Cranes at King's Cross, St Pancras

By John de Plume:

Today, cranes define the skyline of London’s King’s Cross, St Pancras. Their ever presence makes them as if invisible, and yet they are at once unignorable, looming as they do over the proceedings of that immense reservoir of electrical energy. Cranes express the permanent flux of the neoliberal city, the endless growth of capital accumulation made manifest in the endless building and rebuilding of the urban space. Cranes are a concrete representation of the abstract logic of capital, where construction assumes continuation not completion: accumulation with no end other than that of perpetual accumulation as an end in itself.

Each crane alone is an impermanent structure, but cranes and construction remain permanent here. Cranes announce that buildings must be built and, implicitly, that buildings must be torn down too. High in the crane cabin – that liminal space that lays claim to the acquisition of the air by the promised commerce, coming here soon – the atomised subject of capitalist modernity pulls the levers of creation and destruction. Inside or outside of the crane cabin, it makes no difference, such levers are familiar to us all.

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John de Plume is a writer whose work explores political economy, critical theory, and the socio-spatial effects of place. He is a member of Plan C London.