#2: “An Important Piece of the Jigsaw”
Near History & Urban Planning in Angel Alley
Urban planning in London is a frustrating puzzle for those without the right pieces. Writing in August 1990 to the property manager of the council-owned Osborn Street Depot, a warehouse building that stood on a historically fragmented and presently contested land parcel once known as Swan Yard (15-25 Osborn Street), a woman named Anne Doherty understood this metaphor well.
Doherty, a then assistant neighbourhood planning officer for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (LBTH), had been grappling for some years with the latest iteration of the metabolic planning history of Angel Alley and its contiguous urban terrain. Between 1977 and 1992, Doherty managed a tumultuous rear access agreement between the landowners of 15-25 Osborn Street, the Whitechapel Gallery, and LBTH. Importantly, this episode was not thematically distinct from countless other recent planning quandaries around the alley, which included: a failed plan to redevelop 15-25 Osborn Street in 1973, Whitechapel Gallery’s contentious extension proposal designed by Colquhoun & Miller in 1977 (completed in 1984-5), a nebulous LBTH promise to widen Gunthorpe Street, which runs parallel to Angel Alley, in the early 1980’s, and indeed even the demolition of the southern end of the old Swan Yard to build the Whitechapel Gallery almost a century earlier in 1897. Just like its ever-changing historical form in the cartographies of John Rocque (1746), Christopher and John Greenwood (1828), and Charles Booth (1889), the ‘near history’ of Angel Alley was a mutable one.
Using Doherty’s words at the time, Angel Alley as an “important piece of the puzzle” for us fit not only into a mosaic but also a montage. In our research, it soon became apparent that Angel Alley’s ‘deep history’ between 1676 and the 1960’s, and its “eventual history” from the early 2000’s to the present day, have been well documented. Credit for the more long-term historical work is owed largely to initiatives such as the University College London’s unequivocal Survey of London project, the cartographical database, www.theundergroundmap.com, the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, and the many available East London Socialist and Anarchist histories. However, its historical and contemporary prominence was also, to our dismay, inextricable from the ‘Jack The Ripper’ spectacle in the area and the tours, blogs, and novels that continue to substantiate it. Despite this, little was publicly available about its near history: a discrete chunk of 20th century that roughly appends the dissolution of the London County Council (1965) or the arrival of Freedom Press to the alley (1967) and bookends Thomas Hirschhorn’s The Bridge installation (2000), which once briefly connected Freedom Press to Whitechapel Gallery. During this time, a series of decisions had changed the shape and nature of the alley demonstrably, yet without evidence of these decisions, knowledge about this recent history was confined to the memories of an experienced few anarchists and gallerists or the folklore of more recent arrivals to the alleysphere.
In order to make visible this evasive temporal puzzle piece, we scoured the LBTH Planning Archives aided by the welcome facilitation of LBTH Programme Manager, Ross Hughes. Our archival deep dives focused on this aforementioned period of near history, the end of which coincided with post-2000’s digitalisation of planning applications on the publicly accessible yet somewhat impenetrable LBTH Planning Portal. We came across a set of planning applications reference numbers which gathered a collection of architectural proposals, planning observations, professional correspondences, memorandums, queries, and registration forms that spoke to a period between 1977 and 1997 in remarkably intimate detail. Supplemented by interviews and conversations with available staff and ex-staff from Whitechapel Gallery and Freedom Press, we used this information to substantiate our working notion of ‘alleywork’: a shadowy labour situated in disinvested urban infrastructure that aptly navigates the many historical realities we seek to question rather than arrive definitively at the one we seek to change.
The following pamphlet is a selection of architectural plan drawings taken from information associated with the following planning applications reference numbers:
PA/77/00202
PA/82/00234
PA/82/00233
PA/85/00259
PA/86/00434
PA/97/816A
They are available on request from LBTH’s Planning and Building Control Department.
This pamphlet can be picked up for free at the Whitechapel Gallery, please contact publicprogrammes@whitechapelgallery.org to reserve your copy.
