Cities are not made by housing alone. Nor, even, by the cafes and retail units and light garnish of landscape that tend to come with speculative residential developments. They also need places such as Cockpit Arts, a social enterprise providing studio space to craftspeople that has been operating in Bloomsbury, central London, since 1986, and in Deptford, in the south-east of the city, since 2002. Cities are made, inter alia, by people making things.
Their second location is in one of those zones where the pressure to build housing numbers combines with the availability of ex-industrial sites to create a newish but already widespread urban type. There’s housing – close-packed, repetitious and rectangular – built with remorseless spatial efficiency, the mentality of a distribution warehouse applied to places to live. And there’s what’s left in the gaps between the housing: weeds, mud, oddities, broken things, fragments of bygone engineering and public works, survivors of older and richer versions of city life.
