Somang Lee, Living Line. Photo: Henry Broome, 1 September 2023.

Running north-south along the Greenwich Meridian, The Line is public art walk route that begins at the Olympic Park in Stratford and finishes at the O2 arena on the Greenwich Peninsula, two corporatised, semi-private developments patrolled by security guards, luxury flats towering above, everywhere CCTV cameras and disciplinary notices. Signage is absent for large stretches of the walk and I get lost a few times. I meet a Line guide at Three Mills, an Anglo-Saxon tidal mill on the River Lea between Bromley-by-Bow and West Ham. She was born not far from here. She wants to study art therapy, she tells me. Sheʼs around 19 or 20, I guess. Sheʼs lived in Whitechapel, Barking, East Ham, Tottenham, Stratford and Wanstead*. Moved on by the council every few years. The first time she moved house she was three days old. I study the plaques next to the sculptures, listing the financial supporters, property developers, engineering consultants, regeneration projects: Vastint, Ramboll, ARUP, Berkeley Group, Ballymore, City Island, Royal Docks, Emirates Airline, IFS Cloud, The New Millennium Experience Company, the O2. The Line supposedly seeks to inspire and empower local people through art but, paid for by the developers bulldozing working-class, black and brown communities in the area, it is inextricably implicated in the violence of gentrification, displacement and exclusion.

London 2012 and Anish Kapoorʼs Orbit: Extreme capitalist architecture

There are 24 works of art on the route, the first being Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit, marketed as UK’s tallest sculpture, a twisting ascendable tower made of lattice tubular steel, erected in 2012 to commemorate the London Olympics – once a bright, Team-GB red now a sun-bleached splurgy maroon. An extension of the Westfield shopping experience: youʼre only welcome if you spend money. Skyline views available for £15, the price excludes The Slide, coiled around the tower, a steel slide created by the artist Carsten Höller. Tickets are half price on West Ham FC match days, when for a brief time the park fills with life, then empties again.

Olympic Park, Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit in the background. Photo: Henry Broome, 1 September 2023.

The project came out of a chance encounter between Boris Johnson, then-Mayor of London, and Lakshmi Mittal, founder of ArcelorMittal, the worldʼs largest steel firm. Their paths crossed at the coat check at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Johnson raised the idea of creating an iconic landmark for the Games and asked if ArcelorMittal would supply the steel. On top of £3.1m from the public coffers, construction was funded with a £10m gift from ArcelorMittal and a further £9.2m loan from the steel company. London Legacy Development Corporation 2022/23 accounts show that the debt now stands at £14.9m after interest. Visitor figures peaked in 2016/17 with 193,000. There were 123,000 in 2019/20, 180,000 in 2020/21, 60,000 in 2021/22 – the attraction was closed for half the year due to COVID-19 – and there were 87,000 in 2022/23 but it closed for repairs for the three months. With ticket sales considerably below pre-pandemic levels and interest accruing, The Orbit seems like it has no chance of repaying the debt.

Co-founded in 2015 by gallerist Megan Piper and urban regeneration leader Clive Dutton, The Line emerged from the Olympic project. Dutton presided over the East London Olympic regeneration legacy. He worked on Westfield Shopping Centre at Stratford (the biggest shopping centre in Europe), Canning Town and the Royal Docks. The Orbit was built for the opening of the Games but Somang Lee, Virginia Overton and Tracey Eminʼs Line installations were funded by London Legacy Development Corporation, superseding the Olympic Delivery Authority - the planning authority for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and surrounding areas, which ‘works to deliver the regeneration legacy of the #London2012 Games and lasting benefits for east London.’

ExCel security, Royal Docks. Photo: Henry Broome, 1 September 2023.

