropped to 0.1%. House prices have risen by about 7% every year since 1980, while job security has decreased, wages have largely remained stagnant (particularly in relation to rates of inflation), and mortgage terms and interest rates have become increasingly hostile. As owning a house has become more unattainable, it has been presented as not only an increasingly desirable aspiration, but something written in stone as one of the clearest markers of achievement. When, really, it’s just a hangover of Thatcher’s government, fed through the narrative conveyer belts of New Labour and neoliberalism, designed to make housing security about personal achievements and failures, not generational wealth and by-design structural breakdowns.

The inaccessibility of property ownership is matched in absurdity by the predominately unregulated rental market in the UK, and impossibly depleted council housing, hawked over by developers. Housing could be — should be, has been — a matter of right, a collective responsibility to make possible and maintain, and not a personal triumph bolstered by circumstantial privileges. The irony of many of the houses and flats now being lauded as objects of desire and capital is that they were originally built as council housing with socialist values, in the late 19th and through the 20th century. Today this feels rich, both metaphorically and literally. For instance, the Boundary Estate, a housing development in East London built by the local government authority in the late 19th century, was one of the first social housing schemes in the UK. Approximately one-third of the flats in the Grade II listed estate are now privately owned, and a two-bedroom flat costs around £700,000. Similarly, Balfron Tower, designed by architect Erno Goldfinger in 1963 as part of the Brownfield Estate in East London, was intended as a social housing estate led by Goldfinger’s Marxist politics. He saw the potential of neighbourly bonds in the “streets of the sky”, but as its commissioner, the London County Council was succeeded by the Greater London Council The council was abolished in 1986 and was passed on to Tower Hamlets Council, which then became a “no-go area”. It was used as a set in the apocalyptic zombie horror film 28 Days Later, and generally treated as shorthand for the failures of state-backed building.

In 2010, Poplar Harca, a housing association, took over ownership of Balfron Tower from Tower Hamlets Council, winning a vote prior to which it had told tenants the association would refurbish their flats. Everyone was rehoused, but only private leaseholders were allowed back — with social housing tenants being told that the impact of a global financial downturn meant it wasn’t possible for them to return. During the renovation process, the construction hoardings were printed with Goldfinger quotes, and the marketing suite was decorated with pictures of his designs and an enthusiastic aesthetic celebration of Brutalism.

Six ‘heritage units’ were designed to reflect the original vision in aesthetic terms, while the project moved further away from anything that could be recognised as politically visionary, and the rest of the building was updated to reflect the potential desires of potential buyers. At one point in its redevelopment — when residents had been moved out, property guardians and artists moved in — the National Trust opened a pop-up flat designed by Wayne Hemingway, where there was an immersive overnight production of Macbeth. Turner Prize-nominated artist Catherine Yass attempted to throw a piano off the block as part of a “swan song to the lost socialist ideals of modernist housing” but was stopped by a petition led by residents living on the estate below.

In 2023, the Balfron Tower Partnership had failed to sell a single flat in Balfron Tower and withdrew one-hundred-and-thirty properties from the market. The potential customer profile the developers were hoping would buy into Balfron for its architectural history (excited by original light fittings and flooring) weren’t interested in the mostly identikit open plan layouts, or the new brown windows that didn’t open. It is now mostly rented to private tenants, managed by the property management company Way of Life, with a one-bedroom flat being rented for approximately £2,000 per month.

Balfron Tower is a tragic, and alarmingly common example of the problems of fetishising social housing as a historical value, and not an ongoing need for stability. In a 2023 interview with Novara Media, Alex Wakefield, secretary of London Renters Union’s Tower Hamlets branch, said that it showed how “good” architecture was not considered acceptable for those on lower incomes: “[Balfron] was not realising some sort of economic value by staying in the hands of the working classes”. “Good” architecture, as well as realising its economic value, should fulfil the task of communicating the cosmopolitan-good-taste of the people who own it — and never have brown windows, unless they are an original feature.

“Good” architecture and “good” design, even when it has been intended as an egalitarian project — like the Bauhaus, and the Arts and Crafts Movement — has often been mixed up with productive intentions and not so effective results, with homes, furniture and objects remaining among those who mostly need it the least. But the creative ideas and ideals did make it into the processes of house building more broadly, even looking at ceiling heights and the scale of rooms in early and mid 20th century developments. Now, the proposed standardisation of modernism, which was meant to encourage people away from value judgements based on design, has been replaced with the standardisation of (loosely personalised) algorithms, with modernist design presented as the platonic ideal of good taste via marketing masquerading as publishing.
‘Multidisciplinary estate agents’ with ‘an elevated aesthetic and ethical approach’ are everywhere, offering their services to ‘discerning audiences’, should we be lucky enough to fit (and foot) the bill. Surely the truest form of an estate agent is closer to late-stage-capitalist-goth-barbie Christine Quinn, or the hapless, incompetent, accidentally frank Stath, desperately trying to let someone a flat.

