Earlier this month, Barking and Dagenham was voted the worst place to live in Britain. The survey, carried out by property website Rightmove, asked residents in 130 places to rate their neighbourhoods and the borough came 130th. It’s perhaps not the most groundbreaking piece of research ever carried out (rich people are happier with their surroundings than poor people!) but, still, it’s another kick in the teeth for an area that has had more kicks than most.
The survey is only the latest in a long line of bad news stories: the UK’s most burgled town, the highest rate of teenage pregnancies and the highest level of unemployment in the capital. While a wave of gentrification has swept through other parts of London, leaving a trail of artisan bakeries and craft beer breweries in its wake, Barking and Dagenham has remained on the margins, its invitation to the party lost in the post.
I grew up in the area in the 1980s and my strongest memory was a sense of being on the edge of things. It was neither Essex nor London, an anomaly, a sprawling manufacturing town dropped into the suburbs, its only landmarks of distinction the white water towers and wind turbines of the Ford motor plant.
Dagenham has been described as a mining town without the mines and, in terms of its dependence on one major employer, it is not that far-fetched a comparison. Since the 1930s, Dagenham has been synonymous with the car manufacturer, which at its peak was employing 40,000 people. After Ford, the next biggest employer was the pharmaceutical company Sanofi, which used to be known as May & Baker. If you didn’t work for one or the other, the chances were you knew someone who did. As a student, I’d get summer jobs in the canteen at Ford and would often come face to face with my former classmates.
It’s impossible to overstate how these factories shaped the area’s social and cultural landscape. Not only did they provide a job (and, if you worked for Ford, a subsidised car) but your social life, leisure facilities and your sense of identity. When the factories wound down – Ford closed its last vehicle assembly line in 2002 (although engine production continues) and Sanofi shut down its plant in 2013 – the impact on the area was devastating. Nearby shops and pubs went out of business overnight. Within five years of the Ford closures, it’s estimated that 25% of the borough’s homeowners had sold up and moved out, kickstarting a demographic shift that only gathered pace in the ensuing years. The low point came in 2006 when the BNP won 12 seats on Barking and Dagenham council.
I’ve not been back to the area since Sanofi moved out, so it comes as a bit of a shock to step out of Dagenham East tube station and see a big hole where many of the factory buildings used to stand. Surrounded by blue hoardings, the land is about to be redeveloped as a business and science park, Londoneast-uk, but that is not what has brought me here. It is also the latest focal point for an exciting arts initiative that is transforming the borough’s cultural landscape.
Creative Barking and Dagenham (CBD) is a three-year project funded by the Arts Council for England that was set up in response to a survey that found the borough had some of the lowest levels of engagement with the arts in the country. It is built on a network of “cultural connectors” – volunteers recruited from the area – who have the final say on which artworks are commissioned and it has led to a radical transformation of the nature and quality of art appearing in the borough. Whereas before money was being ploughed into strange concrete sculptures on roundabouts along the A13 or municipal events in parks that no one went to, the last year has seen a flourishing of innovative, grassroots projects.
“It’s about working-class people taking control of the arts and owning it, creating their own narrative, celebrating their own heritage,” says CBD’s programme director, Miriam Nelken. “There’s a real sense of disempowerment here with the closure of the factories and all the headlines about Barking and Dagenham. This is about enabling people to think that they can do stuff, they do matter and they are part of history.”
One of the first projects, commissioned by arts company Create in partnership with CBD, was a mural in Valence Park that tells the story of the Becontree estate. Built to provide housing for East End slum-dwellers and soldiers returning from the first world war, it was the biggest social housing project in the world, with some 27,000 homes. The mural by Chad McCail, called This Used to Be Fields, illustrates key moments in the estate’s history, such as the opening of the Ford plant in 1931, the sewing machinists’ strike for equal pay in 1968 and residents chasing BNP candidate Richard Barnbrook, dressed as St George and riding a horse, off the estate in 2010.
Another project has seen the film-makers Close and Remote driving around the local estates in a customised Ford Transit van making a series of 50 one-minute films that will look at the impact of globalisation on Barking and Dagenham and how the residents’ working lives have changed. The finished work will be shown at a number of open-air screenings in the autumn.
But the latest commission is perhaps the most radical yet. At the entrance to the Sanofi site, I meet up with the artist Geraldine Pilgrim, who has been invited to create a “performance journey” that will tell the story of the pioneering pharmaceutical firm. Pilgrim is known for her atmospheric and haunting works that “bring the ghosts out of the walls” of landmarks such as the former Midland Grand hotel at St Pancras (before its recent restoration) and the disused Marshall Street baths in Westminster. As soon as she stepped inside the factory, she knew she wanted to tell its story: “I usually work in derelict buildings but this isn’t derelict, it’s asleep and it’s waiting to wake up and that’s what’s so exciting about it,” she says.
