"A little bit of dereliction in an otherwise-polished city can be glorious"

Derelict buildings don't usually get left alone for long but they have a unique value in today's cities, writes Jessica Furseth.

A little bit of dereliction in an otherwise-polished city can be glorious.

Take Battersea Power Station. For over 30 years it loomed large and useless over the Thames in central London. As restoration plans came and went, it was almost as if this art deco masterpiece was thumbing its nose at efforts to make good use of a prime piece of land in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

London's heavy-footed march towards gentrification will not be denied. Maybe this is why it can feel pleasing, to Londoners like myself, to see a redundant and ruggedly attractive piece of industrial history just sit there, defiant.

Almost always, restoration is an exercise in compromise

As renovations go, Battersea Power Station is a good one, with the chimneys even recast using the original techniques. But most redevelopment projects don't have anywhere near that kind of budget, and it's rare to see such uncompromising care.

In cities that cry out for more housing it's hard to justify doing nothing with buildings of no use, and city-dwellers may feel doomed to forever watching neighbourhood landmarks replaced by nondescript blocks of flats. Almost always, restoration is an exercise in compromise.

So when a run down building is left alone longer than expected, I can't help but sense a little glee. Maybe you too have a dilapidated, charming structure that you walk past often, wondering what it was once used for. The thought of losing these private monuments can feel like losing a landmark in your life.

Right now the Bethnal Green gasholders, hugging the Regent's Canal in east London, are being filled with flats. It's a challenging sight after 12 years of these delightfully shabby monuments to the city's Victorian industrial past sitting empty, solemnly taking up valuable space in a rapidly gentrifying area.

When I spoke to Historic England, I learned it costs around £10 million to restore a gasholder frame. This is why you only see restored gasholders left empty in high value developments such as at King's Cross, Bow and Fulham.

It was never on the cards to restore the Bethnal Green frames without the financial incentive of adding housing, and the alternative was to tear them down. But like many who loved the way the empty frames rose into the sky, I have mixed feelings about the compromise.

It's a privileged position to be able to look at dereliction and find it romantic

Would it have been better to just let them go? I honestly don't know. The romantic in me would prefer seeing the gasholders simply left alone, wild and peeling, but that's not an option. They would have continued to rust and become dangerously unstable, before eventually collapsing.

That's what's going to happen to the West Pier in Brighton on the south coast of England, whose skeletal remains are slowly being reclaimed by the sea. After closing in 1975, hopes of restoration were dashed by a 2003 fire, and the ruin has become a much-loved landmark.

The knowledge that it will likely never be restored but gradually fade away over several generations has only strengthened the emotional pull of the pier among locals. "Part of the joy of looking at the West Pier over any period of time is that it is constantly changing. It gets people to think about the past, present and future," historian Fred Gray told the Brighton Argus.

The West Pier's fate is protected by the fact that it's in the sea, so there's no land to eye up. It's only very occasionally that a building not pulling its weight gets left alone.

It's a privileged position to be able to look at dereliction and find it romantic. For most towns it's an alarming sign of decay, signalling people moving away and the loss of the town's economic foundation.

Perhaps understandably, once these sites are developed the projects usually seek to erase any sign of dereliction. But its retention can lead to fantastic results.

When a useless building is left alone for decades, there's usually an issue

Take Tempelhof, the former Berlin airfield that's now a giant park. Plans to turn it into housing were derailed by a vocal local campaign and a 2014 referendum that enshrined in law the site's future as a public space, at least for now. Today, Berliners can fly kites, rollerblade, and teach their kids to ride bikes on the site where the city successfully resisted a Cold War blockade, and maintained its freedom.

Then there's North Brother Island in New York City's East River, a former isolation site for people with smallpox (as well as Typhoid Mary), which is now an official conservation area for herons.

Another formerly pox-ridden ruin in the city is the Renwick Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island, which has been proposed as the location for a covid-19 memorial. As one of the few abandoned places in New York that's easy to visit, this may be a nice conclusion.

When a useless building is left alone for decades, there's usually an issue. Maybe it's regulations, heritage protections and noisy activists, or maybe it's just expensive-to-fix soil contamination, a stubborn landowner, or the money's run out mid-stream.

The Red Hook Grain Terminal (pictured top), also in New York, ticks almost all of these boxes, and has been sitting unused on the Brooklyn waterfront since 1965. It's been a glint in many a developer's eye, pictured variously as industry space, cement storage, apartments, or even a film studio. No firm plans are yet in the works.

In the meantime, this concrete monstrosity has been neglected for so long that it's started to feel like communal property. Urban explorers can't get enough of it, climbing on top of the 120-foot-tall grain elevator to skateboard or even bungee jump. Fines are common, and people have even been jailed for trespassing.

It doesn't take much for people to start treating a building as a symbol

On the other side of the US, another kind of building is seeing its increasing dereliction embraced by the community to the chagrin of the authorities. After works on the Oceanwide Plaza in Downtown Los Angeles stalled in 2019, people started scaling the trio of skyscrapers to add bold and colourful tags.

The developer called it vandalism that, if left unchecked, would surely inspire further decay, while the People's City Council of Los Angeles collective called it "a perfect depiction of Los Angeles".

As the debate continues over the future of Downtown Los Angeles, Oceanwide Plaza has been blocked off to try and prevent any more radical beautification, but if anything the graffiti artists, now accompanied by paragliders, have only grown bolder. The result is an increasing sense of the towers as communal property, and honestly, it's fascinating to watch.

The Los Angeles skyscrapers didn't have much emotional resonance when all this started – they weren't historically important, nor all that architecturally interesting. But it doesn't take much for people to start treating a building as a symbol, inspiring affection for the things it represents.

I have always thought of abandoned urban elements as moments where we can take a breath in the face of change, or a chance for the city to flex its imagination. Dereliction is an opportunity to dream of alternative ways to use urban space, and a reminder that the city is never finished.

Jessica Furseth is a journalist based in London. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vox, Time Out, Huck, The Cut, Atlas Obscura, Vice, The Independent, and elsewhere.

The photo is by Felix Lipov via Shutterstock.

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