Speaking in 2012, then Newham Council Executive Director for Regeneration, Planning and Property Clive Dutton claimed that the Olympics ‘has most certainly accelerated what would have happened in some shape or form – it’s just fast-forwarded it by at least 20 years’. Even at the time, though, it was clear the so-called ‘regeneration Games’ were ripping communities apart. Writing in Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City in June 2012, a month before the opening ceremony, Anna Minton writes, ‘This is the architecture of extreme capitalism, [...] a divided landscape of privately owned, disconnected, high security, gated enclaves side by side with enclaves of poverty [...] untouched by the wealth around them.’ Looking back from 2024, the London Olympics were clearly a driver for social cleansing. In 2007, Sebastian Coe, chair of London’s organising committee, promised the Olympic regeneration scheme would produce 30,000-40,000 new homes, specifically saying ‘much of which will be ‘affordable housing’ available to key workers such as nurses or teachers’. A decade on just 13,000 homes have been built on and around the Olympic site, less than 1,500 genuinely affordable to people on average local incomes. In 2018, Newham placed the highest number of families in England out of borough – 1,799. This number rises to 5,414 if including all four Olympic legacy boroughs – Newham, Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest. Compared to national demographics, displacement caused by the Olympics has disproportionately affected racialised people. In the 2021 Census, 42.2% of Newham residents identified as Asian (compared with 43.5% in 2011), while 17.5% identified as black (compared with 19.6% the previous decade) and 30.8% of Newham residents identified as white, up from 29.0% in 2011. Census data doesn’t show the relationship between race and class but it seems to suggest that racialised people are getting pushed out of Newham.

Greenwich: A beacon for new residential luxury

View from IFS Cloud cable car, looking toward Trinity Buoy Wharf, north side of the Thames. Photo: Henry Broome, 1 September 2023.

In Greenwich, at the other end of the route, Alex Chinneckʼs A Bullet from a Shooting, an upside-down electricity pylon sticking up out the ground, as if shot from the sky. I get a first glimpse of the sculpture 90 metres above the Thames, looking down from IFS Cloud cable car, another project delivered by Boris Johnsonʼs mayorship, which also forms part of the Line route. The views are awesome. There are vast mounds of earth on the north side of the river. Massive areas of former-industrial land have been cleared, ready for urban transformation.

Across the Thames, Greenwich. There is the Millennium Dome, built under Blairʼs government, for a long time regarded as a costly white elephant before it was redeveloped and rebranded as the O2 Arena. Now the area is home to one of Europeʼs large single regeneration projects: the Greenwich Peninsula. There, real estate developer Knight Dragon has already completed on a creative district with 150,000 sq ft of workspace, plus their own sculpture trail called The Tide, and the Hong Kong company is building 17,000 luxury apartments on the plot. An outgrowth of the development, Chinneckʼs sculpture was commissioned by Knight Dragon to coincide with the 2015 London Design Festival. Similar to the materials used for Kapoorʼs Orbit, the 15-tonne structure is made up of 1,200 metres of galvanised steel, supplied by Tata Steel. Their products have been used on a wide variety of large-scale construction projects across the capital – including The Shard, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and Crossrail. Melted down, The Shard’s steel and the Bullet’s steel is not dissimilar. Developer real estate and developer-funded public art share a common material language.

The sculpture is supposed to reference the history of the site, once home to the largest oil and gas works in Europe but it is also a continuation of Knight Dragonʼs vision. At night it lights up and becomes a ‘visual beacon […] signifying the site’s future as a new residential district for London’, reads the London Design Festival website. The houses here will not be for ordinary people though. The developer has promised 1,800 affordable homes, just 11% of the total 17,000. Some of the studios and one bedroom properties were available to purchase via the governmentʼs Help to Buy scheme before it expired in March 2023. A House of Lords report from 2022 found that Help to Buy inflates prices by more than its subsidy value in areas where it is needed the most. In areas where jobs are located and housing is severely supply constrained, like Greater London, the scheme has ‘led to a substantive increase in house prices, with no statistically significant effect on construction numbers.’ The report concludes ‘In the long term, funding for home ownership schemes do not provide good value for money, which would be better spent on increasing housing supply.’

Connection to people and place: Marked for redevelopment

Alec Peever, Helping Hands. Photo: Henry Broome, 1 September 2023.

Between these two cities within a city lie never-ending concrete pathways through the River Leaʼs wetlands, mostly used by Deliveroo riders, it seems; you hear the whir of an e-bike and then they're gone. Strangersʼ lives donʼt intersect here. I see the odd person on foot but there is no exchange of eye contact, no interaction or acknowledgment of presence. I get it, this isnʼt an experience, a place to spend time, this is a cut through. Set way back from the trail, council blocks rise from behind the dense stinging nettles and buddleia, rust stains running down the cladding. The Line doesnʼt really feel like it touches these communities, the meaning and content of the works more or less detached from people and place. Close to Bow Locks, as the River Lea turns into Bow Creek, I come across Abigail Fallisʼs sculpture DNA DL90 (2003), a sorry reminder of retail collapse. Suggesting the notion that consumerism has become a part of our genetic make-up, the work consists of 22 Kwik Save shopping trolleys stacked in the shape of a double helix, commissioned by the discount supermarket chain before it went into administration in 2007. The sculpture first went on display at Sculpture at Goodwood in Surrey (2004-2009), then it was installed outside Arts Council’s Newcastle office for a five-year term (2009-2014), before it was acquired by The Line and moved to its current location in 2014, almost dumped on Bow without any care.

