Inheritance Geographies: Black Presence and the Making of London

Abstract

Blackness has been fundamental in the making of Western cities. This thesis takes London as a site of focus through which to explore Black spatial practices. All too often, the disciplines of architecture and planning attempt to adopt apolitical, ahistorical approaches to physical space – the reality, however, is that no such space exists. Traditional pedagogies struggle to accept built interventions which occur outside strict disciplinary boundaries. By extension, these fields devalue, trivialize, or refuse to acknowledge the influence of racialized Others in shaping the built environment. Although Black people have lived and worked in Western cities for centuries, within the dominant discourse Black people are hardly ever recognized as active agents of spatial transformation and creation. This is exacerbated by visual and discursive norms which fixate on representing space in particular ways —which are not necessarily representative of the ways in which racialized groups exist, use, and make space.

This thesis rejects the minimization of Blackness in the Western canon. It calls on the disciplines of architecture and planning to expand their pedagogical horizons and to challenge normative ways of reading and understanding the built environment. Two broad case studies, British transatlantic slavery and the Windrush migration, serve as the lens through which London is investigated and mapped. In doing so, we can complicate traditional readings of space, and better recognize the roles of Blackness in creating the city – through Black presence simultaneously physical and psychological, tangible and intangible. A celebration and exploration of the richness of Black contributions in London allow us to engage the city as an ever-evolving historical, political, and social archive. The project considers some of the ways in which Black people — those departed, those present, and those future — have transformed London, which for centuries sat at the heart of a global empire, and which today remains a site of contestation. Ultimately, the soul of the project is simple: London is what it is because of Black presence.