Review: Clearings in a Concrete Jungle

Abstract

Clearings in a Concrete Jungle . Television documentary by the Street Farmers (Peter Crump, Bruce Haggart, and Grahame Caine), first aired 18 June 1973 on BBC 2 (BFI archives, British Film Institute, London) Most revolutions start from the streets. The one, however, called for by the British anarchist, activist architectural group Street Farmers in their 1973 documentary Clearings in a Concrete Jungle , did not begin in the streets nor in public demonstration, but from the inner city: the interior of the urban fabric.1 To battle what the documentary diagnosed as the “highly structured detritus of metropolitan imagination,” the social and political revolution should start from the house and the way of inhabiting the land. The TV program envisioned a change of the city as a whole, achieved through tactical changes in small pieces—islands of habitation taken “off the grid” of energy supply. The main theme of the documentary was one of the earliest ecological houses, the Eco-House, or Street Farmhouse, built in 1972 as a laboratory and living experiment by Grahame Caine, a member of the Street Farmers, which was originally formed by Peter Crump and Bruce Haggart. The Eco-House was a fully functional, integrated system that converted human waste to methane for cooking, as well as included a hydroponic greenhouse that produced radishes, tomatoes, and even bananas. Caine, then a twenty-six-year-old fourth-year student at the Architectural Association of London, designed and built the house on land borrowed from Thames Polytechnic in Eltham, South London, as part of his diploma thesis at the AA. He received a provisional two-year permit from the borough of Woolwich district surveyor with the promise to build an “inhabitable housing laboratory” that would grow vegetables out of household effluents and fertilize the land with reprocessed organic waste. With the help of the Street Farmers, Caine was able to start construction in September 1972, during his fifth year, and to inhabit the house by Christmas. After having lived in the house for two years with his family, …