Close by, I encounter a sculpture that isn’t part of The Line, Helping Hands, a stone sculpture of two hands locked in tight grip carved by Alec Peever, installed on Three Mills Green, next to the old distillery, and unveiled in 2001 to commemorate the centenary of the Three Mills tragedy. As detailed by a newspaper article from the time, a group of distillery workers were sent to inspect a nearby well. A man descended down a ladder. Suddenly, he fell to the bottom, suffocated by noxious gas the inquest determined after. Not realising, the distillery manager rushed down to help, only making it a short way before he too was overcome and fell to the bottom. One after the other, two more went down, trying to save their mates, each suffering the same death, victim to the negligence of their manager, who failed to follow procedure; he should have used a lit candle to test the air before anyone descended. Unlike a lot of sculptures on The Line, Peeverʼs work responds directly to local history, and it seems to carry weight and meaning for people around. You canʼt help feeling moved by the sculpture, the workerʼs bravery, the bonds that make people foolishly risk their lives for each other, against all sense. For years now, trade unionists have gathered here on International Workers’ Memorial Day, celebrated annually 28 April, as a day to remember all workers who lost their lives to workplace illness or injury, united by the words ‘Remember the Dead, Fight for the Living!’

I donʼt experience anything like this with any of the works of The Line. To their credit though, they have been putting resources into community outreach and increasing local access to art. The organisation initiated health and education programmes in 2021. There are wellbeing walks every Thursday for people referred by their local GP or social prescribing link worker. Now in its third year, the youth guide programme has employed 70 local 18-21 years olds over the Summer months. The organisation has delivered artist-led school workshops across Newham, Tower Hamlets and Greenwich, often built into the development of artists’ works; for example, Somang Leeʼs Olympic Park commission involved drawing workshops at Pudding Mill Allotments with Year 5 students from Carpenters Primary School in Stratford.

Somehow though there is a disconnect, even when the works are genuinely ʻsite-specificʼ, created in response to the locations they are installed in, with feeling for local communities, engaging them in a conversation. When you read the plaques next to the works, ‘Berkeley Group’, ‘Ballymore’, ‘Emirates Airline’, it feels like a betrayal of the kids in the workshops, the vulnerable people on the wellbeing walks. You canʼt create public space with money that is destroying local peopleʼs lives, wrecking house and home. Like a row of stakes hammered into ground, The Line tells local people that their homes are marked for redevelopment.

More than damage limitation

Public art has for a long time been financed by property developers. According to public art think tank ixiaʼs 2022-23 report, Why Public Art, Why Now? Re-thinking Art and the Public Realm, ‘Much of what has been considered to be “public art” over the last three decades has been driven by funding made available through Section 106 Agreements.’ This is a legal agreement between a local authority and a developer; in exchange for planning permission, the developer agrees to ‘improve the immediate area, or offset or mitigate any impacts of the development’. This involves making financial contributions to the council for infrastructure and services, which can include transport, public realm, sports and recreation, education as well as public art. Knight Dragon agreed the provision of 1,800 affordable homes through Section 106. For developers, sculpture and affordable housing are just ways of getting gentrification over the line. It’s a loop-hole. If ‘mitigating harm’ and remedial measures is the extent of ambition, the developers will continue to devastate communities. We cannot allow the developers to rip up the ground we live on if they promise to pay a bit back. For public art as well as housing, we can hope for more than damage limitation.

Tower blocks, near Mill Meads. Photo: Henry Broome, 1 September 2023.

Walking The Line, hearing the stories of people who live and work in the area, signs of another way already begin to show. The guide I met at Three Mills, bearing testament to local struggles, writing her own experiences into the sculptures, relating the works to place. The trade unionists who gather annually at Peever’s Helping Hands, a sculpture turned into an anchor point for collective organising in the area, strengthening the bonds between local people and their ties to the neighbourhood. Even as residents resist gentrification, displacement and exclusion, they show public art could be a space where community thrives. If we’re going to realise that promise, we have to put money and decision-making power in local people’s hands.

*Places have changed to protect the identity of the guide.