City of Dust
I live on a boat, the Thames burbling and surging at my front door. On my horizon left and right are the great, glazed blocks of London’s two trading centres: big, new, carbon-heavy. More interesting to me is the fluid life of the river in-between. The moorings are tidal, provisional, always shifting. Boats join and leave, our home was once something else and may become something else again, passing tugs negotiate ebb and flow, pulling waste for incineration or transformation into building products. Between our boats, a steady flow of messages exchanges life’s essentials and detritus: Can anyone give a length of hose, a soldering iron, fenders? Take frying pans, karaoke gear, a bike?
Moving on board, I picked up a scuffed, second-hand copy of Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens’ last completed novel. It is a strange read, wilfully over-complicated and fragmentary, multiple plots and styles connected by unlikely coincidences. Some of it now reads as problematic, much of it dated in other ways – sensational, mawkish, sermonising. It drags in places.
Yet it is exhilarating, too. I bought the book because famously the Thames, my new home, runs through it like an additional character, sinister yet redemptive, an atmospheric bringer of life and death. I was surprised to find a second stream runs through it too, one of ‘dust’ or waste materials. An inheritance of a miser’s mounds of dust – ash, cinders, vegetable, bone, crockery, rags, perhaps worse – sets the book in motion, and actual or symbolic references to waste, reuse and value follow throughout. The mounds have value in themselves and might contain goods or papers of greater value still. Around them, the characters engage in gathering, exchange and recycling, both tangible (rags to paper, say) and abstract. They sift and sort, scavenge and hoard. In case we should miss the point, one negotiates early on with another for the return of bones from their own, amputated leg.
I am an architect with an interest in circularity, no literary or sociological expert. This book is 160 years old. Why do I find it so relevant, so bracing?
First, the striking presence of waste. It feels easy to accept the river as literary material, as poetic presence, symbolic heart of London, recurring backdrop to the tale. It is more challenging to accept waste in those same ways. Yet here, waste is plot material, setting, catalyst, metaphor, more.
Dickens’ London was of course dominated by waste, drowning in smog and manure. He doesn’t romanticise or exaggerate. The mounds in Our Mutual Friend are based on actual landmarks, most likely the Great Dust Heap at Battle Bridge, Kings Cross. Considerable wealth was made at this scale, but that was just the peak of a grimmer, subsistence economy of dustmen, bone-pickers, sewer hunters, night soil men, shoremen, mudlarks, dredger-men, watermen, rag-gatherers, street grubbers, pure-finders. It was a world of waste, impossible to ignore. This alone intrigues me. We stand now at the threshold of a new economy of waste, the Circular Economy. But this ‘new’ economy is also an old one, pushed aside for very understandable reasons by the Sanitary Movement and other Dickensian contemporaries. From that time onwards, waste is something 'over there', to be forgotten and dealt with by others; now our solution to recycling remains, it seems, ‘over there’, to be somehow remedied by a distant, unmotivated capitalist machine. Once dismantled, how do we rebuild what was a vast ecosystem of local, horizontal exchange, and make it fit for our times?
Then, what waste means for the story. For Dickens, waste is unavoidably ‘over here’. All characters are linked by exchange, defined by how they view that exchange. If this were just a tall tale about the ‘Golden Dustman’ and those at the centre of the tale – rags to riches, money versus love – then it would be an 800-page one-liner. But it is a sustained meditation on value, self and how we interrelate, grappling with greed, corruption, society, class, and identity. So, there is plenty to think about regarding our cultural constructs of value, of what is ‘waste’ and what ‘treasure’. Circularity requires that we blur the two; in his contemporaneous magazine Household Words, Dickens did exactly that, publishing articles on reclamation, conversion and reuse, a world suddenly full of potential worth.
And then, and here I lean heavily on the insight of Nancy Aycock Metz, Dickens goes further, to question not just how we value things, but how we value our engagement with things. In my role, I am familiar with circularity as a sustainable imperative, fundamentally a technological, systemic challenge. Dickens, as novelist, looks further to the moral aspect, our personal or shared narrative about waste. The characters that are most sympathetically drawn – most intriguing, most alive on the page – are those engaged in acts of gathering and transformation, the imaginative work of finding connections and making order. Our linear economy requires continual acts of self-deceit, of consumption without consequence; Dickens shows us meaning in responsible renewal and change, in making and re-making our world – separately and together – in an ongoing process. These characters (Mr Venus, Jenny Wren) are not diminished by circularity, but find a greater sense of self through navigating a social web, through having skills, mastery, agency, expression. We talk in our sector about the social value of circularity’s shared goals; how do we change our capitalist narrative of detached, passive consumption to one of exchange and transformation, one that allows us to access our creative, personal and social potential? What would this look like at city-scale?
There is something powerful in all this. Riddled through this book, that is in so many ways a product of another time, are themes that could not be more current. What if we once again consider our stream of waste as not somehow ‘other’, but as part of our story, as much a part of London as the Thames? And more, for it speaks of us, and the exchanges that connect us, and that which we value. How radical might our thinking be? What could we gain, from our own City of Dust?
This article was written by Jonathan Mann, Associate at Gort Scott.