The production is called Well and it will entwine the story of the factory and its workers with the history of medicine and pharmaceuticals, taking the audience on a journey through a series of dream-like encounters with a choir of chemists, line-dancing packers, a recreation of an Ebola isolation unit, interspersed with some poignant observations about illness and recovery.
Pilgrim takes me on a tour of building D31, the heart of the old Sanofi factory and one of the few parts of it left standing. It was here that the “wonder drug” sulfapyridine, which famously cured Winston Churchill’s pneumonia, was discovered. In the silent corridors, automatic doors open with a sigh as we approach them, lists of drug batches to be tested are still written in black marker pen on whiteboards and in the rooms where the lab workers used to change into their protective clothing, the name labels are still stuck to the lockers. The building has lain empty for two years, but there’s an eerie sense that the employees have just stepped out for a fire drill and could come filing back in at any moment. “I walk into buildings and I immediately get the atmosphere. People have been so happy working here, it’s imbued in the walls,” says Pilgrim.
The production is unusual in that the cast is largely made up of locals and former Sanofi employees. I meet some of the participants after my tour and it’s fair to say that no one is more surprised than they are to find themselves taking part in a piece of groundbreaking theatre. “I don’t know how I got into this really,” says Mike Blagojevitch, who used to work for Sanofi “in tablets and capsules”. “We came on one of the tours and Pilgrim said she could tell how passionate we were about it all and she said she’d really love us to be part of it. You can’t really say no, can you?”
Joyce Crowly was recruited via one of the local line-dancing groups (line dancing is huge in Dagenham). A machinist for Ford in the 1950s, she came along because she thought it would be “a bit of fun”. I say that she seems remarkably unfazed by her forthcoming 15 minutes of fame, but then she confides that she’s already made a video with Paul McCartney. “I’m line dancing in the background on Brown-Eyed Handsome Man. I’m the one with the funny hat. Don’t tell anyone or they’ll think I’m showing off.”
It’s this have-a-go attitude that has made the CBD initiative such a success, according to Liza Vallance, artistic director of Studio 3 Arts, a charity that has worked in the borough for some 30 years and which is overseeing the project. “Getting involved in an arts project is risky you know, but there’s nothing quite like the people here and their ability to embrace a new idea,” she says.
Her headquarters is a community centre on the edge of Barking’s Gascoigne estate, which made headlines last year for having Britain’s largest primary school, with almost 1,300 pupils. The neighbourhood is in a state of flux with several of the big tower blocks being demolished and residents being “decanted” (that terrible word) to other parts of the borough, but the centre feels like a hub of cheerful productivity. When I call in, a group of young performers is rehearsing for a forthcoming comedy show in the studio and volunteers are manning the front desk and gallery space and watering the flowers in the community garden.
Vallance is currently scouting for an A-list actor to take the lead role in a promenade production of The Merchant of Venice, which she is developing for Barking town centre next summer. It will start on the quayside of the river Roding and end in the council chamber at the town hall. She believes the play’s themes of economic hardship, money-lending, seeking sanctuary and tolerance will have resonance in an area where the issue of race is never far from the surface and where it can seem as though every other shop is a Cash Converters outlet.
Vallance is full of praise for the new leader of Barking and Dagenham council, Darren Rodwell, for getting behind the project: “He is really bold actually, relentless in his pursuit of raising the profile of this place. He’s a local boy born and bred and he’s on it.”
I meet Rodwell later that afternoon. He’s come straight from a meeting with London mayoral candidate Tessa Jowell and is still buzzing from the recent visit of the Queen to mark the borough’s 50th anniversary. It seems churlish to bring up the Rightmove survey, but of course I do.
Rodwell’s sunny mood darkens instantly: “How dare they? How dare they do that? It’s very insulting, because quite frankly no one knows the stories of the people in this borough; no one knows that in two weeks’ time we’re taking 750 people to the seaside because that may be the only holiday that some of the kids round here get; no one understands that we’ve gone from one food bank to 14 because of the way this government is destroying vulnerable people’s lives. This borough is a good borough, the people in it are good people and we don’t need some jumped-up company telling us what we’re not.”
He was particularly incensed by a follow-up clip on Good Morning Britain in which two women were brought down from Harrogate (voted the best place to live for the third year running) so they could be filmed walking along Dagenham Heathway, one of the borough’s busiest shopping streets, looking unimpressed at the litter, shuttered shop fronts and lack of pavement cafes. It was a patronising stunt and one to which Rodwell responds with another entertaining tirade, which ends with him inviting Harrogate “to stick their Bettys tea rooms up their backsides”.