In 2012, at San Diego’s annual Fourth of July ‘Big Bay Boom’, all the fireworks went off at once. What was meant to be an 18 minute display, was over in 15 seconds; the rockets, fountains, brocade crowns, strobes and comets launching into the sky with a boom, forming a mushroom cloud with a rain of sparkling light collapsing into the water, as the crowd looked on with a mix of excitement and fear.

Fireworks were invented around 800 AD, when an alchemist in China mixed potassium nitrate, sulphur and charcoal hoping to find the secret to eternal life. Instead, they invented gunpowder, and when it was poured into bamboo tubes and lit on fire, the air passing through the tube made the flames crackle and spark. Fireworks were thought to ward off evil spirits, and they continue to be set off all over the world, to celebrate, commemorate, and mark the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. The turn of a new year has been celebrated since about 2000 BCE, in Mesopotamia, and it has always occurred on different dates according to variations in traditions, calendars, ruling powers, and positions in relation to the sun. New Year’s Eve holds a balance of anticipation and regret, with people seeking hope and forgiveness, joy and oblivion.

In the same way that it can be difficult to tell whether someone is laughing or crying, a raucous party and a bustling protest can mimic each other, or cross over into a unified entity. In periods of political upheaval and social unrest, people’s frustrations and desires are often expressed through the music they are making and listening to; the most challenging times requiring the most elaborate distraction or release. Acid house, which grew from disco and Chicago house, was popularised in the UK, and particularly at Manchester’s Haçienda, as people fought the systematic oppression of Margaret Thatcher’s government. The Conservative party had been in power since 1979, the scale of privatisation, decimation of rights and hollowing out of welfare, health and education had drained people of their faith in government, but rather than giving in, the response was one of strength and retaliation through community and celebration.

Music, film, literature and art have long reflected our anxieties, or what those in power want to be the dominant mode of thought, with cultural shifts rising up through youth culture, subcultures and social movements, or trickling down through soft power policies and intelligence agencies. In the 1950s, the CIA promoted and funded Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art as part of a programme promoting American ideals abroad, which also sought to discredit Socialist Realism. Anti-Communist sentiment in America had grown from the geopolitical tensions between the United States and Soviet Russia after the Second World War, and the soft power tactics of the CIA deepened peoples suspicions — the Cold War mounting through propaganda, espionage, psychological warfare, and the nuclear arms race.

In 1945, US President Harry Truman had ordered for two atomic bombs — the first and only to be used in warfare — to be dropped on Japan, the ‘Thin Man’ or ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima and ‘Fat Man’ on Nagasaki. Justified as the result of an ultimatum from the United Nations to Imperial Japan, the bombs killed upwards of 200,000 people, and ongoing radiation impacted the long-term health of the population and land. Only a year after its founding in 1946, the UN created the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, which sought to eliminate the use of nuclear weapons, but six months later the United States conducted its first post-war nuclear tests, Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll.

Bikini Atoll is part of the Marshall Islands, which sit near the Equator in the Pacific Ocean. The indigenous population were sent into permanent exile when the US military arrived and told them they were being evacuated “for the good of mankind and to end all world wars”. The first nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll were publicly announced and observed by an audience of invited guests and press, as fleets of target ships assembled in the lagoon. The first bomb, named ‘Gilda’ after a Rita Hayworth character, was dropped from a plane — and four days later, designer and engineer Louis Réard introduced the two-piece swimsuit design, the bikini, at a public swimming pool in Paris — 
the second, known as ‘Helen of Bikini’ was detonated 27 metres under water, with radioactive sea spray causing extensive contamination. In 1954, a second series of tests took place at Bikini Atoll, with thermonuclear bombs that were 1,000 times as powerful as those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, creating large craters and contaminating both Bikini and its surrounding islands.

Bikini Atoll had been rich in flora and fauna, and when the islanders were forcibly evicted they were moved to previously uninhabited islands that would go on to be proven unsuitable for sustaining life. The indigenous community had been promised they would return to Bikini Atoll, but the resulting radiation from years of nuclear activity had contaminated the soil and water, and apart from a failed, lethal attempt at repatriation in the 1970s, the people of Bikini Atoll continue to be displaced.

In 2017, a study by Stanford University reported that the Atoll’s lagoon was full of schools of fish that appeared healthy to the naked eye, with abundant living coral, crabs and sharks. Ocean life seemed to be thriving, because it had been left alone, and was somehow resilient to the effects of radiation poisoning. The legacy of colonial and chemical violence at Bikini Atoll has rendered the island uninhabitable, but the lagoon seems to have found a way to adapt in the absence of human interference.

