Maternal publics: Time, relationality and the public sphere

Abstract

I took the image in Figure 11.1 on my mobile phone in the East End ofLondon, on a familiar ‘desire path’ across an urban landscape between home and taking my kids to one of their endless after-school activities. In this case it was their karate class, somewhere on the border between the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and the London Borough of Hackney, where I have been living for the past 15 years. It is an area that has undergone dramatic gentrification recently, shifting from being characterized by extreme poverty, unemployment and socio-economic stagnation, to being an area in which those conditions still prevail, but now alongside, and somewhat veiled by, a throbbing middle-class street culture focused around the local park and a vibrant weekend organic farmers market. As I trampled along my desire path each week, children and equipment trailing behind me (quite literally, in the case of the white karate suit regularly dragging through the mud, and one red boxing glove already missing, abandoned irretrievably somewhere en route) I walked past this site, watching a derelict ‘public house’ going up for sale, watching no one buy it for years, and then eventually seeing a notice for planning permission for the development of 15 ubiquitous new apartments overlooking the park. The building was then partially demolished, and, for a briefperiod of time, one wall was left standing. It was during this moment that someone, or a group of someones, felt compelled to climb over the fence of the now privatized site and make this intervention. This was not a small job - not a passing act of graffiti with an aerosol. This would have needed tools, possibly noisy tools to cut these letters into the plaster of the remaining wall. It must have taken a considerable time to do - hours certainly, perhaps all night. The letters are over 2 metres high; the wall stretches for about 8 metres in length. It was a transitory intervention. I think of it as a scream: ‘MOTHER’ across the urban landscape, and a week later, it was gone.