Rodwell seems genuinely put out, but it’s about time someone got angry on behalf of this place. For almost a century, the area has been a convenient dumping ground for all the things that London didn’t want in its backyard: the heavy industry, the sewage works, the power stations, the oil refineries. And people too. Dagenham’s relatively cheap housing has given other London boroughs an affordable way of cutting their waiting lists, offloading people via rental agreements with private landlords that the council has no say over. Inevitably, this has led to squalid living conditions for some tenants and tensions within the community.
Rodwell grew up on the Becontree estate and remembers a time when residents, as part of their tenancy agreement, would have to adhere to a strict set of standards, such as cleaning their front steps, keeping their net curtains white and cutting their hedges. The rise of right to buy and then buy to let has put paid to that and many of the streets now look scruffy and unloved. “The first generation of people moving into these properties, they remembered the hardship of where they came from, they had pride, but that has worn away over the generations,” he says. His priority as council leader, he tells me, is to restore a sense of “civic pride” and he enthusiastically lists measures he’s introducing, ranging from DNA-testing dog poo to track down irresponsible owners to cracking down on slum landlords.
Rodwell says the arts have a central role to play in creating pride and community cohesion. “The arts are the glue that brings people together and if we don’t make people think they’re part of something, you get isolationism and then you get extremism, and you get the situation we had with the BNP.”
Perhaps the biggest challenge now facing the borough (or “opportunity” as Rodwell prefers to call it) is that London is expanding ever eastwards and this is one of the few urban areas left that still has land to build on. A huge brownfield site formerly owned by Barking power station was earmarked for development in 1994 and planning permission for 10,800 homes granted. Twenty one years later, only 1,200 homes have been built and the residents of Barking Riverside are still waiting for a rail link to connect them to the rest of the city. Until the transport infrastructure is improved, no further homes can be built. It’s just another example of how this borough is expected to mop up the overspill from London, but has yet to be given the means or the infrastructure to support it.
When I ask Rodwell if he thinks the area could eventually see the same kind of gentrification that has transformed Tower Hamlets or Hackney (not always for the better) he’s ambivalent: “Gentrification is one thing, but why not ambition and aspiration for the working class because there is a difference between the two? We’ve got to keep the essence of what is Barking and Dagenham, that is what makes us unique.”
Half a mile away from Barking Riverside is Dagenham’s Sunday market. If you’ve ever wondered, while walking through one of the more gentrified corners of London, what happens to all the people and stuff that gets pushed out when house prices and business rents rocket skywards, here it is. In the middle of an industrial estate, downwind of the Beckton sewage works, is the last bastion of the old East End. It is every cheap-and-cheerful market stall that was priced out of Hackney’s Broadway Market or the Brixton arches. It is foot-long hot dogs and churning vats of rainbow-coloured slush puppies and things you’ve never seen on sale in a market before: “affordable headstones” sold out of the back of a van, bejewelled harnesses for Staffordshire bull terriers and a kiosk offering advice on “no win, no fee” injury claims.
I ask stallholders Gillian Cooper and Mark Coleman whether they can see this area becoming gentrified and they look at me as though I’m slightly mad. Will I come back in two years and find you selling ostrich burgers? “No, because we won’t be here. It will have been bulldozed to make way for houses that no one wants to live in,” says Cooper.
I’m not so sure about that. After years of stagnation, property prices in the area have started to creep up. Last year saw the opening of the Ice House Quarter in Barking, a group of old warehouses on the Roding that have been converted into studio and performance spaces. And there are rumours of an arthouse cinema coming to the area.
In Valence Park, I bump into Verity-Jane Keefe, an artist from Hackney who is touring the borough in a bus she has converted into a mobile museum. Her work documents and celebrates the social histories of the area’s estates, places such as Goresbrook Village, a trio of tower blocks known locally as “Legoland” that were demolished two years ago.
“I really like how the area seems to represent everything that’s happening in London,” she tells me. “All eyes are moving east, people are getting priced out of the centre. This is the edge lands and as an artist it feels like a really good place to thrash things out.”
She’s right. The edge lands are where it’s at. Once upon a time, if you lived in Dagenham and wanted to see something exciting, you got on a train and went into London. Now it’s the other way around. “It’s about changing the narrative, isn’t it?” says Liza Vallance. “For years, we’ve had stigma and stereotypes about what Barking and Dagenham is. But there is a culture of ambition and aspiration here and it feels as though we’re finally stepping out of the wings and grabbing what’s rightfully ours.”
Well runs from 31 August to 6 September at the former Sanofi factory, Dagenham. Box office: 0208 507 5607 or thebroadwaybarking.com.