While nuclear tests were being conducted at Bikini Atoll, President Truman had another site established in the Nevada desert. Homes, shops and restaurants were built, and cars, aircrafts and mannequins were placed around the site, to establish the impact of a nuclear blast. Shockwaves and radiation spread to neighbouring indigenous land, and as far as Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Washington and Idaho, with nuclear fallout travelling downwind. The mushroom clouds could be seen for 100 miles, and nuclear tests became a tourist attraction for guests at downtown hotels in Las Vegas, with casinos hosting parties, and creating ‘atomic-theme’ cocktails.

The National Atomic Testing Museum, Las Vegas sits behind the Paris Las Vegas casino, a 30 minute walk off the main strip on East Flamingo Road. The museum holds materials and artefacts relating to nuclear testing, spanning from reports and data, to advertisements for nuclear testing, ‘atomic’ wine, merchandise, comics and a crossover collection of ‘UFO and Alien Pop Culture’. The way America’s nuclear history has been to some extent fictionalised, or aligned with fantastical theories of alien activity, speaks to an effort to detach the legacy of chemical violence from history. At the same time, narratives focused on nuclear testing and the socio-political context of the Cold War in books, films and artworks publicised peoples’ fears, critiques and suspicions about nuclear testing and what was driving it. Films like Godzilla, The Atomic Kid, On the Beach, Planet of the Apes and Goldeneye spoke to people’s anxieties, but it was only later — or in films produced outside of America — that people would fully critically engage with the military context in America.

The Cold War Hollywood blacklist prevented actors, writers and directors seen to be associated with or sympathetic to Communism from working, and this included perceived sympathy through the critique of government. Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb — released in 1964 and filmed in London — satirises fears of a nuclear conflict between the United States and Soviet Union; following the battle for authority between a US Air Force general and the President and his ‘War Room’, as they try to prevent the general from starting World War Three. The film closes with a medley of atomic mushroom clouds, set to the tune of We’ll Meet Again by Vera Lynn.

When faced with difficulty, or states of emergency, human nature seems to swing between the desire to escape and avoid (whether literally or through distraction) or stay in place and face reality. Popular entertainment, art, music and parties can provide a distraction, or they can be a site of refusal — of state violence, and victimisation. Those at the centre of a crisis, who feel its direct impact reverberate through their life, often have a sense of calm about them, as they find remarkable ways to adapt.

For people living on Stromboli, an active volcano a few miles off the coast of Italy, the regular booms and molten debris are essentially background noise. Although the populated areas appear to be at the base of the volcano, where the island meets the sea, most of the 2 miles of rock extend under the sea, and the people of Stromboli, visiting scientists, tourists, and artists taking parts in the Fiorucci Art Trust’s ‘Volcano Extravaganza’, are actually living near the top. There is a constant threat of a devastating blast, but the spectacle of molten lava leaping from Stromboli’s peak like a firework, or the ground shaking as if an atomic bomb had just gone off — or an asteroid hit Earth — creates both a sense of excitement, and a connection to the cycles of nature. In a 2021 piece for The New York Times, a resident of Stromboli said: “We love danger, in some ways. It lets us feel immortal. It brings fear and joy together.”

It is ironic that a near-death experience, or living constantly with existential threat, can make us feel immortal — as if by surviving one brush with death, the odds stack in our favour indefinitely. Perhaps rather than feeling immortal, in living on an active volcano, people have to continually face the reality of the fragility of life, be more in tune with their surroundings, and live in spite of that. Like those who continue to go to work, invite friends for dinner, party and protest after a natural or manmade disaster, during economic crises, wartime or grief.

While technology, NASA tests, medical research and ‘survivalist’ merchandise are providing ways to prolong — or at least feel in control of — life; the large-scale response to the climate emergency — or lack thereof — continues to threaten life at a scale that is hard to fully comprehend. The last mass extinction was set in motion when an asteroid struck Earth, or specifically Chicxulub, Mexico, an area that unlike Lourdes — where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared at the Grotto of the Apparitions, and is now the Las Vegas of Catholicism — goes largely uncelebrated, its name translating as ‘the devil’s flea’.

The next mass extinction is less likely to be the result of an asteroid hitting Earth, than it is an implosion caused by the impact of imperialism, capital and wilful ignorance. In Richard Kelly’s 2007 film Southland Tales, the opening scene tracks a crowd of laughing families celebrating the Fourth of July, before a mushroom cloud blasts into the sky and launches World War Three. As the smoke dissipates, the voiceover of an Iraq war veteran — played by Justin Timberlake — declares: “This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a whimper but with a bang.”