This project aimed to interrogate the varied processes, politics and possibilities of ‘creative repurposing’ in local development
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Creative repurposing of intangible heritage in Barking and Dagenham
Author: Jon Winder
Barking and Dagenham might seem like an unlikely case study for exploring the role of heritage in levelling up. It has just forty-seven listed buildings, while the other case studies in this series, Coventry and Sunderland, both have over three hundred listed structures and its immediate neighbours in London all have more than one hundred each. However, these numbers hide a rich local history and overlook the significance of intangible heritage in the borough. Although at an early stage of development, the research undertaken for the case study suggests that an expansive understanding of heritage and the scale of redevelopment in the borough make Barking and Dagenham a good case study for exploring the creative repurposing of heritage in urban renewal.
Barking and Dagenham is an outer London borough, formerly in Essex, in which series it was treated by the Victoria County History. The borough is bounded on three sides by rivers. To the south, the Thames provides a riverboat link to central London, while the Roding and Beam separate the borough from Newham and Havering respectively. It has been identified as a Levelling Up Priority Area 1 and scores poorly on many indices of deprivation. The apparent certainties that previously shaped the local economy, identity and sense of place, including a job at the Dagenham Ford factory and a council house on the Becontree estate, have been undermined by economic and political change over the last forty years. More recently, the borough’s population has grown significantly and become notably more diverse in terms of age and ethnicity. Plans for over forty thousand new homes and additional employment opportunities will bring more people to the borough. Fostering an inclusive sense of local identity will be vital in creating a cohesive, healthy and sustainable community.
Although there may be few listed buildings, there is significant potential for heritage to contribute to urban renewal here. The built environment has a long history of change and vestiges from the past remain. The once powerful Barking Abbey was demolished in the 1539 and while materials were used to build royal palaces elsewhere, its remains now provide structure to a green open space in the centre of Barking. Once home to England’s largest fishing fleet, subsequent industrialisation and urbanisation may have covered the marshes and fields between the town of Barking and village of Dagenham, but remnants of former uses still exist, including significant trees on the Becontree estate, industrial buildings and riverside piers.
Heritage Potential
The Royal Society of Arts’ 'Pride in Place', 2020 Heritage Index found that Barking and Dagenham ranked highly for heritage potential, noting that more could be done to increase the use, participation and funding of its heritage assets, including historic parks and open spaces, industrial heritage, and museums and archives. This is already taking place and there are recent examples that demonstrate the physical adaptation of Barking and Dagenham’s built heritage.
The striking, grade-II listed Dagenham Civic Centre no longer performs municipal functions and is instead used by Coventry University as an educational centre. Barking Park’s redundant park keeper’s lodge has been adapted for use as a children’s nursery, where children are now encouraged rather than prohibited from playing on the grass. Recently, the hosting of BikeFest in the grounds of Barking Abbey, and its sponsorship by Amazon, highlighted sustainable transport, changing employment opportunities and a tentative first step away from the borough’s economic and cultural ties to automotive movement and manufacturing. New developments will also make a small contribution towards raising awareness of the borough’s heritage. For example, the redevelopment of the former Abbey Retail Park to build one thousand new homes will fund a book on the archaeology of Barking Abbey.
Telling Stories
But more significant than the physical adaptation of built heritage are attempts to shape local identity through the stories being told about the borough and its population. The municipal vision of providing better, healthier homes, which inspired the construction of the Becontree estate, continues to inspire local political ambitions. The area also continues to provide space to deal with the perceived problems of central London. Just as the fields between Barking and Dagenham provided land for the construction of new housing for interwar residents of London’s east end, today the borough will soon rehome the City of London’s historic markets, including Billingsgate, Smithfield and New Spitalfields on the site of the former Barking Reach power station. The volume of new homes, residents and jobs being created by such schemes reinforce the need to promote adaptive and inclusive stories about the area.
There have been attempts to highlight the borough’s past association with progressive protest, particularly links with the women’s suffrage and women’s rights movements. In addition to museum displays, these stories have been promoted in a small way through the recent Three Lamps project, which sought to make relate local history to present-day issues. However, the partial information available onsite and online hints at the rather limited reach of this project and represents a missed opportunity to adequately share a significant and relevant story.
Creating a New Sense of Place
One organisation that is already repurposing stories about the past is the Participatory City Foundation and its Every One Every Day project. With a diverse range of funders, it is working to make it easier for local people to spend time with neighbours, doing practical and useful things. In practice this means repurposing local shops, turning them into creative spaces where residents can develop their own projects, use workshop space, utilise materials and equipment and take part in business programmes. With five neighbourhood shops across the borough and the larger Everyone’s Warehouse in the centre, they have helped to develop a network of 6,000 local people and supported over 230 neighbourhood projects, with the ambition to create friendly, healthy and happy neighbourhoods.
In doing so, the Every One Every Day project is building on the area’s long association with manufacturing and continues to emphasise its potential to produce and create useful things. But it is also subtly challenging an exclusive sense of local identity and is instead working hard to promote an inclusive sense of place. Its seasonal newspaper reaches 60,000 local homes and promotes both residents’ projects and a version of inclusivity that does not prioritise one section of the community over another. Rather than targeting underrepresented groups, Every One Every Day supports activities which are open and accessible to everyone and bridges the gaps between the diverse communities through shared activities and practical events. This approach to community participation in shaping local places and cultures seems particularly important in an area with so many new homes and new residents. It combines some stories from the past with a recognition that new forms of bonding within the community are necessary if it is to be a healthy and inclusive place.
However, both the intangible and built heritage of the borough, as well as the many new homes and urban infrastructures being built, face a very significant challenge from the consequences of unchecked climate change. Based on conservative assumptions, Climate Central predict than much of the borough will be below the annual flood level by 2050. Although beyond the sole influence of the local authority, this startling finding is in sharp contrast to their assertion in the draft Local Plan that ‘car use is still a vital part of Barking and Dagenham’s heritage, economy and day-to-day life.’
Key Findings
- The creative repurposing of both physical and intangible heritage can play a key role in delivering a holistic version of levelling up that promotes both people and place.
- To be socially and environmentally sustainable, activities to promote Levelling Up need to be place-specific, inclusive and genuinely community-led, something being pioneered by Every One Every Day in Barking and Dagenham.
- The successful and meaningful co-production and adaptation of intangible heritage requires large scale participation systems, rather than ad-hoc and small-scale projects.
- Successfully repurposing intangible heritage recognises both continuity and change, drawing on existing stories about a place while also adapting them to be more inclusive and representative of changing populations.
Challenges and questions for further investigation
- Without radical and urgent action to tackle climate change, levelling up will be something of an irrelevance as low-lying areas such as Barking and Dagenham face regular inundation by flood waters (unless levelling up also encompasses raising the level of the land). At a local level, increasing our understanding of the somewhat ambivalent relationship between the area and its boundary rivers will be a vital first step in tackling this issue.
- Further research into the impacts of small scale, short term, ad-hoc heritage interventions may question their social and economic benefits and point to the need for larger, systemic approaches. Collaboration between historians, sociologists and heritage practitioners may prove productive in this regard.
- Recent studies of other areas within the Thames Estuary have explored the intersection of heritage, levelling up and climate change in considerably more detail, something that could usefully be replicated in Barking and Dagenham (see for example the recent report by Professor David Gill on Historic Kent).
