The space of change Artists in the East End 1968 - 1980

Nick Green details the shift from industry to art in examining the origins of East London’s studio blocks Phenomena generate myths, and like any phenomenon, a mythology has grown up around the East End arts scene which clouds the facts, ignores the complexities and leans heavily upon oversimplification. That much, one might expect. More worrying is that the very process of creating the legend distorts the history, recent though it may be. An example: Butlers Wharf, on the south bank of the Thames, immediately East of Tower Bridge, has attached to its newly scrubbed yellow brickwork, one of those ubiquitous blue plaques, giving a one sentence synopsis of the building’s history. The wharf used to be spice warehouses, we are told, lay derelict for a while, and was then converted into shops and restaurants. What this sanitised version of events fails to mention is that Butlers Wharf lay derelict, or semi-derelict at least, for the best part of a decade, and that for several years in the 1970s, it was home to three hundred or so artists, punk musicians and designers amongst others. Put it another way. In its lifetime, that building has had three uses: as a spice warehouse until the early 1970s; as a clandestine ‘artists’ colony’ for most of the 1970s; and restaurants and shops in the latter half of the 1990s. It was empty for much of the 1980s, the subject of planning wrangles. The point is that although it has been a tourist attraction for less time than it was an artists’ colony, this aspect of the existence of the building is simply ignored. It is easy enough to take a politically motivated stab at why: that the artists and their colleagues were eventually evicted to make way for a more profitable use would not look good when publicly presented as historical fact. More likely I suspect, and more prosaic, is that whoever wrote the script for the blue plaque, two decades after the event, simply didn’t know.